The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  “Maybe they’ll all come back. Maybe they’re just waiting.”

  “For what?” she asked, but he didn’t have an answer, or didn’t care to answer. He put his face in her neck.

  “Once when I was little,” he said finally, “I think I must have been three or four, my sisters and my parents went to dinner and left me behind. They didn’t notice that they’d forgotten me. I was pretty quiet then, especially in cars. I hated to talk while the car was moving. I was next door with a friend, making mud pies. When I came home and the door was locked, I thought they were inside and had locked me out because they hated me. My sister had said she hated me, the week before, because I cut her hair while she was sleeping—I never knew why I did that. It was just a little snip, and she forgave me, but no one had ever said they hated me before, not that I remember. So I thought she’d been pretending, and that she still hated me, and everyone hated me, so they had shut up the house against me, and would never let me in again. But then it got dark, and the house stayed dark, and I realized that the car was gone, and that they had gone somewhere without me. I was sure that they had moved away, and that they were never coming back. So I sat on the front steps and put my head in my arms and cried for an hour straight, until they came home. My mother said she had to scream my name at me to make me stop crying, and shake me to make me understand that she was there, and that they were back. I remember that. When they came back it was like they had been there all along, but I had gone someplace where they weren’t. I cried and cried. The house disappeared, and the steps disappeared. The noise of the crickets and even the noise of my crying disappeared, all I could think of was how they were gone and never coming back. I didn’t even know what death was, back then.”

  She could tell he was waiting for her to answer him somehow, so she told him something she’d already mentioned in another bed-bounded conversation. “Sometimes,” Jemma said, “if I put my head down in a dark room I get a feeling like Calvin is right behind me, reaching out his hand to touch my shoulder. If I would just wait long enough he could touch me. But I always turn around, and he’s always not there.”

  Rob’s breathing became so deep and even that Jemma thought he must be sleeping. Then he spoke again.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to pray a little?”

  Jemma kept catching glimpses of the boy whom she’d literally run into on the night of her trip with Vivian. But no one else had ever seen him, and she could never find him when she went looking for him deliberately on the wards. After many days of unsuccessful searching, she finally became convinced he must be a seven-hundredth child. She’d encountered him, always unexpectedly and by accident, a total of three or four times, depending on whether or not one counted his appearance during her trip, which she was inclined to do.

  Lying next to Rob, she could not sleep. There was so much else to worry about, but she worried only about this boy. Night after night it kept happening: she would lie and imagine him in some sort of gruesome trouble, stuck with his foot in a bear trap or pursued by a hungry land-shark or just crying himself to sleep somewhere, until finally she would rise and go look for him. This time she brought a camera with her, having borrowed the one that usually lived in a drawer on the general ward, kept for the sake of recording interesting physical findings, distinctive rashes and tuberous growths and birth marks in the shape of Jesus or Italy. She took a picture of Rob sleeping before she left, and he startled but did not wake at the flash.

  She started at the gift shop on the first floor and walked all the way up to the garden on the roof. A week and a half before, passing by the gift shop on another late-night walk, she had noticed a pair of red bolt cutters leaning casually against the aluminum gate that had been rolled down over the entrance since the night of the storm. It was one aspect of the hospital that had not changed at all: the gate did not roll up, and the inventory lay inert, the licorice and teddy bears were locked beyond the reach of the children who wanted them, and the flowers wilted in their humidified refrigerators, because the little old lady who’d minded the store for the past twenty years was drowned with the key to the gate. The lady had stopped Jemma once as she hurried through the lobby, late for pre-rounding in the nursery. “You must see this!” she said, putting a claw on Jemma’s shoulder. She took a little key from around her neck and turned it in a panel above the height of her head on the wall outside the shop. “Open sesame!” she cried, and hopped back and forth on her feet, looking so much like a little bird that Jemma expected her to start pecking at the ground between her legs. After the Thing the angel would not roll up the door. “The shop is still closed,” was all she would say whenever people asked her to do it.

