The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  “Just one little push,” he said.

  “Are you lonely?” asked Dr. Snood, not thinking before he spoke. Two people had already died this morning, and he couldn’t stand another, especially a suicide, of which they’d thankfully not yet had a single one. “I’ll be your friend. Are you tired? You can sleep in my bed. Are you sad? I can be very amusing.”

  “Maybe if you just blew on me,” he said.

  “Are you lonely?” he asked him again, reaching up high to lay a hand on his shoulder. “I’m lonely, too,” he said. “We all are.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Dr. Chandra asked. “Why are you touching me?”

  “I don’t like suicide,” he said. It was true, but it was the wrong thing to say.

  “I see a whale,” Dr. Chandra said, and drove an elbow into Dr. Snood’s face, and pushed himself forward. Dr. Snood reached after him, but not quickly enough, or not sincerely enough, and Dr. Chandra fell. He broke on the surface of the water instead of falling through it, and floated there in piles of greasy ash that would coat the windows on the third floor for days.

  Jarvis was making shoes. On their two-hundred-and-thirty-first day at sea he sat on the floor before a replicator on the seventh floor, trying to get the right pair. Everybody should have a nice pair of shoes—he’d decided that a long time ago, and he thought it made a difference, even for the ones who were almost dead and wouldn’t know if you chewed on their toes, let alone if you put a new pair of shoes on their feet. They did a little better, or they looked a little happier, or they smelled a little less—he wasn’t sure what it was, exactly. It made him feel better, anyway. It was like doing something, and it was doing something—turning the idea of a shoe into words about a shoe, and turning the words into the thing.

  “This isn’t what I asked for,” he told the angel.

  “It is the shoe.”

  “My smelly ass, bitch,” he said. “It’s not the fucking shoe. It’s not even half of the shoe. This shit ain’t worth dreaming about. This shit ain’t worth thinking about by accident. What the fuck am I paying you for, to fuck up every minute of the day?”

  “I am not paid except in prayer and thanks to God.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” he said. “I’ll tell you if you’re paid or not, and how it is. What’s wrong with you? Who made you such a stupid, useless bitch?”

  “I rose like you from out of the mind of God.”

  “Shut the fuck up. Who asked you to talk? Just put the fucking spangles on the side, and not on the top, and maybe I won’t have to shit in my pants right now because of your stupidness.”

  “But do you really want spangles on the side?”

  He screwed up his face, rolled forward to his knees, and banged on the cool metal surface of the replicator, grunting and groaning. “I’m shitting,” he said. “Right now, squeezing out a big lumpy shit because I just can’t fucking stand it anymore. Just put the spangles on, bitch. Just put them where I tell you.”

  “Very well, but I have listened to her dreams and I know where she wants her spangles to fall.”

  “Just do it, bitch. Who’s in fucking charge here, anyway?”

  “You are,” she said, and the machine sighed, and the mist spilled out on the floor. When he picked the shoe from the hollow it was still full of mist. He turned it over in his hand and the mist spilled out, falling slow and straight, splitting into a dozen rivulets and disappearing just before it reached the floor. The shoe was just as he had imagined it, and finally just as he had described it—nothing missing, nothing extra, the sole just as black as he wanted it, the velero nibs and steel spikes arranged just as they were supposed to be (they would help her stay steady on her feet and draw blood if she should have to kick some random motherfucker in the face); the sparkles were subtle but not invisible, the red tongue was flared just so, and the inside of the shoe was blaze-orange and would always have that smell (he partook of it now) that was like pressing a brand-new not-yet-kicked soccer ball against your face and breathing in through your mouth and nose both.

  “Finally,” he said, and walked off, swinging the shoes by their long laces at his sides. He passed Josh and Cindy and Kidney—all too busy to talk—stopped a moment at the window to look out over the water at the sunny day, and came finally to the general medical ward, stuffed with old patients, three to a room. He passed by his patients’ rooms—he had already made his rounds and was sure that everybody had their medicine and something to look at and that if they needed anything else it could wait a few minutes for him to take care of this thing. He passed Ms. Dufresne’s room, and saw her feet sticking over the edge of the bed, wearing her sneaker-boots. He stuck his hand inside her door to wave, and she called out, “Hey, baby!”

