The Children's Hospital

74

Jarvis was making shoes. On their two-hundred-and-thirty-first day at sea he sat on the floor before a replicator on the seventh floor, trying to get the right pair. Everybody should have a nice pair of shoes — he’d decided that a long time ago, and he thought it made a difference, even for the ones who were almost dead and wouldn’t know if you chewed on their toes, let alone if you put a new pair of shoes on their feet. They did a little better, or they looked a little happier, or they smelled a little less — he wasn’t sure what it was, exactly. It made him feel better, anyway. It was like doing something, and it was doing something — turning the idea of a shoe into words about a shoe, and turning the words into the thing.

“This isn’t what I asked for,” he told the angel.

“It is the shoe.”

“My smelly ass, bitch,” he said. “It’s not the fucking shoe. It’s not even half of the shoe. This shit ain’t worth dreaming about. This shit ain’t worth thinking about by accident. What the fuck am I paying you for, to fuck up every minute of the day?”

“I am not paid except in prayer and thanks to God.”

“Shut the fuck up,” he said. “I’ll tell you if you’re paid or not, and how it is. What’s wrong with you? Who made you such a stupid, useless bitch?”

“I rose like you from out of the mind of God.”

“Shut the fuck up. Who asked you to talk? Just put the fucking spangles on the side, and not on the top, and maybe I won’t have to shit in my pants right now because of your stupidness.”

“But do you really want spangles on the side?”

He screwed up his face, rolled forward to his knees, and banged on the cool metal surface of the replicator, grunting and groaning. “I’m shitting,” he said. “Right now, squeezing out a big lumpy shit because I just can’t fucking stand it anymore. Just put the spangles on, bitch. Just put them where I tell you.”

“Very well, but I have listened to her dreams and I know where she wants her spangles to fall.”

“Just do it, bitch. Who’s in fucking charge here, anyway?”

“You are,” she said, and the machine sighed, and the mist spilled out on the floor. When he picked the shoe from the hollow it was still full of mist. He turned it over in his hand and the mist spilled out, falling slow and straight, splitting into a dozen rivulets and disappearing just before it reached the floor. The shoe was just as he had imagined it, and finally just as he had described it — nothing missing, nothing extra, the sole just as black as he wanted it, the velero nibs and steel spikes arranged just as they were supposed to be (they would help her stay steady on her feet and draw blood if she should have to kick some random motherfucker in the face); the sparkles were subtle but not invisible, the red tongue was flared just so, and the inside of the shoe was blaze-orange and would always have that smell (he partook of it now) that was like pressing a brand-new not-yet-kicked soccer ball against your face and breathing in through your mouth and nose both.

“Finally,” he said, and walked off, swinging the shoes by their long laces at his sides. He passed Josh and Cindy and Kidney — all too busy to talk — stopped a moment at the window to look out over the water at the sunny day, and came finally to the general medical ward, stuffed with old patients, three to a room. He passed by his patients’ rooms — he had already made his rounds and was sure that everybody had their medicine and something to look at and that if they needed anything else it could wait a few minutes for him to take care of this thing. He passed Ms. Dufresne’s room, and saw her feet sticking over the edge of the bed, wearing her sneaker-boots. He stuck his hand inside her door to wave, and she called out, “Hey, baby!”

“I’m not your baby,” he called back, in a friendly way, but put on a don’t-fuck-with-me face as he passed the nurses’ station — he didn’t want them asking him to go fetch a bag of blood or change the tubing in an IV pump right now, and they knew better than to ask him for the least little shit of a thing if the invitation was not on his face. Five more doors down the hall he came to the family conference room where Jemma was sleeping, shouldered the door open, and went in.

This was the place they used to bring families to tell them their kids were going to die. In the old days he’d hidden here, like he’d hidden everywhere else, supremely powerful in his invisibility, hearing all and knowing all, biting his knuckles under the couch while Dr. Sashay detailed for Juan’s mother all the ways in which he was fucked, the lady crying through her questions, the dry hiss of a tissue leaving the box marking time as regular as a slow-ticking clock. Jemma was sleeping on the couch now, stretched on her side, her huge belly just reaching beyond the cushions, her feet stuck up over the armrest, one clog standing beneath them and the other dangling off her toes. Before he got the shoes out he touched her belly very softly and closed his eyes. “Hey baby,” he said. It gave him a feeling, to touch her on the belly — nothing he could describe very well but it was good, though he knew it was perverted to go around touching ladies on their belly. Even if they were pregnant, it wasn’t right and he wasn’t a freak. “Sorry,” he said. She just kept sleeping.

He pushed off the clog with a finger and put on the shoes. They fit just right — they always did — big enough to go on easy and small enough to hug your foot like a hand that squeezed but didn’t tickle. He tied them hard, throwing the knot swiftly down the lace, and cursing softly at her as he did up the bows, but she still didn’t wake.

“Don’t say I never fucking did something for you,” he said, stifling a yawn, and left with her clogs. He would climb to the roof and throw them into the water.