Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital

“And I’m saying it again. Come away with me, whoever wants to. Whoever thinks that they can be sincere and fucking mean it this time. Whoever will look around with me and say, Fuck this, you’re all dead, be dead — I want to live. We made a dead council and passed dead rules and played dead games with each other. We had some dead parties and did some dead fucking and some of us have paired off into dead couples and dead families and we are all dead together — a promiscuous mix in a giant grave. We have declaimed deadly against the mistakes of the old world and said that we would not repeat them, but more than half of us can’t even decide what they were and the other half probably has an opinion but doesn’t really care. Well, I quit it. I quit from the dead council and the dead games. There is something else we have to figure out — not just why it happened but what we’re going to do about it, how we’re going to make ourselves new — before it’s too late, and I’m starting on it right now. Here I go.”

She looked down at the floor and was quiet. Jemma could tell that she’d closed her eyes, though she couldn’t see it. A whole minute passed in silence, then Karen asked, “When is she going to go?” People started to murmur, and then to talk, and then, here and there, to shout. “Go on,” Wanda Sullivan called across to Vivian. “Get going, I’ll come, too.” But Vivian just stood there, going somewhere, Jemma could tell, inside her head, not able to see where her friend was going but perceiving that she was getting smaller and smaller until she was gone entirely.

The Council met in emergency session to replace Vivian, or rather to replace the office vacated by Monserrat when she was promoted by Vivian’s resignation to the office of Second Friend. Ishmael remained First, and Jemma remained as she was, unaffected politically but really quite depressed by the whole development, and distracted during the replacement hearings by perseverating thoughts on dead friendships.

“Of course we’re still friends,” Vivian had told her when she went to visit her after the speech. “Why would that change?”

“Well, that big breakup speech, for one thing. When did I suddenly become somebody you couldn’t talk to?” Vivian held up a pair of black underwear, gently shaking out the folds in the silk before she folded it up and put it in her suitcase.

“It’s not like that. It wasn’t the sort of thing to talk about, until it was time. I just decided all of a sudden, and then the angel made me talk about it. She knew all the time, I think. She acts like a fucking airhead but she knew the boat was coming and the kid was coming and she’s keeping bad secrets even now. She knows it’s almost too late, and she gave me a kick. A little one, but I needed it.” Jemma was leaning in the door. She stood up straight, folded her arms and unfolded them, then leaned against the other side. Vivian kept folding her huge stock of underwear, slowly and deliberately.

“Why are you doing this?”

“I already talked about it,” Vivian said, and that’s all she would say, by way of explanation, or denial, when Jemma asked if it wasn’t something about her, if it wasn’t that Vivian wanted herself to be the grand pooh-bah, if she didn’t think that Jemma wasn’t taking it all seriously enough or trying hard enough. “I can try harder,” Jemma said. “You know that about me — I can always try harder. Maybe if I try harder I can get the kid to wake up. I know you have a plan — we can do it together.”

“I already talked about it,” Vivian said, sighing deeply. Jemma heard an answer in the sigh — Yes, you are too lazy. Yes, you are not smart enough. Yes, the office is bigger than you and you are not ever going to grow into it. “You can come with me,” Vivian said.

“Come where?” Jemma asked. With her hand she indicated the window and the endless sea.

“Away,” Vivian said. “You know what I mean. Don’t keep going the same way as everybody else. They’re all going to get fucked, and you will too. Even you, Jemma.”

“There’s no place to go,” Jemma said, “and I couldn’t go, anyway. I was elected. So were you.”

“We’ll find a place to make ourselves different. You and Rob could come. You could even bring that weird kid.”

“You were elected,” Jemma said again. Vivian shrugged.

“I know what I have to do, even if I don’t know what I’m doing.” She smoothed her hand over her underwear and closed the top of the suitcase.

“Don’t they have underwear, where you’re going?” Jemma asked.

“You can come, too,” Vivian said, and picked up her suitcase. She waited patiently for Jemma to finally step out of her way, and then she walked out the door, leaving behind a whole closet full of clothes. Jemma sat down on the bed and picked up a framed picture of the ocean horizon. She read the inscription on the back: You make me remember that I once knew people who were beautiful in their bodies and their souls.

Dr. Snood put himself far forward for the office of Third Friend. He had had the most votes of the also-rans, and he played that distinction to maximal advantage. Jemma wondered who had actually written the law governing emergency successions — she didn’t remember it ever really being discussed, except as a package of duty dispensed to some subcommittee. They all turned to it with panicked interest after Vivian made her speech. There would be a temporary appointment, drawn from the Council or the general population, and then another election.

She watched Dr. Snood make his speech. He wasn’t so bad, she supposed, or he was bad in a way that would probably be good for the Council. The weeks and months had modified his smarm — everybody was different, weren’t they? Look at what happened to Vivian, she thought, and wondered what she would see if the fire in her eyes let them look into people’s minds, if she could see their secret hearts as easily as she could see their ordinary hearts. She tried it with Dr. Snood: from across the room she became aware of the beating of his heart, of his respirations, of the cascade of impulses flowing across and through his brain in a pattern that was certainly the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen in him. She knew he had an erection, but she didn’t know what he was thinking, or what he wanted more than anything, or if he was really in love with Dr. Tiller: all things she wondered about. Because I am smarmy, she thought, because I once was somebody, because I consider myself to be rather swell, because I have big feet and soft hands, because I know a lot about poop — for these reasons I should lead you. They were about to make a vote — Connie, Jordan Sasscock, and the withered old volunteer had also thrown their hats in the ring — when the angel announced a code in the PICU.

Jemma was too pregnant to leap over the table, but she managed to lift her bottom over the top and do a swift scoot-and-roll, and she made good time down the hall to the unit. The fire was already in her hands when she passed through the double doors, green auras around her clenched fists. In the room next to the boy’s a body was laid out, pale and seizing, naked except for a scrap of cut pants that lay across one thigh. The room was hardly converted back to its old use. There were still paper alphabets on the wall, and the monitor — was that v-fib or just the seizures? — was framed in drooping green fur, and sported a pair of goggle-eyes on its top. “Get out of the way,” Jemma said, full of fire now, so it choked her and made her sound like she was about to cry. The seven bodies in the therapeutic cluster leaped away and revealed the patient’s face. Jemma almost faltered when she saw it was Maggie, death throes making her chinless rat-face less attractive than ever. Jemma brought her hands up and let the fire spill out as she brought them down. Maggie jumped when Jemma hit her chest, her whole body rising in a bounce before it settled again on the bed.