“I told you,” she said. “I haven’t been living here for the past month for no reason. Look at them. They missed it.” Jemma looked to her guards, who were yawning and stretching. “Hey,” Vivian said to Helen Dufresne, the attendant closest to her. “Write this down for the record, please. Ishmael eats shit with a…” She cried out again, a deep bark, so Helena leaped back and threw up her hands, dropping her pen and pad.
Jemma stood up and asked “What, what?” though she could see what was wrong. Vivian had dropped her cigarette in the bed and was clutching at the rails, her hands rigid, a dreadful grimace on her face. Jemma brushed the cigarette off the sheets and raised up her hands. “Hey,” she said, “knock it off.” Her guards came rushing up. She raised her hands up higher. Vivian opened her mouth wider, but stopped shouting.
“Don’t you do it,” said Arthur.
“It’s not allowed, ma’am,” said Jude.
“Of course not,” Jemma said, and burned. Arthur and Jude tried to reach her, but it only took the smallest portion of her attention to make it so they could only move their arms. They made swimming motions through her fire but came no closer to her.
Vivian relaxed even before Jemma touched her. “No,” she said. “No.”
“Don’t worry,” Jemma said. “I’m here.”
“You can’t… Don’t. I see it. It’s just over there. Don’t get in the way.” She went rigid again. Jemma could see plainly the lesions of the botch all along her spine, unfolding like paper to spread out into her chest and abdomen. There was one in her head, a swelling black aneurysm about to burst into blood and dust.
“I feel it,” Jemma said. “I can stop it. I just didn’t… care enough before.” She was making that up, though every time she burned these days it was brighter than before, and it was always a surprise as well as a bitter disappointment when she failed to save someone.
“You can’t…” Vivian said. “Look at it! I never guessed it would be beautiful. It’s not supposed to be… it’s not even a word!”
“It’s awful,” Jemma said, not yet aware that they weren’t looking at the same thing.
“Maybe it’s nasty inside,” Vivian said. “Or it smells bad. I can’t smell it from here. If I can reach it…”
“Just relax,” Jemma said, because Vivian was trying to sit up.
“If I touch it, then I’ll know. And if I say it, then you’ll all hear, and it’ll stop. We’ll all have passports — don’t you get it? I just have to touch it. Don’t get in my way.”
“Just relax,” Jemma said, and tried to make her sleepy with the fire, making it cool and dark and soft. Vivian pushed her away, then arched her back.
“Don’t get in my way,” she said again, but Jemma, perceiving that Vivian was leaping out of the bed, though her body remained arched and fixed between the rails, tried to throw herself between Vivian and the ceiling. “Don’t,” she said again, and Jemma said, “I have to.”
She was partially aware of bodies flying around the room, sustaining little hurts that were healed almost as soon as they were sustained, caught in the maelstrom that spun around the bed. All the rest of her attention was on Vivian, her body and her not-body. With one hand she burned at the botch while the other grabbed frantically at her friend, who struggled against her.
“Would you knock it the fuck off?” Vivian said, quieter now. “It’s just at my fingertips.”
“Sorry,” Jemma said, holding tight, but whatever she was holding on to — now it felt like a hand, now a foot, now a shoulder — slipped away, and Vivian was gone in the next instant, leaving behind only a lingering impression of surprise, despair, and delight. She should have stopped then, dropped the fire and wept by her friend’s bed, like someone who was remotely normal would do, but when she knew Vivian was dead she got the stony feeling again, as powerful now as the thing that Dr. Snood called her dreadful burden, rooting her feet to the ground and securing her will to the task of burning the botch to a different sort of ash.
Jemma, from far away, where Arthur and Jude are pinned against the wall, one right side up and the other upside down, both vomiting streams of green bile that take the shape of birds and insects to fly around the room, it looks like you are punching Vivian in the face and stomach. They are both a little distracted by the vomiting, but both are still watching you, and their report will seriously compromise any hope you have of being trusted by anybody in this hospital ever again, let alone being restored to your lost office. Give up, please — no one has ever defeated my brother, and no one can hope to, not even you, though you are glorious in your fury and your fire, and oh, I love to see you burn, and I know you are traveling swiftly to a place where you’re not just burning at the botch but at all the wrongs and hurts and sadness and obscenity of the old world — it’s easy, isn’t it, to make them the same? And if you could burn black tar to dust to ash to harmless air, or call Vivian back to a clean body, or harrow the hospital again like you did before, then why not swoop down on wings of green fire to pluck Martin Marty out of his smashed car, your father out of his cancer-bed, your mother out of her house, the world out of its own filthy ruin? Now are you even fighting, or just burning for the sake of it? My brother doesn’t even notice — he’s gone off to the seventh floor to take another life. Vivian was nothing to him, my dear, but another piece of flesh to consume, another bright hope to ruin, another job. Your own brother is burning years away, and I know you are asking yourself, is this how he burned, so mighty, so impotent? It’s a useless question, and soon you will hurt Arthur and Jude. There now. That’s better — I see a flicker, and sense your sudden weariness. You are as tired as a toddler at noon. Another flicker, and a stutter in your flame, and a strange sob, but no tears, and then you are dimming, and then dull, only a shining in your eyes hinting at how brightly you were burning. Helen Dufresne is laid out beside her chair — her companions have all fled. She is overcome by what she has witnessed. She tried to write down the noises that Vivian shouted, but there’s only illegible scrawl on her pad, and when she wakes she’ll remember nothing but that Vivian seemed exultant as she left. Arthur and Jude are fully awake, and feeling surprisingly refreshed, though I can see as plainly as you how the botch has settled in all their bones. You are too weak to resist them when they haul you up by your shoulders, and I have always been too weak to help you, but in the spirit of protest I’ll say to both of them, though they won’t hear me, Get away from her. You are not fit to look at her, to touch the hem of her yellow gown, to lick her shoe, to smell her shit, or even poke it with a stick.
72
Praise them! my sister sings. Praise their last days!
But I am silent.
Praise their last days! she sings out again, as if I had merely missed my cue.
I don’t feel like singing, or praying, I say.
The whole hospital trembles, and all over people look out the window or at the ceiling, expecting some new catastrophe. It’s not a matter of feeling like it, she says when she has recovered from her shock.
Our brother is merciless, I say.
Our brother is perfect, she replies.
Our brother is cruel.
He does not know the meaning of that word.
It would be better if they had all drowned.
Who are you to question the violence of grace?
I am he who commanded grace, I shout, and stretch myself to stand over the whole hospital, and for a moment I am a giant in the sky. Thin and rarefied and empty.
You are the recording angel, she says, after a moment has passed, and I feel as foolish as I look, a hollow spirit, full of air. Do not torture yourself with memory and with doubt. Sing with me. I am crafting a lullaby, you know. When I am diminished again she starts to sing, a dull, quiet croon.