Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital

“I am almost dead,” Pickie said sadly as Jemma helped Kidney into her chair, positioned the sundae in front of her, and handed her a spoon.

“That’s worse than tired,” Kidney said. “You sure look good for somebody who’s about to die.”

“Eat,” Jemma said to Kidney, and to Pickie, “Don’t say things like that.”

“It’s almost time,” he said. “All this time I thought they were afraid of me, that they knew what I could do to an angel.” He opened his mouth to show them his big perfect teeth. “But they were never afraid, they were just waiting.”

“You should make a sundae,” Kidney said, digging in. “That’ll make you feel better.”

“Ice cream would make me more cold but no less dead.”

“Pickie,” Jemma said. “I have got a roll of demerits in my pocket.”

“I know it when you’re lying,” he said

“Today there is roast beef ice cream,” Kidney said.

“There is always roast beef,” Pickie said. “It makes no difference, and you know, you have always known, that I am a simple vegetarian. Why must they destroy me? Why do they hate me? What have I done except be born and try to be true to my brother? I love my brother — is that any reason for them to destroy me?”

Jemma picked at some whipped cream that had stuck to Kidney’s hair. “There’s just one angel,” she said. “And she likes you. She likes everybody — that’s her problem. But she wouldn’t hurt a fly. How many times do I have to tell you?”

“As many times as it would take to make it true. You could talk forever, and never understand. I used to think that you could protect me. I dreamed of you and him in battle — you burned his wings and ravaged his flesh, but still he came for me. He tore me to pieces while you watched and cried out but you were useless. You are useless to me and I am already dead.”

“Oh, come here, you,” she said, pulling him from his chair for a hug. It was what she and Rob did whenever he got too crazy, whenever he talked himself into a tizzy of paranoia, or when he grew silent and pulled at his testicles, or smelled obsessively at his hands. Rob had made the discovery that if you just held him for long enough, he would let out a funny noise, a growl and a burp, and soften in your arms, and for a little while he would talk about other things, and even seem happy. She held him and held him, and finally he made a noise, but not the one she wanted. She felt his arms moving behind her, and felt him swallow. She pushed him back. He was eating whipped cream and caramel off his hands. Behind her Kidney was face down in her sundae. Jemma could feel the cold burning her face, but the child slept through it.

“She is gone,” Pickie said, “and I am gone, too.”

I have such violent dreams, and yet they are never nightmares. The nightmare is the one where I wake up fifty years from now, happily married, and see a picture by my bed of the family I have happily fathered, every face smiling, every heart black with the sin I put in it. So happy and so dead — it wakes me screaming every time.

The happy dream is the one where I hang myself and then set myself on fire (through merely an act of will) as I dangle from the oak in the Nottingham’s driveway — I know it is that tree because of the tar patch on the trunk that looks like a mocking face. I stab myself in the belly on the green of the seventh hole, and my blood flows in a torrent, filling up the low dells and the high hills of Severna Forest, until every house is floating, and every neighbor declaims from their porch, Finally, Calvin. Finally! They are scolding and congratulating me all at once.

If I have the one where I cut out my own heart and then put out my eyes, then I am buoyed up all day, and nothing can spoil my good mood. I know why it is so. If you are a born sacrifice, then knives and chains and fire are the things that comfort you. If I were born to be president, then dreams of long black sedans and budget summaries would give me the same feeling.

And it’s not even the hard part, dealing with that. It’s not keeping my violent dreams to myself, or practicing little violations on myself, or even imagining the really impossible ones: a person would need four arms to cut in such a way, and how can you cut out your tongue if you’ve already cut off a hand? The hard part is understanding how it can follow that a supreme act of violence against myself could be an end to violence.

“Have you seen Pickie Beecher?” Jemma asked. It was a question she was asking everybody who could still talk. On the two-hundred-and-forty-second day since the flood he had been missing for three days, his weird, sullen presence gone from the public spaces of the hospital, his stain gone from her mind. She looked for him everywhere in both places, waddling from the roof down to the lobby, and sitting quietly under the toy as she searched fruitlessly in her mind for the familiar blot. She knew he could hide from her, in the world and in her head — he’d demonstrated it for her one night, putting a finger in his mouth and blowing his cheeks out, he’d winked out of her head in an instant, and challenged her to find him. He said he would hide somewhere on the fourth floor. The effort exhausted him — she’d never have found him if he hadn’t been panting so loudly inside a hamper full of filthy linens in the PICU. He could do it, but she didn’t think he could do it for long, so she was searching worriedly. That morning she started again at the top of the hospital, meaning to search more thoroughly, and question at least one representative from every floor. Rob started in Radiology and was working his way up. Ethel Puffer started in the first lighted basement.

“I haven’t,” said Helena Dufresne, off the ward but still mostly bed-bound on the ninth floor. “But then, I try not to see him even when I see him.” She shuddered. “He gives me the willies! Right, Tir?” She turned and caught her son in a huge yawn. “Stop that!”

“Sorry, Mom,” he said. “I saw Pickie four days ago. He was sitting on my bed. I had to shoo him away. He’s not creepy. You shouldn’t say that. He’s just a little different.”

“Creepy different,” said his mother, shaking her head.

“One time he brought me a mango. Right out of the blue. I didn’t ask him for it, but I sure wanted one. Is that creepy?”

“I saw him cough up a hairball and then eat it up again. From off the floor. Is that creepy?”

“I used to eat my boogers, back before,” Tir said.

“That’s different,” said his mother. “You couldn’t help it.”

“It’s totally the same,” Tir said. “I must’ve eaten a pound.” He yawned again.

“I won’t tell you again,” said his mother.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’m not tired.” Fifteen years old a week before, Tir was one of the youngest kids still awake.

“When you saw him,” Jemma said, “did he seem… afraid?”

Tir shook his head. “That little fucker wasn’t afraid of anything.”

“Watch your fucking mouth,” said his mother.

“Sorry,” Tir said. His pager went off and he raised it to his ear to hear the message. “Got to go,” he said. “Frank is banging his head again.” The ninth floor had been reconverted to a psych ward — there was a subset of patients who were almost entirely unaffected in their bodies, but whose minds were rotted out with the botch. Frank was one of them. Jemma had been in the lobby when he started to beat Connie at her bar and was about to take him out when Arthur — still trailing her with Jude wherever she went — tranked him. Connie was still in relatively good health, and quite sane, though horribly sad all the time, and there was no mirth anymore at her bar.