Chris Adrian: The Children's Hospital

“Sister!” Ishmael said. “Come out!”

“Presently,” said the angel, and the whole hospital shook so hard that Jemma almost dropped her baby. She looked around for an iceberg but only saw the land; they’d run aground.

“Brother and Brother! It is time!”

We are already here, I say, because we are standing at our corners, I in the South and my brother in the West. Jemma sees the air unfolding but doesn’t see us yet. Ishmael goes to stand in the East, his feet almost touching on the bits of earth that spilled onto the ledge when the hospital ran aground; the hospital is received into a curve in the land, and the green top of the cliff is just level with the roof.

“What’s wrong with you?” Jemma asks, because Ishmael is unfolding, too, picking off his put-on flesh by the handful and filling up a shape drawn in the air above him.

“Sister!” he says again. “Come out!”

“Patience,” she says. “We are still waiting.” She unfolds in the West, withdrawing herself from the hospital. Floor by floor, the replicators stop their sighing and the lights dim. The toy slows and stops.

“Waiting for what?” Jemma says.

“For you,” I say.

“Get away from my baby!” you say, clutching it tighter, though I am nowhere near it. It cries again; the tip of your breast has fallen away in ash. You switch sides and look to the four quadrants. Now you can see all of us, my little brother rising over the pieces of his fleshly disguise, a heap of parts at his feet; my sister with her kind mouth; my big brother and his black wings; and me.

“You are your brother’s sister,” I say.

“What the fuck do you know about my brother?” you ask me.

“Look,” I say, and the vision rises out of you: your brother’s feast, except now it is laid before you and comes from you.

“Go away,” you say. “None of you are real.” My little brother raises his wings to smash you, but our sister restrains him. “Go away,” you say again, but we can’t go anywhere yet, so you go away instead, ignoring us, ignoring the flow of blood and ash from between your legs, ignoring your blackening toes and feet, ignoring the feast, ignoring everything but your baby.

You turn away and look through the space between my brother and sister to see the land. “See?” you say to your baby. “See it?” You try to imagine the life you will live with him there. You throw up the structure of a life in your imagination. It is as big as a cathedral but collapses before it has even assumed a whole shape. “That’s all right,” you say. “It’s okay.” You look deep into his face. “Seven and ten,” you say, fudging the Apgars a little — there’s no such thing as a ten but no carping resident is here now to bitch at you about that. He looks so serene you know he is not going to miss you. “Look,” you say again, trying to turn his face to the land without disturbing his latch, and you think, “It isn’t mine to give, but I give it to you.”

I suffered a whole lifetime to get to where you are now — agonizing every day and night over my destiny, never knowing until I put the knife in my belly and made the first hard cut if I was worthy of it or not. I soared to Heaven on all that pain, and tore off the gates, and fetched out the grace that later rained down deadly on the world. You went through our life unthinking, and your gift came to you as naturally as your baby. And how can I envy you that, when you do your part in the same way, giving the world away in a stroke, and sundering sin forever from the generations?

An unremembered weight pushes on my back and neck and forces my face into the ground. My brothers and my sisters bow to me, as countless legions bowed to me, infinite circles on the ice and the water and the land, all of them crushed under the supreme violence of mercy and grace — they bowed to me like this on the night that I made my own sacrifice, and my brief ascension. I cry out and my brothers and my sister cry out but you ignore us. Your baby has turned his eyes to the land and you have become lost in his face, not caring how we are humbled. Five or six children have passed you before you fully appreciate that they are awake and walking out of the hospital.

They pass by you in twos, the youngest coming first in the arms of the oldest. You call out to them, “Josh! Ethel! Cindy!” but they only look toward the land, not sparing a look either for my brother, folded in half and moaning. Josh Swift, Ella Thims in his arms, steps up on the ledge and off onto the grass. They come quicker as soon as the first of them is out of the hospital entirely, surging by now, some running and leaping — Juan and Kidney and Magnolia. The boy from the boat is holding Magnolia’s hand as they walk. You want to call to him but realize you never did learn his name. They talk to each other as they go and though you can hear the words clearly you don’t understand a thing they are saying.

You look to your right at Jarvis — he’s tripped in his haste and said something in the tone of a curse. He won’t look at you either, even when you say his name.

“Look at me,” you say to them.

“Do not ask for such things,” I say, though with this weight on my back I cannot speak very loud. The children pass, more and more swiftly; they stir a wind against your face. You try to count them as they pass; it seems like many more than seven hundred by the time the last two come out. Pickie steps carefully over the grass, holding Brenda against his shoulder. He stoops next to you and holds out his free arm.

“No,” you say.

“It’s all right. They go together, Mama,” he says, and adds something else. You know it is supposed to be comforting, but again you can’t understand the words, and realize he isn’t talking to you.

“No,” you say again, but your left hand is ash and you are about to drop the baby anyway when he takes him. The child doesn’t cry. You fall over as they walk away; it is the next to last thing you see, the King’s Daughter looking at you over Pickie’s shoulder as they step on the ledge and onto the land.

We are released when the last child has left. My brothers and my sisters rise and take to the sky — you see them from where you lie. With just a few beats of their huge wings they dwindle to specks, and they are calling down for me to follow but I am not quite free.

“Calvin?” you ask, seeing me clearly for the first time.

“Of course,” I say.

“Why are you crying?” It’s only because I am bending so close that I can hear you.

“Because I love you,” I say. “Because I am sad.” And I am thinking not just of you but of our dead, and all the dead souls departed from the hospital and the world, and wondering what might have been achieved by my extraordinary sacrifice if I had lived all my life under a burden of sadness instead of a burden of rage.

“I’m sad too,” you say, and then you are gone, flung away from the Earth, calling out for your baby. I take a last look at the new world, then turn and follow after you.

Many thanks to the pediatric residency program at the University of California San Francisco and to the National Endowment for the Arts for the time and means to complete this novel, and to Julie Orringer, Dave Eggers, and Eli Horowitz for bringing it to publication.