The Children's Hospital

57

“It’s a tale of sex and woe,” said Karen. “Just like my marriage. You want me to read you some?”

“No thanks,” said Dr. Chandra. “I’ve heard enough of those.”

“You’re just being a prude. It’s not like you think. It’s not pornographic. It’s philosophic. Well, maybe not quite that either, but it’s not what you think.”

“I have no interest,” he said. “Anyway, we’re not allowed, and I always do what I’m told.”

“I’m allowed. You’re allowed. The twelve-year-olds are not allowed. Which is as it should be, though like I say, it’s not pornographic. But I can see how it could be dangerous, you know. It makes you think the wrong thoughts. I find myself thinking the wrong thoughts. Bad thoughts. Not dirty thoughts. How many times do I have to tell you that it’s not like that? You want me to read you some?”

“I just want some more coffee,” he said. She sighed, closed the book she’d been holding open in front of him all the time they’d been talking, put it down, and took his cup. He stared at it but did not open it or even touch it. He’d seen the boy in the PICU, had taken the tour there just like everybody else, and wondered like everybody else what was going on with him, that his illness could resist Jemma Claflin’s Jesus-magic. The boy had a beautiful face. It wasn’t a surprise that people like Karen were falling in love with him, or that they wanted to know every last little thing about him, or that they would form reading groups around his sex diary.

“I have no interest in that sort of thing,” he said again to Karen when she gave him his coffee.

“Which is exactly your problem,” she said. “You have no interest.”

“Have a good day,” he said, trying to make it sound like he actually wanted her to have a bad day, but he always failed at that. His compliments only ever sounded like compliments. If he sat still for it Karen would spend an hour digging out the root causes of his unhappiness. It was always offered, he knew, in a spirit of earnest helpfulness, but her argument always sounded like an insult, and stung like one, and never inspired him to improve himself. It only made him want to go to his room, to sit on his balcony thinking about how he could hardly stand to be around his only friend in the hospital, and calm himself by staring at the water.

When he got back to his room he sat in his usual place, and stared out like usual at the horizon, but no peace came to him. When he closed his eyes he could see the boy’s face on the water. “I have no interest in him,” he said again, but when he went inside to ask the angel for lunch he asked for a copy of the little book as well.

I can still see Miami and I’m already bored. A new year for me Mrs. DiMange but everything seems the same. Still the same gray color in everybody’s face and on my face and still the same tired feeling when I look up at the sky. It should lift something out of me looking up like that it used to but never does any more. In dream number five you are looking up into that sky and the blue feeling is something you have gathered in your mouth and when we kiss it passes into me and I think, it’s like this. Also we are flying, or you are flying and I am riding you — yes, we’re doing the Jackson and it’s like in number seven but in that one you are floating on the water and every time I push into you the water pushes back and you cry out like a bird.

They’re afraid to leave me home, that’s why I’m here, floating away on a boat full of old anniversary couples. It has nothing to do with my birthday, except that I’d have an excuse to throw another party, not that I would. Nobody really appreciates it, when you go out of your way like that. Better to pick one person and do a whole party’s worth of shit for them, than to spread your goodwill among a gaggle of dumb asses. In number twenty-three I have a party just for you. It’s in my house and every room is decorated in a different way, always with things you like, only for you.

We are going to San Juan and Jamaica and Aruba and St. Thomas and Martinique. Who cares?

A day of discoveries, Mrs. DiMange. I am the youngest person on board. There’s food everywhere and you can stuff yourself at the Lido buffet all night long. The Alternative Theater does not show alternative movies — next I will puzzle out in exactly what way it is alternative, no one seems to know. The bartender in the casino won’t card me. There’s no one in the piano bar during the day and I can play all I want while the sun is up.

