The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  She really wasn’t that involved. Vivian and Dr. Snood were in bed together on account of the wedding, and they both told her the same thing: This wedding isn’t for you and Rob, it’s for the hospital, it’s for the people. She thought that made it sound like a funeral—it’s not for you, you’re dead! If she had been one of those girls who had been planning a dream wedding since she first donned a toilet-paper veil at the age of nine, instead of someone who had been obsessively planning against her wedding since about the same time, then it might have upset her not to be very involved in the details. As, it was she was rather relieved—they were going to put on a better show than she ever could. She was able to veto almost all the stupid stuff, and absolutely everything that would have humiliated her, like the plastic window in the belly of the dress, designed by Vivian to showcase her baby and her newly popped belly button.

  There were more suggestions about the dress than about any other aspect of the wedding. It seemed like everybody had an idea, and everybody got to express them in a contest: every citizen of the hospital was invited to submit their design to the Council. There would be no reward except the work itself, a dance with the bride, and the satisfaction of clothing the Universal Friend on what many (recalling memories, candified by nostalgia and drunkenness, of their own weddings to husbands and wives now lost) thought should be the happiest day of their life, but hundreds of people submitted designs and proceeded to lobby for them. With the angel to help them, everyone was an expert tailor, and most everyone was a capable promoter. Signs appeared in the halls: The Empire Dress: It Was Good Enough For Josephine, It’s Good Enough For Us, and A-Line? Super-Fine! and Slip Dress or Bust! Rival designs unfurled from the balconies; five and six stories tall, they faced each other across the lobby and made Jemma think of battling giantesses in organdy and chiffon and lace. For some people, making a sign or inflating the paper design wasn’t enough; they had the dresses made and wore them as they went about their day. Jemma actually liked this idea: the hideousness of some of the dresses could only be appreciated in the flesh. For all the variety of hideousness Jemma only vetoed a few: a dress with big lacy wings that were supposed to flap gracefully as she said her vows; Vivian’s window dress; a sweeping, misty thing with a hood and eyeholes that was supposed to make her look like a spirit (the spirit of perseverance, said the notes, which will marry the spirit of hope) but actually would have made her look like a Klan bride; and an awful fortress of silk and charmeuse and guipure lace whose train was meant to stretch up the spiral ramp all the way to the ninth floor.

  “You should wear a hat with birds in it,” said Kidney. On the day before the wedding Jemma’s class degraded within minutes of starting into idle speculation. They were on the roof again, sitting in the garden, the field having been taken over by empty tables, set up for the reception.

  “Live birds,” said Valium. “Attached by strings so they can’t fly away. You’d need a real strong chin strap, though.”

  “There are no more birds, dorky,” said Ethel Puffer.

  “I meant robots, dorky.”

  “Can we make them?” asked Josh Swift.

  “The angel can make anything,” said Juan Fraggle.

  “I will make something wonderful,” Pickie Beecher said.

  “Let’s talk about inflammatory bowel disease,” Jemma said.

  “Inflammatory bowel disease,” said Jarvis, “was where your guts get all ruined from nobody knew what. It would make you shit in your dress. Bloody shit all over the nice white dress. It wouldn’t be pretty.”

  “Watch your mouth,” said Magnolia.

  “It would ruin the party,” said Josh Swift.

  “Inflammatory bowel disease ruins the party of life,” said Ethel.

  “It used to,” said Magnolia.

  “Or a big spider on you head,” said Kidney, “and a dress made all of webs. Like in a Halloween wedding.”

  “Let’s make a dress,” Magnolia said. “Can we make a dress?”

  “There have been enough dresses made already for everybody in this place to get married twice,” Jemma said.

  “Come on. We’ll make it right on you.”

  “I’ve already got the last fitting this afternoon, Magnolia. You can come to that, if you like.”

  “It won’t be like we could do,” said Ethel.

