The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  Rob came through on the other side of the crowd just as Jemma got close enough to wade through some smaller pieces. Rob and Dr. Sasscock helped Ishmael stand up. He was clothed in cake, a big lump of it clinging modestly to his crotch, and two spongy yellow epaulettes at either shoulder. Little people were stuck everywhere on his back and his legs and his chest. He was weeping now.

  “Okay, buddy,” Rob said. “Time to get you home.”

  Ishmael leaned on him, turning away from Dr. Sasscock and pressing his face into Rob’s shoulder. “I’m so lonely,” he said as he was led away.

  The party was more subdued, but not unfestive, after Ishmael was led away. Another cake was brought out after the other one was cleared away by a volunteer crew who threw it by the shovel full into the sea, and those brave enough to taste the old cake from shovel or shoe declared that the new one was even better than the first. Jemma did her duties: the cutting of the cake, the scheduled dances with Rob, and the solemn little mini-ceremony where she tossed her bouquet into the water, in memory of all the dead, instead of flinging it to the ravenous maidens, but she didn’t have much fun after Ishmael fell in the cake. His rage had depressed her. She had tried all her life to believe that drunkenness hid or perverted the truth, and that the real you was not the one that fell into things or spat poison at people you loved or threw glass at your children, and though she did mostly believe that, there was still a part of her that did not, and it made her sad to think that big, gentle Ishmael, with the innocent, unknown past, might deep down be a rageful, depressed hater.

  The cake was consumed, the music played, a few more rockets, private creations that were made by kids without the sanction of the official wedding planners, were launched from the stern. Jemma stayed at her table when she wasn’t doing a duty. With her feet up and her back supported and the band having yielded the little stage to the resident string quartet, she got a little sleepy, and when the wind blew her veil over her head to fall across her face, she didn’t move it. Hearing the music and the lick of the torches and the faint noise of the water, she imagined that she was at a beach wedding, somewhere, and that she was just a guest, and wondered if it hadn’t been in terribly poor taste, to come to someone else’s wedding in a wedding gown, when Rob lifted her veil and kissed her.

  “Party’s over,” he said. His jacket was mottled with cake stains, and his hair was stiff in places with icing. She reached out and brushed her hand through it. Past him she could see people still dancing and drinking. A section of tables had been cleared away to make room for a soccer game, organized by Jarvis.

  “Can we leave now?” she asked him. He straightened up and offered her his arm, and they proceeded to their wedding buggy. It was just a fancy wooden cart, built to roll down the ramp like an oversized pinewood-derby racer, but much slower. Pickie Beecher had begged for and received the job of coachman. He looked the part, in his old-fashioned suit, a tall faux-beaver hat on his bald head. People threw flower petals and glitter as they climbed in, and as they rode slowly down the ramp, Pickie carefully steering around people and tables and the odd photographer who jumped into their path to take a picture. Jemma waved and smiled, caught glitter and petals and threw them back. “I’m so tired!” she called out.

  On the fourth floor they got out and walked the rest of the way to the call room. Jemma had quashed a movement to install them in a suite, and was glad now that she had, because this was almost like coming home, enough like it to be nice, and enough unlike it to be bearable. Rob opened the door and they held hands as they jumped through sideways—Jemma had not wished to be carried in. “How tired is tired?” Rob asked her.

  “Not that tired,” she said. She liked undressing him out of fancy clothes, how smoothly the jacket slid back from his shoulders, how the bow tie came undone with one pull, how she had to reach around his back to undo the cummerbund. His shoes popped off with hardly any effort, and she could pull off the silk socks just by pinching them at the toe and drawing back her arm. His pants fell in a pool at his feet once she unbuttoned them, unzipped his fly, and pushed back his suspenders. She pulled his undershirt off his head and undid the buttons on his fancy underwear, only having to push a little to make them fall on top of the pants. She took his hands and pulled him forward; in two steps he was free of everything. Still in her whole outfit, she put her arms around his waist and her face in his shoulder. He smelled of cake.

