The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  No one could agree on what it meant, but everyone agreed it must mean something. As Dr. Sundae put it, “Only a fool would deny the significance of a leaping whale.” It was assumed, after weeks of staring into the empty sea, that all the animals had perished when the rain washed out the seas, though the angel stated, when questioned, that every low animal everywhere, on sea or land, had been “preserved.” Were the fish preserved at a deeper level of the ocean, and had the waters now receded to that level? Had they been sequestered in a bubble at some warm latitude, and released now because the time of the waters was almost over? What about the mammals? Kidney asked the angel for a dolphin–English translator and was supplied with a box on a string to fit over her mouth, and a plug for her ear. When the dolphins came again she hung out of a PICU window and asked them, Where have you been? Where are you going? Where is everyone else? in squeaks and clicks and whistles, then listened with her head cocked at the weird spray of sound that shot back. She shook her head and furrowed her brow. “They just keep laughing,” she said.

  The five candidates stood behind podiums on a new stage, in the middle of the lobby and under the shadow of the big toy. Jemma was in the crowd—the whole hospital had turned out to listen, even the NICU inhabitants, tricked out in soft jumpers, all of their sporty strollers parked in a bloc by the gift shop. Jemma found her attention drawn to them, when the candidates, even Vivian, started to bore her. The babies were all quiet but not still. They reached their fat little hands from stroller to stroller, stroking the big head of their nearest neighbor, or sucking on a finger or fist not theirs. They babbled softly at each other. Sometimes it seemed like they were commenting on the speakers. Anna stood near Jemma with Brenda hanging on her chest in a snuggly. The child was sleeping soundly and did not point at anybody.

  It was a lively but poorly organized debate. Father Jane was moderating, asking questions submitted by the hospital population for each of the five, Dr. Snood, Dr. Sundae, Vivian, Ishmael, and Monserrat. There had been another debate three days before, diffidently moderated by John Grampus, between the score and more of people running for the lesser seats on the Council.

  “We’ve been afraid all this time,” Vivian was saying, “to consider why the old world passed away, or to try to discover what the new one has to be like. I think it’s time to put this attitude behind us.”

  “Some of us never had that bad attitude,” said Dr. Sundae. “There have been voices crying from the wilderness of obfuscation from the very first day. I’m talking about myself, of course.”

  “Of course,” said Dr. Snood. “Dr. Sundae, I can still hear your complaints. But who doesn’t agree that the saving of lives must take precedent over idle speculation?”

  “Idle speculation? Have you looked out the window lately, Doctor? Do you think anyone left on this Earth would speculate idly on that?” Dr. Snood opened his mouth to reply, but Father Jane interrupted him. She was armed with his gavel, and kept jumping in just when things started to get exciting.

  “Honorable Candidates!” she said. “Please be nice. Let’s move on to the next question. Where do you see this community in one month? In two months? In three months? Ms. Vaca will speak first.”

  Monserrat tapped at her microphone—she’d been doing that each time she spoke. “I think it is a stupid question, and I apologize to the person who asked it, because I know you are not stupid, and I am not saying you are stupid, no, no.” She smiled beautifully, shining her teeth all along the crowd in a hundred and eighty degree arc. “But the question, yes, it is stupid, because it simply cannot be answered. Or instead, it can be answered, but to nobody’s good. I can tell you what I think could be happening one month from now, and two months from now, and three months from now, but who cares? We could be anywhere, we could be doing anything, it depends on you.” Now she pointed, describing with her finger the same arc her teeth had just described, but in reverse.

