The Children's Hospital

75

The youngest ones fell asleep first. Former micro-preemies grew logy between feeds, and their parents thought at first that they were becoming lazy or distracted by the travails of their caretakers when they lost interest in crawling or pulling to a stand, and could not be convinced even to try to feed themselves with hand or spoon. When some of them became difficult to wake even for a bottle, people worried that the babies were depressed — who wasn’t, these days? — and the winnowed Council met in special session to review the scanty old literature on the use of antidepressants in children under a year old, but even before the first batch of doctored formula was cooked up, the earliest and most miraculous of them — Brenda — had already been asleep for twenty-four hours straight. At hour twenty-eight Anna paged Jemma and asked her to come up.

Escape was probably too strong a word for what she did. She always just walked out of jail. The angel would always open the door, and she had learned to make herself hard to touch, so when the guards tried to push her back or grab her arm, their arms grew weak, or they couldn’t quite find her or aim their guns with their shaking hands.

They threw her back into her room every day or two; she hardly held it against them any more, though it infuriated Rob, and he was always tracking down Dr. Snood to call him a motherfucker and threaten to quit. Dr. Snood only looked at him blandly, dabbing with a black gauze hanky at his nose, which was always running and often bled — it had been his only symptom for weeks, and he put it about that dedication to his job was holding the botch in him at bay. “We’ll muddle on without you,” he said to Rob, who never quit, and never slept, and never even cried anymore, though he still made a crying face, sometimes, in the dark of their room, when Jemma wished she couldn’t see him as plainly with her mind as with her eyes.

That day, number two hundred and seventeen, Jemma examined Brenda and every one of the other sleeping babies (a total of ten had been re-orphaned and returned to the crèche) walking by every fancy crib, each one unique, some designed by the crèche mothers and some by the parents, to look like airplanes or boats or spaceships, heavy sculpture or molecular models — they were supposed to reflect the incubating passions of their inhabitants. It had caused a controversy, back when they all had the time to debate such points, because people asked, who was to say what passions were incubating in those little heads, and maybe your baby didn’t want to be a pilot or a string theorist or a heterosexual, and who could say what would be art and what would be artisanship in the new world, and hadn’t it always been a sin, to tell your child what they could or couldn’t be? Three crèche seminars and two town meetings and a Council debate later, they decided that you could build whatever you liked for your baby, but that no baby would spend more than three days in any one crib. For days the babies rotated all around the room, but not anymore — it was too exhausting, all the paperwork that went with the rotations, and the infection-control issues were daunting. Anna was representative of her colleagues when she said, “I haven’t got time for that shit, now.”

Jemma was quick. She could do it just with a glimpse now, a pan-scan that lit up the whole little body from the tips of the toes to the even ends of the soft hair, but she always made it look harder than it was, in case people should think she wasn’t trying hard enough, in case people should think she’d become flippant or callow or just lazy in addition to being crazy and evil. She knew Anna didn’t think that of her, but still she peered into the crib for another minute, contemplating the fat sleeping face, and how the eyes darted behind the lids.

“Do babies dream?” Anna asked her.

“This one does,” Jemma said. She could perceive that the little mind was skipping along inside the head at a thousand people, a thousand places a minute, but could not see the shapes in the dream, or read the story, if there was one there.

“Has she got it?” Anna asked.

“Yes,” Jemma said, “but it’s not making her sick. It’s just making her sleepy, like the boy.”

“Can you fix it?”

“I’ll get tranked if I try,” Jemma said, because Arthur and Jude were standing only a few feet away. “I can already tell that it won’t help,” she added.

“You try, I’ll block them,” Anna said.

“Okay,” Jemma said, sighing. “I wouldn’t do this for anybody else.”

