The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  “Because the whole thing was for the kids, right?” he said, and paused. They had passed the fifth floor, and were halfway to the sixth. Jemma noticed that the numbers that marked the floors were different from before—they were bigger and the colors were deeper. They shined at the surface like they were still wet, or like the surface of puddles. She put her hand against the 5 as they passed it, expecting her hand to sink into the bright yellow paint. It was solid and smooth, and made her hand tingle. “That was my job,” he said, “to design a hospital for sick kids. But not just a hospital—it would be a wonderful new machine for which the angel would become the soul and the mind, the intellect and the will. Not that I had ever designed a hospital before. Or a computer, for that matter—that’s where she lives, in the last basement. Way, way, way down, in the computer core. When I said I couldn’t do it, she asked me, Where is your faith, creature? Where is your trust in the Lord your God? Lost up my ass, bitch, I said, but she knew that I was the bitch, and I would do anything she told me to, and believe whatever she told me, and try my hardest for her because she was becoming the most important person in my life. Sure enough, within a month the hospital people called me right out of the blue to offer me the commission, and when I sat down to do it, it just sort of happened. It was all inspiration. And even though I didn’t understand where it came from, I understood it when it passed through my hand. Fantastic shit, crazy shit—I can hardly describe it, but you’ll see it working. When the construction began I visited the site every night with her, hidden in her darkness, and she executed miracle after miracle, building all the secret holy parts of the building while I directed her from a second, secret set of plans, that only she and I ever saw. For once she did as I told her, and I swear she didn’t understand how most of what she was building actually worked, but I did. I got it.” He tapped a finger against his head. “It all just sort of rose up. I got proud. She punished me.”

  He ran his hand along the wall as they passed the doorway to the seventh floor. “Oh, the whole place is a miracle,” he said. “I could bore you with all the miracles. Dry as a bone, even in the deepest cellars. Replicators—have you seen those yet?—that can make anything out of anything. You were wondering, weren’t you, how we’re supposed to eat? Wait until you see! Apples out of old shoes; shoes out of shit; movies out of just an idea. Wait till you try that. It’s like humming a few bars and then getting the whole song played back to you, but you tell her a couple lines of a story and she gives you back the whole thing, just as you would have imagined it, if only you weren’t too depressed, or too dull. Every day there was some new incredible thing to conceive and build. I started thinking of the people who would come—I could almost see you all, and understand how horrible it was going to be, but it was up to me to make it a little bit better. I am to be the preserver and the comforter, she told me—a load of shit. It was me. I was doing it all. She was just the fucking wrench. Night after night after night of miracles. I didn’t want to ever finish because I knew what would come after we were done.

  “All this miraculous shit,” he said, throwing out his arms in a gesture meant to take in the whole hospital, “all to save the kids. I don’t have any kids, but if I did, you can bet they would be here. No nieces or nephews, either. I would have brought them, too. As it was, I warned as many children as I could. You have to believe me. They were the only ones I could tell. I would go to playgrounds and lean over the fence to talk to a child, and I could speak. I’d say what was coming, and sometimes they would listen, and sometimes they were old enough to understand what I was saying, but none of them took me seriously. The small ones thought I was telling a story, the bigger ones told me I was crazy. And a grown man cannot go talking to children in a playground without arousing suspicions. There are those signs, right? No adults allowed without the company of a child. But I couldn’t stop until I had gotten at least one to say he would go to the hospital if an unusually heavy and persistent rain should begin to fall. Children complained to their parents about the strange man in the park. There was a trip to the police station. One boy did say he would go, when the time came. That was something.” They had passed the eighth and ninth floors, the signs sea green and sky blue.

  “I thought it would come sooner, you know. This hospital has been operating for what—a year? I had all that time to fret. I thought maybe it wouldn’t happen, though she never left me, and she always said it would indeed happen, that it would be swift and ferocious, not like last time where it just sort of drizzled a warning for days and days while everybody went on burning their children and fucking their poodles. And it was pretty ferocious, wasn’t it? Well, here we are.”

