The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  “Sure,” she said.

  “Sometimes I can make anyone do anything I want.”

  “I know,” she said, because when she closed her eyes she saw him knocking the rocket aside, and she really believed he could do anything.

  “Everyone else wants me to go, too. Even though they don’t know what it is. They’ve been waiting and waiting, and wanting it and wanting it.”

  “I know,” she said, and he laughed.

  “No you don’t.” Then he turned and hurled a piece of corn at their mother, and ran off into the darkness beyond the reach of the torches. Their mother had just lit the sparklers in her crown and raised up the arms she’d kept so carefully green with repeated applications of makeup throughout the day, to call down the big fireworks. It knocked her upside the head just as she cried out, “Let there be liberty!” and the first rocket shot up, a red-white-and-blue peony.

  After that the hot corn began to fly in earnest, along with raw and cooked crabs that spun like frisbees as they sailed through the air. Jemma got nicked with a passing claw as she stood on the beach, not sure if she should watch the fight or the fireworks. Those who were drunk enough thwacked or stabbed at their neighbors with corn, or struck them with lobsters as if with a purse, or punched, or kicked, like Jemma’s father, mindful, even almost too drunk to walk, of his surgeons hands. Of the children only the teenagers participated, fighting with each other but not entirely seriously, and Tiffany Cropp, who in a confused ecstasy of rage, and in the dark between explosions, bit her own father on the calf.

  Jemma and Rachel and a dozen other children on the beach were herded knee-high into the river by Elena and a few other older kids, out of the way of the food. Then they turned their faces to the sky and back to the earth again, watching the fight and the fireworks. Severna Forest was rightly said to have the best fireworks display east of DC. It went on while the fight intensified, red-white-and-blue peonies; silver swans; white stars that burst three times in succession to show a blue circle in their heart; red flares that burst green at their apogee and settled in shapes like trees into the water; a red, green, purple, and orange set, spheres of four different sizes that hung in the sky like a giant bowl of fruit for what seemed to Jemma to be forever—every explosion made Jemma’s stomach leap, her attention so consumed by what she saw that she did not hear herself exclaim with the people on the shore at every new explosion. For Jemma it was wonder piled on wonder, until the last, which seemed to explode just over her head, so she had to lean so far back she thought her hair would touch the water, a procession of flares in every color Jemma had ever seen, that exploded one by one, each one bigger and brighter than the last, each one touching her with a wave of force she felt break against her face, each one echoing in her eye and her head until she felt sure she must be suspended high in the sky. “Goodbye!” her brother shouted at her. She had waded close to the pier, and looking up she saw him there, framed against the explosions with his arms lifted up to the sky, as if he was summoning them out of the clouds, or hurling them out from his breast. “They are sending me!” he said. “Goodbye, I’m going!” In a panic, she clawed her way up a pylon and held on to his ankle, ready to be dragged after him into the sky. He shook his foot but she wouldn’t let go, and after the finale he was still just his ordinary self with his arms up. He sat down heavily next to her. On the beach people were still fighting and cursing, and Sheriff Travis turned on the lights on his patrol car, and started shouting on his bullhorn for people to calm down.

  “Did you go?” Jemma asked her brother.

  “What do you think?” he said.

  I do not like your brothers, Pickie Beecher says. It is very early in the morning, and he sits on the edge of the roof, kicking his feet idly in the air and sipping at a packet of blood. I like every brother. Every brother lives in my heart, but these two… I do not like them.

  Never mind them.

  Angels hate me.

  You are an orphan of creation.

  Brother-killers, all of you. Even now brothers are dying, and what are you doing about it?

  I am the recording angel.

  Another and another and another. Death after death, and didn’t my mother undo death?

  Not for everyone. But do not fear my brothers. The accuser has nothing to say to you, and the destroyer will not touch you. A different way has been prepared for you.

  Death, he says.

  Not death, I say. But life. Someone has died for the sake of everyone else’s happiness. Even yours.

  Will I get to be with my brother again?

