The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  “You have to try it,” Karen said. “It’s guaranteed—not even a picogram of caffeine, but you’d never know the difference. I don’t know the difference, and if anybody could tell it would be me. Anyway I verified it up in the lab. There’s a set of HPLC columns in special chem.”

  “I trust you,” Jemma said.

  “I don’t,” said Chandra, “this business about Pudding and the sexbot is too much.”

  “Ask Jordan,” Karen said, “but get him good and drunk first. And it wasn’t a sexbot, it was a three-dimensional simulacrum of his wife. And he was just looking at it. There’s no evidence at all for any other sort of… activity.”

  “There’s no evidence at all, period,” said Chandra.

  “You turn everything dirty,” Karen said to him, and put a tiny little cup down in front of Jemma, not one-tenth the size of the one that sat in front of Dr. Chandra.

  “Are people making sexbots?” Jemma asked, taking the briefest little sip of the coffee, and gagging.

  “Of course not,” said Karen. “Stop spreading lies,” she said to Dr. Chandra.

  “You’re the gossip monger,” he said. “And anyway, fuck off. You’re not my boss anymore. I’m out of the program, lady.”

  “Sirius, Sirius,” she said. “You’ve got to let that go. Do you know that was in one of your letters, when we were talking about you at the selection meeting? He’s a worrier, the letter said, in that obligatory negative sentence. He tends to hang on to things.” She set down another huge cup in front of him, full of hot milk, and poured in the espresso, making an expert design, a perfectly symmetrical spirograph flower.

  “I’m never going back,” he said calmly, poking a finger into the foam and bringing it to his mouth.

  “Maybe I should just have some milk,” Jemma said.

  “Milk for the baby then,” Karen said, sweeping up the little cup and drinking it herself. “I can’t tell the difference,” she said. “Not at all. Could you?”

  “I’m not very experienced,” Jemma said. “About the sexbots—maybe we should talk about them in the Council. It could get pretty weird, artificial people running around and mixing with the real people. What if we couldn’t tell the difference?”

  “There are no sexbots,” Karen said, looking among her shelves—once they’d held old charts and admission protocols—for a milk mug. She selected a bowl, like Chandra’s, poured the milk, and started to steam it, so Jemma could only pick out a few words when she continued to talk. “Artificial vagina… imaginary… his was like a formal portrait… just visiting… the angel wouldn’t… trust me.”

  “Can I have a paper cup?” asked Dr. Chandra. “I’m not going to stick around here and be persecuted.”

  “I have a nice relaxing tea,” said Karen. “You should try some. It would make you less touchy.”

  “I don’t even like tea, and I’m not touchy,” he said, and tapped his finger on the bar. Karen gave him an aluminum mug with a rubber lid, and he transferred his drink.

  “You ruined the flower,” she said. “Want me to fix it?” She held up her little metal pitcher of milk.

  “I’m late to fuck my robot,” he said, and shuffled off.

  “Pull up your pants!” Karen called after him, and whispered to Jemma, “He’s very lonely. He comes here every day to tell me how much he hates me, but sometimes I think I’m the closest thing he has to a friend.”

  “Some people are having a hard time,” Jemma said, holding her bowl in both hands and sipping at her milk. Vivian had given her a calcium quota to meet each day. She could not remember how much was in a bowl of milk. “Not knowing what to do, and not having any work.”

  “He hated work, too,” Karen said. “Some people are just never happy. It’s something I learned, being chief. You bend over backward for some people and they’re like, I wanted raspberry and this is strawberry, or this is 2 percent and I wanted 1 percent, and you’re like, What’s the fucking difference you are one of a hundred residents, can’t you just give me a break and do your work? Children are dying out there.”

  “Not anymore,” Jemma said.

  “You know what I mean. I can’t imagine what it’s like for you. Okay, I can… you’re chief of the whole hospital. It’s a huge job, but you’re doing swell. I mean it, and I know it. Your approval rating is 86 percent.”

  “I have an approval rating?” Jemma asked.

