Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital

“You let me know if you do not find him,” Monserrat said, standing also and putting a hand on Jemma’s arm. “It would be a bad thing. It would be the worse thing, if we really lost one of them. Even that one.”

“Gone?” said Father Jane. “Gone where?”

“Just gone,” Jemma said. “We can’t find him anywhere.”

“Well, he must be somewhere,” said John Grampus, who lay in his bed on the seventh floor, staring at her with heavy-lidded eyes, a PCA button in his hand. He was one of the few people to have an isolated case of the botch. It was only in his foot and calf, but had turned his flesh there black, and creeped a little higher every day until Dr. Walnut skillfully whacked off his leg just below the knee. There was a fancy bionic limb all ready for him — it was sitting on a table in his room — one of a series designed by Dr. Walnut and the angel for different citizens in whom the botch had manifested similarly — but the surgeon went to the PICU before he could attach it. Dr. Sasscock, not a surgeon but considered a surgical personality, and possessing himself a gleaming silver foot, was exploring the possibility of a medical attachment, working on his drops, a solution of nanobots who would do a hundred thousand tiny surgeries and stitch nerves to wires and bone to steel, before he got sick, too. Jemma could have done it in a jiffy — she sat in her bed and imagined it — but she knew better than to try. Jordan Sasscock didn’t trust her any more than Dr. Snood did, and John Grampus had told her frankly, if apologetically, that he would rather hop out his remaining days than burn to death.

“Nowhere I can find him,” Jemma said.

“Maybe he’s just playing a game,” said Father Jane. “I think it’s how he deals with things, you know. When it gets too much for him he climbs a tree or eats dirt or hides. I think he tries to project all his worry. He makes us worry for him. It was just the anniversary of his brother’s death. Just last week he told me that. It must be a sad day for him.”

“He says that every month,” Jemma said.

“Nonetheless,” said Father Jane. “He came to me and asked me to play kwok, a game where you have to run all the way up the ramp with a fake possum on your head. That was just the preliminary — whoever got there last was it, and had to find the other person. Find me, he said, before he ran off to hide. Find me. I think he meant more than just find me. I was thinking to myself that he wanted to be found in a much more profound way, and I meant to have a conversation with him about how a person becomes found. It is not something you can do by yourself, Pickie, I was going to say. There has to be something else outside of you, doesn’t there, but it’s not me. I’m just an old woman. I’m not going to make it.”

“Don’t talk like that,” said John Grampus, closing his eyes and taking her hand.

“One minute you are just walking along, I would have told him, and then the next you are suspended in the gaze of the infinite. It looks in you and through you and part of its power is that it shows you just what it sees. You are under the eye and you become the eye, and you know who you are and what you will get, and you know where you are. I am tired already, Pickie, and it’s not the worst thing in the world, for an old lady with no complaints to be denied something she is too old even to understand. But you’re too young to be this sad and this strange. That’s what I would have said, and now you say he’s gone. I should have told him when I had the chance.”

“Have I showed you this?” asked Grampus, his eyes still closed. He squeezed them tighter and the bionic foot twitched on the table beside him. “How about that? My sympathetic foot. She made it so specifically for me, and so much a part of me, that even not attached I can make it do that, and I can feel it, like I can feel the old foot, there but not there. Just when I’m ready to give up on her she does something wonderful.”

“Did he say anything else to you?” Jemma asked Father Jane.

“We talked about becoming and destroying and cruelty, but it was all pretend, all in my head. Outside of my head we barely ever talked, you know.”

“Or just after I’ve given up on her, I should say, because it’s always after I’ve given her up for a whore that she surprises me. Not that kind of whore, mind you — I’m sure she never cheated on me like that. She’s a promising whore, an I-love-you-best whore. Of course I love you best. You are the first star of my affection. For a thousand years I have cherished the idea of you even before you were born, and I watched you and yearned toward you long before I spoke to you out of the darkness. You are my creature and I am your angel. I will preserve you forever and forever. What a line!”

“Okay,” Jemma said. “Thanks anyway.”

“Maybe she got him,” said Grampus. “Did you think of that? Hasn’t it occurred to you that she can’t like everybody, that she can’t try for everybody? I don’t know all her secrets — maybe she has to axe somebody so she can save everybody else. And she was always slandering him to anyone who would listen. Abomination this, abomination that. You should ask her.”

“I did,” Jemma said. Over and over she had asked, phrasing the question differently in hope of getting a different answer, or trying to surprise the angel by asking the question in the middle of another question — What is our where is Pickie Beecher latitude? Always she got silence for an answer, but this was no different than before he had disappeared. “She doesn’t like to talk about him,” Jemma said.

“Yeah, right,” he said. “Well, she’ll talk about him with me. Where is he?” he shouted, reaching behind his head to pound on the wall. His foot leaped once on the table. “What have you done with him? I know you fucked him up!”

The voice responded right away, speaking from the wall. “I am the preserving angel,” she said simply. “I preserve and I preserve and I preserve. The leprous and the scabby and the ugly of soul are gathered to my breast. Even the abomination is gathered to my breast. I reject no one.”

“Don’t you believe it,” said John Grampus.

“I should have thought of this before,” said Ethel. She and Jemma and Rob met on the fifth floor to report their failures. Pickie was not in the ER catacombs or the first nine basements or the lobby shrubs; Ishmael had not seen him, Dr. Sundae had not seen him, Dr. Snood had not seen him, though there was something so obtuse about his response that Rob suspected he was hiding something. Ethel had not even searched all of the second floor. In the dormitory Josh Swift made the suggestion to her: ask the angel. Like Jemma, she already had, but that wasn’t what he meant. He dug in his pocket and brought out a dolphin-talker — they’d become popular toys since Kidney first asked the angel to make one, though people had yet to get a dolphin engaged in a meaningful conversation. He raised it to his lips and blew a stream of clicks and whistles at her. “Oh,” she’d said, and proceeded to the nearest replicator to demand a Pickie-Tracker.

It looked like a little vacuum cleaner strapped to her back, a shiny chrome cylinder suspended off her shoulders by two braided straps, with a tube of corrugated metal, about the thickness of a wrist, that stretched along her neck and over her head, flaring at the end to a rotating and humming disk that radiated an energy that Jemma could feel but not see. It made a high, thin noise that tickled Jemma’s ear when she stepped too close to Ethel. She was wearing a pair of large wraparound sunglasses, of the sort that old people had used to put over their regular glasses. She looked sinister and daffy.