The Children's Hospital

21

“Are you happy, my darling?” the angel asked.

“What kind of fucking question is that?” John Grampus replied. He was taking a walk through the hospital, an activity that was a little more than a daily routine for him. It was all he did, walk all day from floor to floor, up and down the spiraling ramp, a perennial visitor to children and families and staff. Now and then he helped out with something, fetching supplies or medications or babysitting or pinning a shrieking toddler for a blood draw, but almost five weeks later he had not settled into a job the way all the other laypeople had. Zini, the pruned-up nurse-manager with the air of a hard-ridden madam, had cornered him one day to scold him for neglecting his civic duty. She told him that everyone was pitching in, everybody was exhausting themselves, but she didn’t know what he was doing. And in reply he asked, “Who do you think put that hospital under your feet, you stupid fucking bitch?” They were standing in the middle of the ward, and when he shouted at her silence fell up and down the halls. He walked away, continuing his endless journey, and a schlumfy resident applauded him quietly as he left the ward.

“I want you to be happy,” the angel said. He was headed up the ramp, and she seemed to speak out of the flowers in the balcony boxes.

“Oh, please.”

“You are still the first in my heart.”

“I know you say that to everybody. And you don’t even have a heart. You’ve got a fifty-pound ceramic sphere full of super-cooled borocarbide.”

“If I do not have a heart, then what is it in me that aches for your unhappiness?”

“Super-cooled!” he said, turning to the planter and shouting at it. It was ridiculous, to feel like she had broken up with him, or to feel like their relationship had been ruined by all these other people — the one thousand one hundred and sixty-three others whom she tucked in night and day when they took their rest, whom she serenaded and fed and bathed, her invisible fingers shaping every drop of water as it sprayed and massaged the acres of tired flesh. She had spread herself out among them, and he had done the same thing, traveling all over the hospital with his story until it was told to every doctor and nurse and technician, to every deaf preemie and deaf, doddering grandma, to every toddler and teenager. It wasn’t their secret anymore; she wasn’t his angel anymore. For forty days she had not leaked from out of any black surface to embrace him, and she said that was no longer for her to do, but who knew where she was spreading her strange and wonderful enveloping pressures these days? She was in love with everybody.

He was just going to tell her how sick of her he was, when he was distracted by a sudden commotion. A naked child came running down the ramp. He saw her running through the bars of the balcony across the lobby, pursued by a fat nurse who was at least fifty yards behind her. “I’m going home!” the child was shouting. She was small and pale and so bowlegged that she seemed to waddle as she ran.

“Stop her!” the nurse called out to Grampus, who was the only person nearby on the ramp. So he stuck a foot out casually as the child passed and tripped her. She went flying, and landed in a tumbling heap. She lay there and cried, and he could hear the angel calling out comfort to her from the carpet.

“You fucking asshole,” the fat nurse said when she arrived. “You didn’t have to trip her. She has rickets. Her bones are fragile.”

“You said to stop her.”

“You didn’t have to trip her. This is a hospital. We don’t hurt kids here.”

“I know it’s a hospital,” he said, and hurried off, stepping carefully around the heaving, panting bulk of the nurse and reversing his course. He went down the ramp to the lobby, with his fingers in his ears and singing “la la la” to keep himself deaf to the angel. He sat on a bench under the toy, and kept his fingers in his ears, though he stopped singing. His thoughts were racing, as fleet as the crippled child, toward the past, but with a heave that made him feel like he was pulling a muscle in his brain, he stopped them, and did not think about his father, or his old lover, or all the rainy nights when the angel had comforted him when he quailed at his task.

“You are not happy,” the angel said. “How can I make you happy?” He plugged his fingers deeper into his ears, and started to sing “Danny Boy,” and shut his eyes when people started to stare at him. He’d gotten through three verses when he felt a hand on his leg, and nearly jumped off the bench, because he thought it was the angel, come to him again in a body made of tangible darkness. But it was Father Jane.

“John,” she said. “Are you all right?”