The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  “Well,” she said finally. “What can I tell you?”

  “It was like this with my granny,” Vivian said. “Everybody hanging around her bed, waiting for her to die.”

  “You’re not going to die,” Jemma said.

  “You keep saying that.” They were in the rehab playroom, Vivian lying face up in her hospital bed, Jemma sitting in a deep inflatable easy chairs of the sort that you could kick or hurl harmlessly across the room, when you were in the mood. Arthur and Jude, two men from the lift team who’d been assigned by Dr. Snood to follow Jemma wherever she went, sat on the ground close to the door, and between them and Vivian four of Vivian’s disciples sat on inflatable mushroom-shaped stools, close enough to be able to hear everything they said. Vivian called them her death guard. They were there to catch her last words, because everybody on the ninth floor felt sure that Vivian, before anyone else, was going to come up with the reason, even if only moments before she died. “The worse I feel,” she’d told Jemma, “the closer I feel to getting it. You know what that means, right?” Jemma didn’t know, and didn’t want to hear about it anyway.

  “Cheer up,” Vivian said. “You’re healthy. Your baby’s healthy. It could be a lot worse.”

  “That’s coming,” Jemma said.

  “You’ll be fine,” Vivian said. “Your baby will be fine.”

  “How can you know that? You haven’t laid a hand on my belly in weeks.”

  “I’ve thought it through,” Vivian said. She sighed. “Is it midnight yet?”

  “Almost,” Jemma said, tired of the question and not looking at her watch. “I don’t really care,” she said. “It’s just that it’s made me very confused. Now what do I do? I almost wanted to ask them the question, but it would have been too humiliating.”

  “Do what I do. Lie here and try to figure it out, and wait for the big show.”

  “Stupid fucking Ishmael.”

  “Well, that at least you should have seen coming. Everything else—that’s just things falling apart.”

  “He seemed so sincere.”

  “Tell me about it. I’ll love you forever. I won’t let them impeach you—it’s all the same thing to him. Ouch.” She shifted in her bed. “I think I just felt my kidney fail.”

  “Your kidneys are fine,” Jemma said, taking a very quick look. There was a barely perceptible shimmer in the air when she looked into Vivian’s belly, and no fire at all. Still, one of Dr. Snood’s goons lifted his head, as if sniffing the air, and stared at her. Jemma looked away.

  “They’re probably the only good thing left in my body. This must be what it’s like to get old. I think Granny was even in this position, except her hand was always up over her head, like this. See? I think it was stuck, or maybe she just liked it like that. Vivian, she said, I hope a truck or a fat man falls on you and kills you long before you ever get like me. She suffered terribly. I used to hate to come home from school, because I knew she would be there, and I could smell the smell by sixth period, way before I even left to go home. This isn’t so bad, compared to what she went through. She paused a moment. Say, do I smell?”

  “No,” Jemma said.

  “You wouldn’t tell me if I did.” She cried out suddenly and her four attendants leaped from their stools.

  “What? Where does it hurt?” Jemma asked, though what she sensed from her friend was a high spike of elation.

  “I almost had it. Closer and closer. Like a wave of nausea or… something else. I get so close and then it just rushes away, the feeling and the knowledge. For a second there it almost felt like it wasn’t too late for me.”

  “You’re not going to die,” Jemma said.

  “You keep saying that enough times and maybe someone in here will believe it, but never me. Is it midnight yet?”

  “Thirty seconds,” Jemma said, just as they heard the compressors start to hum behind the walls, and the lights started to dim further, and a bright mote appeared in the heart of the hanging sun.

  “Here it comes,” Vivian said.

  Vivian was right, there was something about the model in the rehab gym that you could only appreciate if you were really depressed. When the ceiling faded and the stars began to shine out of the darkness and the planets brightened and the sun blazed, it was different than all the other times Jemma had watched it, like being lifted out of your body and hanging in space instead of like watching a fancy mechanical diorama. It seemed so real it made her wonder if her horrible day had really happened, because her memory of waking, of rounds, of her trial, of her speech, all seemed so flimsy and vague compared to the hard light of the uncountable stars, the darting flight of Mercury, the pale green eye of Venus, or the perfect blue globe of earth, unmarked by land or cloud. A dwindling part of her was still wondering if she shouldn’t have just made them all see—she knew she could have done it, opened up their minds with prying green fire and made them know she wasn’t crazy, or just forced them to give up the stupid, distracting business of impeachment; there was some organ she could have found or imagined in them which, when squeezed in her green fist, would have poured out an abundance of Jemma-love and devotion. It would have been better, she was sure, than trying to convince them with mere words. “I’m not crazy,” she’d said, “I’ve just been trying to help, and the worst thing is, I care very deeply about all of you, I have a sort of love for everybody.” It was weak and stupid thing and nothing she had planned to say, and love was the wrong word anyway for the compelling interest she had in them, and having said that made it seem even more like a humiliating breakup when all of them, even Ishmael raised their arms and turned their thumbs down at her.

