The Children's Hospital

50

“I do,” said Jemma. “And I will. Yes. Forever.” But did she, and would she, and could she, and really forever? She had made a lifelong habit of thinking better of her decisions after they were made; this one was no exception, though she fervently hoped that this time it wouldn’t be like before, when she would lie all day on the floor regretting the purchase of a couch, or like the night she slept with her first boyfriend, and had answered falsely when he asked, “Is it in?” because she realized, just before she answered, that an opportunity had settled on her, a chance to do it and not do it, to have a thing taken from her and then receive it back. He humped and gasped, and Jemma shouted with him as much from relief as from pleasure, because she knew how it always changed how you wanted something, once you had it, and when she made the decision again just an hour later, on the other side of the experience, it was not traumatic at all. Why couldn’t everything be like that?

She liked rehearsal dreams, the ones anxiety provoked — the richer the anxiety the richer was the dream, the more detailed the false, practice experience. She took her boards before she took them, and had watched the letters on the screen disassemble out of the question and into a statement: you are entering the wrong profession, honey; and she’d peered at a piece of diseased liver and seen it look more and more and more real, until it oozed and pressed out of the screen to fall softly on her keyboard and overwhelm her with its rotten, bloody smell. Before she took the exam for her driver’s license she’d driven with the instructor over the most incredible terrains, glaciers and moonscapes and lava flows and war zones, asking over and over of the tiny instructor with the forbidding hair bun, Are you sure we’re supposed to be here? But she only spoke back after she’d grown fangs and fastened them around Jemma’s throat, and then she only said, through a mouthful of blood, Keep your eyes on the road! She’d had a medical-school admission interview with a small, elderly radiologist whose two-foot erection stood out of his fly the whole time they talked; it tried to engage her in conversation, too, but she knew that if she paid it the slightest mind she’d never be admitted. And she’d spent days at dream-colleges, all-girls schools where every night a fraternity boy was lured onto the campus and slaughtered for a feast, and Jemma sat at a table next to a dean of students dressed only in waist-long black hair, a horn on her forehead, and two sharpened thimbles placed over her nipples, who told her, Go ahead and eat, my pretty-pretty. It won’t make you any more evil.

Or she could just imagine the consequences of her decision. Rehearsal dreams were rare, and life could be depended upon to provide only a limited number of false-insertions. She never dreamed of her wedding until after it was over, and Rob Dickens could not, after all, be convinced to have a preliminary, secret ceremony where they jumped over a broom and proclaimed their troth three times to each other, something so small and secret it could have been done away with a simple set of words, on second thought, or maybe it’s all a little hasty, or even just one word, nevermind. It was too late for that, he said, and she realized that a month before she could have bought him off with a kiss and a candy ring.

She imagined they were already married; it wasn’t very difficult. She didn’t think they would behave very differently, afterward. She put a piece of black tape around her finger and pretended it was a ring, and gave it an invisible, intangible weightiness. The days would go on and nothing would change. They’d rise every day from the tiny bed they shared, and check outside their little window on the unchanging state of the world. They’d go and teach their classes, Rob with better success every day, his students mastering every day another flip or twist until they could all just stay in the air flipping and spinning indefinitely, and Jemma every day teaching her kids some new sort of silliness in place of the power to undo sickness. Their child would be born and they would become a family, contented, but barred from true happiness until the waters should recede and they should all step out onto a green mountain.

