The Children's Hospital

56

It was Kidney who noticed the boat. A week after the Match, on their one-hundred-and-seventy-third day at sea she pointed it out during Jemma’s class. They were playing multi-vector scrabble, a game designed by Josh Swift, who was insufficiently challenged by the regular game, and so went to the angel for help making a board that let you spell words up in every direction into the air, and down below the board, which floated four feet above the ground. They were playing in two teams of four and one of five — Jemma and Pickie and the three youngest children. Jemma’s team had just taken the lead when Pickie built pantarch up from cupola. Kidney’s observation interrupted an argument between Pickie and Josh, who would not believe that there was any such word as pantarch, pantarchy, or pantarchian.

“It’s just another iceberg,” said Cindy Flemm, squinting after Kidney’s pointing finger. Four days before they’d seen the first one, a mountain of green ice that passed over the horizon in the early-morning darkness, raising false hopes of an island, and then false alarms of a collision as it drifted steadily toward them, getting huger and huger in the hours after dawn. Just at noon, they passed within five hundred yards of it, and people crowded the roof and the windows to stare up, hoping to see a bear or a penguin. One after another the icebergs came sliding over the horizon in every shape and every size, the smallest not much bigger than a car and the biggest dwarfing the hospital. Within a day they had become a common sight, but they never lost their novelty. Jemma found she could stare at them for hours. Even just one penguin would have been heartening, but she daydreamed of swarms of them pouring over the ice on their bellies, sliding in spirals down to the sea, now green and clear — it was water that cried out for penguins to frolic in it. The incredible abundance of fish should have been enough, she knew, but already people were turning away from the windows and the water and looking to the sky. “I just want a bird, just one,” said Helena Dufresene, one morning on the roof. “It would be such a gift,” she added, and Jemma found herself agreeing, and consoling herself with a fantasy of hidden penguins, secreting themselves on the back side of every iceberg, holding flippers to beaks as they passed the hospital.

“Nuh uh,” said Kidney. “It’s a big boat. I can see the smokestack.”

“Iceberg,” said Jarvis.

“It’s not moving the same,” said Josh.

Jemma squinted, too. She could see the boat-shape moving among a herd of hill-sized icebergs, but she wasn’t convinced. “Let’s get back to the game,” she said, but they all ignored her. Josh went to a replicator and politely asked the angel for a pair of binoculars. She gave him an old-fashioned spyglass of polished brass. He raised it to his eye and said, “Hot damn.”

“Wait a minute,” Jemma said. “We should make sure before you all go running off and…” But they were already all running off to shout “A boat! A boat!” throughout the hospital. Soon it was just she and Pickie there.

He looked through the little telescope and said, “Another angel, Mama. As if we didn’t have enough already.” She asked what he meant, but he sat down to consider the Scrabble board again and handed the glass to Jemma. She looked through it and saw what the children had seen: a big boat, a cruise liner, floating backward between two icebergs, as if they were escorting it someplace.

There was another swarming to the roof, and people called out “Hello!” as the boat drifted nearer, even though it was still over a mile away, and the huge crowd grew entirely silent while they waited for a reply. Jemma went right to the Council chamber, swimming against the current on the ramp. Dr. Tiller was already there, sitting on a table and tapping one booted foot on a chair as she watched the boat getting bigger and bigger outside the window.

“What do you think, Dr. Claflin?” she asked. Jemma shrugged and sat down. When the other Friends and the rest of the Council had arrived they declared an emergency session and began to babble furiously, asking and answering questions like What does it mean, and What do you think, and What should we do, and Does anyone else think it looks like the Queen Elizabeth Two? The boat loomed behind them as they had their wild, excited discussions; Jemma turned to look over her shoulder every ten minutes and found it had gotten a little bigger. She called for order but no one could hear her, and she would not use the gavel. When she turned to Vivian she could hardly make herself heard until the four of them pushed their chairs together and huddled their heads.

“How will we get over to the boat?” asked Ishmael.

“What precautions should we take?” asked Vivian.

“How soon can we go?” asked Jemma.

“It is no place for you,” said Monserrat. “What if there are cannibals?”

“Why would there be cannibals?”

“Because,” Monserrat said. “There is always something bad on boats like that.”

“If I say I go, I go. Who’s in charge here?”

“We are,” said Ishmael.

“You are,” said Vivian, “but with qualifications.”

