The Children's Hospital

84

“Synfrosius,” Jemma said to Rob. “It’s a good name. I like that name!” They were lying in bed, getting ready to go out on their new rounds — superhero rounds, Rob called them. A week before there’d been a winnowing among the patients: the botch had raged mightily in a night, and in the course of twelve hours everyone in the PICU and the seven satellite ICUs was dead. Rob never ran away, like the majority of the staff, most just overwhelmed by a process that seemed to be declaring the futility of their work and their lives, some not just driven crazy by the abundance of suffering and death but stricken with the botch-madness, their brains scabbed with black ash and their minds a mess of fear and sadness and rage, so they wept as they ran, and punched in the face anyone who tried to stop them or comfort them. Rob was happy as he worked for the first time in weeks, glad to be fighting so hard but glad too because he could tell it was almost over. Jemma could feel it, from where she spent the night, groaning at the foot of their bed, reaching all over the hospital with her mind, as futile and useless as anyone else, experiencing the pain of the dying but not much succeeding in alleviating it. When the sun rose — another clear, beautiful day dawning over the water — all that was left of their last patient, Dr. Pudding, was three ribs and five kilos of ash (his bed weighed him every morning), and Rob and Dr. Tiller were the only two caretakers left in the unit.

“Lambchop,” said Rob. “I like that one too!” In the past two days he had not entirely been himself. He looked the same, and acted the same, and felt the same, and talking to him you would mostly not know that the botch had started to unfold in his brain, but more and more he would get excited about something like a silly name, or the fabric of their sheets, or the shape and texture of an asparagus newly condensed out of the replicator mist. And more and more Jemma spent all her time around him trying not to do her dry sobbing cry.

“That’s a nickname,” she said gently.

“Lambert Chopin Claflin-Dickens-Dickens-Claflin.”

“Those are all last names.”

“Vivian, then. Poor Vivian!” He didn’t seem to know he was sick, or that he was not acting entirely normal. Jemma kept expecting him to have a moment of high suspicion, when he hurried to the radiology suite to image his brain, but he never did.

“Poor Vivian,” Jemma said. “I’m sorry, Vivian.” Practice should probably have given her a better poker face by now, but she was grateful that Rob, even with his diminishing capacities, was facing away from her. “Sorry everybody,” she said, but she could not feel for everyone else the sort of regret she felt for failing to save Vivian, or miss them like she missed her, or like she missed the parts of Rob that were slipping slowly away.

“That’s a good one,” he said. “Or Pickie. But kids would probably make fun of him or her. Here comes Ass Pickie. There goes Pickie My Nose. Or how about Spanky?”

“Short for what?”

“Spankenmeier? Spankenbush? Spartacus?”

“I kind of like Spartacus.”

“Vivian,” said Rob. Something shifted in his voice, and she knew without even looking in his head that he was suddenly all there again. “Even if it’s a boy. There won’t be any name-calling in the new world.”

“Vivian what?”

“Just Vivian. Or, Vivian!”

“Supermodel Vivian,” Jemma said softly. The baby kicked her.

“Are you all right?” Rob asked, when she started.

“Just a kick,” she said. And then they were both quiet for a while. Jemma, always open to the rest of the hospital except when she actively hid from it, tried not to notice the terrible quiet.

The hospital was changed again, full of empty places and wild places, more than ever a home for survivors. The high death toll of the past week was not limited to the PICU. The Council was almost extinct, only Dr. Snood and Ishmael remaining of the four Friends, and only Dr. Tiller remaining of the extended twelve, though Cindy and her friends had organized themselves in a sort of alternate Council, which sometimes concurred with and sometimes resisted the senile efforts of the adults, who had stopped legislating and proclaiming. Dr. Tiller and Dr. Snood used the vestiges of their authority to organize protection for the sleeping children — no one younger than eighteen was awake now — and to organize the children themselves, more space allotted now for the medical dormitories than for the palliative adult wards.

“I put you back!” Monserrat had declared to Jemma, just before she died. “It is in my power, to give it away, my high place. It is for you again, my baby.” (She wasn’t entirely sane, and confused Jemma alternately with her daughter, her granddaughter, and Ricky Ricardo). “Now you are me. I give you the power, a different power, so you can make it all better again.”

“It’s all right,” Jemma said. “Don’t worry about anything.” She’d come to the death, drawn by her compulsion and by Monserrat’s request. Dr. Tiller was there, too, along with Dr. Snood, regal zombies in their immaculate clothes, their lips black and their ears shredding at the edges into papery ash. Ishmael stood at the head of the bed, entirely hale and handsome as ever, in a sane and quiet interlude.

Dr. Snood spoke. “A brief examination of the law will tell you that the office…” Dr. Tiller put a hand on his arm. “Shush, Darling,” she said. “She’s just raving.”

“Who has to tell you?” Monserrat asked Jemma, crying and smiling and grabbing her around her neck to press her face into her boobs, still wonderfully full, though her belly was collapsed down to her spine. “Who has to tell you, to do the next thing? Who else could it, besides you? Vivian, Jane, Ishmael, everyone wasting our time but the whole world, all the children just waiting for you to say the word, my sweet Desi. Oh, that smile! Oh, that hair! Sing to me, darling. Sing to the children and the whole world. The gates are waiting — open them!”

“It’s all right,” Jemma said, hardly batting an eye as she wove and placed a series of blocks in her thalamus, blocking the botch when it tried to make her scream. It was like playing tennis in the dark, but she could have played ten games at once. Every day brought her more power, and made her feel more useless.

“Sing, sing!” Monserrat screamed, so Jemma uttered soft babalus into her chest until Monserrat began to weep. “You!” she said, before a minute of singing went by, all of them indulging her now with the mournful crooning. “You!” She pushed Jemma away, sat up, pointed square in her face, and died. Ishmael chose that moment to totally lose his mind, tearing off his shirt and scratching at his flesh. “You!” he echoed, pointing at Jemma. “You!” With his non-pointing hand he scooped ash from the corpse, spat in it, and smeared his face. That was four days previous, and ever after he could be seen wandering up and down the ramp, clothed only in smears of ash, screaming at the carpet and accusing anyone he met of explicitly detailed crimes. Jemma could always feel him, a presence in her mind even uglier than Pickie had been.

“Seven days,” Rob said, reaching behind himself to put a hand on her belly.

“If it’s on time. Nobody was ever on time, in my family.”

“My sisters were early.”

“Cheetarah. I always wanted that to be my name.”

“Have you been wondering…”

“What?”

“If… I’m afraid to say it. It might be a jinx.”

“Give me a clue.”

“What if it’s only… if when by the time we land there are only two people over twenty-one left in the hospital?”

“Ishmael and Dr. Snood. That’ll suck.”

“Not them.”

“Don’t say it; you’re right. It’s a jinx. I used to do that all the time. Sure is a quiet call night, and, Where are all the patients? My medicine senior got so mad at me once. I thought she was going to slap me. If you say it, they will come, she told me. If you say it, it won’t be us.”

“We won’t talk about it.”

“We never were talking about it.”

“I never mentioned it.”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Jemma said, but she clutched him suddenly, squeezing and squeezing, as if just by holding tight enough with her body and her mind she could keep any more of him from slipping away.