Pickie would only talk of his brother’s thousand eyes and hundred hands. “But what was his name?” Jemma asked, a question she’d asked many times before.
“He was my brother,” Pickie said, the same old answer. “Now he is dead, and there is no good in anything, and I must live on forever to witness all the wrongness. Every wrong thing arises from the death of brothers, and every wrong thing has come from my brother’s death. Oh! Oh! Oh!”
He knocked his head against the glass. Jemma said nothing — that week they were trying to extinguish all his bad behaviors by ignoring them — but she reached and patted him dexterously on the head, knowing it might be interpreted as an encouragement, but unable to just leave him alone banging his head, though he wasn’t doing it very hard, more a vigorous tap than a really hard bang. She patted him until he stopped, but refused to sing him a song, when he asked, because she was getting late already, and her next patient was a time sucker.
She went down to room 636, occupied by an eleven-year-old boy with cerebral palsy and developmental delay named Tiresias Dufresne. Gorked on the surface, unable to walk, or speak, he nevertheless had a lot going on inside his head. He had a special headset, lost in the flood, that had allowed him to communicate by fixing his eyes on letters and words on a computer screen. Attempts to replicate it had not satisfied him. His vocoder had never said a bad word about anybody, but his mother, popularly known on the ward as “that fucking bitch,” six feet tall and weighing as much as three average-sized medical students, was the apotheosis of the hospital mom. In the first weeks of her pediatric rotation Jemma had observed another hierarchy: spineless parents with noodle-supple wills were “sweeties”; parents who wanted everything explained in detail before consenting to a procedure or intervention were “a little difficult”; those who actually refused procedures or interventions became frankly “difficult”; those who habitually refused interventions or dictated treatment based on their own past experience entered the continuum of “crazy,” at whose far end Ms. Dufresne reigned unquestioned.
“Just do whatever she tells you to do,” was the advice Dr. Chandra gave Jemma when she met Ms. Dufresne for the first time. “If she starts getting angry, it’s okay to run away. And don’t cry in front of her; it just makes her more mad.”
“Good morning!” Jemma called as she entered the room. Ms. Dufresne was an armoire-sized shadow in her chair at the window. Tir was moving restlessly in his bed, flexing and extending his arms and legs as if he were trying to swim within the space confined by the blue mesh tent that hooked to his bedrails and kept him from falling to the floor.
“Hello dear,” said Ms. Dufresne quietly. Jemma had gotten along with her pretty well so far, but she had already learned how fine was the line between “dear” and “motherfucker.” Still, she was used to being abused, and somehow she preferred the motherly rage of Ms. Dufresne to the exquisite smarminess of Dr. Snood. It helped, somehow, to think that it was fierce love for her gorky, twitchy boy that made Ms. Dufresne thunder, and stomp her feet, and wave her fists in the air just before your face, and threaten to pull your tongue out through your ass.
“How is he?” Jemma asked, aware of her mistake as she made it.
“Why don’t you ask him? You know he can talk to you.” Ms. Dufresne’s breathing became a little heavier. She didn’t like to interpret for lazy motherfuckers who couldn’t be bothered to make the effort to speak to her son.
“Sorry!” Jemma said brightly. “Tir, how are you today? Do you feel better than yesterday?” He stopped his breast-stroking for a few seconds and turned his eyes to the windows. “That’s yes, isn’t it?”
“Same as it was yesterday. Same as it was the day before. Same as it was always.” Ms. Dufresne began to huff. She was not a well woman; her grocery list of illnesses included diabetes, hypertension, coronary artery disease, and congestive heart failure.
“Are you feeling okay?” Jemma asked Tir. He was in the hospital for an attack of cyclic vomiting. He’d thrown up everything that had passed his lips or his button for the three days before he’d been admitted, and was still being fed through his veins now, six weeks later. He looked to the window again, at the gray banks of clouds floating over the silver water. “Great!” she squeaked, unzipping his bed with a broad sweep of her hand and arm. “I’m just going to listen, okay?” He continued to swim as she listened on his chest and back. Tir was always smiling, even when he was in horrible pain, or in mid-barf. His smile was involuntary and useless for the purpose of gauging his mood, but his big hazel eyes were richly expressive.
“You sound hungry. Are you hungry?” He looked at the door: no. “Well, how about if we try and creep the feeds up some? Let’s go up to ten cc’s an hour.” His feeds were presently running at seven cc’s an hour.
“Eight would be better,” said his mother.
“Eight would be okay, but ten would be superb! We’d like to get you off the sauce, Tir.” She smacked his hanging bag of parenteral nutrition. Every day Dr. Snood asked for the precise number of milliliters of nutrition solution delivered into the boy’s veins. “Shouldn’t we reduce that, Dr. Claflin?” he’d ask her. “Don’t you think his liver would thank you? Wouldn’t his liver rejoice?”
Ms. Dufresne stood up. “Sure, it would be great. Every time it’s like this. Ten would be great, you say, and you rush him, and then the vomiting starts again. So let it be ten. What do you care? You won’t be here when he vomits. It’ll be me covered in it, trying to keep him from choking on it. But I’ll call you, when he does it. I’ll put you in his bed and he can vomit on you. How will you like that? I’ll put your face in it and you can eat it, like a dog. Like a fucking dog!” She had come to the other side of the bed, and was twisting the blue mesh in her giant hands, huffing like a cartoon locomotive. Tir swam on blithely.
“Eight it is!” Jemma said. “I’ll just go tell the nurse now. Have a good morning, Tir,” she added, and, “Have a good day everybody!” She had never fled from the room, but she often walked out backward like she did now, in case an object should fly at her head.
Down the hall from Tir’s room was another room she hated to enter. A CF boy named Sylvester Sullivan lived there with his mother. Sylvester was sweet, five years old but stuck at the developmental level of a two-year-old for reasons that were never determined because his mother disallowed portions of the workup, insisting that there was nothing wrong with her son. He knew a few words, but most of his utterance was excited, endearing, cheerful babbling. Most of his mother’s utterance was babbling, too, of the anxious rather than cheerful sort. It endeared her to no one.
Jemma couldn’t stand being around her, let alone talking to her, so she had worked out a system with the sympathetic nurses, who passed responsibility for that room among each other like a snake, so none of them had to deal with Mrs. Sullivan for more than one day out of the week. Jemma had to see Sylvester every day, but she waited for a signal from the nurses to go into the room. When his mother left to go to the bathroom, or take a shower, or to get her son a graham cracker, then Jemma, who had mastered a three hundred and sixty second exam, would dart in and look at Sylvester and his vitals sheet. She was telling Carla/Snarla about the change in Tir’s feeds when the signal came, a page on the overhead system, “Line six for Jemma Claflin.” There were only five lines on the sixth-floor phones.