“Can anyone stop me from going over there?”

“Probably not,” said Ishmael. “But wouldn’t it be a better idea—”

“No,” Jemma said.

“Very well,” said Monserrat. “The four of us will go, though I saw the movie, Cannibal Cruise, and it was a boat just like that one which came drifting out of the mist to lure and destroy the curious.”

“The question remains,” said Ishmael. “How to travel?”

Vivian drew a picture of a boat on Jemma’s big yellow pad, and Ishmael, carefully taking the pen from her, broke it down into sections small enough to come out of a replicator. They traded the pen back and forth, clarifying and embellishing the sketch — sails, solar-powered propeller, hydrofoil, boarding crane — while the Council chamber continued in bedlam. Dr. Snood took off his shoe, finally, and pounded it on the table. “Order!” he shouted. “Order! Madame Friend, will you bring us to order?”

Jemma opened her mouth, but before she could speak the ship, which had disappeared as the hospital made one of its usual midday rotations, drifted into view again not a hundred yards away. Jemma stood up, and now she did like everyone else — she hurried to the window and pressed her face against the glass.

Dr. Snood lobbied vigorously to be appointed an ambassador, but the only thing worse than cannibals were cannibals encountered in the company of a snide fussbudget — Jemma had her absolute way. They appeased Dr. Snood by appointing him and the lift team as backups.

It was ten o’clock in the morning when Kidney spotted the boat. By five Jemma and the three lesser Friends were gathered at the head of the crowd on the roof. The boat had sidled up within twenty yards of them, close enough to read the name, the Celebration, and to see how utterly empty the decks and windows were. It was huge — the center of the hospital floated at a point about fifty yards from the bow, but the boat stretched out for hundreds of yards behind them.

They tested their phones one more time, and then Rob aimed the bazooka-sized launcher the angel had made for them and fired a rope and a hook across the water. It punched into a wall on the far side of a section of promenade deck and stuck fast. He sent another one over to strike four feet above the first, and he and Ishmael secured the lines to new hooks in the sycamore tree, stretching them tight with a crank. Rob tested them, tightening them both three times before he was satisfied, bouncing on the bottom one and launching himself over the first one, releasing one hand and doing a half twist before swinging down on the other side.

“Okay,” he said. “Are you sure you don’t want a fifth person?” He had sounded like Dr. Snood, when he had Jemma alone, arguing that it wasn’t safe for her to go.

“We’ll call if we need help,” Vivian said, and dialed her phone in demonstration. Back in the crowd, Dr. Snood answered his.

“Hello?” he said.

“See you later,” Vivian said. She hung up and climbed on the ropes. Jemma pulled at the neck of her maternity wetsuit — they were all wearing wetsuits — and went after her, looking down, like she wasn’t supposed to, as soon as she cleared the edge of the roof. A section of the eighth floor stuck out protectively underneath her, and then she cleared that. Emma waved at her from out of a fourth-floor window, part of an extraction team waiting with hooks and life preservers in the PICU, in case any of them fell in. Jemma put one black rubber bootie in front of the other and in five steps was over the green water. It made her feel cold just to look at it. She imagined the penguins again, streaming below the clear surface in a horde, and breaking the surface to jump up and perform stupid and amazing tricks on the rope.

Vivian shook the top line, and broke her reverie. “Come on, Poky,” she said.

On the other side, the four Friends arranged themselves in a line and began to explore. Ishmael went first, carrying the weapon. “The angel gave you that?” Jemma had asked him on the roof, when she saw that he was carrying a gun.

“It’s not what you think,” he said, turning and firing it at a bush. It shot something that looked like a stream of ink — not very fast, either. Jemma thought it was just a squirt gun until the coherent beam of ink suddenly broke apart into a net that wrapped around the bush. “That bush is neutralized,” Ishmael said.

They had landed on the third deck from the top of the ship. It was empty except for a row of lounge chairs. “They’re filthy,” said Monserrat, bending down to run her finger along the arm of a chair. It was covered with a layer of thick black dust, her finger left a glaring white mark. Vivian said, “Don’t touch that stuff.” She cupped her hand around her mouth and shouted out, “Hello!”

“You’re going to wake up the zombies,” Jemma said.

“There has to be someone here,” Vivian said.

“There doesn’t,” said Ishmael. “They could have gotten off at a different stop, or they could all be dead. Maybe they all jumped in the water. Maybe I was here, way before. Nothing looks familiar.”