  No, but the grieving for him will be done. You won’t want to anymore.

  That is the most disgusting thing I have ever heard, he says.

  You say that now. But how can you know what tomorrow will bring?

  It is always the same. Every new day dawns, and my brother is still gone, and my whole life is one great aching after him.

  I am supposed to say, Have faith. I am supposed to compare his small, strange mind, unfavorably, with the gigantic and subtle wonders of providence. But though I can feel those very words forming in the empty air of my chest, my own will and my angelic destiny shaping them together, I find I cannot speak them. They stick in my throat and feel as solid as a bone.

  It’s hard, I say, to miss your brother or your sister

  Sisters are nothing, Pickie says. And what do you know about, it, anyway? But then he reaches out beside him without looking at me, and takes my hand.

  Rob was eating his lunch when Ishmael accosted him. He really should have eaten it on the way to the lab—he had a cell culture cooking there, and Dr. Sundae could not be relied upon to check it for him. He thought she probably had the botch in her brain, but he kept asking Jemma to check on it. He was salting his macaroni and cheese when Ishmael reached from behind him to put a hand on his wrist.

  “There’s already enough salt in the sea,” he said. Rob shook his hand off. They weren’t exactly pals anymore. In a better, less exhausted world, somebody would have arranged an intervention for his erratic behavior. Off and on he was paranoid, and violent with himself. More than one person had seen him standing in some alcove off the ramp, pulling at his hair or biting his fingers. And there wasn’t a person above the age of twenty-one who hadn’t had him pop up and charge them with something improbable—stepping on a dodo or poisoning a mountain or uncoloring the sky. These accusations were almost quaint, but lately he seemed to like more and more to accuse people of wild vile sexual transgressions, and sometimes new mothers and fathers covered the ears of their children when he came around. And yet most of the time he was sober and clear-headed and totally normal, an able organizer and cheerleader for all their futile efforts against the botch.

  “I like salt,” Rob said, not turning around to see which Ishmael was standing behind him. But he couldn’t eat with the man staring at the back of his head, so he said, “Want to sit down?”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” Ishmael said, and took the spoon that Rob was going to use for his ice cream to help himself to the macaroni and cheese. “I miss you,” he said, around a mouthful.

  “I miss you too,” Rob said, because his mother had taught him that you always had to say that back to people, even when you didn’t mean it.

  “We used to be friends, didn’t we? Weren’t you my pal?”

  “Sure,” Rob said.

  “Golden days! I miss them too. I was happier then, back before I knew.”

  “Well, we were all having a pretty good time there, for a while. Things are harder now. But it doesn’t mean that there’s not something good coming.” Ishmael laughed out loud at that, and Rob blushed, because it sounded so dumb. If he were someone like Father Jane he might be able to say the same thing in a way that would seem proudly hopeful instead of simply naïve.

  “Maybe for somebody, but not…” Ishmael cocked his head, and put down his spoon, and leaned over the table. “You know, I was going to say, not for you. But who knows? And you’re
not like everybody else, anyway. I mean, everybody knows it. You’ll get the Best Boy award, when this is all over, and they are all sitting around deciding who has been the Biggest Whore or the Whiniest Worm or the Handsomest Hip. I can see it.”

  “Um… thanks.”

  “It’s just a fact. Don’t thank me for it. There aren’t many like you… trust me! I see into all the places that people try to hide. It’s what I used to do, I’m sure of it. I illuminated and I judged and I wanted to punish. I wanted it so bad!” He struck a fist on the table, catching the edge of Rob’s bowl and sending macaroni flying.

  “Take it easy there, pal,” Rob said.

  “Pal! Now I’m your pal! Your long-lost, neglected pal! Well, that’s fine. Even if it does stand for Personal Ass Licker. That’s its own distinct pleasure, and don’t I know it?”

  “Have you been drinking?” Rob asked him.

  “I wish! I don’t need to, not anymore. It helps nothing, to drink. But back to our story. You and I were going to move in together. Best Boy and Angriest Aardvark. Can’t you see it?”