And another discovery — I went in to pee in the casino bathroom while Muz was slaving at the slot machine and it was very fancy — white marble and real towels folded by the sink and a little man who runs in twelve times a day to change them, and soap in a dish, and French-milled pucks in the urinals. They were the good kind, there in a row with nothing to block the view of your neighbor. In number 13 you walk in while I’m there and stand with a banana poking out of your pants. I am in disguise, you say, and I am in love, and then there comes a Jackson, you against the wall with your cheek pressed against the seams between the cement blocks. I was thinking about it, because it was so fancy, and I was redoing our bathroom in my head, taking out the truckstop décor and installing the new marble — just standing there. Not waiting for one because it didn’t seem like the right place. I get a sense, you know. I thought I could tell where things happen. It’s like there’s a glow, like how you know somebody’s interested, even though they’re standing in line next to you at the supermarket with their wife and their three kids. You look at them and they’ll follow you anywhere. It’s like that, but with a place and not a person.

He just reached out. It was fine. That’s enough of an invitation, standing there in a line of high-class urinals with a great big boner. I could hardly be offended, and he wasn’t so bad. He was dressed up for dinner in a white jacket and a black bow tie. I touched that first — it was real, the kind you have to knot up yourself. Seven black buttons on a shirt as fancy as any of the toilets. Silver rims — I thought I could see myself. Then I held on to him. He was bigger than me. Jack says soaking your dick in miracle-gro will make it bigger but I did that all summer and it made no fucking difference at all.

We need a little privacy, he said, walking backward through one of the marble doors. He stood on the toilet so the little man, when he came in to change the towels, would think it was just me in there, standing and thinking. I did a Bush 1 on him and then I climbed up and he did me too. It was fine. I saw him later in the dining room with his family. He raised his knife to me like a salute and he winked. I walked right past his table to go to the bathroom again and I waited for five minutes but he didn’t come.

Everything all right in there? Muz asked, when I finally came back, putting a hand on my sensitive stomach.

Fine, I said, but nothing tasted any good, and no matter what the waiter brought it wasn’t what I wanted.

Vivian did not like what she was reading. She had read the whole thing through twice already, but kept going back to it because she thought it must contain a clue to the boy’s past, and to their future. She had read it the first time looking for answers about the boat, but it said nothing about where everyone had gone. No mass leap from the decks, no zombie war, no death by starvation. Just the desperate notes of a boy in trouble.

“I do not like what I am reading,” she said out loud. She was at her desk, hunched close over the book, as if getting her brain close to the letters was going to make it easier for her to understand their secret meaning.

“I can offer you something far more pleasant,” the angel said.

Vivian shook her head and rubbed her eyes, then looked up at the pictures of the boy she’d taped across the wall above her desk, eight views of his sleeping face. If you studied them like she had, you could see that his expression was not the same in every picture. Here there was just a little droop of the eyebrows that suggested sadness, here a hint of a smile, here his eyes seemed shut tight, not just closed in sleep. The diary was a desperate message to his teacher — so full of love and yet how it condemned her, so Mrs. DiMange was the Great Satan of the hospital. But he was a message too, as obvious and as inscrutable as his diary, thrust at them over the waters just as another had been thrust up at them. And did he speak as lovingly, and damn as thoroughly, as this little black book?

Two today.

In the morning a man in the Lido buffet. I brushed up against his belly while we were in line for breakfast, and then he brushed up against me before he sat down. We went up two more times and both times it happened — my hand drifting across him I could feel how hard it was even through the pants and even just with my knuckles. He stayed behind after his wife went away and after Muz and Puz went to the salon. I went into the bathroom it was the good kind — just one toilet and a lock on the door. Mostly he just wanted to stand there and Wilson and by the time I finally convinced him to Coolidge it wasn’t even a minute before he popped. He wouldn’t look at me afterward but he asked me my name.

Later on but before lunch in the gym. I lifted for a little while and then I went in the back. There was nobody in the sauna but one guy was sitting in the steam room he looked up at me when I came in and I could tell right away though he didn’t move until the steam came on. Then his hand came out of the cloud and settled on my chest. He said I was a big boy but I said I was just inflated from the bench press it goes away in a half hour and then I’m just another skinny puppy. Bush again and a little bit of Bush Jr. It got too hot and we had to finish in the shower.

