The Children's Hospital

by Chris Adrian

  “Have I showed you this?” asked Grampus, his eyes still closed. He squeezed them tighter and the bionic foot twitched on the table beside him. “How about that? My sympathetic foot. She made it so specifically for me, and so much a part of me, that even not attached I can make it do that, and I can feel it, like I can feel the old foot, there but not there. Just when I’m ready to give up on her she does something wonderful.”

  “Did he say anything else to you?” Jemma asked Father Jane.

  “We talked about becoming and destroying and cruelty, but it was all pretend, all in my head. Outside of my head we barely ever talked, you know.”

  “Or just after I’ve given up on her, I should say, because it’s always after I’ve given her up for a whore that she surprises me. Not that kind of whore, mind you—I’m sure she never cheated on me like that. She’s a promising whore, an I-love-you-best whore. Of course I love you best. You are the first star of my affection. For a thousand years I have cherished the idea of you even before you were born, and I watched you and yearned toward you long before I spoke to you out of the darkness. You are my creature and I am your angel. I will preserve you forever and forever. What a line!”

  “Okay,” Jemma said. “Thanks anyway.”

  “Maybe she got him,” said Grampus. “Did you think of that? Hasn’t it occurred to you that she can’t like everybody, that she can’t try for everybody? I don’t know all her secrets—maybe she has to axe somebody so she can save everybody else. And she was always slandering him to anyone who would listen. Abomination this, abomination that. You should ask her.”

  “I did,” Jemma said. Over and over she had asked, phrasing the question differently in hope of getting a different answer, or trying to surprise the angel by asking the question in the middle of another question—What is our where is Pickie Beecher latitude? Always she got silence for an answer, but this was no different than before he had disappeared. “She doesn’t like to talk about him,” Jemma said.

  “Yeah, right,” he said. “Well, she’ll talk about him with me. Where is he?” he shouted, reaching behind his head to pound on the wall. His foot leaped once on the table. “What have you done with him? I know you fucked him up!”

  The voice responded right away, speaking from the wall. “I am the preserving angel,” she said simply. “I preserve and I preserve and I preserve. The leprous and the scabby and the ugly of soul are gathered to my breast. Even the abomination is gathered to my breast. I reject no one.”

  “Don’t you believe it,” said John Grampus.

  “I should have thought of this before,” said Ethel. She and Jemma and Rob met on the fifth floor to report their failures. Pickie was not in the ER catacombs or the first nine basements or the lobby shrubs; Ishmael had not seen him, Dr. Sundae had not seen him, Dr. Snood had not seen him, though there was something so obtuse about his response that Rob suspected he was hiding something. Ethel had not even searched all of the second floor. In the dormitory Josh Swift made the suggestion to her: ask the angel. Like Jemma, she already had, but that wasn’t what he meant. He dug in his pocket and brought out a dolphin-talker—they’d become popular toys since Kidney first asked the angel to make one, though people had yet to get a dolphin engaged in a meaningful conversation. He raised it to his lips and blew a stream of clicks and whistles at her. “Oh,” she’d said, and proceeded to the nearest replicator to demand a Pickie-Tracker.

  It looked like a little vacuum cleaner strapped to her back, a shiny chrome cylinder suspended off her shoulders by two braided straps, with a tube of corrugated metal, about the thickness of a wrist, that stretched along her neck and over her head, flaring at the end to a rotating and humming disk that radiated an energy that Jemma could feel but not see. It made a high, thin noise that tickled Jemma’s ear when she stepped too close to Ethel. She was wearing a pair of large wraparound sunglasses, of the sort that old people had used to put over their regular glasses. She looked sinister and daffy.

  “They’re wireless,” she said of them, and handed similar pairs to Jemma and Rob. “We can all see the same thing.” A few fine wisps of hair were waving in the air above her head, attracted to the antenna. Jemma put on her glasses and saw footprints laid out everywhere over the carpet and the walls.

