The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  “It is the lesson of the dream that you must hear. I’m sure some of you have already guessed it. I remembered my scripture in the morning. I climbed up on a chair so I could put my face right in the window and look at the miles and miles of empty ocean and I spoke it aloud, What did you go out into the wilderness to see? And I knew who had been talking to me all night. And I knew it was not to see, but to do, and I knew I must come and speak to you, not of Why me, because I cannot know. Not of How long, because it does not matter. Not even of Why at all, except as it pertains to What next.

  “So now I ask you the same question. What have we come out here for? It’s so late, my friends, to ask ourselves the question, but the answer seemed obvious, before, when the circus was upon us. Now, in the quiet, we must ask ourselves again. I submit that the answer is, we don’t know. But we must know, we must decide, and I think that our errand must be as awful and wonderful as our circumstance. I don’t know what it is—can you forgive my presumption if I call on all of you to define it, and then to execute it? I call on myself to do it, too.

  “So that’s what I had to say. That’s the question I wanted to ask. That’s all. Thank you for listening to me.”

  “A little lower,” said Vivian. “I want the five-year-olds to see it, too.”

  “But they’re not voting,” Jemma said. She was helping Vivian hang campaign posters, up and down the ramp, empty in the late evening, most everybody off at the movies or in one of the many Sunday-night meetings.

  “So? They can talk. They can influence. Snood is ignoring everybody under sixteen.”

  “Well,” said Jemma. “How about a clown nose, then?” She drew a circle with her finger around Vivian’s nose.

  “Clowns suck ass,” was all Vivian said. Not all of her posters even had her picture on them, and on the two that did, her image was dwarfed by the text. She had three different posters, with three different slogans. One, blue letters on a red field, simply said: VIVIAN BENNETT: YOUR UNIVERSAL FRIEND. Between Universal and Friend her picture was set, four inches by four, a shot of her lovely face, looking friendly but not too friendly. It looked like a natural and spontaneous expression, but Jemma knew it was precisely calculated. At a poster party two nights before, Vivian had exhausted her with a catalog of expressions, trying them out on her before Rob took her picture. “How about this?” she’d say, and turn her lips up just a millimeter more. At first Jemma only pretended to notice a difference between expressions, but after a half hour of it she could actually see the difference the position of an eyebrow or the intensity of the stare could make. They’d chosen an expression they labeled a fusion of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Rogers, but it didn’t come out on film the way it looked in life. Vivian blamed Rob because he’d used a softening lens, hoping to make her look glamorous, not understanding that Vivian could look glamorous clothed only in pieces of toilet paper stuck randomly to her body, and that such devices were not necessary—indeed they were the only thing that could spoil her beauty. “Universal Friend,” she said to Rob when she fired him, “not Universal Whore.” In the final picture, which Jemma took herself, Vivian, overcorrecting for the luscious come-hitherness of the previous set, looked a bit stiff.

  The other two posters all had longer text, one red on white, the other blue on green: VIVIAN BENNETT STILL WANTS TO KNOW WHY IT HAPPENED, and VIVIAN BENNETT: COME WITH ME INTO THE NEW WORLD. They put them in all the popular places, along the spiral ramp, in the cafeteria, in the playroom, on the walls of the lobby. And Vivian climbed up on the toy to attach three to a whirligig; they spun just slowly enough to read. She had some made into transparencies and attached them to the windows. She had miniatures made, of paper for the adults, and of gummy-stuff for the under-twelves. Her competitors quickly copied her. There was nothing she could do, and no one to complain to, except the angel, who listened impassively but gave everyone the same advantages.

  The Committee had been working for months at its own destruction, but at just the pace Jemma expected, and just the pace she would have if someone had assigned her the task of destroying herself, when she hardly had time to sleep or eat or pee. No one seemed much offended by the oligarchy, though—Jemma, at least, was too tired and too depressed to give it a whole lot of thought, and even the half dozen or so surviving political agitators of the old world never did more than send memos to the Committee, and attend the sessions where they worked out the increasingly complex details of their transformation into an elected council. Every week the Committee reminded the population and itself that it must soon disband, and yet it never did.

  By the day after Thing Two, when the hospital was deprived of its usual business, everyone suddenly knew it was time. After passing the motion that deplored, punished, and celebrated Jemma’s act of vigilantism, the Committee started its own doomsday clock—the body would dissolve in twenty-six days. To Jemma it hardly seemed long enough to properly decorate the hospital with posters, let alone to mount a campaign.

  It had mostly escaped her attention, though, that people had been campaigning for weeks, even in advance of a decision regarding the form and power of the high office. Jemma had thought the people who were running—except Vivian, whose ambition she already suspected—were only being very friendly. Ishmael was garrulous and expansive—he’d never had much of a real job, and spent most of his time socializing with people with work to do. He seemed to be friends with everybody, except Vivian, since they’d broken up a week before, after Vivian discovered that he’d been cheating on her with an as yet untallied number of women and men. Dr. Snood spent an hour or two every day checking up on people, gauging the state of the hospital in a walking tour. He gave the impression, whenever he came by, of carrying out an inspection. Monserrat appeared to be just selling her tamales, as she always had, not gathering a constituency. Likewise Dr. Sundae was doing her usual business when she trudged from floor to floor, worsening everybody’s depression in personal encounters.