Matt and Gavin. They’re nice names. I used to say my name was Matt, sometimes. What’s your name? They never really want to know. They’re just being polite I think I like it better when they don’t ask and I don’t ask either. Once somebody called out my real name while we were doing it and I couldn’t even finish I was so mad. I knocked his face against the floor I was hoping so bad that I would knock his teeth right up into his nose but then he made this noise it was very sad and I had to stop everything. I didn’t know why I was so mad it seemed a little extreme but later I figured it out. My name is for you. It’s for you to say. You say it in every one except number 20 and 15 and 40.

They were by the pool I sat down between them it didn’t take very long. Sometimes I am lucky but not usually this lucky there is something special about this boat. Matt smelled like coconuts Gavin smelled like gum. What do you like to do they asked me I said everything. I got to be in the middle of the Coolidge.

“It’s not breakfast material,” Frank said, when his wife paused in her reading to give him a look that invited some kind of commentary.

“What does that mean? It’s not cereal? It’s not yogurt? You can’t eat it?”

“It’s too sad, to read it in the beginning of the day. Let’s have something else. Where’s The Tattle Bear? Or how about something made up entirely?”

Connie shook her head. “That’s exactly your problem.”

“It is? What is?”

“This, exactly this. You want to avoid the problem, and bury your face in the paper. Listen, the problem is more important than The Tattle Bear, and more important than breakfast, and more important than any of that fancy pornography you’ve been watching.”

“But I haven’t been… what are you talking about?”

“And how like you,” she said, surprising him with an expression he had not seen since before the old world passed away — she wrinkled her nose and pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. To anyone else it would have looked like she was just concentrating very hard and like she smelled something very peculiar, but to Frank it announced her loathing disappointment. As suddenly as she put it on, she took the expression off, and then her face was merely ugly and sad, and she was crying.

“What?” he asked. “Good God, what is it?”

“How can you not know,” she said between little sobs, “when I’m talking about our daughter?”

“Ah,” he said, and he didn’t need for her to say, If he is doing this, then what is she doing? Or if a boy can be so sad, than can’t a girl? It was exactly the sort of ridiculous thing she would obsess over, but he didn’t say so, too sad himself at the way she was crying, and at the way this old difference had crept back into their life, and at the way they were fighting again. To see her like this again, so angry and crazy and sad, was as surprising as seeing a mountain thrust up out of the sea. And yet it had a quality, too, of fateful recognition. Of course she was still like this, and of course the earth had not utterly passed away.

“Don’t you sigh at me!” she shrieked. He didn’t answer, or even heave a more expansive sigh, but said, “I’m sorry.” He reached over the table and took the book and started to read from where she had left off.

A girl today, finally. Not a girl — a lady, older than you, even. And her husband, too, but he mostly just watched. She said his name — Scott! Scott! — at the end of our Reagan it was very traditional. The Reagan, that is. Not even a Nancy, just a Ronald, just me on top and him getting closer and closer until he was touching me but no Coolidge though I called out for it I might have said please. He called back to her, too, reaching past me to touch her I could feel him pressed up against my back and he sprayed all over me without hardly any incentive at all. Then they both held me I did a very simple Harrison until I popped and they both put their hands in it and put their hands in their mouths it was like watching Pooh eating honey.

I keep wondering what was going on between them, during. They weren’t even touching, even at the end he was just reaching for her and he ran his hands over her without touching her. I was close and I could see it, always an inch or a half inch or just a breath of space between them. It was like they had called me out of some place to put me between them but I wasn’t there, either. I can’t explain it but it was very definite this is a very strange boat every day I discover it more. I mean I knew what it was like while it was happening but now I am grabbing at it it’s like smoke but I know I’ll think about it while I’m asleep. I kept looking back at him and looking at her and looking back at him I wanted eyes in the back of my head to see them both at the same time. They must be very much in love.