  “I’m not your baby,” he called back, in a friendly way, but put on a don’t-fuck-with-me face as he passed the nurses’ station—he didn’t want them asking him to go fetch a bag of blood or change the tubing in an IV pump right now, and they knew better than to ask him for the least little shit of a thing if the invitation was not on his face. Five more doors down the hall he came to the family conference room where Jemma was sleeping, shouldered the door open, and went in.

  This was the place they used to bring families to tell them their kids were going to die. In the old days he’d hidden here, like he’d hidden everywhere else, supremely powerful in his invisibility, hearing all and knowing all, biting his knuckles under the couch while Dr. Sashay detailed for Juan’s mother all the ways in which he was fucked, the lady crying through her questions, the dry hiss of a tissue leaving the box marking time as regular as a slow-ticking clock. Jemma was sleeping on the couch now, stretched on her side, her huge belly just reaching beyond the cushions, her feet stuck up over the armrest, one clog standing beneath them and the other dangling off her toes. Before he got the shoes out he touched her belly very softly and closed his eyes. “Hey baby,” he said. It gave him a feeling, to touch her on the belly—nothing he could describe very well but it was good, though he knew it was perverted to go around touching ladies on their belly. Even if they were pregnant, it wasn’t right and he wasn’t a freak. “Sorry,” he said. She just kept sleeping.

  He pushed off the clog with a finger and put on the shoes. They fit just right—they always did—big enough to go on easy and small enough to hug your foot like a hand that squeezed but didn’t tickle. He tied them hard, throwing the knot swiftly down the lace, and cursing softly at her as he did up the bows, but she still didn’t wake.

  “Don’t say I never fucking did something for you,” he said, stifling a yawn, and left with her clogs. He would climb to the roof and throw them into the water.

  The youngest ones fell asleep first. Former micro-preemies grew logy between feeds, and their parents thought at first that they were becoming lazy or distracted by the travails of their caretakers when they lost interest in crawling or pulling to a stand, and could not be convinced even to try to feed themselves with hand or spoon. When some of them became difficult to wake even for a bottle, people worried that the babies were depressed—who wasn’t, these days?—and the winnowed Council met in special session to review the scanty old literature on the use of antidepressants in children under a year old, but even before the first batch of doctored formula was cooked up, the earliest and most miraculous of them—Brenda—had already been asleep for twenty-four hours straight. At hour twenty-eight Anna paged Jemma and asked her to come up.

  Escape was probably too strong a word for what she did. She always just walked out of jail. The angel would always open the door, and she had learned to make herself hard to touch, so when the guards tried to push her back or grab her arm, their arms grew weak, or they couldn’t quite find her or aim their guns with their shaking hands.

  They threw her back into her room every day or two; she hardly held it against them any more, though it infuriated Rob, and he was always tracking down Dr. Snood to call him a motherfucker and threaten to quit. Dr. Snood only looked at him blandly
, dabbing with a black gauze hanky at his nose, which was always running and often bled—it had been his only symptom for weeks, and he put it about that dedication to his job was holding the botch in him at bay. “We’ll muddle on without you,” he said to Rob, who never quit, and never slept, and never even cried anymore, though he still made a crying face, sometimes, in the dark of their room, when Jemma wished she couldn’t see him as plainly with her mind as with her eyes.

