The Children's Hospital

8

I should not weep for any of them, nor regret their fate, nor shake one feather in sympathy.

I am not the mourning angel. Neither is my sister, though she weeps freely, with them and for them, and tells them over and over, I will keep you, have no fear. And somewhere there is another angel, who will become my brother when he enrolls himself in this apocalypse, weeping and saying, I will make your crimes known to you, though it is too late for you to repent. And somewhere else another one, weeping even as he plans the thousand ways in which he will kill them. For we must be four — I know this as certainly as I know my part, past and present and future — recorder and preserver and accuser and destroyer. Why four and not one, or eight, or sixteen, or one hundred thousand of us, as many legions as bowed down before Calvin Claflin the night he changed the world, I do not know. I am not as I was, and that kind of knowledge is beyond me now.

I should be happy. Back when I wanted things, this is what I wanted more than anything else — a new beginning. Everything I hated, every thing that heaped on me and oppressed me, is washed away, or buried under a world’s weight of water. So there should be no room in my heart for anything but joyful expectation. But I lost my hope for the new world with my rage for the old. Those emotions were, like they always felt, as big as the earth, as heavy as the earth, married to the earth. They were not portable. I could not take them with me, I have only ever been able to remember them. Yet still I should be happy. Immortality has made me tolerant of tragedy, after all. Another death, and another, and another — they really do add up to nothing. The death that mattered has already happened, and so all these, yes the billy-uns and billy-uns, are afterthought. And maybe, like the wise woman says, in eternity the old world is Troy, and the everyday existence now drowned and lost is in fact the ballad they sing in the streets of Heaven. I wouldn’t know, having barely arrived before I left again. I should say, Let it all stay drowned. It’s not my job to cry for it. Yet I do.

Others are spendthrift with the moments of stillness that Jemma wisely rations, and so often they hear the quiet noise. Anika mistook it for the noise of the ocean the first time she heard it, but the walls and windows that keep out the water keep out the littlest sound. It is background to every noise in the hospital — underneath the chiming alarms and the huffing respirators and the conversations, whispered or shouted, underneath the fornicators’ sighing Os and underneath the merely human weeping that is constant from dusk till dawn (for as soon as one of them cries himself to sleep another wakes and, as soon as he remembers where he is and what has happened and who he has lost, starts to cry). She puts a little cough in it and a sniffling quality and the faintest suggestion of words—Oh and No.

You are not the mourning angel, I tell her. There is no mourning angel.

Would that there were, she says. Vivian asks her replicator for a cup of tea and nearly drops it when it comes with a lamentation. “Woe!” my sister shouts. “O the innocent world! O Creation!”

“Innocent,” Vivian says. “Ha!” But she sits with her tea by a window in a room near the NICU and, staring out at the water, gives a little hiccup and starts gently also to weep.

Is this comfort? I ask, and my sister says, Of a sort.

There’s no comfort anywhere in this place, I say, and no one happy. Not even infants or the hopeless retards with their empty minds. Only Jemma goes through her workday with hardly a thought for the numberless dead. How far fallen I am from my mortal days, when I might have skipped along with her, or taught her what reasons there were to celebrate. Before I put away my rage, or spent it to the last scalding drop, I might have numbered all the numberless sins that Vivian wrestles with as she sips her tea and knocks her head gently against the window, and cries a little harder. I remember it — the rage that was like grief. I have always understood how thoroughly diminished I am without it, but never felt the loss so much as now. Now another angel gets the job I made a life of. I fold my wings close, and shrink myself to the size of the room and smaller — I am as small and frail and sad as a lonely old widow when I settle down to cry next to Jemma’s friend. I can comfort you too, my sister says.