  They stood at the bottom of the last flight of stairs, looking up at the door to the roof. “Still want your look?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. Seven miles, she was thinking. Hah! But even inside her head the exclamation sounded weak and full of doubt. John Grampus went up the stairs and threw the door open. It was dark on the other side, and Jemma wondered if it was night already until she realized that the door did not lead directly outside. He threw a switch on the wall beyond the door and lit up an enormous room. The walls and roof were made of glass, but they were darkened like all the windows below. The place was full of plants and flowers, some that Jemma recognized—fig trees and ferns and roses and mums and daisies and irises in lacquered pots—and some that she didn’t, strange tall flowers that looked vaguely like orchids, and short plants with succulent leaves as long as her finger. They shivered when she bent to touch one.

  “We’re in the greenhouse,” he said, closing the door and punching a button on the wall. There were buttons all over the place, now. She had spent two weeks in this hospital, slave to the whims of cruel nurses, a fetch-monkey for attendings and residents—they’d sent her all over on unimportant missions of busywork, and she’d wandered, herself, bored and lonely, despite her exhaustion too nervous to sleep in between deliveries. She was familiar with the whole place, so all the new buttons and switches and consoles in the walls were shocking to her. Looking for an open door to the stairs, she had noticed that the halls were wider everywhere, the ceiling was higher, and the place was full of new corridors and doors and rooms—the whole hospital had expanded as if it had taken a huge, deep breath.

  “Ready?” he asked. She did not respond, but he threw open the door anyway, and it so happened that they were standing just in front of the sun, and when the light hit her eyes she cried out and closed them.

  “Easy now,” he said. “I have sunglasses, but not for you. Didn’t you think it might be sunny? Here, I’ll guide you.” He took her by the elbow and drew her out into air which felt crisp and bright against her skin. She didn’t breathe at first because she feared the air would be full of the miasma of wet rot, but when she breathed the air was sweet. “I wonder why it isn’t colder,” he said, “since we’re so high up. I wonder why we aren’t choking, for that matter. Go ahead and open your eyes.”

  Jemma shut her eyes tighter, considering things. Maybe it was enough, just to have come up here. Maybe she should just turn around and hurry back down the stairs. She probably did not really want to see all the bodies, their agony still obvious on their faces, whatever cruel seabirds had survived nesting in their hair and lazily pecking at the ripe eyeballs of their hosts, and it would probably be better to hold on to that blank feeling, an old friend, after all. She should be a sensible person for once and realize that she did not want to see the water, seven miles deep over the whole unfortunate world. It would all remain impossible, after all, until she opened her eyes.

  Years before, Vivian—back then still a new friend but the closest thing she had to family—had walked her up the aisle, past the rows of folding chairs draped with hideous velvet slipcovers, and the calla lilies flowering in an obscene corridor on either side of her feet. For the tenth time that day she thought how the calla lily must be the nastiest flower ever, and wished again that someone would outlaw it. Faces tu
rned to watch her as she passed, people crying or whispering. She would not turn to look at them directly. A trick of her peripheral vision made the heads seem like they were waving on stalks or bobbing on strings. Jemma leaned heavily on her friend. Funeral number four, she thought. I should be good at this, by now.

  Martin’s mother was waiting with him, dressed in a black sequined dress that might have been matronly if not for the hip-high slit that revealed her aged but shapely leg. She leaned against the coffin like a crooning dame against a piano. As people paused to look in she would touch their hands or faces with her own hand. “Isn’t he beautiful, Jemma?” she asked, when Jemma came near enough to see in. He was not beautiful anymore. The mortician had failed to restore the symmetry of his face ruined in the crash, and in trying to hide the bruising on his face had only succeeded in tarting him up horrifically. His staring eyes were the worst thing, stitched open so he could, as his mother requested, see into eternity. “Kiss him goodbye, darling,” his mother said. “One last time, honey.”