  “There it goes,” she thought, imagining the humiliation, the caring at all about the whole stupid fucking day, was drawn out of her by a combination of gravitational and astronomical influences, so her anger went flying to Mercury, her thwarted love—though it wasn’t love—to Venus, her shame to Saturn, until the only question she asked herself was, What is this day, compared to the majesty of the cosmos?

  “You weren’t kidding,” she said after the motors cut out and the stars faded and planets slowed and stopped. Vivian was taking long draws off another cigarette.

  “I told you,” she said. “I haven’t been living here for the past month for no reason. Look at them. They missed it.” Jemma looked to her guards, who were yawning and stretching. “Hey,” Vivian said to Helen Dufresne, the attendant closest to her. “Write this down for the record, please. Ishmael eats shit with a…” She cried out again, a deep bark, so Helena leaped back and threw up her hands, dropping her pen and pad.

  Jemma stood up and asked “What, what?” though she could see what was wrong. Vivian had dropped her cigarette in the bed and was clutching at the rails, her hands rigid, a dreadful grimace on her face. Jemma brushed the cigarette off the sheets and raised up her hands. “Hey,” she said, “knock it off.” Her guards came rushing up. She raised her hands up higher. Vivian opened her mouth wider, but stopped shouting.

  “Don’t you do it,” said Arthur.

  “It’s not allowed, ma’am,” said Jude.

  “Of course not,” Jemma said, and burned. Arthur and Jude tried to reach her, but it only took the smallest portion of her attention to make it so they could only move their arms. They made swimming motions through her fire but came no closer to her.

  Vivian relaxed even before Jemma touched her. “No,” she said. “No.”

  “Don’t worry,” Jemma said. “I’m here.”

  “You can’t… Don’t. I see it. It’s just over there. Don’t get in the way.” She went rigid again. Jemma could see plainly the lesions of the botch all along her spine, unfolding like paper to spread out into her chest and abdomen. There was one in her head, a swelling black aneurysm about to burst into blood and dust.

  “I feel it,” Jemma said. “I can stop it. I just didn’t… care enough before.” She was making that up, though every time she burned these days it was brighter than before, and it was
always a surprise as well as a bitter disappointment when she failed to save someone.

  “You can’t…” Vivian said. “Look at it! I never guessed it would be beautiful. It’s not supposed to be… it’s not even a word!”

  “It’s awful,” Jemma said, not yet aware that they weren’t looking at the same thing.

  “Maybe it’s nasty inside,” Vivian said. “Or it smells bad. I can’t smell it from here. If I can reach it…”

  “Just relax,” Jemma said, because Vivian was trying to sit up.

  “If I touch it, then I’ll know. And if I say it, then you’ll all hear, and it’ll stop. We’ll all have passports—don’t you get it? I just have to touch it. Don’t get in my way.”

  “Just relax,” Jemma said, and tried to make her sleepy with the fire, making it cool and dark and soft. Vivian pushed her away, then arched her back.

  “Don’t get in my way,” she said again, but Jemma, perceiving that Vivian was leaping out of the bed, though her body remained arched and fixed between the rails, tried to throw herself between Vivian and the ceiling. “Don’t,” she said again, and Jemma said, “I have to.”

  She was partially aware of bodies flying around the room, sustaining little hurts that were healed almost as soon as they were sustained, caught in the maelstrom that spun around the bed. All the rest of her attention was on Vivian, her body and her not-body. With one hand she burned at the botch while the other grabbed frantically at her friend, who struggled against her.

  “Would you knock it the fuck off?” Vivian said, quieter now. “It’s just at my fingertips.”

  “Sorry,” Jemma said, holding tight, but whatever she was holding on to—now it felt like a hand, now a foot, now a shoulder—slipped away, and Vivian was gone in the next instant, leaving behind only a lingering impression of surprise, despair, and delight. She should have stopped then, dropped the fire and wept by her friend’s bed, like someone who was remotely normal would do, but when she knew Vivian was dead she got the stony feeling again, as powerful now as the thing that Dr. Snood called her dreadful burden, rooting her feet to the ground and securing her will to the task of burning the botch to a different sort of ash.

