“Or until we get out of here. Which is never, and forever.”
“I’ll stay here with you.”
“I don’t care who dies next. There’s nothing I can do.”
“Not a thing.”
“They can all just fuck off. The vents can fuck off, and the art lines can fuck off. The chest tubes and the foleys and the bypass machines. Fuck them all. Even the people underneath them, they can fuck off, too.”
“Fuck them all,” Jemma said.
“Double fuck them,” Rob said, and sighed, and Jemma imagined the double fucking, two-penised Rob striding naked through the hospital to thrust at the patients and the machines and the tubes, the patients and their sick, tired nurses and doctors. Only the children were spared the violence of the purple-headed twins. She laughed. “It’s not funny,” he said.
“I know.” It was too dark to see his face with her eyes. “Come here,” she said trying to grab at him with her toes: they were sitting with their backs at either wall of the closet. She picked at his shirt, and shoveled him toward her with the side of her feet.
“I don’t want to,” he said. “I like it over here. I just want to be alone, with you here. Just sitting like this in the dark, where nobody will find us, until the end.”
“Okay,” Jemma said, but she still kept pulling at him, with her fingers and her toes, her hands and her feet, with her body. She imagined a heaviness in the space between her legs, and a slow force reaching through the space between them to latch between his legs and draw her to him. He slowly moved, not grabbed by her imagination but because she knew he didn’t mean any of what he was saying. “I could grow you a double penis,” she said. “That would be something.”
“One’s enough,” he said, scooting close enough to press against her. She turned onto her side. He curled over her back.
“It’s not bad for the baby,” they said together, because Vivian had already told them that, and because they had read about it the old sources, and because they still needed to say it, even though they knew it, to make it even more true. She was only two weeks from term, but still it was careful and slow; they hardly moved, even when they weren’t doing it in a closet or on the roof or in the ER or yes, under the beds of the comatose. They hardly needed to move anymore, to make it happen for each of them, even though Jemma mostly kept her promise not to meddle with his fuck centers, and when she imagined herself playing a grand fugue upon his orgasmatron, it was merely an idle daydream, and when extraordinary pleasures became real for them it was almost none of her doing.
Her mind wandered, not away from the two of them, but further into them. Down and down, he pushed her further and further into a quiet place, where all the feelings in the hospital came sliding down to bump against her, and the hospital in her head was almost a perfect mirror of the hospital in the world, dwindling hope and mounting despair reflected in exact measure. “God fucking dammit,” Rob said. “Stupid motherfucking bastards. Fucking gummy-bear shitbird. God damn, God damn, God damn”—he built up frustration along with his his need for her, until it crested and broke. She felt thrown by it and washed by it. She gave a push with her mind — just a little one — and it was like she had reset him. He cried against her back and snotted down her neck and made noises that she could not understand as words, though she knew they were words. He was apologizing to her and to the patients, to his mother and his sisters, to Vivian and Dr. Sasscock and Pickie Beecher.
“Hush up,” she said, “it’s all right.”
It wasn’t though, not really. It was just getting worse and worse — she tried not to imagine the new horrors that were coming, the new ways in which the botch would twist their bodies and their minds, but it was like trying not to scratch an itchy scab, or worry a painful tooth. She’d seen it all and yet every day she was surprised by some new horrors, strange and dreadful in ways that were more subtle than she ever expected, eye spikes and dry rot in the mouth and regurgitant cloaca syndrome.
“That was horrible,” he said after a little while.
“The worst,” she said. “You suck at this.”
“You too. It’s like doing it with a smelly pillow.”
“Or a chicken bone.”
“Or a chair.”
“We may as well just give up,” she said.
“We may as well just lie down and die,” he said.
“Goodbye, stupid world.”
“Fuck you all.”
“Here we go,” she said. He pulled a blanket down from the shelf above them to cover their legs. They settled closer to each other and he was asleep before another minute had passed, his breathing deep and regular and slightly snoring, his arms twitching and his feet fluttering before growing still. Then he had fallen asleep, but Jemma lay awake, looking, though she always promised herself she wouldn’t, at the little bits of botch scattered throughout his body. It lay here and there in little dormant seeds, and she did not know if it was something she was doing that was keeping it from blossoming horribly in him. It seemed ridiculous again, to think that her love had finally become protective of someone. Hello again, her baby said to her.
Hello, she said.
It’s not bad for me, you know. I barely notice. And I won’t remember, at all, when I’m older, about the hanky-panky.
I’m glad to hear it.
That’s not to say I want to, you know, be with you. I mean I was still hoping…
For somebody else.
Exactly. No offense.
None taken. Who knows better than me, all the reasons you should run and hide from me, after you get out?
A remarkably mature perspective.
I am older than you.
But that doesn’t always count for much.
Touché.
But while we’re on that subject. About the fellow there.
Yes?
Can you protect him? Can you protect me?
I don’t know, Jemma said.
And are you sure… are you really sure that it’s not you, after all, who’s causing all the trouble? What if this whole botch business is coming from you? You know, leaking out of your bottom at night while you sleep.
But it came from the boat.
Who can say, really, what came from the boat and what didn’t come from the boat?
That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.
But you concede, don’t you, that maybe… just maybe… it would be best if he just sort of gathered me up and hurried away with me when the time comes. That we’d be better off without you?
Well…
I’m glad you understand.
But I didn’t…
It’s so nice to have a conversation with someone who is reasonable, and sane, and knows when to do the right thing.
But I…
I’m so glad we talked. I’m always so glad, after we talk.
Me too, Jemma said. Then she put her face in the blanket and wept.
82
“Are you ready?” Father Jane asked, addressing her congregation from bed. They were in the auditorium, her bed stuck up at the front of the room, John Grampus standing at her side. To all eyes but Jemma’s he seemed to have made a miraculous recovery — he was out of bed, off the respirator, on po digoxin and could be seen for a while running every day up and down the ramp on his bionic leg — heroically attached by Drs. Tiller, Sundae, and Snood with the help of Dr. Walnut’s notes and some automated surgical devices — until it became clear that the same people who had first celebrated his return to health as a sign of universal hope, were beginning to resent him, his swift little jog and his too-short baby-blue running shorts. For everyone else, to look at him was to see no trace of illness, but Jemma could see the botch in him, dormant cysts in his muscles. “Are you ready?” Father Jane asked again, pausing to look out over the little crowd with her blind eyes — a thick layer of black cataract kept her from seeing anything but blurry shapes. She pointed but didn’t call out names.