  Jemma had been thinking about this night, and considering different ways to make it special, had almost asked the angel to make them a pill that would make them forget they had ever had sex before, so they would approach each other as if for the first time. But she worried about the baby, and the whole thing seemed like something only the very bored and desperate would do. She didn’t even mention it to Rob. There was something very nice about it, though, even without any special additions or considerations. When they knocked their wedding bands together it was oddly sensual, after all, and their mutual fatigue led to a new thing. He stretched out behind her, and they held their hands together above their heads, and moved less and less until they had both fallen asleep. Then Jemma dreamed of the evening that had just passed, and saw again the march down the ramp from the second floor, and the various choirs performing, and the tumblers, and the speeches, some dull, some not, given by various citizens and Council members. She saw Father Jane and John Grampus pronounce them wife and wife and husband and husband, and friend and friend, and family all together. But all these things were flavored and interrupted by furious little bouts of sex. No one seemed to mind it. No one looked away when they took a break during the vows for a few urgent thrusts. In fact Father Jane leaned over and whispered to Rob that he ought to bite her ear, teaching him by example how to muffle his teeth with his lips.

  The long procession up the ramp to the roof was punctuated with thrusts delivered and received in every conceivable position, a few requiring support from bystanders. Upstairs it continued through the first, second, and third toasts. They did it while they danced, breaking apart to spin all the way across the dance floor, bowing to each other from afar, and then rushing back together for more mad coupling in the middle of a clapping circle of guests. They did it under the fireworks, and by the cake, and in the cake, Ishmael in the dream being entirely sober. He watched them from the same table from which Jemma had watched him.

  In the cake, amid the odor of cake, they finished together, and the new thing was not a dream of sex after sex—Jemma had had those before—but when they woke together, crying out together, and discovered that the dream had been made real. In the dream your cry turns to a long stream of cake that flies from your mouth and spells words—oh! oh! oh!—in the air, and you feel the whole hospital trembling underneath you, and all the little cake people feel it, too, and roll on the ground in an agony of pleasure until they melt. Then you feel Rob pressing his chest into your back, and he squeezes you with an arm thrown just north of the swell in your belly, and you feel his panting breath against your shoulder, and his nose scraping across your wet neck. You lie there a moment more, both fully awake now, and then you scramble away from him, and sit up as he scrambles away from you, falling half out of the bed. You look at him in the dim light. He wipes his nose and sniffs, blue eyes still wide with surprise, and somehow it seems not unusual at all to have shared a dream with this person, and even the content of the dream seems usual—of course everyone does a little poking all through the wedding ceremony, everybody except for the terribly backward Amish and the grimmest of Orthodox Jews, and what is a wedding cake for except to fuck in? Every groom stands behind his bride in the wedding buggy, thrusting his hips and cracking a horsewhip in the air, but does anyone, has anyone before, and will anyone ever again, wake in the middle of their wedding night and look at their new husband and be so utterly astonished by love?

  I am not supposed to use my imagination.

  I am not supposed to write better lives for them, or even different lives for them. I watch, and I li
sten, and everything is recorded, and nothing is lost. This is the Book of the King’s Daughter, and do you see it is not written but lived.

  Once it was my gift and my curse, to remake the whole world. Not anymore.

  Rob Dickens was asleep beside Jemma, one arm under her and the other thrown over his eyes, one leg straight and the other bent with the knee raised toward the ceiling. It was the attitude of a man just resting and not actually asleep, but he really was asleep. He was dreaming of dolphins. In an orange suit of scales and a pair of green gloves and green panties he rode a pair of them, a foot on either back and the double-bridle in his left hand, sending telepathic inquiries out into an empty sea, asking, Is anybody out there?

  Outside Kidney paused at the door to mark it with a giant invisible K before continuing on her way. Some days she woke up feeling like something bad was going to happen and so she proceeded through the hospital marking the doors of everybody she liked because she hoped it would keep them from harm, though lately her apprehension has always been groundless, and she never has saved anyone from a bad thing by marking the door with her letter. How many K’s had she drawn on the front door at home? Still a body has to try, she told herself, and did the hopscotch pattern in the carpet before she entered the crèche, where nurses in white robes were feeding the babies or singing to the babies or playing with the babies. She hopped and skipped, now working a pattern only she could see, toward Anna, who was playing a recorder over a crib. “Let me hold one,” she told her. Inside the crib the King’s Daughter sucked on her fist, kicked her feet, and listened not to the recorder but to the plaintive sighs of the drowned.