It might be a little worse than that, or a lot better, or a lot worse. The room and the bed might seem smaller, now that she was officially tied to it. They might get bored with one another. With the ring to her eye, Rob Dickens might appear less beautiful than he had before, or than he actually was. She might grow resentful because she could not just up and smooch with any boy she liked — maybe there was someone better waiting for her, someone more perfectly matched, maybe they all had someone perfect waiting for them under the earth, who would rise up as soon as the hospital made a landing — she could see them, if she closed her eyes and looked, scores and scores of better halves, spared the weird journey to the new world, looking at their watches and their calendars and sighing impatiently. Thinking of this, she might start to hate the situation, just a little, not enough for anyone to really notice — and Rob, meanwhile, would be feeling all the same things — but it would be enough for her to allow Dr. Snood to paw at her in one of the linen closets, because she wanted to cheat and punish herself for cheating, and in subjecting herself to Dr. Snood’s thin hands she could do both things at the same time. She’d come back to the room reeking of his cologne, and Rob would come back with the sparklies from Dr. Tiller’s headdress sticking to his underwear, and they would lie next to each other and be disappointed in what they’d become, and both of them would look at her belly and smile a little because they would convince themselves that the baby would come and make the big difference, and make everything all right again.

Or she might put on the real ring, in the presence of Father Jane and John Grampus and the entire hospital population, and feel a different sort of change, an elation instead of a deflation. It might be marriage could facilitate a more perfect expression of their love, and represent, like people were talking about, a new and better beginning for the whole place. They might find that merely touching their rings together would send them both into a head-popping orgasm, and seen through the eye of the ring Rob Dickens might be so beautiful that looking at him would make her cry. They might look out the window every day at a sea that was a little lower, and notice something in themselves corresponding a little higher, a feeling of optimism and well-being that in the old world was only known in drug dreams. Every day they’d go to class, Rob teaching his children not just how to tumble but to fly, and Jemma one day drawing green fire out of every last pupil. Together they’d fix Pickie Beecher, and then get to work on more subtle kinds of wrongness, things that Jemma could not perceive yet, but they would learn to see them together.

Or she might put on the ring and understand immediately how it was a mistake to wear it, and yet know that no matter how she pulled at it, it would never come off, and if she should chop off her finger then she would only grow another one, and liquid gold would seep out of her skin and form itself again into a perfect and perfectly awful circle. Rob would get it, too — the feeling like the stony feeling. They would lie next to each other with stones in their bellies, trying not to touch. Everyone else in the hospital would know it and feel it also: a great mistake had been committed. It would sap everyone’s enthusiasm, and efforts to remake and improve the world would dwindle — what’s the use anymore, they would all ask themselves, it’s all already been ruined by this ill-advised marriage. The child would ripen and emerge and weep for its parents and when it could talk the first thing it would ask would be, Why did you do it? Every night her brother’s ghost would come shake a chain of bones over her head and say, I fucking told you, and every morning they would wake up to a sea a little higher than the day before, not sure who this other person was in their bed, and not understanding why they hated that person so much.

“Do you take her as husband and wife,” Father Jane and John Grampus were saying, “and will you be husband and wife to her, and love her with perfect love, and work every day and night to make and redeem the new world, and will you do all these things, in life and beyond death, forever?” Jemma had been looking at the sharp corner of Rob’s collar, but he took her chin in his hand and lifted her face until their eyes met. His expression was so earnest that she read it immediately: he was saying, Don’t go anywhere. She tried not to, but in the silence before he spoke she found herself becoming aware of the whole hospital, the hundreds of people gathered in the lobby and ringing the balconies all the way to the ninth floor, details of their party outfits flashing through her mind. Even with her eyes open she could see the little hands of children in their flower bags, rubbing petals between their thumbs and fingers, eager to cast them down as soon as Rob made his answer and the priest and prophet made them married. In half a second she rose up through all nine floors and out the roof to meet her brother. He rose from the sea, a blue-green giant made of water and seaweed and bits of the drowned old world, and raised up a fist made of white, crushing water over her and the hospital and her constituents and the man who would become her husband in a matter of seconds. Rage poured out of his mouth, wind and water and thunder, and his fist came down, knocking her back to the lobby floor and crashing through the roof, becoming as it drove down a sharp edge of water that cleaved the hospital in two and split the ground between her and Rob. Amid the screaming and moaning and the wash of bloody foam, among the swirling children and parts of children Jemma could still see Rob. He was just a pair of disembodied, earnest blue eyes, but they fixed her in place, and seemed to glow, and the light they shed picked out the pieces of his body hidden by her fantasy of doom, until the waters were driven back. He smiled a little, and nodded, and spoke his answer.