  That day, number two hundred and seventeen, Jemma examined Brenda and every one of the other sleeping babies (a total of ten had been re-orphaned and returned to the crèche) walking by every fancy crib, each one unique, some designed by the crèche mothers and some by the parents, to look like airplanes or boats or spaceships, heavy sculpture or molecular models—they were supposed to reflect the incubating passions of their inhabitants. It had caused a controversy, back when they all had the time to debate such points, because people asked, who was to say what passions were incubating in those little heads, and maybe your baby didn’t want to be a pilot or a string theorist or a heterosexual, and who could say what would be art and what would be artisanship in the new world, and hadn’t it always been a sin, to tell your child what they could or couldn’t be? Three crèche seminars and two town meetings and a Council debate later, they decided that you could build whatever you liked for your baby, but that no baby would spend more than three days in any one crib. For days the babies rotated all around the room, but not anymore—it was too exhausting, all the paperwork that went with the rotations, and the infection-control issues were daunting. Anna was representative of her colleagues when she said, “I haven’t got time for that shit, now.”

  Jemma was quick. She could do it just with a glimpse now, a pan-scan that lit up the whole little body from the tips of the toes to the even ends of the soft hair, but she always made it look harder than it was, in case people should think she wasn’t trying hard enough, in case people should think she’d become flippant or callow or just lazy in addition to being crazy and evil. She knew Anna didn’t think that of her, but still she peered into the crib for another minute, contemplating the fat sleeping face, and how the eyes darted behind the lids.

  “Do babies dream?” Anna asked her.

  “This one does,” Jemma said. She could perceive that the little mind was skipping along inside the head at a thousand people, a thousand places a minute, but could not see the shapes in the dream, or read the story, if there was one there.

  “Has she got it?” Anna asked.

  “Yes,” Jemma said, “but it’s not making her sick. It’s just making her sleepy, like the boy.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  “I’ll get tranked if I try,” Jemma said, because Arthur and Jude were standing only a few feet away. “I can already tell that it won’t help,” she added.

  “You try, I’ll block them,” Anna said.

  “Okay,” Jemma said, sighing. “I wouldn’t do this for anybody else.”

  “Sure you would,” Anna said, then turned and rushed toward the guards. “My babies!” she called at them. “What are you doing out of your cribs?” She ran at them with her arms open, white crèche robe flaring out to either side, screening Jemma, who placed a single finger on the baby’s soft spot. It was all she needed to do. She lit up the spine and got her surprise. Green and bright, her fire picked out patches of shadow everywhere in the baby. Trying to catch them all was just like trying to grab ashes out of the air. She got a few, but there was always more, and the ones she touched burned but did not change under her attention. She put them in imaginary pockets, thinking, maybe if I cart them away… but she knew she could stand there forever and there would always be more of them, and already Anna was down and the darts were flying at Jemma’s neck. The tranquilizer was not really a problem—she knew it was coming and easily changed the drug to something that only made her feel a little peppy, and kept it well away from the black hole where her baby lived, but the black motes were leaping from her pockets to make a deep shadow that clung to her face and settled in her eyes. She thought she knew just how tired the babies must be feeling as she slumped forward into the soft rubbery arms of the baby’s crib—it was built to look like a giant friendly octopus. She felt the guards take her just as she fell asleep, and knew she was going back to jail as certainly as Anna would spend the next week burning off the demerits she’d just earned.

  “I’m tired,” said Kidney.

  “No you’re not,” Jemma said firmly, though the child’s exhaustion was made plain by her drooping shoulders, stooped back, puffy eyes, and cranky tears. She could see it, too, strapped all around her like an armor of pillows, and settled on her, and rising behind her eyes—something softer and thicker than what was in the grown-ups, but it was still the botch—black ash that sucked at Jemma’s mind, and impugning and condemning her as a failure. Jemma was tired, too. She’d woken late from her nap in the meditation room, and relieved Connie from her babysitting late, and not even noticed her fancy new shoes until Connie complimented her on them. “Let’s play scrabble,” she said to Kidney.

  “I’m too tired for scrabble.”