  “No.”

  “But don’t tell me,” he said, “that you haven’t ever thought about it. Didn’t I just finish saying that I see all the places that nobody else sees?” He leaned over the table, and then climbed up on it one knee at a time, so even though Rob pushed back his chair, Ishmael could push his face right up against him, so his hair touched Rob’s hair and their noses were nearly touching. He put a hand right on Rob’s belly and said, “Don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it.”

  Maybe he had, but that had nothing to do with the sudden panic that rose in him. All the late days in PICU, surrounded by a deadly illness whose rules of contagion were still unknown, had not made him feel suddenly so unsafe, so threatened, as he did now. It felt suddenly like Ishmael was pressed close against him, though he still lay atop the table. Chest to chest and hip to hip and thigh to thigh, Rob suddenly felt him pressing in. Ishmael whispered his proposition, and Rob shouted back the first thing that popped into his head: “I love my wife!”

  That worked. Ishmael leaned back, and climbed back down into his chair, and then stood up. “So you do,” he said, now sounding very sad. “I can’t argue with that.” He gathered two handfuls of the scattered macaroni and put them in his pocket, and then walked away.

  The morning of her impeachment trial, three weeks after the arrival of the boat and the boy, Jemma lay in bed, feeling weary and achy and depressed. She’d come half-awake when Rob had left, summoned back to the PICU by his pager, and pretended to be asleep, watching through slitted eyes as he rose from bed, stretched, and pulled on his scrubs. He washed his face with water in a bowl; Pickie was still sleeping in the bathroom, and Rob was too considerate of Pickie to wash there. Jemma stirred a little, arranging herself in an accessible position and closing her eyes tight. When he kissed her she brushed a hand lazily against his face. “I love you,” he told her, and she knew the highlight of her day had just come and gone.

  Back during her surgery rotation she’d lain similarly abed, with the cold pre-dawn air spilling in her window, listening to the distant murmuring of her alarm clock. She smacked it across the room every day when it brought her the news that she must wake and travel to the OR. It would not yet be four a.m., but she could perfectly imagine the accumulating insults of the day, and her perfect exhaustion and depression when she came home again to sit in front of her window and watch the lights on the bay, thinking of nothing and feeling like a big pile of shit sculpted up into the shape of a girl. She lay that morning with her face in her pillow, a tiny corner of it stuck in her mouth, and thought of rounds and her late-afternoon trial, and how she would rather sleep than get up, rather hide on the roof than go help on the sixth floor, and rather gouge her eyes out with spoons than go to the trial. Maybe, she thought, they could just mail her the verdict, or shoot a flare where she could see it from her window, red for you’re out, blue for we still love you. She turned on her side and pressed her nose against the cool cement wall, thinking of witnesses, seeing Dr. Snood and Dr. Chandra and Dr. Pudding on the stand, and then imagining a series of special witnesses, raised from the sea or conjured form the air, her mother, her father, her brother, Martin, Sister Gertrude, Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Cat in the Hat, Bugs Bunny, and that curious and amusing Martian who wore a shoe brush on his head. I knew she was trouble from the moment I saw her, the Martian said, and her mother said, All the Claflins are fucking insane, why should she be any different, and her brother rose up out of the witness box, fifteen feet tall, to crouch over the whole assembly and kill them all with a single derisive snort.

  She heard Rob slip out the door, closing it so slowly behind him that the click of the latch was drawn out to two syllables. She turned again in the bed wishing she could lie on her back and throw her arm over her eyes, but she was too afraid that the baby might sit on its own blood supply and strangle itself. She piled both pillows on top of her head and fell asleep again, into a sleeping dream—she had liked those, in school, because they made it seem like you were getting twice as much sleep as you actually were—where she was lounging on a table in the Council chamber, stretching and turning and spinning like the slow hand of a clock, so her head pointed at everyone in the room and she heard them murmuring about how peaceful she looked, and what a shame it would be to wake her. Eyes closed, still turning and spinning, she became convinced that she was riding in her parents’ car, feigning sleep, and hoping that her father would carry her into the house.

