The Children's Hospital

53

They called it the Match, after another process of assignation. There was on the one hand an embarrassment of parentless children and on the other a large population of childless adults. There were the hundred-and-thirty families and the seventy-two single parents who’d been together with their children on the night of the flood; the hundreds of other children had been up till now cared for by the same nursing teams who had cared for them from the time they first entered the hospital. The ward had become the family unit. So twenty different parents played with Ella Thims and fed her and changed her diapers, and she had her siblings among the GI kids, and Josh and Ethel were at first a part of the big one family. These families had been unstable from the start — Cindy and Wayne and other, older children were already together, in a sense, like dozens of other teenagers were coming together in benevolent gangs, more and more resistant to the authority of the nurses and the other adults, and there were families who vacuumed up stray children and adopted them. Unofficial, unorganized, it had been progressing since Thing Two, and no busybody worth their salt could let it just happen. Who knew what they would end up with, when the dust settled? The Council, Jemma’s not-wedding behind them, the educational curriculum set and deemed appropriate, every child and teacher seeming reasonably content with what they were learning or teaching, and most of the old hospital transformed or being transformed into spaces deemed better suited to their new mission of education, preservation, and the fostering of hope, turned its eye on the current distribution of individuals throughout the hospital, and overturning the last vestiges of the old hospital order.

I should be on my honeymoon, Jemma thought as she listened to the days of debate on how they should organize themselves. There must be a hundred different patches of tropical water she and Rob could have visited. Or they might have floated behind the hospital in a romantic dinghy, a houseboat big enough just for the two of them with an automated crank to pay out the line, farther and farther until the hospital was only a smudge against the horizon, and conspirators with sharp knives might depose her with a single cut. Where is the resolution, she wondered, that would have built me a honey-boat? She was in meetings the next day. “It wasn’t really a wedding,” Vivian noted, “so you shouldn’t really get a honeymoon, right?”

People had cleaved together from the first into pairs and even the occasional much-whispered about ménage, or the more innocent but no less frequently discussed situations of two-timers or men and women who dated the same three people, one then two then three then back again to one, in serial but evanescent monogamy. True multiple-partnerships were extremely rare, but Jordan Sasscock had acquired eight wives, though none of them called themselves that. There’d been no ceremony, private or public, and Dr. Sasscock certainly never described them that way. In fact, when someone called them wives he’d become uncharacteristically upset, his suave jovial affect lifting off of him in a second. As serious and furious as Dr. Snood in a snit, he’d say, “We are all together, but it’s not like that.” There was something derogatory about wives that rubbed all nine of them the wrong way, though when he was drunk you might get him to agree that he was in some sense husband to all of them. But he pointed out to people who were curious enough to ask at length about the arrangement that he was no bigamist or powerful fuck-lord presiding over a harem. It was all more equitable and more mysterious than that. “I am lost in them,” he would say finally, dreamily.

There were only two of them at first, girls he had unwisely tried to date simultaneously in a world that was only two-hundred meters across. It was not surprising that the two outraged women became friends, but no one ever understood how they made a collective decision to receive the miscreant back into their beds and their lives — there were rumors that Sasscock, who’d proved himself a very capable replicator engineer, had made a potion to addle them with, but too many people had tried something similar and failed for anyone to believe that the angel would do that, and anyone who spent time with the threesome could tell right away that the women, though in love, were not love-slaves.

Jemma had imagined it, feeling a little dirty even though it was only on one occasion that she diagrammed all the sexual possibilities, arranging them like groaning Lincoln Logs in her head to make structures of ecstasy and lust. It was more work, and more interesting, to imagine the comforts they found, these refugee women, in the many-armed other, and what words they whispered over their gigantic pillow in Sasscock’s room, now all bed except for the little alcove for the replicator and the sink. Sometimes she had envied them, and imagined herself stepping into a groaning mass that petted and stroked itself not to orgasm but to solace, and she thought she could understand the appeal, entirely separate from the prospect of owning a share of handsome Jordan Sasscock, of entering into such a compact.