“Maybe,” Jemma said. She closed her eyes and tried to look without using her eyes. Her fellow explorers were bright and obvious, she tried to look past them, imagining the ship to be entirely transparent, a cruise ship for Wonder Woman to relax on, to stuff herself at a constant buffet, to lie by the pool while she got a massage and a manicure and a teeth cleaning and a high colonic all at once.

“Let’s go,” Vivian said.

“Wait,” Jemma said. “I’m listening.”

“What do you hear?” asked Monserrat.

“Nothing,” said Jemma, already terminally distracted by the surprising variety of objects that came tumbling from Wonder Woman’s colon — old red meat, chewing gum, a California license plate, a hundred cocaine-stuffed condoms — but had seen already in her mind a glass boat empty of any flash of green life and filled with as much dust as air. They walked on in their cautious single file, down the deck toward the stern of the boat. Jemma looked back at the hospital. There was an unbroken line of people standing along the edge of the roof, and a face at every window. It should have been stranger, she thought, to see it floating there twenty yards away, but somehow the attendant icebergs seemed like the only strange part of the picture. The others turned around too, and all four of them stood, arrested by the sight until Snood, watching them with a pair of fancy binoculars, called to ask if something was wrong.

“It looks so small,” Ishmael said. “Have we really been in there such a long time?”

“Some of us longer than others,” said Vivian.

The wall to their left fell away after a few hundred feet, and the deck opened up across the width of the ship. There were dozens more chairs, and tables, all gathered in circles around a big circular bar. Jemma walked up and peered over the edge of it, at a hundred liquor bottles arranged in a spiral that echoed the shape of the hospital across the water. Not a single one was broken. The floor behind the bar was covered with the same black dust as the chairs.

“Hey,” Jemma said. “Footprints.” They crossed each other in the dust, and there was an intact pair standing in front of the vodka section.

“At least a thirteen,” Vivian said. “Do you think they’re fresh?” Everybody shrugged, not knowing how to tell such things. The back of the bar was sheltered by the wind, so they decided the prints might have been there for a long time. They crossed the deck and passed through a door onto rich carpet, raising dust with every step no matter how lightly they tried to go. Monserrat sneezed. “Hello,” Vivian said again, not very loud.

They passed a sign: Smoking Room, and pressed their heads against the glass to look inside at the dusty leather furniture and full ashtrays. Vivian’s phone rang again, making them all jump. “What?” she said, answering it. “Yes. Don’t call again unless an iceberg is about to hit us. All right. Goodbye. Snood again,” she said after she hung up, shaking her head. Beyond the smoking room they found another set of red-carpeted stairs. They considered splitting up, so some of them could continue exploring this deck while others went below, but fear of zombies or some similar unpleasantness kept them together. They discovered two more bars, a game room, a golf simulator, and a hot tub so full of dust it had become a pool of mud. They walked down the same strip of deck they’d landed on. Jemma waved at the hospital, feeling silly.

“It’s the Lido deck,” Vivian said excitedly at the bottom of the stairs, reading the name off a sign in the wall. “This is where all the action is. We’ll find someone here.”

“Or something,” said Monserrat. The nearest door led into a salon complex, a gym and a spa, and a row of doors that opened onto dusty massage tables. They found a shriveled magazine in the sauna. Ishmael put his finger in the third mud-tub they found.

“Don’t touch it,” said Vivian.

“Maybe it’s beauty mud,” he said.

“If you put it on your face, I’m not letting you back into the hospital,” Jemma said. But he only held up her finger and stared at it a moment before wiping it on his wetsuit. Outside was the big pool, covered with a fine layer of dust, but not muddy, an empty restaurant, and two long buffets filled with mummified food, shrunken heads of lettuce and dusty shrimp nubbins and pies caved in like old faces.

“Did they leave in a hurry?” Ishmael asked, considering a Renaissance-fair-sized turkey leg. He dropped it on the deck, making a dull thud that was echoed seconds later by a loud thud somewhere on the deck above them.