  John Grampus and Father Jane passed by, taking their Monday/Wednesday/Friday stroll among the babies. “They’re all so cute,” she said, “I don’t know how a person would choose.”

  “Well,” he said, “it’s not like we actually get to pick.” They walked on, arm in arm, pausing by every favorite baby. John Grampus talked of his lover Ray, how he would have liked this baby because it always has that mean look on its face, or how that baby has got his chin, and wouldn’t it be a shame if all these babies were not their own little unfolding selves at all but just containers for recycled souls, and maybe it’s not a baby with Ray’s chin but Ray with Ray’s chin? “It would be so depressing if there was no such thing as a new soul, but it would be nice, too.”

  “Ella liked to say that a breast-feeding baby was staring off into another world.”

  “Ray said he thought they saw ghosts!”

  They had a lot in common, the two dead lovers. They liked the same music, ate the same food, pursued the same professions, read the same books, liked equivalent if not identical things in bed. “Oh yes,” Jane had confided drunkenly one night, “she liked to be licked right here,” drawing the anatomy on the tablecloth. Somewhere they must be getting along famously, they liked to think, and each living lover wondered if the dead ones, unfettered of fleshly orientations, spent every eternal night spirit-fucking while their living halves ate exquisite bits of synthesized cheese and tasted vintages condensed out of the imagination of the angel, holding hands, cupping chins, kissing fingers and confessing to each other an absolute unattraction and marveling as their hips seemed almost magnetically to repulse each other.

  Anna bent over her baby and kissed her on the head. “She’s almost discovered her toes,” she said to Heloise, the nurse who’d been watching her for her while she was gone. “There’s formula out,” she said, pointing to it. “I should be back before the next feed, but just in case. Don’t let that weird kid touch my baby.” She indicated Kidney with a jerk of her head that made her earrings jingle. After she’d put off her white robe she took the earrings off and put them in a pack around her waist. She didn’t like not to wear them, but they jangled when she ran, so children looked up when she went by, expecting to see the tired old volunteer pushing an ice-cream cart. She did a few stretches right there, smoothed the front of her turquoise unitard, retied her shoes, waved at her baby, and was off. Brenda did not mark her departure.

  She hit the hopscotch marks on her way to the ramp, only missing one, then started up. She ran every day but Sunday, though she had not previously been in the habit of keeping healthy, and had run before only on rare occasions of pursuit. It was something the angel had suggested, the voice drifting gently down from the ceiling one evening after Anna had returned from her shift to her little room and had just finished her decompressing with a fifteen-minute shower. “Are you so fat on purpose?” was the question she had asked. Anna had answered, “Fuck off, Billy,” but the question inaugurated a discussion; when the angel looked at her with the thousand eyes of the hospital she saw a different lady than Anna did in the mirror. They started with in-room stretching and calisthenics and special bitter teas designed to increase her enthusiasm and destabilize her fat. The unitard was of a material that clung harder in some places than others, lifting here and pressing there, so when she finally went out she looked more Rubinesque than doughy. At first she could hardly get up the first spiral. Now she ran to the top without stopping.

  She wasn’t the only runner out this morning. She did a smiling nod at the others and said hello to Alan, a radiology tech who always took his shirt off at the top of the ramp and walked back down with it tucked into his pants. There was always something swinging hugely in his shorts as he walked briskly down the spiral. It would be nice, she thought, to walk down with him one day. Perhaps when she was a little firmer. It wouldn’t be long before she was among the firmest people in the hospital; already there was nothing left to pinch between her ass and her thigh, and when she poked a finger against the flesh of her ass it hardly gave at all, but she wanted it so firm that if someone should happen to bite it, it would be like biting the ass of a mannequin. And she would wait until her ears were done—they are a little floppy in the lobes, in fact nearly as floppy as an old man’s, but Billy had a plan to fix them which would involve nothing more complicated than a cream, some drops, a night brace, and an adult-sized sit-and-spin on which she must spin counterclockwise for ten minutes at a time three times in a single night.

