by Chris Adrian
She was feeling more and more tired now, but mightier and mightier. Here in the sicker regions of the hospital, her power seemed to grow. To the murmur and thrill of primary pulmonary hypertension she said hush, and they grew still. The mushy brains of the meningitic grew firm and springy at the touch of her mind. Every species of shock, cardiogenic, neurogenic, septic, anaphylactic, she calmed. It got so she did not even have to touch them to make them well. Flame bridged the distance between her fingers and their skin, and it was over in moments. She held her hand over Marcus Guzman’s face. He had been stable on the LVAD since she touched him. In her imagination he was a big piece of rotten meat, but she called a boy out of it. He came clawing up, tearing with his teeth at the back rot and the gray gristle, squirming free, maggot-boy, a fire lit in the center of the next bloody flower to rise from his mouth. I’m back! he shouted in her head, whole and alive in her mind and in the world.
The few adults who were still struggling against their captors had barely broken free before she had finished. “Take me downstairs,” she said to Rob. They slipped away in the confusion generated by the waking children, who would not stay in bed, upsetting IV poles and tugging on wires.
She leaned heavily on Rob as they passed into the NICU, recalling the night of the storm, when she and he had passed hand in hand through the same doors into the drama of a universal desaturation. The bays were similarly chaotic now, partly because the babies were upset and misbehaving again, and partly in anticipation of Jemma’s arrival. They went to the nearest baby before anybody marked them, a former twenty-four-weeker born the night before the storm. He was still small at thirty-three weeks, and missing most of his gut from a bout of NEC, and possessed of a bad brain on account of a head bleed, and his lungs were ruined from prolonged intubation. Jemma fixed his head and his lungs and his gut, spinning it out in her mind like a little thread of yarn. Then she picked him up, unsticking his monitors and setting off the klaxons. That got everybody’s attention. Every adult in the bay turned to look at her just as she was holding the baby up, and they all saw it ripen and swell in her hands to the size of a proper three-month-old. It shrieked in pain, and then, as the fire passed, in hunger.
She inflated other preemies, enough to decorate a birthday party, it seemed, and she imagined them strung together in a squirming, drooling arch. She moved through the NICU, leaving fat three-, four-, and five-month-olds in her wake, babies whose shoulders squeaked against the side of their plasticine bassinets as she lay them back down. She noticed now, and wondered how it could have escaped her before, that the sicker and more complicated babies were gathered around the King’s Daughter, as if she had called them to her, or complicated their illnesses by proximity. So in the far bays, at her outermost periphery, were the feeders and growers, the former preemies who had escaped brain damage and sepsis and even intubation. Closer in were the babies with an isolated event, one bad night, a little head bleed, a plunge in and out of sepsis, a lung that collapsed and reopened as if it were trying to wink. In the next circle: two or three small events, or one big one—a bigger bleed, a chest tube, another NEC. Still, these babies had made better recoveries than those who were one step closer to Brenda, babies missing gut, or with lungs jackhammered into shoe leather by the pounding of the ventilators, or bleeds that wiped out the whole brain.
Jemma went back and forth among these rings of acuteness, passing closer to Brenda and then farther from her. She could hear the murmurs of the spectators as clearly and remotely as the buzzing of a mosquito; they asked each other what she was doing when she shuffled with Rob into one bay to lay hands on one or two patients before leaving for another bay, then coming back a few moments later. Jemma did not know herself what she was doing, or who was declaring this order, but she understood that she must touch Brenda last, and she perceived her as the greatest wrong, the densest wrong; it did not surprise her that all the lesser wrongness should be drawn to her in imperfect circles. It seemed to Jemma a form of praise, how they submitted themselves to her in orbit.
