She found Pickie perched on the edge of his bed, sipping at a juice pack that was actually a unit of fresh whole blood.
“What do you want?” he asked her around the straw. It gleamed like steel in the light from the hall. When Jemma tried to snatch the blood from him he ran from her, evading her easily, all the while sipping on his blood until the pack was flat as an envelope. He handed that over to her, but would not give up the straw, and Jemma couldn’t find it when she searched him.
“I thought you were a vegetarian,” she said to him finally, after staring into his guiltless face for a few minutes, trying and failing to formulate a proper scolding.
“Blood is not meat,” he had said simply, and Dr. Snood had a stern talk with him, and assigned Jemma the job of designing a behavior-modification program that would break him of the habit. She was still working on it, and all she’d come up with so far was slipping him a unit of O negative spiked with ipecac.
“Hey, Peanut Butter,” said Rob Dickens, when the child walked up to them and stared. Pickie ignored him. He faced Ishmael and bowed deeply to him.
“I see you,” he said, and then sniffed at Ishmael’s leg. “Will you accuse me like your sister in the walls? Don’t waste your breath. I’m not listening!” Then he plugged up his ears and ran off back down the hall singing la la la at the top of his lungs.
“Well, hello to you too!” Ishmael said, laughing again.
“Like I was saying,” Jemma said. “The little lunatics.”
“But they’re kind of sweet, really,” Rob said.
Every other child took an instant liking to the stranger. On the eighth floor, the hematology-oncology ward, bald children in facemasks emerged without permission from their positive pressure rooms to give him a hug, while solemn-faced parents stared appraisingly at him. Rumor of him had spread immediately through the whole hospital. Not just the children wanted to touch him. Nurses and doctors and technicians and more outgoing parents stopped the three of them as they walked to shake his hand, as if to congratulate him for surviving.
On the ninth floor Jemma had decided he was jolly. On the eighth she decided he was kind, and that he had children, despite his youth, because of the way he touched the heme-onc kids, without any fear, and because of the way he talked to them, which was neither the overly familiar, unctuous babbling or the stiff, formal butler-talk engaged in by people who were unfamiliar with or afraid of children. On the seventh floor she decided he was catty, because he turned to her, after a pear-shaped nurse had scolded him for tickling a liver-transplant kid without washing his hands first, and whispered, “Her ass is as big as Texas!”
“As Texas was,” Jemma corrected.
On the sixth floor she decided he was patient, because he suffered Ella Thims’s game of pick-up-my-toy with utter calm. She sat in her red wagon at the nurses’ station, repeatedly throwing a toy phone on the floor and clapping her hands together. He’d pick up the phone and hold it to his ear, saying, “Hello, hello? I think it’s for you!” before handing it back. Ella wiggled in her flounces and cackled delightedly every time she got the phone back. Jemma could do it only once or twice without wanting to chew off her fingers, but Ishmael played the game twenty or twenty-five times before Rob dragged him on.
They were delayed again while he entangled himself in other games, playing hopscotch in the hall with a pair of pale, spindly CF twins, and pulling in a surrey a five-year-old boy recovering from myocarditis.
“You look great, Ethan,” Rob said to him as the boy lashed at the stranger with a terry-cloth rope cut from a restraint.
“I feel great!” he said. This was the boy that Jemma had helped code on the night of her trip with Vivian. His heart, ravaged by a virus, huge but weak when Jemma had met him before, was now almost back to normal. The day after his bad night his edema was improved and his three different murmurs, each more pathological than the last, were all silenced. Aloysius Pan, the overworked and perpetually sour-faced cardiology fellow, had echoed him for a whole hour, not believing what he was not seeing. “Do you want to hear how loud I can scream?” he asked them, not waiting for an answer before splitting their ears. A nurse and his mother called out for him to shut up. “Before I could only make a peep,” he said defensively. Everyone had recognized his improvement as a miracle though no one had named it such, and he was the only child in the hospital who was definitely getting better.
On the fifth floor she decided Ishmael was thoughtful, because he brought replicated flowers to Janie, and she suspected he had been a wife-beater, because there was something too practiced about his apology, and about the flourish with which he presented the bouquet. She felt sure, despite his protest to the contrary, that he had done this before.
Still, on the fourth floor she knew he was gentle, because of the way he held one of the sturdier preemies, recently extubated but still with a feeding tube in her mouth and oxygen prongs in her nose. Little black girls were famous for being the best survivors, and this baby was the star of the unit that week, but she still fit in his hand with room left over. As he stroked her head with two fingers her saturation rose to a new personal best of 97 percent.
“And who is this little monster?” he asked about Brenda. “Hello, Princess,” he said, putting a hand on her isolette.
“She really is a princess,” said Rob. “Or she was.”
“If you touch her, I’ll break your hand,” said Anna, stepping up on the dais with a new bag of feeds in her hand. The feed bag was softer than a pillow, but she handled it in a menacing way.
“Just admiring,” said Ishmael. When they all looked down at Brenda she pointed again squarely at Jemma.
“I wish she wouldn’t do that,” Jemma said softly.
“She’s just stretching,” said Rob.
“It means she really likes you,” said Anna. Ishmael pointed back at the baby, and laughed.
On the third floor the tour paused, then ended, in the big playroom. There Jemma decided she could really know nothing about him, and that she was being foolish, thinking she could assemble her cursory perceptions of this man, the strangest of strangers, into anything resembling a real person or a real life. She watched him play in a pool of colored plastic balls with Rob, Ethan, and two others, both Vivian’s patients, unrelated boys with the same rare intestinal lymphoid hyperplasia that required them to be fed periodically through their veins. He and Rob grappled, each holding the other by the shoulders and not moving, though both grinned ferociously and waves of tension seemed to flow from body to body across the bridge their arms made, until Rob was thrown. He spun around once in the air and sent up a splash of colored spheres when he landed. Then all three boys jumped at once on Ishmael, and hung on him like on a tree, one from his neck, one from his arm, and one around his waist. His Santa-laugh filled the whole room, the second biggest one in the hospital, a gym-sized space filled with every sort of amusement
“Who is that?” Vivian asked her, when she caught up with them after rounds.
“That’s him,” Jemma said.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Vivian said again and again, placing different emphasis on different words each time, now on the got, now on the fucking, now on the kidding, as Jemma told the short story of Ishmael’s exit from the sea. Her face changed while Jemma spoke. Jemma thought he was having the same effect on her that he had had on everyone else; that his survival outside the hospital was inspiring hope for other miraculous survivals.