  “I got an idea!” said Cindy Flemm, who up until now had been lying on her belly with her head pointing away from the group, braiding three dandelions together. She jumped up, dragged Jemma up by an arm, and pushed her toward the elevator.

  “I don’t think…” Jemma said, and, “We really had better not…” and, “I have to meet Rob in ten minutes.”

  “We’ll dress him up, too,” said Ethel. The others swarmed around her—even the ones who weren’t particularly interested in dressmaking were happy to help push her, and to participate in the bullying.

  “Sometimes they scare me,” she said to Rob, after they had made her into Cindy’s vision of a space bride. They pushed her straight to the big replicator in the old rehab unit and sat her on a stool while the boys worked on the veil and the girls made the dress—not so much a dress as a sparkly bodysuit with a skirt that rode out stiffly from her hips and made her look like she was wearing a flying saucer. The veil was a helmet with a veil in place of the faceplate and a solar-system mobile stuck on the top, each planet a glass marble, a model of the model in the gym. On her hip, just under the skirt, she wore a holster, upon which she carried a white wedding blaster, in case the groom should get prematurely fresh, or aliens attack. They put Rob, when he got there, in a one-piece suit of black scales, and gave him a cape that was silver on one side and black on the other, except if you stared at the black side for long enough you would see that there were faint iridescent stars shining out from within. They made him a black glass helmet shaped like a giant chess castle. He complained that it made him look evil. By the time they were fully dressed, half of the kids had lost interest and wandered away—class had been officially over for fifteen minutes, anyway. She and Rob left the others in the gym, telling each other stories about the marriage of the rebel space princess to the dark emperor, who was actually her father.

  “I mean,” she said, “Pickie is just weird, and closed, but him aside, I still think Jarvis would as soon punch me in the face as say hello to me, and Ethel pretends like she’s normal but I can see how sad and ruined she feels. It’s like beetles in her head, a big swarm of them crawling over and over each other.”

  “These are neat,” Rob said, carrying her helmet and looking at the marbles. The planets with atmospheres had simulated weather. He flicked his finger against Jupiter and sets storms raging.

  “Rob, are you listening to me at all?”

  “Of course. You just don’t like kids very much. That’ll change. My mom said she never liked kids, when she was young, but then after Gillian everything was different.”

  “But I love kids. I can’t believe you said that. I love kids.”

  “No you don’t. I mean, not in general. Any one of them, you’re fine with. But the big groups, when they stare at you with those big eyes, and don’t say anything—it makes you all sweaty and nervous. I’ve seen it.”

  “Are you really not scared of Pickie?”

  “A little,” he admitted. “He just needs some loving.”

  “And an exorcism. And Ethel—there’s nothing wrong in her head, but everything wrong in her head. There’s nothing I can fix. It’s… dispiriting. And the two of them are concocting something together. I try to keep them on separate projects in class, but they hang around together on the outside and they’ve got this secret project going.”

  “Blood and black paint,” Rob said. “Holy shit.” They’d come up to the balcony on the ninth floor, and looked down at the preparations happening in the lobby. Far below, Ishmael was hanging festoons of ribbon from the toy. Jemma waved when he looked up at them. He pointed at his watch, and started to climb down. “Is that all really f
or us?”

  “It is expressly not for us,” Jemma said. She took his arm and started down the ramp, headed toward the Council meeting and, like Ishmael, already a little late. Wedding dresses and formalwear had been popping up all over lately—people trying out their wedding-dress designs, or trying out their own outfits, so the Space Groom and Bride did not draw the attention Jemma expected, although a couple people stopped to ask them if it was already tomorrow, or if the rehearsal was starting already, and they attracted a wedding train of seven-to-ten-year-olds who marched solemnly behind them. When one of them threw a doughnut Rob whipped around and sprayed them with confetti from the wedding blaster.