  “Don’t do it,” Vivan whispered, but Jemma did. She bent closer and closer, seeking to reconcile this face with the living boy she had loved. He stared past her. Before she kissed his lips she saw how they were parted slightly, and how thick the thread was, twine really, that bound his mouth and kept his jaw from dropping down to his chest. A coldness went into her when she touched her lips to his, and the feeling, a great heaviness, centered in her belly, as if she had eaten a boulder.

  “Kiss me, too, darling,” said his mother, reaching for her and blinking through her tarry mascara. Before she could grab her Vivian stepped ahead and absorbed the awful embrace. Her lover’s mother seemed not to notice. She wept ecstatically, and seemed not to hear when Vivian said, “There, there you horrible beast.” Jemma stepped back and watched as the elfin mortician turned a little crank set at one end of the coffin, and the lid slowly closed. She looked back and forth between Martin’s face and the mortician’s ears. Twin eruptions of white hair poured out of them, like little clouds of steam that belied the fixed waxy friendliness of his expression. As the lid fell further down, and the crack grew smaller, she bent at the waist to peer in a final time, not knowing why she did, because it only made the heavy feeling heavier, every second longer she looked at the face. A final bit of light gleamed in his soulless eye. She thought she saw him wink, and then the coffin was closed.

  “I shouldn’t have looked,” she said to Vivian.

  “I fucking told you,” she said gently, guiding her back to her seat. Jemma had closed her eyes and not opened them yet, and did not open them through the rest of the ceremony. While Father Dover spoke false praise about her lover—wasn’t he patient, wasn’t he peaceful, wasn’t he a gentle boy?—she watched the dead face stare past her, and felt the heaviness in her get weightier, as if the stone she’d eaten was dividing in her, pounds into pounds, and she felt sure she’d never move again.

  “Open your eyes,” said John. Jemma had them shut so tight that the muscles at her temples were twitching and she was getting a headache.

  “I don’t want to see it,” she said. She held out her hand at him. “I changed my mind. Take me back down.”

  “You’ll see it anyway. Listen, it’s starting now.” Above the wind she could hear a faint whooshing noise that sounded precisely like a heart murmur. It grew louder and harsher as she listened. She was bad at murmurs, but found herself quite readily classifying this one—high pitched, rumbling, holosystolic—the hospital had aortic stenosis. The building moved under her feet, and she cried out as she fell, opening her eyes and throwing her hands behind her to break her fall.

  “See?” he said. “It’s far more horrible than it looks.” Jemma shaded her eyes with one hand and looked out ahead. The roof had changed since the last time she’d sneaked up here. Previously a wide space of concrete with a few well-tended planters, now it was all grass and gardens—a huge tree was growing on the other side, reaching out of a crowd of bushes and benches and plants. Jemma was standing in the middle of a field of soft grass, surrounded by a little road that ran the circumference of the roof. Beyond the edge there was only blue water, no bodies or birds or bobbing detritus. The hospital was spinning—that was why she’d fallen.

  “What’s happening?” she asked.

  “An adjustment,” he said proudly. “The windows are clearing—I told you they would. Some hallways are lengthening while others contract, just a little. The carpets are growing thicker. The hospital is still preparing, becoming what we need it to be. It’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  She rose unsteadily, climbing up the man’s side—he seemed quite sure of his footing. They spun in a brisk arc. Jemma saw the same thing no matter how far the hospital turned her: a calm flat blue that stretched to a line where it changed its shade almost imperceptibly and became the sky. It should not have been beautiful, but she found it to be so. She imagined quite vividly the horrors masked by that insouciant blue surface, and tried so hard to feel a crushing grief, but only the heavy feeling came, filling her up and rooting her to the spot, so she stood firm even as the hospital stopped its rotation and turned the other way, then stopped again and began to move forward, as if it had suddenly become certain of its direction. It gathered speed, so Jemma’s hair flew back above her head and her eyes and nose burned from the cold wind. She looked away from the water and sky to study John’s face. He’d lifted his glasses to look toward the horizon. She thought her face must look like his, blank but not calm. “It’s so blue,” he said.

