The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  Jemma did it, clenching her fists and curling her toes, squinching her eyes and grinding her teeth. She tried to make the same noise that her brother had. When she opened her eyes the mist cloud had reached the wall behind the bed, and was falling toward them.

  “Good enough, I guess,” Calvin said. “I hope he brings me what I want this year. I hope I’ve finally been good enough—not that he gives a gift because of anything you do. I know he only gives the gifts to increase his own glory, but I still hope I’ve been good in the right way, finally. I don’t want to be found wanting again. This time I want to get it. You know?”

  “An erector set?” Jemma asked.

  “No, stupid. Going. Maybe this year. Maybe finally.” He took in a deep breath, and Jemma was sure he was going to use it to shout or sing, but he only blew it out in a big sigh. Then he was quiet.

  “The clouds are coming,” Jemma said as the mist fell down farther. He just snored when she knocked him in the ribs, and when the mist had settled on them completely she found she could not find him anymore, not with her elbow and not with her hand. “Where are you?” she called out into the fog. She reached with both her hands as far out as she could reach to her sides, but felt only air. The fog brightened and condensed. “Where are you?” she called out again.

  “Over here,” came a voice, but not Calvin’s. It was a voice that sounded like many people talking, all saying the same thing at the same time. The fog began to lift from the foot of the bed, a little at a time, as if it were being torn away in little strips to unwrap the person it was concealing.

  “Santa?” Jemma asked, because it was a Santa shape that she saw through the fog, the hat and the beard and the belly. But as her vision became clearer she saw that though the thing had the shape of Santa, it looked very different from the traditional representations. It was a Santa of Santas, his body made up of tiny bodies. Jemma counted twelve of them just in the face.

  “We are the Unity of Santa,” it said, eight of them pushing and twisting away from each other to be the moving lips. It stared, four little bodies bowing to her when it blinked.

  “What do you want?” Jemma asked it, when it did not go away, and did not speak.

  “To show you wonderful things,” it said. “Only take our hand and we will go.” It held a hand out to her, each body at the tip of each finger extending its arms and hands and fingers at her.

  “Are you taking me to a Christmas past?” Jemma asked, because she had earlier in the day been reading A Christmas Carol.

  “What would be the point?” it asked, wiggling its hand, and wiggling all its hands until Jemma put her own hand out to touch it. It was like touching a caterpillar or her father’s beard.

  “Where are we going?” Jemma asked, suddenly quite certain that she was dreaming for all that pinching her bottom failed to wake her. The mist was streaming on either side of them, as if they were traveling fast, and she felt a wind on her face that blew colder and colder.

  “North,” said the Unity of Santa. “Where else?”

  At great speed, but for no more time than it would have taken her to walk from one end of the room to the other, they traveled, coming to rest when the boat-bed drove up with a squeaking crunch upon a shore of snow. They were out of the mist. As the Unity of Santa helped her out of the boat Jemma looked back at her brother—she could see him plainly though she had never been able to find him with her hands—looking very pale as he slept.

  “But what will happen to my brother?” Jemma asked.

  “He will sleep. Come along. She is waiting.”

  “Who?” Jemma asked, but her guide was silent as they walked through ice tunnels that were sometimes so narrow that Jemma could reach up and put a hand on the ceiling, and sometimes so wide that Jemma couldn’t see the walls let alone the ceiling, until they came to a round wooden door. The Unity extracted from its pocket a key made of little Santas. It opened the door and waved Jemma through.

  She found herself in the middle of Santa’s workshop. It was much busier than she thought it should be, given that Santa was already out in the world delivering presents. But all the elves were still working furiously. Indeed, most of them looked sad and tired. When she asked why the elves were all still working, her guide told her that it was for her, that all the presents they were making were for her. “If you don’t want them, then all you have to do is say the word,” said the Unity. Jemma was silent.

