The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  “But she’ll listen to you,” Carla said.

  “She listens to everybody,” Jemma said.

  “Are you ready?” Jemma asked again of the crowd. It was eleven fifty-nine. She paused with her finger inches away from the button, wondering if she should take this opportunity to lead them in imagining how their lives would change after the Match. If anyone has any objections, she wanted to say, let him speak now or else. She stayed with her finger just inches from the button, asking silently of all the faces in the crowded council room, Do you know what this means, and asking the same thing of herself. She placed her other hand over her belly. For a few moments it was very quiet, until Maggie spoke from out of the crowd.

  “What are you waiting for, genius?” she asked. “Don’t you know how to press a fucking button?”

  “Here they come,” said Father Jane. She was peeking out their door, down the hall at the line of approaching children.

  “I’m never going to remember all the names. Nine! It’s ridiculous. How many times do I have to point out that it’s ridiculous?”

  “Maybe it’s ridiculous, but it’s wonderful, too.”

  “It’s not too late to make nametags.”

  “That’s cold. Quick, light the candles.”

  “Is it someone’s birthday?” Grampus asked. “How will we remember all the birthdays?” But he lit the candles, and stood in the doorway with Jane, holding the welcome cake she had baked, and singing the welcome song she had composed. Arms occupied, he didn’t have to hug them, but kissed them all as Jane greeted them. They all had the same face—soft and round and framed in white-blond hair. The differing ages and sexes hardly made any difference in the features, but the expression worn by the teenagers—wary mistrust—set them apart from their siblings.

  “Welcome Shout!” she said. “Welcome Kidney! Welcome Valium! Welcome States’-Rights! Welcome Jesus! Welcome Bottom! Welcome Salt! Welcome Sand! Welcome Couch!”

  They all nodded and smiled and the littlest one gave Jane a plant—a tall spindly thing with spiny leaves and a single drooping blossom that looked like a slack mouth. There were enough of them that they ought to have sung back to them, or done some complicated dance, but instead they piled directly onto the couch, squeezing in a double row of four and a single triple column in the middle. They arranged themselves so swiftly it was obvious that they had been squeezing themselves like that onto all sorts of furniture all their lives. They all stared around the room, taking in their new home, except for Kidney—that was the smallest one, he suddenly remembered—who looked squarely at John Grampus and said, “Well, now what do we do?”

  Whichever one is left over, Rob had written. Whichever one nobody wants. Give us that one. At eight o’clock on Match Day, a half hour after the show ended, when much of the audience was still trying to crowd into Connie’s bar for a drink, to fortify themselves against both the final, agonizing minutes of waiting, and mute the lingering horror of the awful puppet show performed by Ethel and Pickie Beecher, the angel released swarms of tiny insectoid waldoes, each only as big as a cookie, outsized by the yellow slip of paper that every one carried, like a sail, on its back. The high whine of their engines preceded them down the ramp—they rolled into the lobby in pairs but split up to find the recipients of their news. When one of them crashed into Jemma’s foot she’d thought she’d just gotten in its way, but when she stepped aside it backed up and rammed her foot again. She looked over at Rob, who was staring fervently at his own shoes.

  “There’s something I should tell you,” he said, and then confessed that he’d entered them in the Match.

  “You what?” she asked him, over and over while children and adults ran back and forth around them, waving their golden tickets and seeking their match. She kept pointing at her belly, now with one hand, now with the other, now with both. “Hello!” she said. “Didn’t you notice this?”

  “Whichever one was left over, is what I asked for,” he said. “I didn’t want one of them to be left out.” The waldo was still bumping insistently against her foot when Pickie came slipping through the crowd, ticket in hand. “Hello,” he said simply, when he arrived.

  “There you are!” Jemma said brightly. Rob looked surprised to see him—that only aggravated her fury. “You may as well just have asked for him,” she told him later.