Jemma wondered if she was the only sober person at the reception. Unprecedented amounts of booze had been replicated for the party, some never before tasted on the earth, and the Council, which put forth an official line that alcohol should not be replicated within the hospital except at Connie’s new bar in the old emergency room, where she could, at her discretion, require you to undergo immediate detox with a shot of a blue liquid that looked and tasted just like the solution barbers had used to sterilize their combs and scissors. But the prohibition, which had been stated anyway in the mildest language, and was always largely ignored, was relaxed even further for the party. People hovered around the ice sculpture, four leaping dolphins who poured champagne out of their mouths, dipping and re-dipping, or received drinks from whichever temporary bartender happened to be behind a table. There were no servants, except, as the Council had declared, that they each were the servant of the other. So you received your whiskey skidoo or your green envy or your Rob ’n’ Jemma from someone dressed up as fancy as you, and maybe even from Rob or from Jemma, who, though it was (and yet was expressly not) their day, were not excused from the fifteen-minute rounds of duty.

People talked about the wedding, and called it a wedding, or the wedding to end all weddings, but it was not supposed to be a wedding, and that was the one thing people were not supposed to call it. At first it was supposed to be a wedding, a very wonderful one, and then it was supposed to be a wedding and something more, but as the Council examined the old order, and reflected on the institutions of the old world, it was decided that a modification was in order. It would be something new, something never before seen on the earth, a ceremony that would as much officially and visibly mark the whole community’s commitment to making a new beginning as it would bind two lovers together for life. This was all fine with Jemma: to be married without having a wedding seemed better in line with her previous commitments and obsessions. She signed off on all sorts of innovations, and added a few of her own. For instance, it was Jemma who declared that no one would be with the bride or with the groom. “Away with that tired old distinction,” she said, and let everybody be simply of the wedding. Except they could not be of the wedding, because this was not a wedding. The official name for it was “the ceremony,” but many people, neo-traditionalists, simply called it, like the other major events that had befallen them, a Thing, and when someone used that word you had to figure out by context if they meant Thing One, Thing Two, Thing Three, or just some ordinary thing.

As the wedding was more and better than a wedding, so the reception was more and better than an ordinary party. But we can call it a reception, Jemma had asked, in a meeting.

“Yes,” said Dr. Snood. “Why wouldn’t we?”

“If the wedding is not a wedding, then doesn’t it follow that the reception is not a reception?”

“But it is. It’s still a party following a big event. It’s the event that is different, not the party, or the idea of the party. But the idea of the event is quite different.”

“So it’s just a party,” Jemma said.

“Oh, it’s more than just a party.”

“But it’s still a reception? And we will all call it a reception and be satisfied with that?”

“Correct.” All this was clarified in subsection sixteen of section four of paragraph twelve of a document called On the New Ceremony. It was a thick piece of work, detailing the number of hors d’oeuvre that could be on any given serving plate, the gallons of champagne that would spew per hour from the mouths of the dolphins, the depth of the mousse trough, and the temperatures of the various roasts. It told how many and what sort of fireworks would be let off, and contained twenty pages of seating charts alone. It did not specify levels of required or permitted drunkenness for the guests and celebrants, but Jemma imagined that it did, as she walked about on the roof nodding at people and shaking their hands and engaging in brief drunken conversation with them. She and her brother had tried to come up with a better system of classification, one, two, and three sheets to the wind not being sufficiently subtle to describe the states and degrees of intoxication that their parents regularly achieved. They settled on a blotto scale, one through ten, though Calvin had a change of heart, insisting that there must exist gradations far beyond what they could measure, and he called to expand the scale from pico-blotto at the small end to mega-blotto on the big. They postulated the existence of a mean, a person, they called him Cousin Otto, who was kept in a vault in Stockholm in a carefully controlled steady state of drunkenness, exactly five point zero zero zero zero blotto, against whose perfect drunk all the drunkenness in the world was measured. Every morning a team of scientists would test his coordination and speech and ability to maintain an erection and calibrate him with nips of booze as pure as science could produce.

