Children of the Night

by Dan Simmons

  “Well…” began the American man, licking his lips again and holding on to his calculator with both hands. “We didn’t mean…”

  His wife appeared to be on the verge of tears. “It’s just so hard to get visas for the sick children,” she said. Her accent sounded like Oklahoma or Texas.

  “Shut up!” shouted the taller of the guides. He was yelling at O’Rourke, not the couple. The guide took three fast steps forward and raised his fist as if he were going to hammer the priest into the floor.

  Kate watched as O’Rourke turned slowly and then moved very quickly, catching the guide’s raised arm at the wrist, and slowly lowering it. The guide shifted his left hand to grip O’Rourke’s wrist, but his arm continued downward. She could see the Romanian’s face growing redder as he struggled, could hear his heavy boots scraping the floor as he shifted for better leverage, but the captured wrist continued descending until O’Rourke held the arm and still-clenched fist immobile at the man’s side. The guide’s face had gone from red to something approaching purple; his entire body was shaking from the strain of attempting to break free. The priest’s face had never changed expression.

  The smaller guide reached into his jacket and came out with a switchblade. The blade flicked out and he took a step forward.

  The taller man snapped something even as the Romanian parents began shouting and the American wife began crying. O’Rourke released the first guide’s wrist and Kate saw the big man gasp and flex his fingers. He snarled something else and his shorter companion put away the knife and herded the confused Americans out of the apartment, the procession brushing past Kate in the doorway as if she didn’t exist. The children in the apartment were crying, as was the Gypsy woman. The father stood rubbing his stubbled cheek as if he had been slapped.

  “Îmi pare foarte rău,” O’Rourke said to the Gypsy couple, and Kate understood it as I’m very sorry. “Noapte bună,” he said, backing out of the apartment. Good night.

  The door slammed and he looked at Kate standing there.

  “Don’t you want to catch the Americans?” she said. “Get them to ride back to Bucharest with us?”

  “Why?”

  “They’ll just go somewhere else with those…those creeps. They’ll end up stealing another child out of its bed.”

  O’Rourke shook his head. “Not tonight, I don’t think. This sort of messed up the rhythm of their evening. I’ll call the Americans tomorrow at the Lido.”

  Kate glanced at the dark stairwell. “Aren’t you afraid that one or the other of those two thugs will be waiting for you?”

  She had the sense that the priest could not stop the smile of pure pleasure at the thought. She watched as he rubbed the smile away. “I don’t think so,” he said softly, with only a hint of regret audible. “They’ll be too busy herding their pigeons home, trying to calm them and set up another buying spree.”

  Kate shook her head and walked down the stairs with him, out of the building smelling of garlic and urine and hopelessness.

  Despite her exhaustion, they talked more on the ride back to Bucharest. The Dacia was an accumulation of gear rumbles, mechanical moans, and spring creakings, the air whistled in even through closed windows, but they raised their voices and talked.

  “I knew that most of the American couples ended up paying for healthy children,” said Kate. “I didn’t know that the shopping trips were this cynical.”

  O’Rourke nodded, his eyes still on the dark road. Piteşti was a receding wall of flame behind them. “You should see it when they take them to one of the poorer Gypsy villages,” he said softly. “It turns into an auction…a real riot.”

  “Do they concentrate on Gypsies then?” Kate heard the thickness of pure tiredness in her own voice. She found herself longing for a cigarette even though she had not smoked since she was a teenager.

  “Frequently. The people are poor enough, desperate enough, less willing to go to the authorities when bullied.”

  Kate looked sideways at the sparse lights in a village a kilometer or two from the highway. Road flares flickered alongside the frequent vehicles broken down in the weeds alongside the road. She had counted at least one disabled truck or car every kilometer or two during the ride west. “Do these born-again Americans ever adopt from the orphanages?”

  “Occasionally,” said the priest. “But you know the difficulties.”

  Kate nodded. “Half of the children are sick. Most of the rest are retarded or emotionally crippled. The American Embassy won’t allow the sick ones a visa.” She laughed and was shocked by the harshness of the sound, “What a fuck-up.”

