The Children's Hospital

85

There are days left, and days, but already I am nostalgic for the watching, and anxious for Jemma’s end. For all my watching, and all my waiting, now I would rather that the end not come at all, the baby not come at all, the hospital never land ashore. I must have known, when I made my own choice, and did my deed, that the consequences would claim Jemma, too, just as they claimed everyone else in the world. But still I am hoping for an ending where she steps out of the hospital and lives in the new world with her baby and these seven hundred and one other children, even though I know she would not belong there any more than I would.

And it would be even better than stopping what’s coming, if I could roll back all the time between her and her last happiness, or my last happiness. I contain all the past, but have no power over it, and it would take more than an angel to fly with her through the blowing ash of the botch-time, past her ascent over the hospital populace, past her wedding and her unveiling and her great night, past the subtle hints of her pregnancy and her slumbering power, past even the night of the storm, though I think she was happy enough, doing the screwing with Rob Dickens that conceived the last baby of the old world and the first baby of the new one.

But why stop there, when we can fly back past every death, her first lover in his crumpled car — see how the dents unfold and the blood flows cleanly off the white metal? Her mother unburns in her kitchen, her father gets a little stronger, day after day, as his cancer dies back, until he is his old self again, and Jemma’s life is almost again a life free from a permanent shadow of unhappiness. A little further back and Calvin might be doused, his organs stuffed back in their proper place, his tongue fetched from his right hand and his eyeballs from his left. Make him whole again, and Jemma is happy again. No death has touched her life and she thinks that everyone she loves is going to live forever.

But I wouldn’t stop there. As long as we are moving, let the time fly backward, and shrink them, Jemma and Calvin both, down until they fit in my own favorite moment, or the moment, anyway, from whenceforth it might all have been different. Jemma and Calvin are sitting on their roof, and instead of pushing her away, a bomb to destroy the adult world he hates and does not understand, let him hold on to her instead, and show her the stars above the roof, and tell her the names — different from what he’s learned in books — that he’s made up for them. Never mind the sins and pleasures and miseries of the old world, never mind the unknowable, indescribable satisfactions of the world to come, let me just watch them there, and let them just stay there, and let all of us finally be happy.