There were mostly fives and ones about that night. Jemma made her rounds, at first arm in arm with Rob, and then by herself after he got swept away to dance or do flips, and did her time carrying a tray of bacon-wrapped asparagus and serving drinks at the bar, and noticed that most people approximated Cousin Otto, very friendly and somewhat stumbly, slurring only when excitement drove them to speak too fast. Most of the children managed a one without drinking anything at all. The twelve-and-unders were all flushed and sweaty and had their weak little inhibitions undone by the festive atmosphere. Among the older kids there were a few zeroes, some fives, and a number of sevens. Cindy Flemm, an eight, leaned heavily on her Wayne, looking like a five a.m. prom queen, insulting people, apologizing immediately, and inaugurating new friendships with them. Rob was a three or a four; Vivian was a six. There were only two tens, Drs. Sundae and Snood, and only one who fell off the scale. That was Ishmael, who for the last half of the party sat at a table and ranted at anyone who would come within ten feet of him.

“We can dig down deep,” he was saying as Jemma sat down at his table with a virgin Rob ’n’ Jemma in one hand and a plate of miniature quiches — no two were alike — in the other. “Deep under the drowned earth, or deep into Hell, or we could climb up above the clouds, or inside a mountain, or even just sit down underneath all the water in a sea of kelp, or you could hide in the trunk of a Volkswagen in the middle of a thick jungle of kelp. He would still send His snake to bite you on the ass.”

“What is he talking about?” Jemma whispered to Jordan Sasscock.

“I have no idea,” he whispered back. “A little while ago he was talking about a movie he was going to have made, and then he started to get mad about something.”

“Ah,” he said, squinting at her. “It’s the Bird! Bird of Frankenstein! Bird of Moron! Tell, me, little bridle, do you think you are safe here?”

“Well…” Jemma said.

“Shush! Did you think I actually wanted to hear you talking? No, I was just being polite. But enough of that. There’s no time left for that. You are not safe. I am not safe. Nobody is safe from destruction. And sudden, for that matter. And unexpected. Sudden, unexpected destruction. It could happen like that.” He tried to snap his fingers but his fingers were greasy from the buttery quiches, and the fingers only slid off one another without making any noise. He tried it again, flailing his arm and knocking over his drink. “As easy as that, anyway,” he said, looking around the table. There was an abandoned drink at the seat to his left, which he raked toward himself. “It’s easy for Him to do it, to yank the carpet or draw back the plank. It’s not just that He can do it, but that He can do it so easily.”

“Ishmael,” Jemma asked. “What are you talking about?”

“If you don’t know,” he said. “Then it’s too late to ask. I’m tired of you, anyway. Aren’t you tired of her?” He looked around at the other people at the table, Dr. Tiller and Dr. Sasscock and Dr. Sundae and Frank and Connie, and asked it again. “Aren’t you all tired of her? Bridey this and bridey that and let’s make a wedding dress and oh are you going to enter the contest to design a pillow for their mint?”

“Do you want to take a nap?” Jemma asked him. The music paused, and the first of the fireworks went off. Ishmael cringed away from them, but everyone else at the table turned to the sky to see the bursting fire flowers, not just peonies but roses and lilies and tulips and orchids on long curving stems. A rocket trailed bright green fire that hung for a whole minute in the sky, arcing up and then starting down, finally bursting into white flares that seemed to fold themselves out, revealing insides that were pink and orange and red.

“It’s what everyone is doing, isn’t it? Napping, sleeping, dreaming, dancing, feasting, drinking. Of all these drinking is the best. It says yes to the truth, and lets you understand how angry He is. I think He is angrier with the people out on that dance floor than He is with the bones under the water. You are all still boundlessly, furiously corrupt.”

“And what are you?” asked Dr. Tiller, seated across from Jemma. “Pure chopped liver? White tuna in virgin olive oil?”

