The Children's Hospital

77

“Have you seen Pickie Beecher?” Jemma asked. It was a question she was asking everybody who could still talk. On the two-hundred-and-forty-second day since the flood he had been missing for three days, his weird, sullen presence gone from the public spaces of the hospital, his stain gone from her mind. She looked for him everywhere in both places, waddling from the roof down to the lobby, and sitting quietly under the toy as she searched fruitlessly in her mind for the familiar blot. She knew he could hide from her, in the world and in her head — he’d demonstrated it for her one night, putting a finger in his mouth and blowing his cheeks out, he’d winked out of her head in an instant, and challenged her to find him. He said he would hide somewhere on the fourth floor. The effort exhausted him — she’d never have found him if he hadn’t been panting so loudly inside a hamper full of filthy linens in the PICU. He could do it, but she didn’t think he could do it for long, so she was searching worriedly. That morning she started again at the top of the hospital, meaning to search more thoroughly, and question at least one representative from every floor. Rob started in Radiology and was working his way up. Ethel Puffer started in the first lighted basement.

“I haven’t,” said Helena Dufresne, off the ward but still mostly bed-bound on the ninth floor. “But then, I try not to see him even when I see him.” She shuddered. “He gives me the willies! Right, Tir?” She turned and caught her son in a huge yawn. “Stop that!”

“Sorry, Mom,” he said. “I saw Pickie four days ago. He was sitting on my bed. I had to shoo him away. He’s not creepy. You shouldn’t say that. He’s just a little different.”

“Creepy different,” said his mother, shaking her head.

“One time he brought me a mango. Right out of the blue. I didn’t ask him for it, but I sure wanted one. Is that creepy?”

“I saw him cough up a hairball and then eat it up again. From off the floor. Is that creepy?”

“I used to eat my boogers, back before,” Tir said.

“That’s different,” said his mother. “You couldn’t help it.”

“It’s totally the same,” Tir said. “I must’ve eaten a pound.” He yawned again.

“I won’t tell you again,” said his mother.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’m not tired.” Fifteen years old a week before, Tir was one of the youngest kids still awake.

“When you saw him,” Jemma said, “did he seem… afraid?”

Tir shook his head. “That little fucker wasn’t afraid of anything.”

“Watch your fucking mouth,” said his mother.

“Sorry,” Tir said. His pager went off and he raised it to his ear to hear the message. “Got to go,” he said. “Frank is banging his head again.” The ninth floor had been reconverted to a psych ward — there was a subset of patients who were almost entirely unaffected in their bodies, but whose minds were rotted out with the botch. Frank was one of them. Jemma had been in the lobby when he started to beat Connie at her bar and was about to take him out when Arthur — still trailing her with Jude wherever she went — tranked him. Connie was still in relatively good health, and quite sane, though horribly sad all the time, and there was no mirth anymore at her bar.

“Would you like some tea?” Helena asked.

“I should keep looking,” Jemma said.

“Just stay a moment. It’s been a little while.”

“Maybe just a sip,” Jemma said, because Helena Dufresne was one of the few parents in the hospital not mistrustful of her.

“How are you?” she asked, when they’d sat down on a round bench under a window. “Are they still mistreating you down there?”

Jemma shrugged. “Worried,” she said.

“After you find your little friend you ought to come up and stay for a while, or for the duration. What’s down there for you except a bunch of fuckers who think you’re crazy? We can tell the difference up here — we’d treat you right, as long as you didn’t pull any shit, and mind you I don’t believe — none of us believe — half of what they say, the stories that go up and down and up again, out of the Council chamber and into the kitchen, into Tiller’s mouth and our of Snood’s ass. You may not be the Friend anymore but you were Her friend, and we have not forgotten that.”

“Thanks,” Jemma said, not sure what else to say.

“But how are you? You look about ready to pop.”

“The due date’s three weeks away. I guess it could come any day, though.”

“Who’s going to hold your hand? Who’s going to yell at the doctors to give you some space? Who’s going to put their shoe between your teeth, when the pains come?”

“Rob and I have a plan. Not too detailed — that’s bad luck.”

“Well, you just let me know. Just give a call, I’ll come advocating. Like, get the fuck away from her or I’ll smash your face! What’s in that needle, motherfucker! I haven’t forgotten the old days, you know. But why don’t you just stay here? We’ve got Dr. Sundae here now. Doesn’t she know how to bring out a baby?”

“She’s a pathologist. Ms. Fraggle — that’s Juan’s mom. She was a midwife in Bolivia, before. I’ve got her.”

