That was the floating dream. There was a sinking one, too, where he drifted down into the old world, holding his breath for days until he realizes that he simply doesn’t need to breathe anymore. When he opens his mouth to speak a huge bubble comes out that breaks into smaller bubbles that break into sounds when they pop, muted and dull but still they spell out the word that is in his mind. Down past schools of sardines and swarms of little squid and a solitary eel, out of the reach of the sun he falls, spinning and twisting, reaching for jellyfish when he passes them, trying to pluck out the glowing red string in their hearts. There is a light at the bottom of the sea, the windows of the dead still glowing homely through the water.
There’s got to be something better for me to be doing, she thought every time she indulged herself with this daydream, head to the glass, eyes shut tight. There was a lot of pain she could be sneakily ameliorating, and the new subtleties of her gift almost made it possible for her to wrestle with the botch while appearing to the casual observer to be doing her nails or picking her nose, but it was so hard to pull herself away from this story, Pickie in the deep dark world under the water, visiting with the dead.
Have you see my brother? he asks of a woman, bending to see her better because she’s wedged under a park bench, her bony cheek pressed against the sidewalk. Only a few scraps of flesh remain on her face — they wave like ribbons in the shifting local current — but her hair is entirely intact, lustrous and thick and speckled with tiny glowing crabs that scuttle and swing along the strands. Her eyes are long eaten, but two pale fish turn in the sockets to look at him, so it seems she is looking at him. I asked if you had seen him, he says, but she doesn’t speak.
He walks on, down a street strewn with parts, legs and hands and a head rolling in the current like a tumbleweed, a torso hollowed out and sheltering snails under its ribs. A steering wheel drifts just above the level of his head. He jumps it, grabs it, and throws it up toward a window. It knocks against the glass and falls again. Just before it hits the ground a thick white tentacle emerges from the house to snag it and take it inside. He waits for a few minutes for it to come out again, even puts out his hand politely for a shake, but the house, though brightly lit, remains silent and still. He walks a little farther — there’s a playground spread out underneath a dead oak, swings blowing, the big cage of a jungle gym full of people, pressed together in a heap.
Have you seen my brother? he asks the bony faces that look up between triangles, pressed against the bars. I know you must have seen him, at the end. I know you can tell me where he is. You don’t want to make me wander forever, do you? I’m not allowed to stop, you know, until I find him.
“Does it look any different?” a voice asked beside her. She stepped back from the glass and opened her eyes. Ishmael was there. “I see you standing there all the time, looking out. Does it ever look any different?”
She shrugged but didn’t look at him. He wasn’t one of her favorite people anymore, since the business with the Council, but that didn’t stop him from trying to talk to her all the time. He was never much fun, and sometimes he was downright crazy. She didn’t see the botch in him yet when she looked, but something made him knock his head against the wall and bite his lip till he bled, always in the context of a rant against some person of the day who’d infuriated him with a real or imagined slight. He only seemed to really lose it when he was alone with her, so she tried to stay away.
“What do you see, when you look out?” he asked her.
“Water,” she said.
“Really,” he said. “I think I know you better than that, and I know that look. I’ve seen it on other people’s faces, staring out like that, too. They see whole other worlds, lost under the water or waiting just over the horizon. Is that what you see?”
She shrugged again.
“I used to look out there and see all the dead people. I’d look straight down, just staring and staring, and eventually the faces would start to rise up, one at a time, so slowly, and they’d get closer and closer and I’d wonder if I knew them until they broke the surface and popped just like a bubble. I used to feel sorry for them, or sad. Not so much any more. Now I wonder what they did, and I know what they did, and all I can think is how all that water is barely enough to cover it up.”
“Don’t you have work to do?”
“I think this is it — it’s not a distraction, wanting to… I dream of such fabulous punishments, and nothing is ever enough.”
“Are you high?” Jemma asked. She always asked him, he always laughed at her.
“Have you ever seen a head squeezed and squeezed, harder and harder until…”
“Well, I have work to do,” Jemma said. “Unemployed, and work up to here. See you later!” But you hope never to see him again, and skip into a scurrying hurry when you hear him pounding his fist against the window. Don’t worry — not even he can break it. And don’t worry — it’s all right to find him so distasteful, though you pity him for being so upset all the time, he’s certainly not done you any favors lately. He is my brother but our bonds are not blood, and I don’t like him either, when he gets like this, pounding now with his hand and now with his head, biting his tongue and making little bloody o’s on the glass every time he strikes it with his face.
80
She always knew when somebody died. Never mind the angel’s flute, playing a universally hated tune that sounded to most ears like a mournful cell-phone ringer, or how she announced every death no matter how many people pleaded with her to shut up: “A great soul has passed! A great soul is flown from the earth! Celebrate this life!” During adult codes she was silent now, except that sometimes she would start to play her flute along with the alarm chimes, a slur on the code teams. But Jemma could feel them, too, every death a prick against her awareness, a complaint and a sadness in her head, and then a tearing sensation, like someone was peeling a band-aid off her face.
She tried not to go to them, but as they passed day two hundred and fifty at sea and they became more frequent, you could hardly avoid being present at one unless you stayed locked in your room, always an option for Jemma, who was usually pursued by the still-hale Arthur and Jude and still under an injunction of house arrest by the Council, even if they no longer tried to enforce it. She could stand less than ever to be in her room, lonely for Rob and for Pickie and for Vivian. Jemma was the only unemployed person in the hospital — every child too small to work was busy sleeping — so now she made wandering her full time occupation.
If only they knew, the ignorant morons who call you the angel of death, how very different you are from my littlest brother — if only they could see him, everywhere around them, or appreciate how deeply he is settled in them, ashes in the marrow of their bones. He is not a glowing pregnant lady in a yellow gown, green scrubs, and sparkly blue sneakers, who takes two steps toward the dying for every one step she takes away from them, a struggle plain on her face, grimacing or clenching her teeth but never smiling, like some people say she does. You have refined your art at every death, the fire growing thinner and more subtle until it is just an unease in the air, easily lost in the greater unease surrounding the death, the shouting and the hurried flurry of meds and compressions and the deployment of the wonderful and futile new machines, the liquid-respirator helmets and the implant-able LVADs and the nanobot solutions that every fourth or fifth death extend a life by another hour or day.