“Bye bye!” Ella said, waving both her swollen hands. Outside Cindy Flemm’s room, after Jemma finished what she thought was a very thorough presentation, considering how little she knew the patient, and that she’d hardly touched her, Dr. Snood asked her impatiently, “But what about her stool?”
“I don’t know,” Jemma said. That was the wrong answer to give a man who had devoted his life to the bowels, and it literally turned the remainder of rounds to shit. Thereafter Dr. Snood uncovered her failures with a curious combination of fury and glee, and made a great show of interrogating all her patients on the quality of their feces. Kidney, a lowly consult, got deferred to afternoon rounds, but not even Pickie Beecher, whose mood Jemma pretended (fruitlessly) to know intimately, escaped questioning, though he had no GI complaints. Dr. Snood pointed out to Jemma the risk of intestinal obstruction in a boy who habitually consumed all the hair off his head. “He could have a bezoar,” he said, “a bezoar” and the strange word sounded like a curse on her incompetence.
“And how are your poops?” Dr. Snood asked Pickie Beecher, after the briefest conversation about his mood, conducted while the rest of the team stared out the window or pointedly away from it — it was another distinction, noticed not just by Jemma; some people did the windows and some people didn’t. Timmy and Anika kept their eyes on the floor, but Vivian and Dr. Chandra kept their eyes fixed on the horizon.
“Lonely,” said Pickie. “And my bottom is hurting. I have got a sore on it.” Dr. Snood, raising an eyebrow at Jemma, asked if he could see it. Pickie Beecher obediently turned over in his bed, lifted his rear, and raised his gown.
“Look closely,” he said, and Dr. Snood did, whipping a penlight from his pocket and peering almost eye to eye into Pickie Beecher’s bottom.
“Where is the hurting?” Dr. Snood moved his light and his head at various angles.
“Here!” Pickie Beecher said, and cast a net of liquid brown and black stool over Dr. Snood’s head and shoulders. Then he collapsed in a paroxysm of giggling, rolling off the bed to the floor, laughing and laughing while the uniquely hideous smell filled the room and everyone but Timmy and Dr. Snood held their sleeve to their nose. Dr. Snood stood up calmly, touching his finger to the stool then holding it at arm’s length for inspection. “Fetch me a guaiac card, Dr. Claflin,” he said to Jemma. “I do believe this is melena.”
10
Here and there, in blocks of two or three hours, she and Rob would sleep. He’d finish crying, his sobs quieting to little hiccups, and then he was snoring and already starting to drool. Jemma always fell asleep soon after him, but woke within an hour or two. She might watch him for a little while, note his eyes moving under his lids and wonder if he was dreaming of his mother and his sisters, but then she would rise and wander. Every night, passing by the patient rooms, she’d see nurses or parents or bleary-eyed residents, standing beneath the televisions and looking uselessly from channel to channel. She would have avoided the television in any disaster, anyhow. All the late junior disasters had made her stomach hurt to consider, and she’d actively run away from the screens everywhere that played them over and over again. She stopped once beside a nurse she didn’t know and looked up at the screen, imagining in the static an endless repetition of flood, a supremely high and distant vantage that showed the earth in space turning a deeper and deeper blue. If you flipped for long enough the angel-lady would offer you a cheery movie, whether you wanted one or not.
They wanted a voice and an image, she supposed. Someone to tell them what was happening, even after the windows cleared and it became so obvious what had happened. Never mind that the angel broadcast blessings in her buzzing, broken mechanical nose voice. They were as repetitious and horrible, in their way, as a television scene would have been. “Creatures,” she’d call out. “I will preserve you.” It sounded less comforting every time she said it.
Jemma wasn’t sure what she was looking for, the first time, when she went out from her room, not sleepy and not protected by work. She felt naked to the fact of the changed world in a way she did not when she was rushing from patient to patient, trying to make sense of their diseases and their progress, or wilting under the withering abuse of Dr. Snood or Anika’s remote, lizardlike gaze. She went out into the hospital, wrapped in the stony feeling that returned as soon as distractions failed. She knew that what she felt, or rather what she didn’t feel, was wrong. She knew that it was a sin, perhaps the first and worst sin of this new world, to look out on the water and miss nothing that was under it. It was uncharitable to feel so sharply lucky, that the only two people she cared about were in the hospital with her. So she would shadow a doorway when she heard weeping coming from it, and see a parent crying in a chair next to their child’s bed, or she might follow after a nurse when she slipped into the bathroom to break down. Everyone was weeping separately. There was not, like she thought there should be, a mass weeping, no mass gathering for catharsis on the ramp, though certainly at any moment there were any number of people crying at the same time. Sometimes they’d murmur names or words as they knocked their heads gently against the nearest hard surface, calling out Oh God, Oh God, and sometimes eliciting a reply of comfort from the angel. Jemma tried to open herself up to it, and make herself susceptible to the sadness — just hearing someone vomit could make her throw up, after all, and just looking at Cindy Flemm, eternally pale and clammy, made her feel nauseated.
It never worked, it was only wearying to listen to. Eventually it drove her back to sleep, but it never put anything so distinct as sadness in her. She’d lie down again next to Rob, her back turned against his back, looking out the window at the dark sea and beating her hand softly against her chest, as if that might make her heart hurt.
11
“We really shouldn’t be doing this,” Jemma said. They had both finished their evening rounds, Vivian helping Jemma with her patients, seeing three of them for her and writing orders on two more.
“Who’s to say?” Vivian replied. “Maybe this is the one thing we should be doing, above all others. The lady didn’t object. She helped. She made them to order.”
“Still,” Jemma said. They sat at a little table in a playroom on the fourth floor, emptied of children by the late hour. Jemma’s chair was far too small for her, but she found it comfortable, to sit with her hips flexed and her chin on her knees. She watched Vivian as she arranged and rearranged crumpets on the tiny plates, and lifted the lid off a teapot only as big as her fist to check the progress of the steeping.
“Doesn’t it smell wonderful?” Vivian asked, holding the teapot toward Jemma and moving it under her nose. Jemma coughed at the acid, bitter odor.
Every month or so, before the Thing, Vivian would have Jemma over for mushrooms. She would make mushrooms over pasta, or a mushroom ragout served in pastry shells, mushroom salad served up in a wooden bowl big enough to wash a baby in, mushroom pizza, mushroom brownies, and once, ill-advised, nauseating brown mushroom smoothies. Then they would talk all night in Vivian’s apartment, a place she decorated with artificial monkeys from her extensive collection, plastic and plush, metal and wood, sitting on shelves, perched over door frames and posed on the furniture in tableaux that were gruesome or whimsical depending on the mood of their mistress. Their eyes of button or glass always seemed to watch Jemma as she lay back on Vivian’s lime-green sectional. “Your monkey,” Jemma would whisper, “he’s staring at me!” No matter how many times she said it, it always seemed hysterically funny. Once or twice the monkeys might hiss or spit, or speak a line of poetry, or caress each other lewdly. At the height of each trip she and Vivian would go outside and walk hand in hand through a world that seemed to Jemma to thrum with a secret significance that she knew but could never express. Once they stood on the bridge outside Jemma’s apartment and watched the moon rise. No ordinary moon, it was too big, and too white, and seemed to stretch and pull itself like taffy until it stood up out of the water, a magnificent, god-like schmoo. Jemma looked at her own hands bathed in the pure white light, and felt like she finally understood what they were for. She reached over to touch her friend, who was trembling and glowing. When she put her hands over Vivian’s heart she was filled with inexpressible, deep understanding, which passed as quickly as it flashed over her, but left her with a serene sort of hangover.