The Children's Hospital

36

“A little lower,” said Vivian. “I want the five-year-olds to see it, too.”

“But they’re not voting,” Jemma said. She was helping Vivian hang campaign posters, up and down the ramp, empty in the late evening, most everybody off at the movies or in one of the many Sunday-night meetings.

“So? They can talk. They can influence. Snood is ignoring everybody under sixteen.”

“Well,” said Jemma. “How about a clown nose, then?” She drew a circle with her finger around Vivian’s nose.

“Clowns suck ass,” was all Vivian said. Not all of her posters even had her picture on them, and on the two that did, her image was dwarfed by the text. She had three different posters, with three different slogans. One, blue letters on a red field, simply said: VIVIAN BENNETT: YOUR UNIVERSAL FRIEND. Between Universal and Friend her picture was set, four inches by four, a shot of her lovely face, looking friendly but not too friendly. It looked like a natural and spontaneous expression, but Jemma knew it was precisely calculated. At a poster party two nights before, Vivian had exhausted her with a catalog of expressions, trying them out on her before Rob took her picture. “How about this?” she’d say, and turn her lips up just a millimeter more. At first Jemma only pretended to notice a difference between expressions, but after a half hour of it she could actually see the difference the position of an eyebrow or the intensity of the stare could make. They’d chosen an expression they labeled a fusion of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Rogers, but it didn’t come out on film the way it looked in life. Vivian blamed Rob because he’d used a softening lens, hoping to make her look glamorous, not understanding that Vivian could look glamorous clothed only in pieces of toilet paper stuck randomly to her body, and that such devices were not necessary — indeed they were the only thing that could spoil her beauty. “Universal Friend,” she said to Rob when she fired him, “not Universal Whore.” In the final picture, which Jemma took herself, Vivian, overcorrecting for the luscious come-hitherness of the previous set, looked a bit stiff.

The other two posters all had longer text, one red on white, the other blue on green: VIVIAN BENNETT STILL WANTS TO KNOW WHY IT HAPPENED, and VIVIAN BENNETT: COME WITH ME INTO THE NEW WORLD. They put them in all the popular places, along the spiral ramp, in the cafeteria, in the playroom, on the walls of the lobby. And Vivian climbed up on the toy to attach three to a whirligig; they spun just slowly enough to read. She had some made into transparencies and attached them to the windows. She had miniatures made, of paper for the adults, and of gummy-stuff for the under-twelves. Her competitors quickly copied her. There was nothing she could do, and no one to complain to, except the angel, who listened impassively but gave everyone the same advantages.

The Committee had been working for months at its own destruction, but at just the pace Jemma expected, and just the pace she would have if someone had assigned her the task of destroying herself, when she hardly had time to sleep or eat or pee. No one seemed much offended by the oligarchy, though — Jemma, at least, was too tired and too depressed to give it a whole lot of thought, and even the half dozen or so surviving political agitators of the old world never did more than send memos to the Committee, and attend the sessions where they worked out the increasingly complex details of their transformation into an elected council. Every week the Committee reminded the population and itself that it must soon disband, and yet it never did.

By the day after Thing Two, when the hospital was deprived of its usual business, everyone suddenly knew it was time. After passing the motion that deplored, punished, and celebrated Jemma’s act of vigilantism, the Committee started its own doomsday clock — the body would dissolve in twenty-six days. To Jemma it hardly seemed long enough to properly decorate the hospital with posters, let alone to mount a campaign.

It had mostly escaped her attention, though, that people had been campaigning for weeks, even in advance of a decision regarding the form and power of the high office. Jemma had thought the people who were running — except Vivian, whose ambition she already suspected — were only being very friendly. Ishmael was garrulous and expansive — he’d never had much of a real job, and spent most of his time socializing with people with work to do. He seemed to be friends with everybody, except Vivian, since they’d broken up a week before, after Vivian discovered that he’d been cheating on her with an as yet untallied number of women and men. Dr. Snood spent an hour or two every day checking up on people, gauging the state of the hospital in a walking tour. He gave the impression, whenever he came by, of carrying out an inspection. Monserrat appeared to be just selling her tamales, as she always had, not gathering a constituency. Likewise Dr. Sundae was doing her usual business when she trudged from floor to floor, worsening everybody’s depression in personal encounters.

They all wanted to be the Universal Friend. “The grandest sort of pooh-bah,” Vivian said. The Friend would be a President in all but name, and would have been called one if the Committee, in a gesture toward the new, hadn’t wanted to call him something else. The Friend would be assisted by three others, each a little less than the one who came before, the First Friend, and the Second, and the Third. Then there was the Council, twelve in number, headed by a Secretary. All these were elected offices — thirty-five people all together were running for one of them. Once instated, the Executive and the Legislature would appoint together a Judiciary, a council of six, not that they’d needed any judges yet. It all seemed very traditional, to Jemma, but Vivian insisted it would be new and strange and wonderful.

“A little higher,” Vivian said after they’d proceeded about fifty yards up the ramp and Jemma stopped to hang an “into the new world” poster underneath one of Dr. Snood’s, which featured a huge picture of him behind his slogan, DON’T CHANGE HORSES IN THE MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN There was another small poster a few feet down the ramp. His all said the same thing: ISHMAEL: YOU KNOW ME.

“I know you all right,” said Vivian, looking at the poster. As the poster party wore on into the early morning, Vivian consumed vast amounts of a synthetic blue liquor while Jemma and Rob engaged in long, frustrating conversations with the replicator. Rob had occupied himself too much with making them for the competition: Jacob Snood: I’m Better Than You; and Ishmael: I’ll Fuck Anything.

Ishmael never came by their room anymore for Wednesday-night backgammon, and never came anymore in the morning to fetch Rob for a run on the roof.

“Father Jane is stealing my boyfriend,” Jemma said, more to distract Vivian from unpleasant ruminations than because it was necessarily true.

“Your fiancé.”

“My boyfriend.”

“She doesn’t like boys,” Vivian said, turning her gaze back to Dr. Snood.

“Not like that,” Jemma said. “Though that could just be an act — remember Veronica Kelly?” That was a false lesbian whom Vivian had exposed when they were sophomores.

“If she liked boys she’d be all over Grampus. If she was going to change her mind he’d know before Rob did.”

“Not like that, anyway. He talks about her all the time, and counts the hours to the next meeting, and all day it’s been defining the errand this and defining the errand that. He didn’t used to be so impressionable.”

“Good thing she’s not running for anything.”

“Not that what she said didn’t make sense. It was all very nice, and nicely articulated, and I was probably just imagining things but I swear I can hear it resonating in people, but there’s just something about her.”

“The macramé,” Vivian said.

“I don’t know. She’s just… hasty somehow.”

“Is Rob fucking Father Jane?” Vivian asked of the air.

“Not even in dreams,” came the reply from a speaker in the floor.

“There you go,” Vivian said. “You wouldn’t know a good thing if it bit you in the ass, anyway.”

“Are you talking to me?” Jemma asked.

“A little higher,” Vivian said, putting her hand on Jemma’s and pushing her poster up the wall until it covered Snood’s.

“Not that high,” said the angel.