“All the doctors are all the doctors now — you’re all the same. Don’t you get it? When are you going to come? We’re like our own little world up here. It’s not like other places.”

“I know,” Jemma said, though there were all sorts of little worlds scattered through this hospital — Vivian started a trend when she immigrated to the ninth floor. Every day they became a little more distinct, she thought, even as they died off. They sat for a while in silence, Helen smiling at her gently, Jemma trying not to notice the botch seeded in her liver — it was like trying not to notice spinach in the teeth or an open fly, and like ignoring a crying baby or a screaming amputee. Part of her wanted to douse the lady in flame again; part of her wanted to run away. She sat and finished her tea, a special blend that smelled like almonds but tasted like wet sticks. “Well,” she said, when she was done. “I had better keep looking.”

“I haven’t seen him,” said Monserrat. “But then, I have not been looking for him, and when he is there I try not to notice him, no matter how he makes himself obtrusive. He’s not usually a very helpful little boy. You ask him to get a sat or a temperature — both of these are well within his abilities, I know — and he draws you a picture of his brother, or brings you a steak and asks if he can watch you eat it. I’m sure he’s off playing some game.”

“I think something happened to him,” Jemma said. They were on the eighth floor, in Dr. Sashay’s old parlor, one of the few places in the hospital not entirely reconverted for clinical use. It had been the only dirty utility room in the hospital that had a window, small and oval, exactly like the one in Jemma’s room. The cabinets that used to hold hemoccult supplies and dirty potties had been replaced by display cases, full of curios: porcelain dolls and tribal fetishes — recreations from out of a larger collection Dr. Sashay had kept in her lost home. The big square toilet was a fountain now, the porcelain turned to dark stone, two jets of water rising up and down, taking turns being the taller of the pair. Monserrat had been using it as an office since she had delegated herself as an overseer to this floor, part of Dr. Snood’s initiative to make the Council into a more supportive entity for the hospital in crisis. Instead of just legislating from the fifth floor they would reach out to every ward, and be present there all day long. They wouldn’t have it on the ninth floor: Snood was so thoroughly ignored that he just left eventually, but everywhere else there was somebody acting like Monserrat, a liaison and a subtle overseer and a pal. The eighth floor was a place without any real oncologic issues anymore. They were given over to palliating the worst of the worst. People in whom the botch manifested as a particularly hideous affliction, for whom the experimental treatments would only be a torture, came there to experience the new morphine and super fentanyl and ultra-benzos.

“If I ever met a boy who could take care of himself,” Monserrat said, “it’s that one. I wouldn’t worry about him, if I were you. Isn’t there enough of other things, for worrying?”

“I try to just pick one thing and do a good job with it,” Jemma said, though in fact all her other worries had been subsumed by her concern over Pickie.

“That’s one way. I find I cannot do the ignoring. I have to worry about the depression of the nurses and who is getting sleepy now and whether Dr. Snood is being good to us. I know he is trying to be good but sometimes he gets like a proud little penguin and it makes me worry, and I ask myself, Is it time for the coup? I say it to him, Is it time for a coup, Mr. Napoleon? Is it time for me to take you down? I don’t think he believes that I could do it. I talk to Ishmael about it and he curses him but then he only has curses for anyone these days. He is always in a bad mood. It’s wrong, I think. A person should be sad and not angry, here. Sadness is the better thing.”

“He was afraid for a couple days before he disappeared, like he thought somebody was going to hurt him. He said the angel was out to get him, but he’s always been saying that, and the angel wouldn’t hurt anybody.”

“She is a tricky lady. I have come to understand that. But she wouldn’t hurt us, oh no. Where would we be without her? All dead, of course. All floating dead, or all at the bottom of the sea. Maybe you should come with me, next time I ask Snood. So he can be reminded of how it comes and goes. How you can be king of the cats and then just another stray dog.”

“We try to stay out of each other’s way,” Jemma said.

“This I can handle,” Monserrat said, indicating the ward outside with her hands. “The low blood pressure and the high blood pressure and the pain — all the pain. I am not a doctor but it’s easy to say, You are doing this wrong, do something different. I don’t say it like that, of course. I say Listen, listen to the moaning. What does it say to you? And then I am there with my own answers when they don’t have answers of their own. Knowing what to do for these poor ones is fine, but knowing what to do for all the poor ones is not. I ask myself, Is there something else we could be doing for us all? Not like Vivian was asking. I mean something more practical but not even that is easy. And we ask ourselves in the Council meetings, Is there something else we could be doing? And I never have an answer and we never have an answer.”