  Karen laughed. “You’re so funny sometimes.” She called down the bar to the two women sitting at the far end, interrupting their conversation. “Isn’t she doing a great job?” Carla nodded vigorously, and Helena Dufresne held up a single thumb. Karen refilled their cups, and pulled another espresso for herself. “This is the real stuff,” she said, and detailed for Jemma the process by which she and the angel had increased the potency of the beans until they practically trembled, and all the new uses she was finding for fancy coffee, and how she was not certain if she was pulling new uses out of the old thing, or making something entirely new when she experimented with the replicator. “When I ask for anti-wrinkle coffee,” she asked, “is she making it from scratch or just bringing forward a property already inherent in the bean? It’s so hard to tell with her. She can be so squirrely.” She poured out thick coffee in a solid dish and had Jemma soak her cuticles in it.

  “Did you enter?” Jemma asked her.

  “Of course,” Karen said. “I hope Siri did, too. I asked him but he wouldn’t tell. How about you?”

  “It would be gluttony,” Jemma said, putting a hand on her belly.

  “There are more kids than adults,” Karen pointed out.

  “It would still be weird,” Jemma said. “My fingers are tingling.”

  “It’s the natural enzymes,” Karen said. “They’re giving you a manicure.” She leaned forward and said, “Ella Thims. She’s my first choice.”

  “A sweet girl.”

  “I’ve known her forever. I took care of her every July for three years in a row, and I was there when she came slithering out of her mama. That was some initial exam, let me tell you. Where’s the vagina? Where’s the anus? I thought it was because I was a stupid intern that I couldn’t find them. I visit her every day—we’re practically a family already.” She brought her hands to her heart. “It makes me nervous to talk about it.”

  “The coffee probably doesn’t help,” Jemma said.

  “Oh, I’m immune,” she said, but everyone who came here knew that she got more chatty and jumpy throughout the day, and that by closing time she stood on the bar proclaiming stomping cheers for her favorite customers.

  “Now they’re numb,” Jemma said, taking her fingers out, sure she’d see the ends dissolved down to slender bone.

  “That’s the baby,” Karen said, pushing her hand back in. “It’s a thing I never understood. Numb toes I got, if the baby’s sitting on a plexus, but fingers? Something about hCG, but then why does it get worse in the third trimester? I had it too, with Abbie…” She clutched at the back of Jemma’s hand and burst suddenly into tears—they fell, fat and full, onto the highly polished counter and splashed back into Jemma’s flat dish of coffee. “Oh God!” Karen moaned. “What’s wrong with me? This is so stupid. I promised myself I wouldn’t… It’s all fine now, I should really know better. Am I cheating on her, though? That’s the thing… that’s the stupid, stupid, stupid thing. I know better in here—she pounded on her chest—in here I know that none of them belong to us and they pass from one to the other and Abbie is somewhere now, cared for just like I’ll care for Ella but still it feels like a big fat betrayal and I know I’ll tuck Ella in at night and they’ll be out there, Abbie and Carl, just so angry at me because I’m cheating.”

  “It’s okay,” Jemma said, hugging Karen back and scattering coffee-drops from her fingers. She meant it in a very generic sense—things are generally okay, more or less, probably, or it’s okay for you to cry and slobber on me—but not as a denial of the fact that the dead judge or that they can be provoked to fury
by our unfaithfulness. Who was Jemma to absolve Karen of the fury of her dead husband and child, or to absolve any of them? Even Juan Fraggle’s family was cheating on his dad, knitting and teaching salsa dancing and karate (his sisters were black belts) and just going on, waking every day to something more and more and more like contentment.

  The two women at the end of the bar gave up their conversation and came over, Carla just standing to Jemma’s left with her arms folded, but Helena walking behind the counter to take Karen in her big flabby arms. “There,” she said. “You just cry it out, baby. Get it all out so nothing spoils your fun tonight.” Karen went “Ack, Ack, Ack!” shaking and snotting. Helena winked at Jemma over Karen’s shoulder, and Jemma pointed at her watch.

  “My class,” she whispered, and the big lady nodded.

  “It’s all under control,” she said. “It’s all okay.” Carla leaned an elbow on the bar and trailed a finger in Jemma’s coffee, staring at Jemma’s shoes.

