Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital

Hello, she said.

It’s not bad for me, you know. I barely notice. And I won’t remember, at all, when I’m older, about the hanky-panky.

I’m glad to hear it.

That’s not to say I want to, you know, be with you. I mean I was still hoping…

For somebody else.

Exactly. No offense.

None taken. Who knows better than me, all the reasons you should run and hide from me, after you get out?

A remarkably mature perspective.

I am older than you.

But that doesn’t always count for much.

Touché.

But while we’re on that subject. About the fellow there.

Yes?

Can you protect him? Can you protect me?

I don’t know, Jemma said.

And are you sure… are you really sure that it’s not you, after all, who’s causing all the trouble? What if this whole botch business is coming from you? You know, leaking out of your bottom at night while you sleep.

But it came from the boat.

Who can say, really, what came from the boat and what didn’t come from the boat?

That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.

But you concede, don’t you, that maybe… just maybe… it would be best if he just sort of gathered me up and hurried away with me when the time comes. That we’d be better off without you?

Well…

I’m glad you understand.

But I didn’t…

It’s so nice to have a conversation with someone who is reasonable, and sane, and knows when to do the right thing.

But I…

I’m so glad we talked. I’m always so glad, after we talk.

Me too, Jemma said. Then she put her face in the blanket and wept.

“Are you ready?” Father Jane asked, addressing her congregation from bed. They were in the auditorium, her bed stuck up at the front of the room, John Grampus standing at her side. To all eyes but Jemma’s he seemed to have made a miraculous recovery — he was out of bed, off the respirator, on po digoxin and could be seen for a while running every day up and down the ramp on his bionic leg — heroically attached by Drs. Tiller, Sundae, and Snood with the help of Dr. Walnut’s notes and some automated surgical devices — until it became clear that the same people who had first celebrated his return to health as a sign of universal hope, were beginning to resent him, his swift little jog and his too-short baby-blue running shorts. For everyone else, to look at him was to see no trace of illness, but Jemma could see the botch in him, dormant cysts in his muscles. “Are you ready?” Father Jane asked again, pausing to look out over the little crowd with her blind eyes — a thick layer of black cataract kept her from seeing anything but blurry shapes. She pointed but didn’t call out names.

“I have been asking myself that question every day now, for the past few weeks. I used to ask it in an entirely different context. Jane, are you ready for the new world? Are you ready to start again? Are you ready to leave this very comfortable place, to take up burdens that will be heavy in ways that you can’t even imagine? Are you ready to be worthy of that place. Are you ready for your second chance?

“You know, I never was really sure. You will be angry with me when I tell you that I always wanted one more day, another chance to talk to the angel, another opportunity to gather up my courage and make sure that I could handle it. It’s almost a relief, to know that I’m not going to see it, now. Almost, but not quite, because I really did think I was finally ready. It was all in me, everything I needed to step out and be worthy of the new grass and the new trees and the new mountains and the deep new sky. I thought I could see everything, the shape of the leaves, the colors of the new, wonderful birds — colors not ever even seen before. It was probably stupid, to think I could contain it in my mind, to know it at all before it was here, and maybe this vanity is just barred me from it. It’s easy to think that. It’s always easier, to think the worst thing. Jane, you’re fat. Jane, you’re a whore. Jane, you’re disgusting. Jane, you’re too ugly, inside and out, for anyone to love you. You hardly even have to try, to think like that. Jane, a whale has a better chance of swimming up your ass than do you of entering the new world.

“Lately I’ve been asking myself another question. Are you ready? It sounds the same, but actually is different. Are you ready to leave this horrible place? Are you ready to be freed from the chamber? Are you ready to go away from here? It should be an easy answer, I know. But I am held by other questions. I worry for our errand, whether we ever properly defined it, let alone completed it. All these sleeping children — I know what they are dreaming about — I envy them and sometimes I am angry at them and sometimes I even feel a hatred toward them. I hope it is just the sickness in me that makes me want to bite the baby or kick the toddler — when I am thinking Why not me, these feelings are the answer. Weren’t we supposed to do something with them and with ourselves? We kept saying that we would. Remember what Vivian said? We were all saying it, in our own way. We kept sounding like we meant it. I worry that we all just sat around, after a while, trying to enjoy a ride that was never meant to be fun, that when the obvious was presented to us we stared and stared at it, and pretended it was not there, and that when we thought we were improving ourselves and making a model of what was to come we were only playing a stupid game.

“Again, it’s so easy to think like this. Somehow this bed makes it easier. I asked the angel for a bed that would help me think, that would push my mind out of its usual ruts, and yes there are these special buttons, and the clasping mittens that give you that wonderful massage, but lying in bed was ever an activity for the morose, the languid, the lazy depressives. I got a glimpse, the other day, not in a dream, not in vision. I wasn’t even looking out the window. You know I lost the feeling in my toes about five days ago. Now they don’t hurt like they did, but I have to check, every so often, to make sure they’re still there. You remember Dr. Walnut, no doubt, and how his toes rotted to little stubs, how they were black and hard on the outside, red and tender in the middle. I have a fear of that. I lifted up the sheet to look and my toes were there but so was this other thing.

“I had a feeling — my toes were there and I was so grateful to still have them, and out of that I had this feeling that everything was right, that everything had gone just as it should have. How about that? I am a pretty sensitive girl, and I have a good memory. I took another look at things, and yes I felt the sadnesss and the rage, the cold grief, but then it was sort of… farther away, and this other feeling was still there. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about rotting toes or broken promises or orphaned sleepers, or about the lost world, and all those people under the water, but I could think about them and still I had this feeling like everything was all right. Maybe it is just a vessel in my brain, all blocked up and causing trouble, or spreading lies in my head. I don’t think so.

“So here I am, lying down here in front of you. Look, my toes are still here.” She wiggled them under the sheet. “I can’t feel them but I can move them! Look, I am ready. I am all right, all fine, all… done. How about you? That is the lesson for today, the little bit that I can tell you about this afternoon, before you go back to your patients or your own illness. And before you go I want you to try it for me. I want to try to make you feel it, because I am sure that it is the very next step. Are you ready? John and Elizabeth and Rob and Connie, I know you’re out there. Close your eyes with me and pray.”