  “It depends on you what happens. If you want us to be unhappy, to be sleeping all during the day and forgetting about the children, letting the babies cry and the teenagers go hungry, then we can do that. If you want us to all be living in cardboard boxes here in the lobby, then we can do that. If you want us to keep building this place into something wonderful, a city like the great Disney World where I went in my youth and I thought, if only I could live here. I said to my mama, I want to live here. Please don’t make me leave! And my mama made this filthy, filthy thing at me.” Monserrat raised a hand and rubbed her thumb and first two fingers together in a money grubbing gesture. “And she said to me, Honey, you ain’t got the money to live here forever. But that is what you could do, you could make a place so delightful that every child here would turn to you—yes to you,” she pointed imperiously at Father Jane, “because now you are her mama, we are all of us her mama—she would say to you, Mama I never want to go away from this place, I am so happy. Do you know how incredible that is? How much of a miracle? It’s as much as what Ms. Jemma did, and as much as all the deadly waters, if we can make this place so happy, and make these children so happy that they do not even remember their old sadness, and by that I mean the old sadness of before, and the sadness of losing that. Do you understand me? Do you see it like I do? You, do you see it?” She pointed at a lab tech, Sadie the urine-tutor, who sat in the front row. Sadie coughed and blushed and nodded.

  Monserrat pointed elsewhere in the audience, and Jemma, who never was sure if people were pointing or waving at her and so never responded to a wave or a point, no matter how friendly or imperious, still felt a little flushed as the finger waved in her general direction. Vivian was worried about Monserrat, and secretly called her the Tamalagogue, because she argued, or at least proclaimed, so passionately, and seemed able to make people feel what she was feeling. “She is a screaming teakettle with barely a quarter inch of water in it,” Vivian said, a little unfairly, Jemma thought, because the lady did not seem shallow to her. Jemma had fixed her diabetes, and touched something rich and angry in her, some deep resource that previously was employed only in peddling tamales which no one could ever turn down, not even the nauseated or the full or the vegetarian.

  Monserrat folded her arms across her chest and nodded vigorously, approving very strongly of what she had just said. Dr. Sundae was next in the speaking order. “Obviously,” she said, “obviously we will all have to play a part in deciding what comes next. But will it just pop up on its own, like some surprising weed, or is it something that will require planning, and even cultivation? We’re all very smart, here. I think we know what the answer is.

  “In a month, or two months, or three months, I think we could be landed. I think the waters are waiting for us, and will be drawn back as soon as we demonstrate that we have become a worthy colony, one fit to be put ashore in a new, unspoiled place. And how will we demonstrate this? Well, the first step will be tonight, for you are choosing your direction when you are choosing your director. I mean no more slight than is absolutely necessary against my competitors when I say that if you choose someone with no clear vision of how to make this demonstration, and by that I really mean—I must say it—someone besides me—then you should be prepared to stay out here… indefinitely. But perhaps you like it out here.

  “And maybe there is much to like, now. Certainly there are many distractions. We concoct new ones every day. But weave me the basket, please, that will redeem the sin that called down destruction upon you. Teach me the mathematics that will prove we were innocent, or undeserving of destruction. Play me the instrument that does not increase our trespass. We should be refined by our affliction, but instead we wave our hands in front of our faces and say, Look at the bird!

  “I tell you we will be destroyed little by little if we do not look inward and back, to discover and disown our sin. We are rocked in plenty out here, and given days full of nothing but the opportunity for reflection. I propose that we begin to do so systematically, and with all our effort, and put our bright minds to the task of desi
gning a repentance, and yes, there may be fasting, and scourging, and weeping, and yes, yes—gnashing of teeth. But look inside, all of you, do you think anything else will suffice for what you’ve done?”

  It was very quiet when Dr. Sundae stopped talking. Had there been surviving crickets anywhere in the world, Jemma was sure she would have heard them, then. She didn’t think she could make much in the way of a prediction about who was going to win, but she was sure Dr. Sundae would come in dead last.

  “Thank you, Dr. Sundae,” said Vivian, the next to speak, “for that frightening harangue. I’m afraid I agree with part of what you’ve just said. In three months we could very well still be out here. We have no way of knowing how long it will be. We’ve all thought about the possibility of it being forever. I feel like it will be less than that, but the angel’s not telling and my magic eight ball is confused on the subject.