  They all wanted to be the Universal Friend. “The grandest sort of pooh-bah,” Vivian said. The Friend would be a President in all but name, and would have been called one if the Committee, in a gesture toward the new, hadn’t wanted to call him something else. The Friend would be assisted by three others, each a little less than the one who came before, the First Friend, and the Second, and the Third. Then there was the Council, twelve in number, headed by a Secretary. All these were elected offices—thirty-five people all together were running for one of them. Once instated, the Executive and the Legislature would appoint together a Judiciary, a council of six, not that they’d needed any judges yet. It all seemed very traditional, to Jemma, but Vivian insisted it would be new and strange and wonderful.

  “A little higher,” Vivian said after they’d proceeded about fifty yards up the ramp and Jemma stopped to hang an “into the new world” poster underneath one of Dr. Snood’s, which featured a huge picture of him behind his slogan, DON’T CHANGE HORSES IN THE MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN There was another small poster a few feet down the ramp. His all said the same thing: ISHMAEL: YOU KNOW ME.

  “I know you all right,” said Vivian, looking at the poster. As the poster party wore on into the early morning, Vivian consumed vast amounts of a synthetic blue liquor while Jemma and Rob engaged in long, frustrating conversations with the replicator. Rob had occupied himself too much with making them for the competition: Jacob Snood: I’m Better Than You; and Ishmael: I’ll Fuck Anything.

  Ishmael never came by their room anymore for Wednesday-night backgammon, and never came anymore in the morning to fetch Rob for a run on the roof.

  “Father Jane is stealing my boyfriend,” Jemma said, more to distract Vivian from unpleasant ruminations than because it was necessarily true.

  “Your fiancé.”

  “My boyfriend.”

  “She doesn’t like boys,” Vivian said, turning her gaze back to Dr. Snood.

  “Not like that,” Jemma said. “Though that could just be an act—remember Veronica Kelly?” That w
as a false lesbian whom Vivian had exposed when they were sophomores.

  “If she liked boys she’d be all over Grampus. If she was going to change her mind he’d know before Rob did.”

  “Not like that, anyway. He talks about her all the time, and counts the hours to the next meeting, and all day it’s been defining the errand this and defining the errand that. He didn’t used to be so impressionable.”

  “Good thing she’s not running for anything.”

  “Not that what she said didn’t make sense. It was all very nice, and nicely articulated, and I was probably just imagining things but I swear I can hear it resonating in people, but there’s just something about her.”

  “The macramé,” Vivian said.

  “I don’t know. She’s just… hasty somehow.”

  “Is Rob fucking Father Jane?” Vivian asked of the air.

  “Not even in dreams,” came the reply from a speaker in the floor.

  “There you go,” Vivian said. “You wouldn’t know a good thing if it bit you in the ass, anyway.”

  “Are you talking to me?” Jemma asked.

  “A little higher,” Vivian said, putting her hand on Jemma’s and pushing her poster up the wall until it covered Snood’s.

  “Not that high,” said the angel.

  When is a person not herself anymore, Jemma not Jemma, you not you? It’s the other question you ask yourself every day. Your brother had a theory, you remember, of radiating corruption—it proceeded, he said, out of him (and you) to ruin the whole world. Wasn’t it a change in you that changed this place, something inside you rising like seven hundred children from their sickbeds in a single night? Your brother said it comes back, the ruin, magnified a thousand times. All your corruption comes home to you, from the world, as sure as an echo. Something wonderful must be coming back to you, then.

  Jemma lay awake, Rob snoring beside her. After exhausting him with sex she was not the least bit tired. “Oh, it’s totally normal,” Vivian had told her when Jemma asked what sort of problem her dreadful horniness represented. “Lots of women get like that. There’s no harm in it, unless you’ve got a previa or something. Except…” They were alone in an ER exam room, but Vivian leaned forward to whisper the precaution, “If he blows air up your little missus then you could get an air embolism and then—well.” She drew a finger across her throat.

  “Who blows air up the little missus?” Jemma had asked, and Vivian had shrugged innocently.

  She lay in bed, touching Rob’s arm every so often to make sure he was still there, and holding her hand up in the moonlight to see if it looked any different. She pinched her thumb and forefinger together, then pulled them apart, stretching a little line of fire, as stretchy and gooey as a gob of spit, between them. She put her fingers together again to put out the fire.

  She turned and pushed her back up against Rob. He muttered something, backed away, then scooted forward and threw an arm around her, sighing against her shoulder. She lay with her face on her arm, staring straight ahead at their pagers where they lay stacked on the nightstand. They’d both been silent all week, but Jemma expected one to go off as she watched them. Her eye wandered to the wall across from the bed, papered with plush animals. They’d run out of room, lining them along the baseboards and stacking them on the bed, so Rob had started to fasten them to the wall with industrial staples through the ear or the neck.