  He had cut his own silhouette out of the door, but he was not a small child, so Jemma could slip through, though she tore the edge of her yellow scrub gown on a jag of aluminum. Some light from the lobby came through the door, so it was bright enough for her to see him feeding at the candy trough, scooping up handfuls of gummy bears and jelly beans to his mouth and then gazing around the place, like a thoughtful ruminant, as he chewed. He saw her and froze, his cheeks puffed up with candy.

  “I won’t hurt you,” she said quietly, squatting down and bringing her hands up, palms out like she was surrendering to him. “What’s your name?” He only stared at her. She could hear him breathing loudly through his mouth. “Do you have a cold?” she asked him, because he sounded terribly congested. “My name’s Jemma,” she told him, when he did not answer her. He chewed and swallowed, then brought his fist up to the level of his face and opened it to show her a pile of glistening red candy. “No, thank you,” she said politely, and he cast the candy in her face. She knew what they were as they struck her and she smelled them: hot candy tamales, shaped like giant bacilli, made spicy with artificial cinnamon flavor. They were sopping wet from the warmth and sweat of his hand, and they stung her eyes. She fell back out of her squat, clutching at her face. He ran over her, stepping square on her sternum with his shoe and knocking out her breath. He was very heavy, for all that he was very thin. As her breath was pushed out of her it occurred to her that he must be incredibly dense. By the time she recovered and stood up he was long gone.

  Tonight the gate was open—the next day the men from the lift team had cut away the rest of the gate, and ten minutes after that the remaining pieces had fallen out of the wall. Everyone had access to the gift shop, where the candy and teddy bears were free now, restocked every evening by the surviving hospital volunteer, who had moved away from his old haunt on the eighth floor to make the shop his stake.

  The boy was not there. Jemma wandered in and picked up a white angora teddy bear, idly combing its long hair with her fingers. The volunteer was one of the most creative replicators in the hospital, making candy more fantastic than anything from the fevered imagination of Willy Wonka, and bears with long white hair or dancing feet and dancing eyes, or who would moan at you from the utmost depth of their affection. She replaced the bear, though there was no such thing as stealing from the shop. “Do you like it?” the slow, quiet man would ask if you touched something or looked at it twice. “Then take it. It is for you.”

  She was not sure exactly why she felt compelled to pursue this child. Rob pointed out that he was probably doing fine, and would come forward if he should ever need taking care of. Breaking and entering might very well be a sign of self-sufficiency, Jemma admitted, but still she felt like she had to find him. Not to justify herself in the face of his rude accusation, though she imagined herself detailing to him all the reasons she was in fact not a junkie whore. She had a sense that there was something wrong with him, something she or someone must address, entirely aside from his bad behavior. But she could not say what this was. “You’re neurotic,” Vivian said, “which is okay.” Other people prayed or broke down at regular intervals or lost themselves in the rigors of the PICU: Jemma worried in her gut about a possibly imaginary child. “I’m fucking crazy,” Jemma said to Vivian, but that had n
othing to do with this kid.

  She searched randomly, ward by ward, camera always ready, and finally saw him in a research wing of the sixth floor. There were fifteen rooms set aside, down their own special corridor, for patients who were enrolled in clinical trials. The research ward, like the rest of the hospital, was full, nurses continuing to execute the protocols because Dr. Snood insisted on it. It would have been a sort of defeat, to abandon the studies only because the principle investigators had all perished.

  After peeking in on the fifteen patients and the two nurses, neither of whom gave her a second look, she turned to leave the ward, and saw him standing at the end of the hall. He made a gesture at her, nothing as simple as a single finger—he kicked out a foot and threw out both hands and twisted his head, but she knew what it meant: Fuck you—then fled, too quick for her to get a good picture. All she caught was the end of his leg and his shoe. She looked for a long time on the sixth floor, but could not find him again, not there and not on any of the higher floors, though she hunted slowly and carefully. It was past two when she came to the roof garden. She climbed the sycamore tree and reclined in the lower branches.

