Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital

“Carla,” he said. “Don’t be gloomy. Musette, remember that I love you. Hannah, I love you too! I love everybody — don’t forget!”

Another little botch bomb exploded along his aorta, and he started to exsanguinate into his chest. Carla saw his pressure dropping and opened up his fluids while Musette hung hypernephrine on top of the dopa. Jemma ground her head into the wall, astounded by the extraordinary pain he was supposed to be suffering. Surely it was enough for your lung to collapse and your heart to leak and your great vessels to explode — it all hurt enough, by itself. Why pluck at his thalamus to make phantom agonies real? There was something too cruel about a plague like this — someone had to be in charge of it. She knocked her head softly on the wall three times, every knock a blow against an organizing principle she imagined but did not perceive.

They pushed more meds and more fluids, and hung the synthetic blood that Sasscock himself had perfected, but it ran out as quickly as they pushed it in, pouring from his bottom and his mouth, and they all kept going, bagging him and doing compressions and changing out his chest tubes when they clotted, until his brittling bones broke under their hands, his handsome face collapsed under the mask, and then under their resuscitating kisses, and he was like any of the others, a mess of blood and ash in the ruined shape of a person.

“I’m tired,” Rob said.

“I know,” said Jemma.

“I don’t want to do this anymore. It’s stupid and pointless. It only makes me more tired. Nothing else, nothing useful, nothing good. Just more tiredness and more death and more uselessness.”

“Exactly,” Jemma said.

“I’m going to stay in here forever.”

“Okay,” she said. They were in a linen closet on the seventh floor, a place Rob had modified to accommodate him in these dark moods. It had used to be Vivian’s place, discovered the night of their final trip, to which she’d return for little vacations not just when she was feeling sad, but also when she needed a quiet place to sit and consider her list. Lying under the shelves, cushioned by a layer of blankets and pillowcases, she said she could almost see the words written on the darkness, pale letters that burned brighter and brighter as she became more certain that she had found another offense. Rob had removed two of the shelves and lined the bottom with a thick gymnastics mat. This made it a more comfortable place to lie down, but also made the close space smell of sweaty boy.

“Or until we get out of here. Which is never, and forever.”

“I’ll stay here with you.”

“I don’t care who dies next. There’s nothing I can do.”

“Not a thing.”

“They can all just fuck off. The vents can fuck off, and the art lines can fuck off. The chest tubes and the foleys and the bypass machines. Fuck them all. Even the people underneath them, they can fuck off, too.”

“Fuck them all,” Jemma said.

“Double fuck them,” Rob said, and sighed, and Jemma imagined the double fucking, two-penised Rob striding naked through the hospital to thrust at the patients and the machines and the tubes, the patients and their sick, tired nurses and doctors. Only the children were spared the violence of the purple-headed twins. She laughed. “It’s not funny,” he said.

“I know.” It was too dark to see his face with her eyes. “Come here,” she said trying to grab at him with her toes: they were sitting with their backs at either wall of the closet. She picked at his shirt, and shoveled him toward her with the side of her feet.

“I don’t want to,” he said. “I like it over here. I just want to be alone, with you here. Just sitting like this in the dark, where nobody will find us, until the end.”

“Okay,” Jemma said, but she still kept pulling at him, with her fingers and her toes, her hands and her feet, with her body. She imagined a heaviness in the space between her legs, and a slow force reaching through the space between them to latch between his legs and draw her to him. He slowly moved, not grabbed by her imagination but because she knew he didn’t mean any of what he was saying. “I could grow you a double penis,” she said. “That would be something.”

“One’s enough,” he said, scooting close enough to press against her. She turned onto her side. He curled over her back.

“It’s not bad for the baby,” they said together, because Vivian had already told them that, and because they had read about it the old sources, and because they still needed to say it, even though they knew it, to make it even more true. She was only two weeks from term, but still it was careful and slow; they hardly moved, even when they weren’t doing it in a closet or on the roof or in the ER or yes, under the beds of the comatose. They hardly needed to move anymore, to make it happen for each of them, even though Jemma mostly kept her promise not to meddle with his fuck centers, and when she imagined herself playing a grand fugue upon his orgasmatron, it was merely an idle daydream, and when extraordinary pleasures became real for them it was almost none of her doing.

Her mind wandered, not away from the two of them, but further into them. Down and down, he pushed her further and further into a quiet place, where all the feelings in the hospital came sliding down to bump against her, and the hospital in her head was almost a perfect mirror of the hospital in the world, dwindling hope and mounting despair reflected in exact measure. “God fucking dammit,” Rob said. “Stupid motherfucking bastards. Fucking gummy-bear shitbird. God damn, God damn, God damn” —he built up frustration along with his his need for her, until it crested and broke. She felt thrown by it and washed by it. She gave a push with her mind — just a little one — and it was like she had reset him. He cried against her back and snotted down her neck and made noises that she could not understand as words, though she knew they were words. He was apologizing to her and to the patients, to his mother and his sisters, to Vivian and Dr. Sasscock and Pickie Beecher.

“Hush up,” she said, “it’s all right.”

It wasn’t though, not really. It was just getting worse and worse — she tried not to imagine the new horrors that were coming, the new ways in which the botch would twist their bodies and their minds, but it was like trying not to scratch an itchy scab, or worry a painful tooth. She’d seen it all and yet every day she was surprised by some new horrors, strange and dreadful in ways that were more subtle than she ever expected, eye spikes and dry rot in the mouth and regurgitant cloaca syndrome.

“That was horrible,” he said after a little while.

“The worst,” she said. “You suck at this.”

“You too. It’s like doing it with a smelly pillow.”

“Or a chicken bone.”

“Or a chair.”

“We may as well just give up,” she said.

“We may as well just lie down and die,” he said.

“Goodbye, stupid world.”

“Fuck you all.”

“Here we go,” she said. He pulled a blanket down from the shelf above them to cover their legs. They settled closer to each other and he was asleep before another minute had passed, his breathing deep and regular and slightly snoring, his arms twitching and his feet fluttering before growing still. Then he had fallen asleep, but Jemma lay awake, looking, though she always promised herself she wouldn’t, at the little bits of botch scattered throughout his body. It lay here and there in little dormant seeds, and she did not know if it was something she was doing that was keeping it from blossoming horribly in him. It seemed ridiculous again, to think that her love had finally become protective of someone. Hello again, her baby said to her.