“I am… very drunk,” he said, and laughed. He reached out, very swift and very sure for someone so drunk, and plucked Dr. Tiller’s Rob ’n’ Jemma from her hand, then drank it all down in one gulp. Jemma sipped at hers. It tasted kind of like shampoo, and she wondered of she weren’t missing the best part of the experience, without the alcohol. It was the most popular drink at the party, and the most stupefying, designed by Connie and the angel so that just one of them was enough to knock you on your ass. “I am… sad and angry. Why is my spirit so sad and angry? I look back at my life and all I can remember is rage and rage and rage. What are you, anyway, Ms. Fancy-Ass Do-Rag Sourpuss?”

“I am Dr. Carmen Octavia Tiller,” she said, tilting her head back and looking him right in the eye. “How many lives have you saved?” Ishmael laughed again.

“Creature! You think you will escape the water, just because you’re dry now? The bottom could drop out of this place at any moment, and then nothing would keep you from being dragged down by your own corruption. You say, I have taken pains, I have made amends, I am being careful, but you haven’t, and you haven’t, and you aren’t.”

“Hear hear,” said Dr. Sundae, staring up at the empty sky, waiting for the rest of the show.

“Now you’re putting words in my mouth,” said Dr. Tiller.

“I had better do it, since all you put in your own is shit and worse than shit.” He knocked his head once against the table, making all the plates and glasses jump.

“Hey,” Jemma said. “Take it easy.”

“There is no more ease, and has been no more since the rain came, and yet everyone cries, Ease and pleasure and good work and celebration. But no matter what you do all that keeps you from the water is the uncovenanted, unobliged hospital of an incensed God.” He stood and leaned over the table and nabbed Jemma’s drink, but had hardly taken it all into his mouth before he spit it out again. “That’s useless,” he said, pushing himself upright off the table, wobbling in place while he looked around for the nearest bar table. Another flight of rockets went up, animals this time, a parade of leaping fish and dolphins, a serene blue whale that hung hugely in the sky for a moment and then gave a languid swish of its tail and dissolved from its head down, so it appeared to be swimming off into a different, hidden sky. There were jellyfish with rocket-streamer tentacles and bright, magnesium-flare bodies, and a host of land animals that galloped or trotted or slithered across the stars. Ishmael came back with a drink in either hand, one of them already empty, just as the finale exploded above them. “You shat all over the old covenant,” he shouted, “and there will be no more covenants, and the new uncovenant will not be with you!” No one but Jemma was listening, though. They were all looking up at the four rockets that burst in turn into blue sea, green land, silver mountain, and white cloud, the whole picture seeming to take up the whole quarter of sky toward which the animals had all been swimming or running or slithering. The music started again. Ishmael took off his shirt and stumbled out toward the dance floor, where he knocked Josh aside with a blow from his hip and swayed and stomped with Cindy Flemm, both of them doing an awkward-looking honky jive that mostly involved pointing around in various directions. A herd of pre-teens, hopping alternately from foot to foot, broke and ran when they came near.

Jemma never told him “I think you’ve had enough,” though it was obvious that he had already achieved the drunk of a lifetime, and she never warned him to look out for the cake, though she was sure he would fall into it at some point, because there was something about drunks and cakes and punch bowls and Christmas trees, an attraction as certain and powerful as gravity that dictated they must meet once a certain level of drunkenness was established. Many nights she had watched as her mother approached the ten blotto threshold and was drawn inevitably to sway and lean toward her shelves of precious porcelain figurines, the ones she’d been collecting for decades. And when she finally did fall into them one night when Jemma was sixteen it was as satisfying as a celestial event. By the time Ishmael fell into the cake he had taken off all his clothes except for one stubbornly clinging shoe and sock. Jemma was still sitting, leaning forward with both elbows on the table. She had a good view of him and the small crowd of assistants he’d drawn to himself, people trying to get him dressed again or take away his drinks. He was too big for anyone to make him do something he didn’t want to do. The shoe only thwarted him because he had triple knotted it at some point.