  The garden was always quiet. Jemma wanted the singing of crickets, but there were no insects, no birds, no spiders or worms, only the grass, flowers and bushes, and the very climbable tree. She lay with the camera in her lap, looking out at the dark water, calm and flat. The moon was not yet up, the sky was full of stars. She looked into her lap at the camera, flipping through its memory to get to the picture of the boy. There was the rash of erythema migrans; some dramatically clubbed fingers that she knew belonged to the pudgy CF boy who had his eye on Cindy Flemm; the tamale lady solemnly presenting her product; Brenda squinting and looking irritated; Rob sleeping; a picture of Vivian and Ishmael. Jemma had run into them on the fourth floor. “Oh, it’s the cruise photographer!” Vivian said. “Take our picture, lady.” They posed in front of a giant photograph of the lost landscape of Hawaii, blocking out a pair of island children at play in the sand. Vivian grabbed Ishmael around the waist and pulled him tight against her. In the picture they seemed to be standing on dry land, and looked like honeymooners.

  Then there was the shoe. Jemma fiddled with the camera controls, isolating and enlarging the view, thinking it might yield some information, but all she saw was the brand and the grime, the worn tread. He was not wearing any socks. She looked up from the camera into the sky.

  She half-recognized some of the constellations. Calvin would have known them all, and been able to tell where they were in the world just by looking at them. Dr. Sundae, the pathologist, was an amateur astronomer, but could only say that they were somewhere over Western Europe, and drifting north. Jemma forgot the stars and tried to look past them and pierce with her vision into the black space behind. She held the camera up to the sky, so it was pointing at her, and scrolled through the pictures again, imagining the pix-elated light traveling over eternity, into the blackness between and behind the stars, to enter the furious house of God, sending something like Calvin had sent something the night he killed himself.

  She imagined for herself a camera with infinite memory, one that held the face of every person dead under the water, wondering if seeing every last face would make her care more about them, or make clear to her the reason that had chased her around the hospital while she was tripping. Her heart had ached in sophomore history at the deep faces of the Civil War dead, but that didn’t really relate, or make her a better person, because what she felt had been more a sort of crush on those handsome dead boys, rather than real grief, and anyway that was before her own family had run off, practically hand in hand, into the kingdom of the dead.

  She put the camera down and crossed herself. It was the way, she remembered, to open a prayer. She knew how to do it, but only half-wanted to, and she essentially failed at it. She only swiped at herself, making a quick line down her face and chest with the back of her hand. When she was small she did the crispest crossing of anyone she knew. There was a prayer she used to say, something she made up herself when she was seven years old, independent of her brother, a simple, selfish plea to protect and make happy everyone in her family. She could not remember how it went.

  “Why, really?” she asked aloud. Vivian had started a list. “It’s going to be really long,” she’d told Jemma, when they made up over the little drug quarrel. Already she had fifty items arranged in order of increasing egregiousness. Why really, though? Jemma asked herself again. For just a moment she saw her brother in her mind, holding his eyes in one hand and his tongue in the other, and she almost considered how his suicide was a complaint against the world, and how happy it would make him to know everything he hated had been destroyed. For years she had been stealing glances at his burning body, and into the dark holes he’d made of his mouth and eyes, never able to look for more than a moment. Tonight was no exception. She could spend hours treasuring a memory of him alive, but the sight of his body, and the facts of his death, she could not bear for more than a second.

  She felt all of a sudden very sleepy—this happened to her on call: she’d be feeling wired and nervous and lie in her call bed staring at the ceiling, and then suddenly realize she was totally exhausted. She was too sleepy now even to cross herself again and close her prayer, something she had always been careful to do when she was a child, because she felt that between the crossings you were open to God in a way that was profound and dangerous, and that if you were to enter into some mundane, profane activity within the crossing, like going to pee, then something very bad would happen to you at least, and probably to everyone you loved, and maybe the whole world.

