“Oh yes he did!” Thelma said when Jemma raised her head to ask the question, Did he really…? She closed the chart, sighed, and started down the hall. She did not care for psychiatry, though she had done well in her clerkship, the first of her third year. She’d felt she made no one really any better, nor even helped to make anyone better, and did not like it when she found herself in the position of junior warden to the prisoners. “But he’s still crazy,” she’d protested to one attending when they discharged yet another sloth-like depressive back onto the street over his dull, desperate protests. “We don’t use that word,” the attending had replied.
P.B.’s door was lavender, set in a lavender frame. Jemma knocked lightly and pushed it farther open. It was dark inside, but the blinds were drawn up and the sun was rising. “Hello!” Jemma said, trying to cast reassuring tones in her voice, but only succeeding, she thought, in making herself sound like a muppet. She put a hand up to shade her eyes against the first rays of the sun, just peeping, huge and red, over the distant blue horizon. She could see the bed, a flat dark shape with a lump in the middle, glinting red and silver along the safety rails. As she watched, the lump contracted and stretched, and then rose so very slowly, as if yoked to the sun rising behind it. “Is that you under there?” Jemma asked brightly, but the thing only continued silently to rise. She looked toward the feet, thinking it must be levitating now to be rising so high, but all she saw was a flash of silver when she looked down. I don’t have time for displays, she thought. Just then the child stretched to his limit, and threw back his blanket like a mincing vampire, blocking the glare. She saw a pale bald boy whose head seemed two sizes too big for his body.
“My name is Pickie Beecher,” he whispered. “I am a vegetarian.”
“Good for you. My name is Jemma. I’m a student doctor here in the hospital. I’ve come to talk to you. Is that okay?” He stared at her a moment, still in his vampire pose, then dropped his blanket and shrugged. Jemma came around the other side of the bed to escape the glare. The rising sun pinked him up and made his eyes shine like black buttons.
“It’s very bright today,” she said stupidly.
“It often is,” he said, sitting down again.
“How do you feel this morning?” she asked. He shrugged. “Do you feel better or worse than yesterday?”
“I hardly notice the passing of the days.”
“Okay. Well, if I asked you to rate your mood and give it a score between one bunny rabbit and ten bunny rabbits, with one bunny rabbit meaning you are very, very sad, and ten bunny rabbits meaning you are very, very happy, where would you put it? How many bunny rabbits?”
“Are you bleeding?”
“No. How many rabbits?”
“But I can smell your blood.”
“I really think I’d know if I were bleeding somewhere. But let’s concentrate on the bunny rabbits. How many do you think?” He cocked his head at her, closed his eyes, sniffed deeply, and smiled. “Five bunny rabbits? More? Seven? How about seven?”
“You have the best blood in you. Blood within blood, the newest blood, blood so new it is only the possibility of blood.”
“Seven bunny rabbits. That’s how many I’ll put you down for.”
“For breakfast?” he said.
“No, for your mood. For how you’re feeling this morning, if you’re happy or sad.”
“It doesn’t matter. I am a vegetarian now.”
“But how are you feeling?” Jemma asked, somewhat harshly.
“We are beyond feeling now,” he said sadly. That was a statement Jemma was not prepared to argue with. She gave up on that question.
“Have you been hearing any voices that other people don’t hear, or seeing things other people can’t see?” He bit his lip and furrowed his brow, and kicked his little bare feet out toward the window a few times.
“The angel speaks to me. She says, Abomination, ageless of days, you too are a child. Even you will be saved. You will be washed clean and saved. I do not believe her.”
Jemma was not sure what to do with that. Did he mean a private angel, a voice like bread talking, or did he mean the chatty Kathy living in a computer core somewhere in one of the hospital’s new sub-sub-basements? That lady talked to everybody. To Jemma she said things like, “Be comforted, your brother did not die for nothing,” and “Name me, Jemma, and I will be your truest friend,” and “You are more beautiful than the open sky.”
“What do you know about my brother?” Jemma demanded of her, but she’d only breathe back, “Name me, oh please name me.” “Name yourself,” Jemma told her. Rob, the sucker, had already succumbed, and called her Betty, the first name he’d thought of. She wanted a different name from everybody, to seal a personal covenant, she said, and to invite and allow her preserving protection.
“How about if I take a listen to you?” Jemma asked Pickie, waving her stethoscope in a very friendly manner.
He raised his arms above his head. “Do what you will.”
His physical exam was perfectly normal — his heart beat at a regular rate in a regular rhythm, and she heard no extra sounds, no murmur, no rub, no gallop. His lungs were clear — she liked the clear rustling noise a pair of healthy lungs made. He did not complain when she listened a little too long at his back, and when she listened on his belly he giggled like an ordinary six-year-old. After she’d finished she tried and failed once more to elicit an official statement on his mood. She gave up on her other questions.
“Do you want me to close the blinds?” she asked, because now the sun, smaller but hotter, was shining full into the room. He didn’t answer her, so she left the window as she’d found it.
Just as she was closing the door he called out, “Doctor?”
“I’m not a doctor yet. You should call me Jemma.”
“Doctor Jemma?”
She sighed. “Yes, Pickie?”
“My brother is dead.”
She almost said, Lots of people are dead, Pickie, but it seemed too cruel to say that, even if it were so obvious and true. Instead she said, “I’m sorry,” and shut the door on him, his silver bed, and his lavender room.
Her next two patients were on the sixth floor, both of them languishing on the GI service. The first was a three-year-old girl named Ella Thims who had one of those terribly exclusive diseases, a syndrome of caudal regression that had left her incomplete in her bowels, and blank between her legs. The surgeons had feasted on her for many months, so that now she was a miraculous horror of reconstruction. Jemma had spent her time on her first visit to the girl trying to sort out her various ostomies and riddle the ocher contents of the bags, and she still was not sure she comprehended the Escheresque complexities of her urinary anatomy.
Jemma feared her. She’d seen her before, staked out at the nurses’ station on the sixth floor in a little red wagon, her bags hidden under flounces, blood or albumin or parenteral nutrition hanging above her from an IV pump. Twice a day volunteers would take her for a spin around the floor. She’d wave and call hello to anyone who’d meet her yellow eyes — years of TPN had done a number on her liver. On her bad days, when she was infected or oozing blood from her orifices, she’d still come out to the station, but not wave or call hello, or mischievously throw toys from her wagon, or slap her hands to her huge, Cushingoid cheeks over and over in a refined Oh No! gesture. She’d only lie on her back, her eyes staring but unfocused, and utter piercing shrieks on the quarter hour.
Today she was as well as she ever got. When Jemma came in she was standing in her crib naked but for her diaper, gripping the bars with her swollen fingers. She smiled when she saw Jemma, and called out, “Hello!”