Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital

She wasn’t the only runner out this morning. She did a smiling nod at the others and said hello to Alan, a radiology tech who always took his shirt off at the top of the ramp and walked back down with it tucked into his pants. There was always something swinging hugely in his shorts as he walked briskly down the spiral. It would be nice, she thought, to walk down with him one day. Perhaps when she was a little firmer. It wouldn’t be long before she was among the firmest people in the hospital; already there was nothing left to pinch between her ass and her thigh, and when she poked a finger against the flesh of her ass it hardly gave at all, but she wanted it so firm that if someone should happen to bite it, it would be like biting the ass of a mannequin. And she would wait until her ears were done — they are a little floppy in the lobes, in fact nearly as floppy as an old man’s, but Billy had a plan to fix them which would involve nothing more complicated than a cream, some drops, a night brace, and an adult-sized sit-and-spin on which she must spin counterclockwise for ten minutes at a time three times in a single night.

As soon as she reached the eighth floor she sprinted for the ninth. The doors at the top were open — she could feel the salt breeze blow against her as she took the final curve, so fast she thought she could run along the wall as easily as on the floor, and then she passed through the door and decelerated into a power walk, folding her hands behind her neck and lifting her face into the bright sun and the cold wind. She walked in a circle for a while, did pull-ups — three sets of twenty — at the monkey bars, and lay down in the grass. She’d rest just a moment before she started her laps around the roof — a hundred and sixty of them equaled four miles. There was a small cloud passing overhead in the shape of her family. I have not forgotten you, she thought.

Drs. Snood and Tiller passed by her where she lay. Some people will sleep anywhere, Dr. Tiller thought. Even when it was very cold the two doctors took a morning walk up here.

“I dreamed again,” he said, “of the resistant bug.”

“Poor Jacob. Did you wake screaming? I have fewer and fewer of the scream dreams, these days.”

“No. It chased me, yes, like usual, scuttling on eight legs then six legs then four and even for a little while on two. It never holds still until it becomes an inky gelatinous concept that presses against my face and sucks all the breath out of me.”

“You are still waiting for everything to go back to the way it was.”

“I’m afraid, Carmen. If I am forgetting my medicine, then how much could anyone else remember? I sat for an hour on the toilet this morning trying to recall the dosing for pentasa suppositories.”

“You’d sit there for an hour anyway. Do all gastroenterologists spend so much time on the toilet?”

“I’ve not had to look up that dose since my third year in medical school. What’s next, prednisone? Tomorrow morning will I wake up thinking IBD stands for itsy-bitsy duodenum, or that Crohn’s disease only strikes old women?”

“If you do then I’ll…” Oh, let them go. Walk on, there’s a reason Jemma doesn’t like you, and another reason why I don’t, and another, and others beyond even what my brother shall catalog against you. There were a score of people up here on the roof this morning. Karen and Anika were setting up a badminton net. If Jemma sleeps in I might inhabit the shuttlecock. It’s a distinct sort of fun, to be a shuttlecock in the hands of competent players, and every time the racquet connects I connect with the life behind it. Monserrat has come up for a solitary picnic. Out of a basket big enough to hold all the organs in her abdomen she removes a cup of yogurt, a peach, and a small thermos of coffee. She shook out the crisp white sheet she’ll sit on, snapping it in the sun, turning once or twice with it to make it spin and flap more. Even from across the roof I could tell how much she enjoyed the contrast between the white sheet and the blue sky. I slither along toward her in the grass, gathering speed as I go. I want to be with her when she tastes the coffee. But there is the skylight to look into before I get there, uncovered on this bright morning. I look down on the model; Jupiter was closest to me; the red eye stared dully at the wall. Pickie Beecher was standing underneath in a patch of sun. He shaded his eyes and looked at me.

“I see you,” he said.

They called it the Match, after another process of assignation. There was on the one hand an embarrassment of parentless children and on the other a large population of childless adults. There were the hundred-and-thirty families and the seventy-two single parents who’d been together with their children on the night of the flood; the hundreds of other children had been up till now cared for by the same nursing teams who had cared for them from the time they first entered the hospital. The ward had become the family unit. So twenty different parents played with Ella Thims and fed her and changed her diapers, and she had her siblings among the GI kids, and Josh and Ethel were at first a part of the big one family. These families had been unstable from the start — Cindy and Wayne and other, older children were already together, in a sense, like dozens of other teenagers were coming together in benevolent gangs, more and more resistant to the authority of the nurses and the other adults, and there were families who vacuumed up stray children and adopted them. Unofficial, unorganized, it had been progressing since Thing Two, and no busybody worth their salt could let it just happen. Who knew what they would end up with, when the dust settled? The Council, Jemma’s not-wedding behind them, the educational curriculum set and deemed appropriate, every child and teacher seeming reasonably content with what they were learning or teaching, and most of the old hospital transformed or being transformed into spaces deemed better suited to their new mission of education, preservation, and the fostering of hope, turned its eye on the current distribution of individuals throughout the hospital, and overturning the last vestiges of the old hospital order.

I should be on my honeymoon, Jemma thought as she listened to the days of debate on how they should organize themselves. There must be a hundred different patches of tropical water she and Rob could have visited. Or they might have floated behind the hospital in a romantic dinghy, a houseboat big enough just for the two of them with an automated crank to pay out the line, farther and farther until the hospital was only a smudge against the horizon, and conspirators with sharp knives might depose her with a single cut. Where is the resolution, she wondered, that would have built me a honey-boat? She was in meetings the next day. “It wasn’t really a wedding,” Vivian noted, “so you shouldn’t really get a honeymoon, right?”

People had cleaved together from the first into pairs and even the occasional much-whispered about ménage, or the more innocent but no less frequently discussed situations of two-timers or men and women who dated the same three people, one then two then three then back again to one, in serial but evanescent monogamy. True multiple-partnerships were extremely rare, but Jordan Sasscock had acquired eight wives, though none of them called themselves that. There’d been no ceremony, private or public, and Dr. Sasscock certainly never described them that way. In fact, when someone called them wives he’d become uncharacteristically upset, his suave jovial affect lifting off of him in a second. As serious and furious as Dr. Snood in a snit, he’d say, “We are all together, but it’s not like that.” There was something derogatory about wives that rubbed all nine of them the wrong way, though when he was drunk you might get him to agree that he was in some sense husband to all of them. But he pointed out to people who were curious enough to ask at length about the arrangement that he was no bigamist or powerful fuck-lord presiding over a harem. It was all more equitable and more mysterious than that. “I am lost in them,” he would say finally, dreamily.