  Pickie moved into their room that night, bringing only a suitcase full of lavender pajamas and the cloud-colored puppet to which he’d given voice in the puppet show. There wasn’t any magic button to press, to make the room bigger, and the angel would not or could not accommodate them with another room, or a balcony-bubble, or an extra-dimensional pocket. Rob dragged in another bed and set it atop the one they slept in. They discovered the first night that he had a habit of rolling out of his bed, both of them waking around two a.m. to a leaden thump, and both too sleepy and disoriented to possibly know what it was until they heard Pickie say, “I am not injured.” After that they took the top bunk, but the next morning they found Pickie sleeping in the tub, which he said he preferred, anyway, and asked them to cover him over as he slept with a piece of plywood. They refused. He made do with a blanket tied to the soap holder at one edge, draped over the tub, and weighted on the side with books.

  “Whichever is left over,” she said again on the second night he was with them, after they were reasonably certain that he was asleep.

  “Aren’t we done with that?” he asked. “I said I was sorry, and that I wasn’t sorry. I’m glad he’s here. You’re glad too. You admitted it. Are you taking it back now?”

  “No. I know,” she said

  “You can’t take it back,” he said.

  “I’m not. Don’t be a goon.”

  “You’re the goon. Cheap and squeaky goon with no room in your heart for a bald little blood drinker.”

  “He’s given up the hooch,” Jemma said.

  “I guaiac’d a stool,” Rob said.

  “At least you didn’t get us Snood in a big diaper. “

  “That would have been worse. Not that this is bad. It’s just new, like for everybody else. I can’t stop thinking about them, everybody going back to their rooms with new kids and new lives, to be new families. It’s all different and better for everybody, and we’re twice as lucky because we get to do it now and we get to do it again in four months.”

  “I didn’t say it was bad. It all worked out. It’s all fine. I’m fine with it. Who else does he belong with?”

  “Nobody,” he said, and lifted her shirt to kiss her between the shoulders. Just as he did it there came a horrible screech from the bathroom. They both recognized it instantly, the same noise that had rang out in the puppet show. They threw open the bathroom door and turned on the light. Pickie was sitting calmly in the empty tub, his hand in his gray puppet.

  “What’s the matter?” Rob asked him

  “All’s well,” he said.

  “You screamed,” Jemma said.

  “I am playing with my puppet.”

  “Okay,” said Rob. “Don’t.”

  “We mean don’t scream,” Jemma said. “You can play with the puppet.”

  “Just do it quietly,” Rob said.

  “It’s very late,” Jemma said.

  “It is one twenty-three,” Pickie said.

  On the fourth night she and Rob had sex, to assert their authority over their room, Jemma thought, and because they both really wanted to. It was a quiet affair, Jemma on her side and Rob behind her. For ten minutes they were silent and unmoving, both of them listening intently for noise from beyond the bathroom door. It was closed, and they could hear nothing but the hum of the bathroom fan—Pickie liked to have it running while he slept. It was the sort of sex very old people must have, Jemma thought, whose bones hurt when they move, or the sex available to lovers buried together in a coffin, for whom space is at an utter premium, whose hips can give or take no more than a few inches. It would have been enough, and it was its own sort of new pleasure, the quiet and t
he constraint, but still they told each other the things they would have done, in a different room, or with the tub empty in the next room, and Jemma was a little distracted by how curious it was to have whispery phone sex with no phone, and the person right behind you, and the actual thing going on too.

  Rob left before dawn the next morning to go running with Jordan Sasscock. Jemma forced herself from bed not long afterward because she wanted to make breakfast for Pickie. She had meant to do it on both preceding days but had slugged too long abed, and Pickie slipped past her during one of the fifteen snooze interludes she habitually indulged in since her mornings had become lazy. She rose and dressed and started replicating furiously. She moved the desk away from the wall and covered it with a tablecloth and set the two chairs in the room at it, and arranged the variety of little dishes on it: mango bread and churros and boiled eggs with butter and pancakes in the shape of a P and cereal letters that spelled his whole name, and then the things she knew he would actually like: blood oranges and blood sausage and a stinking blood pudding. As if he were acting out a part as certainly as she was trying to the toilet flushed just as she poured out two huge glasses of juice for them and he opened the bathroom door. He stood there a moment looking at the food.