  He stayed for the Council meeting, which was just a final run of Dr. Snood’s big list. He rolled out all six feet of it while everyone else made checks on the screens of their notebooks. It was formally determined that everything was ready: every dais and platform had risen in time; every festoon was hanging in its proper place; every performer in every exhibition had mastered his part; every rocket was in place on the roof; every flower-petal bag was tied with a piece of green or white ribbon. “And what about the couple?” Dr. Snood asked finally, marking off an item on his list that was not on theirs. “Are you ready?” Rob took her hand and they each took a side of the room to smile at.

  “You’re not going to wear that dress, are you?” asked Dr. Sundae.

  “It’s my dancin’ dress,” Jemma said. She and Vivian left Rob behind then, though he tried to follow them.

  “Some things still hold,” Vivian said, “No matter what fucked-up bouffanterie we’ve made of this. Not until she comes leaping down the aisle with her hundred and sixty attending virgins do you get to see her in the real dress.”

  “That’s only the day of the wedding,” he said, but she wouldn’t relent, and Jemma, who for all that she largely did not care what happened with the ceremony, and probably would not have complained if someone had insisted on her actually having a hundred and sixty virgin attendants, found that she was getting rather excited about a few things, like the blue garter she’d been wearing off and on all week, and the prospect of hiding from Rob in her crazy dress. They went to Vivian’s room, which doubled now as her atelier. Jemma wondered about that: the dress on its mannequin looming by the window all night long. Did Vivian wake at night to find it gesturing rudely at her, or did it ever loom over her, or did the veil ever wave at night with such moon-infused beauty that it made her heart ache a little, from bitterness or desire? It was one of the things that had drawn them together, how they had both forsworn marriage, but Jemma wondered if Vivian still meant to proceed through life using up and discarding men now that they were in such short supply. “The little ones will grow,” she’d said to Jemma. “There’s still plenty.” But she threw herself into the dressmaking and the wedding planning like someone who wanted one of her own.

  Jemma stood up on a wooden box in front of the covered mirror while Vivian fussed and mumbled. “I got it,” she said, meaning she had correctly anticipated how much bigger Jemma would be when she made the final alterations on the dress the week before. There was practically nothing to do now except pat it down and sigh over it. Jemma looked out the window while Vivian fluffed up the veil and draped and redraped the train. The sun, setting on the other side of the hospital, colored the foam of the wake pink and orange. She thought she saw a whale blow, and a flash of wet blue skin, halfway to the horizon. She was squinting and leaning forward, looking for it again, when Vivian whipped the silk off the mirror.

  “Well, how do you like it?” she asked.

  “I do,” said Jemma. “And I will. Yes. Forever.” But did she, and would she, and could she, and really forever? She had made a lifelong habit of thinking better of her decisions after they were made; this one was no exception, though she fervently hoped that this time it wouldn’t be like before, when she would lie all day on the floor regretting the purchase of a couch, or like the night she slept with her first boyfriend, and had answered falsely when he asked, “Is it in?” because she realized, just before she answered, that an opportunity had settled on her, a chance to do it and not do it, to have a thing taken from her and then receive it back. He humped and gasped, and Jemma shouted with him as much from relief as from pleasure, because she knew how it always changed how you wanted something, once you had it, and when she made the decision again just an hour later, on the other side of the experience, it was not traumatic at all. Why couldn’t everything be like that?

  She liked rehearsal dreams, the ones anxiety provoked—the richer the anxiety the richer was the dream, the more detailed the false, practice experience. She took her boards before she took them, and had watched the letters on the screen disassemble out of the question and into a statement: you are entering the wrong profession, honey; and she’d peered at a piece of diseased liver and seen it look more and more and more real, until it oozed and pressed out of the screen to fall softly on her keyboard and overwhelm her with its rotten, bloody smell. Before she took the exam for her driver’s license she’d driven with the instructor over the most incredible terrains, glaciers and moonscapes and lava flows and war zones, asking over and over of the tiny instructor with the forbidding hair bun, Are you sure we’re supposed to be here? But she only spoke back after she’d grown fangs and fastened them around Jemma’s throat, and then she only said, through a mouthful of blood, Keep your eyes on the road! She’d had a medical-school admission interview with a small, elderly radiologist whose two-foot erection stood out of his fly the whole time they talked; it tried to engage her in conversation, too, but she knew that if she paid it the slightest mind she’d never be admitted. And she’d spent days at dream-colleges, all-girls schools where every night a fraternity boy was lured onto the campus and slaughtered for a feast, and Jemma sat at a table next to a dean of students dressed only in waist-long black hair, a horn on her forehead, and two sharpened thimbles placed over her nipples, who told her, Go ahead and eat, my pretty-pretty. It won’t make you any more evil.

