by Chris Adrian
“I am almost dead,” Pickie said sadly as Jemma helped Kidney into her chair, positioned the sundae in front of her, and handed her a spoon.
“That’s worse than tired,” Kidney said. “You sure look good for somebody who’s about to die.”
“Eat,” Jemma said to Kidney, and to Pickie, “Don’t say things like that.”
“It’s almost time,” he said. “All this time I thought they were afraid of me, that they knew what I could do to an angel.” He opened his mouth to show them his big perfect teeth. “But they were never afraid, they were just waiting.”
“You should make a sundae,” Kidney said, digging in. “That’ll make you feel better.”
“Ice cream would make me more cold but no less dead.”
“Pickie,” Jemma said. “I have got a roll of demerits in my pocket.”
“I know it when you’re lying,” he said
“Today there is roast beef ice cream,” Kidney said.
“There is always roast beef,” Pickie said. “It makes no difference, and you know, you have always known, that I am a simple vegetarian. Why must they destroy me? Why do they hate me? What have I done except be born and try to be true to my brother? I love my brother—is that any reason for them to destroy me?”
Jemma picked at some whipped cream that had stuck to Kidney’s hair. “There’s just one angel,” she said. “And she likes you. She likes everybody—that’s her problem. But she wouldn’t hurt a fly. How many times do I have to tell you?”
“As many times as it would take to make it true. You could talk forever, and never understand. I used to think that you could protect me. I dreamed of you and him in battle—you burned his wings and ravaged his flesh, but still he came for me. He tore me to pieces while you watched and cried out but you were useless. You are useless to me and I am already dead.”
“Oh, come here, you,” she said, pulling him from his chair for a hug. It was what she and Rob did whenever he got too crazy, whenever he talked himself into a tizzy of paranoia, or when he grew silent and pulled at his testicles, or smelled obsessively at his hands. Rob had made the discovery that if you just held him for long enough, he would let out a funny noise, a growl and a burp, and soften in your arms, and for a little while he would talk about other things, and even seem happy. She held him and held him, and finally he made a noise, but not the one she wanted. She felt his arms moving behind her, and felt him swallow. She pushed him back. He was eating whipped cream and caramel off his hands. Behind her Kidney was face down in her sundae. Jemma could feel the cold burning her face, but the child slept through it.
“She is gone,” Pickie said, “and I am gone, too.”
I have such violent dreams, and yet they are never nightmares. The nightmare is the one where I wake up fifty years from now, happily married, and see a picture by my bed of the family I have happily fathered, every face smiling, every heart black with the sin I put in it. So happy and so dead—it wakes me screaming every time.
The happy dream is the one where I hang myself and then set myself on fire (through merely an act of will) as I dangle from the oak in the Nottingham’s driveway—I know it is that tree because of the tar patch on the trunk that looks like a mocking face. I stab myself in the belly on the green of the seventh hole, and my blood flows in a torrent, filling up the low dells and the high hills of Severna Forest, until every house is floating, and every neighbor declaims from their porch, Finally, Calvin. Finally! They are scolding and congratulating me all at once.
If I have the one where I cut out my own heart and then put out my eyes, then I am buoyed up all day, and nothing can spoil my good mood. I know why it is so. If you are a born sacrifice, then knives and chains and fire are the things that comfort you. If I were born to be president, then dreams of long black sedans and budget summaries would give me the same feeling.
And it’s not even the hard part, dealing with that. It’s not keeping my violent dreams to myself, or practicing little violations on myself, or even imagining the really impossible ones: a person would need four arms to cut in such a way, and how can you cut out your tongue if you’ve already cut off a hand? The hard part is understanding how it can follow that a supreme act of violence against myself could be an end to violence.