  Jemma, from far away, where Arthur and Jude are pinned against the wall, one right side up and the other upside down, both vomiting streams of green bile that take the shape of birds and insects to fly around the room, it looks like you are punching Vivian in the face and stomach. They are both a little distracted by the vomiting, but both are still watching you, and their report will seriously compromise any hope you have of being trusted by anybody in this hospital ever again, let alone being restored to your lost office. Give up, please—no one has ever defeated my brother, and no one can hope to, not even you, though you are glorious in your fury and your fire, and oh, I love to see you burn, and I know you are traveling swiftly to a place where you’re not just burning at the botch but at all the wrongs and hurts and sadness and obscenity of the old world—it’s easy, isn’t it, to make them the same? And if you could burn black tar to dust to ash to harmless air, or call Vivian back to a clean body, or harrow the hospital again like you did before, then why not swoop down on wings of green fire to pluck Martin Marty out of his smashed car, your father out of his cancer-bed, your mother out of her house, the world out of its own filthy ruin? Now are you even fighting, or just burning for the sake of it? My brother doesn’t even notice—he’s gone off to the seventh floor to take another life. Vivian was nothing to him, my dear, but another piece of flesh to consume, another bright hope to ruin, another job. Your own brother is burning years away, and I know you are asking yourself, is this how he burned, so mighty, so impotent? It’s a useless question, and soon you will hurt Arthur and Jude. There now. That’s better—I see a flicker, and sense your sudden weariness. You are as tired as a toddler at noon. Another flicker, and a stutter in your flame, and a strange sob, but no tears, and then you are dimming, and then dull, only a shining in your eyes hinting at how brightly you were burning. Helen Dufresne is laid out beside her chair—her companions have all fled. She is overcome by what she has witnessed. She tried to write down the noises that Vivian shouted, but there’s only illegible scrawl on her pad, and when she wakes she’ll remember nothing but that Vivian seemed exultant as she left. Arthur and Jude are fully awake, and feeling surprisingly refreshed, though I can see as plainly as you how the botch has settled in all their bones. You are too weak to resist them when they haul you up by your shoulders, and I have always been too weak to help you, but in the spirit of protest I’ll say to both of them, though they won’t hear me, Get away from her. You are not fit to look at her, to touch the hem of her yellow gown, to lick her shoe, to smell her shit, or even poke it with a stick.

  Praise them! my sister sings. Praise their last days!

  But I am silent.

  Praise their last days! she sings out again, as if I had merely missed my cue.

  I don’t feel like singing, or praying, I say.

  The whole hospital trembles, and all over people look out the window or at the ceiling, expecting some new catastrophe. It’s not a matter of feeling like it, she says when she has recovered from her shock.

  Our brother is merciless, I say.

  Our brother is perfect, she replies.

  Our brother is cruel.

  He does not know the meaning of that word.

  It would be better if they had all drowned.

  Who are you to question the violence of grace?

  I am he who commanded grace, I shout, and stretch myself to stand over the whole hospital, and for a moment I am a giant in the sky. Thin and rarefied and empty.

  You are the recording angel, she says, after a moment has passed, and I feel as foolish as I look, a hollow spirit, full of air. Do not torture yourself with memory and with doubt. Sing with me. I am crafting a lullaby, you know. When I am diminished again she starts to sing, a dull, quiet croon.

  Why is it so hard to remember, I ask her, how richly they deserved it?

  Dr. Snood interrupted Dr. Chandra at his suicide. He hadn’t meant to do anything of the sort. He was chasing down a child who had been sassy to him, one of the old rickets family, a seven-year-old who had abandoned a wagon full of laboratory specimens to spoil in the lobby. “I don’t feel like it!” she’d said, when Dr. Snood had commanded her to haul the thing to the lab, and she had torn up her demerit and thrown it on the ground as soon as she’d received it. He wanted to catch her to give her a talking-to, stern but gentle. She was a child, but who among them were children anymore? There was no leisure for any of them now, not for the young or the sick or the weak, not for the weary and not for the depressed. He could frame that in a way a seven-year-old could comprehend. It would be a very fulfilling talk. He was sure they would both go away from it revitalized.

  He lost the child on the eighth floor, and when he put his head into one of the old BMT rooms, now an abandoned ballet salon, he saw Dr. Chandra standing in the window.

  “Don’t,” he said, loud but not too loud, afraid of scaring him into the jump. Dr. Chandra drew back his foot and turned around.

  “You,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Dr. Snood. “It’s me.”

  “What are you doing up here?”

  “I had a feeling someone was going to do something stupid. I… sensed it.”

  “Nothing stupid about what I’ve got planned.”

  “You’ve got that poised-in-the-window look of somebody about to kill himself.”

  “Exactly. The only stupid thing is having waited this long. I’m almost too late, and you’re making me later.”

  “Come down from there. We’ll figure something out.”

  “You go ahead your way, Doctor. I’ll go mine.”

  “Wait! At least tell me why.”

  “You can probably get it from the context,” he said, not turning around.

  “Maybe I’m not as smart as I look.”

  “I guess I could believe that. He
re’s the short version, then, because I think I just threw a PVC. I’m about to die anyway, I never did any of the shit I was supposed to do, and it’s the only thing that would make me happy.”

  “But if you’re going to…”

  “It’s not the same, is it. Is it?” He turned his head to look at Dr. Snood. “If I do it then I do it. If it just happens then it just happens, and then my whole life I’ll never have had done anything. I was supposed to do it years ago. Years ago, and now it’s almost too late. Okay? Will you go away now?”

  “That’s not it,” said Dr. Snood. “I can tell when people are lying to me.”

  “Well, that’s what I’m offering. You’re free to presume whatever else you want.”

  “You’re just tired of the work. Well, we’re all tired of the work, but we’ve got to keep up with it. What other choice have we got?”

  Dr Chandra spread out his arms beside him in a downward sweep, as if to say, Behold! Then he turned back to face the water.

  “Wait a minute,” Dr. Snood said. “I think I’ve got an idea.

  “Fuck,” he said. “It’s starting. I can’t move my foot. What do I have to do to get a push?”

  “You think something will change because you do it, or someone will be happy? You think the botch will go back into whatever box it came out of, just because of this? You think you can start over again, somewhere else?”