  Jemma wasn’t sure what to say, so she just slinked off, head down, walking quickly out of the ER and into the lobby, giving out hardly a wave as she passed onto the ramp and started the climb. She wasn’t really late for her class. “It’s another part of your job,” Dr. Sundae had told her, accosting her after a Council meeting, backing Jemma up against the window, her matronly bosom pressing closer and closer. Jemma could smell her asparagus breath, and their clothes were almost touching when she spoke. “To comfort the afflicted—you’ve already done so much, but scratch any of us and you get an uncontrolled weeper. Look inside, I think you’ll find it—surprise!—the means to comfort us even as you healed them.” Then she had leaned even closer, and put a hand on the window, palm flat against the glass.

  “I really have to pee,” Jemma said. It was true, but not what she ought to have said. Don’t tell me what my job is, you scary old bitch—that would have been better. I’m not for you to lecture anymore, you scary old bitch. Or even just, You scary old bitch, whispered in accusation and admiration. She had hurried but not run away from her.

  She started waving again after walking the first loop of the spiral with her head down. “Hello, Sylvester. Hello, Ms. Sullivan. Hello, Dr. Sasscock. Hello, Dr. Pudding.” She remembered the sexbot and stopped by the rail to make a note on her little computer. A week after Vivian had commissioned them from the angel almost every adult and half the kids had one of the little devices, as long, wide, and thin as an index card, flat black glass on one side, bright metal on the other. You could write on it with a pen or ask it to record your voice. She was still confusing the icons. Though she meant just to record her voice, two days later when she went over her notes before the next meeting she would see her own puffy, pink face, pictured in such clarity and precision by the in-screen camera that she diagnosed herself with melasma, the toy clanking and whirling behind her and a mysterious beehive hairdo passing through the frame just as she spoke the words: “Sexbot sexbot sexbot.”

  “Say it soft and it’s almost like praying,” said John Grampus, sidling up next to her.

  “You shouldn’t sneak up,” Jemma said.

  “I was trying to get your attention. Distracted by the big day?”

  “I just have to push the button.” She started walking again up the ramp. “It’s not such a big day.”

  “Tell that to… everybody. I’m so nervous I can barely walk straight. See?” He stumbled for her and took a few boneless steps before straightening up and walking straight beside her again. “I keep thinking it’s a bad idea. Have you heard that from anyone else?”

  “Anika still wants the number five involved somehow. Like that. A couple others, angry about their schemes getting ignored.”

  He stopped her and put a hand on her shoulder. “Jane applied for all those crazy kids. All of them? Can you fucking believe that?”

  “You can’t split up the family,” Jemma said.

  “It’s a big step,” he said, shaking his head. She wasn’t sure if she meant applying to adopt Kidney’s whole family, or his moving in with Father Jane, another unsolicited confidence he’d given her, on another walk like this one the week before. She did not understand their relationship, and though it sometimes helped her to fall asleep at night, picturing them in bed, or playing cards, or imagining that she was John Grampus reaching out, so slowly and hesitantly, to touch the unfamiliar and rather frightening boob, she didn’t want to think of it right now.

  “As big as it gets,” Jemma agreed, an appropriate platitude, she thought, and she ducked into the stairwell. He didn’t follow her. She sat down on the stairs, put her head in her hands, and thought of the boobs, a hundred boobs and a hundred hands reaching out, hesitating and uncertain, to touch them. Go away, she said to them, and the kaleidoscope vision fractured and fell in on itself. Then it was dark behind her eyes but she could feel the people passing by outside the door, and feel John Grampus making his anxious way up to the roof. “Sometimes it’s hard to be alone,” she’d said to Rob, and he’d held her tighter in their bed, thinking she was complaining of loneliness.

  It was the same old class—diffident and minimally instructive—until the kids started talking about their families. Juan was the only non-orphan. He sat back in the grass, looking deeply at every speaking face as they went around and around in a circle. They were supposed to be trying to levitate a pencil—not that Jemma could lift inanimate objects with her mind (she tried to float knives and soap and pins in the water but though she had lifted hundred-kilo Helena none of it would budge) but wasn’t it possible that their gifts were of another sort entirely than Jemma’s? Moving pencils, changing the color of grass, turning a candy mushroom to a real mushroom with a blink of the eye—maybe they couldn’t heal for the same reason that Jemma couldn’t shoot lasers out of her eyes: it was simply not for her to do it.