  They climbed up many stairs, flights of five or ten steps set into the walls, or passing through the walls, but always rising, up toward the top of the workshop. The elves looked sadder and more haggard the farther they climbed, but the presents they worked on were ever more sublime. On what Jemma thought might be the ninth floor she found a pair of emaciated elves dressed only in little barrels painstakingly sewing her name in gold into the vapors of a small cloud.

  “Oh, oh!” Jemma called out. “Is that the cloud that I asked for?” The elves looked up at her briefly with dark, empty eyes before returning to their work.

  “Stupid girl,” said the Unity of Santa. “What does it look like, a pony?”

  “Sorry!” Jemma said, suddenly afraid that all the wonders she’d passed would be denied her.

  “There’s no sorry here,” it said. They’d come to another door, bigger than the first, and colored a deeper red. The Unity of Santa kicked it, so hard that a few of the constituents were knocked from the hat, and fell to catch hands and join with the long ropes of Santas who were its hair. It thrust Jemma into a long room, full of torchlight and reeking, Jemma thought, of winter—pine and berries and smoke and the bright sting of cold air. Jemma realized she could feel her nose again. She put her hand on it.

  “Yes, hello!” A woman at the far end of the room, seated in a wooden throne, was putting her hand to her nose just as Jemma was doing. “Hello! Is this what you do to greet a body? I think I like it better than waving.”

  “I was just checking to see if my nose was there.”

  “It certainly is,” said the lady. She was dressed in a red velvet robe trimmed in white fur, and berries were caught up in her great loops of hair. On closer inspection, the berries seemed to Jemma to be growing from her hair, not just resting in it. As plain as the mouth below it. “Do you know who I am, little girl?”

  “Mrs. Claus,” Jemma said, though not sure about that, because this lady was black, and Jemma’s mother had told her, when Jemma asked specifically if Mrs. Claus or Santa himself might be black, that it was a frank impossibility and an absurd thought, and had furthermore denied the blackness of Jesus, Nefertiti, and the Queen of Sheba.

  “Clever girl,” she said. She leaned back in the chair and crossed her legs, flashing shiny boots that ran up to her thighs. “Do you know why you are here?”

  “To get my presents?”

  “Just that? There’s more, if you’re smart enough. Here it is: all that you have seen is nothing at all compared to what I can give you, if you answer the question I’ll pose. But if you get the question wrong then you get nothing, and then you must pay a terrible price. Too terrible even for me to speak of just yet.”

  “Would I get a pony?” Jemma asked, “If I answer the question?”

  “Who knows? Maybe you’ll get a thousand ponies. Will you answer my question?”

  Jemma looked at the lady, and at the Unity of Santa, and back down the hall through the door to the workshop. She knew her brother would scold her for seeking the bird in the bush, but she did it anyway, imagining herself riding a pony that was made of a thousand ponies, a Unity of pony.

  “Okay,” Jemma said slowly. Mrs. Claus stood up and walked down the marble steps that led up to her throne. She stopped on the last one and bent over Jemma, her hair swinging close enough that Jemma could tell how it smelled like moss.

  “Very well,” she said. “Tell me, child, what has Santa got under his hat?”

  Jemma folded her arms and ducked her chin and began to think hard. Air? That would be the sensible answer.
An elf? He might just keep one there. An apple? That was possible, but not particularly likely. His hair? That was even more sensible, but Jemma thought she had a better answer.

  “His head,” she said.

  “No, child,” Mrs. Claus said, looking a little shocked at Jemma’s answer. “World peace. World peace. That’s what’s under his hat. Haven’t you been listening to your brother?”

  “I have been,” Jemma said. “All night long.”

  Mrs. Claus sighed. “A liar, too,” she said sadly. “Well, off with her head then.”

  “Are you talking about me?” Jemma asked.

