The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  “Could Jesus do this?” Jemma asked. Stiff rods of flame grew out from her fingernails, and she curled them in an I’ll-get-you-my-pretty gesture over Kidney’s face. Jemma meant the gesture to be empty show—the child was well, there was nothing to fix—but she realized, pretending to be about to strike, that she could. Feeling certain she could dash the girl’s face to the floor, she stepped back, dropping her hands. The child was still flinching away but not crying.

  “But he was fierce too,” Pickie said.

  “Look,” said Jemma. “I’m just me, but I swear if I hear any different, you all will be the first to know.” That seemed to satisfy them. The lesson began with all of them composing themselves in their spots on the floor, being quiet and becoming aware of their own breathing. There were no animals to experiment on, no lame bunny for every child to lay his hands upon. Instead, Jemma had a wounded teddy bear. She’d stabbed it herself, a couple thrusts with a scalpel in its round belly. She’d pulled out a little stuffing, and pried out one of its eyes with a spoon. She put it in the center of the circle, knowing no one could heal it except with a needle and thread, but thinking its plight might draw out a spark from someone.

  They all furrowed their brows quite impressively at the thing, but no one glowed, or shot sparkles from their eyes. Kidney fell asleep. They could not heal the bear, but they had better luck with an imaginary puppy, which they constructed together, piece by piece from his wet black nose to his short thumping tail. As soon as it was complete they began to afflict it with nose-rot, dog-dropsy, a broken paw, a broken heart, sudden blindness, bald-ass syndrome (courtesy of Jarvis), tooth-rot; a rhabdomyosarcoma arising from its right leg; dog-Down’s syndrome; prune-belly; apricot-head; bloody tears, and the flu. What one child afflicted, the next must lift. Jemma imagined the sad thing twitching in the middle of their circle, and called out what she saw as the children related their almost universal success until Pickie broke the puppy’s heart and Ethel could not (or would not) heal it.

  “It’s an awful way to die,” she said. She was folded up in the only perfect lotus of the group, and her eyes were shut tight, so her make-up made it look as if she had no eyes at all, just deep empty black sockets. “It hurts so bad, and his heart can’t take it. His intestines are turning to dust. He’s walking in a circle ’cause he can’t get comfortable. Every time his heart beats it feels like somebody just stabbed him in the chest. That’s seventy or eighty stabs a minute!”

  “Then I fix him and he’s fine,” Jemma said, but not everyone was convinced, and Kidney, awake again, wept for the puppy. For another fifteen minutes she had them consider the color green, and fill themselves up with green, and imagine their every organ turning green until it had to come leaking out of their ears. Fully half of them fell asleep, and Pickie Beecher would not participate at all. “I do not like that color,” he said.

  For the last fifteen minutes of class she had them don imaginary clogs and she taught them a few steps, swearing them to secrecy lest her name become underlined on Maggie’s list. The clogging went better than the healing. Each of them picked up the steps with minimal instruction, and Jarvis did not proclaim clogging to be something practiced by the strictly gay, and Ethel and Pickie looked happy and almost normal as they danced, but then who could clog gloomily?

  After they’d all gone on to their next class, Jemma remained behind in the conference room, seated again on the table, holding the bear and staring at the places where they’d been sitting, imagining she could see the spots of warmth on the carpet. She put her face in her hands and held them all in her head, considering the thin green strands that bound them to her. She didn’t know if they were real and invisible, or entirely an illusion, part of the hangover from what she’d done. But they were with her, these twelve and all the others, bits of them always in her head. Pickie Beecher was different, equally present if not more so, a black mote floating in her mind. Already a singular and unique wrongness, he was even more noticeable because he was alone now, because he alone marred the perfect health of the hospital. Jemma found that she always had a very strong suspicion of where he was.