  “It’s breakfast,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I usually abstain.” But he sat down and put his napkin in his lap, and started assembling a variety of foods upon his plate. “I don’t care much for sausage,” he said, pulling the whole plate of them next to his and spearing one with the tip of his knife, and smelling of it deeply before taking a bite.

  “They’re all for you,” Jemma said, dipping her spoon into a bowl of Pickios. That and the juice was all she wanted. She’d already had three churros. “Did you sleep okay?” she asked him.

  “Except for the muttering of the angel. Did you know she can talk from out of the faucet?”

  “I guess she can talk from anywhere.”

  “I stuffed it up with a cloth, so she talked from the drain. I covered that with my shoe, so her voice came seeping from between the tiles. I couldn’t cover those up. For an hour she talked to me. I’m trying to sleep, I told her. I am one-hundred and thirty-one years weary tonight, angel. Shut your blessed mouth. But she said, Abomination, ageless of days, soon you will be washed clean, and you will not be hungry anymore.” He tore an orange in half with his little hands and popped the flesh off the skin, then stuck both halves in his mouth before starting to chew hugely on them. “I am always hungry,” he said, “but I am not a slave to my hungers.”

  “It’s not polite to talk with your mouth full.”

  “Pardon me,” he said, flashing pieces of orange and sausage and wet sticky crumbs of churro. “She tells me, Soon you will not miss your brother anymore. Can you imagine anything more obscene? Better to tell me, Soon your brother will not be dead any longer. That would be better, easier to believe, and exactly the opposite of that other obscenity. But the dead are dead. That was decided long ago.”

  “Maybe she means that things will be so nice it just won’t hurt so much anymore, or you won’t think of it so often.”

  “Am I a whore, to go licking after the first distraction? Are you that sort of whore?”

  “It’s not polite to say whore, Pickie. Especially at the table.”

  “Pardon me. I ask no pardon, though, for my fury. Would you pass over the pudding? Thank you. You’re wrong, anyhow. You cannot know the shape of the new world any more than I can. We are both too old. No one knows it now but the infants, and they speak to no one. The knowledge will pass up through the years—maybe Ella Thims will know it soon. It will come so late to you and to me that it will be as good as never.” He concentrated a moment on the pudding. “I hate angels,” he said.

  “But you eat their food.”

  “Shall I eat my hand instead?” He ate up the whole of the pudding, then turned back to the churros, and started and completed the eggs, wiping the dish with a pancake and then eating that, too. He ate everything on the table, even drinking down the dregs of Jemma’s cereal milk. “It’s good to be a vegetarian,” he said, when he was finished.

  “Would you like something else?” she asked him. “It would be easy to make.”

  “I could eat it,” he said, “but it wouldn’t make any difference. You won’t be hungry anymore. You will forget your brother. Better to say the moon will become an eye, or the sun will burn blue. Nasty, stupid fucking angel!”

  “Pickie! Apologize right now,” she said, though she hated her too, in her way, and she hardly wanted to be a corrector or a disciplinarian.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I am so sorry, for so many things. I will not say sorry to an angel, though.” He got out of his chair and ran over to her, skibbling like an ordinary six-year-old. “Oh Mama,” he said. “I am too sorry. I know you are not that sort of whore, not one to ever forget your brother. It is the worst sin, just the sort to be encouraged in by an angel. Wasn’t it the reason for the drowning, because too many of them had forgotten their dead brothers, because they all went on like such lives and deaths did not matter? Shame and water upon them.” He sighed, and sobbed, and Jemma was so tempted to stab into his sick little brain with green fire and burn it clean of all the wacky shit infesting it, but she could tell without trying that she would be as harshly rebuked as ever. She petted his warm bald head and murmured, “It’s okay.” This made him laugh. He lifted his head to smile at her, then put his face in her lap again and sang. It took her a little while to make out what he was saying. “Baby, baby, baby,” he sang, over and over, his little hand resting one her belly, Jemma protecting herself with layer after layer of imaginary insanity repellant. “Baby, baby, baby,” and finally, after a hundred or more baby’s, “Baby brother.”