  As soon as she reached the eighth floor she sprinted for the ninth. The doors at the top were open—she could feel the salt breeze blow against her as she took the final curve, so fast she thought she could run along the wall as easily as on the floor, and then she passed through the door and decelerated into a power walk, folding her hands behind her neck and lifting her face into the bright sun and the cold wind. She walked in a circle for a while, did pull-ups—three sets of twenty—at the monkey bars, and lay down in the grass. She’d rest just a moment before she started her laps around the roof—a hundred and sixty of them equaled four miles. There was a small cloud passing overhead in the shape of her family. I have not forgotten you, she thought.

  Drs. Snood and Tiller passed by her where she lay. Some people will sleep anywhere, Dr. Tiller thought. Even when it was very cold the two doctors took a morning walk up here.

  “I dreamed again,” he said, “of the resistant bug.”

  “Poor Jacob. Did you wake screaming? I have fewer and fewer of the scream dreams, these days.”

  “No. It chased me, yes, like usual, scuttling on eight legs then six legs then four and even for a little while on two. It never holds still until it becomes an inky gelatinous concept that presses against my face and sucks all the breath out of me.”

  “You are still waiting for everything to go back to the way it was.”

  “I’m afraid, Carmen. If I am forgetting my medicine, then how much could anyone else remember? I sat for an hour on the toilet this morning trying to recall the dosing for pentasa suppositories.”

  “You’d sit there for an hour anyway. Do all gastroenterologists spend so much time on the toilet?”

  “I’ve not had to look up that dose since my third year in medical school. What’s next, prednisone? Tomorrow morning will I wake up thinking IBD stands for itsy-bitsy duodenum, or that Crohn
’s disease only strikes old women?”

  “If you do then I’ll…” Oh, let them go. Walk on, there’s a reason Jemma doesn’t like you, and another reason why I don’t, and another, and others beyond even what my brother shall catalog against you. There were a score of people up here on the roof this morning. Karen and Anika were setting up a badminton net. If Jemma sleeps in I might inhabit the shuttlecock. It’s a distinct sort of fun, to be a shuttlecock in the hands of competent players, and every time the racquet connects I connect with the life behind it. Monserrat has come up for a solitary picnic. Out of a basket big enough to hold all the organs in her abdomen she removes a cup of yogurt, a peach, and a small thermos of coffee. She shook out the crisp white sheet she’ll sit on, snapping it in the sun, turning once or twice with it to make it spin and flap more. Even from across the roof I could tell how much she enjoyed the contrast between the white sheet and the blue sky. I slither along toward her in the grass, gathering speed as I go. I want to be with her when she tastes the coffee. But there is the skylight to look into before I get there, uncovered on this bright morning. I look down on the model; Jupiter was closest to me; the red eye stared dully at the wall. Pickie Beecher was standing underneath in a patch of sun. He shaded his eyes and looked at me.

  “I see you,” he said.

  They called it the Match, after another process of assignation. There was on the one hand an embarrassment of parentless children and on the other a large population of childless adults. There were the hundred-and-thirty families and the seventy-two single parents who’d been together with their children on the night of the flood; the hundreds of other children had been up till now cared for by the same nursing teams who had cared for them from the time they first entered the hospital. The ward had become the family unit. So twenty different parents played with Ella Thims and fed her and changed her diapers, and she had her siblings among the GI kids, and Josh and Ethel were at first a part of the big one family. These families had been unstable from the start—Cindy and Wayne and other, older children were already together, in a sense, like dozens of other teenagers were coming together in benevolent gangs, more and more resistant to the authority of the nurses and the other adults, and there were families who vacuumed up stray children and adopted them. Unofficial, unorganized, it had been progressing since Thing Two, and no busybody worth their salt could let it just happen. Who knew what they would end up with, when the dust settled? The Council, Jemma’s not-wedding behind them, the educational curriculum set and deemed appropriate, every child and teacher seeming reasonably content with what they were learning or teaching, and most of the old hospital transformed or being transformed into spaces deemed better suited to their new mission of education, preservation, and the fostering of hope, turned its eye on the current distribution of individuals throughout the hospital, and overturning the last vestiges of the old hospital order.