She’d dart, in her slow, blind, guided way, into Brenda’s bay and fix one on the periphery: the baby with leprechaunism, small, hairy, with pointy ears that Jemma tapped with her finger into a round shape. An anencephalic that would have been let to die in the old world; here it was treasured and trapped with the respirator and a hanging tangle of inotropes. Green fire spilled like long hair from the back of its open head. Its pointy black eyes collapsed in their sockets and grew back as orbs of flame that preserved, when they’d cooled, the color of Jemma’s fire. Two conjoined twins, whom Dolores and Dr. Walnut had not dared touch because they shared a bowel and a liver, Jemma separated as easy as the halves of a cream cookie, with the same simultaneous clockwise and counterclockwise twist of the wrists that she’d practiced a thousand times as a child. And, almost finally, she fixed an awful Harlequin Fetus, who’d toddled precociously through the nightmares of generations of medical students. Jemma had stared obsessively at the pictures in her embryology book, fascinated by the horny skin gashed with deep fissures, so the child seemed to be wearing a costume of continents, and by the eyes, twin bulging black puddings. Jemma was fascinated and repelled by the skin, compelled to touch it more often than was probably good for her or for the patient. Rubbing your cheek against him was like rubbing it against a tree. Jemma lifted him with both hands, pulling him out of his isolette, pulling him free of his monitoring leads and of the precious PICC that was his only access. She looked for a moment into his big eyes, as black and lusterless as the eyes of a crab, and then gave him a gentle shake. Everyone knew you weren’t supposed to shake a baby, no matter how they were so eminently shakable, or how much you wanted to do it, to silence their endless complaint. So one of the more sensitive spectators gasped at the first shake. Others, less delicate of sensibility, shouted as Jemma shook the baby harder and harder, its head lolling on its limp neck, but the arms and legs barely moving on joints that behaved like they were immobilized by leather casts. The little brain sloshed in the skull, relieved by fire of injuries as they were sustained. Fire shone from the crevices between the plates of skin, and jumped up in eruptions as Jemma shook. The baby seemed to be making a joyful noise as she shook it, and she found herself falling into a rhythm—cha cha cha—when the skin came flying away in rough, heavy pieces. There was warm, soft skin underneath. The puddings swelled and popped, revealing a pair of hazel eyes. Jemma put the steaming baby down and turned away. She took a deep breath and held it, treasuring the ordinary air in her lungs like the finest marijuana vapor, and looked out over the unit. Every nurse, physician, and parent of the NICU was crowded into the middle bay, some of them holding well children, all of them staring at her. A crowd pushed gently and fearfully from the door, making ripples of pressure that pushed the nearest observers out of line toward Jemma, people who stepped back again as soon as they came forward. Jemma let out her breath and reached beside her for Rob, her hand closing on the square bulk of his shoulder. She did not lean on him, but tipped forward instead, saving herself from falling by taking a few clumsy steps. She stopped, stood straight, then did it again. In this way she traveled to the center of the room, through the parting crowd, until she stood before the little dais where Brenda was raised in her isolette. She looked up the steps—there seemed to be a few more now than she remembered—and paused, feeling suddenly depressed and intimidated, the exultation in her soul collapsing suddenly away somewhere inside of her, folding, brilliant and shining, into an encompassing darkness. She’d had this feeling before, standing before dawn in front of the hospital, feeling like it was going to tip over and crush her, not wanting to enter but knowing that she must.
Rob walked up against her, and put his arms around her, and gave her a fortifying squeeze. “Just one more,” he said. “You can do it.” She stumbled on the first step. He failed to catch her when she fell, though his hands grabbed at her. She climbed the steps with both hands and feet, like a child. She raised herself up at t
he top, hands pulling on the frame of the isolette as she pushed with her feet, tipping the whole device a little, so the baby rolled inside, and Jemma came face to face with her through the plastic wall. As Jemma stood the black aniridic eyes held her own. They seemed to suck at her; Jemma thought she could feel something passing out of her own eyes and traveling the line of her sight to disappear into the baby’s, and she could not name what was being drawn out of her. Jemma gave a little cry of distress, the first she’d uttered that night.
