The Children's Hospital

62

Dr. Chandra shuffled down the ramp, looking at his shoes. They were better shoes than he’d ever had in his life. Previously, before the end of the world, he could never get ones that fit him because his left foot was a size nine-and-a-half and his right foot was a size ten-and-a-half, and though he usually tried to buy for the bigger foot, he was a sucker for a cheap shoe, and gravitated to stores where two-hundred-dollar shoes were on sale for fifty dollars. They were outliers and misfits in the most exact sense of that word, the shoes that migrated to the huge, sad emporiums where he shopped — little tennies hardly big enough for a kewpie doll lay next to huge Frankenstein boots. He always bought the big shoes, because they were cheap and because it made him feel special, if fake, knowing that people perceived him as having big feet, and some reasonably handsome man or woman might look at him as he clomped down the street in his size thirteens and wonder, was it true what they say about men with big feet?

They were hard to run in, but he almost never had any occasion to run in the old world, someone having said falsely of him that they had never seen him ever run even to a code, that he had only done that thing like when you are trying to be polite to the driver who is allowing you to cross in front of their car at an intersection, where you give the appearance of running though you are still moving at the velocity of a walk. And the laces would never stay tied, perhaps because the constant sliding motion of his foot within the shoe slowly worked them loose as he walked. He was always having to stop and balance on one foot to tie them, a struggle if he had a package or had been drinking, and he had a horror of touching the ground, which made it complicated to touch the laces that had been flipping and flopping against the filthy sidewalk, sometimes trailing in a smear of poop or a glistening comma of spittle. A normal person would have just bought shoes that fit, but when he looked down he got a rare good feeling, watching his big feet fly over the earth and never saw when he passed his striding reflection in a shop window, what everyone else did, a schlumfy goofball in clown shoes.

But finally he had shoes that fit him. The angel made them special, sized exactly to each foot but shaped so that one did not appear larger than the other, and both appeared larger than they actually were. The laces were coated with a very selective adhesive resin that stuck only to itself, not to the shoes, not his fingers, and not to the filthy ground, and now every day he tied his shoes exactly once. He had the aspect of somebody who was staring depressively at his shoes, but really he was admiring them — they were only three days old and the best thing to happen to him this week.

He looked up, finally, narrowly missing a collision with a child — it was Jeri Vega, one of the old liver kids. Months after her recovery, he was still shocked by how well she looked, and hardly recognized her out of her gaunt, yellow hairiness. She looked up into his face as she twirled around him, gazing seriously into his eyes and giving him a sharp Shirley Temple salute. They had all had that look about them, before, not in their eyes but something around the eyes that proclaimed their chronic illness. It was the closest thing to clinical acumen he had developed in his short medical career, being able to recognize it, even in the fetal surgery and bone-marrow transplant poster-children who had lived cutely on billboards and bus-sides all over the city, part of a public relations campaign launched by the hospital shortly before the flood, meant to educate the public about the extremely wonderful things happening in their midst. Now that look was gone from all the children, but some of the adults were already starting to get it.

Everyone has got someone but me, he thought, looking up at all the couples. He was passing the second floor, coming down the last section of the ramp — it was not that crowded for a Saturday afternoon, but since people started getting sick some were staying in their rooms or restricting themselves to particular areas, and now there was Vivian’s faction, fifty people — or maybe now it was more — who never left the ninth floor. I should have just taken the elevator, he thought, or let the angel make me something in my room. So many people walking hand in hand, and everyone in pairs except the severest, most lonely freaks — so there was Dr. Sundae going hand in hand with Dr. Topper, and there were Dr. Snood and Dr. Tiller. He almost hurried a few steps and hid behind a pillar before Dr. Tiller could see him, fearing she might try to dragoon him into her newly reestablished rounds in the PICU. She seemed to think that just because adults were getting sick the pediatric residents should all become puppies for her to kick again. Sorry, lady, he wanted to say to her. There are so many other ways for me to be miserable that don’t involve you at all. But he probably wouldn’t ever say that to her.

