I have never seen anything that speaks even remotely to the existence of God, and yet I believe. I believe so hard it hurts — I consider it every night, the aching in my chest that comes from too strenuous exercise of an invisible unbodied organ of belief. It would be better to doubt, and if I could suspend my belief for just a moment I would be free — just for a moment! — of the constant, planet-heavy pressure of His gaze.
He is watching me. He has always been watching me, and every time I fail at going, or lose more understanding of my problem and the world’s problem, then the pressure only gets heavier, and some days I can barely get out of bed for the weight of it, and I have lain underneath a night sky awake all night, open to His awful gaze all night, asking all night, What am I, that you should always look at me? I think the great weight of it should drive me grave-deep into the ground.
For so many years I thought He was watching just to see me fuck up all the time, and the more I fucked up, the closer He watched, all my failures His entertainment. It is a marginally better comfort, to think He is watching because I might do something right one day. But what might I do, that would warrant a lifetime of heavy, heavenly scrutiny?
I say I believe and I say, Help my belief.
21
“Are you happy, my darling?” the angel asked.
“What kind of fucking question is that?” John Grampus replied. He was taking a walk through the hospital, an activity that was a little more than a daily routine for him. It was all he did, walk all day from floor to floor, up and down the spiraling ramp, a perennial visitor to children and families and staff. Now and then he helped out with something, fetching supplies or medications or babysitting or pinning a shrieking toddler for a blood draw, but almost five weeks later he had not settled into a job the way all the other laypeople had. Zini, the pruned-up nurse-manager with the air of a hard-ridden madam, had cornered him one day to scold him for neglecting his civic duty. She told him that everyone was pitching in, everybody was exhausting themselves, but she didn’t know what he was doing. And in reply he asked, “Who do you think put that hospital under your feet, you stupid fucking bitch?” They were standing in the middle of the ward, and when he shouted at her silence fell up and down the halls. He walked away, continuing his endless journey, and a schlumfy resident applauded him quietly as he left the ward.
“I want you to be happy,” the angel said. He was headed up the ramp, and she seemed to speak out of the flowers in the balcony boxes.
“Oh, please.”
“You are still the first in my heart.”
“I know you say that to everybody. And you don’t even have a heart. You’ve got a fifty-pound ceramic sphere full of super-cooled borocarbide.”
“If I do not have a heart, then what is it in me that aches for your unhappiness?”
“Super-cooled!” he said, turning to the planter and shouting at it. It was ridiculous, to feel like she had broken up with him, or to feel like their relationship had been ruined by all these other people — the one thousand one hundred and sixty-three others whom she tucked in night and day when they took their rest, whom she serenaded and fed and bathed, her invisible fingers shaping every drop of water as it sprayed and massaged the acres of tired flesh. She had spread herself out among them, and he had done the same thing, traveling all over the hospital with his story until it was told to every doctor and nurse and technician, to every deaf preemie and deaf, doddering grandma, to every toddler and teenager. It wasn’t their secret anymore; she wasn’t his angel anymore. For forty days she had not leaked from out of any black surface to embrace him, and she said that was no longer for her to do, but who knew where she was spreading her strange and wonderful enveloping pressures these days? She was in love with everybody.
He was just going to tell her how sick of her he was, when he was distracted by a sudden commotion. A naked child came running down the ramp. He saw her running through the bars of the balcony across the lobby, pursued by a fat nurse who was at least fifty yards behind her. “I’m going home!” the child was shouting. She was small and pale and so bowlegged that she seemed to waddle as she ran.
“Stop her!” the nurse called out to Grampus, who was the only person nearby on the ramp. So he stuck a foot out casually as the child passed and tripped her. She went flying, and landed in a tumbling heap. She lay there and cried, and he could hear the angel calling out comfort to her from the carpet.
“You fucking asshole,” the fat nurse said when she arrived. “You didn’t have to trip her. She has rickets. Her bones are fragile.”
“You said to stop her.”
“You didn’t have to trip her. This is a hospital. We don’t hurt kids here.”
“I know it’s a hospital,” he said, and hurried off, stepping carefully around the heaving, panting bulk of the nurse and reversing his course. He went down the ramp to the lobby, with his fingers in his ears and singing “la la la” to keep himself deaf to the angel. He sat on a bench under the toy, and kept his fingers in his ears, though he stopped singing. His thoughts were racing, as fleet as the crippled child, toward the past, but with a heave that made him feel like he was pulling a muscle in his brain, he stopped them, and did not think about his father, or his old lover, or all the rainy nights when the angel had comforted him when he quailed at his task.
“You are not happy,” the angel said. “How can I make you happy?” He plugged his fingers deeper into his ears, and started to sing “Danny Boy,” and shut his eyes when people started to stare at him. He’d gotten through three verses when he felt a hand on his leg, and nearly jumped off the bench, because he thought it was the angel, come to him again in a body made of tangible darkness. But it was Father Jane.
“John,” she said. “Are you all right?”
22
One could always confide in Vivian. She was a gossip but she operated by sharply defined rules of secrecy: If she knew an item was classified, then she’d not divulge it even under the worst duress, but all secrets must come to her clearly labeled. Information not tagged as sensitive she passed on with glee. So Jemma was sure to say, before she spoke, “This is classified. I mean it’s really, really classified.”
“I’ll die before I’ll tell,” Vivian said seriously. They were back in their abandoned conference room, in the midmorning after rounds two days after Jemma took the pregnancy test. Vivian had stocked the little fridge with synthesized yogurt packaged in bottles shaped like fruit. She was eating one now, scraping with a long, thin spoon at the bottom of a glass peach.
But when Jemma opened her mouth to speak it, she vomited instead. A little blurp that she thought must be just the size of the word “pregnant” fell out upon the table. The rest Jemma directed to a little shin-high garbage can near the door. So Vivian guessed it, and Jemma nodded, hand over mouth. Her body had provided her with only the one clue before she took the test. Afterward, she was mobbed with symptoms. She developed something new at each floor as she made her deliberately long way back to the call room. She woke up nauseated from her nap, and vomited once before she left the garden. On the ninth floor her mouth was flooded with saliva, so she had to stop at every water fountain to spit. On the eighth floor she became terribly tired, and had to lean against the wall every fifty yards or so. Before she had traversed the seventh floor she had to pee three times. On the sixth floor she developed terrible heartburn, and stole milk from the patients’ fridge, sipping it as she walked, then vomiting it up on the fifth floor. She bloated, then, and became flatulent, her ass merrily whistling and driving her forward as she took the last flight of stairs. In their room, she stood with her back against the door, and as she watched Rob sleeping on his side among the twisted blankets, his hands folded and thrust between his thighs, her breasts began to feel full, and tingle, and ache.