The Children's Hospital

63

It was called the botch, and a person was said to be stricken with it or not. Almost everybody acknowledged that it was a curse from God, but speculation abounded on whether there was not some natural and therefore treatable mediating agent — a virus or bacterium or toxin. Nothing was growing in the microbiology cultures, and blood and tissue samples taken from the victims — there were five of them now in the PICU — showed a haphazard and inconsistent range of anomalies. Dr. Sundae retreated deeper into her lab, where she and a variety of MD/PhDs were busy trying to isolate a causative agent, while the strictly clinical types were trying to write a predictive natural history. Rob was one of the latter. Jemma spent almost all her free time with him and the victims in the PICU.

She tried not to take as an affront all the hullabaloo over finding the virus — if there was a virus, wouldn’t she know, and wouldn’t Maggie have sprung back from death in as spritely a manner as any of the children? — and tried not to take personally the rumors that came back to her, that people were wondering if she weren’t just temporarily off her game, if she retained only the flashiness but not the substance of her gift, or if she hadn’t just let Maggie die because she hated her. “Everybody sure hated her,” said Karen, in marked display of poor taste at the memorial service held the day after she died. “Everybody hated her a lot. Sometimes I think she wanted people to hate her. That almost makes it okay, doesn’t it, if you hate somebody that kind of likes it, or at least expects it? I sure hated her, and I was one of her good friends.”

“I didn’t hate her,” Jemma said to Rob, both of them staring resolutely at the line of children dancing in somber black clogs in front of the square golden box that was Maggie’s coffin. They were supposed to be clogging joyfully, but some of them were clumsy with grief, and so their dance seemed hesitant and sad. “The kids liked her,” Jemma added. When the children were done dancing, and Father Jane had spoken, and they had all sung “A Clog and a Smile,” people drifted off back to their classes or their private worrying. To the accompaniment of a single flute (Dr. Tiller playing a tarantella), Maggie’s dry, black corpse, mostly ash except for a little doll-sized remainder, a bit of spine and lung and liver and bowel, that echoed her former, larger shape, was trundled off by a quartet of volunteers, to be sealed in the first basement, because nobody could bear to add another body to the ocean.

“I didn’t hate her,” Jemma said again, sitting in her old place in the PICU, the siege of exhaustion where she used to collapse halfway through her call nights and spend five minutes forgetting all her responsibilities and doing nothing. Rob was sitting across from her, talking on the telephone to Dr. Tiller. He hung up and rubbed his eyes. It was their two-hundredth day at sea.

“Her Helen Lane cells are dead,” he said.

“I thought she was immortal,” Jemma said, remembering the summer she spent doing an obligatory stint of research. She’d worked with a not very glamorous fungus, but Vivian, three labs over, was raising a virus in dish after dish of Helen Lane cells, and had become quite taken with the woman whose cancer had been living on in labs around the world for decades after her death. She had liked to tell stories about her, and for three months addressed all her diary entries to her, and claimed to have strange dreams where she followed screaming down telescoping white hallways to find Helen Lane strapped in a complicated torture machine, a gleaming collection of steel and glass knives and needles that made a quiet sort of chainsaw noise as it flayed her and then sewed on her skin. Release me, Vivian! she would shout, causing Vivian to feel very conflicted about her research all the next day.

“She fed them some of Karen’s blood and they died,” Rob said. “But not before they made multinucleated giant cells. I think we should put the ganciclovir back on everybody.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Jemma said. Rob jumped up, either ignoring or not noticing Jemma’s bored tone, and ran off down the hall toward the fellows’ call room, recently re-converted from a finger-painting studio. She wasn’t actually bored, though she affected a distinct air of aloofness from the medical proceedings in the PICU: they were doing their thing, she was doing hers, and she was not about to go back to being a kick-me-in-the-ass scut monkey after having wished away all the diseases of the old world. She still hoped that it would just be a matter of time, a matter of understanding, a matter of imagining a cure in the right context, before this one would fall to her.