  “Yes,” said O’Rourke.

  Suddenly Kate found herself telling the priest about the children she had been trying to help, the children who had died through lack of appropriate medical care, or lack of supplies, or lack of compassion and competence on the part of the Romanian hospital staff. She found herself telling him about the baby in the isolation ward in District Hospital One; the abandoned, nameless, helpless little boy who responded to transfusions but who soon began wasting away again from some immune-disorder that Kate could not isolate or diagnose with the primitive equipment available to her here.

  “It’s not AIDS,” she said. “Not simple anemia or hepatitis, not any of the blood-related immune disorders that I’m familiar with—not even the rare ones. I’m convinced that in the States, with the equipment and people I have at Boulder CDC, I could isolate it, find it, and fix it. But this child has no family and this country would never pay for his transfer to Stateside, or even allow a visa if I paid for it.” She rubbed harshly at her cheek. “He’s seven months old and he’s depending on me and he’s dying…and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.” She was amazed to find her cheek moist with tears. She turned her face farther from the priest.

  “Why don’t you adopt him?” O’Rourke said softly.

  She turned to stare at him in shock. He looked at her but said nothing more. Nor did she. They drove into darkened Bucharest in silence.

  Chapter Ten

  THE Romanians did not refer to their unnamed and unidentified male patients as John Doe. The abandoned seven-month-old in the isolation ward of District Hospital One was called—in the notes Lucian had translated for Kate—Unidentified Juvenile Patient #2613. Most abandoned children had notes in their file telling who the parents had been, or who had dropped them off at orphanages or hospitals, or at least where they had been discovered, but the file on Unidentified Juvenile Patient #2613 was empty of all such information.

  Kate had gone through those notes the night before after returning from Piteşti with Father O’Rourke. She had thanked him for the ride when getting out of the Dacia in front of her apartment after midnight. They had said nothing else about his suggestion—if it had been a suggestion. Kate still wondered if the priest might have been making a joke.

  But she had gone through her notes before collapsing onto her bed.

  Unidentified Juvenile Patient #2613 had been brought to Bucharest’s District Hospital One after doctors in a pediatric hospital in Tîrgovişte had failed to make a diagnosis of the boy’s obviously life-threatening condition. Symptoms included loss of weight, listlessness, vomiting, refusal to take formula, and some sort of immune-system disorder that made every cold or flu virus potentially deadly to the infant. Blood tests showed no hepatitis or other liver dysfunction, nor anemia, but the white cell count was far too low. Transfusions beginning when the baby was five months old had seemed to offer a miraculous recovery—for almost two weeks the boy had drunk from the bottle and put on weight, his reaction to a patch test had shown a positive immune-system response—but then the immune problem began again and the cycle started over. More recent transfusions had brought about shorter and shorter remissions. The Tîrgovişte hospital had transferred the child to Bucharest five weeks ago and Kate Neuman had spent most of that time just struggling to keep him alive.

  Now she entered the isolation ward. The fat nurse with
the harelip was standing at the infant’s cribside, feeding him; or rather, she was smoking a cigarette and staring the opposite direction while holding a bottle through the crib bars, pressing the nipple against the baby’s cheek. He was crying feebly and ignoring it.

  “Get out,” said Kate. She repeated it in Romanian. The nurse slid the bottle into the grimy pocket of her smock, gave Kate a malevolent smile, flicked ashes from her cigarette, and waddled out.

  Kate lifted the baby and looked around for the rocker she had requisitioned for the room. It was missing again. Kate sat on the cold radiator under the window and cradled the baby, rocking him softly. I’ll authorize the intravenous feeding at once, she thought. The last transfusion had offered remission for only five days.

  The tiny baby in her arms focused his eyes on her and quit crying. He was so small that he could have been seven weeks old rather than seven months. The flesh of his little hands and tiny feet was pink and almost translucent. His eyes were very large. He stared intently at Kate, as if awaiting an answer to an old question.

  Kate removed the bottle of formula she had heated before coming in and sought his small mouth with the nipple. He turned away, repeatedly refusing, but each time his gaze came back to her. Kate set the bottle on the window ledge and just rocked him. The baby’s eyes slowly closed and his rapid breathing slowed into sleep.