“Have you seen Pickie Beecher?” Jemma asked. It was a question she was asking everybody who could still talk. On the two-hundred-and-forty-second day since the flood he had been missing for three days, his weird, sullen presence gone from the public spaces of the hospital, his stain gone from her mind. She looked for him everywhere in both places, waddling from the roof down to the lobby, and sitting quietly under the toy as she searched fruitlessly in her mind for the familiar blot. She knew he could hide from her, in the world and in her head—he’d demonstrated it for her one night, putting a finger in his mouth and blowing his cheeks out, he’d winked out of her head in an instant, and challenged her to find him. He said he would hide somewhere on the fourth floor. The effort exhausted him—she’d never have found him if he hadn’t been panting so loudly inside a hamper full of filthy linens in the PICU. He could do it, but she didn’t think he could do it for long, so she was searching worriedly. That morning she started again at the top of the hospital, meaning to search more thoroughly, and question at least one representative from every floor. Rob started in Radiology and was working his way up. Ethel Puffer started in the first lighted basement.
“I haven’t,” said Helena Dufresne, off the ward but still mostly bed-bound on the ninth floor. “But then, I try not to see him even when I see him.” She shuddered. “He gives me the willies! Right, Tir?” She turned and caught her son in a huge yawn. “Stop that!”
“Sorry, Mom,” he said. “I saw Pickie four days ago. He was sitting on my bed. I had to shoo him away. He’s not creepy. You shouldn’t say that. He’s just a little different.”
“Creepy different,” said his mother, shaking her head.
“One time he brought me a mango. Right out of the blue. I didn’t ask him for it, but I sure wanted one. Is that creepy?”
“I saw him cough up a hairball and then eat it up again. From off the floor. Is that creepy?”
“I used to eat my boogers, back before,” Tir said.
“That’s different,” said his mother. “You couldn’t help it.”
“It’s totally the same,” Tir said. “I must’ve eaten a pound.” He yawned again.
“I won’t tell you again,” said his mother.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’m not tired.” Fifteen years old a week before, Tir was one of the youngest kids still awake.
“When you saw him,” Jemma said, “did he seem… afraid?”
Tir shook his head. “That little fucker wasn’t afraid of anything.”
“Watch your fucking mouth,” said his mother.
“Sorry,” Tir said. His pager went off and he raised it to his ear to hear the message. “Got to go,” he said. “Frank is banging his head again.” The ninth floor had been reconverted to a psych ward—there was a subset of patients who were almost entirely unaffected in their bodies, but whose minds were rotted out with the botch. Frank was one of them. Jemma had been in the lobby when he started to beat Connie at her bar and was about to take him out when Arthur—still trailing her with Jude wherever she went—tranked him. Connie was still in relatively good health, and quite sane, though horribly sad all the time, and there was no mirth anymore at her bar.
“Would you like some tea?” Helena asked.
“I should keep looking,” Jemma said.
“Just stay a moment. It’s been a little while.”
“Maybe just a sip,” Jemma said, because Helena Dufresne was one of the few parents in the hospital not mistrustful of her.
“How are you?” she asked, when they’d sat down on a round bench under a window. “Are they still mistreating you down there?”
Jemma shrugged. “Worried,” she said.
“After you find your little f
riend you ought to come up and stay for a while, or for the duration. What’s down there for you except a bunch of fuckers who think you’re crazy? We can tell the difference up here—we’d treat you right, as long as you didn’t pull any shit, and mind you I don’t believe—none of us believe—half of what they say, the stories that go up and down and up again, out of the Council chamber and into the kitchen, into Tiller’s mouth and our of Snood’s ass. You may not be the Friend anymore but you were Her friend, and we have not forgotten that.”
“Thanks,” Jemma said, not sure what else to say.
“But how are you? You look about ready to pop.”
“The due date’s three weeks away. I guess it could come any day, though.”
“Who’s going to hold your hand? Who’s going to yell at the doctors to give you some space? Who’s going to put their shoe between your teeth, when the pains come?”
“Rob and I have a plan. Not too detailed—that’s bad luck.”
“Well, you just let me know. Just give a call, I’ll come advocating. Like, get the fuck away from her or I’ll smash your face! What’s in that needle, motherfucker! I haven’t forgotten the old days, you know. But why don’t you just stay here? We’ve got Dr. Sundae here now. Doesn’t she know how to bring out a baby?”