“Sure you would,” Anna said, then turned and rushed toward the guards. “My babies!” she called at them. “What are you doing out of your cribs?” She ran at them with her arms open, white crèche robe flaring out to either side, screening Jemma, who placed a single finger on the baby’s soft spot. It was all she needed to do. She lit up the spine and got her surprise. Green and bright, her fire picked out patches of shadow everywhere in the baby. Trying to catch them all was just like trying to grab ashes out of the air. She got a few, but there was always more, and the ones she touched burned but did not change under her attention. She put them in imaginary pockets, thinking, maybe if I cart them away… but she knew she could stand there forever and there would always be more of them, and already Anna was down and the darts were flying at Jemma’s neck. The tranquilizer was not really a problem — she knew it was coming and easily changed the drug to something that only made her feel a little peppy, and kept it well away from the black hole where her baby lived, but the black motes were leaping from her pockets to make a deep shadow that clung to her face and settled in her eyes. She thought she knew just how tired the babies must be feeling as she slumped forward into the soft rubbery arms of the baby’s crib — it was built to look like a giant friendly octopus. She felt the guards take her just as she fell asleep, and knew she was going back to jail as certainly as Anna would spend the next week burning off the demerits she’d just earned.

“I’m tired,” said Kidney.

“No you’re not,” Jemma said firmly, though the child’s exhaustion was made plain by her drooping shoulders, stooped back, puffy eyes, and cranky tears. She could see it, too, strapped all around her like an armor of pillows, and settled on her, and rising behind her eyes — something softer and thicker than what was in the grown-ups, but it was still the botch — black ash that sucked at Jemma’s mind, and impugning and condemning her as a failure. Jemma was tired, too. She’d woken late from her nap in the meditation room, and relieved Connie from her babysitting late, and not even noticed her fancy new shoes until Connie complimented her on them. “Let’s play scrabble,” she said to Kidney.

“I’m too tired for scrabble.”

“How about bunny recess?” Jemma asked. It was her job to keep this child stimulated. She would have preferred a job in the new ward — as the one- and two-year-olds fell asleep they converted the disco into a medical dormitory — but the job was too popular, and she too far out of favor with everyone except Rob, Pickie Beecher, and Father Jane, to land it. It was a burden for a hospital once again crowded with patients, to staff another ward, but everyone agreed that the children and adults should not be housed together, and though the sleepers did not require much care beyond tube feeds and diaper changes, people clamored for an assignment to the dormitory because it was so much better to brush a toddler’s hair than to sweep another flaky piece of your dissolving colleague out of the bed, or listen to their moans when they become tolerant to the latest opioid and their wounds began again to ache wildly.

“No,” said Kidney.

It was a fool’s enterprise, Jemma knew. The botch was in all of them already, just waiting to manifest, and no amount of Romper Rooming would keep it away when it decided to come. And there were worse things, on display in the crowded wards, than merely falling asleep, and missing whatever new horrors the remaining days would bring them. But it was poor form, to just let it happen, and she could understand why people who couldn’t see what she saw might think the children were falling asleep because they were bored, or just not stimulated like they had been when their days had been full of classes and shows and sports tournaments. “Let’s go for a walk,” Jemma said.

“Only if you carry me.”

“It’s better if you walk.”

“I’m too tired,” Kidney said, whining and drumming her heels against the ground.

“Let’s have a sundae,” Jemma said. “We’ll just walk to the cafeteria and then I’ll make you a sundae as big as your head.”

“Okay,” Kidney said, crying again, and looking not at all excited or delighted by the prospect of ice cream. Jemma would not carry her no matter how she whined, but let her ride a plastic horse through the halls and down the ramp, pushing it every so often with her foot to scoot it forward on its wheels, but refusing to pull the bridle and tow her. She perked up a little on the ramp, zooming away down the span between the fifth and fourth floors and running into a wall. She lay too still after she fell. Jemma hurried over and set her on her feet.

“It’s nice to lay down,” she said sullenly, getting back on the horse.

“Lie down,” Jemma said. “And it’s only nice at night, when you’re hooked up. I’d hate to have to give you a demerit.”

“You’d never give me a demerit,” she said.

“Don’t push me,” Jemma said.

“Demerits are stupid. You’re not stupid. Not like that.”

“We’ve all got to…” Jemma began, but stopped herself before she could give voice to one of Dr. Tiller’s platitudes. “The sundaes are waiting,” she said. Kidney went to the edge and stared down at the lobby.