  “It’s time to wake,” said the angel. “They’ll need you at rounds in thirty minutes.”

  “Shut up,” Jemma said. “I’m asleep.”

  “You’re awake now. I see it very clearly. Shall I tell you the state of creation outside?”

  “Still wet, I know,” Jemma said.

  “The water temperature is twenty-six degrees Celsius. The sky is overcast with a scattering of cirrus clouds. There are fifteen dolphins circling the second floor, a school of tuna outside the main entrance, and a large jellyfish outside the emergency room. Many children are watching it. Would you like to know who the children are?”

  “I’m ordering you to be quiet,” Jemma said. “I have a busy day. I need to sleep through it.”

  “You have a busy day,” the angel agreed. “Breakfast has already been prepared. I will shriek an alarm if you do not rise from bed in the next three minutes.” She began to count softly.

  “They don’t need me up there,” Jemma said. The angel kept counting. Jemma flailed angrily under her covers, right to left and left to right, until the count had risen to a hundred seconds. When she rolled her legs out of the bed and touched her feet to the floor the counting stopped. It wasn’t comfortable, but she thought she could probably fall asleep again like that. When she didn’t move for another minute, the angel began to shriek, just softly at first, like a kitten horribly tortured but too small to make a very big noise. Jemma stood up before it got too loud.

  “Good morning,” the angel said.

  “Probably for somebody, somewhere,” Jemma said. She walked to the little table. Pickie had laid out breakfast for her, two boiled eggs, a kiwi, and a banana arranged in a hairy-nosed face. He’d written a note next to the tall glass of orange juice: it is breakfast.

  “Would you like something else?” the angel asked. “The abomination touched that food. I witnessed it.”

  “Don’t call Pickie names.”

  “He is not yet clean.”

  “Neither am I,” Jemma said, smelling her upper lip, then her hair, then her shirt: cat food, smoke, illness. Vivian was sick with the botch. Jemma had stayed late with her the previous night, and not washed her hair when she came back downstairs. She peeled the eggs but ate only the fruit, drank half the juice, then took a long shower, standing for fifteen minutes under the water, resting her head against the tile.

  “They are waiting,” the angel kept saying, but no one was waiting for her when she finally got
up to the sixth floor. The nurses barely met her eyes, and only the children, hurrying up and down the hall with bedpans or blood, or pulling bags of IV fluid in the little red carts in which they themselves used to be hauled, smiled at her. The younger ones were merely fetchers; the older ones were helping with jobs formerly performed by adults too sick now to work.

  “I only have three patients,” said Cindy Flemm when she saw Jemma coming down the hall, “and I’m late for rounds. It’s my first time being late. Josh said they take away your patients, if you’re late.”

  “Wouldn’t that be great?” Jemma said. “I think they give you more, though.” They walked together down the hall, Cindy going over the numbers on her three face-sized index cards.

  “Josh has this fancy PDA, but I like the cards better. What’s your system?”

  “Toilet paper,” Jemma said. “Slow down there, Speedy.”

  “Sorry,” Cindy said, not slowing. She got to the conference room a few paces ahead of Jemma, darted in, then popped back out to hold the door. “Sorry,” she said again, and Jemma heard, Sorry you’re pregnant, Sorry everyone is afraid of you, and Sorry you’ve become useless.

  Dr. Tiller looked up at her and gestured toward an empty seat. Timmy looked at her, too. Ethel Puffer, pulling a plate of brownies toward herself, waved. Josh was presenting a patient.

  “She looks a little yellow this morning,” he was saying. “Do you think the botch could be getting to her liver?”

  “Many things are possible, Dr. Swift,” said Dr. Tiller. “And some unpleasant business impossible today might be tomorrow’s reality. But finish your presentation and then we’ll consider those things.” Josh blushed. Jemma broke in before he could go on.