“She’s a pathologist. Ms. Fraggle—that’s Juan’s mom. She was a midwife in Bolivia, before. I’ve got her.”
“All the doctors are all the doctors now—you’re all the same. Don’t you get it? When are you going to come? We’re like our own little world up here. It’s not like other places.”
“I know,” Jemma said, though there were all sorts of little worlds scattered through this hospital—Vivian started a trend when she immigrated to the ninth floor. Every day they became a little more distinct, she thought, even as they died off. They sat for a while in silence, Helen smiling at her gently, Jemma trying not to notice the botch seeded in her liver—it was like trying not to notice spinach in the teeth or an open fly, and like ignoring a crying baby or a screaming amputee. Part of her wanted to douse the lady in flame again; part of her wanted to run away. She sat and finished her tea, a special blend that smelled like almonds but tasted like wet sticks. “Well,” she said, when she was done. “I had better keep looking.”
“I haven’t seen him,” said Monserrat. “But then, I have not been looking for him, and when he is there I try not to notice him, no matter how he makes himself obtrusive. He’s not usually a very helpful little boy. You ask him to get a sat or a temperature—both of these are well within his abilities, I know—and he draws you a picture of his brother, or brings you a steak and asks if he can watch you eat it. I’m sure he’s off playing some game.”
“I think something happened to him,” Jemma said. They were on the eighth floor, in Dr. Sashay’s old parlor, one of the few places in the hospital not entirely reconverted for clinical use. It had been the only dirty utility room in the hospital that had a window, small and oval, exactly like the one in Jemma’s room. The cabinets that used to hold hemoccult supplies and dirty potties had been replaced by display cases, full of curios: porcelain dolls and tribal fetishes—recreations from out of a larger collection Dr. Sashay had kept in her lost home. The big square toilet was a fountain now, the porcelain turned to dark stone, two jets of water rising up and down, taking turns being the taller of the pair. Monserrat had been using it as an office since she had delegated herself as an overseer to this floor, part of Dr. Snood’s initiative to make the Council into a more supportive entity for the hospital in crisis. Instead of just legislating from the fifth floor they would reach out to every ward, and be present there all day long. They wouldn’t have it on the ninth floor: Snood was so thoroughly ignored that he just left eventually, but everywhere else there was somebody acting like Monserrat, a liaison and a subtle overseer and a pal. The eighth floor was a place without any real oncologic issues anymore. They were given over to palliating the worst of the worst. People in whom the botch manifested as a particularly hideous affliction, for whom the experimental treatments would only be a torture, came there to experience the new morphine and super fentanyl and ultra-benzos.
“If I ever met a boy who could take care of himself,” Monserrat said, “it’s that one. I wouldn’t worry about him, if I were you. Isn’t there enough of other things, for worrying?”
“I try to just pick one thing and do a good job with it,” Jemma said, though in fact all her other worries had been subsumed by her concern over Pickie.
“That’s one way. I find I cannot do the ignoring. I have to worry about the depression of the nurses and who is getting sleepy now and whether Dr. Snood is being good to us. I know he is trying to be good but sometimes he gets like a proud little penguin and it makes me worry, and I ask myself, Is it time for the coup? I say it to him, Is it time for a coup, Mr. Napoleon? Is it time for me to take you down? I don’t think he believes that I could do it. I talk to Ishmael about it and he curses him but then he only has curses for anyone these days. He is always in a bad mood. It’s wrong, I think. A person should be sad and not angry, here. Sadness is the better thing.”
“He was afraid for a couple days before he disappeared, like he thought somebody was going to hurt him. He said the angel was out to get him, but he’s always been saying that, and the angel wouldn’t hurt anybody.”
“She is a tricky lady. I have come to understand that. But she wouldn’t hurt us, oh no. Where would we be without her? All dead, of course. All floating dead, or all at the bottom of the sea. Maybe you should come with me, next time I ask Snood. So he can be reminded of how it comes and goes. How you can be king of the cats and then just another stray dog.”