Conclaves were just shaping up, associations of sentiment — a preponderance of Baptists on the third floor, the fifteen Mormons moving one night, en masse, to the fifth, separate lesbian and gay ghettos in the rehab unit, but they were voluntary and amorphous congregations, and seemed to denote little in terms of either a grander plan, or a deeper meaning; no matter where people lived, or what creed they professed, everybody mixed in Father Jane’s huge Sunday Services, only Dr. Sundae and her snake handlers, the Jews, and the Coptics holding anything like regularly separate services yet. The Council looked for other patterns of condensation, wondering if there was a plan in which they participated unaware, that might guide them when it came time to assign the children, but there was no pattern anyone could make out. People were dating across the borders of race and class and profession and age and religion, across floors and specialties, across vast disparities of height and weight and attractiveness. How best, then, to decide which child should go where when the crèches were disbanded and every hospital room turned into a home?

“The family is dead!” Anika proclaimed, speaking in one of the crowded meetings — they became increasingly public forums with every passing day, until they had to be moved from the conference room to the lobby, where Jemma’s table was set up under the shadow of the toy — for the most radical contingent of the population. It would be not just futile but dangerous to imitate the old pattern. In fact, these people urged the Council to consider that they may all have been placed here for the very purpose of formulating and implementing a new order. The absolute minimum number of parental units needed for each child was five — they’d done the calculations, and this was a number that guaranteed every child at least two good parental units without crossing a threshold of confusion beyond which the mixture of opinions and styles would do as much harm as good. “There’s always a bad mother,” Anika said, “and there’s always a bad father. The molester is always lurking, somebody’s always waiting to tell you that you look fat in your prom dress. There’s always somebody who will hate the child that they should love, and half the time or more it’s the same person, isn’t it? If you do the math you discover that you hated a fourth of your mother and half of your father and they loved perhaps one-seventh of the person that you became. This is the misery of two. But with five you get perfection, because even if each parent only loves 20 percent of the child each child is totally loved, and every child can pick and choose among the smorgasborg to construct the parent they love totally.”

Jemma nodded and put on a thoughtful face while Anika was speaking, but made an unnecessary note to herself on the big yellow pad that sat in front of her during every meeting: V-E-T-0. Over the hours and days of deliberations they heard other ideas. There were staunch traditionalists, represented not unexpectedly by Dr. Sundae, who wanted to keep the present arrangement until every last two citizens of the hospital had been partnered in an officially recognized marriage, and offered Rob and Jemma as an example of a partnership insufficiently formalized, what with the unusual permutations of the ceremony and the insistence of the lesbian priestess and deacon-prophet as they married them that they were not in fact marrying them. There should be a mass ceremony presided over by Father Jane in her strictest and most formal Unitarian capacity, in which every male and female of marrying age (described as being so low as fourteen and as high as twenty-one) were joined together based on whatever natural (but not unnatural) affinities were already in play among the population but also, and more importantly, on a subcommittee of the Council, newly to be formed, which would study files to be prepared by an entirely separate subcommittee and make incontrovertible matches, the last of them to be completed no more than forty days from the adoption of the authorizing resolution. A week after the ceremony, the children would be distributed, these matches made based on the work of yet another heroic subcommittee.

“We are all still thinking,” said Karen, “in the terms of the old system. Didn’t Ishmael say it many weeks ago? If we are all a big family, then aren’t these, each of them and all of them, our children? Each of us shares somehow in their care now, why shouldn’t that continue? Why not make ourselves formally what we already are informally?” She went on to suggest that every child begin to circulate among the adult citizens in such a way that every last child would rotate with every last possible parent. They would build a clock in the lobby that would chime whenever it was time to switch, and slowly, by means of deceptively transient-appearing relationships (and wasn’t every family relationship transient anyway, disappointment or suppressed hatred or mortality counting the time as surely as any giant clock?), individual transience becoming collective permanence, they would become a giant family in truth, where every boy or girl was son or daughter to every man and woman, and every man and woman parent to every boy and girl. Jemma tried to mouth veto reassuringly to Jeri Vega’s mother, who was clenching her fists while Karen told her that Jeri would rotate away from her, but rotate back, like all good things joining in an ebbing, flowing cycle of departure and return. “But she’s my daughter,” Jessie’s mother said, and Karen said, “She is my daughter, too.”