  “I wonder sometimes how much it matters, though. It already feels to me like we’ve been out here forever, and it feels like the waters came just yesterday. It was ages ago, and a moment ago that the kids all got better. I hope I don’t sound too much like Dr. Sundae if I say it’s not how much time we spend out here, but what we do with it, that matters. And I think it happened for a reason, too, of course I do. I mean, we know it wasn’t global warming, right? And I think we should reflect on the reason—find out why it happened and reform ourselves accordingly. But it won’t profit any of us to gnash our teeth or crawl down the catwalk in a hair-shirt fashion show. I don’t think the water is waiting for us to be good. We’re all good already, we’ve all done good things in the past months, and who knows what good things you all did before that. And maybe that’s why you’re here now. As I said, the eight ball is confused.

  “We should build something, I think. We should decide together what was wrong about the old world and start building the new one, because it has to start here, whether we land someplace tomorrow or in ten years. So that’s what I think we’ll be doing in the coming months, building up a new world out of this place where children used to come to die. I have a clear vision for it. I hope you’ll let me share it with you.”

  Jemma felt a curious attraction toward her friend, and thought she saw people leaning a little toward the stage, and then suddenly leaning back away from it when Dr. Snood started to speak.

  “Well,” he said. “Children never came here expressly to die. I think we all realize that. Sometimes we did our best and failed them, but we never lured them to our candy house to practice atrocities on them or smother them in their sleep. I think it’s important to be clear on this point, because what we were is what determines what we will be. This is still a hospital, no matter how we trick it up with stages and playing fields and movie theaters, and our work is still the work of a hospital—preservation. We have been granted either a reprieve or a new mandate, I do not know which, and I don’t think anybody does know which, even the agent of the change. Dr. Claflin, are you out there? May I ask you, do you know, is it a reprieve, will we all be going back to our old work in a month or two months or three?” Jemma could not believe the gall of him, to pimp her in this crowd, to reach back in time to pull his pimping prerogative out of the old, dead order. She was surrounded by short children, and had nowhere to hide.

  “Better ask the eight ball, Doctor,” she shouted back at him.

  “Yes, well, I understand it’s confused. I don’t think we can know, Dr. Claflin. It is all too strange and new for most of us, which is exactly why we should preserve our old, familiar forms, even if we have to fill them with new things. Because I tell you we are a hospital, and will always be a hospital, because a hospital, more than anything else, even more than a place where children go to become well, is a community, and this hospital was a community for many years before it became… how it is now… isolated.

  “I think in a month we will be a more perfect community, and in another month, and another, we will become still more perfect. We are already building something, in ourselves, between ourselves, and outside of ourselves. Look around you at all the changes, and look inside yourselves at all the changes. We have only begun to apply the sort of energy that kept us going during those weeks and weeks of thirty-six-hour shifts, the same wonderful dedication that gave such excellent care to children as sick as any I have ever seen, and not a single child died, not a single child. We are still a hospital. We are still a community of workers, and the work we are going to do is something truly wonderful.”

  He got significant applause. Jemma stuck her hands in her pockets and glared at him.

  Ishmael spoke last. “You all know what I think about this. We’ve talked about it together, more or less.” He looked out into the audience. “Right, Bob? Right, Martha? Right, Alan?” His eyes traveled slowly around the room, and he named thirty or forty of the spectators around the stage, plus a smattering of those who were watching from the first, second, and even the third floors. “Basically, I think everybody’s right. Everybody’s got a part of it. I can’t tell you what I did, what part I played in getting us this big screwing, because I can’t remember. Hell, maybe it’s all my fault, and only mine. Sometimes when I’m angry I wonder if it’s me I’m most angry at, and I look in the mirror sometimes and say, You bastard. But there are things for us to atone for, and to reflect on, and it’s all up to you, that’s true. Nothing is going to happen, no matter how much we stand up here and blab, unless you want it to. And we are a community, I believe that, and feel like a part of it, though I never did much, before, except fetch blankets and change diapers, not knowing what I was good for.

