She sat up, exhausted but totally awake, lifting Rob’s arm to smell deeply of it, then let it drop. She could bite his ass (gently) and not wake him, but if she made the faintest peep of a pager-imitation he’d be up in an instant, reaching for the phone. She got out of bed, put on her shoes, and went looking again for her mystery boy. It had been a couple days since she’d searched.
But she felt the same if not worse after an hour of it, failing to catch even a glimpse of him. She had always had a hard time mustering sympathy for the victims of panic attacks, patients who slouched into the emergency room short of breath, with chest pain and tingling in their lips and fingers. You were supposed to ask them, Are you experiencing a crushing sense of doom? Now, with her hands and lips starting to tingle, and a bubbling sense of anxiety rising ever higher in her, she was better inclined toward them. She paused by the blood bank, examining a dirty sock abandoned in the hall. It was too small to belong to the child she sought.
She heard a scream and the noise of breaking glass. Maybe Pickie was conducting a raid — she ran to the blood-bank window. The teller was cleaning up a spill. “It’s all right,” she said to Jemma. “Just some clumsiness and a waste of some prime O neg.” When Jemma saw the blood gleaming against the linoleum two thoughts bloomed in her head: first she remembered blood on the green linoleum of her parents’ kitchen; then she realized her period was late.
She felt equal parts “Aha!” and “Oh no!” Surely every moron with a functional uterus was able to keep track of these things, even the smallest-brained furry mammal knew when she was late. But Jemma had never been late before, and the only time it had ever been even a little different was a month before — the flow had been a little decreased, and the color a little changed. Now that made sense, too. She suffered from none of those entities whose names sounded like the names of evil Greek queens: dysmenorrhea, menorrhagia, menometrorrhagia, no horrible cramps, no bloatiness, no sourceless rages or crying spells. Since she was fourteen it had not ever demanded much attention from her.
And she was cautious: even during years of celibacy she stayed on her OCP, and dutifully replaced the condoms in her cabinet as they expired, and expired, and expired. Even at the first call-room encounter, she and Rob Dickens had used a condom. She always had one available, in her wallet, or her purse, or even, sometimes, in her shoe. Vivian had taught her well. She could lay out the rough shape of the years of her sex life in her mind: there was no spot of recklessness, in that regard, anywhere in it. Yes, witnessing a birth put her in the mood for sex, but she still had the most awful fear of pregnancy.
“You look a little pale,” said the teller. “Would you like some tea?” She worked alone all night long, in a lab that was isolated from the core lab, and was always trying to get people to sit down and talk when all they wanted was to take their blood and run.
“Tea!” Jemma said. “Oh, fuck!” She was thinking of Vivian’s mushroom tea, and the pictures of monsters she’d seen in her embryology class, and of limbless, eyeless babies floating out of teacups on beds of soft mushroom steam.
“What’s wrong with a little tea?” the teller asked. Jemma ran off without answering.
She’d made some acquaintances during her insomniac peregrinations of the hospitaclass="underline" nurses on various floors, ward clerks, the tamale lady, and techs in the core hematology and chemistry labs. Ten techs were working the night of the storm; now six worked by day, and four at night. She found the one doing urines, a woman named Sadie, and pretended to want to learn how to do a urinalysis so she could get close enough to the urine pregnancy tests to swipe two. Sadie was thorough, and had three urines batched already for testing. She went through each of them with Jemma, who had to pee furiously because of her question, and because of all the pee she was looking at, and because she had been drinking potent synthesized espressos all evening in an effort to flog her memory to give up what it was hiding.
When she got away from Sadie she went toward her room but veered away when she got to the door and she remembered Rob was still inside. She hurried to three other bathrooms, proceeding with the cautious but hurried steps of a girl about to wet her pants. None of them were empty: in two she found gossiping nurses, in another an anonymous person in red slippers with intestinal distress. She wanted and needed to be alone to do the test, so she picked up a flashlight from the sixth floor and went to the roof and peed on the dry ground beside a blueberry bush, taking ten milliliters from the middle in a plastic cup. She had done pregnancy tests before. Two weeks in a teen clinic and a procession of panicked fourteen-year-olds had made her an expert. It seemed like witchcraft, messing with your own pee among exotic foliage, under the light of a full moon, in the middle of the ocean. She sucked up a cc with her stolen pipette and applied a drop to the blank window, set the timer on her watch for three minutes, and turned on the flashlight. At first she kept the light on the test, and her eyes closed, but the monsters were still flashing in her head. She opened her eyes and turned off the light. The test, small and round, gleamed like a piece of fallen moon, but she couldn’t see what was happening in the window. “Bar, bar, bar,” she said. “Minus sign. Negative.” There were lots of reasons to miss your period besides being pregnant, and two days was not very late. Great stress was a reason. No one would fault a period for being late on account of the end of the world. She stood up and pulled down her pants to look at her spotless underwear, a gift from Vivian who was synthesizing her own line of lingerie. The timer sounded.
Jemma knelt again and raised the light, shining it down and blinking. Later she’d think her eye had tried to humor her, because at first she only saw the flat horizontal bar. But when she blinked again the window flickered and the vertical bar was there, dark, unbroken, blue, and undeniable. The image seemed to expand, the cross growing bigger and bigger, not in the air, but in her mind. She shut her eyes to block it out, but still it grew, as big as a mouse, a cat, a dog, a horse, a house, a hospital. It hung over her and cast her into deep, blue-black shadow.
She’d never been fainty, not as a child witnessing near brainings or facial deglovings, not at the news of death after death after death after death, not in gross lab, not during rectal disimpactions, not picking maggots from the feet of aged diabetics. But now she swooned like a helpless, petticoated weakling, falling back among the dusty rivulets of her pee with her pants around her thighs. The flashlight came to rest under the blueberry bush, lighting the underside of its leaves. Jemma, not awake and not asleep, watched the blue cross as it continued to rise and expand and triumph over her.
20
I have never seen an angel, or seen a statue cry bloody tears, or felt the greater hardness that Elena Rauschenberg says that she can provoke by stroking the loincloth of Christ crucified in St. Mary’s church. I have never felt transported by prayer, or felt the immanence of God while caught up in a wave at the seashore. I went without sleep once for sixty hours — it was number twenty-three in a book called Forty Ways to See God, but all I saw was an imaginary angel, a naked man with wings crouched like a vulture at the foot of my sister’s bed. He was watching her sleep, and I knew I was only imagining him.