She closed her eyes and held on, imagining like she always did that they were out on the water and his fatness made him float, and that they weren’t just on the water but suspended in grief, which was a phrase she had overheard from Carla when the nurses were shrinking each other one night at the station and didn’t realize that her call radio was on. Their voices had woken her and she had listened to them talking about how much they missed whomever and how it was all too horrible to be real and she watched the water. Grief was yellow, she felt sure of that, and so she floated in a yellow sea holding tight to Wayne’s doughy back while they floated and rolled. He was kissing her and then polishing her breasts with his big wet mouth and then for a little while she was doing the thing her sister had called playing her boyfriend’s oboe. She would say “I petted his weasel” or “I played his oboe” because she couldn’t say things like cock or blow job but Cindy had no problem with that, and indeed she had gone around in the afternoon quietly singing blow job, blow jooob, pronouncing it now like an Indian lady and now like a little Dutch girl, and she had looked forward all day to the end, the shock and the taste of which she thought was just like touching a nine-volt battery to your tongue. Her sister had said it was like Clamato but Cindy knew she was wrong and wanted to tell her.
“What?” Wayne said. “What? Why do you always have to ruin it by crying? It’s no big deal. It’s just us. It’s just you and me being together.” She kept her head down there and didn’t say anything, and he pulled her up and kissed her. “Quiet,” he said. “They’re going to hear.” So she pressed her face deep into his chest until she was a little calmer.
“Why us?” she said finally. “How come a bunch of fuck-up sickies? How come not normal people?”
“Shut up,” he said. He put his hand over the back of her neck and for a moment she thought he would push her south again, but he just squeezed and petted her there. “Who else but us? We’re fine. I mean look at you. Look at you.” He waved a hand over her broviac line and her scarred-up belly. “You’re perfect,” he said.
14
A committee formed. Someone had planned, not for this eventuality, but for something remotely like it: in the event of a catastrophe a special governing body would assemble to oversee the function of the hospital in crisis, its authority superceding that of the regular board. Jemma would have liked for there to have been a button, located in the office of the hospital chief-of-staff, that would have released the pre-selected governors from frozen stasis, but there was no such thing. There was in fact a speed-dial button on the chief-of-staff’s phone, that activated the crisis phone tree, but when someone finally thought to press it, it only caused the angel — Jemma had finally started to call her that, like everybody else did — to sing a lullaby from out of the receiver.
Of those planned governors only one had been in the hospital on the night of the storm: Dr. Snood, who already had a very well developed sense of his own importance. “At least he’s not the grand pooh-bah,” said Vivian, herself a member of the Committee. “Not officially, anyway.”
There was no president, no chairman, no grand pooh-bah, but Dr. Snood was considered by himself and most others to be preeminent. He called the first three members to replace his drowned colleagues. He selected Dr. Sundae, an insomniac pathologist who did all the NICU post-mortems once a week between the hours of midnight and six a.m., a lady familiar to Jemma and the other students as the architect of second-year pathology exams that brought the best young minds of the country to the brink of nervous collapse, and someone who would sooner chew off her own foot than be charitable with a test point. He called Dr. Tiller, an intensivist also known as Dr. Killer, not because she wasn’t an outstanding clinician, but because she was famously cruel to residents and students. And he called Zini, the ill-tempered nurse-manager of the surgical floor, a woman in her fifties whose drooping body was always constrained in shiny, tight skirts and blouses, so she always looked to Jemma like she had been packaged by aliens for preparation as a microwave dinner. She was doing a rare favor the night of the flood, having made herself available as a substitute for the junior manager who should have been called in to help deal with the lack of beds in the full-to-capacity hospital. Dr. Snood was known, like most everyone else in the hospital, to hate her, but even he, in his overweening pride, understood that every hospital government, council, or committee must have at least one nurse-manager to dip her sullen paws into the mix of business.
This tetrarchy of fussbudgets reigned only for a few days before people began to agitate for wider representation. An initial plan for each of the first four to call four others was scrapped when it was met with widespread indignation, especially from the lab techs, housekeepers, and cafeteria workers, who felt sure that their chances of having a say in things would be slim at best with a committee dominated by nurses and physicians. So names were put forward from among the nurses, residents, techs, cooks, cashiers, janitors, parents, students, and others, placed in secure black boxes made by the angel expressly for the purpose of receiving secret ballots. It was not precisely an election, and the committee that eventually took shape was not formed by an entirely democratic process (the fussbudgets chose from among the proposed candidates), but at least it took some of the sting out of oligarchy.
Vivian became the student representative, thrust forward by the surviving third- and fourth-years. Vice-president of their class, she was the most conspicuous choice. Raised along with her were Karen, the surviving chief-resident, Emma the NICU/PICU fellow, Jordan Sasscock, three nurses (two from the floors and one from the ER), two parents, a senior lab tech, and the hospital tamale lady, whose selection was less surprising than it might at first have seemed, given that she had been coming to the hospital for twenty years and knew everyone, and that the cashier/cook/housecleaning faction fell into squabbling and was unable to produce a universally agreed-upon list of candidates. The first action the expanded committee took was to call a seven-teenth member to join them: John Grampus, who came reluctantly, kicking against the pricking insistence of the angel.
The Committee then inaugurated the census that counted and described the survivors: 699 sick children; 37 siblings; 106 parents; 152 nurses; 20 interns; 15 residents; 18 students; 10 attendings; 10 fellows; 10 laboratory technologists; 4 phlebotomists; 5 radiographic technologists; 6 emergency room technicians; 5 paramedics; 18 ward clerks; 1 chef and 14 subordinate food service workers; 1 volunteer; 1 chaplain-in-training; 2 cashiers; 15 housekeepers; 1 maintenance person; 2 security guards; 2 members of the lift team; and the single itinerant tamale vendor.
The census complete, they devoted themselves to dividing and conserving what had suddenly become the only limited resource in the hospitaclass="underline" the staff. Electricity appeared to be inexhaustible; food and medicine were both proving replicable — you had only to ask the angel for what you wanted, be it a pound of tuna or a million units of bicillin; but you could not replicate a new intern when the one you had was all used up. Karen, the chief, who had months of experience creatively inflicting merciless call on her residents, and Dr. Tiller, herself a former chief, were the architects of the various consolidated teams.