She half-recognized some of the constellations. Calvin would have known them all, and been able to tell where they were in the world just by looking at them. Dr. Sundae, the pathologist, was an amateur astronomer, but could only say that they were somewhere over Western Europe, and drifting north. Jemma forgot the stars and tried to look past them and pierce with her vision into the black space behind. She held the camera up to the sky, so it was pointing at her, and scrolled through the pictures again, imagining the pix-elated light traveling over eternity, into the blackness between and behind the stars, to enter the furious house of God, sending something like Calvin had sent something the night he killed himself.
She imagined for herself a camera with infinite memory, one that held the face of every person dead under the water, wondering if seeing every last face would make her care more about them, or make clear to her the reason that had chased her around the hospital while she was tripping. Her heart had ached in sophomore history at the deep faces of the Civil War dead, but that didn’t really relate, or make her a better person, because what she felt had been more a sort of crush on those handsome dead boys, rather than real grief, and anyway that was before her own family had run off, practically hand in hand, into the kingdom of the dead.
She put the camera down and crossed herself. It was the way, she remembered, to open a prayer. She knew how to do it, but only half-wanted to, and she essentially failed at it. She only swiped at herself, making a quick line down her face and chest with the back of her hand. When she was small she did the crispest crossing of anyone she knew. There was a prayer she used to say, something she made up herself when she was seven years old, independent of her brother, a simple, selfish plea to protect and make happy everyone in her family. She could not remember how it went.
“Why, really?” she asked aloud. Vivian had started a list. “It’s going to be really long,” she’d told Jemma, when they made up over the little drug quarrel. Already she had fifty items arranged in order of increasing egregiousness. Why really, though? Jemma asked herself again. For just a moment she saw her brother in her mind, holding his eyes in one hand and his tongue in the other, and she almost considered how his suicide was a complaint against the world, and how happy it would make him to know everything he hated had been destroyed. For years she had been stealing glances at his burning body, and into the dark holes he’d made of his mouth and eyes, never able to look for more than a moment. Tonight was no exception. She could spend hours treasuring a memory of him alive, but the sight of his body, and the facts of his death, she could not bear for more than a second.
She felt all of a sudden very sleepy — this happened to her on calclass="underline" she’d be feeling wired and nervous and lie in her call bed staring at the ceiling, and then suddenly realize she was totally exhausted. She was too sleepy now even to cross herself again and close her prayer, something she had always been careful to do when she was a child, because she felt that between the crossings you were open to God in a way that was profound and dangerous, and that if you were to enter into some mundane, profane activity within the crossing, like going to pee, then something very bad would happen to you at least, and probably to everyone you loved, and maybe the whole world.
She slept and experienced a rush of hypnagogic imagery, the sort of fast, weird dreams she had when she fell asleep in class. Once she’d dreamed in biochemistry that a gigantic enzyme had her enmeshed in its quaternary structure and was dissolving her painfully. Now she dreamed of Brenda, pointing at her from within her isolette. Why is she pointing at me? Jemma asked herself, and then asked the child the same question.
After waking briefly, and opening her eyes on a world of green seas and green stars, Jemma turned her face into her shoulder and slept again, deeply this time. She did not notice the warm wind, or the noise of the water, or the moon when it came up, just a sliver of orange light in the eastern sky. She did not notice when the tree shifted in its branches, and seemed to stretch them and part its leaves, presenting her belly-first to the blackness behind the stars.
Jarvis saw it. He wiped his sweaty face, thinking it must be the sweat in his eyes that made the junkie whore seem to glow. When he looked again it had stopped, and she was just another crazy junkie in a tree. He had seen those before, the tree in the courtyard outside his window at home having filled regularly with a few of them every evening. They’d lay along the thick branches, all fucked up, like boneless leopards, talking in such low mellow tones that he could only catch every few words. Hey baby boy, one would say to him, almost every evening, waving languidly. “Fuck off,” he’d say, and they’d all laugh at him.
He went very quietly over the grass, not wanting to get too close to her — he still didn’t understand why she was always trying to follow him, though he knew that she was somehow dangerous as well as nasty and pathetic — but he wanted the camera. He stopped at every branch as he climbed toward her, listening to her breathe. She snored and said names — Melvin and Snob and Fartin’—all her crack buddies, he was sure. He had to pull on the camera a little to get it out of her hand, but he was less afraid of her waking by then. Something about how much she snored convinced him she was a very deep sleeper, and he almost took her picture when he decided he could just look at his own ass in the mirror if he wanted to see something ugly.
He went home on the fifth path — he’d mapped out twenty-five altogether — and no one saw him the whole way, because he didn’t want them to. He saw the creepy molester who had told him over and over in the playground that the big rain was coming and that he better head to the hospital on that night and bring everybody he cared about, even if nobody was sick. Nobody would come. When he pretended to be sick, first with a bad bellyache and then with a headache and then even coughing up ketchup practically into his mother’s lap, she only laughed at him, then scolded, and gave him one smart blow across his ass, for tempting God with a feigned illness. “I have to go to the hospital!” he shouted at his mother, and she shouted back that he had to go to bed.
He went anyway, running through the rain, knowing he was doing something unforgivable, but he didn’t go back even though he stopped three times and looked toward his house.
The Creep was sitting on the edge of the balcony where the ramp passed the eighth floor, dangling his legs over and staring down at the lobby. One push, Jarvis thought, was all it would take. He had said it, after all, and maybe saying it was what made it happen, and it had all been his plan. That would make him the man who killed Jarvis’ mother and his baby sisters and his big brother — everybody gone, everybody dead all at once. He bent down like a sprinter and touched his fingers to the ground, ready to run at him and push him, but in the end he just took his picture and was gone before he could even turn his head when the camera made a beep and a flash.
He saw others. It was always entirely up to him, what he saw and what he didn’t, and who saw him, so if he saw the giant fucker they pulled out of the water sucking on that lady’s neck — he didn’t remember her name but she was cute and he wanted to take her picture but it would have been pornography and he hated that — it was because he wanted to, like he wanted to see the lady at the blood bank doing her work. He was waiting for her to lick one of the big bloody popsicles, but all she ever did was watch them thaw. No one could make him look at shit he didn’t want to see, so the whole place was empty of heartbreak, and the ICU was full of empty beds, and nobody looked like his mother, even the gigantic huffing lady who lived with her retarded boy in room 636, and if some lady was crying in the stairs on his way down she didn’t make a sound he could hear, and he hardly felt her flesh under his shoe when he stepped on her.