The Children's Hospital

59

People came to watch the boy sleep. Because he was in isolation no one was allowed to get very close to him — a sheet of glass and a plastic tent separated him from every spectator. They put him in a special room, and required everyone who took care of him to dress up in big puffy moon suits, complete with glass helmets and air hoses that snaked out of the back and looked like long pink tails. Not everyone read a belated lesson of quarantine in the abundant black ash on the boat, and though Jemma insisted the boy was somehow sick Dr. Snood pointed out that there was no spot on him and that no test they had done had revealed any illness in him. Still, most everyone agreed that it was better to err on the side of prudence until they knew exactly what they were dealing with. What that was, they still really had no idea. Dr. Pudding had dusted off his equipment and rebooted his computers to scan the boy’s whole body with every available modality, but the plain films and the CT and MRI and MRA scans revealed nothing except his bone age and that everyone was fascinated by him — he drew trailing crowds every time he was wheeled out of the PICU down to radiology, and bootleg copies of his scans multiplied almost as quickly as had the copies of his diary that appeared in the hands of thirteen-year-olds almost as fast as they could be confiscated. The diary entered the popular culture of the hospital; the boy’s life became the subject of heated speculation at Karen’s bar and a few brawls at Connie’s, and what started as speculative recreations of his last days became lurid horror and pornography—Goodbye, Mrs. DiMange; A Hand in the Mist; The Lido Zombie; A Reagan in the Sun.

Jemma stood with Rob and Ishmael in radiology while the boy got a last scan, a modified PET that was supposed not just to look for activity in his brain but to indicate how he was feeling. Dr. Pudding tried to explain it, but lost Jemma when he posited the existence of happy and sad glucose, each with its own signature that blazed forth, for anyone who could see it, when it was metabolized. “It isn’t happy or sad inherently,” he said, “but the brain makes it so, in spectacularly fine gradations.”

“He looks happy,” Ishmael pointed out, while the three of them watched through the window as the boy’s legs disappeared into the scanner. “Don’t you get a happy feeling, just looking at him? It’s like looking at a baby sleeping.”

“He makes me nervous,” Rob said.

“He makes me afraid,” said Jemma.

“Or a cat, asleep on a radiator,” said Ishmael.

“Just before it bursts into flame,” said Rob.

“I think I knew him,” Ishmael said again. “I feel like I’ve seen him, before. Maybe I did come from there, after all.”

“Maybe you’re Matt,” said Rob.

“That’s not even funny,” Ishmael said. He’d drafted the resolution condemning Matt and Gavin and the bathroom men and all the others who’d molested the boy or been molested by him — they’d spent hours trying to make a decision, and finally passed the useless resolution nearly unanimously. Jemma abstained, but wouldn’t veto it because that would have been an equally useless act, and because it seemed to matter so much to Ishmael, who never before had been so spirited in a Council discussion. “He’s my brother even if he isn’t my brother,” he said confidently. “Didn’t we both come from there?” He pointed at the wall, beyond which lay the nearest windows and the water.

“Here it is!” Dr. Pudding cried from behind his bank of monitors. They went and looked at the images — multi-colored snow in the shape of a brain. “He’s sad!” he said. “Look at all that mauve depression!”

That test, and all the others, while descriptive, were never profitable — they couldn’t tell what was wrong, and though they screened his blood and urine for every toxin and toxic metabolite they could think of, Dr. Sundae developing new assays with the assistance of the angel when the science of the old world did not suffice to answer a question, no test yielded more than did the evidence of their eyes: the boy was sleeping.

Jemma was sure there was an answer to be had, it was just a matter of framing the question correctly. There was a reason he was sleeping, and she thought she might puzzle it out if she could just look at him in the right way, or look at him for long enough, or look at him in the right state of mind. She spent hours in his room — too many, Vivian told her, for a pregnant woman to spend in the room of a boy with a mystery illness, no matter that she wore a five-ply isolation suit and tempered-glass helmet, no matter that she didn’t breathe the same air as him. But she felt compelled to be close to him, and to study him with her usual and unusual senses. So she stood in his room, half sitting on a table, looking at him.