Jemma’s suggestion, delivered on the third day of deliberations that seemed likely to go on forever, combined elements that had already been put forward by others. The heavy duty of researching and defining affinities she delegated to the angel, who would work based on what she already knew of everyone on board and what they would tell her in interviews or questionnaires. Requests for specific individuals would be accepted but not encouraged. Children who already had one parent or more in the hospital would stay with them and not be rotated way or shared except through the usual media of school and play. Individuals could submit themselves to the Match as individuals or in groups of up to two; same sex couples must not be discriminated against. Siblings would not be separated, and if the thing were going to happen there was no reason for it not to happen soon. They should do it within the week.

This didn’t end the debate. A whole parade of people were still waiting to tell their ideas, but after every third or fourth crazy scheme the Council would talk again about Jemma’s suggestion and as people delineated the benefits of robot nannies upon a nascent civilization, or made calls for inverted families where the children would discipline their parents and teach them how to live in the new world, it became obvious that her plan possessed more than all the others the attractive qualities of being both feasible and not too loony. The Council retired back to its chamber and after a short discussion with the angel passed a resolution which Jemma signed into law. This time she really did say, “So let it be written, so let it be done,” but quiet enough that only Vivian and Ishmael heard her.

The angel preferred interviews; these were conducted. Some relationships were fortified or even inaugurated by the stimulus of the Match, a few fell apart. Those who wanted to make requests made them, and the angel held the algorithm in abeyance until such time as the Council wished it activated. It would take about eight hours to run. Why that long and not seven or nine, or why not instantaneously, she would not say. She manufactured a big red button — eminently pressable — which Jemma wanted to hit right away, but Ishmael had the idea of waiting until the following day, taking advantage of a previously scheduled talent show to distract people from the waiting. So Jemma awoke that day about a half hour after Kidney had made her mark on her door and not half a second after Pickie Beecher laid his eyes upon me. Before she opened her eyes she considered her schedule, picturing it in her head, thick blue letters on a yellow pad as big as the bed. There was only a single item on it today: 12:00 p.m. — Press button.

She opened her eyes, stared at the ceiling for a while, stared at the window for a while, stared at the door for a while, hoping that Rob might come through it and lie down beside her. She was not yet so far removed from sleep that she couldn’t go right back to it, and it would have been very pleasant to put her head on his chest, murmur, “I’ve got a big day ahead of me,” and sleep for three hours and forty-five minutes. Her eyes closed, she drifted back toward sleep and she had a small, swift dream in which not Rob but the big red button walked through the door and lay down beside her, and she tried unsuccessfully to snuggle up to it. Careful, it said to her. Don’t make me pop yet.

It was not a usual morning, though she went about her usual business. She got out of bed and did the chair-assisted yoga poses that Vivian had taught her. She hated them, though less than the exercises she was supposed to do on odd days. The room was almost too small to do them, but she wouldn’t be caught dead stretching and lotusing in public, or any place that she might be seen. She dragged a chair to the middle of the room, pushed the table up against the bathroom door, and did the downward-facing dog, leaning forward from her hips and grabbing the lower edge of the seat. “Watch your head,” said the angel.

“Leave me alone,” Jemma said. “Who said you could watch?”

“I am always watching,” she said, but shut up. Vivian had cautioned her not to lower her head too far, and said that she must be extremely careful once she got to the third trimester. “If you lower your head below your heart in the third trimester,” she said, “you will die instantly.”

Eight breaths later, she was done with that one, and then it was time for the modified dancer and warrior two and warrior three and the pony on the table and the squatting palm, eight breaths for every pose. She spent ten minutes, exactly the requisite time, in a lotus on her mat — now was the time she was supposed to be visualizing her healthy pregnancy. She managed it for a minute, imagining it, a foot long now, wrapped in transparent skin, and then it was laid out beside any number of other approximately foot-long objects: Rob’s hairy foot, a submarine sandwich, the first dildo she had ever met, a really big hot dog. This was the exhausting part, to turn her thought on her baby, and dive into the black whole in her belly.