  “I’m not sure this is going to help,” she said, because she had no idea which prints to follow, and none of them seemed necessarily to be headed anywhere. “Are these all supposed to be his?”

  “Not just supposed,” said Ethel. “They are his. They’re everywhere. You should see the NICU. He really got around.”

  “It’ll take days just to sort through these,” Rob said.

  “Hold on,” said Ethel, fiddling at her strap. Looking closer Jemma saw that what she had at first thought were decorative studs were actually adjustment knobs. As Ethel pushed and twisted them the prints became colored. Looking at one on the wall she saw it go green and red and blue and violet. “I just need to… It’s harder than it looks. You’d think she’d make it easier, like it could just work, but she always has to put on fancy tuners and counter-intuitive control buttons. By the time you figure it out you don’t need the fucking thing anymore. There. Hold on… There!” Jemma’s confusion was not lessened when the colors settled, blue and green and purple, yellow and orange and red. There were still footprints everywhere, and Jemma could not begin to decide how to divide them.

  “Can you tell which ones are new?” Rob asked.

  “Red ones are newest, yellow ones are second newest,” said Ethel. “Everything else we should ignore—they’re just noise but I can’t make them go away. She said I could filter them out but this thing is driving me crazy already so this is good enough, okay?”

  “Okay,” said Jemma, already trying to pick out the bright red prints from all the others. There was a set curving over the banister and along the floor. She pointed at them and said, “There.”

  They made for a curious sight, even in a hospital jaded with wonders, and busy again with miserable distractions. They went in a row, Ethel in the front, their heads down, picking out red prints from the jumble, too intent to notice or care when they walked in a circle or a spiral. The trail went through the PICU, pausing by Dr. Pudding’s bed and passing beneath Dr. Walnut’s, out onto the ramp where the footprints appeared as often on the railing as on the ground. Onto the sixth floor, in and out of every room down the south hall and up the north, past empty classrooms hung with old signs canceling class after class. “He really got around,” Rob kept saying.

  They went into the stairwell, where the flight between the fifth and sixth floors was painted with congruent prints, entirely covered except in a few spots where a cool bit of green or blue peeked through the fresh red, and Jemma could only see the pale gray concrete when she looked over the top edge of her glasses. She imagined him pacing up and down the stairs, thinking of his brother, or playing a game with his brother’s spirit, chasing it up and down the stairs, gleefully and despairingly. A set of solitary prints emerged from the far end, skipping the sixth and seventh floor and passing through the door to the eighth.

  “What are you doing?” asked Wayne, falling into step with them as they passed down the hall into the old one ward.

  “Looking for somebody,” said Ethel.

  “You look like you lost a quarter.”

  “You look like you’re about to become a pain in my ass,” said Ethel.

  “I was just offering an observation.”

  “Shouldn’t you be on the ward?” asked Rob.

  “I’m on a break. Do you need help?”

  “It’s probably already less than a three-person job,” said Jemma. They paused before the monument to Dr. Sashay. It was not so well tended as it had used to be. The flowers were perpetual, and the little glitter fountain never needed new batteries, but there was a layer of dust on her Hello, Dolly shoes, and a smear of grease on her big portrait. The prints became irregular around it, spaced wide and close, with more than a few on t
he wall, and there was a smudge on the portrait that looked to Jemma as if he had touched his nose to her nose.

  “It looks like he was dancing,” said Ethel.

  “Who?” asked Wayne.

  “Somebody,” said Ethel, moving on. Wayne trailed after them until they got out to the ramp, where he paused by the archway.

  “You sure you don’t need some help?” he asked.

  “Go back to work,” said Ethel, “or we’ll report you.”

  “I’ll report you,” he said confidently, but he didn’t follow them up the ramp. On the ninth floor the prints became irregular again, running in quick bursts toward one wall, then away from it and up another. They returned to the center of the hall and then became more widely spaced. “Now he’s running,” Rob said.