The cake was as tall as he was. Nine tiers, it looked a little like the hospital itself, and was decorated with a fine marzipan lace and hundreds of little figurines. It was a not-wedding cake for a not-wedding. Instead of Rob and Jemma standing on the top, everyone in the hospital had a little representative planted in the frosting. Ishmael had gone after the cake knife, to cut his shoelaces, and had scared away his assistants when he brandished it. There was no one nearby to catch him when he fell after finally extricating himself from the shoe. It went flying forward as he went falling back, passing within feet of Jemma’s head. “How can you rest for one moment in this condition?” he was shouting, before he tipped. Being in the cake seemed to calm him. He just lay there while the music stopped again and word of the disaster spread across the roof and down the ramp into the hospital. People stopped dancing and talking and drinking and eating; children stopped chasing each other or throwing food, and ring after ring gathered around the former cake to look at him. Jemma got up and went to it, too. The crowd parted for her, people thinking that she must be terribly upset to see her cake destroyed, but she didn’t much care about the cake. It could be replaced in an instant.

Rob came through on the other side of the crowd just as Jemma got close enough to wade through some smaller pieces. Rob and Dr. Sasscock helped Ishmael stand up. He was clothed in cake, a big lump of it clinging modestly to his crotch, and two spongy yellow epaulettes at either shoulder. Little people were stuck everywhere on his back and his legs and his chest. He was weeping now.

“Okay, buddy,” Rob said. “Time to get you home.”

Ishmael leaned on him, turning away from Dr. Sasscock and pressing his face into Rob’s shoulder. “I’m so lonely,” he said as he was led away.

The party was more subdued, but not unfestive, after Ishmael was led away. Another cake was brought out after the other one was cleared away by a volunteer crew who threw it by the shovel full into the sea, and those brave enough to taste the old cake from shovel or shoe declared that the new one was even better than the first. Jemma did her duties: the cutting of the cake, the scheduled dances with Rob, and the solemn little mini-ceremony where she tossed her bouquet into the water, in memory of all the dead, instead of flinging it to the ravenous maidens, but she didn’t have much fun after Ishmael fell in the cake. His rage had depressed her. She had tried all her life to believe that drunkenness hid or perverted the truth, and that the real you was not the one that fell into things or spat poison at people you loved or threw glass at your children, and though she did mostly believe that, there was still a part of her that did not, and it made her sad to think that big, gentle Ishmael, with the innocent, unknown past, might deep down be a rageful, depressed hater.

The cake was consumed, the music played, a few more rockets, private creations that were made by kids without the sanction of the official wedding planners, were launched from the stern. Jemma stayed at her table when she wasn’t doing a duty. With her feet up and her back supported and the band having yielded the little stage to the resident string quartet, she got a little sleepy, and when the wind blew her veil over her head to fall across her face, she didn’t move it. Hearing the music and the lick of the torches and the faint noise of the water, she imagined that she was at a beach wedding, somewhere, and that she was just a guest, and wondered if it hadn’t been in terribly poor taste, to come to someone else’s wedding in a wedding gown, when Rob lifted her veil and kissed her.

“Party’s over,” he said. His jacket was mottled with cake stains, and his hair was stiff in places with icing. She reached out and brushed her hand through it. Past him she could see people still dancing and drinking. A section of tables had been cleared away to make room for a soccer game, organized by Jarvis.

“Can we leave now?” she asked him. He straightened up and offered her his arm, and they proceeded to their wedding buggy. It was just a fancy wooden cart, built to roll down the ramp like an oversized pinewood-derby racer, but much slower. Pickie Beecher had begged for and received the job of coachman. He looked the part, in his old-fashioned suit, a tall faux-beaver hat on his bald head. People threw flower petals and glitter as they climbed in, and as they rode slowly down the ramp, Pickie carefully steering around people and tables and the odd photographer who jumped into their path to take a picture. Jemma waved and smiled, caught glitter and petals and threw them back. “I’m so tired!” she called out.