What’s wrong with me? he wondered, watching the parents and the neo-parents and the rare childless couple promenading around the toy or watching kids scramble on the playground. He ran through the usual reasons in his head — you are too ugly, too sad, too gay, not gay enough, too lonely. It shows on your face and in your walk, how lonely you are. People say, there goes the lonely fellow to buy a frozen pizza and rent a pornographic video. Don’t touch him or you’ll be lonely too. It was true that the angel often made him pizza in his room, and that he watched her pornography, but only the really interesting stuff, and it was more because he was curious than because he was lonely that he watched Rock Hudson and Ronald Reagan in the musical she called Pillow Face.

He sat down on a bench underneath the shadow of the toy, forgetting, for now, about the coffee he’d meant to fetch, wondering if he could rub his face like he wanted to without looking even more lonely and sad. Maybe I should have applied for a baby, he thought. But that was a strategy of aging fat women, to recruit a child to console their loneliness. He opened his hands and looked in them — no black spots yet — then clapped them to his face.

Across the grass, people were setting up for a show scheduled for that night, putting the final touches on the staircase on the stage, Connie and Anika stapling real flowers to the curling banister. Dr. Sashay was stomping up and down the stairs, calling out, “Are you sure this is sturdy enough?” Josh Swift and Cindy Flemm were finishing up a piece of backdrop.

“There’s no way this is going to dry in time,” Cindy said.

“Sure it will,” Josh said. “It’s got this special polymer in it. I hope my horses look more like horses from far away.”

“They’re pretty,” Cindy said. “This is exhausting. I want to take a nap. Do you want to take a nap?”

“Do you really mean nap, or do you mean the other thing?”

“I really mean a nap, but I could probably be talked into… oh fuck. He’s watching us.”

Josh turned back and saw Wayne sitting alone in the audience, surrounded by empty seats. “Is he whittling?” he asked.

“I think it’s supposed to be threatening. I’m so tired of this. I’m exhausted of it.”

“It’s okay,” Josh said. “I’ll talk to him again later. Maybe if I let him hit me this time he’d feel a sense of closure.”

“Maybe if we both hit him he’d leave us the fuck alone.”

“Moron,” Wayne was saying. “Drooly fucking moron.” He was whittling, but not very threateningly, on a piece of mahogany, making a fancy My Little Pony for Cindy, because he knew two things about her that the moron didn’t: they were her favorite toys when she was five years old, and mahogany was her favorite wood.

“I see you,” says Pickie Beecher, walking by with a ladder over his shoulder.

“I see you too, you little freak,” says Wayne, not looking up from his whittling.

“You all look alike to me,” he says.

Wayne does not respond, but I say, It is because we are brothers and sister.

“The same eyes, the same face,” he says, walking on. He puts down his ladder by the stage and heads toward the playground. “And you all smell alike. Everyone else is starting to look like you, too. Not everyone, just the sick ones. Why is that?”

My brother is in them. The destroying angel.

“My brother is dead, killed by angels. I have never forgiven you. I never will.” He sits down on the edge of the playground, on one of the railroad ties that mark the border of the grass circle, takes off his shoes, and rubs his toes in the grass. Jemma lies a few feet away from us, where I left her, overcome by a sudden nap — at week twenty-nine this is her newest symptom, constant exhaustion and frequent naps. Dr. Tiller and Dr. Snood walk by, Dr. Tiller seeing in her sprawled form confirmation of her laziness, but Dr. Snood says, “Poor thing.”

Do you miss your brother? I ask. I miss my sister every day. My real sister, I mean.

“Stab,” says Pickie Beecher, poking himself sharply in the chest. “Stab! Stab! Stab!”

“Be quiet, child,” says Dr. Tiller, striding over, her headdress glittering in the far-falling sunlight. Pickie jumps up and stands over Jemma.

“If you hurt her,” he says. “Or if you hurt my brother inside of her, then I will consume you. I already know the taste of your flesh.” Then he opens his mouth to me, wider and wider, so his whole face seems to have become teeth around a black hole, and if I dared to look I could see the glaring red root of his abomination hanging in his middle. He snaps shut his teeth, making a sound like two heads knocking together. It hurts my ears to hear it.

“Don’t you threaten me,” Dr. Tiller says, handing Pickie a fat roll of demerits, and Jemma wakes.