  “Where are we going?” she asked him anxiously, finally registering the very determined way the hospital was moving through the water.

  “You know as well as I do,” he said, and shrugged. “She never told me what would happen next.”

  I should not weep for any of them, nor regret their fate, nor shake one feather in sympathy.

  I am not the mourning angel. Neither is my sister, though she weeps freely, with them and for them, and tells them over and over, I will keep you, have no fear. And somewhere there is another angel, who will become my brother when he enrolls himself in this apocalypse, weeping and saying, I will make your crimes known to you, though it is too late for you to repent. And somewhere else another one, weeping even as he plans the thousand ways in which he will kill them. For we must be four—I know this as certainly as I know my part, past and present and future—recorder and preserver and accuser and destroyer. Why four and not one, or eight, or sixteen, or one hundred thousand of us, as many legions as bowed down before Calvin Claflin the night he changed the world, I do not know. I am not as I was, and that kind of knowledge is beyond me now.

  I should be happy. Back when I wanted things, this is what I wanted more than anything else—a new beginning. Everything I hated, every thing that heaped on me and oppressed me, is washed away, or buried under a world’s weight of water. So there should be no room in my heart for anything but joyful expectation. But I lost my hope for the new world with my rage for the old. Those emotions were, like they always felt, as big as the earth, as heavy as the earth, married to the earth. They were not portable. I could not take them with me, I have only ever been able to remember them. Yet still I should be happy. Immortality has made me tolerant of tragedy, after all. Another death, and another, and another—they really do add up to nothing. The death that mattered has already happened, and so all these, yes the billy-uns and billy-uns, are afterthought. And maybe, like the wise woman says, in eternity the old world is Troy, and the everyday existence now drowned and lost is in fact the ballad they sing in the streets of Heaven. I wouldn’t know, having barely arrived before I left again. I should say, Let it all stay drowned. It’s not my job to cry for it. Yet I do.

  Others are spendthrift with the moments of stillness that Jemma wisely rations, and so often they hear the quiet noise. Anika mistook it for the noise of the ocean the first time she heard it, but the walls and windows that keep out the water keep out the littlest sound. It is backgroun
d to every noise in the hospital—underneath the chiming alarms and the huffing respirators and the conversations, whispered or shouted, underneath the fornicators’ sighing Os and underneath the merely human weeping that is constant from dusk till dawn (for as soon as one of them cries himself to sleep another wakes and, as soon as he remembers where he is and what has happened and who he has lost, starts to cry). She puts a little cough in it and a sniffling quality and the faintest suggestion of words—Oh and No.

  You are not the mourning angel, I tell her. There is no mourning angel.

  Would that there were, she says. Vivian asks her replicator for a cup of tea and nearly drops it when it comes with a lamentation. “Woe!” my sister shouts. “O the innocent world! O Creation!”

  “Innocent,” Vivian says. “Ha!” But she sits with her tea by a window in a room near the NICU and, staring out at the water, gives a little hiccup and starts gently also to weep.

  Is this comfort? I ask, and my sister says, Of a sort.

  There’s no comfort anywhere in this place, I say, and no one happy. Not even infants or the hopeless retards with their empty minds. Only Jemma goes through her workday with hardly a thought for the numberless dead. How far fallen I am from my mortal days, when I might have skipped along with her, or taught her what reasons there were to celebrate. Before I put away my rage, or spent it to the last scalding drop, I might have numbered all the numberless sins that Vivian wrestles with as she sips her tea and knocks her head gently against the window, and cries a little harder. I remember it—the rage that was like grief. I have always understood how thoroughly diminished I am without it, but never felt the loss so much as now. Now another angel gets the job I made a life of. I fold my wings close, and shrink myself to the size of the room and smaller—I am as small and frail and sad as a lonely old widow when I settle down to cry next to Jemma’s friend. I can comfort you too, my sister says.