“How many of these have you done before?” the nurse asked her. Jemma said three, which was technically true, but she did not volunteer that none of those attempts had been successful. She knew the procedure well enough, knew how to put a rolled washcloth under the little neck and tilt the head back, how to pry open the toothless mouth with her pinkie and sweep the tongue aside with the edge of the laryngoscope blade. She put her tube in the first hole she saw. “Esophagus,” said the nurse, listening over the belly with a stethoscope as Jemma puffed a few bursts of air through the tube with a bag. “Did it again,” she said, after Jemma’s second try. “Did you say you’d done this before?” Jemma didn’t answer, only rolled the head back again and poised her arm for another swoop. She saw it again, the single pink wet hole, and understood how it wasn’t the anatomy she sought. She wondered how a trachea could be so thoroughly hidden in a neck the diameter of a shot glass. The nurse was shouting out the baby’s heart rate, which fell further and further as Jemma failed to remove the foreign body from its throat. “One ten!” she shrieked. “Ninety! Sixty!” Jemma took out the scope, straightened her back, and took a step back right into Rob.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Intubating this little boy.”
“Trying, anyway,” the nurse said. Rob took the bag and mask from her and ventilated by hand. When Jemma went in again he looked over her shoulder, his cheek pressed to hers. He was covered in sweat. His clothes were soaked through, and Jemma wondered if other people had noticed how he reeked of sex.
“Ah, just pull back a little,” he said, tugging gently at her wrist. The vocal cords popped into view and Jemma went through them with the tube. Rob’s fingers clutched the tube over hers, pinning it against the kicking baby’s lips.
“You’re in, finally,” the nurse said to Jemma.
“Don’t let go till the tube is secure,” said Rob, and then he hurried away. Jemma could not figure how much time had passed since she saw him last, and she quickly lost track again after he was gone. She intubated two more babies, put in another IV, assisted with a chest tube, bag-ventilated for a half hour under the intermittent tutelage of a pierced-up respiratory therapist, and finally changed a diaper, and then she could not find another emergency. Jemma was in the third bay, the middle bay, when it all stopped; she sat down on the floor and leaned back against the wall. She saw Dr. Chandra standing in the middle of the bay, a silver laryngoscope in his hand, looking forlorn and confused. Natalie and Emma were standing very tall on either side of an isolette three babies down from where Jemma sat, with their heads held high and their noses elevated, so they looked to be sniffing for the next crisis, but it never came. Dr. Grouse, the attending, was standing with his arms folded, seeming to be staring intently at a monitor, but his eyes were closed. The silence of alarms seemed heavy and oppressive, and the noise of a loosely connected piece of oxygen tubing near Jemma’s head was rather soothing. She closed her eyes and fell asleep, but only for a few minutes, waking to discover the nurse Anna shaking formula on her from a bottle.
“Wake up, sweetie,” she said. “You can’t sleep there.”
“Stop that,” Jemma said.
“It’s not too hot, is it?” Anna asked, shaking out a few drops onto her arm.
“What time is it?” Jemma asked.
“I haven’t looked. Will you move, or should I roll you out of the way?”
Jemma stood. “What happened?”
“You were here. You saw. They all crumped at once. The whole damn unit, except her.” She pointed to an isolette in the middle of the room. It was set upon a dais that Jemma was quite sure hadn’t been there the day before. “She auto-extubated an hour ago. How about that? Now they want me to try to feed her. That seems a little hasty, don’t you think?”
“I mean outside. What happened outside?”
Anna shrugged. “Ask somebody who’s thinking about it,” she said, and turned to feed her patient. Jemma walked away from her, to the isolette on the dais. Standing on her toes, she could look inside to see the King’s Daughter, sucking on her hand with her rabbity mouth. She turned her head to look serenely at Jemma. It was unbearable, not for the ugliness of her face, but for the peace of her eyes. “Brenda,” Anna said. “Isn’t that an awful name? She needs a sleeveless tee shirt and bad hair, to go along with that name.”
“I have to go,” Jemma said — she had a view into all the bays but didn’t see Rob anywhere that she looked. She hurried right out of the unit, past the little flocks of people three or four strong, who were finally turning on the televisions set high in the corners of every bay, seeking answers about the state of the world but finding only lambent static.
5
It takes four angels to oversee an apocalypse: a recorder to make the book that would be scripture in the new world; a preserver to comfort and to save those selected to be the first generation; an accuser to remind them why they suffer; and a destroyer to revoke the promise of survival and redemption, and to teach them the awful truth about furious sheltering grace. And I am the least of these, for though I alone know the whole story of the call that asked for the end of the world and the flood that answered it, and though it falls to me to write the Book of Calvin and the Acts of Jemma and the Book of the King’s Daughter, I already know that in the new world no one will read scripture, and they will not labor under the sort of covenant that can be written down in words.
Now we are only two, but two others are coming, our brother and our brother. We are a family, but only in the way every angel is related to every other angel, and nothing but duty binds us. I do not love or hate the angel in the walls of the hospital, who all these stunned survivors are getting to know by name, since they must capture some small part of her bright essence with a name before she can serve them. Ancient and ageless, she never lived or died. I was a special case. Only Metatron was like me, mortal before he was angel. But he went on to be the right hand of God, and I am the imaginary friend Jemma has never even known that she has. Still, he is not really my brother either, though if I ever met him I would call him such, and I was mightier, in my way, than he ever was, or is.
* * *
On their first day at sea I am obligated to dance above the hospital and praise them all, the high and the low, the damned and the elect. I remember lust, and it is like that, to be taken by the urge to dance and praise. I would have railed against it, in my old days, and schemed against it, and destroyed it. Not anymore. It is a joy to submit.
My sister sings with me, though she is trapped in the substance of the hospital, and cannot leave it to dance with me. If she did, it would sink like a stone. I spin in a spiral that echoes the form of the hospital below. Blue sky above and blue sea below and the hospital a white mote between them.
Praise their ignorance, my sister sings.
Praise their fear, I sing.
Praise their hatred.
Praise their envy.
Praise their bitter grief.
Praise them and put them aside.
They are eating the last tainted bread of the earth.
Praise their unhappy fate.
And praise their hours of joy.