He was sorry. He was terribly, terribly, terribly sorry, and could not apologize enough to Janie. He said he’d never hit a woman before, or hit anyone before, though of course he couldn’t be entirely sure about that, because he had no memory of anything before he’d woken in the PICU. He did not know his name, so they gave him one. They had a contest right there in the unit: Motherfucker (Janie’s suggestion); John; Gift-of-the-Sea; Mannanan Mac Lir; Poseidon; Aquaman; Nimor; Joe. Rob called him Ishmael, and won.
Jemma found herself the silent partner on a hospital tour, her association with Rob getting her on the bus, though evening rounds were coming and she had not seen any of her patients since the morning. Vivian had promised to cover for her, but she considered anyway how Dr. Snood would release some new affliction from his ass to punish her. It would be worth it, she thought. Rob was almost chipper as he took them from the top of the hospital to the bottom. She followed along behind their two broad backs, hurrying to catch up and then running into the both of them when they stopped to examine some aspect or attribute of the hospital. Always Ishmael would turn and smile at her when she collided with him. When he had gotten out of his bed in the PICU, all observing heads had craned back on their necks as he rose to his full height. He had not looked so tall floating in the water.
“Replicators!” he said on the ninth floor. “Just like in that television show. I remember it… with the red-haired boy, and the little girl with the talking robot doll that smote all her enemies.”
“Not exactly,” Rob said, ordering a pitcher of lemonade. They took it to the window at the end of the hall and stood together in a patch of sunlight. The sky was marked here and there with starfish-shaped clouds, and the sea matched the color of Ishmael’s eyes, gray green.
“You don’t remember anything about before?” Jemma asked him again. “Not anything at all?”
“That’s what he said,” Rob said, with a hint of testiness, because Jemma had been asking and asking this question.
“Not a thing.”
“It must be nice,” Jemma said. “Not remembering what you lost.”
“Maybe it is,” he said, staring at her. “I have nothing to compare it to.” His thin blond hair stuck up from his head in a half-dozen different cowlicks, and made him look even younger than he probably was. She wanted to smooth it down.
“It must be… nice,” Jemma said again, and looked away from his eyes. Ishmael laughed, a pleasant sound, a deep, Santa-like ho-ho-ho. Rob was smiling as he sipped at his lemonade. Jemma tried to smile, too, but, though she was showing her teeth, what she was doing did not feel like a smile, and she knew it must look ghastly. She looked back at the sea, envying this blank man his blank history, and wondering what it must be like to come new into this place.
“Seven miles,” Ishmael said, looking out the window with her. “I suppose I’ll just have to wait to believe it.”
“I’m still waiting,” said Rob, and Jemma thought, Liar, because nobody could cry that hard for something that they didn’t believe in.
“What sort of patients are up here?” Ishmael asked after they had all been silent and sea-gazing for a moment.
“It’s a rehab floor,” Rob said. “Kids who are medically stable but have to learn to walk again, or hold a fork — that sort of thing.”
“And little lunatics,” Jemma said. Pickie Beecher appeared in the hall, as if on cue. They watched him walk down to them. He was dressed in the lavender pajamas that came with his room. She had been spending a lot of time with him, working up his melena under Dr. Snood’s whip, a tough job for Jemma, who could muster no enthusiasm for shit, and did not like even to consider it. She especially did not like to see it, and when she happened upon it, which she often did during her third year of school — it was always leaping out at her from within the pants of the homeless derelicts she encountered in the ER, or shooting out with the baby in a delivery, or surprising her when she turned back the sheets of the deranged or demented — it haunted her, so she’d think the odor was clinging all day on her clothes and her hair. Worse than anything was having to go seeking after it, finger first, the student’s duty.
But the mystery of Pickie’s poop had to be solved, so Jemma had scheduled the tests and accompanied him down to radiology and to the endoscopy suite. First, she repeated the guaiac test on two more specimens: Pickie dutifully shat in a plastic hat for her, then peered over the rim of the hat as Jemma poked at it with a little stick.
Two more bright blue hemoccult cards later, she took him down to nuclear medicine to look for a Meckel’s diverticulum, an entity dimly recalled from her first-year anatomy class. “It’s an extra thingie in your belly,” she told Pickie, while the surviving radiology attending, Dr. Pudding, stood behind a dark glass, calling out orders to the tech over an intercom. She was not sure how to describe to a six-year-old a pocket of ectopic gastric tissue in the gut. “It can make you bleed because it makes acid where there shouldn’t be acid.”
“Sometimes I have a bitterness in my belly,” he said, lifting and dropping the heavy hem of her lead apron. He held very still for his IV, and for the repeated films of his belly. He waited patiently for the technetium to distribute through his body, playing a game with his hands, twisting his fingers up one on top of the other, and then untwisting them. When she told him that the scan was negative he shrugged and said, “I do have a bitterness, though.”
Colonoscopy necessitates a cleanout. The term brought to Jemma’s mind images of merry little maids sweeping out one’s colon, but it was actually accomplished with large volumes of an osmotic laxative. All night long Pickie Beecher was flushed out with three hundred cc’s an hour of polyethylene glycol. Jemma put the nasogastric tube down herself, while Thelma watched. It was not a procedure that required finesse; you greased the tube and shoved it in, encouraging the patient to swallow when it reached the back of the throat. Nonetheless, she had to do it twice. All seemed to go well the first time, she greased and shoved, and the whole length of the tube disappeared into his nostril, but when she tried to flush it nothing would go in. Then she noticed that Pickie was working his jaws ever so subtly. “Open your mouth,” she told him. When he did, the coiled tube whipped out like a lolling tongue.
“It’s chewy,” he said.
Ten hours and four liters later, Jemma took him down to the endoscopy suite. “Sweet dreams,” she said.
“I will dream of my brother,” he told her when Dr. Wood, the anesthesiologist, pushed the sedative. During the procedure, Jemma tried to hide behind the little curtain the anesthesiologists put up to hide themselves from the surgeons, but Dr. Snood called her out to stand by him as he manipulated the servos that controlled the endoscope. He was almost pleasant as they toured Pickie’s bowels. He pointed out landmarks like a dad on a cross-country car trip. The quality of the cleanout was a source of joy for him. “Pristine!” he kept saying. “Pristine!”
There was only a little portion of bowel that they could not visualize, scoping from above and below. Everything else was totally normal. No bleeding ulcers, no friable polyps, no sharp foreign bodies, no granulomas. “No bezoars,” Jemma said, trying to hurl the curse back at Dr. Snood. “Not a bezoar in sight.” Dr. Snood sighed.
“We’ll see what the path shows,” he said, meaning the biopsies. But they were normal, too. Jemma was in the slow process of setting up a tagged red cell scan (the technician who did those was dead, but the surviving ones thought they could wing it) when she solved the mystery quite by accident. Sleepless again, she’d wandered all the way to the ninth floor, taking a survey of sleeping children’s faces, compulsively checking on all her patients. She shadowed their doors, staying just long enough to see the light fall on a plump, pale face, and it was calming to her, and it was making her sleepier and sleepier.