Others are spendthrift with the moments of stillness that Jemma wisely rations, and so often they hear the quiet noise. Anika mistook it for the noise of the ocean the first time she heard it, but the walls and windows that keep out the water keep out the littlest sound. It is background to every noise in the hospital — underneath the chiming alarms and the huffing respirators and the conversations, whispered or shouted, underneath the fornicators’ sighing Os and underneath the merely human weeping that is constant from dusk till dawn (for as soon as one of them cries himself to sleep another wakes and, as soon as he remembers where he is and what has happened and who he has lost, starts to cry). She puts a little cough in it and a sniffling quality and the faintest suggestion of words—Oh and No.
You are not the mourning angel, I tell her. There is no mourning angel.
Would that there were, she says. Vivian asks her replicator for a cup of tea and nearly drops it when it comes with a lamentation. “Woe!” my sister shouts. “O the innocent world! O Creation!”
“Innocent,” Vivian says. “Ha!” But she sits with her tea by a window in a room near the NICU and, staring out at the water, gives a little hiccup and starts gently also to weep.
Is this comfort? I ask, and my sister says, Of a sort.
There’s no comfort anywhere in this place, I say, and no one happy. Not even infants or the hopeless retards with their empty minds. Only Jemma goes through her workday with hardly a thought for the numberless dead. How far fallen I am from my mortal days, when I might have skipped along with her, or taught her what reasons there were to celebrate. Before I put away my rage, or spent it to the last scalding drop, I might have numbered all the numberless sins that Vivian wrestles with as she sips her tea and knocks her head gently against the window, and cries a little harder. I remember it — the rage that was like grief. I have always understood how thoroughly diminished I am without it, but never felt the loss so much as now. Now another angel gets the job I made a life of. I fold my wings close, and shrink myself to the size of the room and smaller — I am as small and frail and sad as a lonely old widow when I settle down to cry next to Jemma’s friend. I can comfort you too, my sister says.
9
Already it was six thirty, and Jemma had four more patients to see, one of them a psychiatric case, who surely counted for two or three patients all by himself, as it always took longer to round on psych patients, both because there were more (and nosier) questions to ask them, and because they tended to babble like the lunatics they were, or stare wordlessly at her, like snakes. She was supposed to meet with her senior resident at seven thirty, and then with the whole team at eight o’clock. She might do it, if she suddenly became more efficient than she’d ever been before in her life.
The Thing — she was not sure what else to call it, and there was as of yet, one week out from it, no consensus on a name among the survivors — had greatly expanded her duties. Attrition promoted her to intern status, though the interns, sorest afflicted with call, had survived better as a group than any other among the physicians. Three-fourths of the class was present in the hospital the night of the storm, compared with one fourth of the second-years, a handful of the third-years, a single chief resident, and a sprinkling of attendings. The attrition made for a nightmare of cross-cover, a call night that went on forever. New, unwieldy services were declared. Jemma was bumped from the nursery service when it merged with the NICU/PICU service, and landed on the Neuro/General/GI team, which later absorbed the dispossessed psychiatry patients. There was another student — her friend Vivian, Dr. Chandra, the intern, a second-year resident named Anika who acted as the senior, and one precious attending, a haughty gastroenterologist summoned in the night of the storm to do an endoscopy that proved too challenging for Timmy, the fellow on call.
Jemma took the stairs — the elevators were working but she avoided them because the angel-lady was always singing in them — to the ninth floor, home to the psychiatric and rehab units. In every hospital she’d ever worked in, the psych unit was always located on the top floor, as if to maximize the patients’ chances of a successful suicide when they inevitably defenestrated. As she pushed through the door off the staircase, she imagined the inhabitants of the ward, mostly brittle anorexics and the under-ten oppositional-defiant set, running down the long halls toward the bright windows, only to bounce off the glass or shatter into a fluff of papery skin and bone. The floor was divided half and half between rehab and psych. The rehab side was done up in a space motif, with dark blue walls and black ceilings set with tiny electric lights, seven-toed green alien footprints on the carpets, spaceship wagons, and, in the playroom, the star chamber that John Grampus had bragged about, a scale model of the solar system hung from the ceiling — before the Thing it had been made of styrofoam and plastic, but when the doors opened afterward the children discovered that the styrofoam planets were now made of glass, and that they hung in space without any visible support, and the stars in the ceiling, formerly just glow-in-the-dark stickers of the sort Jemma had in her bedroom as a child, now shined deeply from a dark sky, brightening and dimming in synchrony with the stars above the roof. The psych side was not decorated except with the pastels thought soothing to the eyes and minds of the young insane. Vivian, who carried three of the four psych patients, thought it was too drab, and wanted giant mushrooms in every room, and bodiless cat-smiles painted on the walls, and deforming mirrors to confirm the worst delusions of the anorexics.
The ward had capacity for fifteen, and was the only ward in the hospital not full or over-full on the night of the storm. Now in addition to the four psych patients it housed boarders from the ER, children whose croup or asthma or innocent viral syndrome had resolved and left them well. A single nurse presided there, a serene Samoan lady named Thelma who was in the habit of gathering the children up once a day for a group hug, even the anorexics, who struggled against her, or cursed at the touch of her great fat body against theirs. “Here to see my babies?” she said to Jemma through the intercom, when Jemma waved through the glass to be let in.
“Just one,” Jemma said. She saw her patient’s initials on the board behind Thelma: P.B. A round lavender magnet denoted his location; the rooms on the ward were not numbered but colored, lavender, rose, moss, sage, lemon, rust, peach, cucumber, sienna, sea-foam, caramel, saffron, cornflower, tangerine, periwinkle.
“If he bites or scratches just scream for me,” Thelma said as Jemma approached the desk. “I know how to handle him. You want me to come with you? He can be rough on first-timers.”
“No, thanks,” Jemma said, trying to look bored as she flipped through the chart, uncovering the particulars of the case. The boy was six years old and carried diagnoses of juvenile schizophrenia vs. bipolar disease, trichotillomania, and pica. He’d been found a year before nesting in an abandoned refrigerator at a dump, the apparent leader (though not the eldest) of seven filthy feral children. He had passed through eight different foster homes and was ejected from the last after eating their cat.