“Are you all right?” Rob asked behind her.
“Open it up,” Jemma said to him quietly. He flipped the latches at each end of the box, and the plastic wall fell open. When he pressed a button the baby emerged automatically, born on a broad tongue of plastic. Still holding Jemma’s eyes, the baby lifted a hand and brought it over her body to point squarely at Jemma. Close to her, and with the baby lying in the open air, Jemma could finally see that she was pointing squarely at her belly. Jemma reached out and took the seven-fingered hand. Brenda grasped hers and brought it to her mouth.
The fire came, a trickle at first, then a flood, and then a torrent. Jemma felt like the child was executing an operation on her, not the other way around. Brenda sucked so hard on her finger that it ached, and the way the fire raced up her spine and down her arm made her feel like the child was consuming her very essence. The obvious things were relatively easy to fix: extra fingers dropped off and got lost in the blankets; the rabbit mouth fused and pursed; the teratoma pinched away and rolled off the platform, making a noise as it fell like a balloon full of oil and marbles. The deeper wrongness: heterotaxy; the double-outlet right ventricle; the sequestered bits of lung, the blood infection and the endocarditis; the chromosomal microdeletions; all yielded with scarcely more effort. But the deepest wrong, something even Jemma’s deep sight could not properly delineate or describe, but only sense, was different. Trying to scorch it was like trying to light a wet sponge with a warm rock. Jemma would have failed if the child had not revealed to her, with her greedy sucking, that there were reserves of fire she had not tapped for any of the other children. Even as Jemma was drained she was filled again, brighter and hotter, until no one could look at her, and Rob, pushed back, had to crouch halfway down the steps. Jemma thought she felt her baby touch on the inside of her belly as wave after wave of fire washed from her and into the mouth of the child before her. At the end she had become angry—she did not know if it was at the child or the wrongness in it, and she was cursing roundly at the top of her lungs, all sorts of obscenity and nastiness leaping from her mouth. She fell to her knees again, furious and weak, pulling the child, still attached to her finger, on top of her. Jemma found herself wanting both to preserve the child and destroy the unnamable thing inside it. It occurred to her that she must look like she was wrestling with a rabbit or a teddy bear.
The struggle ended suddenly, after Jemma had thrown her rage and fire-subsidized will at the unnamable in an attack so vicious and huge she knew it must be the last and best she could do, and she imagined herself dashing the child against a stone in her mind, releasing another child, a well child, the monster’s flawless twin, the longed-for image of its unruined self made real. Jemma opened her eyes on the baby’s, so close that their lashes were touching. The child opened her mouth and Jemma’s finger, the skin all pruny now, slipped out. Brenda took a few deep, huffing breaths, and began to cry.
Jemma came down the steps with the child in her arms. Rob stood up as she reached him. “All done,” he said.
“Almost,” Jemma said. She looked over the crowd, conscious of all the reciprocating stares—Emma and Dr. Tiller and Monserrat and Janie and Vivian and John Grampus and Father Jane—and she finally appreciated how huge a crowd she’d been drawing along behind her. Exhausted but still vigorous—only the fire was bearing her up but it did a better job than her ordinary will ever had—she looked over their heads or past their faces, searching for Pickie Beecher. In the newly harrowed hospital, he stood out more plainly in her mind, a beacon of wrongness. She knew he was in the room, but not where, until she saw a glint near the door, the red and blue light of the monitors reflecting off his shiny bald head. She passed the baby to Rob and went in pursuit. Outside the bay she saw him passing through the main door. She called out, “Stop!”
“You can’t catch me!” he said. “You can’t touch me!” He paused a moment longer to taunt her, leaping in the air and clicking his heels together, then turned and fled. He was quite fast, and Jemma certainly would not have caught him if he had not looked back to stick out his tongue. So he ran headlong into Ishmael’s knees, who stepped out of a corridor just in time to impede him. Pickie bounced off the big man and fell back flat on his back. Jemma was on him before he could get up.