Nothing today, except you. I did three Harrison’s just by myself and it was numbers twenty-two, fourteen, nineteen, fifty-three, and seventy — seventy all alone by itself for twenty minutes between coming back on board and going to dinner I finished just in time. We are in Aruba but all these places seem the same to me, the market squares and the white beaches. Everywhere we go Puz buys a bottle of rum and Muz buys a big tube of Retin-A at the drug store now she has three. She stopped me in the middle of the square this afternoon Puz was walking ahead and she stopped in the middle of making fun of him. She put her hand on my arm and held on to her hat like it might blow away from the questions she was about to ask and said, Are you all right? Are you having a good time?

Oh yes I said. Very good very very good.

There were opportunities today a man on the beach and a lady with a dog and a note from Matt and Aaron slipped under my door but I just wanted to be alone with you now it is almost midnight and somebody is standing a little ways down the deck staring out just like me I could walk by him and touch him as I passed and then it would happen I can already see it. But let him go let them all go I just want to be here with you.

“Are you bored?” Ethel asked Pickie Beecher.

“I am always bored,” he said.

“Well, keep cutting. We’re almost done.” They were snipping words out of the diary and putting them in a glass bowl on the floor. Pickie kept dropping them from too high, and then chasing the fluttering word as it drifted about her room. She had opened a window on the same day that the boat-boy had come into the hospital. She had just finally felt like it, was all.

She had the thought that the boy had something to tell her, and to tell all of them — a fascinating and horrible story, full of something worse and more exciting than mere zombies — and she wanted to help him to tell it. But a séance had yielded the usual silence, which made sense because he wasn’t dead. And the aluminum tiara that the angel insisted was the telepathy device she had asked for only made her hear a very quiet sort of murmuring that she could easily have just been imagining. She couldn’t get close enough to put a pen in his sleeping hand, and sitting quietly with a pen in her hand yielded nothing but page after page of straight lines. Then she had the idea of using his own words. They would isolate every last one of them in a bowl, and then draw them out one after another to assemble a message, and maybe even a conversation.

“My hand hurts,” Pickie said.

“Keep working.”

“You are a cruel master.”

“Don’t call me that. Friends don’t call each other master.”

“I have no friends, except my brother, and where is he?”

“Don’t start that again. Just keep cutting, we’re almost done.” For a while the only sound was of their scissors working as she snipped in her book and Pickie snipped in his — the boy had written on both sides of every page, so to avoid getting words that were whole on one side but truncated on the other, she got a copy for each of them and painted out whole pages in them, odds in the one and evens in the other. “You know,” she said, as she snipped apart the last two words and let them fall into the bowl, “I don’t cut because I want to hurt myself. I cut because I want to feel alive.” Pickie yawned. “Hold on,” Ethel said. “The good part is coming.”

They closed their eyes and fished in the bowl with their hands, pinching the slips between their fingers and laying them out on an empty game board. It was Chutes and Ladders, one of the many old favorites in the playroom that even the preschoolers had abandoned for the more sophisticated diversions of the angel.

Still cry different silver wonder four teacher were the words.

“What do you think it means?” Ethel asked.

Pickie seemed hardly to think at all before he replied. “Still because he still misses his brother. Cry to cry for him. Different because he is unique in his grief, though the absence of a brother is the commonest grief and the most essential loneliness. Silver for his brother’s silver eyes, never to shine in the world. Wonder for the lost wonder of his iron sighs, and the miracles that died with him. Four is the perfect number — it is everywhere and has nothing to do with the message. Teacher because his brother was to teach him happiness and now it is a lesson he will never learn.”

Ethel looked at him a moment and then gave him a hug, a gesture he tolerated like always. She gathered up the words and put them back in the bowl. “Let’s try again,” she said.

