“Maybe you are somebody’s uncle. You haven’t met everybody yet, have you?”
“Why did he deserve to live?”
“I think we’re all wondering that,” Vivian said. “Each of us about everybody else, and each of us about ourselves. And maybe we deserve it like people deserve a punishment, you know? Maybe it’s not even a reward, to be bottled up here. Maybe somebody somewhere else is on the good ship.”
“Sorry to be sad. I didn’t mean to bring you down. I was having such a good time, until just now.”
“Me too. I still am. It’s okay. You don’t have to be happy all the time. You wouldn’t fit in here, if you were. We’re all fucking miserable, in case you haven’t noticed.”
He did not reply, but he took her hand in his, and they sat that way for a little while.
“Guess what?” she said finally.
“What?” he said, turning his face to look at her.
“You’re beautiful,” she said. Which was not at all what she had meant to say. That wasn’t something she was accustomed to saying to men, especially on a date. And when they said it to her, she would say, “I know,” a reply which effectively shut down such unprofitable and boring conversation. But Ishmael’s face seemed to her unaccountably lovely just then, so sad and so earnest and yet somehow more than perfect in every line, a collection of lovely shapes that added up, just in that moment, that actually made her feel as if her heart was skipping a beat.
“Not like you,” he said, and kissed her. They had kissed before, but not like this — as soon as his lips touched hers she knew that they would be having sex within minutes.
“I don’t usually get like this,” she said to him as she pulled at his shirt, trying to get it over his head, breathless at the prospect of seeing him naked, and thinking for some reason that she wanted to uncover him completely, clothes first, and then the layer of sadness he seemed to have wrapped himself under that evening, and then his very skin, because every covering layer was only hiding a more startling loveliness. She was practiced at sex — sometimes she felt like she’d been doing it forever, but she’d hardly ever been so excited as she was now.
“Me neither,” he said. “I mean, I don’t think so. Or I do… wait.” He put his face in her neck and then dragged it down her body, straight past her breasts and her belly and into her lap, and from down there he spoke again in a muffled voice. “I mean I think you’re my first. Oh yes, definitely.” And doing it, he said, “I’ve never done this before!”
Dr. Chandra lived next door, but he wasn’t listening. The walls weren’t thick, but they’d never permit a sound to slip through, though a couple might shout or sing together at the top of their lungs. He was sitting in his bed, which was just as nice as Vivian’s bed. He had leaped at one of the new rooms as soon as the angel had announced that they were available. This was the sort of thing he had always missed out on in the old world. He never got the bottom bunk, or the nicer apartment, or won the door prize. And this place was much nicer than anything he’d had in the old world — the big bed and the fancy sheets and the soft thick rug would have been out of his league. He finally lived someplace that had a balcony and a fireplace and a window in the bathroom. But he was hardly ever there, and even when he was, it did not make him happy, or even contented, in the way that he had supposed it would. This was his day off — not really even a day, it was only eighteen hours — and like with all of them he spent it decorating and redecorating, trying to get the place right.
“You just need someone to share it with,” the angel told him, because he had just been decorating again and telling her how it was all still not quite right. “Then it would be perfect.”
“Shut up,” he said, but fondly, because even though she got him in trouble not waking him up in time, and even though he strongly suspected that she was kind to him only because she had to be — because God forced her to be that way or because she was programmed to practice an utterly undiscriminating kindness — he still considered her to be one of his few friends.
“You’re a handsome boy,” she said. “And you have so much to offer. I can think of a dozen men who would feel blessedly lucky to date you.”
“Oh, please,” he said. “I do not like these walls. Saffron? Mustard is more like it. I wanted to feel like I was surrounded by Dalai Lamas.”
“Would you like to see these men?”
“Hell no,” he said. “Show me the paint samples again.” She did as she was told, flashing solid blocks of color on the television screen, but faces began to pop up between colors, a nurse from the NICU whose name he did not know, a physical-plant man, totally bald though he couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, the big Samoan from the lift team. “Stop that,” he said.
“How about this one?” She showed him Jordan Sasscock.
“Oh please,” he said. “Totally out of my league, not to mention totally straight.”
“Don’t be so sure,” she said. “Some of us can hear his dreams.”
“You’re too much.” He put a pillow over his face and closed his eyes. “Never mind the paint, just turn out the lights. I’m going to sit here and suffocate.”
“Let me help you dream, then. Just while you’re waiting for that special person.”
“None of that,” he said. But after she turned off the lights he took away the pillow, and he didn’t object when she started to show him pictures of an imaginary date, and an imaginary life, and imaginary comforts. Until he fell asleep he watched a slideshow, pictures of him and Jordan Sasscock on some kind of in-hospital vacation, at a fancy dinner in some dark room, walking close to each other on the roof, both of them too discreet to hold hands and yet in picture after picture Jordan was punching him affectionately on the shoulder. He would not look when she showed them in bed, except at the end, when he lay with his head on Jordan’s chest, both of them sound asleep, their faces slack and puffy, bathed in morning sun from the window on the balcony.
“Behold your happiness,” the angel said, “and do not cry.”
19
Jemma conducted a census of her own, not of numbers but of types. Others, thinking, like everybody did, of the precedent, asked themselves, where were the animals? They looked out the windows into the empty ocean and some asked the angel, What was the crime of the panda, that it should be eradicated? All she would say was that they were preserved, leading to speculation that this meant they were preserved in the mind of God, or that they were preserved in a deep, airtight cave under the ocean, or that somewhere out there on the sea another hospital was floating, twin to this one in every way except that it was stuffed full of ailing and well pandas. The precedent was in Jemma’s mind also, though not because it brought to mind the innumerable animals drowning in innocent pairs. She found herself thinking in twos as she looked at her fellow survivors. Among the children it was obvious that of even the most obscure illnesses two had been preserved — there were a pair of Pfeiffer syndromes, a pair of intestinal lymphangiectasias, a pair of lymphocyte-adhesion deficiencies; only Brenda, it seemed, was totally unique in her affliction. That this should happen in a place that had a whole ward devoted solely to the problem of hypoglycemia was not entirely strange. But Jemma looked further to see other pairs: a stylish nurse, the one with the great big ass, who inhabited the sixth floor had a twin in the PICU who wore the very same pair of rhinestone-encrusted granny glasses. There was a civilian Dr. Snood, father to one of the NICU babies; both men had the same blue eyes, looked down the same proud nose at people in the very same way, had the same leathery skin and the same awful hair. There was a pale girl in the cafeteria, a little big, with bleached hair and large brown eyes who could have been twin to Jemma before she died her hair red. These cases were superficial and obvious, and probably, Jemma thought, meant nothing. She wanted deeper pairings; not necessarily romantic, but fateful. Like would will to like and execute a destiny together.