Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital

Jemma raised her hand.

“Dr. Claflin,” said Dr Sundae. “You know I cannot recognize you yet.”

“Is this a testimony?” Jemma asked, “or Grand Rounds?”

“I am going to pretend I didn’t hear that, Dr. Claflin. Your turn is coming.” Rob was waving his hand in the audience. “Dr. Dickens, if this Council wants your testimony, we will call for it specifically.”

“As I was saying,” said Dr. Snood, “I first became worried when the landing party, if we can call it that, returned from the boat, and that is when I started gathering evidence. I kept a log of unusual behaviors including strange movements, strange or inappropriate comments, and unjustified or unprovoked use of her gift. This figure summarizes one data set: I or my agents recorded sixty-four separate instances where Dr. Claflin used her gift in the absence of any appreciable illness in any living being around her. Notice the increase in frequency.” He showed a graph, weeks versus frequency of the observed behavior, whose points made an upward-sweeping line.

“Jesus Christ,” Jemma said, “you’ve been following me?” Dr. Sundae, eyes on the graph, held up a single warning finger. Everyone else ignored her except Ishmael, who caught her eye and winked. Jemma shook her head. She wanted to pound her fists on the table, but instead she just collapsed her steeple and folded the left hand over the right. She stared ahead at the wall, but not at the graph, and actually tried not to listen to what Dr. Snood was saying, though when he presented a table detailing the dates of emotional outbursts including three episodes of spontaneous crying, she stood up calmly and said, loud but not shouting, “Have you noticed, Doctor, that I am pregnant?” It was the first time she had ever put the special tone in her voice when she said Doctor, the one that turned it from a title into an insult. She felt both vindicated and ashamed. Dr. Sundae, at least, seemed sympathetic — she pretended not to hear her.

“This is all starting to drag, Dr. Snood,” she said, and he hurried through his next twenty slides, summarizing the data in a flash, until he came to the brain MRI and PET scans that were done months before, as part of the initial workup of her wonderful affliction. He zipped through Dr. Pudding’s report, outlining all the normal structures with his pointer, excitement growing in his voice until he came to a last series of cuts on the MRI and said “Look, just look at the amygdala! It was grossly hypertrophied.” He presented a corresponding section of the PET that showed increased uptake of glucose in that region. “Rage,” he said, turning away from the screen and waving his arms, cutting across the Council with his laser. “Fury, violence, destruction — these are all mediated by the amygdala. Dr. Claflin’s amygdala has become an almond of doom”—he raised his fist—“struggling vainly to suppress the dark impulses unleashed by her dreadful burden. Do I have to paint a picture for you of the horrible things that could happen if it fails completely?”

He started to do just that, and there was even another set of pictures — artist’s renderings he commissioned from a talented parent, but Dr. Sundae cut him off. “That will do, Dr. Snood,” she said. The next witnesses, Anika and Janie, were both too sick to testify. Now it was Jemma’s turn. Dr. Sundae called for her to step up into the box.

“I’m fine right here,” Jemma said. She spent a few moments just staring around the room at various faces, seeing who would meet her gaze and who would hold it. Dr. Walnut looked away. Dr. Chandra looked back but made that gesture, the quick swipe over his nose, that she knew meant he had seen something dirty or unpleasant. Rob smiled. Ishmael winked again. “No matter what,” he had told her that afternoon, “you can count on me. No matter what they say about you. No matter how horrible they make you sound, I won’t vote against you, and they can’t do a thing without all three of us going against you.” She nodded and looked beyond him. Connie smiled but shook her wattle menacingly. Dr. Sundae nodded sternly at her and raised her eyebrows. Dr. Snood stared back and shook his head pityingly. She wanted so badly for Vivian to be here to defend her — she’d do a better job by far than Jemma ever could.

“Well,” she said finally. “What can I tell you?”

“It was like this with my granny,” Vivian said. “Everybody hanging around her bed, waiting for her to die.”

“You’re not going to die,” Jemma said.

“You keep saying that.” They were in the rehab playroom, Vivian lying face up in her hospital bed, Jemma sitting in a deep inflatable easy chairs of the sort that you could kick or hurl harmlessly across the room, when you were in the mood. Arthur and Jude, two men from the lift team who’d been assigned by Dr. Snood to follow Jemma wherever she went, sat on the ground close to the door, and between them and Vivian four of Vivian’s disciples sat on inflatable mushroom-shaped stools, close enough to be able to hear everything they said. Vivian called them her death guard. They were there to catch her last words, because everybody on the ninth floor felt sure that Vivian, before anyone else, was going to come up with the reason, even if only moments before she died. “The worse I feel,” she’d told Jemma, “the closer I feel to getting it. You know what that means, right?” Jemma didn’t know, and didn’t want to hear about it anyway.

“Cheer up,” Vivian said. “You’re healthy. Your baby’s healthy. It could be a lot worse.”

“That’s coming,” Jemma said.

“You’ll be fine,” Vivian said. “Your baby will be fine.”

“How can you know that? You haven’t laid a hand on my belly in weeks.”

“I’ve thought it through,” Vivian said. She sighed. “Is it midnight yet?”

“Almost,” Jemma said, tired of the question and not looking at her watch. “I don’t really care,” she said. “It’s just that it’s made me very confused. Now what do I do? I almost wanted to ask them the question, but it would have been too humiliating.”

“Do what I do. Lie here and try to figure it out, and wait for the big show.”

“Stupid fucking Ishmael.”

“Well, that at least you should have seen coming. Everything else — that’s just things falling apart.”

“He seemed so sincere.”

“Tell me about it. I’ll love you forever. I won’t let them impeach you — it’s all the same thing to him. Ouch.” She shifted in her bed. “I think I just felt my kidney fail.”

“Your kidneys are fine,” Jemma said, taking a very quick look. There was a barely perceptible shimmer in the air when she looked into Vivian’s belly, and no fire at all. Still, one of Dr. Snood’s goons lifted his head, as if sniffing the air, and stared at her. Jemma looked away.

“They’re probably the only good thing left in my body. This must be what it’s like to get old. I think Granny was even in this position, except her hand was always up over her head, like this. See? I think it was stuck, or maybe she just liked it like that. Vivian, she said, I hope a truck or a fat man falls on you and kills you long before you ever get like me. She suffered terribly. I used to hate to come home from school, because I knew she would be there, and I could smell the smell by sixth period, way before I even left to go home. This isn’t so bad, compared to what she went through. She paused a moment. Say, do I smell?”

“No,” Jemma said.

“You wouldn’t tell me if I did.” She cried out suddenly and her four attendants leaped from their stools.

“What? Where does it hurt?” Jemma asked, though what she sensed from her friend was a high spike of elation.