Jemma thought it would be easy. With such obvious wrong under her hand, and all her deep reserves available to her, she was sure she could burn this boy’s brain clean quicker than a good spanking might take. Maybe the healing would take the form of a spanking—take that you crazy little bastard! But when she tried to fix him, her fire turned back on her, burning through her skin and into her blood—she swore she heard her baby cry out with her in pain. She caught sight of Pickie again and again, where he lay under her, as a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces were forced together against the cuts, so they made a nonsense picture and a shape as random as spilled liquid; as a doll, a construction of grief, a mechanical boy who missed his brother with the untiring efficiency of a machine; as an abomination, a dripping boy-shaped clot rising to life in a dark room. At the touch of him against her mind she was overcome with nausea, and rolled off him, retching and dizzy. He stood up above her, giving her an offended look. “Not me,” he said. He turned and walked casually away, past Ishmael, who was sitting on the carpet rubbing his bruised knee, but another Pickie remained in his place, an imaginary Pickie even paler than the first, whose open mouth vomited streams of blood over Jemma’s whole body. It pressed between her lips. At the taste of it she fell again, lost under waves of nausea and blackness and fire that dimmed and dimmed with every agitated breath she took, until it was extinguished.
I feel a change in me, commensurate with the change in the world. So I was filled up with joy when the waters rose, and so now I feel emptied out, drained and hollowed and sad.
Praise! my sister says, in voices for me to hear, and for the refugees to hear, and even for our brother to hear, deeply sleeping in his mortal costume. He stirs and rages a little in response to her joy, for anger is his worship and his praise. And then to me she says, It is abomination, to be sad in the dawn of this great day.
I am joyously happy, I say.
Humph, she says, releasing a horde of balloons from underneath the lobby. They rise toward the top of the atrium, most of them blown by her to float down the halls of the wards, but a few bob impatiently at the ceiling, and she opens a door in the glass to let them out like so many dogs.
Who could not rejoice, on this day? I ask her. And who could feel anything but pride and joy, seeing Jemma ascend to the regency of her power, putting out her hand to heal the hospital and the world? It is the sort of thing most angels would wait an eternity to see, and isn’t it the pinnacle of a recorder’s career? If I am sad it is probably because someone has to mourn for all the lost sicknesses, for the jolly fleshy tumors and fancy blood dyscrasias and unique anatomies that will never be seen again in a child. They are dead and gone and soon will be forgotten, and I have become the sort of angel who is saddened by any loss, and grieved by any death.
Mortals covet. They covet flavorful tea and dark chocolate and silver ladles and fluffy comforters and the fat bottoms of women bending over to tie a shoe. They covet wide green fields and open skies and even hulking mountains of ice and stone. Nothing—nothing in creation has ever been safe from them. Calvin Claflin coveted the whole earth. He wanted to hold it in his hand and crush it in his fist, and he coveted the stars, and he coveted the hot fire at the bottom of the sun. He coveted his
sister’s bland ignorant peace, and he coveted her inheritance of a power that would make all of his seem nothing, because it was bigger than him and his complaint, and because he suspected that when at last she commanded it her hand would bring life instead of death, and that she would redeem where he could only reform.
But angels are not covetous. Angels do not envy.
Dr. Chandra was waiting for the bells to start ringing. Yes—great big Catholic bells, ringing throughout the hospital. Drs. Tiller and Snood would clutch their ears at the sound of them, and cry out, and then melt like wet witches. Or maybe their heads would just explode. “It’s the end of an era!” he’d say to anyone who would listen. Internship was over at last. There should be a parade, at least.
“Don’t you think there should be a parade?” he asked Rob Dickens, who shared with him the task of writing the final notes for all the charts in the PICU. It was a stupid, unnecessary job, but Tiller had insisted. Skipping a day’s notes was a mortal sin in her book, and after the big miracle these charts had languished with blank pages for a week.