Everyone has got someone but me, he thought, looking up at all the couples. He was passing the second floor, coming down the last section of the ramp — it was not that crowded for a Saturday afternoon, but since people started getting sick some were staying in their rooms or restricting themselves to particular areas, and now there was Vivian’s faction, fifty people — or maybe now it was more — who never left the ninth floor. I should have just taken the elevator, he thought, or let the angel make me something in my room. So many people walking hand in hand, and everyone in pairs except the severest, most lonely freaks — so there was Dr. Sundae going hand in hand with Dr. Topper, and there were Dr. Snood and Dr. Tiller. He almost hurried a few steps and hid behind a pillar before Dr. Tiller could see him, fearing she might try to dragoon him into her newly reestablished rounds in the PICU. She seemed to think that just because adults were getting sick the pediatric residents should all become puppies for her to kick again. Sorry, lady, he wanted to say to her. There are so many other ways for me to be miserable that don’t involve you at all. But he probably wouldn’t ever say that to her.
What’s wrong with me? he wondered, watching the parents and the neo-parents and the rare childless couple promenading around the toy or watching kids scramble on the playground. He ran through the usual reasons in his head — you are too ugly, too sad, too gay, not gay enough, too lonely. It shows on your face and in your walk, how lonely you are. People say, there goes the lonely fellow to buy a frozen pizza and rent a pornographic video. Don’t touch him or you’ll be lonely too. It was true that the angel often made him pizza in his room, and that he watched her pornography, but only the really interesting stuff, and it was more because he was curious than because he was lonely that he watched Rock Hudson and Ronald Reagan in the musical she called Pillow Face.
He sat down on a bench underneath the shadow of the toy, forgetting, for now, about the coffee he’d meant to fetch, wondering if he could rub his face like he wanted to without looking even more lonely and sad. Maybe I should have applied for a baby, he thought. But that was a strategy of aging fat women, to recruit a child to console their loneliness. He opened his hands and looked in them — no black spots yet — then clapped them to his face.
Across the grass, people were setting up for a show scheduled for that night, putting the final touches on the staircase on the stage, Connie and Anika stapling real flowers to the curling banister. Dr. Sashay was stomping up and down the stairs, calling out, “Are you sure this is sturdy enough?” Josh Swift and Cindy Flemm were finishing up a piece of backdrop.
“There’s no way this is going to dry in time,” Cindy said.
“Sure it will,” Josh said. “It’s got this special polymer in it. I hope my horses look more like horses from far away.”
“They’re pretty,” Cindy said. “This is exhausting. I want to take a nap. Do you want to take a nap?”
“Do you really mean nap, or do you mean the other thing?”
“I really mean a nap, but I could probably be talked into… oh fuck. He’s watching us.”
Josh turned back and saw Wayne sitting alone in the audience, surrounded by empty seats. “Is he whittling?” he asked.
“I think it’s supposed to be threatening. I’m so tired of this. I’m exhausted of it.”
“It’s okay,” Josh said. “I’ll talk to him again later. Maybe if I let him hit me this time he’d feel a sense of closure.”
“Maybe if we both hit him he’d leave us the fuck alone.”
“Moron,” Wayne was saying. “Drooly fucking moron.” He was whittling, but not very threateningly, on a piece of mahogany, making a fancy My Little Pony for Cindy, because he knew two things about her that the moron didn’t: they were her favorite toys when she was five years old, and mahogany was her favorite wood.
“I see you,” says Pickie Beecher, walking by with a ladder over his shoulder.
“I see you too, you little freak,” says Wayne, not looking up from his whittling.
“You all look alike to me,” he says.
Wayne does not respond, but I say, It is because we are brothers and sister.
“The same eyes, the same face,” he says, walking on. He puts down his ladder by the stage and heads toward the playground. “And you all smell alike. Everyone else is starting to look like you, too. Not everyone, just the sick ones. Why is that?”
My brother is in them. The destroying angel.
“My brother is dead, killed by angels. I have never forgiven you. I never will.” He sits down on the edge of the playground, on one of the railroad ties that mark the border of the grass circle, takes off his shoes, and rubs his toes in the grass. Jemma lies a few feet away from us, where I left her, overcome by a sudden nap — at week twenty-nine this is her newest symptom, constant exhaustion and frequent naps. Dr. Tiller and Dr. Snood walk by, Dr. Tiller seeing in her sprawled form confirmation of her laziness, but Dr. Snood says, “Poor thing.”
Do you miss your brother? I ask. I miss my sister every day. My real sister, I mean.
“Stab,” says Pickie Beecher, poking himself sharply in the chest. “Stab! Stab! Stab!”
“Be quiet, child,” says Dr. Tiller, striding over, her headdress glittering in the far-falling sunlight. Pickie jumps up and stands over Jemma.
“If you hurt her,” he says. “Or if you hurt my brother inside of her, then I will consume you. I already know the taste of your flesh.” Then he opens his mouth to me, wider and wider, so his whole face seems to have become teeth around a black hole, and if I dared to look I could see the glaring red root of his abomination hanging in his middle. He snaps shut his teeth, making a sound like two heads knocking together. It hurts my ears to hear it.
“Don’t you threaten me,” Dr. Tiller says, handing Pickie a fat roll of demerits, and Jemma wakes.
63
It was called the botch, and a person was said to be stricken with it or not. Almost everybody acknowledged that it was a curse from God, but speculation abounded on whether there was not some natural and therefore treatable mediating agent — a virus or bacterium or toxin. Nothing was growing in the microbiology cultures, and blood and tissue samples taken from the victims — there were five of them now in the PICU — showed a haphazard and inconsistent range of anomalies. Dr. Sundae retreated deeper into her lab, where she and a variety of MD/PhDs were busy trying to isolate a causative agent, while the strictly clinical types were trying to write a predictive natural history. Rob was one of the latter. Jemma spent almost all her free time with him and the victims in the PICU.
She tried not to take as an affront all the hullabaloo over finding the virus — if there was a virus, wouldn’t she know, and wouldn’t Maggie have sprung back from death in as spritely a manner as any of the children? — and tried not to take personally the rumors that came back to her, that people were wondering if she weren’t just temporarily off her game, if she retained only the flashiness but not the substance of her gift, or if she hadn’t just let Maggie die because she hated her. “Everybody sure hated her,” said Karen, in marked display of poor taste at the memorial service held the day after she died. “Everybody hated her a lot. Sometimes I think she wanted people to hate her. That almost makes it okay, doesn’t it, if you hate somebody that kind of likes it, or at least expects it? I sure hated her, and I was one of her good friends.”