Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital

“Those what?” asked Calvin.

“Nothing.”

“Those what?” Calvin asked again. He’d already showed Deb how angry he could get if he thought an adult was hiding something from him.

“Forty-niners,” Deb said. “Gold-diggers. There’s gold out there, you know.”

“Cape Cod,” Jemma said. “Boston. Honolulu. They’re all on bays.”

“Anyway, he moved on. To Buffalo, you wait and see.”

“Do they need killers there?” Calvin asked.

“No more than anyplace else,” said Deb, and started to talk about the weather again, and how it gave her trouble with her emphysema, and made her awful phlegmy. Jemma scooted down in her seat, curling her knees up and falling to the side, so her cheek rested against the peeling leather seat, and she could see out the rear window. The familiar procession of objects — the tall trees alongside the long road out of the forest; the telephone wires strung alongside General’s Highway; the aerials on the houses just outside of town — passed more quickly than usual. Mary Ann sped along faster than ever before. As they went faster, Jemma felt calmer. She reached a hand up to the open window and spread her fingers against the rushing air, listening to her brother and Deb talk of murder and baseball and the heat.

“Let me drop you off in the courtyard today,” Deb said as they turned at the statehouse and passed down School Street.

“No thanks,” said Calvin.

“Come on,” she said. “I’ll honk the horn and you can wave to all the kids. They’ll all die of jealousy. They’ll just all drop down dead.”

“The usual place will be fine,” Calvin said.

“One day I’m going to drive you right into the lobby,” Deb said, and laughed so hard she started coughing, and pulled over a half a block from the tree where she usually let them out, so she could double over the wheel and hack and hack. Jemma stood on her seat and peered over the armrest, but Deb waved her out, gasping “I’m fine!” Calvin helped Jemma out of the cab, and held her hand till they were a block from school. Deb drove by just as they were passing through the iron gate. She honked and waved and cackled, drawing stares from every other child in the yard, but Jemma and her brother kept their heads down and their eyes on the ground.

Sister Gertrude liked to talk about sin, especially on a hot day. For two weeks in their fourth-period religion class they had been learning about Hell, who lived in what level, and the particulars of their suffering. Today there would be a test, after a last-minute review. She’d drawn the familiar triangle on the board — the gentler upper regions of Hell being more exclusive than the lower regions because, as Sister Gertrude said, more people sin worse. It looked to Jemma just like the food pyramid, and she had confused the two in daydreams, so she almost answered once that fruits and grains were punished in the frozen bottom of Hell.

Sister Gertrude stood behind her desk, obscuring the top of the pyramid with her wimpled head. She scanned the quiet, dark room — she liked to draw the curtains and turn down the lights during fourth period, because she thought the darkness facilitated profitable spiritual reflection — and suddenly pointed at Martin Marty, two desks to Jemma’s left. “You, Martin,” she said. “A candy-fresser drives his scooter of a cliff because he is too busy unwrapping his taffy to watch where he is going. Where does he go?”

“To the second circle,” he said immediately. “Where all gluttons are punished.” Jemma had known that one, and wished she’d been asked.

“Very good,” said Sister Gertrude. She passed by Martin’s desk and deposited a cherry cough drop on it. She was always eating them, and did not consider them candy, though they had only the faintest hint of menthol in them, and they were the most pleasant reward she gave. “Rachel,” she said, “Another candy-fresser is denied her nasty gratification by her wise mother, who will not buy her the pound of chocolate she desires. The girl holds her breath in the middle of the supermarket checkout aisle, thinking to force her mother, but the wise lady ignores her stupid show. The angry, sullen creature holds her breath longer than ever before, even after she passes out, and she suffocates herself. Where will she find herself next?”

“Oh, that’s a hard one,” Rachel said, from three seats behind Jemma. “It wasn’t a suicide, was it? She didn’t mean to die. She’s doing some gluttony, isn’t she, but she’s angry, too, and the angriness is worse than the gluttoniness, so she should go to the place that hurts more. That’s, um, number five?”

“Excellent,” said Sister Gertrude. “Excellently reasoned.” She swept by the desk, depositing two cough drops. “Donald Peerman, how will she be punished there?”

“Oh, something really bad. Poked with hot pokers, right?”

“Wrong, it is a wet punishment, not a dry. Petra Forsyth?” Jemma’s attention started to drift as Sister Gertrude’s calls fell farther and farther away from her desk, and she thought not of hell, but of her sleeping mother — she wondered what she was dreaming about. She let her eyes fall almost closed so she could imagine it better. Her mother was dreaming of flying, just like Jemma did. Probably it was an ordinary dream, she was walking home up the hill, or walking down the street in town, when suddenly she realized that there was a much better way to get around, and took to the air, not in a leap like Superman, but in strokes, like she was swimming, pulling and kicking herself a little further up into the air with every stroke. Jemma followed her all over town. She was doing laps around the statehouse when Sister Gertrude called on her.

“Miss Claflin!” she said, rising up suddenly in front of her desk and leaning over so the delicate crucifix she wore on an extra-long chain swung at Jemma’s eye. “Please tell me where daydreamers are punished.”

“Oh,” Jemma said, fidgeting in her chair and thinking furiously, flying through the pyramidal Hell in a rapid sweep, looking around her desperately for the easily distracted girls with half-lidded eyes. “Not in the first circle, or the second. Um, not in number three, or number four, that’s for greedy people. Not in number five, where the angry people get wet, like you said. Uh, it must be lower. Boy, I wish it was higher, but it must be lower. Is it between five and six?”

“Is it? Is it? I thought you would know, being a practiced artist of the daydream. Do not try to distract us with answers to questions I have not asked, Miss Claflin. If you are ignorant then proclaim your ignorance. We have not, in fact, discussed the fate of incorrigible daydreamers, who waste their lives in idle speculation. It is a kind of sloth, but not punished with the worst kinds of sloth. Daydreamers remediate in Purgatory. That’s where you’ll go. Can’t you just see the newspaper article, children? Miss Jemma Claflin was hit by a bus this afternoon as she walked along, daydreaming of the loveliness of creampuffs. Stern angels escorted her immediately to Purgatory, where she will spend three quarters of eternity peeling and sewing the skin onto the same banana, and trying to organize her thoughts.”

“How long is three-quarters of eternity?” asked Rachel.

“Just as long as it sounds. Enough of review, though. Almost everyone is ready. Books away, pencils out!” Sister Gertrude erased the board with a damp sponge, eschewing the dry eraser so no trace of the pyramid would be left to tempt and assist incipient cheaters.

The test wasn’t so terrible. It was the usual format, matching, multiple choice, and fill in the blank. With a ruler Jemma carefully drew lines between sins in the left column and the appropriate place in Hell in the right column, eating five pounds of gummy bears connected with circle number three, not sharing your snack with somebody who forgot theirs connected to number four, and saying your prayers wrong connected with number six. She had no trouble with any of the multiple choice questions except the last one: Lying children are punished a) with hot licorice whips b) by being turned into snakes c) by having their tongues split every morning with a rusty knife d) tickling and boiling. No one was tickled in Hell, everybody knew that. Only gluttons were punished with food. She knew the right answer involved a forked tongue, but snakes had forked tongues, so b and c both seemed like the right answer to her. She stared and stared at the paper, waiting for one or the other to seem more right. In the end she chose b.