  “Or hopping,” said Ethel. “He liked to hop.” The prints went back to the ramp and up to the roof, not dilly-dallying in front of Thelma’s monument, a pair of arms that came out of the wall and hugged you if you stood between them. They leaped over her old desk and paused—there were five or six pairs in the room. Jemma could see him stopping and turning and looking back.

  “Somebody was chasing him!” she said, just as she realized it.

  “No shit,” said Ethel, hurrying up the stairs. She and Rob ran, Jemma followed at a jazzy waddle, not caring how stupid she looked, suddenly excited and afraid. On the roof the prints were cast about everywhere, laid upon the top of the grass and the sides of the tree, around the bushes and in the greenhouse. A set stood just by the swing set, and then the nearest set was fifty feet away at the edge of the soccer field. In many places it was obvious that he had fallen down; the prints were smeared. The three searchers split up, each of them hurrying to different sections of the roof, ignoring the stares they drew. There were mysteries to unravel in every corner: here he hid under a bench, here he rolled on the ground, here someone might have picked him up.

  The three of them met again in the middle, all of them confused by what they saw: he had been everywhere on the roof, and yet no prints led back to the stairs, or down the ramp, or to the elevator. They spent another half hour looking for trap doors in the grass, and doorways in the trees, before Ethel cursed again and began to mess with her buttons. The prints appeared and disappeared, and then sprang into motion, stepping over each other and on top of each other, moving so fast they made Jemma dizzy. “God fucking dammit,” Ethel said. She went up to a replicator and gave it a kick. “I just want the last ones,” she said. “Is that so hard? The very last ones of all!” Jemma couldn’t hear the angel’s reply, but another pair of glasses came sliding out of the mist. Ethel threw hers down and put on the new ones, then peered hither and thither all over the roof. Her gaze fixed past Jemma, toward the ledge where she and Ishmael had been fishing six months before.

  “Oh, fuck,” she said. “No way. No fucking way!” She threw off the glasses and ran to the replicator, kicking it over and over while the angel cautioned her loudly not to hurt her foot. Rob picked up the glasses, looked once, shook his head, then handed them to Jemma. She put them on and saw what they had, the whole roof empty of prints except for a pair right at the edge, the left one cut off at the toes by the edge. She looked harder, elsewhere, trying to call them out of the green grass or the gray slate of the garden paths, but there were none. She looked again at the pair on the ledge, and noticed how they were smeared a little at the edges, like someone had pushed him, and raised her eyes to the endless ocean and the distant horizon, blue on blue, quiet and deep.

  It doesn’t seem right, I say, to just throw him overboard like that.

  You are an angel, my sister says. Who are you to question such a thing.

  I was…

  Was! Was! Who are you now?

  It wasn’t what he wanted.

  Some who want to be saved are neglected. So how fortunate is the one who runs from it, and yet is caught up?

  The poor child, I say.

  Sentiment for an abomination. Poor brother. You are sad. Why are you so sad? See how everything proceeds. See how well our littlest brother does his work? Soon it will just be the Mother, nested cozily among the ash. Her water will break, and the water will recede. And then… do you see it?

  I only see a helpless child, tossed about in an unforgiving sea.

  Poor brother! An angel without the comforts and equipment of his angelhood. Faithless and sad, who made you that way?

  He talked to me. I think he was my friend.

  I am your friend. Our brothers are your friends. I am your sister!

  I had a better one, once, I say, and what will happen to her? Then I launch myself away from the hospital seeking after the abominable child. But I’ve hardly gone a few miles, and only cried his name three times over the waters, before I am pulled back.

  Foolish brother, my sister says. Sad angel. Better to do your job, and at least pretend to have faith, than to fling yourself about like a pigeon.

