Why is it so hard to remember, I ask her, how richly they deserved it?
73
Dr. Snood interrupted Dr. Chandra at his suicide. He hadn’t meant to do anything of the sort. He was chasing down a child who had been sassy to him, one of the old rickets family, a seven-year-old who had abandoned a wagon full of laboratory specimens to spoil in the lobby. “I don’t feel like it!” she’d said, when Dr. Snood had commanded her to haul the thing to the lab, and she had torn up her demerit and thrown it on the ground as soon as she’d received it. He wanted to catch her to give her a talking-to, stern but gentle. She was a child, but who among them were children anymore? There was no leisure for any of them now, not for the young or the sick or the weak, not for the weary and not for the depressed. He could frame that in a way a seven-year-old could comprehend. It would be a very fulfilling talk. He was sure they would both go away from it revitalized.
He lost the child on the eighth floor, and when he put his head into one of the old BMT rooms, now an abandoned ballet salon, he saw Dr. Chandra standing in the window.
“Don’t,” he said, loud but not too loud, afraid of scaring him into the jump. Dr. Chandra drew back his foot and turned around.
“You,” he said.
“Yes,” said Dr. Snood. “It’s me.”
“What are you doing up here?”
“I had a feeling someone was going to do something stupid. I… sensed it.”
“Nothing stupid about what I’ve got planned.”
“You’ve got that poised-in-the-window look of somebody about to kill himself.”
“Exactly. The only stupid thing is having waited this long. I’m almost too late, and you’re making me later.”
“Come down from there. We’ll figure something out.”
“You go ahead your way, Doctor. I’ll go mine.”
“Wait! At least tell me why.”
“You can probably get it from the context,” he said, not turning around.
“Maybe I’m not as smart as I look.”
“I guess I could believe that. Here’s the short version, then, because I think I just threw a PVC. I’m about to die anyway, I never did any of the shit I was supposed to do, and it’s the only thing that would make me happy.”
“But if you’re going to…”
“It’s not the same, is it. Is it?” He turned his head to look at Dr. Snood. “If I do it then I do it. If it just happens then it just happens, and then my whole life I’ll never have had done anything. I was supposed to do it years ago. Years ago, and now it’s almost too late. Okay? Will you go away now?”
“That’s not it,” said Dr. Snood. “I can tell when people are lying to me.”
“Well, that’s what I’m offering. You’re free to presume whatever else you want.”
“You’re just tired of the work. Well, we’re all tired of the work, but we’ve got to keep up with it. What other choice have we got?”
Dr Chandra spread out his arms beside him in a downward sweep, as if to say, Behold! Then he turned back to face the water.
“Wait a minute,” Dr. Snood said. “I think I’ve got an idea.
“Fuck,” he said. “It’s starting. I can’t move my foot. What do I have to do to get a push?”
“You think something will change because you do it, or someone will be happy? You think the botch will go back into whatever box it came out of, just because of this? You think you can start over again, somewhere else?”
“Just one little push,” he said.
“Are you lonely?” asked Dr. Snood, not thinking before he spoke. Two people had already died this morning, and he couldn’t stand another, especially a suicide, of which they’d thankfully not yet had a single one. “I’ll be your friend. Are you tired? You can sleep in my bed. Are you sad? I can be very amusing.”
“Maybe if you just blew on me,” he said.
“Are you lonely?” he asked him again, reaching up high to lay a hand on his shoulder. “I’m lonely, too,” he said. “We all are.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Dr. Chandra asked. “Why are you touching me?”
“I don’t like suicide,” he said. It was true, but it was the wrong thing to say.
“I see a whale,” Dr. Chandra said, and drove an elbow into Dr. Snood’s face, and pushed himself forward. Dr. Snood reached after him, but not quickly enough, or not sincerely enough, and Dr. Chandra fell. He broke on the surface of the water instead of falling through it, and floated there in piles of greasy ash that would coat the windows on the third floor for days.
74
Jarvis was making shoes. On their two-hundred-and-thirty-first day at sea he sat on the floor before a replicator on the seventh floor, trying to get the right pair. Everybody should have a nice pair of shoes — he’d decided that a long time ago, and he thought it made a difference, even for the ones who were almost dead and wouldn’t know if you chewed on their toes, let alone if you put a new pair of shoes on their feet. They did a little better, or they looked a little happier, or they smelled a little less — he wasn’t sure what it was, exactly. It made him feel better, anyway. It was like doing something, and it was doing something — turning the idea of a shoe into words about a shoe, and turning the words into the thing.
“This isn’t what I asked for,” he told the angel.
“It is the shoe.”
“My smelly ass, bitch,” he said. “It’s not the fucking shoe. It’s not even half of the shoe. This shit ain’t worth dreaming about. This shit ain’t worth thinking about by accident. What the fuck am I paying you for, to fuck up every minute of the day?”
“I am not paid except in prayer and thanks to God.”
“Shut the fuck up,” he said. “I’ll tell you if you’re paid or not, and how it is. What’s wrong with you? Who made you such a stupid, useless bitch?”
“I rose like you from out of the mind of God.”
“Shut the fuck up. Who asked you to talk? Just put the fucking spangles on the side, and not on the top, and maybe I won’t have to shit in my pants right now because of your stupidness.”
“But do you really want spangles on the side?”
He screwed up his face, rolled forward to his knees, and banged on the cool metal surface of the replicator, grunting and groaning. “I’m shitting,” he said. “Right now, squeezing out a big lumpy shit because I just can’t fucking stand it anymore. Just put the spangles on, bitch. Just put them where I tell you.”
“Very well, but I have listened to her dreams and I know where she wants her spangles to fall.”
“Just do it, bitch. Who’s in fucking charge here, anyway?”
“You are,” she said, and the machine sighed, and the mist spilled out on the floor. When he picked the shoe from the hollow it was still full of mist. He turned it over in his hand and the mist spilled out, falling slow and straight, splitting into a dozen rivulets and disappearing just before it reached the floor. The shoe was just as he had imagined it, and finally just as he had described it — nothing missing, nothing extra, the sole just as black as he wanted it, the velero nibs and steel spikes arranged just as they were supposed to be (they would help her stay steady on her feet and draw blood if she should have to kick some random motherfucker in the face); the sparkles were subtle but not invisible, the red tongue was flared just so, and the inside of the shoe was blaze-orange and would always have that smell (he partook of it now) that was like pressing a brand-new not-yet-kicked soccer ball against your face and breathing in through your mouth and nose both.