“What is it?” asked one of them.
“A lady,” said another.
“Good lady or bad lady?” said a third.
“Her aura is black,” said a fourth — Jemma wasn’t even sure where the voice was coming from.
“It’s a doctor,” said the first one, directly above Jemma on the top bunk.
“Student,” said the third one, by the window. “The coat is short.”
“Who’s Kidney?” Jemma asked.
“We are all Kidney,” said the one in the top bunk, “and none of us are Kidney.”
“A doughnut,” said the one by the window. “Don’t talk to it.”
“Don’t talk to it.”
“Don’t talk to it.”
“I’m kind of in a hurry,” Jemma said, “and I’m here to help. I’m Jemma. I’m a student doctor.”
“You are a doughnut,” said the one by the window, a girl.
“You’re Couch,” Jemma said. “You’re the oldest, right?”
“I am Kidney,” she said.
“Jesus,” Jemma said, passing her hand across her face.
“Over here!” said a new voice, but Jemma looked up too late to see where it came from.
“Okay,” Jemma said, turning on the light. “Everybody up.” She sat them up and counted all nine of them, and examined the two girls who appeared to be around five. Both of them were too ticklish for a good belly exam. Her watch alarm went off as she was wrestling with the second one.
“Time to go,” said the one by the window.
“I’ll say when it’s time to go,” Jemma said, but she left just a few minutes later. She walked slowly back down to the charting room, thinking too late of tricks she might have tried — prize for Kidney; candy-gram for Kidney; time for Kidney to go dogsledding. Vivian would have wet a towel and cracked it above their heads.
In the charting room Anika was talking to Dr. Chandra, one of the few interns who remained an intern. Anika had a harried, motherly energy to her — she was always trying to calm you down but only succeeded in infecting you with her own high-frequency anxiety. She had her hand on Chandra’s knee, and was scolding him and comforting him.
“You just can’t let it get to you, Siri,” she said. “We’ve all got a job to do.”
“It’s not that,” he said. “I just didn’t get up on time. I asked the angel to wake me up, but I didn’t hear her.” He was rumored to be slow and lazy, and was not very popular among the students because he made them all call him Dr. Chandra, even though he was just an intern, and was always trying to foist his work onto them. But he hadn’t tried to foist anything on Jemma yet, and she found that she sort of liked his haplessness and his messy hair and the way his pants fell down past his hips, like Calvin’s had.
“You don’t have to make up a story,” said Anika. “I know how it is. It would be so much easier for us all to roll over and give up, but we just can’t. The kids are still sick, you know. Everything else may have changed, but that’s still the same.”
“I’m very tired,” he admitted, “but if she had just told me what time it was. You know, I think I asked her and she lied. I think she just tells you what time you want it to be, instead of what time it actually is.”
“It’s not going to get any better,” Anika said, squeezing on his knee and staring deep into his lazy, heavy-lidded eyes with hers, which were always wide open and seemed never likely to close, not even in sleep. “Get a better alarm clock.”
“She said she would wake me up.”
“But now you know that’s not a job for her. Let her make you breakfast, but don’t let her wake you up. Would you like me to page you tomorrow at five?”
“I’ll set my alarm.”
“All right, then. Well, we’re done with that. Let’s have some tea.” She turned and spoke to one of the now ubiquitous replicators — there were two of them in the crowded charting room. “Anika’s blend,” she said, “two cups with honey and milk.” Jemma was still not used to the machines, and did not think she ever could get used to them. She preferred to go down to the cafeteria and take food from a heap, though that stuff came out of the replicator mist, too, always made to order by the angel. “There you are, sweetie,” she said to Jemma, pretending like she had just noticed her, though Jemma had been standing there for the past minute and a half. “How’s it going?”
“Okay, I think,” Jemma said.
“Any dire crises?”
“None that I recognize, but there are a couple things that I’m confused about. And I’m not sure I even managed to find one of the patients.”
“Well, have a cup of tea and tell me all about it.” She ordered another cup of Anika’s blend but Jemma didn’t touch it. Pre-rounding should have been more of a comfort. Certainly Anika meant it to be one, a stress-free opportunity to fill her in on the events of the night and ask her questions about symptoms or treatments beyond Jemma’s third-year ken. But her staring eyes and the violent, bird-like way she nodded her head made Jemma nervous, and she tended to focus all her attention on aspects of the exam that Jemma hadn’t realized were important — were the contents of the ostomy bag burnt sienna or burnt umber? — and her answers just made Jemma more confused.
“So that’s an okay pressure?” Jemma asked, because Anika had seemed entirely unfazed by Ella’s vitals.
“Of course not, honey,” Anika said, but before Jemma could get her to elucidate, the rest of the team crowded into the room and it was time to go off to rounds. That morning they were a worse misery than ever before. She supposed it was to be expected. She’d had only the most cursory contact with most of the eleven patients she’d seen, a quarter of whom were new to her that morning. She had so many excuses for doing a bad job: she was only a third-year medical student; she didn’t know the patients; the world had ended. She voiced none of them, but suffered the withering glare of Dr. Snood, who stood on his personal Olympus and hurled down thunderbolts meant either to destroy or educate her, she could not tell which.
Vivian, a chronic succeeder, tried to help her. She knew all her own patients as intimately as her own fancy underwear, and even knew many of Jemma’s better than she did. Outside Ella Thims’s room, after Jemma had summarized the little girl’s progress overnight, stuttered out her incomplete assessment, and murmured a vague plan for the day, Dr. Snood tested her knowledge. “What is most likely to kill this child?” he asked Jemma when she was done talking. For a moment Jemma could only consider his horrid bangs, the combed-forward emissaries of a hairline that had probably receded to his neck. Your dreadfully ill-advised hairdo! she wanted to shout, but she said nothing yet. Instead she put on her thoughtful face, a look like she was just about to speak, which always bought her a few moments in situations like these. She looked past Dr. Snood, and Anika, and Dr. Chandra, and Timmy. Vivian caught Jemma’s eye with her own and fed her the answer. She turned around and placing her hands on her lower back, rubbed her flanks sensuously. She was able to do most anything sensuously. Jemma had scrubbed in for surgeries with her and seen men stare helplessly as she washed her long fingers, each separately, one after another, and when she put on her long sterile gloves she looked like she was getting ready to go to the opera.
“Her kidneys,” Jemma said.
“And what else besides?” Vivian wrote it in the air behind them, a giant P, then a U, and finally an S.
“Infection,” Jemma said boldly.
“Those are the two most likely,” said Dr. Snood. Vivian couldn’t help her anymore when Dr. Snood asked about the particulars of Ella’s kidney disease, mesangial sclerosis not lending itself to mime. Inside the room Dr. Snood triumphantly revealed the cause of Ella’s elevated blood pressure, rummaging in her twisted blankets to bring out her antihypertensive patch. “See that she gets another,” Dr. Snood said, sticking it to Jemma’s forehead and sweeping out of the room.