The Children's Hospital

39

Animals presented themselves at the windows of the hospital: a giant eye appeared in one of the small round windows of radiology; three steel-blue makos paused on a journey to pace at a second floor window and watch Maggie clog with her class. Transported by her dancing, it took her a while to notice that the class had stopped moving and were staring at the sharks. She shrieked at them to pay attention and follow along, then shrieked again at the sharks for interrupting her class, and shooed them off by kicking a clog at the window. She was an expert clog-marksman, and could hurl them with enough force to strike someone unconscious, but the glass was unbreakable.

Vivian was tuning and retuning a student’s violin — the pegs on the replicated instruments were always slipping — when a bright red fish appeared at her window. Her three students jumped up from their chairs and pressed their hands and faces against the glass. The little fish just hovered there, moving its lips at them silently. Vivian walked closer to the window and put her hand out to touch the glass. Then to the delight of her students, the fish puffed up to ten times its original size. Vivian did not find it so charming as her students. She thought the fish was glaring at her, and thought it might have been offering a lesson about ambition in its puffed-up display.

Rob’s gymnastics class cried out, “Dolphins!” and pointed behind him, but he thought they were kidding. They were meeting in a new room on the sixth floor, and every time he turned around he only saw the horizon and the empty sky. But as soon as he went back to standing on his head the cry would come again. After missing them three times he just sat down in the middle of his kids and waited. “You all have got to learn to stop joshing the teacher,” Rob said finally. A wrestling match broke out spontaneously between Tir Dufresne and Jarvis, and Rob was just standing to go break it up when he saw the dolphins come leaping at the window, first one, and then a pair, then three at a time, then four, and then a procession of twos, leaping in rapid succession and inclining their eyes toward Rob and the children at the top of their arc. He plastered himself, like the kids, by pressing himself against the glass, and called out tenderly to his fellow mammals. “There must have been a hundred of them,” he told Jemma later.

Dr. Snood saw an electric ray outside of his room. Dr. Sundae felt eyes upon her as she dressed and turned around to see a bigeye tuna staring through her window. A horrific-looking sargassum fish bumped against Father Jane’s window as she was working on her latest sermon. She was so surprised, and so unsettled by the ugliness of the fish, that she fainted.

Jemma was lying in bed, overcome by a late resurgence of nausea, trying to formulate a lesson plan, when she heard the tapping at her window. She was as miserable as she’d been in weeks, more because of her class than because of her persistent vomiting. Vivian and Rob had no trouble formulating lesson plans and executing them, in holding their students’ attention and even demonstrating progress in their learning, after only two weeks of class. Two of Vivian’s students who before, under a harsh Suzuki master, had had only four months of pretend-play on cardboard violins, now were playing “Amazing Grace.” Rob’s class was doing cartwheels in a herd all around the padded playroom, in form that appeared perfect to Jemma’s jealous eye, with none of the Oompah-Loompah awkwardness of just a week before, and Jarvis had mastered the round-off and started on a back handspring — he could only dive backward into a well of foam and colored plastic balls, but any minute he would get that, too.

Jemma’s class had learned to stare at her with great intensity. She had taught them to narrow their eyes, and furrow their brows, and square their chins. They could stare patiently for five minutes at the flame of a scented candle. They could sing in unison the mysterious Om that Jemma, desperate and almost bored with her inability to teach them anything real, had them sing with her. “Become the noise,” she told them, wanting to claw at her cheeks for shame and fraud-feeling, “and let the fire come up from inside you.” Dr. Snood and the others would not release her from the imposed obligation to teach what she could do.

“There’s nothing to teach,” she told him. “It just is. There’s no how.”

“I don’t doubt a certain person thought the same about the calculus, Dr. Claflin.” Jemma hated it when people called it the calculus, and hated calculus, anyway.

“I do doubt it, Dr. Snood. If there were a formula, I’d copy it down and hand it out.”

“Did you expect it to be easy? I think that’s your problem, Dr. Claflin. I noticed it from the day you came on my service. You want things to be easy, but just because you can wave your hand at say, familial polyposis and send it packing, doesn’t mean everything will be easy.”

“I don’t want easy,” Jemma said. “I’m just tired of impossible.”

“Impossible? Jemma, Dr. Claflin, how can you stand there and complain to me of impossibility? Do you think Dr. Whipple found it easy to teach his procedure? I’m sure he wanted to say, Well, I just sort of fiddle with the pancreas, and tie some things off, and remove a lot of sausage, and it sort of happens, oh my! Easy is what you want, but it’s not what you’ll get, and as long as I have any say in it your welfare state of the soul will never pass here.” He was not in the Committee room, and so did not have his little gavel, but he slammed his fist into his palm.

It was stupid, she knew, and like her, to find this reason to be miserable amid all the blossoming optimism in the hospital, but still she settled down in bed and languished under the nausea, wondering if she had not invited it back. Then she heard the tapping at the window. Like the rest of the windows on the fourth floor, it was always about half in and half out of the water, sometimes more and sometimes less, because the buoyancy of the hospital was only relatively constant, something Rob had proved early with a series of marks on the glass. Jemma looked at the window and saw only the blue sky and the edge of the water, but the tapping came again.

She climbed up on a chair to look better, and almost fell back, and did make a little scream, little sibling to the scream she’d voiced for Ishmael. There was a claw tapping just at the edge of the glass, and as she watched a giant white crab scuttle up to cover the whole bottom half of the window. It was fat, and without a spot of color except a blush of pink in its chittering mouthparts, which worked furiously as it regarded her with two dull, globular black eyes. It moved its backfins to steady itself when it drifted down, and tapped again at the glass.

“Hello there,” Jemma said. The very word mouthparts was usually enough to make her feel sick, even when she wasn’t pregnant, and the sight of them always made her feel unclean. She’d always hated crabs, and never partaken in any of the childhood feasts because she could never be convinced they were not just big bugs. This was the ugliest, scariest crab she’d ever seen, but she put her hand against the window, and tapped its message back to it with her finger, because the sight of another living creature lifted her spirits. It didn’t occur to her until later that it might have been sizing her up as a meal, imagining her as carrion, or that it was tapping at the glass because it was trying to get her with its claw. As soon as it drifted away she rushed out to tell someone about it, her nausea forgotten. She found a hundred other stories.

No one could agree on what it meant, but everyone agreed it must mean something. As Dr. Sundae put it, “Only a fool would deny the significance of a leaping whale.” It was assumed, after weeks of staring into the empty sea, that all the animals had perished when the rain washed out the seas, though the angel stated, when questioned, that every low animal everywhere, on sea or land, had been “preserved.” Were the fish preserved at a deeper level of the ocean, and had the waters now receded to that level? Had they been sequestered in a bubble at some warm latitude, and released now because the time of the waters was almost over? What about the mammals? Kidney asked the angel for a dolphin — English translator and was supplied with a box on a string to fit over her mouth, and a plug for her ear. When the dolphins came again she hung out of a PICU window and asked them, Where have you been? Where are you going? Where is everyone else? in squeaks and clicks and whistles, then listened with her head cocked at the weird spray of sound that shot back. She shook her head and furrowed her brow. “They just keep laughing,” she said.