“I’ve seen the broadcasts.”

“It was better when you were there. But those were better times, too. Maybe it wasn’t you that made for it to be good. Maybe it was just to be good, then, like now it is to be bad. What do you think, though? Is there something else we should be doing?”

“Looking for Pickie Beecher,” Jemma said, and stood up to go.

“You let me know if you do not find him,” Monserrat said, standing also and putting a hand on Jemma’s arm. “It would be a bad thing. It would be the worse thing, if we really lost one of them. Even that one.”

“Gone?” said Father Jane. “Gone where?”

“Just gone,” Jemma said. “We can’t find him anywhere.”

“Well, he must be somewhere,” said John Grampus, who lay in his bed on the seventh floor, staring at her with heavy-lidded eyes, a PCA button in his hand. He was one of the few people to have an isolated case of the botch. It was only in his foot and calf, but had turned his flesh there black, and creeped a little higher every day until Dr. Walnut skillfully whacked off his leg just below the knee. There was a fancy bionic limb all ready for him — it was sitting on a table in his room — one of a series designed by Dr. Walnut and the angel for different citizens in whom the botch had manifested similarly — but the surgeon went to the PICU before he could attach it. Dr. Sasscock, not a surgeon but considered a surgical personality, and possessing himself a gleaming silver foot, was exploring the possibility of a medical attachment, working on his drops, a solution of nanobots who would do a hundred thousand tiny surgeries and stitch nerves to wires and bone to steel, before he got sick, too. Jemma could have done it in a jiffy — she sat in her bed and imagined it — but she knew better than to try. Jordan Sasscock didn’t trust her any more than Dr. Snood did, and John Grampus had told her frankly, if apologetically, that he would rather hop out his remaining days than burn to death.

“Nowhere I can find him,” Jemma said.

“Maybe he’s just playing a game,” said Father Jane. “I think it’s how he deals with things, you know. When it gets too much for him he climbs a tree or eats dirt or hides. I think he tries to project all his worry. He makes us worry for him. It was just the anniversary of his brother’s death. Just last week he told me that. It must be a sad day for him.”

“He says that every month,” Jemma said.

“Nonetheless,” said Father Jane. “He came to me and asked me to play kwok, a game where you have to run all the way up the ramp with a fake possum on your head. That was just the preliminary — whoever got there last was it, and had to find the other person. Find me, he said, before he ran off to hide. Find me. I think he meant more than just find me. I was thinking to myself that he wanted to be found in a much more profound way, and I meant to have a conversation with him about how a person becomes found. It is not something you can do by yourself, Pickie, I was going to say. There has to be something else outside of you, doesn’t there, but it’s not me. I’m just an old woman. I’m not going to make it.”

“Don’t talk like that,” said John Grampus, closing his eyes and taking her hand.

“One minute you are just walking along, I would have told him, and then the next you are suspended in the gaze of the infinite. It looks in you and through you and part of its power is that it shows you just what it sees. You are under the eye and you become the eye, and you know who you are and what you will get, and you know where you are. I am tired already, Pickie, and it’s not the worst thing in the world, for an old lady with no complaints to be denied something she is too old even to understand. But you’re too young to be this sad and this strange. That’s what I would have said, and now you say he’s gone. I should have told him when I had the chance.”

“Have I showed you this?” asked Grampus, his eyes still closed. He squeezed them tighter and the bionic foot twitched on the table beside him. “How about that? My sympathetic foot. She made it so specifically for me, and so much a part of me, that even not attached I can make it do that, and I can feel it, like I can feel the old foot, there but not there. Just when I’m ready to give up on her she does something wonderful.”

“Did he say anything else to you?” Jemma asked Father Jane.

“We talked about becoming and destroying and cruelty, but it was all pretend, all in my head. Outside of my head we barely ever talked, you know.”

“Or just after I’ve given up on her, I should say, because it’s always after I’ve given her up for a whore that she surprises me. Not that kind of whore, mind you — I’m sure she never cheated on me like that. She’s a promising whore, an I-love-you-best whore. Of course I love you best. You are the first star of my affection. For a thousand years I have cherished the idea of you even before you were born, and I watched you and yearned toward you long before I spoke to you out of the darkness. You are my creature and I am your angel. I will preserve you forever and forever. What a line!”

“Okay,” Jemma said. “Thanks anyway.”

