He ran his hand along the wall as they passed the doorway to the seventh floor. “Oh, the whole place is a miracle,” he said. “I could bore you with all the miracles. Dry as a bone, even in the deepest cellars. Replicators — have you seen those yet? — that can make anything out of anything. You were wondering, weren’t you, how we’re supposed to eat? Wait until you see! Apples out of old shoes; shoes out of shit; movies out of just an idea. Wait till you try that. It’s like humming a few bars and then getting the whole song played back to you, but you tell her a couple lines of a story and she gives you back the whole thing, just as you would have imagined it, if only you weren’t too depressed, or too dull. Every day there was some new incredible thing to conceive and build. I started thinking of the people who would come — I could almost see you all, and understand how horrible it was going to be, but it was up to me to make it a little bit better. I am to be the preserver and the comforter, she told me — a load of shit. It was me. I was doing it all. She was just the fucking wrench. Night after night after night of miracles. I didn’t want to ever finish because I knew what would come after we were done.
“All this miraculous shit,” he said, throwing out his arms in a gesture meant to take in the whole hospital, “all to save the kids. I don’t have any kids, but if I did, you can bet they would be here. No nieces or nephews, either. I would have brought them, too. As it was, I warned as many children as I could. You have to believe me. They were the only ones I could tell. I would go to playgrounds and lean over the fence to talk to a child, and I could speak. I’d say what was coming, and sometimes they would listen, and sometimes they were old enough to understand what I was saying, but none of them took me seriously. The small ones thought I was telling a story, the bigger ones told me I was crazy. And a grown man cannot go talking to children in a playground without arousing suspicions. There are those signs, right? No adults allowed without the company of a child. But I couldn’t stop until I had gotten at least one to say he would go to the hospital if an unusually heavy and persistent rain should begin to fall. Children complained to their parents about the strange man in the park. There was a trip to the police station. One boy did say he would go, when the time came. That was something.” They had passed the eighth and ninth floors, the signs sea green and sky blue.
“I thought it would come sooner, you know. This hospital has been operating for what — a year? I had all that time to fret. I thought maybe it wouldn’t happen, though she never left me, and she always said it would indeed happen, that it would be swift and ferocious, not like last time where it just sort of drizzled a warning for days and days while everybody went on burning their children and fucking their poodles. And it was pretty ferocious, wasn’t it? Well, here we are.”
They stood at the bottom of the last flight of stairs, looking up at the door to the roof. “Still want your look?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. Seven miles, she was thinking. Hah! But even inside her head the exclamation sounded weak and full of doubt. John Grampus went up the stairs and threw the door open. It was dark on the other side, and Jemma wondered if it was night already until she realized that the door did not lead directly outside. He threw a switch on the wall beyond the door and lit up an enormous room. The walls and roof were made of glass, but they were darkened like all the windows below. The place was full of plants and flowers, some that Jemma recognized — fig trees and ferns and roses and mums and daisies and irises in lacquered pots — and some that she didn’t, strange tall flowers that looked vaguely like orchids, and short plants with succulent leaves as long as her finger. They shivered when she bent to touch one.
“We’re in the greenhouse,” he said, closing the door and punching a button on the wall. There were buttons all over the place, now. She had spent two weeks in this hospital, slave to the whims of cruel nurses, a fetch-monkey for attendings and residents — they’d sent her all over on unimportant missions of busywork, and she’d wandered, herself, bored and lonely, despite her exhaustion too nervous to sleep in between deliveries. She was familiar with the whole place, so all the new buttons and switches and consoles in the walls were shocking to her. Looking for an open door to the stairs, she had noticed that the halls were wider everywhere, the ceiling was higher, and the place was full of new corridors and doors and rooms — the whole hospital had expanded as if it had taken a huge, deep breath.
“Ready?” he asked. She did not respond, but he threw open the door anyway, and it so happened that they were standing just in front of the sun, and when the light hit her eyes she cried out and closed them.
“Easy now,” he said. “I have sunglasses, but not for you. Didn’t you think it might be sunny? Here, I’ll guide you.” He took her by the elbow and drew her out into air which felt crisp and bright against her skin. She didn’t breathe at first because she feared the air would be full of the miasma of wet rot, but when she breathed the air was sweet. “I wonder why it isn’t colder,” he said, “since we’re so high up. I wonder why we aren’t choking, for that matter. Go ahead and open your eyes.”
Jemma shut her eyes tighter, considering things. Maybe it was enough, just to have come up here. Maybe she should just turn around and hurry back down the stairs. She probably did not really want to see all the bodies, their agony still obvious on their faces, whatever cruel seabirds had survived nesting in their hair and lazily pecking at the ripe eyeballs of their hosts, and it would probably be better to hold on to that blank feeling, an old friend, after all. She should be a sensible person for once and realize that she did not want to see the water, seven miles deep over the whole unfortunate world. It would all remain impossible, after all, until she opened her eyes.
Years before, Vivian — back then still a new friend but the closest thing she had to family — had walked her up the aisle, past the rows of folding chairs draped with hideous velvet slipcovers, and the calla lilies flowering in an obscene corridor on either side of her feet. For the tenth time that day she thought how the calla lily must be the nastiest flower ever, and wished again that someone would outlaw it. Faces turned to watch her as she passed, people crying or whispering. She would not turn to look at them directly. A trick of her peripheral vision made the heads seem like they were waving on stalks or bobbing on strings. Jemma leaned heavily on her friend. Funeral number four, she thought. I should be good at this, by now.