“What’d you do?” Vivian asked him. They all stood very still by the buffet, listening, Ishmael with his gun held up next to his ear, but they heard nothing else. They continued exploring; the Lido deck was empty but for dust and old food. On the next floor down they found the first rooms. The ones that were open were empty except for piles of dust, gathered in the carpet, pooled in the sinks, layered on top of the neatly turned down beds and the pillow-chocolates. At the rooms that were locked they knocked but no one answered. Ishmael broke one in with four hard kicks and two blows with his shoulder. He stumbled through the broken door and fell onto the bed, sending up a huge cloud of dust that sent them all backpedaling into the hall, coughing and sneezing. Ishmael emerged, face sooty, wiping dust from his eyes. “Nobody home,” he said.

“These are the fancy rooms,” Monserrat observed. “They all have the nice balconies, but they’re still so small. I was going to take a cruise with my husband, before. It seems like such a terrible idea, now, floating for days out on the water. And so small! My room is bigger, over there. To think that people used to go float on the water on purpose. Where could the fun possibly be in that?”

Past the coffee bar and the library, through the perfumery and a shop with towering shelves full of sentimental porcelain figures, down a grand stairway and through a green atrium, through two dining rooms, into the kitchens and down the stairs again, they continued, finding no one, slowing and stopping when they came into a narrow hall lined on either side with photographs of the passengers. There were hundreds of them to look at — anyone who stepped off the gangplank had become the subject of an unsolicited portrait. Jemma blackened the elbows of her blue wetsuit rubbing dust from the glass to better see the faces. Without speaking they proceeded in tiny side steps down the hall, two on either side, looking at every picture, until Vivian’s phone rang. “I told you not to call me again,” she said, but then her tone softened. “Oh. Oh. Okay, we’ll hurry. There’s nothing here, anyway.” She turned to Jemma. “It’s Rob,” she said. “He says the boat’s drifting. His little meter is reading increasing tension on the line. How much?” she said into the phone again. “That unit means nothing to me. Is that a lot? Okay.” She hung up. “He did a calculation. If the drift continues at the current rate then we have four hours before the line breaks.”

“There’s no one here,” Jemma said, peering at an apple-shaped lady in a tennis visor. She wore a pair of capri pants and a striped tank top — a sort of uniform, there were twenty other women in the hall wearing the same thing. “Look at them all. They were all here, and now no one’s here.”

“We should split up,” said Ishmael, “if we’re in a hurry.”

“There’s no one here,” Jemma said again, shaking her head, but they divvied up the ship, Ishmael getting the most territory, Jemma the least. She only had to look on the rest of this deck. They split up, phones switched to walkie-talkie mode. Jemma turned away from the pictures and continued down the hall, peeking behind another set of bars, resisting the call of the karaoke room — the stereo was quiet but the screen was still actively scrolling the lyrics to “You’ve Got a Friend”—and coming finally to the casino. It was the last room on her deck, so she took her time searching it. Twice the every-fifteen-minute call came on her phone, all of them reporting how they’d found nothing. There was nothing behind the bar in the casino, no one in the fancy marble bathrooms, no one under the blackjack table. Cups of coins still sat on stools next to the slot machines. She played a couple, and wasted twenty minutes demonstrating her bad luck. Worse than the slot machines was the roulette table — it sucked her in. She placed a few bets, but soon forgot them, entranced by the way the ball bounced, rolled, and settled, and complicated the game by rolling the ball from the far end of the table, or tossing it from five, ten and fifteen paces. At twenty it bounced off the table and rolled far away, disappearing under a table in one of the four adjoining bars. Jemma got down on her knees to chase it, and found herself face to face with the boy as soon as she lifted the cloth. About fourteen, dressed in a pair of shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, he had his arms wrapped tight around himself, a plush dolphin and a leather-covered book clutched to his chest. She touched him — he was warm. A thin strand of hair blew away from his mouth with every breath he took, then settled again against his face. Jemma closed her eyes and found him not there in head. She opened them again and prodded his shoulder with her fist. “Hey,” she said. “Wake up.”

True to Rob’s prediction, the boat did not stay with them for long. An hour after they brought the boy back to the hospital the boat began visibly to drift behind them. The ropes snapped, and the gangway that twenty citizens were hastily constructing in a hallway of the seventh floor never had a chance to be lifted into position. The boat simply stopped moving, but they did not. It passed farther and farther behind them while a small crowd stood watching on the roof. Everybody had the feeling it was going to sink, but it only passed into a patch of gray mist. When it was gone people hung their heads, their hopes of attaching a luxury annex to the hospital finally dashed. Dr. Tiller pointed out derisively that they probably had more dance floors and movie theatres and massage rooms in the hospital than the boat had, anyway.