Hello? she said, into the blackness.

Go away, said the baby, the voice as fully imaginary as the body that she saw, an upside-down fetus hanging in a field of stars.

I promised Vivian I would look at you every day. It’s supposed to be good for us.

How can I sleep with you staring at me like that, all creepy. You look crazy. Are you crazy? Am I crazy?

Sometimes I am. A little. Or more than a little. It’s Match Day! she said, trying to change the subject.

Maybe I can get a better family, he said. Would I not be crazy, if I went to live with someone else? Would I still die, if you loved me from far away, instead of from up close?

All that is past. You’re safe.

But I think I would prefer to live with someone else. It’s not personal. I just want to live. I just want to get away from the long reach of your parents’ hands. And I don’t want to have to watch your brother burn every night, or hear the story from you when you sit up drunk all night, regretting everything that ever happened to you.

Well, Jemma said.

I’m glad you understand. I’m glad we had this little talk.

But…

You’re a very good listener. Has anyone ever told you that before? Jordan Sasscock. Put me with him. He’s cute.

But I’m your mother.

Exactly! And before she could ask her baby and herself what that meant, or argue that nothing was ever going to be the same for her, that everyone was going to be happy in the new world, and that she held in her hands the mysterious green remedy for sickness and death, the chime sounded, her exercises were done, and their time was over.

* * *

She wanted to go back to bed. She went downstairs, instead, to Karen’s coffee bar, part of the ER complex, not far from Connie’s more traditional sort of bar. Behind the same series of windows where crabby triage nurses had instructed the wounded and the panicked and the soon-to-be dead on the virtues of waiting one’s proper turn, Karen pumped espresso from a manual machine as tall as she was, made of golden brass and covered in relief with eagles and oxen and calves. Rob was sure it had once been the ark of the covenant, but Karen said it looked just like one she had seen in Italy. During a brief vacation, the two weeks she’d had away from her eighty-hour weeks as an intern, she’d fled Florence and her fiancé and, after a hike and some hitchhiking and a mysterious process of emancipation (“I slept in a field and when I woke up the next day I was sopping wet and my throat hurt like hell but I was so free I cannot even describe it!”) she shacked up with a man who reeked perpetually of dark roasted coffee, hardly able to talk with him but enjoying the first satisfactions of her ten years of sexual activity and serving a brief apprenticeship in his café before going back to her fiancé, in many ways, she insisted, a new woman. She wasn’t the only person for whom an interlude of non-medical happiness had formed the basis of a career — Dr. Neder was throwing pottery on the seventh floor; Dr. Pudding was blowing glass on the second — and like the others she quickly surpassed her lover/teacher, assisted by the angelic technology in the replicators.

Dr. Chandra, Helena Dufresne, and Carla were already all lined up at the bar, Chandra staring morosely into his huge bowl of coffee, Tir’s mom having a discussion with Carla. Karen was drying a tall mug — not actually something she had to do, since used dishes could be thrown, like any other sort of garbage, into the gullet of the replicators, but she said it made her feel authentic, and she liked to meditate while she did her dishes, her best ideas, like the concept of eternally rotating children and the Over-Family, coming to her as she washed and dried.

“I figured it out,” she said to Jemma. “Truly caffeine-free espresso.”

“What’s the point of that?” Jemma asked.

“You have to try it,” Karen said. “It’s guaranteed — not even a picogram of caffeine, but you’d never know the difference. I don’t know the difference, and if anybody could tell it would be me. Anyway I verified it up in the lab. There’s a set of HPLC columns in special chem.”

“I trust you,” Jemma said.

“I don’t,” said Chandra, “this business about Pudding and the sexbot is too much.”

“Ask Jordan,” Karen said, “but get him good and drunk first. And it wasn’t a sexbot, it was a three-dimensional simulacrum of his wife. And he was just looking at it. There’s no evidence at all for any other sort of… activity.”

“There’s no evidence at all, period,” said Chandra.

