Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital

They passed the third floor. Jemma stumbled but John bore her up. She opened her eyes again, and considered the feeling that was in her, and decided that when she saw all the bodies floating, an enormous grief would be written on that blank feeling. It said something terrible about a person, that they had to pretend to grieve at the end of the world. Good Rob Dickens wept not just for his mother and his sisters, but for all the dead, every single creature. When Jemma held him she pressed her face close to his to steal his tears, so when he blinked at her so sadly he would think she was crying, too.

“Can I tell you what happened next? Maybe it’s rude. Maybe that part is still a secret.” He looked up the stairwell, then glared at the cinderblocks in the wall. “Do you care?” he asked, almost shouting, and it took a moment for Jemma to realize he wasn’t talking to her. There was no answer. “I doubt it,” he continued. “I doubt she cares. Well, I was in my living room when I defied her. She was speaking from the fireplace, and when I said no, go get yourself another sucker — actually I said, Go get yourself another sucker, bitch — she said, Stupid creature! in this voice that was so different from before, full of doom but somehow kind of… attractive. She rushed out of the fireplace and ravished me. I don’t know how else to put it. It was sexual. Oh no! Oh yes! I didn’t want it to happen. I don’t even like women, not in that way, be they angel or mortal. I don’t like to look at them. I don’t like to touch them. I don’t like them at all. And why, oh why would I be interested in one of those when all my life I suspected that they were gateways to endless, horrible darkness. Wet, sucking, fishy darkness in an empty cave. I had a dream once where I was attacked by a flying horde of them — they were like bats, flapping all around me, and they bit me with tiny little needle teeth and all I could think was, Now I need a rabies shot. But I did it like I’d been waiting for it all my life. It was sort of sexual and then totally sexual — she was this roiling blackness, with no fishy smell at all. I kept waiting for that. She was so black it hurt my eyes to look at her — I felt this weird pressure, like the darkness was pulling on my eyes, pulling and releasing them and pulling and releasing them, and it hurt. She pulled at me all over, and released me, and pulled. Is this getting gross?”

Jemma nodded.

“Well, when she took me I saw the futility of resistance. The new flood would happen, with or without me. There were others who could do what I could do, though not as well. I thought, I had better do it, since I was damned if I didn’t, and maybe — is this too vain? — if I did it things would be better for the people who were going to live. I’m not a nobody, after all. Anybody else’s hospital would not be mine, and probably not as good. Would anybody else think to do the sur-basins in teak? Would anybody else put in a star chamber? Would anybody else have a fake perpetual-motion machine that turns into a real perpetual-motion machine? Maybe it was a sign, how I could already see in my mind how the rooms would unfold out of each other. When she was done with me, I wanted to do it for her, anyway. Because though she had hurt me I found myself suddenly but undeniably in love with her. Does that make sense?”

“Not really,” said Jemma softly.

“Well, I didn’t think it would. I can hardly expect you to understand. Maybe somebody else will. There are a lot of people in this hospital. Almost as many as I hoped for.”

“Seven miles?” she said. They were passing the fourth floor, but she was not out of breath because they were proceeding so slowly, each of them pausing before each step as if actively considering if it was truly wise to go on.

“Seven miles. That was the plan.”

“That’s impossible,” she said.

“Nothing is impossible for Him.” He raised a finger next to his face to point straight up. “That’s what she said. He made this earth. Why shouldn’t He be able to drown it?”

“Not again,” Jemma said. “He said he wouldn’t.” Never again. Never ever. It was a fact remembered from her third-grade religion class. Sister Gertrude had related to her and her classmates the horrors of the flood, insisting they imagine the agony of the sinners as they drowned. Drowning was one of the worst ways to die, she had said, because you know it’s coming, but you can do nothing to stop it. She had made them all hold their breath for as long as they could. “Don’t you dare breathe!” she had shrieked at Jemma, when a little whistling sigh escaped from between her lips. “The waters are pressing down on you!” And after she had brought a few of them to tears at the absolute hideousness of it all, and filled them with a nauseating fear of God, she had thrown wide the classroom curtains and pointed at the rainbow with which she had synchronized her lecture. “Never again, children!” she cried, with genuine joy on her face. “Never again!” While the class giggled or wept with relief Jemma had vomited a morning snack of chocolate milk down her jumper.

“Yes,” he said. “Those were my words exactly. I even got a Bible and pointed it out to her. She didn’t argue. She didn’t even respond. But I learned pretty soon that nothing would be like it was before. I do not know why. Because she called me a prophet, I thought I would be forced to rush out like a madman and warn of the coming flood, but in fact I was forbidden to do so. Of course, I tried right away to tell everybody I could. I knew better already than to talk back to her, at this point, but I was thinking, Fuck you, lady, I’ll tell anybody I want! I tried to tell my dad, on the telephone, not caring if he thought I was crazy. I only wanted him to be safe, never mind how he made me take piano for fourteen years and made me do that stupid fucking pinewood derby thing every year, though I always lost, and always cried, and he called me pussy-face every time, and not just over the derby. Did I skin my knee? Pussy-face! No date for the prom? Pussy-face! Not distinguished enough for Yale? Pussy-face! What sort of father calls his kid that? It didn’t matter. All was forgiven, everybody was going to die. But when I tried to tell him, I couldn’t even form the words. I was physically unable to speak. She knew I had tried and she punished me, but when she was done she became very tender and… sticky. And she said to me, You may only tell the children.

“Because the whole thing was for the kids, right?” he said, and paused. They had passed the fifth floor, and were halfway to the sixth. Jemma noticed that the numbers that marked the floors were different from before — they were bigger and the colors were deeper. They shined at the surface like they were still wet, or like the surface of puddles. She put her hand against the 5 as they passed it, expecting her hand to sink into the bright yellow paint. It was solid and smooth, and made her hand tingle. “That was my job,” he said, “to design a hospital for sick kids. But not just a hospital — it would be a wonderful new machine for which the angel would become the soul and the mind, the intellect and the will. Not that I had ever designed a hospital before. Or a computer, for that matter — that’s where she lives, in the last basement. Way, way, way down, in the computer core. When I said I couldn’t do it, she asked me, Where is your faith, creature? Where is your trust in the Lord your God? Lost up my ass, bitch, I said, but she knew that I was the bitch, and I would do anything she told me to, and believe whatever she told me, and try my hardest for her because she was becoming the most important person in my life. Sure enough, within a month the hospital people called me right out of the blue to offer me the commission, and when I sat down to do it, it just sort of happened. It was all inspiration. And even though I didn’t understand where it came from, I understood it when it passed through my hand. Fantastic shit, crazy shit — I can hardly describe it, but you’ll see it working. When the construction began I visited the site every night with her, hidden in her darkness, and she executed miracle after miracle, building all the secret holy parts of the building while I directed her from a second, secret set of plans, that only she and I ever saw. For once she did as I told her, and I swear she didn’t understand how most of what she was building actually worked, but I did. I got it.” He tapped a finger against his head. “It all just sort of rose up. I got proud. She punished me.”