“Maybe she got him,” said Grampus. “Did you think of that? Hasn’t it occurred to you that she can’t like everybody, that she can’t try for everybody? I don’t know all her secrets — maybe she has to axe somebody so she can save everybody else. And she was always slandering him to anyone who would listen. Abomination this, abomination that. You should ask her.”

“I did,” Jemma said. Over and over she had asked, phrasing the question differently in hope of getting a different answer, or trying to surprise the angel by asking the question in the middle of another question — What is our where is Pickie Beecher latitude? Always she got silence for an answer, but this was no different than before he had disappeared. “She doesn’t like to talk about him,” Jemma said.

“Yeah, right,” he said. “Well, she’ll talk about him with me. Where is he?” he shouted, reaching behind his head to pound on the wall. His foot leaped once on the table. “What have you done with him? I know you fucked him up!”

The voice responded right away, speaking from the wall. “I am the preserving angel,” she said simply. “I preserve and I preserve and I preserve. The leprous and the scabby and the ugly of soul are gathered to my breast. Even the abomination is gathered to my breast. I reject no one.”

“Don’t you believe it,” said John Grampus.

“I should have thought of this before,” said Ethel. She and Jemma and Rob met on the fifth floor to report their failures. Pickie was not in the ER catacombs or the first nine basements or the lobby shrubs; Ishmael had not seen him, Dr. Sundae had not seen him, Dr. Snood had not seen him, though there was something so obtuse about his response that Rob suspected he was hiding something. Ethel had not even searched all of the second floor. In the dormitory Josh Swift made the suggestion to her: ask the angel. Like Jemma, she already had, but that wasn’t what he meant. He dug in his pocket and brought out a dolphin-talker — they’d become popular toys since Kidney first asked the angel to make one, though people had yet to get a dolphin engaged in a meaningful conversation. He raised it to his lips and blew a stream of clicks and whistles at her. “Oh,” she’d said, and proceeded to the nearest replicator to demand a Pickie-Tracker.

It looked like a little vacuum cleaner strapped to her back, a shiny chrome cylinder suspended off her shoulders by two braided straps, with a tube of corrugated metal, about the thickness of a wrist, that stretched along her neck and over her head, flaring at the end to a rotating and humming disk that radiated an energy that Jemma could feel but not see. It made a high, thin noise that tickled Jemma’s ear when she stepped too close to Ethel. She was wearing a pair of large wraparound sunglasses, of the sort that old people had used to put over their regular glasses. She looked sinister and daffy.

“They’re wireless,” she said of them, and handed similar pairs to Jemma and Rob. “We can all see the same thing.” A few fine wisps of hair were waving in the air above her head, attracted to the antenna. Jemma put on her glasses and saw footprints laid out everywhere over the carpet and the walls.

“I’m not sure this is going to help,” she said, because she had no idea which prints to follow, and none of them seemed necessarily to be headed anywhere. “Are these all supposed to be his?”

“Not just supposed,” said Ethel. “They are his. They’re everywhere. You should see the NICU. He really got around.”

“It’ll take days just to sort through these,” Rob said.

“Hold on,” said Ethel, fiddling at her strap. Looking closer Jemma saw that what she had at first thought were decorative studs were actually adjustment knobs. As Ethel pushed and twisted them the prints became colored. Looking at one on the wall she saw it go green and red and blue and violet. “I just need to… It’s harder than it looks. You’d think she’d make it easier, like it could just work, but she always has to put on fancy tuners and counter-intuitive control buttons. By the time you figure it out you don’t need the fucking thing anymore. There. Hold on… There!” Jemma’s confusion was not lessened when the colors settled, blue and green and purple, yellow and orange and red. There were still footprints everywhere, and Jemma could not begin to decide how to divide them.

“Can you tell which ones are new?” Rob asked.

“Red ones are newest, yellow ones are second newest,” said Ethel. “Everything else we should ignore — they’re just noise but I can’t make them go away. She said I could filter them out but this thing is driving me crazy already so this is good enough, okay?”

“Okay,” said Jemma, already trying to pick out the bright red prints from all the others. There was a set curving over the banister and along the floor. She pointed at them and said, “There.”

They made for a curious sight, even in a hospital jaded with wonders, and busy again with miserable distractions. They went in a row, Ethel in the front, their heads down, picking out red prints from the jumble, too intent to notice or care when they walked in a circle or a spiral. The trail went through the PICU, pausing by Dr. Pudding’s bed and passing beneath Dr. Walnut’s, out onto the ramp where the footprints appeared as often on the railing as on the ground. Onto the sixth floor, in and out of every room down the south hall and up the north, past empty classrooms hung with old signs canceling class after class. “He really got around,” Rob kept saying.