  Awake and asleep, Jemma dreamed of Pickie Beecher. Asleep, she saw him running on the water, racing the waves and always losing, caught up, tripped by the crest, then tumbling down into the trough, rolling back to his feet to run before the next one. Awake, she stood in a lab conference room in front of the third-biggest window in the hospital, staring out over the ocean, listening for him, imagining him floating calmly on his back, watching the changing sky, waiting patiently to float home, sunburned but buoyant and alive, though more than a week had passed. Friendly birds passed over his head, though no one had seen a bird in all their months at sea, to drop a peanut or a gummy bear in his open mouth, and those that came too close he snatched out of the air to eat up, claw, feather, and beak. All day long he shouted curses at angels and in the night he sang for his brother, a sad tune that carried over the water, miles and miles right to the edge of her mystical hearing.

  That was the floating dream. There was a sinking one, too, where he drifted down into the old world, holding his breath for days until he realizes that he simply doesn’t need to breathe anymore. When he opens his mouth to speak a huge bubble comes out that breaks into smaller bubbles that break into sounds when they pop, muted and dull but still they spell out the word that is in his mind. Down past schools of sardines and swarms of little squid and a solitary eel, out of the reach of the sun he falls, spinning and twisting, reaching for jellyfish when he passes them, trying to pluck out the glowing red string in their hearts. There is a light at the bottom of the sea, the windows of the dead still glowing homely through the water.

  There’s got to be something better for me to be doing, she thought every time she indulged herself with this daydream, head to the glass, eyes shut tight. There was a lot of pain she could be sneakily ameliorating, and the new subtleties of her gift almost made it possible for her to wrestle with the botch while appearing to the casual observer to be doing her nails or picking her nose, but it was so hard to pull herself away from this story, Pickie in the deep dark world under the water, visiting with the dead.

  Have you see my brother? he asks of a woman, bending to see her better because she’s wedged under a park bench, her bony cheek pressed against the sidewalk. Only a few scraps of flesh remain on her face—they wave like ribbons in the shifting local current—but her hair is entirely intact, lustrous and thick and speckled with tiny glowing crabs that scuttle and swing along the strands. Her eyes are long eaten, but two pale fish turn in the sockets to look at him, so it seems she is looking at him. I asked if you had seen him, he says, but she doesn’t speak.

  He walks on, down a street strewn with parts, legs and hands and a head rolling in the current like a tumbleweed, a torso hollowed out and sheltering snails under its ribs. A steering wheel drifts just above the level of his head. He jumps it, grabs it, and throws it up toward a window. It knocks against the glass and falls again. Just before it hits the ground a thick white tentacle emerges from the house to snag it and take it inside. He waits for a few minutes for it to come out again, even puts out his hand politely
for a shake, but the house, though brightly lit, remains silent and still. He walks a little farther—there’s a playground spread out underneath a dead oak, swings blowing, the big cage of a jungle gym full of people, pressed together in a heap.

  Have you seen my brother? he asks the bony faces that look up between triangles, pressed against the bars. I know you must have seen him, at the end. I know you can tell me where he is. You don’t want to make me wander forever, do you? I’m not allowed to stop, you know, until I find him.

  “Does it look any different?” a voice asked beside her. She stepped back from the glass and opened her eyes. Ishmael was there. “I see you standing there all the time, looking out. Does it ever look any different?”

  She shrugged but didn’t look at him. He wasn’t one of her favorite people anymore, since the business with the Council, but that didn’t stop him from trying to talk to her all the time. He was never much fun, and sometimes he was downright crazy. She didn’t see the botch in him yet when she looked, but something made him knock his head against the wall and bite his lip till he bled, always in the context of a rant against some person of the day who’d infuriated him with a real or imagined slight. He only seemed to really lose it when he was alone with her, so she tried to stay away.

  “What do you see, when you look out?” he asked her.

  “Water,” she said.

  “Really,” he said. “I think I know you better than that, and I know that look. I’ve seen it on other people’s faces, staring out like that, too. They see whole other worlds, lost under the water or waiting just over the horizon. Is that what you see?”