Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital

This didn’t end the debate. A whole parade of people were still waiting to tell their ideas, but after every third or fourth crazy scheme the Council would talk again about Jemma’s suggestion and as people delineated the benefits of robot nannies upon a nascent civilization, or made calls for inverted families where the children would discipline their parents and teach them how to live in the new world, it became obvious that her plan possessed more than all the others the attractive qualities of being both feasible and not too loony. The Council retired back to its chamber and after a short discussion with the angel passed a resolution which Jemma signed into law. This time she really did say, “So let it be written, so let it be done,” but quiet enough that only Vivian and Ishmael heard her.

The angel preferred interviews; these were conducted. Some relationships were fortified or even inaugurated by the stimulus of the Match, a few fell apart. Those who wanted to make requests made them, and the angel held the algorithm in abeyance until such time as the Council wished it activated. It would take about eight hours to run. Why that long and not seven or nine, or why not instantaneously, she would not say. She manufactured a big red button — eminently pressable — which Jemma wanted to hit right away, but Ishmael had the idea of waiting until the following day, taking advantage of a previously scheduled talent show to distract people from the waiting. So Jemma awoke that day about a half hour after Kidney had made her mark on her door and not half a second after Pickie Beecher laid his eyes upon me. Before she opened her eyes she considered her schedule, picturing it in her head, thick blue letters on a yellow pad as big as the bed. There was only a single item on it today: 12:00 p.m. — Press button.

She opened her eyes, stared at the ceiling for a while, stared at the window for a while, stared at the door for a while, hoping that Rob might come through it and lie down beside her. She was not yet so far removed from sleep that she couldn’t go right back to it, and it would have been very pleasant to put her head on his chest, murmur, “I’ve got a big day ahead of me,” and sleep for three hours and forty-five minutes. Her eyes closed, she drifted back toward sleep and she had a small, swift dream in which not Rob but the big red button walked through the door and lay down beside her, and she tried unsuccessfully to snuggle up to it. Careful, it said to her. Don’t make me pop yet.

It was not a usual morning, though she went about her usual business. She got out of bed and did the chair-assisted yoga poses that Vivian had taught her. She hated them, though less than the exercises she was supposed to do on odd days. The room was almost too small to do them, but she wouldn’t be caught dead stretching and lotusing in public, or any place that she might be seen. She dragged a chair to the middle of the room, pushed the table up against the bathroom door, and did the downward-facing dog, leaning forward from her hips and grabbing the lower edge of the seat. “Watch your head,” said the angel.

“Leave me alone,” Jemma said. “Who said you could watch?”

“I am always watching,” she said, but shut up. Vivian had cautioned her not to lower her head too far, and said that she must be extremely careful once she got to the third trimester. “If you lower your head below your heart in the third trimester,” she said, “you will die instantly.”

Eight breaths later, she was done with that one, and then it was time for the modified dancer and warrior two and warrior three and the pony on the table and the squatting palm, eight breaths for every pose. She spent ten minutes, exactly the requisite time, in a lotus on her mat — now was the time she was supposed to be visualizing her healthy pregnancy. She managed it for a minute, imagining it, a foot long now, wrapped in transparent skin, and then it was laid out beside any number of other approximately foot-long objects: Rob’s hairy foot, a submarine sandwich, the first dildo she had ever met, a really big hot dog. This was the exhausting part, to turn her thought on her baby, and dive into the black whole in her belly.

Hello? she said, into the blackness.

Go away, said the baby, the voice as fully imaginary as the body that she saw, an upside-down fetus hanging in a field of stars.

I promised Vivian I would look at you every day. It’s supposed to be good for us.

How can I sleep with you staring at me like that, all creepy. You look crazy. Are you crazy? Am I crazy?

Sometimes I am. A little. Or more than a little. It’s Match Day! she said, trying to change the subject.

Maybe I can get a better family, he said. Would I not be crazy, if I went to live with someone else? Would I still die, if you loved me from far away, instead of from up close?

All that is past. You’re safe.

But I think I would prefer to live with someone else. It’s not personal. I just want to live. I just want to get away from the long reach of your parents’ hands. And I don’t want to have to watch your brother burn every night, or hear the story from you when you sit up drunk all night, regretting everything that ever happened to you.

Well, Jemma said.

I’m glad you understand. I’m glad we had this little talk.

But…

You’re a very good listener. Has anyone ever told you that before? Jordan Sasscock. Put me with him. He’s cute.

But I’m your mother.

Exactly! And before she could ask her baby and herself what that meant, or argue that nothing was ever going to be the same for her, that everyone was going to be happy in the new world, and that she held in her hands the mysterious green remedy for sickness and death, the chime sounded, her exercises were done, and their time was over.

* * *

She wanted to go back to bed. She went downstairs, instead, to Karen’s coffee bar, part of the ER complex, not far from Connie’s more traditional sort of bar. Behind the same series of windows where crabby triage nurses had instructed the wounded and the panicked and the soon-to-be dead on the virtues of waiting one’s proper turn, Karen pumped espresso from a manual machine as tall as she was, made of golden brass and covered in relief with eagles and oxen and calves. Rob was sure it had once been the ark of the covenant, but Karen said it looked just like one she had seen in Italy. During a brief vacation, the two weeks she’d had away from her eighty-hour weeks as an intern, she’d fled Florence and her fiancé and, after a hike and some hitchhiking and a mysterious process of emancipation (“I slept in a field and when I woke up the next day I was sopping wet and my throat hurt like hell but I was so free I cannot even describe it!”) she shacked up with a man who reeked perpetually of dark roasted coffee, hardly able to talk with him but enjoying the first satisfactions of her ten years of sexual activity and serving a brief apprenticeship in his café before going back to her fiancé, in many ways, she insisted, a new woman. She wasn’t the only person for whom an interlude of non-medical happiness had formed the basis of a career — Dr. Neder was throwing pottery on the seventh floor; Dr. Pudding was blowing glass on the second — and like the others she quickly surpassed her lover/teacher, assisted by the angelic technology in the replicators.

Dr. Chandra, Helena Dufresne, and Carla were already all lined up at the bar, Chandra staring morosely into his huge bowl of coffee, Tir’s mom having a discussion with Carla. Karen was drying a tall mug — not actually something she had to do, since used dishes could be thrown, like any other sort of garbage, into the gullet of the replicators, but she said it made her feel authentic, and she liked to meditate while she did her dishes, her best ideas, like the concept of eternally rotating children and the Over-Family, coming to her as she washed and dried.