“Where is everybody?” she asked.

“Eating ice cream,” Jemma said, and took her hand, so she rode the horse with one hand, pushing along with her feet to keep up because Jemma would just stop every time Kidney let her pull.

The sundae machine was a late invention, as big as a church organ and with as many levers as an organ had pipes, put together by the volunteer before he got sick. Kidney tasted flavors and gave stern instructions to the angel about how a burnt caramel sauce should taste, and how fluffy the whipped cream should be, like a new pillow that’s been slept on three times but not four times. When she was done her sundae was a little bigger than her head, and Jemma had to make two trips to carry it and the one Kidney made for her to a table in the middle of the room. It was crowded for so early in the afternoon, filled with other babysitters and nurses and doctors and the older kids who were doing the larger part of the work, all of them eating before the change of shift, shortly to happen at three. She saw Dr. Sundae and Dr. Sasscock with two of his wives and Emma, all alone with a steaming bowl of soup. Emma looked up at Jemma, then looked back to her food. It was how people mostly greeted her these days.

Pickie Beecher was sitting alone at a table. Kidney ran to him and gave him a hug, spilling details about her day and her predicament before she even sat down. “I played pretend-poke,” she said, “and then there was a walk on the roof, and then we made a movie about a deadly shoe who turned good and had to run from all the shoes who were still deadly, and then I read a book about me, and then I had to eat lunch, and then it was time for exercises, and then we made purses, and then we made a wallet to put in the purse, and then we dressed up like we were going to another wedding, and then we made a paper wok and I was going to have the angel turn it to gold but Jemma said it was too gaudy, but what does she know about woks? And I’m so tired, Pickie, I’m so tired I can hardly stand it.”

“I am almost dead,” Pickie said sadly as Jemma helped Kidney into her chair, positioned the sundae in front of her, and handed her a spoon.

“That’s worse than tired,” Kidney said. “You sure look good for somebody who’s about to die.”

“Eat,” Jemma said to Kidney, and to Pickie, “Don’t say things like that.”

“It’s almost time,” he said. “All this time I thought they were afraid of me, that they knew what I could do to an angel.” He opened his mouth to show them his big perfect teeth. “But they were never afraid, they were just waiting.”

“You should make a sundae,” Kidney said, digging in. “That’ll make you feel better.”

“Ice cream would make me more cold but no less dead.”

“Pickie,” Jemma said. “I have got a roll of demerits in my pocket.”

“I know it when you’re lying,” he said

“Today there is roast beef ice cream,” Kidney said.

“There is always roast beef,” Pickie said. “It makes no difference, and you know, you have always known, that I am a simple vegetarian. Why must they destroy me? Why do they hate me? What have I done except be born and try to be true to my brother? I love my brother — is that any reason for them to destroy me?”

Jemma picked at some whipped cream that had stuck to Kidney’s hair. “There’s just one angel,” she said. “And she likes you. She likes everybody — that’s her problem. But she wouldn’t hurt a fly. How many times do I have to tell you?”

“As many times as it would take to make it true. You could talk forever, and never understand. I used to think that you could protect me. I dreamed of you and him in battle — you burned his wings and ravaged his flesh, but still he came for me. He tore me to pieces while you watched and cried out but you were useless. You are useless to me and I am already dead.”

“Oh, come here, you,” she said, pulling him from his chair for a hug. It was what she and Rob did whenever he got too crazy, whenever he talked himself into a tizzy of paranoia, or when he grew silent and pulled at his testicles, or smelled obsessively at his hands. Rob had made the discovery that if you just held him for long enough, he would let out a funny noise, a growl and a burp, and soften in your arms, and for a little while he would talk about other things, and even seem happy. She held him and held him, and finally he made a noise, but not the one she wanted. She felt his arms moving behind her, and felt him swallow. She pushed him back. He was eating whipped cream and caramel off his hands. Behind her Kidney was face down in her sundae. Jemma could feel the cold burning her face, but the child slept through it.

“She is gone,” Pickie said, “and I am gone, too.”