He started to do just that, and there was even another set of pictures — artist’s renderings he commissioned from a talented parent, but Dr. Sundae cut him off. “That will do, Dr. Snood,” she said. The next witnesses, Anika and Janie, were both too sick to testify. Now it was Jemma’s turn. Dr. Sundae called for her to step up into the box.
“I’m fine right here,” Jemma said. She spent a few moments just staring around the room at various faces, seeing who would meet her gaze and who would hold it. Dr. Walnut looked away. Dr. Chandra looked back but made that gesture, the quick swipe over his nose, that she knew meant he had seen something dirty or unpleasant. Rob smiled. Ishmael winked again. “No matter what,” he had told her that afternoon, “you can count on me. No matter what they say about you. No matter how horrible they make you sound, I won’t vote against you, and they can’t do a thing without all three of us going against you.” She nodded and looked beyond him. Connie smiled but shook her wattle menacingly. Dr. Sundae nodded sternly at her and raised her eyebrows. Dr. Snood stared back and shook his head pityingly. She wanted so badly for Vivian to be here to defend her — she’d do a better job by far than Jemma ever could.
“Well,” she said finally. “What can I tell you?”
71
“It was like this with my granny,” Vivian said. “Everybody hanging around her bed, waiting for her to die.”
“You’re not going to die,” Jemma said.
“You keep saying that.” They were in the rehab playroom, Vivian lying face up in her hospital bed, Jemma sitting in a deep inflatable easy chairs of the sort that you could kick or hurl harmlessly across the room, when you were in the mood. Arthur and Jude, two men from the lift team who’d been assigned by Dr. Snood to follow Jemma wherever she went, sat on the ground close to the door, and between them and Vivian four of Vivian’s disciples sat on inflatable mushroom-shaped stools, close enough to be able to hear everything they said. Vivian called them her death guard. They were there to catch her last words, because everybody on the ninth floor felt sure that Vivian, before anyone else, was going to come up with the reason, even if only moments before she died. “The worse I feel,” she’d told Jemma, “the closer I feel to getting it. You know what that means, right?” Jemma didn’t know, and didn’t want to hear about it anyway.
“Cheer up,” Vivian said. “You’re healthy. Your baby’s healthy. It could be a lot worse.”
“That’s coming,” Jemma said.
“You’ll be fine,” Vivian said. “Your baby will be fine.”
“How can you know that? You haven’t laid a hand on my belly in weeks.”
“I’ve thought it through,” Vivian said. She sighed. “Is it midnight yet?”
“Almost,” Jemma said, tired of the question and not looking at her watch. “I don’t really care,” she said. “It’s just that it’s made me very confused. Now what do I do? I almost wanted to ask them the question, but it would have been too humiliating.”
“Do what I do. Lie here and try to figure it out, and wait for the big show.”
“Stupid fucking Ishmael.”
“Well, that at least you should have seen coming. Everything else — that’s just things falling apart.”
“He seemed so sincere.”
“Tell me about it. I’ll love you forever. I won’t let them impeach you — it’s all the same thing to him. Ouch.” She shifted in her bed. “I think I just felt my kidney fail.”
“Your kidneys are fine,” Jemma said, taking a very quick look. There was a barely perceptible shimmer in the air when she looked into Vivian’s belly, and no fire at all. Still, one of Dr. Snood’s goons lifted his head, as if sniffing the air, and stared at her. Jemma looked away.
“They’re probably the only good thing left in my body. This must be what it’s like to get old. I think Granny was even in this position, except her hand was always up over her head, like this. See? I think it was stuck, or maybe she just liked it like that. Vivian, she said, I hope a truck or a fat man falls on you and kills you long before you ever get like me. She suffered terribly. I used to hate to come home from school, because I knew she would be there, and I could smell the smell by sixth period, way before I even left to go home. This isn’t so bad, compared to what she went through. She paused a moment. Say, do I smell?”
“No,” Jemma said.
“You wouldn’t tell me if I did.” She cried out suddenly and her four attendants leaped from their stools.
“What? Where does it hurt?” Jemma asked, though what she sensed from her friend was a high spike of elation.
“I almost had it. Closer and closer. Like a wave of nausea or… something else. I get so close and then it just rushes away, the feeling and the knowledge. For a second there it almost felt like it wasn’t too late for me.”
“You’re not going to die,” Jemma said.
“You keep saying that enough times and maybe someone in here will believe it, but never me. Is it midnight yet?”
“Thirty seconds,” Jemma said, just as they heard the compressors start to hum behind the walls, and the lights started to dim further, and a bright mote appeared in the heart of the hanging sun.
“Here it comes,” Vivian said.
Vivian was right, there was something about the model in the rehab gym that you could only appreciate if you were really depressed. When the ceiling faded and the stars began to shine out of the darkness and the planets brightened and the sun blazed, it was different than all the other times Jemma had watched it, like being lifted out of your body and hanging in space instead of like watching a fancy mechanical diorama. It seemed so real it made her wonder if her horrible day had really happened, because her memory of waking, of rounds, of her trial, of her speech, all seemed so flimsy and vague compared to the hard light of the uncountable stars, the darting flight of Mercury, the pale green eye of Venus, or the perfect blue globe of earth, unmarked by land or cloud. A dwindling part of her was still wondering if she shouldn’t have just made them all see — she knew she could have done it, opened up their minds with prying green fire and made them know she wasn’t crazy, or just forced them to give up the stupid, distracting business of impeachment; there was some organ she could have found or imagined in them which, when squeezed in her green fist, would have poured out an abundance of Jemma-love and devotion. It would have been better, she was sure, than trying to convince them with mere words. “I’m not crazy,” she’d said, “I’ve just been trying to help, and the worst thing is, I care very deeply about all of you, I have a sort of love for everybody.” It was weak and stupid thing and nothing she had planned to say, and love was the wrong word anyway for the compelling interest she had in them, and having said that made it seem even more like a humiliating breakup when all of them, even Ishmael raised their arms and turned their thumbs down at her.
“There it goes,” she thought, imagining the humiliation, the caring at all about the whole stupid fucking day, was drawn out of her by a combination of gravitational and astronomical influences, so her anger went flying to Mercury, her thwarted love — though it wasn’t love — to Venus, her shame to Saturn, until the only question she asked herself was, What is this day, compared to the majesty of the cosmos?
“You weren’t kidding,” she said after the motors cut out and the stars faded and planets slowed and stopped. Vivian was taking long draws off another cigarette.