She got up and made her usual tour, walking up and down the hall outside the bays that held each victim. She stood a while in front of each one, waving at the nurse behind the doors — Janie in a puffy suit — squinting with her natural eyes to see the patient, their images refracted by the glass doors and plastic isolation tent, while examining them simultaneously in her mind. The weeks passed and she felt more powerful in her gift — she didn’t have to touch a person to know how fast their heart was beating, or how well they were oxygenating their blood, or if they were hungry. It was in her more every day — some nights she felt so nervous and overstuffed with it that she would go up to the roof to hurl green fire at the sky — and yet she could still do nothing for the victims of the botch except scan them and describe their bodily deprivations. The boy, in the middle bay in the victims’ row, slept as soundly as ever, in perfect health as far as she could tell with either her natural or supernatural senses, while Wanda Sullivan, Aloysius Pan, Cotton Chun, Thelma, Karen, and Dolores lay before her in various stages of living decay, and she could not even restore the luster to Karen’s hair, let alone heal any of them.

She put her head against the glass of the middle bay, where the boy was, and closed her eyes, aware of the brief attention paid to her by his nurse, who turned to look at her just for a moment before going back to her task of adding up his output of pee for the morning. The nurses were used to Jemma’s loitering, and seemed not to mind it very much, though she hadn’t proved herself very useful. She almost tried again, bringing her hands up and pressing her palms flat against the glass, but instead of letting the fire seep through the glass and ride on currents of air into the rooms, reaching a hundred thin fingers under the plastic and over the bed to strike their ailing flesh, she just stood their watching them and listening to them, not sure, when they started talking to each other, if she was imagining it or making it happen.

Are we going to die? Thelma asked.

Of course, Dolores said.

I knew we were in trouble, Wanda Sullivan said, when I smelled Sylvester’s poop. It was the worst ever, worse than any of the CF poops. It was pretty floaty, too. It floated right out of the toilet and hung in the air, and I saw how there was a ridge on it like a mouth that opened and said, Wanda, thou art stricken with the botch.

Don’t be fucking stupid, said Karen.

You weren’t there. You didn’t see how black the mouth was inside, like it went on and on forever, that blackness, even though it was rather a small poop, comparatively.

There are probably worse ways to die, said Cotton Chun. I’m glad I didn’t drown.

Maybe we still will, said Aloysius.

Shut the fuck up, said Cotton. I’m so sick of you, man. I’ve been sick of you since the day after I met you.

What did I ever do to you?

Cotton, everybody would say, what was wrong with you yesterday? I saw you in the hall and you looked like your dog just died. Are you okay? I was okay, motherfucker. I was always okay, and I always had to explain that it was you they saw, and that we weren’t related, or the same person on a good day or bad day, and that I didn’t have a fucking clue why you never smiled. What’s your problem, anyway? Would it ever have killed you to have smiled once or twice, or to have been nice to someone, just one single time?

I’m almost happy now.

I mean, someone asks you for an echo and you act like they want you to gouge out your eyeballs.

I can almost see it. Can you all see it?

The land? Thelma said. The new world?

That’s not for us, Aloysius said. There’s another place, a place not here. It is removed from suffering, though there is no happiness there.

What part of shut the fuck up do you not understand? asked Cotton.

There’s nothing out there, Dolores said. Not even a nothing.

I think I see it! Thelma said.

I see it too! Wanda said. Oh, I hope Sylvester comes soon. Is that selfish of me?

Completely, Cotton said.

All you see is what you want to see, Dolores said. I have learned to want nothing anymore, and expect nothing, and so I see the truth.

Spoken like a true surgical intern, said Cotton.

Maybe I don’t see it, Thelma admitted. But I wish I did.

Just waiting for it is its own sort of pleasure, said Aloysius.

I see her, though, Thelma said. Looking at us.

Staring like a freak, Karen said.

This isn’t the zoo! Cotton shouted.

Or the television, said Dolores. Stop gloating.

I’m not, Jemma said.

Gloating over how useless you are, Karen said. I’m the most useless girl in the world. No one is more useless than me.

Are you getting ready to not save us again? asked Wanda.

I could tell the first day I met her, Karen said. Useless. She had that look about her, and the big U on her forehead.

I told Sylvester it was too good to be true. Some days I could still smell it in him, but I never said. I should have told him, Everything will be the same again. Don’t get used to this.

Of course it could have stood for ugly, too.

I’m sick of you, too, said Cotton. Though I’m still more sick of him.

“I’m down here,” said another voice. Jemma opened her eyes and looked down. Sylvester Sullivan was standing at her hip, holding a bunch of daisies and a bottle of baby oil. “Can I go in yet?” he asked her. “I need to rub her feet.”