They went into the stairwell, where the flight between the fifth and sixth floors was painted with congruent prints, entirely covered except in a few spots where a cool bit of green or blue peeked through the fresh red, and Jemma could only see the pale gray concrete when she looked over the top edge of her glasses. She imagined him pacing up and down the stairs, thinking of his brother, or playing a game with his brother’s spirit, chasing it up and down the stairs, gleefully and despairingly. A set of solitary prints emerged from the far end, skipping the sixth and seventh floor and passing through the door to the eighth.

“What are you doing?” asked Wayne, falling into step with them as they passed down the hall into the old one ward.

“Looking for somebody,” said Ethel.

“You look like you lost a quarter.”

“You look like you’re about to become a pain in my ass,” said Ethel.

“I was just offering an observation.”

“Shouldn’t you be on the ward?” asked Rob.

“I’m on a break. Do you need help?”

“It’s probably already less than a three-person job,” said Jemma. They paused before the monument to Dr. Sashay. It was not so well tended as it had used to be. The flowers were perpetual, and the little glitter fountain never needed new batteries, but there was a layer of dust on her Hello, Dolly shoes, and a smear of grease on her big portrait. The prints became irregular around it, spaced wide and close, with more than a few on the wall, and there was a smudge on the portrait that looked to Jemma as if he had touched his nose to her nose.

“It looks like he was dancing,” said Ethel.

“Who?” asked Wayne.

“Somebody,” said Ethel, moving on. Wayne trailed after them until they got out to the ramp, where he paused by the archway.

“You sure you don’t need some help?” he asked.

“Go back to work,” said Ethel, “or we’ll report you.”

“I’ll report you,” he said confidently, but he didn’t follow them up the ramp. On the ninth floor the prints became irregular again, running in quick bursts toward one wall, then away from it and up another. They returned to the center of the hall and then became more widely spaced. “Now he’s running,” Rob said.

“Or hopping,” said Ethel. “He liked to hop.” The prints went back to the ramp and up to the roof, not dilly-dallying in front of Thelma’s monument, a pair of arms that came out of the wall and hugged you if you stood between them. They leaped over her old desk and paused — there were five or six pairs in the room. Jemma could see him stopping and turning and looking back.

“Somebody was chasing him!” she said, just as she realized it.

“No shit,” said Ethel, hurrying up the stairs. She and Rob ran, Jemma followed at a jazzy waddle, not caring how stupid she looked, suddenly excited and afraid. On the roof the prints were cast about everywhere, laid upon the top of the grass and the sides of the tree, around the bushes and in the greenhouse. A set stood just by the swing set, and then the nearest set was fifty feet away at the edge of the soccer field. In many places it was obvious that he had fallen down; the prints were smeared. The three searchers split up, each of them hurrying to different sections of the roof, ignoring the stares they drew. There were mysteries to unravel in every corner: here he hid under a bench, here he rolled on the ground, here someone might have picked him up.

The three of them met again in the middle, all of them confused by what they saw: he had been everywhere on the roof, and yet no prints led back to the stairs, or down the ramp, or to the elevator. They spent another half hour looking for trap doors in the grass, and doorways in the trees, before Ethel cursed again and began to mess with her buttons. The prints appeared and disappeared, and then sprang into motion, stepping over each other and on top of each other, moving so fast they made Jemma dizzy. “God fucking dammit,” Ethel said. She went up to a replicator and gave it a kick. “I just want the last ones,” she said. “Is that so hard? The very last ones of all!” Jemma couldn’t hear the angel’s reply, but another pair of glasses came sliding out of the mist. Ethel threw hers down and put on the new ones, then peered hither and thither all over the roof. Her gaze fixed past Jemma, toward the ledge where she and Ishmael had been fishing six months before.

“Oh, fuck,” she said. “No way. No fucking way!” She threw off the glasses and ran to the replicator, kicking it over and over while the angel cautioned her loudly not to hurt her foot. Rob picked up the glasses, looked once, shook his head, then handed them to Jemma. She put them on and saw what they had, the whole roof empty of prints except for a pair right at the edge, the left one cut off at the toes by the edge. She looked harder, elsewhere, trying to call them out of the green grass or the gray slate of the garden paths, but there were none. She looked again at the pair on the ledge, and noticed how they were smeared a little at the edges, like someone had pushed him, and raised her eyes to the endless ocean and the distant horizon, blue on blue, quiet and deep.