John Grampus and Father Jane passed by, taking their Monday/Wednesday/Friday stroll among the babies. “They’re all so cute,” she said, “I don’t know how a person would choose.”
“Well,” he said, “it’s not like we actually get to pick.” They walked on, arm in arm, pausing by every favorite baby. John Grampus talked of his lover Ray, how he would have liked this baby because it always has that mean look on its face, or how that baby has got his chin, and wouldn’t it be a shame if all these babies were not their own little unfolding selves at all but just containers for recycled souls, and maybe it’s not a baby with Ray’s chin but Ray with Ray’s chin? “It would be so depressing if there was no such thing as a new soul, but it would be nice, too.”
“Ella liked to say that a breast-feeding baby was staring off into another world.”
“Ray said he thought they saw ghosts!”
They had a lot in common, the two dead lovers. They liked the same music, ate the same food, pursued the same professions, read the same books, liked equivalent if not identical things in bed. “Oh yes,” Jane had confided drunkenly one night, “she liked to be licked right here,” drawing the anatomy on the tablecloth. Somewhere they must be getting along famously, they liked to think, and each living lover wondered if the dead ones, unfettered of fleshly orientations, spent every eternal night spirit-fucking while their living halves ate exquisite bits of synthesized cheese and tasted vintages condensed out of the imagination of the angel, holding hands, cupping chins, kissing fingers and confessing to each other an absolute unattraction and marveling as their hips seemed almost magnetically to repulse each other.
Anna bent over her baby and kissed her on the head. “She’s almost discovered her toes,” she said to Heloise, the nurse who’d been watching her for her while she was gone. “There’s formula out,” she said, pointing to it. “I should be back before the next feed, but just in case. Don’t let that weird kid touch my baby.” She indicated Kidney with a jerk of her head that made her earrings jingle. After she’d put off her white robe she took the earrings off and put them in a pack around her waist. She didn’t like not to wear them, but they jangled when she ran, so children looked up when she went by, expecting to see the tired old volunteer pushing an ice-cream cart. She did a few stretches right there, smoothed the front of her turquoise unitard, retied her shoes, waved at her baby, and was off. Brenda did not mark her departure.
She hit the hopscotch marks on her way to the ramp, only missing one, then started up. She ran every day but Sunday, though she had not previously been in the habit of keeping healthy, and had run before only on rare occasions of pursuit. It was something the angel had suggested, the voice drifting gently down from the ceiling one evening after Anna had returned from her shift to her little room and had just finished her decompressing with a fifteen-minute shower. “Are you so fat on purpose?” was the question she had asked. Anna had answered, “Fuck off, Billy,” but the question inaugurated a discussion; when the angel looked at her with the thousand eyes of the hospital she saw a different lady than Anna did in the mirror. They started with in-room stretching and calisthenics and special bitter teas designed to increase her enthusiasm and destabilize her fat. The unitard was of a material that clung harder in some places than others, lifting here and pressing there, so when she finally went out she looked more Rubinesque than doughy. At first she could hardly get up the first spiral. Now she ran to the top without stopping.
She wasn’t the only runner out this morning. She did a smiling nod at the others and said hello to Alan, a radiology tech who always took his shirt off at the top of the ramp and walked back down with it tucked into his pants. There was always something swinging hugely in his shorts as he walked briskly down the spiral. It would be nice, she thought, to walk down with him one day. Perhaps when she was a little firmer. It wouldn’t be long before she was among the firmest people in the hospital; already there was nothing left to pinch between her ass and her thigh, and when she poked a finger against the flesh of her ass it hardly gave at all, but she wanted it so firm that if someone should happen to bite it, it would be like biting the ass of a mannequin. And she would wait until her ears were done — they are a little floppy in the lobes, in fact nearly as floppy as an old man’s, but Billy had a plan to fix them which would involve nothing more complicated than a cream, some drops, a night brace, and an adult-sized sit-and-spin on which she must spin counterclockwise for ten minutes at a time three times in a single night.
As soon as she reached the eighth floor she sprinted for the ninth. The doors at the top were open — she could feel the salt breeze blow against her as she took the final curve, so fast she thought she could run along the wall as easily as on the floor, and then she passed through the door and decelerated into a power walk, folding her hands behind her neck and lifting her face into the bright sun and the cold wind. She walked in a circle for a while, did pull-ups — three sets of twenty — at the monkey bars, and lay down in the grass. She’d rest just a moment before she started her laps around the roof — a hundred and sixty of them equaled four miles. There was a small cloud passing overhead in the shape of her family. I have not forgotten you, she thought.
Drs. Snood and Tiller passed by her where she lay. Some people will sleep anywhere, Dr. Tiller thought. Even when it was very cold the two doctors took a morning walk up here.
“I dreamed again,” he said, “of the resistant bug.”
“Poor Jacob. Did you wake screaming? I have fewer and fewer of the scream dreams, these days.”
“No. It chased me, yes, like usual, scuttling on eight legs then six legs then four and even for a little while on two. It never holds still until it becomes an inky gelatinous concept that presses against my face and sucks all the breath out of me.”
“You are still waiting for everything to go back to the way it was.”
“I’m afraid, Carmen. If I am forgetting my medicine, then how much could anyone else remember? I sat for an hour on the toilet this morning trying to recall the dosing for pentasa suppositories.”
“You’d sit there for an hour anyway. Do all gastroenterologists spend so much time on the toilet?”
“I’ve not had to look up that dose since my third year in medical school. What’s next, prednisone? Tomorrow morning will I wake up thinking IBD stands for itsy-bitsy duodenum, or that Crohn’s disease only strikes old women?”
“If you do then I’ll…” Oh, let them go. Walk on, there’s a reason Jemma doesn’t like you, and another reason why I don’t, and another, and others beyond even what my brother shall catalog against you. There were a score of people up here on the roof this morning. Karen and Anika were setting up a badminton net. If Jemma sleeps in I might inhabit the shuttlecock. It’s a distinct sort of fun, to be a shuttlecock in the hands of competent players, and every time the racquet connects I connect with the life behind it. Monserrat has come up for a solitary picnic. Out of a basket big enough to hold all the organs in her abdomen she removes a cup of yogurt, a peach, and a small thermos of coffee. She shook out the crisp white sheet she’ll sit on, snapping it in the sun, turning once or twice with it to make it spin and flap more. Even from across the roof I could tell how much she enjoyed the contrast between the white sheet and the blue sky. I slither along toward her in the grass, gathering speed as I go. I want to be with her when she tastes the coffee. But there is the skylight to look into before I get there, uncovered on this bright morning. I look down on the model; Jupiter was closest to me; the red eye stared dully at the wall. Pickie Beecher was standing underneath in a patch of sun. He shaded his eyes and looked at me.