The Children's Hospital

26

Vivian was working on her list. She worked on it every day — she only had to look out any window to be reminded about it — but still it felt like a chronically neglected task. There was so much other work to do. She was working as hard as any resident-and-a-half in the old world, and she had never learned so much or had so much responsibility for patients, as she had now, and here and there she had made, in the absence of the one fellow and attending, a decision that truly was life and death. Nonetheless every now and then she had the feeling that all the exhausting and vitally important work she was doing on the ward was easy, and ultimately of no consequence, compared to the list.

If anyone else was making one, she did not know. Jemma had lost interest almost immediately, and the great Why that had occupied their initial days and weeks had lately been neglected. People were just doing the work, after all, and all their spare time was spent grieving or trying to snatch a few minutes of normalcy from out of their extraordinary situation. People were dating, and making friends, and having bitter, comfortless sex, and learning to love better the children in their care, but lamentation had given way to a sort of dull voiceless grief, and thoughtful reflection, never fully established in any but a handful of the populace, was giving way to an exhausted sort of acceptance.

And she was as bad as any of them. Tonight she had been sitting for an hour already with nothing to show for it but a slew of generalities (rudeness… intolerance… war) and a few mild particulars (novels about shoes… grade-school beauty pageants… closeted politicians). Two weeks ago she’d have had ten major and twenty minor categories already delineated in that time, arranged neatly in two columns, and she’d have started to arrange them in ranks and associations. Tonight they were all over the page, clustered like flying insects around a drawing of Ishmael’s back. “Nothing bad about that,” she said, looking at the drawing, and thinking of him. She had put him aside for her work, and now she wished she had not. “I understand,” he said, and went off to do more of his own private work, reading and research, trolling for some personal affinity or flash or recognition that would suggest to him what he had used to do, and who he had been, in the old world.

That was what he said he would do, but in fact he was with Thelma, the big nurse who den-mothered the kids on the psych ward. It wasn’t exactly a date. He had gone up to talk to her, and brought her some fancy candy that the angel had designed for him. He had no idea why he was attracted to her. He did not think large women in their fifties were his type, but he was always being surprised by affinities — mobbed all of a sudden by a violent attraction to some nurse or doctor or patient or piece of furniture. He did not understand the feelings. They were different from what he felt for Vivian — they were not tender, and he knew he did not love these people, for all that he wanted to shove himself, body and soul, into their bodies, or draw them into him until they disappeared. At the height of his lust he wanted to enter them only so he could tear them apart when he exited — he imagined standing and stretching to his full height, and throwing them off him in strips of flying flesh.

No more of that, he told himself every time he did it. And yet he kept doing it again and again, knowing that it was inferior to what he was pursuing with Vivian, and knowing that it would hurt her, and knowing he must keep it secret from her. And what made him saddest about the whole business was that his skill at it, and his familiarity with bodies, and the sense as he raged upon the man or woman in his grip that this was all so familiar, made him think that this was what he had done in the old world. But what kind of job was that, and what sort of person did it? “Do you know,” he said to Thelma, pushing her great hammock-sized bra up off of her breasts, “it is my first time.”

“Mine too, baby,” she said. “Ha ha ha!”