  “Off with her head!” Mrs. Claus shouted. She jumped up and down on the steps as Jemma backed away, then drew out a long-handled axe from beneath her robe. She shook it and pointed it at Jemma, but never swung. “Off with her head!” she said again, her voice echoing in the hall. At her last words the Unity of Santa fell apart, dissolving from the head down, every member tumbling down to the floor to run at Jemma on little feet. Jemma fled. Out the door, past all the elves working in alcoves on her presents. Now they were all sharpening bits of coal, which they threw at her, only one in all nine floors proving herself a good shot. Jemma rubbed her sore forehead as she ran along the ice toward the boat, looking back just once at the swarm of Santas behind her. The boat was drifting away but she made a long leap and landed next to he brother. Then she was on her back again under the mist, listening to her brother snore beside her. She thought she was awake, or that her night visitation had ended, but then she saw them from the corners of her eyes, innumerable little hats rising over the sides of the boat, followed shortly by the pale fat Santa faces in their beards. They only spoke to her, and did not lift a finger to harm her. “The Spirit will visit you next,” they said.

  She waited for the next visitor for what seemed like a whole hour before she realized that the mist was making a sighing noise, or rather that it was speaking very quietly in a voice that was like a person sighing quietly. She peered at the mist and saw a face there, fat like Santa’s face, but sadder. “I am the Spirit of Santa,” it said. “Come away with me.”

  “Okay,” Jemma said, feeling quite trusting despite how poorly she had been treated by Mrs. Claus. It wasn’t that the Spirit was not spooky—it was quite spooky—but Jemma felt safe and not afraid. The feeling like parts of her body were missing had given way to a rubbery feeling. She felt sure that if she curled herself into a ball she could bounce to the ceiling, and was sure that her rubber neck would be proof against an axe.

  The spirit settled on her, cold and wet. When it lifted she was in a graveyard. She remembered this part from the book, and quickly went in search of her own tombstone to see when she was going to die. “Will nobody miss me?” she asked the spirit excitedly, but it was quiet. She found names on the tombstones—Annabelle; Corky; Pooh the Third; Mrs. Beasley; Shenandoah—but hers was nowhere.

  “Who is buried here?” she asked.

  “All forgotten!” the spirit sighed. It rose up in the air and threw out its arms and legs, and began to bleed away from its tips, fingers and toes rarefying into a thinner mist that spun out into threads that drifted over every grave. “No one remembers them!” the Spirit moaned, and sank its tendrils into the ground.

  Jemma had her answer in moments. Felt paws and porcelain hands began to claw up through the dirt, followed shortly by the bodies of ragged bears and dogs and cats, dolls in rags with shattered eyes, robots with broken antennae, giraffes and hippos and elephants leaking stuffing. They crawled from their graves and lurched toward Jemma who, safe in her rubbery feeling, waited for them calmly. They only wanted hugs; she knew it as soon as one got close to her. It was a teddy bear, armless, legless, and unstuffed, just a head on a furry poncho. It smelled just like Aunt Mary’s terrible, terrible breath, a mixture of cat box and rotten meat, but Jemma hugged it tight. She hugged the broken dolls and the broken robots and the dull board games missing their pieces. She had enough hugs for every one of them, but they soon overwhelmed her, burying her under wool and silk and organdy and steel, until the mist settled in through the thin spaces between bodies and touched her skin. Then she was in her brother’s bed again, feeling like it had all gone very well, and that she had passed some sort of test.

  “The Power will come!” cried the Spirit, and then it was gone. Jemma was alone with her sleeping brother in a dark, clear room. She did not have long to wait. There came an ominous knock on the door, four strong blows that Jemma was sure would wake everyone, but there was no change in Calvin’s snoring.

  “Come in,” Jemma whispered. She thought it was Santa this time, good old regular Santa come to comfort her, or explain the significance of what she’d seen. Then she thought it was a headless Santa. Then she realized it was an empty Santa suit—empty but mighty, it would have fit a Santa who was eight feet tall. “Who are you?” Jemma asked, though she already knew.

  It never spoke, but only pulled open its robe with invisible fingers. The robe disrobed, revealing what it had covered, the most beautiful light Jemma had ever seen. It was as strong and bright and warm as the sun, but cold as a faceful of snow. Jemma lay in it, feeling warm and cold, cherished and unnoticed, elevated and, finally, terrified, before she finally fell away, passing out or passing deeper into sleep, but still feeling the presence against her face. She was never aware of waking, but realized with a start that it was morning, and that the sun was shining in her eyes.