He lay in his special PICU bed — made more special in the past two weeks by three nurses who’d added accessories both decorative and functional: a set of projectors, one on either side of the rails beside his head, showed scenes of lost nature, shivering deciduous forests and blue mountains and stark desert dunes, on the ceiling above his face; a pair of shot-glass-sized speakers played the sort of music they thought he’d like; stuffed animals, bionic and plush, rode chains and motors to nuzzle his cheek or his ribs or roar over his head, set up by a nurse who had read someplace that children in comas benefited from this sort of stimulation. A judicious selection of gifts — balls and gloves and rubber dinosaurs brought by people who seemed not to understand what an ancient sort of fourteen he was — was arranged by the nurses on the tables that flanked his bed. Clear-plastic-drape walls — he could have just touched the ones at his sides if he reached his hands toward them — dropped down from the ceiling on three sides of the bed. Only his feet were covered by his sheet and blanket, white hospital finery of the new standard. Jemma ran her eyes back and forth over him, from the hidden shapes of his toes, over his strange Popeye legs, with their huge calves, knobby knees, and fat, hairy thighs, past the foley tube that ran into his diaper, up the trail of hair that came out of the diaper and petered out just past his belly button, marking a border of maturation — everywhere above it he was practically hairless, except on top of his head. She watched the quiet movement of his chest as he breathed, and the little tug between his clavicles that came every fourth or fifth breath. He cracked his pale lips to utter a wet sigh. She put out a finger toward him, meaning to touch his shoulder and send in a little fire to dry out his mouth and throat, but then did it the old fashioned way instead, picking up the Yankauer and suctioning his mouth and the back of his throat. His heart rate dipped — she felt it in her stomach and heard it in the deepening tones of the monitor — and then rose again. The tugging between his clavicles went away. He sighed again.

With the suction still in her hand she put a finger on him, right on his chin, so together they struck a thoughtful pose, and she concentrated on him more fully, imagining that she was suddenly made of cloud, drifting over him then settling over him. She was trying to touch his mind, to root around in his brain to see if anyone was home, to see if he was dreaming. It worked no better than usual. Instead of becoming more aware of him, she found herself repelled from the empty space he occupied but somehow did not take up, and for all that she was concentrating on him, she only became more aware of the people around him in the hospital. They were moving a little differently since he’d come on board, his presence a strange new mass that altered their orbits and routines in subtle ways. She imagined them pausing to consider him: Maggie staring out the window, away from her students, and seeing his body hanging in the sky; Dr. Tiller rocking in a chair in the old psych ward, halted in embroidering a headdress to wonder what his middle name might be; Ishmael stopping for a moment the push-ups he made more difficult by piling half his preschool class on his back to consider again how this boy made him feel finally not lonely anymore; Rob interrupting his own bath-time song with a gloomy feeling — overwhelmed with the certainty that this kid was really bad news; Vivian breaking away from her most obsessive study of the journal not to eat or sleep but to stare and stare into a mound of black cruise-ship ash. It must be her imagination, she knew, but the scenes looked real in her head, and she felt so sure that there was a new list to the hospital, that it no longer rode straight in the water but leaned a little because this boy was so heavy that it must acknowledge him in at least this way. Jemma took another stab at him, covering his whole face with her hand and seeking to understand him by setting him entirely on fire. It showed her everything but revealed nothing, and it made her feel threatened by him, this boy who would not become well. Just before she stopped she had a surge of worry for her baby, because she thought, for no good reason, that the boy was threatening him, too. She took away her hand and opened her eyes and sighed, turning away from the bed. Her whole class was lined up at the window, left to right, Josh to Valium, displayed in order of height. They all waved.