True to Rob’s prediction, the boat did not stay with them for long. An hour after they brought the boy back to the hospital the boat began visibly to drift behind them. The ropes snapped, and the gangway that twenty citizens were hastily constructing in a hallway of the seventh floor never had a chance to be lifted into position. The boat simply stopped moving, but they did not. It passed farther and farther behind them while a small crowd stood watching on the roof. Everybody had the feeling it was going to sink, but it only passed into a patch of gray mist. When it was gone people hung their heads, their hopes of attaching a luxury annex to the hospital finally dashed. Dr. Tiller pointed out derisively that they probably had more dance floors and movie theatres and massage rooms in the hospital than the boat had, anyway.
They took the boy to the PICU. A cautious nurse had stored a bed, instead of tossing it out the window in the big purge, many weeks before when so many hospital beds and IV poles and bedside commodes had gone to their rest in the sea. So he lay under display of his entirely normal vitals, in a room decorated with the drawings of the second-graders who used it as an art studio, his clothes folded neatly on a chair next to his head, his dolphin under his arm, and his book under his hand. It looked like a diary, complete with a lock. No one had opened it yet.
“He looks fine,” Vivian said.
“Almost,” Jemma said. “I really think he’s just sleeping.” She had tried to wake him up across the water, sending a spark through her finger that should have made him jump, but it didn’t even interrupt his snoring. “Well,” she said to Vivian. “I think I’m ready. Would you send the kids in?” She’d asked for her class to be there, to watch and maybe to learn and maybe even to help, or maybe because to involve them, even in the most peripheral way, was more like teaching them something than were games of scrabble, picnics, and her cheating game of hide-and-go-seek. The majority of the crowd had transferred itself from the roof to the space outside the PICU. Inside there were only members of the Council, people Jemma wanted there, and a few citizens chosen by quickly drawn lots. The kids filed through into the room. Someone had arranged them from smallest to largest. They were all very subdued. Even Jarvis looked awed, and was very well-behaved. They stood in a semicircle around Jemma, all joining hands without her even asking them to do it.
“Here we go,” Jemma said. She sat down on his clothes, took his hand, and closed her eyes. He was still curiously not there when she tried to look at him just using her brain. She had to send a little shoelace of flame whipping out and into him to light him up before she could see him properly. It had been a while before she’d really burned — in the past weeks there’s been no call for her fire. Her last patient had come to her over two weeks before, Wayne, who broke his arm in a roller-hockey game. She thought it would take a while to really gear up, that she would have to call up flame for hours before she could really have enough to sock it to him, or that she’d have to let it burn on her before it could get hot enough to wake him up. But it came right away as hard as it had the night she’d done her big fix. One moment she was holding his hand, and only the children standing right there could perceive that there was a noodle of fire wrapped in a coil along both their wrists; the next, she and he both had burst into cool green flames that wrapped the whole bed and licked at the ceiling. Jemma, her mind suddenly full of the image of the hospital viewed from the boat, saw for a moment the strange green flash in the window.
He wasn’t well, after all, not all right — she saw it once he was properly illuminated. He had subtle warts, and most varieties of sexually transmitted infection — syphilis and gonorrhea and chlamydia and scabies, everything but lice and granulosum venereum and the big one, for which she searched assiduously, but there was no trace of it, and she was sure she would recognize it, if it was there. She stomped on the spirochetes with giant green shoes, made fire fingers between which to pinch critters and cocci, placing them one by one into an imaginary bucket that she emptied out the window. The strange little chalmydiae went chirruping out of epithelial cells, evicted by fire and fury, jumping into the bucket like trained circus fleas. These problems were all easy to fix, but none of them, she knew, was what was making him sleep.
She looked through him, from head to toe, over and over, burning further and further in until she felt she could number not just the hairs of his head but the cells of his body. There was still something wrong. She could not put a shape or a name to it, though she burned him and burned him, and as she herself burned brighter even than when she stood in the NICU with Brenda hanging on her finger. Every child but Pickie and Jarvis ran out of the room, and of the others only Ethel kept trying to look into the conflagration to watch the shapes in the middle, to put out her own mind and help with whatever was happening. All over the hospital every living person experienced an off sense, like someone plucking at their spine, or a baby kicking inside them, or just a plainer nausea as Jemma pummeled the boy — she was listening so hard to him, and looking so hard into him that their discomfort became louder and plainer to her as the long minutes passed. There it was, almost a shadow, flickering in the edge of her mind and then disappearing entirely. She stood alone in a bright green room, the sleeping boy at her feet.
She raised her hands and cried out. She felt her baby kick in her, protesting or cheering, she couldn’t tell — even when she was burning this bright she could not look inside herself to see it. She gathered up as much of the fire as she could bear and pounded him with it, no longer trying to give a shape or a voice to what afflicted him, but trying to destroy it. Flames shot out of the room and down the hall, and all over the hospital people stumbled. Then they were gone. Jemma was in the bed, lying on the boy, her cheek pressing against his cheek. He was still asleep.
57
“It’s a tale of sex and woe,” said Karen. “Just like my marriage. You want me to read you some?”