“It’s all right,” Jemma said, hardly batting an eye as she wove and placed a series of blocks in her thalamus, blocking the botch when it tried to make her scream. It was like playing tennis in the dark, but she could have played ten games at once. Every day brought her more power, and made her feel more useless.
“Sing, sing!” Monserrat screamed, so Jemma uttered soft babalus into her chest until Monserrat began to weep. “You!” she said, before a minute of singing went by, all of them indulging her now with the mournful crooning. “You!” She pushed Jemma away, sat up, pointed square in her face, and died. Ishmael chose that moment to totally lose his mind, tearing off his shirt and scratching at his flesh. “You!” he echoed, pointing at Jemma. “You!” With his non-pointing hand he scooped ash from the corpse, spat in it, and smeared his face. That was four days previous, and ever after he could be seen wandering up and down the ramp, clothed only in smears of ash, screaming at the carpet and accusing anyone he met of explicitly detailed crimes. Jemma could always feel him, a presence in her mind even uglier than Pickie had been.
“Seven days,” Rob said, reaching behind himself to put a hand on her belly.
“If it’s on time. Nobody was ever on time, in my family.”
“My sisters were early.”
“Cheetarah. I always wanted that to be my name.”
“Have you been wondering…”
“What?”
“If… I’m afraid to say it. It might be a jinx.”
“Give me a clue.”
“What if it’s only… if when by the time we land there are only two people over twenty-one left in the hospital?”
“Ishmael and Dr. Snood. That’ll suck.”
“Not them.”
“Don’t say it; you’re right. It’s a jinx. I used to do that all the time. Sure is a quiet call night, and, Where are all the patients? My medicine senior got so mad at me once. I thought she was going to slap me. If you say it, they will come, she told me. If you say it, it won’t be us.”
“We won’t talk about it.”
“We never were talking about it.”
“I never mentioned it.”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Jemma said, but she clutched him suddenly, squeezing and squeezing, as if just by holding tight enough with her body and her mind she could keep any more of him from slipping away.
85
There are days left, and days, but already I am nostalgic for the watching, and anxious for Jemma’s end. For all my watching, and all my waiting, now I would rather that the end not come at all, the baby not come at all, the hospital never land ashore. I must have known, when I made my own choice, and did my deed, that the consequences would claim Jemma, too, just as they claimed everyone else in the world. But still I am hoping for an ending where she steps out of the hospital and lives in the new world with her baby and these seven hundred and one other children, even though I know she would not belong there any more than I would.
And it would be even better than stopping what’s coming, if I could roll back all the time between her and her last happiness, or my last happiness. I contain all the past, but have no power over it, and it would take more than an angel to fly with her through the blowing ash of the botch-time, past her ascent over the hospital populace, past her wedding and her unveiling and her great night, past the subtle hints of her pregnancy and her slumbering power, past even the night of the storm, though I think she was happy enough, doing the screwing with Rob Dickens that conceived the last baby of the old world and the first baby of the new one.
But why stop there, when we can fly back past every death, her first lover in his crumpled car — see how the dents unfold and the blood flows cleanly off the white metal? Her mother unburns in her kitchen, her father gets a little stronger, day after day, as his cancer dies back, until he is his old self again, and Jemma’s life is almost again a life free from a permanent shadow of unhappiness. A little further back and Calvin might be doused, his organs stuffed back in their proper place, his tongue fetched from his right hand and his eyeballs from his left. Make him whole again, and Jemma is happy again. No death has touched her life and she thinks that everyone she loves is going to live forever.
But I wouldn’t stop there. As long as we are moving, let the time fly backward, and shrink them, Jemma and Calvin both, down until they fit in my own favorite moment, or the moment, anyway, from whenceforth it might all have been different. Jemma and Calvin are sitting on their roof, and instead of pushing her away, a bomb to destroy the adult world he hates and does not understand, let him hold on to her instead, and show her the stars above the roof, and tell her the names — different from what he’s learned in books — that he’s made up for them. Never mind the sins and pleasures and miseries of the old world, never mind the unknowable, indescribable satisfactions of the world to come, let me just watch them there, and let them just stay there, and let all of us finally be happy.
86
A bucket in one hand, a sponge in the other, Jemma and Rob made their rounds. A few days before she’d started out meaning to wash away the accumulations of ash — the piles in every corner, the greasy smears on the walls, the half-inch-thick layer along the ramp railing — but it made her feel ill just to approach the stuff, let alone touch it, and she remembered too well the barfing of her first trimester, and she couldn’t bear the thought of dealing with the drifted piles, or making mud with it in her bucket. Rob would have done it — he would have done anything she told him — but she didn’t want him covered in it, either. Every part of his brain that might have countermanded an order from her was gone. He was pliable and sweet and happy and sometimes just looking at him was enough to make her cry. She settled for washing the children, all of them asleep now, from the babies in the crèche to Josh Swift, settled in the arms of Cindy Flemm in their old classroom. The process of death and sleep had just about run its course: no one aged twenty-one or younger was awake, and no one older was alive except for her and Rob and Ishmael.
Every three days they rounded with the buckets — that was how long it took for the dust to settle again upon the children — but they visited every one of them every day, turning them in their beds or fluffing their pillows or arranging in a crib the animals that in her absence always seemed to creep closer to the infants. She suspected Ishmael was moving them, as a taunt. They saw very little of him, though they could sometimes hear his voice come down the ramp from a higher floor. Rob was afraid of him, and clung to her every time they heard him laughing or screaming.
They were simple rounds, if exhausting, in their own way. There was no differential diagnosis to generate, no medication to dose, no physical exam to inflict upon the child. Instead there was hair to brush and there were pajamas to smooth and diapers to check. They’d all stopped excreting days before but she still peeked in the diaper or the underwear to make sure they were clean. She’d pulled the last nasogastric tubes a week ago — they were disfiguring and unnecessary. What sustained the children was not food, and they needed their enteric formula less than they needed Rob to play the banjo for them. When their feeds were on they radiated a sense of annoyance; when Rob played they were more deeply serene.