  You took Him away from me, Ethel said, her face rose and dove in the darkness like a tin midway duck. Josh Swift asked, Can you make my hands bigger? I don’t think Wayne really likes me, said Cindy Flemm. Kidney and Valium and States’-Rights and Shout spoke all together, You can have all the new bones, every one of them. Just give us back our father. Jarvis said, You’re the weirdest bitch in the whole wide world. Thank you, said Magnolia. Thank you over and over, like forever. Juan Fraggle asked, Did you eat my fungus? Marcus Guzman said, I saw everybody, when I was gone. Pickie Beecher said, You can’t catch me! You’ll never catch me! and ran away at great speed, covering miles and miles but never leaving her head. She had not rounded on anyone since Thing Two, except in her head, and the phantoms she’d visited while lying in bed had engaged her in conversations that still echoed. She sat there a little while longer, hesitating to go outside, not particularly eager to meet all the stares, and listened.

  * * *

  Rob was still teaching his class when Jemma went to fetch him. They were going together to the lobby, to listen to Father Jane give another talk. Jemma would rather have taken a nap, but Rob had insisted. “Just come and listen,” he said. “She really knows what she’s talking about!” He had been going faithfully to her auditorium services every Saturday and Sunday. Now she was too popular for the two hundred-seat auditorium and lectured in the lobby.

  Rob taught in the big third-floor playroom. He’d moved all the toys and tables to the sides of the room, and laid down mats in strips along the floor, to make space and comfort for tumbling. He taught gymnastics in the afternoon to children of every age, and in the morning he taught calculus to a half dozen little eggheads.

  He was walking down the mat against a busy traffic of somersaulting children, leaning down to speak encouragement or push on a bottom paused on the top of its arc. The tumbling children passed all the way to the end of the room, then started back the way they’d come. They started to learn cartwheels next. Rob demonstrated, rolling off his hands and feet so smooth and swift that Jemma wondered why he didn’t just travel like that all the time. The children fell in shrieking, laughing piles when they tried it, except for Jarvis, who was as clumsy as anyone on his first pass, but improved drastically each time he tried again, so by his fifth turn he was approximating the grace of his teacher. When the end of class came he had to be restrained to keep him from tumbling more. From fifty feet away Jemma could see how angry he was, and read off his lips the curses he mumbled.

  The children started up a begging chant, to get Rob to do a flip for them. He demurred at first, for its own sake, Jemma could tell, and extracted a few goofy promises from them regarding their homework, treatment of each other, and their dedication to math in the coming years. They made a circle around him on one of the mats, hiding him from the waist down from Jemma’s eyes.

  “Are you ready?” he asked them. They shouted that they were, but he asked three more times, until all the girls and half the boys were jumping with frustrated desire. He faked them out with a couple short leaps, then did it for real, swinging his arms back so they were parallel with the floor, then bringing them forward and over his head. From where Jemma was standing it looked like his hands were pulling his feet on invisible strings. He curled into a tight ball, his chin tucked precisely into the space between his knees, and seemed to uncurl in that same instant. She felt herself flying with him. Somehow the exuberance of his spin sucked her off her feet, and carried them off to a place that was quite free of the influence of gravity, and they spent a while suspended away from the world, before he landed on his feet again, taking one step forward to steady himself. The children clapped and cheered, and asked for another but he said, “Not till tomorrow.”

  Jemma stepped into the room once the class was over. She waved and said hello to the sweaty, still-excited children as they passed—Ethe
l and Juan and Shout and Wayne and Cindy and Pickie among others—some of them still jumping and three or four rolling into somersaults as soon as they got out into the hall. Rob had started rolling up his mats, and hadn’t seen her. He rolled one up to the window at the far end of the room, and paused there to look out over the water. A clear morning had become a cloudy afternoon, and the water had darkened every hour of the day.

  “Do another flip,” she called out.

  “There you are,” he said, turning away from the window. “Stay right there!” He ran at her, five or six steps, then fell forward into a round-off, which he followed with two back handsprings and a backflip with a half twist. He judged the distance precisely, but Jemma, afraid of being landed upon, leaped back. He had to take a step to reach her, but still the whole thing seemed like one movement, from the first step he’d taken away from the window through the flip and the ta-dah! motion he made with his arms after he landed.

  “Hot damn,” she said.

  “I think I’m getting the hang of it all again. It’s coming back a lot quicker than I expected.” He jumped in place a couple times. “Do you think my legs could be springier since… you know?”

