No, but the grieving for him will be done. You won’t want to anymore.
That is the most disgusting thing I have ever heard, he says.
You say that now. But how can you know what tomorrow will bring?
It is always the same. Every new day dawns, and my brother is still gone, and my whole life is one great aching after him.
I am supposed to say, Have faith. I am supposed to compare his small, strange mind, unfavorably, with the gigantic and subtle wonders of providence. But though I can feel those very words forming in the empty air of my chest, my own will and my angelic destiny shaping them together, I find I cannot speak them. They stick in my throat and feel as solid as a bone.
It’s hard, I say, to miss your brother or your sister
Sisters are nothing, Pickie says. And what do you know about, it, anyway? But then he reaches out beside him without looking at me, and takes my hand.
68
Rob was eating his lunch when Ishmael accosted him. He really should have eaten it on the way to the lab — he had a cell culture cooking there, and Dr. Sundae could not be relied upon to check it for him. He thought she probably had the botch in her brain, but he kept asking Jemma to check on it. He was salting his macaroni and cheese when Ishmael reached from behind him to put a hand on his wrist.
“There’s already enough salt in the sea,” he said. Rob shook his hand off. They weren’t exactly pals anymore. In a better, less exhausted world, somebody would have arranged an intervention for his erratic behavior. Off and on he was paranoid, and violent with himself. More than one person had seen him standing in some alcove off the ramp, pulling at his hair or biting his fingers. And there wasn’t a person above the age of twenty-one who hadn’t had him pop up and charge them with something improbable — stepping on a dodo or poisoning a mountain or uncoloring the sky. These accusations were almost quaint, but lately he seemed to like more and more to accuse people of wild vile sexual transgressions, and sometimes new mothers and fathers covered the ears of their children when he came around. And yet most of the time he was sober and clear-headed and totally normal, an able organizer and cheerleader for all their futile efforts against the botch.
“I like salt,” Rob said, not turning around to see which Ishmael was standing behind him. But he couldn’t eat with the man staring at the back of his head, so he said, “Want to sit down?”
“Don’t mind if I do,” Ishmael said, and took the spoon that Rob was going to use for his ice cream to help himself to the macaroni and cheese. “I miss you,” he said, around a mouthful.
“I miss you too,” Rob said, because his mother had taught him that you always had to say that back to people, even when you didn’t mean it.
“We used to be friends, didn’t we? Weren’t you my pal?”
“Sure,” Rob said.
“Golden days! I miss them too. I was happier then, back before I knew.”
“Well, we were all having a pretty good time there, for a while. Things are harder now. But it doesn’t mean that there’s not something good coming.” Ishmael laughed out loud at that, and Rob blushed, because it sounded so dumb. If he were someone like Father Jane he might be able to say the same thing in a way that would seem proudly hopeful instead of simply naïve.
“Maybe for somebody, but not…” Ishmael cocked his head, and put down his spoon, and leaned over the table. “You know, I was going to say, not for you. But who knows? And you’re not like everybody else, anyway. I mean, everybody knows it. You’ll get the Best Boy award, when this is all over, and they are all sitting around deciding who has been the Biggest Whore or the Whiniest Worm or the Handsomest Hip. I can see it.”
“Um… thanks.”
“It’s just a fact. Don’t thank me for it. There aren’t many like you… trust me! I see into all the places that people try to hide. It’s what I used to do, I’m sure of it. I illuminated and I judged and I wanted to punish. I wanted it so bad!” He struck a fist on the table, catching the edge of Rob’s bowl and sending macaroni flying.
“Take it easy there, pal,” Rob said.
“Pal! Now I’m your pal! Your long-lost, neglected pal! Well, that’s fine. Even if it does stand for Personal Ass Licker. That’s its own distinct pleasure, and don’t I know it?”
“Have you been drinking?” Rob asked him.
“I wish! I don’t need to, not anymore. It helps nothing, to drink. But back to our story. You and I were going to move in together. Best Boy and Angriest Aardvark. Can’t you see it?”
“No.”
“But don’t tell me,” he said, “that you haven’t ever thought about it. Didn’t I just finish saying that I see all the places that nobody else sees?” He leaned over the table, and then climbed up on it one knee at a time, so even though Rob pushed back his chair, Ishmael could push his face right up against him, so his hair touched Rob’s hair and their noses were nearly touching. He put a hand right on Rob’s belly and said, “Don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it.”
Maybe he had, but that had nothing to do with the sudden panic that rose in him. All the late days in PICU, surrounded by a deadly illness whose rules of contagion were still unknown, had not made him feel suddenly so unsafe, so threatened, as he did now. It felt suddenly like Ishmael was pressed close against him, though he still lay atop the table. Chest to chest and hip to hip and thigh to thigh, Rob suddenly felt him pressing in. Ishmael whispered his proposition, and Rob shouted back the first thing that popped into his head: “I love my wife!”
That worked. Ishmael leaned back, and climbed back down into his chair, and then stood up. “So you do,” he said, now sounding very sad. “I can’t argue with that.” He gathered two handfuls of the scattered macaroni and put them in his pocket, and then walked away.
69
The morning of her impeachment trial, three weeks after the arrival of the boat and the boy, Jemma lay in bed, feeling weary and achy and depressed. She’d come half-awake when Rob had left, summoned back to the PICU by his pager, and pretended to be asleep, watching through slitted eyes as he rose from bed, stretched, and pulled on his scrubs. He washed his face with water in a bowl; Pickie was still sleeping in the bathroom, and Rob was too considerate of Pickie to wash there. Jemma stirred a little, arranging herself in an accessible position and closing her eyes tight. When he kissed her she brushed a hand lazily against his face. “I love you,” he told her, and she knew the highlight of her day had just come and gone.
Back during her surgery rotation she’d lain similarly abed, with the cold pre-dawn air spilling in her window, listening to the distant murmuring of her alarm clock. She smacked it across the room every day when it brought her the news that she must wake and travel to the OR. It would not yet be four a.m., but she could perfectly imagine the accumulating insults of the day, and her perfect exhaustion and depression when she came home again to sit in front of her window and watch the lights on the bay, thinking of nothing and feeling like a big pile of shit sculpted up into the shape of a girl. She lay that morning with her face in her pillow, a tiny corner of it stuck in her mouth, and thought of rounds and her late-afternoon trial, and how she would rather sleep than get up, rather hide on the roof than go help on the sixth floor, and rather gouge her eyes out with spoons than go to the trial. Maybe, she thought, they could just mail her the verdict, or shoot a flare where she could see it from her window, red for you’re out, blue for we still love you. She turned on her side and pressed her nose against the cool cement wall, thinking of witnesses, seeing Dr. Snood and Dr. Chandra and Dr. Pudding on the stand, and then imagining a series of special witnesses, raised from the sea or conjured form the air, her mother, her father, her brother, Martin, Sister Gertrude, Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Cat in the Hat, Bugs Bunny, and that curious and amusing Martian who wore a shoe brush on his head. I knew she was trouble from the moment I saw her, the Martian said, and her mother said, All the Claflins are fucking insane, why should she be any different, and her brother rose up out of the witness box, fifteen feet tall, to crouch over the whole assembly and kill them all with a single derisive snort.