  She tried to leap up and jump on the bed, but her legs were still full of the rubbery feeling, so she fell on her brother. “Calvin!” she shouted, over and over. It took so long to wake him up she thought for a moment that Santa had killed him in the night.

  They hurried downstairs, stumbling in their slippers and drug hangovers on the landing and the stairs, slipping on the last step and tumbling together to the carpet, then both clawing over each other and helping each other up as they made for the basement staircase. They slipped again at the top of those stairs, but bore each other up, and took the last half of the stairs calmly. Jemma stopped at the last step while Calvin went on. She saw the flash of her father’s camera, and heard Calvin gasp. Here at the end she liked to pause, and she finally liked the waiting, because she knew it was utterly in her power now, and all she had to do to make it end was take a step, past the wall that was hiding her from her parents. She understood that this was a moment in time, about to pass. She put her hand on the wall and closed her eyes.

  You must eventually take that last step, have to open every last present, feeling, on your very edges, but not knowing or understanding how they are all wrong, the Smurf mushroom house, the Junior Marie Curie Radioactive Discovery Set with the real glow-in-the-dark artificial radium, even the Bat Girl sleeping bag for which you have positively lusted these past months. They have not given you what you really wanted, just like they haven’t given Calvin what he wanted, because it is not theirs to give. Every box contains an empty, worthless secret. There is offal in your stocking. The valium-visitations of your endless night are already being forgotten, but not their secret lessons. Your parents are waiting, the camera is poised, your brother is rooting like a hog among the plenty, searching for the box that might contain the secret instruction for his going—but stay. You can stay just on this side of the corner, with time still under your thumb, for as long as you like.

  How small a matter had it been to come forth securely, and as it were in sport to undergo death. Herein was true proof of boundless mercy, that he shunned not the death he so greatly dreaded. And there can be no doubt that, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Apostle means to teach the same thing when he says that he “was heard in that he feared.” Some, instead of “feared,” use a term meaning reverence of piety, but how inappropriately, is apparent both from the nature of the thing and the form of the expression. Christ then praying in a loud voice, and with tears, is heard in that he feared, not so as to be exempted from death, but so as not to be swallowed up by it like a sinner, though st
anding as our representative. And certainly no abyss can be imagined more dreadful than to feel that you are abandoned and forsaken of God, and not heard when you invoke Him, just as if he Had conspired your destruction. Worse, though, to live everyday knowing that you never did the thing that you were supposed to, indicted by every ruined person and thing as the first, worst, and only coward. And almost as bad, to spend a whole life trying to figure it out (and isn’t it a gift and a punishment never to be allowed to think of anything else) and still never figure out how to do it.

  The world is as it is, and I am as I am, and how will I ever change either one?

  “Did you find it?” Kidney asked the dolphin. She was in an empty classroom on the fourth floor, standing on a table and leaning out the window.

  “No,” said Light On The Water.

  “Did you look? Did you look hard?”

  “I traveled North to the penguin-water and East to the pillars of the moon and South to the republic of squid and West to the kingdom of the sun. There is water everywhere, and no land. There are no waves for sport, and no beaches whereupon I might throw myself if my heart should break. The world is water, and you have no place but here to rest your round head.”

  “But did you really look? I told you to look all over the world and you’re back already. Did you cheat? I think you cheated. I don’t think you did your homework!”

  Light On The Water ducked her head and slapped the water with her mouth, the dolphin equivalent, Kidney knew, of a shrug. “I have traveled far; my brothers and sisters have traveled farther, and all together we have circumscribed this endless ocean. And Shafts of Moonlight, who is a sorcerer and can see through the eyes of little fish, has been in a trance this past week, searching from little mind to little mind, borrowing eyes all over the world and always only seeing the same thing. Nowhere even a speck of dry sand.”