  Jemma shrugged. “Not on purpose, anyway,” she said. He stopped jumping and kissed her. As they walked hand in hand through the halls and down the spiral ramp to the lobby she considered how he could be the poster boy for the new order. He’d made the transition from procedure-obsessed pseudo-intern to gymnastics and calculus instructor with more than just resignation or even good humor—it was like he’d wadded the old life up in a ball and punted it far away. And this a life that he had always enjoyed more than anyone, pre-Thing and post-Thing. “Do you know what this means?” he kept asking her, that first night, after they’d run back to the room and locked themselves in, as she listened to the muffled noises at the other side of the door that they’d discover in the morning were made by people piling up flowers and plush animals in heaps. She thought she knew what it meant, or that she was beginning to know—she didn’t want to think about it too much at once. Lying against him she knew he was outdistancing her, that his mind was rushing ahead into weeks and months and even years of possibility for the first time since the storm.

  They walked down the ramp, holding hands.

  “I like Father Jane,” Rob said suddenly.

  “Everybody likes her.”

  “I mean I really like her. Watching her talk, I get this feeling. It’s quite new. You’ll see.”

  “You’re not her type.”

  “Not like that,” he said, punching gently on her arm. “I just… believe her.”

  “She’s very sincere.”

  “Not just that,” he said. “My mother was very sincere, but I never believed half the shit she told me about my dad.”

  Someone yelled behind them, “Get out of the way!” Rob flattened himself against the balcony, swinging Jemma in an arc to collide with the railing. She stumbled and caught herself, one hand sinking deep into the soil in a pansy-box. Tiresias Dufresne flew by, riding an IV pole, his feet on the casters and his hands wrapped around the pole, followed by four others, Ethan the heart kid, the two former Panda syndromes, and Sylvester Sullivan bringing up the rear, slaloming expertly around a planter.

  “Watch it!” Rob called out. Sylvester slowed, dragging his foot to brake, and gave them a little wave before he rounded the corner.

  “Pretty skillful,” Jemma said.

  “They’re fixed,” said Rob. “Cindy Flemm designed them. You can steer them with your feet. Anyway, I had this uncle who liked to go to church—Uncle Stuart. He used to come over for lunch afterward and I think I finally understand what he was smiling about all the time.”

  “Uh huh,” Jemma said absently, and began to occupy herself, especially after they had found a place to stand in the lobby, with waving back to people. She waved to Dr. Chandra and Anna and Jordan Sasscock, to Timmy and Anika and Dr. Sashay. Everyone liked to wave at her, or say hello—whenever she walked anywhere in the hospital it was from greeting to greeting to greeting. Friendly waving was everywhere to be seen in the last week, but toward Jemma more than anyone people made gestures of fellowship. No one wanted to talk to her, necessarily—and she considered this a good thing—they only wanted to acknowledge her, and to smile. It made her feel like a school principal, and she would have gone about with a veil over her face, if she thought that would have been any disguise.

  Right on time Father Jane stepped up on a little box under one of the leaning pieces of the toy and raised a cordless microphone to her face.

  “Good afternoon, everyone,” she said. “What a lovely afternoon, and how lovely to see you all gathered down there. I got up this morning and there was a message burned into my bagel. She might have just said it: Today is the day, Jane. I’m babbling already. My old homiletics instructor always told me I drew fine the line between preaching and babbling, but it’s really only when I’m nervous. My old congregation was much smaller than this. Not that you are a congregation. Not exactly. But what are you, then? That’s part of what I want to talk about. In the past days I have been thinking about some particular things, asking some particular questions, and I think everyone would profit by my sharing them.” She wiped her hands against her leather pants, back and forth, so the sides of her legs began to gleam with sweat.

  “If I’d come up here a week ago, then I would have had some different things to talk about. I had different questions before: Why me? Why them? Why at all? How long? Where to? What next? These have mostly fallen away. It’s very strange, isn’t it, to have questions burn and burn and then something happens and you discover that these questions have simply gone out. All except one.

