“It was earlier this morning,” Jemma said. She’d seen him in the gift shop, when she’d gone by for her morning fistful of gummy bears. He’d taken a job as assistant to the volunteer while he waited to remember what he’d done before the Thing.
Ms. Vega stood up out of the corner, took Jeri from her bed, and stood her up by the window. Jeri leaned against her mother’s leg and looked back at Jemma with her huge black eyes. Her mother did a very professional imitation of someone casting a line out into the water. Jemma thought she must have some kind of mechanical apparatus in her mouth, so precisely did she make the noise of a winding reel. “Jeri!” she said excitedly. “What am I doing? I’m fishing for a liver. Oh, they’re biting!” She hauled mightily on her imaginary pole, then pretended to lose it. Then she fell on her daughter, tickling her maniacally. Jeri looked bored with it for a few moments before she burst out laughing. “There,” said her mother. “Now she’s better. You want to have a try?” Jemma approached slowly, and tickled cautiously at the still-hysterical child. As soon as she touched her Jeri calmed and glared at her.
“You’re a bad tickler,” said her mother.
Jemma had woken up with the sense that she was forgetting something, and the feeling worsened through the day. She thought Pickie must have given her something — a sense of unease for an anniversary present. She had obsessively checked her scut list, the row of tasks, each saddled with its own empty box to be checked off or filled in when the task was done. But by the midafternoon she’d done everything but look at Sylvester’s chest film. Down in the dim, cool reading room, looking at the film and waiting for Dr. Pudding to arrive, she felt nagged almost to exasperation by the feeling. It made her more nervous than usual when she tried to read the film. Dr. Pudding made her nervous anyway. He was ancient and fit, a sporty mummy who had run marathons and swum in the frigid bay and had won the national over-seventy wife-throwing championship three years before. There were attendings who wore their spite on their sleeve, like Dr. Tiller, the professional counterpart to raging Helena Dufresne. You could tell she hated you the moment she looked at you. Others, like Dr. Pudding, hid their disdain under a pleasant veneer, but it seemed to Jemma that these types hated no less, and no less passionately, and five minutes with Dr. Pudding almost made her long for Dr. Tiller’s honest fury, or a refreshing dose of Dr. Snood’s plain, old-timey smarm.
“Shadows,” he whispered, looking very dried out in the cold, weak light from the reading box. “Shadows on shadows, Dr. Claflin. Can you make sense of them?”
“I see a smudge,” Jemma said.
“A smudge? Do you mean a blob? Do you mean a smear? Or do you mean an infiltrate? Do you even know what you mean, Dr. Claflin?”
“I see an infiltrate,” Jemma said. “Right there, behind the heart.”
“Do you really?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said confidently.
“Do you think it could be normal anatomy?”
“It’s too fuzzy.”
“Some of us are fuzzier than others. How many films have you read, that you know what’s fuzzy and what’s not? How many, Dr. Claflin?”
“I haven’t really been counting.”
“One, two, three,” he said, pointing at each of her toes and then her fingers and counting up to twenty. “More than this? How many times has piggy been to market?”
“Maybe a few dozen.”
“How many have I read, do you think?”
“Many more,” she said, looking back at the film.
“Thousands and thousands and thousands, Dr. Claflin. Now, what do you see in this film?”
“I guess it’s normal.”
“You guess? Is that what you’ll write in your report?” He picked up the dictaphone receiver and held it out at her. She could hear the tinny voice of the angeclass="underline" “Name me, Jemma Claflin. Oh, give me a name and I will serve you.” Dr. Pudding frowned and hung it up.
“It’s normal,” Jemma said.
“Wrong,” said Dr. Pudding, clapping his hands in front of her face. “If you see it, never let anybody talk you out of it.” He smiled at her, his face in the dim light a tight ghastly friendly mask.
“Thanks,” Jemma said, realizing as she left the room that she had just thanked him for trying to humiliate her. But shame hardly distracted her from her anxiety; it got worse after the hurried lunch with Vivian and Ishmael, and persisted through the evening and the night.
“Are you awake?” she asked Rob, a few minutes after he had come in and collapsed next to her without undressing. He was clammy and smelly but she clung to him anyway, her anxiety palliated a little by the pressure of his bottom against her hips.
“No,” he said.
“Something weird is happening,” she said.
“Understatement of the year. Understatement of all eternity.”
“I mean particularly. I think I caught something from Pickie.”
“Scabies?”
“Crazines. “
“You’re not crazy,” he said.
“You haven’t even heard my symptoms,” she said. “I have this feeling…”
“Like you want to drink some blood?”
“Like I’m forgetting something hugely important.”
“That’s an intern thing,” he said. “Did I dose that drug right? Did I make that kid NPO? Is the chest tube on suction or water seal? It’s just normal.”
“Something bigger,” she said. “Like something’s wrong and I’m not doing what I should do about it.”
“Exactly. It’s an intern thing,” he said. “Congratulations, Dr. Claflin. My little baby’s growing up.” He scooted closer against her and said it again, his voice trailing down as he spoke. “Welcome to the club… always worried… always about to die… it’s all you can do sometimes to not fuck them up worse…”
“That’s not it,” she said. She didn’t speak again, and within minutes he was snoring, but she asked herself over and over, What is it? A variety of problems presented themselves to her as she lay in the dark: Jeri was so very hairy; Sylvester’s pneumonia was sure to prove resistant to the single agent therapy upon which Dr. Snood had insisted; Dr. Chandra was still sleeping too late, and she had figured out that morning that he made up some of his lab results, but hadn’t told anyone of her discovery; her parents were dead and her lover was dead and were they waiting even now for her to join them?; she was not what she should be, she had not done what she was supposed to, this was obvious, inescapable fact; Calvin had a vision for her that she had never understood let alone fulfilled—don’t follow me but follow me your time will come behold my feast behold my offering behold the human grace but sister yours is the harder part; she was inferior to Rob, he loved her better than she loved him, purely, deeply, truly in ways that she had reserved for and lost with her dead, and he was a better doctor, like Vivian was a better student and a better doctor and a hotter mama, both of them were better because they cared more for the work, and subscribed with perfect honesty to the Committee ethic, they just did the work while Jemma just pretended and prevaricated, rounding with false vigor, presenting with false enthusiasm, caring with a false heart, no wonder Snood hated her, he saw right through her; Rob and Vivian were better friends anyway, and better people, open to receiving others into their circles of wonder and grief, sharing their hope and their fear over beer or tea or one of the strange new juices Vivian was always ordering up out of the replicator mist, while Jemma said nothing, they were already part of the project and she was a bystander because trusting is the first deadly sin, sharing is the second; the world had ended, after all, and wasn’t that a big enough problem, and wasn’t anxiety just punishment for a person who said, La la la, it was over already, for me, for a person who felt nothing and cared nothing for what was lost, and who, though she was on the boat, had still managed somehow to miss it? She submitted herself to all these problems in a spirit of open humility, yet nothing changed in her anxiety. These things might be true or not but none was the secret bother.