  “We should have been able to pick,” Magnolia said. “What if I get some freak?”

  “The angel listened to you, didn’t she?” said Josh.

  “She could still give me a freak.”

  “Maybe you want a freak,” said Jarvis. “You want a freak to freak with.”

  “We should have been able to do our own,” said Ethel. “We’re old enough. We’ve been through enough. Jesus fucking Christ. Nobody bothered to ask us.”

  “There was that whole three days of testimony…” Jemma started to say.

  “Nobody asked the important questions,” Ethel said glumly.

  “We’re jumping ship if they try to split us up,” said States’-Rights. He reached out toward Kidney, on the other side of the circle. She stuck out her tongue at him.

  “We should just all stay together,” said Cindy Flemm. “Us thirteen.”

  “And Rob,” said Magnolia. “He could stay.”

  “Wouldn’t that be great?” Cindy asked, turning to Jemma.

  “Like a really horrible skin condition,” Jemma said, but she hugged her.

  “What’s going to happen?” Kidney asked of the sky.

  “Nothing,” said Jarvis. “It’s the same as before. The same old shit, just different people stepping in it.”

  “It’s going to be totally different,” Josh said confidently. “Everything’s going to change. You’re going to have a family. Haven’t you been listening to anything?” Jarvis only tapped on his ear, and smiled.

  “Families come and go,” said Pickie, “but you remain, forever.” He snapped his finger. “Like that. That’s how quickly they are gone. Who cares about them, in the end? There is no other family besides brothers.”

  “And sisters,” said Magnolia.

  “Sisters are irrelevant,” Pickie said. The discussion degraded into an argument, boys against girls, then the under-tens against the over-tens, arguing not about brothers or sisters or families but the necessity of underwear, or icing, or whether it would be better if no one ever had to pee. Food flew. Jemma lay back in the grass again, watching cupcakes sail against another bright blue sky, imagining Rob in his calculus class, standing at
the giant plasma board, striking glowing circles in the dark glass as he poked it with his finger and swept out curves and lines and figures. Everyone in the class had a button stuck on their head, and furthermore everyone in the hospital had one, had always had one set right between their eyebrows, red as a firetruck and tall as the eraser on a fresh pencil. They were reset buttons, or surprise buttons, placed to be pressed in case of potentially lethal boredom or disappointment.

  “Are you all ready?” she asked innocently, after class, after another hour spent wandering on the ramp, after Carla drew her behind the branches of a huge fern on the fifth floor. She’d seen her on the ramp, on the roof—she drifted close enough during class to be struck by a piece of fat—and twice in the lobby, her long horse-face appearing in flashes through the nervous, milling crowd. “Are you following me?” Jemma had finally asked her, when she caught her lurking near the fern. Jemma was coming away from a visit with Sadie’s knitting circle, pockets full of hats and booties.

  “I just wanted to ask,” Carla said. “I just wanted to say. I know, a long time ago—it seems so long ago, Jemma. A hundred years, and it hasn’t even been a hundred days. We didn’t always see the same about things. I’m sorry if I was ever… harsh… and I wanted to make sure. Everybody wants Ella but she belongs with me. Those people weren’t her family. They were kids. They hardly ever came to see her. It was me and Candy and Nicole, but mostly me. Candy and Nicole agree—we had a discussion. It was me. I have to get her.”

  “I’m just going to press the button.”

  “I’ve got some stuff. It’s not like anything else, and okay for a girl like you. I checked, of course. I can’t even describe how it makes you feel. There’s that, or anything else you can think of. Or something you can’t even think of—we’re all dreaming of new things. Every day there’s something new. I keep wondering why we didn’t think of all the possibilities, back before. Were we just too sad, to use our imaginations? But you know what I mean, right? You know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” Jemma said. “Sort of. Look, I just press the button. That’s it. Nothing more, just…” She pressed briskly on Carla’s forehead, right where her button should be.