A double Coolidge from Matt and Gavin it’s not so often you can have them. Matt behind and Aaron in front it was almost too much they kept saying, are you okay and I couldn’t talk because I was too close, chasing something again and almost getting it. They were interfering with the questions so I gave up on the AP class and we went back to the simpler thing, just one at a time, each of them in turn I could not make them go quick or hard enough though I called out for it and they shouted back, and shouted to each other — not like love though it was like at swim practice somebody shouting at you the water makes the voice seem far away. Go Matt go a little harder a little faster you almost have it. Every hit I moved a little further up the bed until my head was against the wall, every hit I was a little bit closer it was you I was chasing, always you no matter who it is. What a mystery how it is never you but it is always you, I reach and reach I can hardly stand it. They’re not wimpy fags like usual they were a little too fainthearted for the double but they do a good job on the easier thing I can hardly tell when one stops and the other starts, they’re so smooth.

I almost get you. You’re hand is reaching out to me and like always I miss it I just barely miss it.

Our last night so I thought it would be nice to have everybody together. I was thinking of everything we could do, things I don’t even have a name for yet. Matt and Gavin and almost everybody else, I found them and each said okay, see you later, but everyone was late and for a long time I thought it would be just me. Then Scott and Mrs. Scott arrived and then Matt and Gavin I thought it was all going to be ruined they were supposed to come in fifteen-minute intervals because I hadn’t told anybody the whole plan. I might have a friend there, too, I said, somebody cool, but I didn’t say who but it was all okay I shouldn’t have worried even though Matt and Gavin were frightened of the girl I could tell.

I named three new things: McKinley and Buchanan and Cleveland. The rooms aren’t very big, especially the singles. That was okay, too. It was like I was swimming through them, suspended in a Bush or a Bush Jr., or a Reagan and a Coolidge — I was floating I was flying I was on my way. Let this be a lesson to you, you told me, how everyone is connected by love. Look at these strangers they would not be together except for you they would all be alone if not for you you are a teacher like me. I am a teacher like you.

* * *

Dr. Chandra was touching himself, though there should not have been anything in the pages of the journal that really excited him in that way — it really was a tale of woe, after all. But it was something he did when he was upset, and the sadness of the story combined with the way it brought back memories of his own teenage adventures with men three and four times his age to make it seem like the necessary thing. Though he told himself over and over as he did it — I am not thinking of that, meaning he was not putting himself in the place of those creepy old men, the way he sometimes in his masturbating imagination put himself in the place of the creepy old men who had pounded his face or his bottom, and imagined his own face, and his own lips crying out under the weight of a fat hairy married man. Really he wasn’t thinking of anything for a while, but was only aware of the thing in him that was, stroke by stroke, coming closer to being launched out of his soul — a sadness and an unease and a frustration. Then he did see the boy, not naked or bottom up, not even the pleasant curve of his arm or the beautiful taper of hair at the back of his neck, but whole, neither clothed nor unclothed. He saw him in a way he could not properly describe, since it was a vision that seemed to include so much more than merely physical attributes. And suddenly the work he was doing — the very familiar work of temporarily ameliorating his own sad-sack situation — was not being done for him but for the boy, and with the same single-minded and vigorous force of imagination with which he might otherwise be imagining just how it might feel to be screwed by William Jennings Bryan or Conan the Barbarian or the handsome Yemeni who worked at the Falafel King down the street from his apartment, he now saw a different life for the boy, absent of desperate random screwings and ruinous teacherly vaginas, and loathing, and sadness. He imagined the boy, now not just clothed and unclothed but somehow bodied and unbodied, utterly at home in the world, and this was an ultimate pleasure. Even to consider it from the great distance pierced by his suddenly unbridled imagination was too much for Dr. Chandra. He blew with a wracking shudder and a great moan, and then lay back on his bed, totally exhausted, feeling somehow, despite appearances, that he had done something right for once.