  Or she could just imagine the consequences of her decision. Rehearsal dreams were rare, and life could be depended upon to provide only a limited number of false-insertions. She never dreamed of her wedding until after it was over, and Rob Dickens could not, after all, be convinced to have a preliminary, secret ceremony where they jumped over a broom and proclaimed their troth three times to each other, something so small and secret it could have been done away with a simple set of words, on second thought, or maybe it’s all a little hasty, or even just one word, nevermind. It was too late for that, he said, and she realized that a month before she could have bought him off with a kiss and a candy ring.

  She imagined they were already married; it wasn’t very difficult. She didn’t think they would behave very differently, afterward. She put a piece of black tape around her finger and pretended it was a ring, and gave it an invisible, intangible weightiness. The days would go on and nothing would change. They’d rise every day from the tiny bed they shared, and check outside their little window on the unchanging state of the world. They’d go and teach their classes, Rob with better success every day, his students mastering every day another flip or twist until they could all just stay in the air flipping and spinning indefinitely, and Jemma every day teaching her kids some new sort of silliness in place of the power to undo sickness. Their child would be born and they would become a family, contented, but barred from true happiness until the waters should recede and they should all step out onto a green mountain.

  It might be a little worse than that, or a lot better, or a lot worse. The room and the bed might seem smaller, now that she was officially tied to it. They might get bored with one another. With the ring to her eye, Rob Dickens might appear less beautiful than he had before, or than he actually was. She might grow resentful because she could not just up and smooch with any boy she liked—maybe there was someone better waiting for her, someone more perfectly matched, maybe they all had someone perfect waiting fo
r them under the earth, who would rise up as soon as the hospital made a landing—she could see them, if she closed her eyes and looked, scores and scores of better halves, spared the weird journey to the new world, looking at their watches and their calendars and sighing impatiently. Thinking of this, she might start to hate the situation, just a little, not enough for anyone to really notice—and Rob, meanwhile, would be feeling all the same things—but it would be enough for her to allow Dr. Snood to paw at her in one of the linen closets, because she wanted to cheat and punish herself for cheating, and in subjecting herself to Dr. Snood’s thin hands she could do both things at the same time. She’d come back to the room reeking of his cologne, and Rob would come back with the sparklies from Dr. Tiller’s headdress sticking to his underwear, and they would lie next to each other and be disappointed in what they’d become, and both of them would look at her belly and smile a little because they would convince themselves that the baby would come and make the big difference, and make everything all right again.

  Or she might put on the real ring, in the presence of Father Jane and John Grampus and the entire hospital population, and feel a different sort of change, an elation instead of a deflation. It might be marriage could facilitate a more perfect expression of their love, and represent, like people were talking about, a new and better beginning for the whole place. They might find that merely touching their rings together would send them both into a head-popping orgasm, and seen through the eye of the ring Rob Dickens might be so beautiful that looking at him would make her cry. They might look out the window every day at a sea that was a little lower, and notice something in themselves corresponding a little higher, a feeling of optimism and well-being that in the old world was only known in drug dreams. Every day they’d go to class, Rob teaching his children not just how to tumble but to fly, and Jemma one day drawing green fire out of every last pupil. Together they’d fix Pickie Beecher, and then get to work on more subtle kinds of wrongness, things that Jemma could not perceive yet, but they would learn to see them together.