“You turn everything dirty,” Karen said to him, and put a tiny little cup down in front of Jemma, not one-tenth the size of the one that sat in front of Dr. Chandra.

“Are people making sexbots?” Jemma asked, taking the briefest little sip of the coffee, and gagging.

“Of course not,” said Karen. “Stop spreading lies,” she said to Dr. Chandra.

“You’re the gossip monger,” he said. “And anyway, fuck off. You’re not my boss anymore. I’m out of the program, lady.”

“Sirius, Sirius,” she said. “You’ve got to let that go. Do you know that was in one of your letters, when we were talking about you at the selection meeting? He’s a worrier, the letter said, in that obligatory negative sentence. He tends to hang on to things.” She set down another huge cup in front of him, full of hot milk, and poured in the espresso, making an expert design, a perfectly symmetrical spirograph flower.

“I’m never going back,” he said calmly, poking a finger into the foam and bringing it to his mouth.

“Maybe I should just have some milk,” Jemma said.

“Milk for the baby then,” Karen said, sweeping up the little cup and drinking it herself. “I can’t tell the difference,” she said. “Not at all. Could you?”

“I’m not very experienced,” Jemma said. “About the sexbots — maybe we should talk about them in the Council. It could get pretty weird, artificial people running around and mixing with the real people. What if we couldn’t tell the difference?”

“There are no sexbots,” Karen said, looking among her shelves — once they’d held old charts and admission protocols — for a milk mug. She selected a bowl, like Chandra’s, poured the milk, and started to steam it, so Jemma could only pick out a few words when she continued to talk. “Artificial vagina… imaginary… his was like a formal portrait… just visiting… the angel wouldn’t… trust me.”

“Can I have a paper cup?” asked Dr. Chandra. “I’m not going to stick around here and be persecuted.”

“I have a nice relaxing tea,” said Karen. “You should try some. It would make you less touchy.”

“I don’t even like tea, and I’m not touchy,” he said, and tapped his finger on the bar. Karen gave him an aluminum mug with a rubber lid, and he transferred his drink.

“You ruined the flower,” she said. “Want me to fix it?” She held up her little metal pitcher of milk.

“I’m late to fuck my robot,” he said, and shuffled off.

“Pull up your pants!” Karen called after him, and whispered to Jemma, “He’s very lonely. He comes here every day to tell me how much he hates me, but sometimes I think I’m the closest thing he has to a friend.”

“Some people are having a hard time,” Jemma said, holding her bowl in both hands and sipping at her milk. Vivian had given her a calcium quota to meet each day. She could not remember how much was in a bowl of milk. “Not knowing what to do, and not having any work.”

“He hated work, too,” Karen said. “Some people are just never happy. It’s something I learned, being chief. You bend over backward for some people and they’re like, I wanted raspberry and this is strawberry, or this is 2 percent and I wanted 1 percent, and you’re like, What’s the fucking difference you are one of a hundred residents, can’t you just give me a break and do your work? Children are dying out there.”

“Not anymore,” Jemma said.

“You know what I mean. I can’t imagine what it’s like for you. Okay, I can… you’re chief of the whole hospital. It’s a huge job, but you’re doing swell. I mean it, and I know it. Your approval rating is 86 percent.”

“I have an approval rating?” Jemma asked.

Karen laughed. “You’re so funny sometimes.” She called down the bar to the two women sitting at the far end, interrupting their conversation. “Isn’t she doing a great job?” Carla nodded vigorously, and Helena Dufresne held up a single thumb. Karen refilled their cups, and pulled another espresso for herself. “This is the real stuff,” she said, and detailed for Jemma the process by which she and the angel had increased the potency of the beans until they practically trembled, and all the new uses she was finding for fancy coffee, and how she was not certain if she was pulling new uses out of the old thing, or making something entirely new when she experimented with the replicator. “When I ask for anti-wrinkle coffee,” she asked, “is she making it from scratch or just bringing forward a property already inherent in the bean? It’s so hard to tell with her. She can be so squirrely.” She poured out thick coffee in a solid dish and had Jemma soak her cuticles in it.

“Did you enter?” Jemma asked her.