  It was Kidney who noticed the boat. A week after the Match, on their one-hundred-and-seventy-third day at sea she pointed it out during Jemma’s class. They were playing multi-vector scrabble, a game designed by Josh Swift, who was insufficiently challenged by the regular game, and so went to the angel for help making a board that let you spell words up in every direction into the air, and down below the board, which floated four feet above the ground. They were playing in two teams of four and one of five—Jemma and Pickie and the three youngest children. Jemma’s team had just taken the lead when Pickie built pantarch up from cupola. Kidney’s observation interrupted an argument between Pickie and Josh, who would not believe that there was any such word as pantarch, pantarchy, or pantarchian.

  “It’s just another iceberg,” said Cindy Flemm, squinting after Kidney’s pointing finger. Four days before they’d seen the first one, a mountain of green ice that passed over the horizon in the early-morning darkness, raising false hopes of an island, and then false alarms of a collision as it drifted steadily toward them, getting huger and huger in the hours after dawn. Just at noon, they passed within five hundred yards of it, and people crowded the roof and the windows to stare up, hoping to see a bear or a penguin. One after another the icebergs came sliding over the horizon in every shape and every size, the smallest not much bigger than a car and the biggest dwarfing the hospital. Within a day they had become a common sight, but they never lost their novelty. Jemma found she could stare at them for hours. Even just one penguin would have been heartening, but she daydreamed of swarms of them pouring over the ice on their bellies, sliding in spirals down to the sea, now green and clear—it was water that cried out for penguins to frolic in it. The incredible abundance of fish should have been enough, she knew, but already people were turning away from the windows and the water and looking to the sky. “I just want a bird, just one,” said Helena Dufresene, one morning on the roof. “It would be such a gift,” she added, and Jemma found herself agreeing, and consoling herself with a fantasy of hidden penguins, secreting themselves on the back side of every iceberg, holding flippers to beaks as they passed the hospital.

  “Nuh uh,” said Kidney. “It’s a big boat. I can see t
he smokestack.”

  “Iceberg,” said Jarvis.

  “It’s not moving the same,” said Josh.

  Jemma squinted, too. She could see the boat-shape moving among a herd of hill-sized icebergs, but she wasn’t convinced. “Let’s get back to the game,” she said, but they all ignored her. Josh went to a replicator and politely asked the angel for a pair of binoculars. She gave him an old-fashioned spyglass of polished brass. He raised it to his eye and said, “Hot damn.”

  “Wait a minute,” Jemma said. “We should make sure before you all go running off and…” But they were already all running off to shout “A boat! A boat!” throughout the hospital. Soon it was just she and Pickie there.

  He looked through the little telescope and said, “Another angel, Mama. As if we didn’t have enough already.” She asked what he meant, but he sat down to consider the Scrabble board again and handed the glass to Jemma. She looked through it and saw what the children had seen: a big boat, a cruise liner, floating backward between two icebergs, as if they were escorting it someplace.

  There was another swarming to the roof, and people called out “Hello!” as the boat drifted nearer, even though it was still over a mile away, and the huge crowd grew entirely silent while they waited for a reply. Jemma went right to the Council chamber, swimming against the current on the ramp. Dr. Tiller was already there, sitting on a table and tapping one booted foot on a chair as she watched the boat getting bigger and bigger outside the window.

  “What do you think, Dr. Claflin?” she asked. Jemma shrugged and sat down. When the other Friends and the rest of the Council had arrived they declared an emergency session and began to babble furiously, asking and answering questions like What does it mean, and What do you think, and What should we do, and Does anyone else think it looks like the Queen Elizabeth Two? The boat loomed behind them as they had their wild, excited discussions; Jemma turned to look over her shoulder every ten minutes and found it had gotten a little bigger. She called for order but no one could hear her, and she would not use the gavel. When she turned to Vivian she could hardly make herself heard until the four of them pushed their chairs together and huddled their heads.