  She slept and experienced a rush of hypnagogic imagery, the sort of fast, weird dreams she had when she fell asleep in class. Once she’d dreamed in biochemistry that a gigantic enzyme had her enmeshed in its quaternary structure and was dissolving her painfully. Now she dreamed of Brenda, pointing at her from within her isolette. Why is she pointing at me? Jemma asked herself, and then asked the child the same question.

  After waking briefly, and opening her eyes on a world of green seas and green stars, Jemma turned her face into her shoulder and slept again, deeply this time. She did not notice the warm wind, or the noise of the water, or the moon when it came up, just a sliver of orange light in the eastern sky. She did not notice when the tree shifted in its branches, and seemed to stretch them and part its leaves, presenting her belly-first to the blackness behind the stars.

  Jarvis saw it. He wiped his sweaty face, thinking it must be the sweat in his eyes that made the junkie whore seem to glow. When he looked again it had stopped, and she was just another crazy junkie in a tree. He had seen those before, the tree in the courtyard outside his window at home having filled regularly with a few of them every evening. They’d lay along the thick branches, all fucked up, like boneless leopards, talking in such low mellow tones that he could only catch every few words. Hey baby boy, one would say to him, almost every evening, waving languidly. “Fuck off,” he’d say, and they’d all laugh at him.

  He went very quietly over the grass, not wanting to get too close to her—he still didn’t understand why she was always trying to follow him, though he knew that she was somehow dangerous as well as nasty and pathetic—but he wanted the camera. He stopped at every branch as he climbed toward her, listening to her breathe. She snored and said names—Melvin and Snob and Fartin’—all her crack buddies, he was sure. He had to pull on the camera a little to get it out of her hand, but he was less afraid of her waking by then. Something about how much she snored convinced him she was a very deep sleeper, and he almost took her picture when he decided he could just look at his own ass in the mirror if he wanted to see something ugly.

  He went home on the fifth path—he’d mapped out twenty-five altogether—and no one saw him the whole way, because he didn’t want them to. He saw the creepy molester who had told him over and over in the playground that the big rain was coming and that he better he
ad to the hospital on that night and bring everybody he cared about, even if nobody was sick. Nobody would come. When he pretended to be sick, first with a bad bellyache and then with a headache and then even coughing up ketchup practically into his mother’s lap, she only laughed at him, then scolded, and gave him one smart blow across his ass, for tempting God with a feigned illness. “I have to go to the hospital!” he shouted at his mother, and she shouted back that he had to go to bed.

  He went anyway, running through the rain, knowing he was doing something unforgivable, but he didn’t go back even though he stopped three times and looked toward his house.

  The Creep was sitting on the edge of the balcony where the ramp passed the eighth floor, dangling his legs over and staring down at the lobby. One push, Jarvis thought, was all it would take. He had said it, after all, and maybe saying it was what made it happen, and it had all been his plan. That would make him the man who killed Jarvis’ mother and his baby sisters and his big brother—everybody gone, everybody dead all at once. He bent down like a sprinter and touched his fingers to the ground, ready to run at him and push him, but in the end he just took his picture and was gone before he could even turn his head when the camera made a beep and a flash.

  He saw others. It was always entirely up to him, what he saw and what he didn’t, and who saw him, so if he saw the giant fucker they pulled out of the water sucking on that lady’s neck—he didn’t remember her name but she was cute and he wanted to take her picture but it would have been pornography and he hated that—it was because he wanted to, like he wanted to see the lady at the blood bank doing her work. He was waiting for her to lick one of the big bloody popsicles, but all she ever did was watch them thaw. No one could make him look at shit he didn’t want to see, so the whole place was empty of heartbreak, and the ICU was full of empty beds, and nobody looked like his mother, even the gigantic huffing lady who lived with her retarded boy in room 636, and if some lady was crying in the stairs on his way down she didn’t make a sound he could hear, and he hardly felt her flesh under his shoe when he stepped on her.