“Of course,” Karen said. “I hope Siri did, too. I asked him but he wouldn’t tell. How about you?”

“It would be gluttony,” Jemma said, putting a hand on her belly.

“There are more kids than adults,” Karen pointed out.

“It would still be weird,” Jemma said. “My fingers are tingling.”

“It’s the natural enzymes,” Karen said. “They’re giving you a manicure.” She leaned forward and said, “Ella Thims. She’s my first choice.”

“A sweet girl.”

“I’ve known her forever. I took care of her every July for three years in a row, and I was there when she came slithering out of her mama. That was some initial exam, let me tell you. Where’s the vagina? Where’s the anus? I thought it was because I was a stupid intern that I couldn’t find them. I visit her every day — we’re practically a family already.” She brought her hands to her heart. “It makes me nervous to talk about it.”

“The coffee probably doesn’t help,” Jemma said.

“Oh, I’m immune,” she said, but everyone who came here knew that she got more chatty and jumpy throughout the day, and that by closing time she stood on the bar proclaiming stomping cheers for her favorite customers.

“Now they’re numb,” Jemma said, taking her fingers out, sure she’d see the ends dissolved down to slender bone.

“That’s the baby,” Karen said, pushing her hand back in. “It’s a thing I never understood. Numb toes I got, if the baby’s sitting on a plexus, but fingers? Something about hCG, but then why does it get worse in the third trimester? I had it too, with Abbie…” She clutched at the back of Jemma’s hand and burst suddenly into tears — they fell, fat and full, onto the highly polished counter and splashed back into Jemma’s flat dish of coffee. “Oh God!” Karen moaned. “What’s wrong with me? This is so stupid. I promised myself I wouldn’t… It’s all fine now, I should really know better. Am I cheating on her, though? That’s the thing… that’s the stupid, stupid, stupid thing. I know better in here — she pounded on her chest — in here I know that none of them belong to us and they pass from one to the other and Abbie is somewhere now, cared for just like I’ll care for Ella but still it feels like a big fat betrayal and I know I’ll tuck Ella in at night and they’ll be out there, Abbie and Carl, just so angry at me because I’m cheating.”

“It’s okay,” Jemma said, hugging Karen back and scattering coffee-drops from her fingers. She meant it in a very generic sense — things are generally okay, more or less, probably, or it’s okay for you to cry and slobber on me — but not as a denial of the fact that the dead judge or that they can be provoked to fury by our unfaithfulness. Who was Jemma to absolve Karen of the fury of her dead husband and child, or to absolve any of them? Even Juan Fraggle’s family was cheating on his dad, knitting and teaching salsa dancing and karate (his sisters were black belts) and just going on, waking every day to something more and more and more like contentment.

The two women at the end of the bar gave up their conversation and came over, Carla just standing to Jemma’s left with her arms folded, but Helena walking behind the counter to take Karen in her big flabby arms. “There,” she said. “You just cry it out, baby. Get it all out so nothing spoils your fun tonight.” Karen went “Ack, Ack, Ack!” shaking and snotting. Helena winked at Jemma over Karen’s shoulder, and Jemma pointed at her watch.

“My class,” she whispered, and the big lady nodded.

“It’s all under control,” she said. “It’s all okay.” Carla leaned an elbow on the bar and trailed a finger in Jemma’s coffee, staring at Jemma’s shoes.

Jemma wasn’t sure what to say, so she just slinked off, head down, walking quickly out of the ER and into the lobby, giving out hardly a wave as she passed onto the ramp and started the climb. She wasn’t really late for her class. “It’s another part of your job,” Dr. Sundae had told her, accosting her after a Council meeting, backing Jemma up against the window, her matronly bosom pressing closer and closer. Jemma could smell her asparagus breath, and their clothes were almost touching when she spoke. “To comfort the afflicted — you’ve already done so much, but scratch any of us and you get an uncontrolled weeper. Look inside, I think you’ll find it — surprise! — the means to comfort us even as you healed them.” Then she had leaned even closer, and put a hand on the window, palm flat against the glass.

