It might be a little worse than that, or a lot better, or a lot worse. The room and the bed might seem smaller, now that she was officially tied to it. They might get bored with one another. With the ring to her eye, Rob Dickens might appear less beautiful than he had before, or than he actually was. She might grow resentful because she could not just up and smooch with any boy she liked — maybe there was someone better waiting for her, someone more perfectly matched, maybe they all had someone perfect waiting for them under the earth, who would rise up as soon as the hospital made a landing — she could see them, if she closed her eyes and looked, scores and scores of better halves, spared the weird journey to the new world, looking at their watches and their calendars and sighing impatiently. Thinking of this, she might start to hate the situation, just a little, not enough for anyone to really notice — and Rob, meanwhile, would be feeling all the same things — but it would be enough for her to allow Dr. Snood to paw at her in one of the linen closets, because she wanted to cheat and punish herself for cheating, and in subjecting herself to Dr. Snood’s thin hands she could do both things at the same time. She’d come back to the room reeking of his cologne, and Rob would come back with the sparklies from Dr. Tiller’s headdress sticking to his underwear, and they would lie next to each other and be disappointed in what they’d become, and both of them would look at her belly and smile a little because they would convince themselves that the baby would come and make the big difference, and make everything all right again.
Or she might put on the real ring, in the presence of Father Jane and John Grampus and the entire hospital population, and feel a different sort of change, an elation instead of a deflation. It might be marriage could facilitate a more perfect expression of their love, and represent, like people were talking about, a new and better beginning for the whole place. They might find that merely touching their rings together would send them both into a head-popping orgasm, and seen through the eye of the ring Rob Dickens might be so beautiful that looking at him would make her cry. They might look out the window every day at a sea that was a little lower, and notice something in themselves corresponding a little higher, a feeling of optimism and well-being that in the old world was only known in drug dreams. Every day they’d go to class, Rob teaching his children not just how to tumble but to fly, and Jemma one day drawing green fire out of every last pupil. Together they’d fix Pickie Beecher, and then get to work on more subtle kinds of wrongness, things that Jemma could not perceive yet, but they would learn to see them together.
Or she might put on the ring and understand immediately how it was a mistake to wear it, and yet know that no matter how she pulled at it, it would never come off, and if she should chop off her finger then she would only grow another one, and liquid gold would seep out of her skin and form itself again into a perfect and perfectly awful circle. Rob would get it, too — the feeling like the stony feeling. They would lie next to each other with stones in their bellies, trying not to touch. Everyone else in the hospital would know it and feel it also: a great mistake had been committed. It would sap everyone’s enthusiasm, and efforts to remake and improve the world would dwindle — what’s the use anymore, they would all ask themselves, it’s all already been ruined by this ill-advised marriage. The child would ripen and emerge and weep for its parents and when it could talk the first thing it would ask would be, Why did you do it? Every night her brother’s ghost would come shake a chain of bones over her head and say, I fucking told you, and every morning they would wake up to a sea a little higher than the day before, not sure who this other person was in their bed, and not understanding why they hated that person so much.
“Do you take her as husband and wife,” Father Jane and John Grampus were saying, “and will you be husband and wife to her, and love her with perfect love, and work every day and night to make and redeem the new world, and will you do all these things, in life and beyond death, forever?” Jemma had been looking at the sharp corner of Rob’s collar, but he took her chin in his hand and lifted her face until their eyes met. His expression was so earnest that she read it immediately: he was saying, Don’t go anywhere. She tried not to, but in the silence before he spoke she found herself becoming aware of the whole hospital, the hundreds of people gathered in the lobby and ringing the balconies all the way to the ninth floor, details of their party outfits flashing through her mind. Even with her eyes open she could see the little hands of children in their flower bags, rubbing petals between their thumbs and fingers, eager to cast them down as soon as Rob made his answer and the priest and prophet made them married. In half a second she rose up through all nine floors and out the roof to meet her brother. He rose from the sea, a blue-green giant made of water and seaweed and bits of the drowned old world, and raised up a fist made of white, crushing water over her and the hospital and her constituents and the man who would become her husband in a matter of seconds. Rage poured out of his mouth, wind and water and thunder, and his fist came down, knocking her back to the lobby floor and crashing through the roof, becoming as it drove down a sharp edge of water that cleaved the hospital in two and split the ground between her and Rob. Amid the screaming and moaning and the wash of bloody foam, among the swirling children and parts of children Jemma could still see Rob. He was just a pair of disembodied, earnest blue eyes, but they fixed her in place, and seemed to glow, and the light they shed picked out the pieces of his body hidden by her fantasy of doom, until the waters were driven back. He smiled a little, and nodded, and spoke his answer.
Jemma wondered if she was the only sober person at the reception. Unprecedented amounts of booze had been replicated for the party, some never before tasted on the earth, and the Council, which put forth an official line that alcohol should not be replicated within the hospital except at Connie’s new bar in the old emergency room, where she could, at her discretion, require you to undergo immediate detox with a shot of a blue liquid that looked and tasted just like the solution barbers had used to sterilize their combs and scissors. But the prohibition, which had been stated anyway in the mildest language, and was always largely ignored, was relaxed even further for the party. People hovered around the ice sculpture, four leaping dolphins who poured champagne out of their mouths, dipping and re-dipping, or received drinks from whichever temporary bartender happened to be behind a table. There were no servants, except, as the Council had declared, that they each were the servant of the other. So you received your whiskey skidoo or your green envy or your Rob ’n’ Jemma from someone dressed up as fancy as you, and maybe even from Rob or from Jemma, who, though it was (and yet was expressly not) their day, were not excused from the fifteen-minute rounds of duty.
People talked about the wedding, and called it a wedding, or the wedding to end all weddings, but it was not supposed to be a wedding, and that was the one thing people were not supposed to call it. At first it was supposed to be a wedding, a very wonderful one, and then it was supposed to be a wedding and something more, but as the Council examined the old order, and reflected on the institutions of the old world, it was decided that a modification was in order. It would be something new, something never before seen on the earth, a ceremony that would as much officially and visibly mark the whole community’s commitment to making a new beginning as it would bind two lovers together for life. This was all fine with Jemma: to be married without having a wedding seemed better in line with her previous commitments and obsessions. She signed off on all sorts of innovations, and added a few of her own. For instance, it was Jemma who declared that no one would be with the bride or with the groom. “Away with that tired old distinction,” she said, and let everybody be simply of the wedding. Except they could not be of the wedding, because this was not a wedding. The official name for it was “the ceremony,” but many people, neo-traditionalists, simply called it, like the other major events that had befallen them, a Thing, and when someone used that word you had to figure out by context if they meant Thing One, Thing Two, Thing Three, or just some ordinary thing.