  She rocked him softly and hummed a lullabye her mother had sung to her.

  “Hush little baby don’t say a word.

  Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.

  And if that mockingbird won’t sing,

  Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring…”

  Suddenly Kate stopped and lifted the child’s face to hers. She smelled the infant scent of his skin, felt the infinite baby softness of what little dark hair he had. His breath was warm and fast against her cheek; she could hear the slight rasp and squeak when he inhaled.

  “Don’t worry, Joshua,” she whispered, still rocking him. “Don’t worry, little Joshua. I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you. I’m not going to let you go.”

  The next morning, after a sixteen-hour shift and only three hours’ sleep, Kate went to the proper Ministry building downtown to begin the endless paperwork for adoption.

  Lucian Forsea, her young friend and translator, met her on the steps of the hospital when she returned that afternoon. He came down the stairs with open arms, hugged her fiercely, kissed her firmly on the cheek, and stepped back. “It is true then?” he asked. “You are adopting the child in Isolation Three?”

  Kate could only stare. She had told no one at the hospital. She had told no one but the officials at the Ministry that morning. But she had seen this before in Bucharest: everyone seemed to know everything as soon as it happened. “It’s true,” she said.

  Lucian grinned and hugged her again.

  Kate had to smile. The Romanian medical student was in his mid-twenties, but she would never have taken him for either a Romanian or a med student. Today Lucian was wearing a Reyn Spooner Hawaiian shirt with huge, pink flowers on it, stone-washed Calvin Klein jeans, and Nike running shoes. His hair was well cut in a style just short of punk, and there was an expensive but not gaudy Rolex chronometer on his wrist. Lucian’s face was too tanned for any medical student, his eyes too clear and outgoing for any Romanian, and his English was smooth and idiomatic. Kate often thought that if she were fifteen years younger, even ten, that Lucian would hold a powerful attraction for her. As it was now, he was her one firm friend in this strange, sad land.

  “Great!” he said, still grinning at the news of her imminent parenthood. “If you and I marry, that way we have a child without all the work and waiting. I always said that Polaroid should get involved in the baby business.”

  Kate hit him on the chest with the heel of her hand. “Be quiet,” she said. “How were your finals?”

  “My finals are finally finalized,” said Lucian. He took her arm in his and started up the stairs. “Tell me your experience at the Ministry. Did they keep you waiting for hours?”

  “Of course.” They went through the tall door into the dim and echoing main hall of District Hospital One. Waiting patients-to-be lined the benches down the long corridor. Gurneys with sleeping or comatose patients sat ignored, like double-parked vehicles. The air smelled of ether and mingled medicines.

  “And once they had you fill out the papers, they kept you waiting hours more?” Lucian’s blue eyes looked at her with what might have been a combination of merriment and…what?…affection? Love? Kate shook the thought away.

  “Actually, no,” she said, stopping with the realization of it. “Once I filled out the forms, they were very efficient. I dealt with just one man. He said he would expedite everything and I realized now that he did. Strange, isn’t it?”

  Lucian made a funny face. Kate sometimes thought that the young man would make a better comedian than doctor, his wit was so quick and face so flexible. “Strange!” he cried. “It is unprecedented! Unheard of! An efficient bureaucrat in Bucharest…my God! The next thing you will be telling me is that there is a real patriot in the National Salvation Front!” Lucian had not lowered his voice, and two hospital administrators down the corridor turned to stare and scowl.

  “Seriously,” said Lucian, patting her hand. “What is this bureaucrat’s name? I, too, may need an efficient man someday.”

  Kate had met Lucian’s father, a well-known poet, intellectual, and critic of the regime; while, somewhat ironically, his mother was connected with the Nomenclature…the Party elite that could shop at Command stores and which always received special privileges. Bucharest had almost two and a half million inhabitants, and sometimes Kate thought that Lucian knew all of them personally. As connected as he was to the Nomenclature and a life of privilege, Lucian was openly contemptuous of both the Ceauşescu and post-Ceauşescu regimes.

