Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital

We are going to San Juan and Jamaica and Aruba and St. Thomas and Martinique. Who cares?

A day of discoveries, Mrs. DiMange. I am the youngest person on board. There’s food everywhere and you can stuff yourself at the Lido buffet all night long. The Alternative Theater does not show alternative movies — next I will puzzle out in exactly what way it is alternative, no one seems to know. The bartender in the casino won’t card me. There’s no one in the piano bar during the day and I can play all I want while the sun is up.

And another discovery — I went in to pee in the casino bathroom while Muz was slaving at the slot machine and it was very fancy — white marble and real towels folded by the sink and a little man who runs in twelve times a day to change them, and soap in a dish, and French-milled pucks in the urinals. They were the good kind, there in a row with nothing to block the view of your neighbor. In number 13 you walk in while I’m there and stand with a banana poking out of your pants. I am in disguise, you say, and I am in love, and then there comes a Jackson, you against the wall with your cheek pressed against the seams between the cement blocks. I was thinking about it, because it was so fancy, and I was redoing our bathroom in my head, taking out the truckstop décor and installing the new marble — just standing there. Not waiting for one because it didn’t seem like the right place. I get a sense, you know. I thought I could tell where things happen. It’s like there’s a glow, like how you know somebody’s interested, even though they’re standing in line next to you at the supermarket with their wife and their three kids. You look at them and they’ll follow you anywhere. It’s like that, but with a place and not a person.

He just reached out. It was fine. That’s enough of an invitation, standing there in a line of high-class urinals with a great big boner. I could hardly be offended, and he wasn’t so bad. He was dressed up for dinner in a white jacket and a black bow tie. I touched that first — it was real, the kind you have to knot up yourself. Seven black buttons on a shirt as fancy as any of the toilets. Silver rims — I thought I could see myself. Then I held on to him. He was bigger than me. Jack says soaking your dick in miracle-gro will make it bigger but I did that all summer and it made no fucking difference at all.

We need a little privacy, he said, walking backward through one of the marble doors. He stood on the toilet so the little man, when he came in to change the towels, would think it was just me in there, standing and thinking. I did a Bush 1 on him and then I climbed up and he did me too. It was fine. I saw him later in the dining room with his family. He raised his knife to me like a salute and he winked. I walked right past his table to go to the bathroom again and I waited for five minutes but he didn’t come.

Everything all right in there? Muz asked, when I finally came back, putting a hand on my sensitive stomach.

Fine, I said, but nothing tasted any good, and no matter what the waiter brought it wasn’t what I wanted.

Vivian did not like what she was reading. She had read the whole thing through twice already, but kept going back to it because she thought it must contain a clue to the boy’s past, and to their future. She had read it the first time looking for answers about the boat, but it said nothing about where everyone had gone. No mass leap from the decks, no zombie war, no death by starvation. Just the desperate notes of a boy in trouble.

“I do not like what I am reading,” she said out loud. She was at her desk, hunched close over the book, as if getting her brain close to the letters was going to make it easier for her to understand their secret meaning.

“I can offer you something far more pleasant,” the angel said.

Vivian shook her head and rubbed her eyes, then looked up at the pictures of the boy she’d taped across the wall above her desk, eight views of his sleeping face. If you studied them like she had, you could see that his expression was not the same in every picture. Here there was just a little droop of the eyebrows that suggested sadness, here a hint of a smile, here his eyes seemed shut tight, not just closed in sleep. The diary was a desperate message to his teacher — so full of love and yet how it condemned her, so Mrs. DiMange was the Great Satan of the hospital. But he was a message too, as obvious and as inscrutable as his diary, thrust at them over the waters just as another had been thrust up at them. And did he speak as lovingly, and damn as thoroughly, as this little black book?

Two today.

In the morning a man in the Lido buffet. I brushed up against his belly while we were in line for breakfast, and then he brushed up against me before he sat down. We went up two more times and both times it happened — my hand drifting across him I could feel how hard it was even through the pants and even just with my knuckles. He stayed behind after his wife went away and after Muz and Puz went to the salon. I went into the bathroom it was the good kind — just one toilet and a lock on the door. Mostly he just wanted to stand there and Wilson and by the time I finally convinced him to Coolidge it wasn’t even a minute before he popped. He wouldn’t look at me afterward but he asked me my name.

Later on but before lunch in the gym. I lifted for a little while and then I went in the back. There was nobody in the sauna but one guy was sitting in the steam room he looked up at me when I came in and I could tell right away though he didn’t move until the steam came on. Then his hand came out of the cloud and settled on my chest. He said I was a big boy but I said I was just inflated from the bench press it goes away in a half hour and then I’m just another skinny puppy. Bush again and a little bit of Bush Jr. It got too hot and we had to finish in the shower.

Matt and Gavin. They’re nice names. I used to say my name was Matt, sometimes. What’s your name? They never really want to know. They’re just being polite I think I like it better when they don’t ask and I don’t ask either. Once somebody called out my real name while we were doing it and I couldn’t even finish I was so mad. I knocked his face against the floor I was hoping so bad that I would knock his teeth right up into his nose but then he made this noise it was very sad and I had to stop everything. I didn’t know why I was so mad it seemed a little extreme but later I figured it out. My name is for you. It’s for you to say. You say it in every one except number 20 and 15 and 40.

They were by the pool I sat down between them it didn’t take very long. Sometimes I am lucky but not usually this lucky there is something special about this boat. Matt smelled like coconuts Gavin smelled like gum. What do you like to do they asked me I said everything. I got to be in the middle of the Coolidge.

“It’s not breakfast material,” Frank said, when his wife paused in her reading to give him a look that invited some kind of commentary.

“What does that mean? It’s not cereal? It’s not yogurt? You can’t eat it?”

“It’s too sad, to read it in the beginning of the day. Let’s have something else. Where’s The Tattle Bear? Or how about something made up entirely?”

Connie shook her head. “That’s exactly your problem.”

“It is? What is?”

“This, exactly this. You want to avoid the problem, and bury your face in the paper. Listen, the problem is more important than The Tattle Bear, and more important than breakfast, and more important than any of that fancy pornography you’ve been watching.”

“But I haven’t been… what are you talking about?”