On the fourth floor they got out and walked the rest of the way to the call room. Jemma had quashed a movement to install them in a suite, and was glad now that she had, because this was almost like coming home, enough like it to be nice, and enough unlike it to be bearable. Rob opened the door and they held hands as they jumped through sideways — Jemma had not wished to be carried in. “How tired is tired?” Rob asked her.

“Not that tired,” she said. She liked undressing him out of fancy clothes, how smoothly the jacket slid back from his shoulders, how the bow tie came undone with one pull, how she had to reach around his back to undo the cummerbund. His shoes popped off with hardly any effort, and she could pull off the silk socks just by pinching them at the toe and drawing back her arm. His pants fell in a pool at his feet once she unbuttoned them, unzipped his fly, and pushed back his suspenders. She pulled his undershirt off his head and undid the buttons on his fancy underwear, only having to push a little to make them fall on top of the pants. She took his hands and pulled him forward; in two steps he was free of everything. Still in her whole outfit, she put her arms around his waist and her face in his shoulder. He smelled of cake.

Jemma had been thinking about this night, and considering different ways to make it special, had almost asked the angel to make them a pill that would make them forget they had ever had sex before, so they would approach each other as if for the first time. But she worried about the baby, and the whole thing seemed like something only the very bored and desperate would do. She didn’t even mention it to Rob. There was something very nice about it, though, even without any special additions or considerations. When they knocked their wedding bands together it was oddly sensual, after all, and their mutual fatigue led to a new thing. He stretched out behind her, and they held their hands together above their heads, and moved less and less until they had both fallen asleep. Then Jemma dreamed of the evening that had just passed, and saw again the march down the ramp from the second floor, and the various choirs performing, and the tumblers, and the speeches, some dull, some not, given by various citizens and Council members. She saw Father Jane and John Grampus pronounce them wife and wife and husband and husband, and friend and friend, and family all together. But all these things were flavored and interrupted by furious little bouts of sex. No one seemed to mind it. No one looked away when they took a break during the vows for a few urgent thrusts. In fact Father Jane leaned over and whispered to Rob that he ought to bite her ear, teaching him by example how to muffle his teeth with his lips.

The long procession up the ramp to the roof was punctuated with thrusts delivered and received in every conceivable position, a few requiring support from bystanders. Upstairs it continued through the first, second, and third toasts. They did it while they danced, breaking apart to spin all the way across the dance floor, bowing to each other from afar, and then rushing back together for more mad coupling in the middle of a clapping circle of guests. They did it under the fireworks, and by the cake, and in the cake, Ishmael in the dream being entirely sober. He watched them from the same table from which Jemma had watched him.

In the cake, amid the odor of cake, they finished together, and the new thing was not a dream of sex after sex — Jemma had had those before — but when they woke together, crying out together, and discovered that the dream had been made real. In the dream your cry turns to a long stream of cake that flies from your mouth and spells words — oh! oh! oh! — in the air, and you feel the whole hospital trembling underneath you, and all the little cake people feel it, too, and roll on the ground in an agony of pleasure until they melt. Then you feel Rob pressing his chest into your back, and he squeezes you with an arm thrown just north of the swell in your belly, and you feel his panting breath against your shoulder, and his nose scraping across your wet neck. You lie there a moment more, both fully awake now, and then you scramble away from him, and sit up as he scrambles away from you, falling half out of the bed. You look at him in the dim light. He wipes his nose and sniffs, blue eyes still wide with surprise, and somehow it seems not unusual at all to have shared a dream with this person, and even the content of the dream seems usual — of course everyone does a little poking all through the wedding ceremony, everybody except for the terribly backward Amish and the grimmest of Orthodox Jews, and what is a wedding cake for except to fuck in? Every groom stands behind his bride in the wedding buggy, thrusting his hips and cracking a horsewhip in the air, but does anyone, has anyone before, and will anyone ever again, wake in the middle of their wedding night and look at their new husband and be so utterly astonished by love?