  They were evidence of the change, too, and whole, healthy Rob Dickens was evidence of the change, and the recent memory of pressing her forehead against the cool window while he spread himself over her back, reaching his hands up along her sides and her neck to gently clasp the sides of her face, it was evidence. The silent pagers were evidence, and the greater silence outside in the hospital—the night had always been full of stray noises, little bits of alarm, or voices raised in frustration, or the voice of the angel announcing a code. Now everyone was asleep except for the isolated nurse here and there, waiting for someone to get sick again. They might as well have been watching against landfall or the rise of a monster from the sea. But Jemma still couldn’t sleep. And she could not describe the change in herself.

  She slipped out of bed, knowing just how quickly she could move without waking Rob, dressed in scrubs and clogs, and went out. It was dark in the hall. She had to follow the little orange strip of emergency lighting along the floor to get to the stairs. By the time I get to the roof, she said to herself as she took the first step up, I will understand completely how I am a different person than I was eight days ago. Every step will be a revelation.

  But the steps were just steps. Proclamations had worked before. Back in college she’d climbed the stadium steps, a lesbian postulant at the bottom, a confident heterosexual at the top. She’d sorted her feelings about particular boys in a particular manner; every step of the way coming to a new conclusion about them—I like his teeth, but not his hair; I like how he smells; he is not a generous person; he is far too close to his cat—until all the little conclusions summed to a decision. This time, on the odd step here and there she made an observation—everything is different now outside of me; I hated medicine and if I really have destroyed it, then whee whee whee; I should be happier like everybody else; I’ll never be able to teach anyone how to do this; Rob can’t die now because of my loving him; I wish I could have done this years ago, when it really mattered—but understanding did not come settling on her, gold glitter from out of the sky.

  On the roof, she stepped out of her shoes and walked around on the soft grass, asking herself the same question as she walked in a circle, Is it all different? When she was trapped in the slough of wishy-washiness over Rob, too weak to run away from him though she was convinced she’d ruin him, she’d asked the same question: Is it all different now, is it all over, am I just being stupid? Now the objective forecast was for continually lifting gloom, but Jemma found herself afraid that if she believed it, if she did not cherish and cultivate the dread that was in her, she’d ruin it for everyone, because the world, as soon as it knew she believed and trusted it, would not resist the chance to prove her a sucker, and punish her for being a sucker. She almost got down on her knees, not to pray, but because she thought it would help her consider things, and maybe become a person who trusted in the future. She thought it might be a good position, too, to kneel and consider her baby, and try to look again inside to see it. As always, it was like trying to look at the tip of your nose, and she could only daydream about the sex or the color of the eyes, or speculate on the nature of the world it would be born into, or worry that something was already horribly wrong, something that she would not be able to fix. She put her hands on her belly, and drew in a deep breath, trying to picture her baby again—it was as big as a chicken egg and had managed to grab hold of her colon, holding her poop hostage against some demand it was still too immature to articulate—and then she let out a great big sigh, huger than anything her mother, a champion sigher, had ever managed. A noise came, as if in answer, a high whine that she thought might be a bug before she saw the person sitting on the edge of the roof near the sandbox.

  It was Ishmael fishing. He let his line fall all the way down to the water, then started to reel it up immediately. Jemma approached him from the side, afraid of startling him and precipitating a long fall back to the sea.

  “It’s okay,” he said when she was still ten feet away. “I know you’re there. I heard you come out of the door.”

  “Sorry,” Jemma said. “Do you want to be alone?”

  “Just want to fish,” he said. “I thought I would like it, and I do.”

  “Catch anything yet?”

  “I don’t have a hook. Just a sinker.”

  “You don’t think there’s anything in there?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere, probably, way down deep. My kids this morning asked about that. I said the fish were all sleeping. I guess they could be. Why don’t you sit down?”

  “Oh, too scared.” But he pointed out that there
was a ledge not ten feet below his feet, so Jemma sat, kicking her heels against the side of the hospital and looking out at the broken moonlight scattered over the water. There was hardly any wind, and the only noise was of the water breaking against the windows down below.

  “Trouble sleeping?” he asked her.

  “Yes. Always. You too?”

  “Usually. I used to run up here. That helped, for a while. I think this is going to help.”

  “Nothing helps me,” Jemma said.

  “You can’t just… fix it?”

  “I guess not,” she said, though she hadn’t tried.

  “You could ask the angel for something. She must have something that would work.”

  “No thanks. Why don’t you ask her?”

  “I’d rather fish. Want to try?” He offered her the pole.

  It took a while to draw the sinker up nine stories. As big as her thumb, it gleamed and dripped.

  “Now for the fun part,” he said. She screwed up the first two casts, not keeping her finger on the release, so the first one only went about ten feet, and the second fifteen. But on the third try she sent the sinker flying out toward the horizon, and the line played out even after she was sure it must have hit the water.

  “Trying to sound out the bottom?”

  “Sorry,” she said. She started to reel the line in.

  “It’s fun, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, yes,” Jemma said, reeling frenetically. “But it’s not making me sleepy.” She had a lot of line to reel in. He let her concentrate on it for a little while, then asked her how Vivian’s campaign was going. “I don’t think I can tell you,” she said.