“We try to stay out of each other’s way,” Jemma said.
“This I can handle,” Monserrat said, indicating the ward outside with her hands. “The low blood pressure and the high blood pressure and the pain—all the pain. I am not a doctor but it’s easy to say, You are doing this wrong, do something different. I don’t say it like that, of course. I say Listen, listen to the moaning. What does it say to you? And then I am there with my own answers when they don’t have answers of their own. Knowing what to do for these poor ones is fine, but knowing what to do for all the poor ones is not. I ask myself, Is there something else we could be doing for us all? Not like Vivian was asking. I mean something more practical but not even that is easy. And we ask ourselves in the Council meetings, Is there something else we could be doing? And I never have an answer and we never have an answer.”
“I’ve seen the broadcasts.”
“It was better when you were there. But those were better times, too. Maybe it wasn’t you that made for it to be good. Maybe it was just to be good, then, like now it is to be bad. What do you think, though? Is there something else we should be doing?”
“Looking for Pickie Beecher,” Jemma said, and stood up to go.
“You let me know if you do not find him,” Monserrat said, standing also and putting a hand on Jemma’s arm. “It would be a bad thing. It would be the worse thing, if we really lost one of them. Even that one.”
“Gone?” said Father Jane. “Gone where?”
“Just gone,” Jemma said. “We can’t find him anywhere.”
“Well, he must be somewhere,” said John Grampus, who lay in his bed on the seventh floor, staring at her with heavy-lidded eyes, a PCA button in his hand. He was one of the few people to have an isolated case of the botch. It was only in his foot and calf, but had turned his flesh there black, and creeped a little higher every day until Dr. Walnut skillfully whacked off his leg just below the knee. There was a fancy bionic limb all ready for him—it was sitting on a table in his room—one of a series designed by Dr. Walnut and the angel for different citizens in whom the botch had manifested similarly—but the surgeon went to the PICU before he could attach it. Dr. Sasscock, not a surgeon but considered a surgical personality, and possessing himself a gleaming silver foot, was exploring the possibility of
a medical attachment, working on his drops, a solution of nanobots who would do a hundred thousand tiny surgeries and stitch nerves to wires and bone to steel, before he got sick, too. Jemma could have done it in a jiffy—she sat in her bed and imagined it—but she knew better than to try. Jordan Sasscock didn’t trust her any more than Dr. Snood did, and John Grampus had told her frankly, if apologetically, that he would rather hop out his remaining days than burn to death.
“Nowhere I can find him,” Jemma said.
“Maybe he’s just playing a game,” said Father Jane. “I think it’s how he deals with things, you know. When it gets too much for him he climbs a tree or eats dirt or hides. I think he tries to project all his worry. He makes us worry for him. It was just the anniversary of his brother’s death. Just last week he told me that. It must be a sad day for him.”
“He says that every month,” Jemma said.
“Nonetheless,” said Father Jane. “He came to me and asked me to play kwok, a game where you have to run all the way up the ramp with a fake possum on your head. That was just the preliminary—whoever got there last was it, and had to find the other person. Find me, he said, before he ran off to hide. Find me. I think he meant more than just find me. I was thinking to myself that he wanted to be found in a much more profound way, and I meant to have a conversation with him about how a person becomes found. It is not something you can do by yourself, Pickie, I was going to say. There has to be something else outside of you, doesn’t there, but it’s not me. I’m just an old woman. I’m not going to make it.”
“Don’t talk like that,” said John Grampus, closing his eyes and taking her hand.
“One minute you are just walking along, I would have told him, and then the next you are suspended in the gaze of the infinite. It looks in you and through you and part of its power is that it shows you just what it sees. You are under the eye and you become the eye, and you know who you are and what you will get, and you know where you are. I am tired already, Pickie, and it’s not the worst thing in the world, for an old lady with no complaints to be denied something she is too old even to understand. But you’re too young to be this sad and this strange. That’s what I would have said, and now you say he’s gone. I should have told him when I had the chance.”