Chris Adrian: The Children's Hospital

From her window she peeped down at the sidewalk. Rob wasn’t there, but she thought she could see his wide, handsome back retreating over the bridge across the street. It spanned a little horseshoe-shaped canal, which many decades before had been a swimming hole, but now was too toxic for bathing. He lived only a few blocks away. If he ran home along the top of the thin railing that kept children from falling into the poisoned waters, it would not be a surprise, because it was his habit to leap up on things, and to test his balance against ledges and curbs and sills. And if he fell into the water and drowned, it would not be a surprise, because she had imperiled him with her kiss.

She lay down on her narrow bed, the same one upon which she’d been sleeping since she was five years old, on the old mattress that still bore the deep impression of the much fatter body she used to inhabit, and she dreamed of veal. In her sleep she followed the weeping of a calf through gray half-darkness, until she found its miserable stall. It cried with the voice of a human child. She knelt to quiet it, saying, There, there, little one, it will be all right. But she knew it would die to please the appetites of man. She cried, ashamed of how she had lied to it, and it began to comfort her. Its little hoof stroked her head, and its soft lips kissed her cheek and her mouth. In a little while longer they were making out, she and the veal calf. Its thick, nimble tongue darted over her own and made her mouth an organ of intense pleasure.

She woke up feeling dizzy and hungover, though she’d had only a single glass of wine the night before. Her mouth tasted like veal, and her room smelled of it. She felt sure that she must have been panting through her mouth the whole night long, polluting her room with the odor of cruel meat. She went to the window to get a breath of untainted air. It was almost seven o’clock, time for him to come running by. He would be wet from the running, and she would think, as she always did, about how it had always seemed to her that people looked better when they were wet, and she would remember ducking repeatedly into the bathroom in high school, where she would wet down her hair in the hope of improving her looks. She’d felt beautiful just once in her life, caught in a rainstorm with her first lover. In the middle of a busy sidewalk he’d kissed her and, with his hand cradling her head, had squeezed out a flood of water from her hair. When it fell down her neck, under her collar, she felt it even over the pouring rain.

She stood at the window, looking back and forth between her clock and the street. At exactly seven he came running over the bridge. He stopped at the bottom of her stoop, and shaded his eyes against the sun to look up at her. “Hi there!” he called up. She could feel her four dead standing behind her, and hear them calling down, Welcome to the family!

Please, she said to them. She was supposed to close her shutters and go sit on her bed, and consider how she had done the right thing, but instead she just stood there, staring at him stupidly until he asked her for another date.

“What kind of doctor do you want to be?” she asked him, surely a first-date question, but she didn’t ask it until that night, over dinner at a vegetarian restaurant.

“The nice kind,” he said.

“Are there other kinds?”

“Medicine brings out the worst in a person.”

“I don’t think so. Do you really think so?”

“Maybe,” he said. “But think about it. You see people at their absolute worst, and all your own personal failings — your weakness, your stupidity, your laziness — show up in their continuing decline. And even if you make them better, they just come back, sicker and needier.”

He looked down at his plate, quietly scooping and dumping his fancy macaroni and cheese with a big spoon. “It’s a privilege to see people at their worst,” she told him, which was something her father liked to say. “You seem nice enough still.”

“I’m already corrupted,” he said.

“You still smell good, though,” she said without thinking about it, and blushed furiously. “I mean, if you were really corrupt you’d smell like bad meat or old yogurt or…” She put a carrot in her mouth so she would stop talking.

“How about you?” he asked her.

“Oh yes, very corrupt.”

“I mean what do you want to end up doing?”

“Surgery,” she said. “Surgery, surgery — my dad was a surgeon.”

“A legacy of corruption,” he said, smiling. Now he had insulted her — reason enough to throw a carrot at him but not reason enough to kill him; still she just sat there, anxious and admiring. He had very large hands.

She took the vow again: no kisses. And she further swore that when he tried to kiss her, she would hold up her hand and drop her chin. She had practiced the gesture in front of her mirror, shaped her smile until she thought it could only be interpreted as regretful and demure, and practiced the backward walk. “I can’t,” she’d said to her reflection. “I just can’t,” words chosen because they were truthful and because they seemed most likely to cause the least hurt. Hand still in the air, she’d walk backward toward her door, not speaking, not answering him if he spoke, then go upstairs to sit at her kitchen table and watch the roach shiver with delight when she told him how it was all over.

The roach was waiting for them when she led Rob upstairs. Not five feet from the door, it seemed to be settling its weight impatiently back and forth from one set of legs to the other. “I’ll get it,” said Rob, and took a step forward to stomp the bug. Jemma threw her whole body into him and pushed him off balance. He stumbled across the room and fell, striking his head on the soft edge of the couch. The roach fled.

“Sorry!” she said, speaking to him and the roach both. “Sorry!” He’d apologized just like that when she ducked away from his goodnight kiss. She had raised her hand in the practiced gesture of final forbidding, but rather than make the gesture she thought she wanted — stop, go away, we can’t do this — it had fastened on his hot ear and drawn his face to hers. Sprawled by the couch, he lay very still for a moment, and she worried that he was dead already. When she helped him up she kept her hand in his and drew him back to her bedroom.

Was the thumping noise the bedpost knocking on her wall, or was it the roach throwing himself in fury against her door? She’d sealed up the crack with a towel so he couldn’t intrude if anger drove him to break their unspoken agreement, but she could hear him in the guttural utterances that issued from her new friend, deep, groaning syllables that rearranged themselves in her head into words— what are you doing, what are you doing, and then what have you done?

“I can’t see you anymore,” she told him the next day. It was easier to say than she’d anticipated that it would be. The words came out of her mouth in a smooth, fluid rush.

On the bridge across the canal, she was walking him home, he on the railing but holding on to her hand. When she was small she’d walked that way with her mother, her mother’s arm lending her balance, and the rail or bench elevating her so they were equally tall. But the rail made him much taller than Jemma, and he was too sure of his balance to need a loan from her.

“Don’t say that,” he said. The sun was just behind him, so his head seemed replaced by a ball of flame. She closed her eyes against him and saw not just the blinking orange globe but his face, too, in disappointed afterimage.

“I can’t see you anymore,” she said again, not opening her eyes but stepping back and pulling her hand free.

“Why not?”

“Because,” she said.