  “The man’s name was Stancu, I think,” said Kate. “Yes, Stancu.”

  “Ahhh,” said Lucian, “like the novelist who died seventeen years ago. No wonder he is a good man. He has large socks to fill with a name like Stancu.”

  “Large shoes to fill,” Kate corrected absently. She was remembering just how efficient the bureaucrat had been, making calls, cutting through paperwork, assuring her that the child’s Romanian exit visa would be completed by eight-thirty the next morning. When she had brought up the ticklish subject of Joshua’s health—she thought of the infant only as Joshua now, although she was not sure why that name had occurred to her—Mr. Stancu had waved away the detail, saying that it might be a problem only with the American Embassy.

  “Shoes, yeah,” said Lucian, still teasing her. “But what kind of slob would wear black wing-tipped bureaucrat shoes without socks? He must fill novelist Stancu’s socks before he can fill his shoes. And speaking of socks…”

  They had taken the elevator to the third floor, gotten clean smocks and masks from the supply closet, and now Lucian was gesturing toward the oversized socks that hospital workers wore over their shoes in the isolation wards. “Just masks,” said Kate. Joshua’s white cell count had been moderately low in this morning’s charts.

  “Hi ho, Silver,” said Lucian, tying his mask in place.

  Kate shook her head. Lucian had told her that he had visited America once with his father. But that had been for only a few days. How would he know about the Lone Ranger?

  Lucian seemed to read her mind. She could see his cheeks crinkle into a grin under the mask. “Tapes of the old radio show,” he said. “I picked some up when I was in New York a few years ago.”

  “When you were a child,” said Kate. Whenever she began to find Lucian irresistible, she reminded herself that the boy had not been born when President Kennedy was assassinated…that he was only three years old when Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed. The fact made Kate feel very old indeed, although she herself had been just ten when the President had been killed and still in high school when Bobby had been shot.

>   Lucian shrugged. “OK, Gramma. Touché. Now are we going to look at your baby here or what?”

  Kate led the way inside, her heart suddenly frozen with the premonition that Joshua would be lying dead and cold in the crib.

  The baby was alive. He lay on his back and looked up at them with wide eyes, his little hands clenching and unclenching. Naked except for his bulky diaper, the flimsy blanket having been kicked off and not set back in place, Unidentified Juvenile Male Patient #2613—soon to be Joshua Arthur Neuman—looked a little like a bruised baby bird dropped prematurely out of its nest: distended belly, ribs sharp against pale, pink skin, tiny fingers flexing, and the obscenity of the tape and needle holding the clumsy umbilicus of the i.v.-drip in place.

  Kate moved to check the i.v. but Lucian was already doing it, adjusting the flow with a practiced hand.

  Kate leaned over the high crib rails and lowered her face to the infant’s, kissing him softly on the cheek. “A few more days, Little One.”

  The baby screwed up his face as if to cry, then sighed instead. His eyes shifted to Lucian’s face, now hanging over the crib.

  “Hey, kid,” said Lucian in a stage whisper, “it’s Neil Diamond time.” Lucian hummed a few bars of “Coming to America.”

  Kate had picked up the metal clipboard hanging on a nail at the foot of the crib and was frowning at the lab notes added since she had stopped by that morning before heading down to the Ministry. “Well, they finally got around to completing the extra blood analysis I asked for three weeks ago,” she said. “I would have done it myself if this goddamn place had a centrifuge or decent microscope.”

  “What did it show?” asked Lucian, using his finger to poke ribs and play with the baby’s belly button.

  “The same low T-cell count we’re finding now,” said Kate. “Also, it confirmed a critical shortage of adenosine deaminase.”

  Lucian suddenly stood at mock attention, closed his eyes, and spoke in a rapid clip, as if answering questions in his oral final exams. “Adenosine deaminase…a critical enzyme required to break down toxic by-products of normal metabolism…missing in such rare disorders as adenosine deaminase deficiency.” Lucian opened his eyes and when he spoke, his voice was serious, “I’m sorry, Kate. That’s not treatable, is it?”