“I really have to pee,” Jemma said. It was true, but not what she ought to have said. Don’t tell me what my job is, you scary old bitch — that would have been better. I’m not for you to lecture anymore, you scary old bitch. Or even just, You scary old bitch, whispered in accusation and admiration. She had hurried but not run away from her.

She started waving again after walking the first loop of the spiral with her head down. “Hello, Sylvester. Hello, Ms. Sullivan. Hello, Dr. Sasscock. Hello, Dr. Pudding.” She remembered the sexbot and stopped by the rail to make a note on her little computer. A week after Vivian had commissioned them from the angel almost every adult and half the kids had one of the little devices, as long, wide, and thin as an index card, flat black glass on one side, bright metal on the other. You could write on it with a pen or ask it to record your voice. She was still confusing the icons. Though she meant just to record her voice, two days later when she went over her notes before the next meeting she would see her own puffy, pink face, pictured in such clarity and precision by the in-screen camera that she diagnosed herself with melasma, the toy clanking and whirling behind her and a mysterious beehive hairdo passing through the frame just as she spoke the words: “Sexbot sexbot sexbot.”

“Say it soft and it’s almost like praying,” said John Grampus, sidling up next to her.

“You shouldn’t sneak up,” Jemma said.

“I was trying to get your attention. Distracted by the big day?”

“I just have to push the button.” She started walking again up the ramp. “It’s not such a big day.”

“Tell that to… everybody. I’m so nervous I can barely walk straight. See?” He stumbled for her and took a few boneless steps before straightening up and walking straight beside her again. “I keep thinking it’s a bad idea. Have you heard that from anyone else?”

“Anika still wants the number five involved somehow. Like that. A couple others, angry about their schemes getting ignored.”

He stopped her and put a hand on her shoulder. “Jane applied for all those crazy kids. All of them? Can you fucking believe that?”

“You can’t split up the family,” Jemma said.

“It’s a big step,” he said, shaking his head. She wasn’t sure if she meant applying to adopt Kidney’s whole family, or his moving in with Father Jane, another unsolicited confidence he’d given her, on another walk like this one the week before. She did not understand their relationship, and though it sometimes helped her to fall asleep at night, picturing them in bed, or playing cards, or imagining that she was John Grampus reaching out, so slowly and hesitantly, to touch the unfamiliar and rather frightening boob, she didn’t want to think of it right now.

“As big as it gets,” Jemma agreed, an appropriate platitude, she thought, and she ducked into the stairwell. He didn’t follow her. She sat down on the stairs, put her head in her hands, and thought of the boobs, a hundred boobs and a hundred hands reaching out, hesitating and uncertain, to touch them. Go away, she said to them, and the kaleidoscope vision fractured and fell in on itself. Then it was dark behind her eyes but she could feel the people passing by outside the door, and feel John Grampus making his anxious way up to the roof. “Sometimes it’s hard to be alone,” she’d said to Rob, and he’d held her tighter in their bed, thinking she was complaining of loneliness.

It was the same old class — diffident and minimally instructive — until the kids started talking about their families. Juan was the only non-orphan. He sat back in the grass, looking deeply at every speaking face as they went around and around in a circle. They were supposed to be trying to levitate a pencil — not that Jemma could lift inanimate objects with her mind (she tried to float knives and soap and pins in the water but though she had lifted hundred-kilo Helena none of it would budge) but wasn’t it possible that their gifts were of another sort entirely than Jemma’s? Moving pencils, changing the color of grass, turning a candy mushroom to a real mushroom with a blink of the eye — maybe they couldn’t heal for the same reason that Jemma couldn’t shoot lasers out of her eyes: it was simply not for her to do it.

“We should have been able to pick,” Magnolia said. “What if I get some freak?”

“The angel listened to you, didn’t she?” said Josh.

“She could still give me a freak.”

“Maybe you want a freak,” said Jarvis. “You want a freak to freak with.”

“We should have been able to do our own,” said Ethel. “We’re old enough. We’ve been through enough. Jesus fucking Christ. Nobody bothered to ask us.”

“There was that whole three days of testimony…” Jemma started to say.