  “I had a dream three nights in a row, a series of dreams, really. I like those, don’t you? When I was in college I had a recurring dream that I was Sylvia Plath’s pony. The dream was like a friend, or like she was my friend. After a difficult exam or a bad date or another nasty telephone call from my mother I’d have the dream the next time I fell asleep, and we would ride through the woods all night long, until just at dawn I’d leap right toward the sun and then wake up. In my first dream Boo was there again—Boo is what I call her—and she said to me, Jane, Jane, why have you come here? I looked around and saw that I was in a desert, there was nothing around except Sylvia, an oven, and a single reed growing up from the sand. I said, To watch this reed, because when the wind blows on it, it does a pretty little dance. And it did do a pretty dance. It wasn’t an ordinary reed. It was so supple, and it glowed like there was moonlight in it, and it looked like there was a lady in it, waving her arms and swinging her hair. I could have watched it all night. But Boo got very upset when I said this. Oh Jane, she said. Look what you make me do! And—it was so terrible—she rushed to the oven and stuck her head inside, and the flames came up and ate her head up, and she screamed and screamed for such a long time, longer than anyone should have been able to. I pulled on her feet but I couldn’t get her free.

  “How many times had I cried out the same words. I said, Sylvia, Boo! Don’t do it! I’d shouted those same words into my pillow back in college, knowing why she did it, and wanting to do it myself, and knowing it wasn’t an on oven, but picturing her nonetheless in flames, or searing her cheek against a heating coil. I woke up in a panic, thinking I was back at our alma mater, and then, strangely, I saw the water at the window and I thought to myself, I’m in the hospital, and everything is all right. Everything is all right! Ha!

  “Boo was waiting for me again, unburnt, when I came back to that desert place. Why have you come here? she asked me again. Was it to see the circus? And I said, Of course. Look at them, Boo! because there was a caravan passing behind her of clowns in big puffy silk pajamas and bearded ladies and strong ladies. I saw Abraham Lincoln on stilts, and a whole midget congress behind him on tricycles that they had to pedal very hard on the sand. There were elephants in velour sweat suits, and a Farrah Fawcett look-alike wearing parachute
pants and a parachute poncho. It was a parade of wonders, as fascinating in the dream as the reed had been. Doesn’t it seem like the obvious answer, when someone standing in front of a parade asks you what you’ve come to see, to say, Well, the parade? But Boo scratched her breast and ran to the oven—it was part of the parade, walking on little iron legs, but it stopped for her—and we repeated the whole ugly scene, and it was even more vibrant and detailed this time. Now I could smell her burning hair and hear the fat under her skin crackle as it burned, and all the time she burned she called out, asking me Why, Jane?

  “I woke again, and this time I actually said, Thank God, I’m in the hospital! Then right away I fell asleep again, and I was back in the desert, and Boo was there, as beautiful as ever. What have you come to see? Have you come to see this man? She stepped aside and showed me our own Mr. Grampus, standing behind her. He was standing very straight, with his eyes closed. It looked like he was in a trance. I said, Boo, he and I are pals. I can see him any old time I like. Why would I come all the way out in the desert just to see him? She pulled out her tongue and stuck her head in the oven and et cetera et cetera. I’ll spare you the details of what came next but I know you can imagine them. I woke again, and slept again, and woke again, every time I woke so damn grateful to be in my little bed, to watch the water pressing up against my window, when usually it just made me feel like I was drowning, or made me think of everybody else drowning. Have you ever had one of those dreams that seems to take a lifetime to finish? That’s what this one felt like. Boo showed me so many things—a sunflower, a marathon, my sophomore literature professor dressed all in leather—and I always gave her the wrong answer when she asked, Why have you come here? And then she showed me something different. It was nothing at all. She just indicated a space with her hands, and for some reason, instead of saying there was nothing there, or that I had come to see the nothing, I said I didn’t know why I had come, but that I would. I will know, I said. I promise you, Boo. Then it was dawn, and the oven ran screaming on its little feet off into the horizon, and Boo took me in her arms and said, Jane, Jane, Jane! and I said Boo! and the rest of it you don’t really need to hear.