They took the boy to the PICU. A cautious nurse had stored a bed, instead of tossing it out the window in the big purge, many weeks before when so many hospital beds and IV poles and bedside commodes had gone to their rest in the sea. So he lay under display of his entirely normal vitals, in a room decorated with the drawings of the second-graders who used it as an art studio, his clothes folded neatly on a chair next to his head, his dolphin under his arm, and his book under his hand. It looked like a diary, complete with a lock. No one had opened it yet.

“He looks fine,” Vivian said.

“Almost,” Jemma said. “I really think he’s just sleeping.” She had tried to wake him up across the water, sending a spark through her finger that should have made him jump, but it didn’t even interrupt his snoring. “Well,” she said to Vivian. “I think I’m ready. Would you send the kids in?” She’d asked for her class to be there, to watch and maybe to learn and maybe even to help, or maybe because to involve them, even in the most peripheral way, was more like teaching them something than were games of scrabble, picnics, and her cheating game of hide-and-go-seek. The majority of the crowd had transferred itself from the roof to the space outside the PICU. Inside there were only members of the Council, people Jemma wanted there, and a few citizens chosen by quickly drawn lots. The kids filed through into the room. Someone had arranged them from smallest to largest. They were all very subdued. Even Jarvis looked awed, and was very well-behaved. They stood in a semicircle around Jemma, all joining hands without her even asking them to do it.

“Here we go,” Jemma said. She sat down on his clothes, took his hand, and closed her eyes. He was still curiously not there when she tried to look at him just using her brain. She had to send a little shoelace of flame whipping out and into him to light him up before she could see him properly. It had been a while before she’d really burned — in the past weeks there’s been no call for her fire. Her last patient had come to her over two weeks before, Wayne, who broke his arm in a roller-hockey game. She thought it would take a while to really gear up, that she would have to call up flame for hours before she could really have enough to sock it to him, or that she’d have to let it burn on her before it could get hot enough to wake him up. But it came right away as hard as it had the night she’d done her big fix. One moment she was holding his hand, and only the children standing right there could perceive that there was a noodle of fire wrapped in a coil along both their wrists; the next, she and he both had burst into cool green flames that wrapped the whole bed and licked at the ceiling. Jemma, her mind suddenly full of the image of the hospital viewed from the boat, saw for a moment the strange green flash in the window.

He wasn’t well, after all, not all right — she saw it once he was properly illuminated. He had subtle warts, and most varieties of sexually transmitted infection — syphilis and gonorrhea and chlamydia and scabies, everything but lice and granulosum venereum and the big one, for which she searched assiduously, but there was no trace of it, and she was sure she would recognize it, if it was there. She stomped on the spirochetes with giant green shoes, made fire fingers between which to pinch critters and cocci, placing them one by one into an imaginary bucket that she emptied out the window. The strange little chalmydiae went chirruping out of epithelial cells, evicted by fire and fury, jumping into the bucket like trained circus fleas. These problems were all easy to fix, but none of them, she knew, was what was making him sleep.

She looked through him, from head to toe, over and over, burning further and further in until she felt she could number not just the hairs of his head but the cells of his body. There was still something wrong. She could not put a shape or a name to it, though she burned him and burned him, and as she herself burned brighter even than when she stood in the NICU with Brenda hanging on her finger. Every child but Pickie and Jarvis ran out of the room, and of the others only Ethel kept trying to look into the conflagration to watch the shapes in the middle, to put out her own mind and help with whatever was happening. All over the hospital every living person experienced an off sense, like someone plucking at their spine, or a baby kicking inside them, or just a plainer nausea as Jemma pummeled the boy — she was listening so hard to him, and looking so hard into him that their discomfort became louder and plainer to her as the long minutes passed. There it was, almost a shadow, flickering in the edge of her mind and then disappearing entirely. She stood alone in a bright green room, the sleeping boy at her feet.

She raised her hands and cried out. She felt her baby kick in her, protesting or cheering, she couldn’t tell — even when she was burning this bright she could not look inside herself to see it. She gathered up as much of the fire as she could bear and pounded him with it, no longer trying to give a shape or a voice to what afflicted him, but trying to destroy it. Flames shot out of the room and down the hall, and all over the hospital people stumbled. Then they were gone. Jemma was in the bed, lying on the boy, her cheek pressing against his cheek. He was still asleep.