“Nobody asked the important questions,” Ethel said glumly.

“We’re jumping ship if they try to split us up,” said States’-Rights. He reached out toward Kidney, on the other side of the circle. She stuck out her tongue at him.

“We should just all stay together,” said Cindy Flemm. “Us thirteen.”

“And Rob,” said Magnolia. “He could stay.”

“Wouldn’t that be great?” Cindy asked, turning to Jemma.

“Like a really horrible skin condition,” Jemma said, but she hugged her.

“What’s going to happen?” Kidney asked of the sky.

“Nothing,” said Jarvis. “It’s the same as before. The same old shit, just different people stepping in it.”

“It’s going to be totally different,” Josh said confidently. “Everything’s going to change. You’re going to have a family. Haven’t you been listening to anything?” Jarvis only tapped on his ear, and smiled.

“Families come and go,” said Pickie, “but you remain, forever.” He snapped his finger. “Like that. That’s how quickly they are gone. Who cares about them, in the end? There is no other family besides brothers.”

“And sisters,” said Magnolia.

“Sisters are irrelevant,” Pickie said. The discussion degraded into an argument, boys against girls, then the under-tens against the over-tens, arguing not about brothers or sisters or families but the necessity of underwear, or icing, or whether it would be better if no one ever had to pee. Food flew. Jemma lay back in the grass again, watching cupcakes sail against another bright blue sky, imagining Rob in his calculus class, standing at the giant plasma board, striking glowing circles in the dark glass as he poked it with his finger and swept out curves and lines and figures. Everyone in the class had a button stuck on their head, and furthermore everyone in the hospital had one, had always had one set right between their eyebrows, red as a firetruck and tall as the eraser on a fresh pencil. They were reset buttons, or surprise buttons, placed to be pressed in case of potentially lethal boredom or disappointment.

“Are you all ready?” she asked innocently, after class, after another hour spent wandering on the ramp, after Carla drew her behind the branches of a huge fern on the fifth floor. She’d seen her on the ramp, on the roof — she drifted close enough during class to be struck by a piece of fat — and twice in the lobby, her long horse-face appearing in flashes through the nervous, milling crowd. “Are you following me?” Jemma had finally asked her, when she caught her lurking near the fern. Jemma was coming away from a visit with Sadie’s knitting circle, pockets full of hats and booties.

“I just wanted to ask,” Carla said. “I just wanted to say. I know, a long time ago — it seems so long ago, Jemma. A hundred years, and it hasn’t even been a hundred days. We didn’t always see the same about things. I’m sorry if I was ever… harsh… and I wanted to make sure. Everybody wants Ella but she belongs with me. Those people weren’t her family. They were kids. They hardly ever came to see her. It was me and Candy and Nicole, but mostly me. Candy and Nicole agree — we had a discussion. It was me. I have to get her.”

“I’m just going to press the button.”

“I’ve got some stuff. It’s not like anything else, and okay for a girl like you. I checked, of course. I can’t even describe how it makes you feel. There’s that, or anything else you can think of. Or something you can’t even think of — we’re all dreaming of new things. Every day there’s something new. I keep wondering why we didn’t think of all the possibilities, back before. Were we just too sad, to use our imaginations? But you know what I mean, right? You know what I mean?”

“Yes,” Jemma said. “Sort of. Look, I just press the button. That’s it. Nothing more, just…” She pressed briskly on Carla’s forehead, right where her button should be.

“But she’ll listen to you,” Carla said.

“She listens to everybody,” Jemma said.

“Are you ready?” Jemma asked again of the crowd. It was eleven fifty-nine. She paused with her finger inches away from the button, wondering if she should take this opportunity to lead them in imagining how their lives would change after the Match. If anyone has any objections, she wanted to say, let him speak now or else. She stayed with her finger just inches from the button, asking silently of all the faces in the crowded council room, Do you know what this means, and asking the same thing of herself. She placed her other hand over her belly. For a few moments it was very quiet, until Maggie spoke from out of the crowd.

“What are you waiting for, genius?” she asked. “Don’t you know how to press a fucking button?”