  “But there’s something else, there’s something more. I think that we’ve already become something more than just a community. Look around you—this is a family, isn’t it? It’s a very strange family, I’ll admit, but aren’t all families strange? I don’t remember my own family. Maybe that’s why I noticed this. I didn’t have one to miss, or be sad about in the same way as everybody else. But I bet they were strange. I look at myself in the mirror and try to imagine them all around me. Sometimes it’s easy to do and sometimes it’s hard, and they’re different every time. I know some of you do the same, look in the mirror for them or look for them elsewhere.

  “I’ll say it again, though. Look around you, at all these adults and the children in their care. So, in a month we’ll be a better family, I think. And in two months we’ll be even better. And in three months we’ll be better in ways we can’t even imagine, in ways that will make all the troubles of the old world seem so small and remote that you’ll all be like me. You will not even remember them.”

  Jemma and Rob spent the rest of the evening trying to calm and distract Vivian, who immediately after the debate entered a tizzy which grew more intense as the time to vote, and the wait for the count, drew near.

  “I think everybody’s right,” she said, not succeeding very well in imitating Ishmael’s goofy baritone. “But they’re all morons, too.”

  “I don’t think he called anybody a moron,” said Jemma. They were in Jemma’s classroom, sitting at the table before a feast of untouched treats. Vivian was too nervous to eat.

  “Not in so many words,” Vivian said. “That’s his special gift. He never said moron, but everybody left with ’morons!’ ringing in their heads.”

  “You did better than he did,” Jemma said, again. Rob came in with more food.

  “Family,” she said. “Who wants to be a family? Like that ever worked before. Shouldn’t we try to be something better than a family?”

  “Have a piece of cheesecake,” said Rob.

  “I don’t want cheesecake,” Vivian said sharply. “I want to crush him.” Jemma sighed. Rob peeled the paper off a cupcake. A cloud of tiny silver sardines swam by, seeming to disappear as they passed through the bars of darkness between windows. They were circling the hospital, and had been passing by every fifteen minutes the whole time Jemma and Vivian had been in the room.

  It was almost ten p.m. The polls had cl
osed at nine, and now volunteers were carefully counting the votes from out of the boxes. There were stations on every floor except the ninth, but most people had voted in the lobby. Jemma and Rob had stood in line for an hour before they were handed their ballots. They were just rectangles of stiff paper, printed with offices and names to select by filling in bubbles, and a space to write in a candidate if the person you wanted wasn’t listed. Jemma thought of all the names she could write in: Bugs Bunny, Eloise, Papa Smurf, any of whom might very well prove to be a capable leader. For the sake of fun she was very much tempted to do it, but if Vivian lost by a single vote she knew she’d have to confess what she did, and never be forgiven. She voted Vivian for Universal Friend, and chose somewhat at random for the Council members, having a hard time remembering what they had said in their speeches and debates, and if she had cared about anything she’d heard.

  “What time is it?” Vivian asked. Rob told her.

  “The counting is slow,” Jemma reminded her.

  “Too slow,” she said. “We should have used the computer.” But there were too many people who didn’t trust the computer to count correctly, or who thought that the angel might pick a favorite to win regardless of the vote count, or who merely wanted to create as much fuss and bustle as possible around the event of voting.

  “Would you like to watch a movie?” Jemma asked. Films about First Ladies were very popular that week. Rob had borrowed a couple of non-pornographic titles from Dr. Chandra: Hillary vs. Mothra and Nancy and Martha: A Love Beyond Time.

  “No. I want to drug myself to sleep and wake up in the morning. I feel like I’m waiting for my board scores. Remember that?” Vivian had hardly slept at all during the last week of waiting for the small gray envelope to arrive.

  “I remember,” Jemma said. “I’m nervous, too. We all are, right?”

  “Right,” Rob said. He had sliced up his cupcake and laid it out on top of a piece of cheesecake, and was just about to cut into this new thing with his fork. “Everybody knows I eat when I’m nervous.”