Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital

“And how like you,” she said, surprising him with an expression he had not seen since before the old world passed away — she wrinkled her nose and pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. To anyone else it would have looked like she was just concentrating very hard and like she smelled something very peculiar, but to Frank it announced her loathing disappointment. As suddenly as she put it on, she took the expression off, and then her face was merely ugly and sad, and she was crying.

“What?” he asked. “Good God, what is it?”

“How can you not know,” she said between little sobs, “when I’m talking about our daughter?”

“Ah,” he said, and he didn’t need for her to say, If he is doing this, then what is she doing? Or if a boy can be so sad, than can’t a girl? It was exactly the sort of ridiculous thing she would obsess over, but he didn’t say so, too sad himself at the way she was crying, and at the way this old difference had crept back into their life, and at the way they were fighting again. To see her like this again, so angry and crazy and sad, was as surprising as seeing a mountain thrust up out of the sea. And yet it had a quality, too, of fateful recognition. Of course she was still like this, and of course the earth had not utterly passed away.

“Don’t you sigh at me!” she shrieked. He didn’t answer, or even heave a more expansive sigh, but said, “I’m sorry.” He reached over the table and took the book and started to read from where she had left off.

A girl today, finally. Not a girl — a lady, older than you, even. And her husband, too, but he mostly just watched. She said his name — Scott! Scott! — at the end of our Reagan it was very traditional. The Reagan, that is. Not even a Nancy, just a Ronald, just me on top and him getting closer and closer until he was touching me but no Coolidge though I called out for it I might have said please. He called back to her, too, reaching past me to touch her I could feel him pressed up against my back and he sprayed all over me without hardly any incentive at all. Then they both held me I did a very simple Harrison until I popped and they both put their hands in it and put their hands in their mouths it was like watching Pooh eating honey.

I keep wondering what was going on between them, during. They weren’t even touching, even at the end he was just reaching for her and he ran his hands over her without touching her. I was close and I could see it, always an inch or a half inch or just a breath of space between them. It was like they had called me out of some place to put me between them but I wasn’t there, either. I can’t explain it but it was very definite this is a very strange boat every day I discover it more. I mean I knew what it was like while it was happening but now I am grabbing at it it’s like smoke but I know I’ll think about it while I’m asleep. I kept looking back at him and looking at her and looking back at him I wanted eyes in the back of my head to see them both at the same time. They must be very much in love.

Nothing today, except you. I did three Harrison’s just by myself and it was numbers twenty-two, fourteen, nineteen, fifty-three, and seventy — seventy all alone by itself for twenty minutes between coming back on board and going to dinner I finished just in time. We are in Aruba but all these places seem the same to me, the market squares and the white beaches. Everywhere we go Puz buys a bottle of rum and Muz buys a big tube of Retin-A at the drug store now she has three. She stopped me in the middle of the square this afternoon Puz was walking ahead and she stopped in the middle of making fun of him. She put her hand on my arm and held on to her hat like it might blow away from the questions she was about to ask and said, Are you all right? Are you having a good time?

Oh yes I said. Very good very very good.

There were opportunities today a man on the beach and a lady with a dog and a note from Matt and Aaron slipped under my door but I just wanted to be alone with you now it is almost midnight and somebody is standing a little ways down the deck staring out just like me I could walk by him and touch him as I passed and then it would happen I can already see it. But let him go let them all go I just want to be here with you.

“Are you bored?” Ethel asked Pickie Beecher.

“I am always bored,” he said.

“Well, keep cutting. We’re almost done.” They were snipping words out of the diary and putting them in a glass bowl on the floor. Pickie kept dropping them from too high, and then chasing the fluttering word as it drifted about her room. She had opened a window on the same day that the boat-boy had come into the hospital. She had just finally felt like it, was all.

She had the thought that the boy had something to tell her, and to tell all of them — a fascinating and horrible story, full of something worse and more exciting than mere zombies — and she wanted to help him to tell it. But a séance had yielded the usual silence, which made sense because he wasn’t dead. And the aluminum tiara that the angel insisted was the telepathy device she had asked for only made her hear a very quiet sort of murmuring that she could easily have just been imagining. She couldn’t get close enough to put a pen in his sleeping hand, and sitting quietly with a pen in her hand yielded nothing but page after page of straight lines. Then she had the idea of using his own words. They would isolate every last one of them in a bowl, and then draw them out one after another to assemble a message, and maybe even a conversation.

“My hand hurts,” Pickie said.

“Keep working.”

“You are a cruel master.”

“Don’t call me that. Friends don’t call each other master.”

“I have no friends, except my brother, and where is he?”

“Don’t start that again. Just keep cutting, we’re almost done.” For a while the only sound was of their scissors working as she snipped in her book and Pickie snipped in his — the boy had written on both sides of every page, so to avoid getting words that were whole on one side but truncated on the other, she got a copy for each of them and painted out whole pages in them, odds in the one and evens in the other. “You know,” she said, as she snipped apart the last two words and let them fall into the bowl, “I don’t cut because I want to hurt myself. I cut because I want to feel alive.” Pickie yawned. “Hold on,” Ethel said. “The good part is coming.”

They closed their eyes and fished in the bowl with their hands, pinching the slips between their fingers and laying them out on an empty game board. It was Chutes and Ladders, one of the many old favorites in the playroom that even the preschoolers had abandoned for the more sophisticated diversions of the angel.

Still cry different silver wonder four teacher were the words.

“What do you think it means?” Ethel asked.

Pickie seemed hardly to think at all before he replied. “Still because he still misses his brother. Cry to cry for him. Different because he is unique in his grief, though the absence of a brother is the commonest grief and the most essential loneliness. Silver for his brother’s silver eyes, never to shine in the world. Wonder for the lost wonder of his iron sighs, and the miracles that died with him. Four is the perfect number — it is everywhere and has nothing to do with the message. Teacher because his brother was to teach him happiness and now it is a lesson he will never learn.”

Ethel looked at him a moment and then gave him a hug, a gesture he tolerated like always. She gathered up the words and put them back in the bowl. “Let’s try again,” she said.

A double Coolidge from Matt and Gavin it’s not so often you can have them. Matt behind and Aaron in front it was almost too much they kept saying, are you okay and I couldn’t talk because I was too close, chasing something again and almost getting it. They were interfering with the questions so I gave up on the AP class and we went back to the simpler thing, just one at a time, each of them in turn I could not make them go quick or hard enough though I called out for it and they shouted back, and shouted to each other — not like love though it was like at swim practice somebody shouting at you the water makes the voice seem far away. Go Matt go a little harder a little faster you almost have it. Every hit I moved a little further up the bed until my head was against the wall, every hit I was a little bit closer it was you I was chasing, always you no matter who it is. What a mystery how it is never you but it is always you, I reach and reach I can hardly stand it. They’re not wimpy fags like usual they were a little too fainthearted for the double but they do a good job on the easier thing I can hardly tell when one stops and the other starts, they’re so smooth.