  “How about bunny recess?” Jemma asked. It was her job to keep this child stimulated. She would have preferred a job in the new ward—as the one- and two-year-olds fell asleep they converted the disco into a medical dormitory—but the job was too popular, and she too far out of favor with everyone except Rob, Pickie Beecher, and Father Jane, to land it. It was a burden for a hospital once again crowded with patients, to staff another ward, but everyone agreed that the children and adults should not be housed together, and though the sleepers did not require much care beyond tube feeds and diaper changes, people clamored for an assignment to the dormitory because it was so much better to brush a toddler’s hair than to sweep another flaky piece of your dissolving colleague out of the bed, or listen to their moans when they become tolerant to the latest opioid and their wounds began again to ache wildly.

  “No,” said Kidney.

  It was a fool’s enterprise, Jemma knew. The botch was in all of them already, just waiting to manifest, and no amount of Romper Rooming would keep it away when it decided to come. And there were worse things, on display in the crowded wards, than merely falling asleep, and missing whatever new horrors the remaining days would bring them. But it was poor form, to just let it happen, and she could understand why people who couldn’t see what she saw might think the children were falling asleep because they were bored, or just not stimulated like they had been when their days had been full of classes and shows and sports tournaments. “Let’s go for a walk,” Jemma said.

  “Only if you carry me.”

  “It’s better if you walk.”

  “I’m too tired,” Kidney said, whining and drumming her heels against the ground.

  “Let’s have a sundae,” Jemma said. “We’ll just walk to the cafeteria and then I’ll make you a sundae as big as your head.”

  “Okay,” Kidney said, crying again, and looking not at all excited or delighted by the prospect of ice cream. Jemma would not carry her no matter how she whined, but let her ride a plastic horse through the halls and down the ramp, pushing it every so often with her foot to scoot it forward on its wheels, but refusing to pull the bridle and tow her. She perked up a little on the ramp, zooming away down the span between the fifth and fourth floors and running into a wall. She lay too still after she fell. Jemma hurried over and set her on her feet.

  “It’s nice to lay down,” she said sullenly, getting back on the horse.

  “Lie down,” Jemma said. “And it’s only nice at night, when you’re hooked up. I’d hate to have to give you a demerit.”

  “You’d never give me a demerit,” she said.

  “Don’t push me,” Jemma said.

  “Demerits are stupid. You’re not stupid. Not like that.”

  “We’ve all got to…” Jemma began, but stopped herself before she could give voice to one of Dr. Tiller’s platit
udes. “The sundaes are waiting,” she said. Kidney went to the edge and stared down at the lobby.

  “Where is everybody?” she asked.

  “Eating ice cream,” Jemma said, and took her hand, so she rode the horse with one hand, pushing along with her feet to keep up because Jemma would just stop every time Kidney let her pull.

  The sundae machine was a late invention, as big as a church organ and with as many levers as an organ had pipes, put together by the volunteer before he got sick. Kidney tasted flavors and gave stern instructions to the angel about how a burnt caramel sauce should taste, and how fluffy the whipped cream should be, like a new pillow that’s been slept on three times but not four times. When she was done her sundae was a little bigger than her head, and Jemma had to make two trips to carry it and the one Kidney made for her to a table in the middle of the room. It was crowded for so early in the afternoon, filled with other babysitters and nurses and doctors and the older kids who were doing the larger part of the work, all of them eating before the change of shift, shortly to happen at three. She saw Dr. Sundae and Dr. Sasscock with two of his wives and Emma, all alone with a steaming bowl of soup. Emma looked up at Jemma, then looked back to her food. It was how people mostly greeted her these days.

  Pickie Beecher was sitting alone at a table. Kidney ran to him and gave him a hug, spilling details about her day and her predicament before she even sat down. “I played pretend-poke,” she said, “and then there was a walk on the roof, and then we made a movie about a deadly shoe who turned good and had to run from all the shoes who were still deadly, and then I read a book about me, and then I had to eat lunch, and then it was time for exercises, and then we made purses, and then we made a wallet to put in the purse, and then we dressed up like we were going to another wedding, and then we made a paper wok and I was going to have the angel turn it to gold but Jemma said it was too gaudy, but what does she know about woks? And I’m so tired, Pickie, I’m so tired I can hardly stand it.”