Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital

“Did you have another bad experience?”

“Not in the way you think.”

“I’m thinking of you finally feeling like somebody was good for more than a day and then you get squashed. No?”

“It’s not that. I just don’t need it. I figured it out. Not the thing, but part of the thing. I can’t explain it yet.”

“You shouldn’t have gone to the boat.”

“Thank God,” Vivian said. “Thank God I went to the boat. Otherwise I’d still be screwed. I’d still be wasting my time, and our time.”

“But the list is your baby. Are you giving up?”

“Of course not. But you can go on and on with a list and never… I can’t explain it yet. One plus protein.”

“I don’t remember how to manage preeclampsia. I’m worried about you.”

“It’s just one plus, probably a contaminant. Go pee again.” That was no problem — Jemma could pee all the time. She was more careful this time, proctored by a fantasy of sickness in which she spent the last months of her pregnancy on a magnesium-sulfate drip, though she should be able to fix preeclampsia and eclampsia or even super-eclampsia and eclampsia suprema, should those diseases come to exist, as easily as she could fix anything or anyone except the boy from the boat.

“But what do you mean, you don’t need it?” Jemma asked again as she came back into the exam room. Vivian was gone. That was another strange thing Vivian was doing lately, suddenly disappearing, out of visits more and less official than this one had been, from lunch on the roof when Jemma went to fetch a ball kicked out of a nearby soccer game, or out of a Council meeting when they were briefly adjourned for dinner. When she caught up with her Vivian always said the same thing, “I needed to be alone for a minute.” Jemma dipped her own urine. This time it was protein-free.

“Thanks for letting me speak,” Vivian said again, up on a balcony in the lobby atrium. Jemma had an excellent view of her, one floor up and directly across from her, standing with her hands folded in a freshly tended flower-box full of pansies. “The angel makes me speak like she’s made everybody else, but I’m glad that she’s done it. I used to think, look at those morons up there, babbling away about their personal obsessions, trying to apply them to everybody else in a way that will make them seem less like a freak. So now I’m the moron. Listen to me.

“I’ve been thinking about the boat. I know you have, too. What happened to them? We’ve assumed that it wasn’t very pleasant, but who knows. Maybe they just left the boy behind when they got a better party boat, one with louder music and taller cakes and more fabulous whores and gigolos. You’re too little, they said to him. You can’t come. We’ve all heard that before, and we all remember, don’t we, how bitter and angry it made us feel. Maybe he got so angry and disappointed that he fell over in a coma.

“But what if they’re all dead? Everybody’s dead, you might say. Big deal. Everybody’s dead but us, because they were not selected like us, because they were not supposed to be part of the new world. We are not here by accident, are we?

“But what if I said to you, we are dead, too? What if I told you that I have been occupied with a single thought ever since I returned to this hospital? It started when I saw the hospital floating in the middle of the fucking ocean, and I can hardly describe how strange it was, to see it like that — it was stranger to see it than to live it — and then I felt it in my little missus, a terrible unease. It spread from there and by the time it got to my head I knew what it was, and now I declare it to you. A single very distinct thought, that we are more dead even than those disappeared people on the boat. There’s a different kind of death than the one we usually think about. We can imagine what they must have gone through on the boat, all the expiring groans, the convulsions and the agonies. Maybe there were devouring little worms, or bigger worms that leaped from the sea to burrow up their asses and eat them up from the inside. Those are the ones that have always scared me. It’s why I never wanted to be buried at sea, which reminds me, as long as we’re talking about this sort of thing, that if you all outlive me, that I want to be cremated. Let me make that clear right now. I’ll hold you responsible if my wishes are not carried out.” She pointed randomly into the crowd, and her finger fell on Pickie Beecher, standing next to Rob one level down to Jemma’s left. He only shrugged.

“Maybe their skin rotted on them or their bones suddenly grew through their skin; maybe they scratched themselves to death. Regardless of how, they all ended up the same way, dead and senseless and inactive, lost in a stupor, incapable of doing anything that matters, totally lost and cut off from anything that’s new. I think we’re like that too.

“We keep deciding that we’re going to be different, or announcing that we have become different, but we stay the same. Lots of other morons have stood up here where I am and said, It’s become obvious that we were doing something wrong, let’s figure it out and do better. I’ve said it to myself. For months I’ve been wondering what we did, what exactly that we did that was so bad that it warranted”—she waved her hands around a couple times, making it somehow a very tired gesture—“all this. A few times I was sure that I’d figured it out, but every time I figured one thing another would come along seeming even more atrocious and obvious. I want for there to be one thing, or one way to describe everything. Lately, but not finally, I’ve been thinking that it wasn’t any of the hundred million obscenities we practiced but something else entirely — merely that we were insincere. I say merely, but really it’s a big thing, to always say sorry, sorry, and never mean it. My mother did that. Sorry, sorry! I didn’t mean to beat the shit out of you with a sack of oranges. I’ll never do it again until the next time.

“How many times are you supposed to put up with that sort of thing? How many times are you supposed to believe someone? What are we getting wrong, that I can still get up here and complain to you about this? Because we are still doing it. There is something excellent that we should be sensitive of and that we should embrace — if we ever really meant that we wanted it. Once or twice during this whole trip I think I believed it, that we were different, that we had finally meant what we said, but I say it again, look around you. Then look back across the water at that empty boat and ask yourselves how we are really different.

“I am so sick of that shit. Aren’t you? Aren’t you sick of hearing how you’ve been corrupt from your very birth, a transgressor from the womb and always liable to the wrath of your mother? Aren’t you sick of going oh, oh, oh! Aren’t you sick of being all worried about it for five minutes and then going back to bed or back to your dog or back to your fabulous floating golden dildo — whatever it is that distracts you from all the sacred affections, the joy and love and fear and sorrow and desire and hope, and makes your hospital life your everyday life again. It’s getting to be a bit of a drag, and an old story, one that everybody should know by now. You shouldn’t need any more morons up here to remind you or to call you away from all the dumb shit.

“But I’m up here anyway, about to call you away from all the dumb shit, because I feel like we have one last chance to turn and recognize the fine thing that’s among us before the really horrible shit comes down. We’ve been floating along like that was all we had to do — get up in the morning and eat and entertain ourselves and keep the kids from getting too bored. Like we would just float into what’s coming. That’s true, we’re on our way to something, but it’s probably not what you’re expecting — not the place where the houses are made of chocolate and your puppy won’t ever die. The people on the boat floated into something. They weren’t saved.