25
Are you taking me to Heaven? Jarvis asks me.
No, I say. I am taking you to the roof.
I can do that myself, he says, but he does not take his hand from mine, or curse me, or even frown, because he knows he wasn’t going anywhere before I fetched him out of the PICU. He was not enjoying his out-of-body experience. Free at last, he stood outside his prison door and hollered to be let back in. I was diminished, crammed in the corner of his room, watching him pace at the foot of his bed, and throw himself every so often upon his body. Face to face with himself he said, You fucker, wake up! He sat down on the floor, put his head in his hands, and cried. My sister was saying that he should take comfort, and that everything was all right, but he ignored her.
I used to like the crying of children. I wished I could complain as profoundly as an infant, and I admired the way that toddlers sob against the world with their whole souls. I imagined an instrument of them, dozens of babies and toddlers arranged like the pipes on an organ, pedals to squeeze them and keys to poke them — I would play out a complaint to capture the ear of God, and in a whistling, snotty symphony of sobs and screams, articulate the thing that oppressed me, reason and remedy for my world-sized dissatisfaction.
But now I cannot stand to hear it. I unfold myself out of the air and say, Look at me.
Nobody looks any different, he said, staring at the passing faces. Even though I’m dead.
You aren’t dead, I say. I am dead, but they look the same to me as always. Which was not entirely true: they are easier for me to look at now.
Hey! he said as we passed the eighth floor. Hey! He tugged on my hand and my arm until I looked at him.
What is it?
I’m not so mad anymore. I feel fine and I just noticed it.
Felicitations, I say. I am not so mad anymore either. You need a fleshy heart, to really feel things.
All that time, all that shit! And all I needed to do was die. He walked on, leading me now.
Well, enjoy it while it lasts, I say.
I know when something is going to last forever, he says. I heard them talking down there. Nothing’s going to save me from dying. Maybe I’m not going to Heaven, but I’m not going back there.
Miracles have been known to happen.
Ha! he says, making it an ancient and ageless sound.
So here we are, I say, because we are on the roof.
So what? I’ve seen it. It looks the same.
It is the same. But you, for now, are different. I am the recording angel; you are just a boy. You can’t wander around all day prying into people’s business: you’ve got to have diversions. So here is one.
I bring him to the edge of the roof, our hands still joined, but when I say what we are going to do, he pulls away.
I can’t swim, he says,
You can now.
I’m not wearing my bathing suit.
You’re not wearing anything. And he notices that this is true.
Shit! I’m naked. You’re naked. You fag! He turns and is about to run, but I am quicker than any wandering undead soul could ever be. I take his hand and leap off the roof, dragging him after me, weighting my wings with memories of sadness and rage. Jarvis is shrieking all the way. We go down, past the long root of the hospital, and the bright globe at the bottom where my sister keeps her spirit, and further, feeling the pressure but not the wetness of the water, falling faster into the lightless cold abyss, but the cold doesn’t bother and we don’t need light for our eyes.
My rubber band, fastened securely to Jemma, is stretching, and Jarvis wears one that is similar, though like every other child there he is attached, soul and body, to the hospital, until they reach the new world. He is reaching next to me, stretching his hands and his fingers because he can tell we are nearing the bottom. We are drawn back before he can touch it.
We shoot out of the water, up into the air, down onto the roof. I have been alighting all my new life on bedposts and leafless trees and flagpole tops and live wires — Jarvis has only done it this one time. I land on my feet; he lands on his ass, but is up again immediately. I think I saw bones! he says, and then, Can I do it again?
26
Vivian was working on her list. She worked on it every day — she only had to look out any window to be reminded about it — but still it felt like a chronically neglected task. There was so much other work to do. She was working as hard as any resident-and-a-half in the old world, and she had never learned so much or had so much responsibility for patients, as she had now, and here and there she had made, in the absence of the one fellow and attending, a decision that truly was life and death. Nonetheless every now and then she had the feeling that all the exhausting and vitally important work she was doing on the ward was easy, and ultimately of no consequence, compared to the list.
If anyone else was making one, she did not know. Jemma had lost interest almost immediately, and the great Why that had occupied their initial days and weeks had lately been neglected. People were just doing the work, after all, and all their spare time was spent grieving or trying to snatch a few minutes of normalcy from out of their extraordinary situation. People were dating, and making friends, and having bitter, comfortless sex, and learning to love better the children in their care, but lamentation had given way to a sort of dull voiceless grief, and thoughtful reflection, never fully established in any but a handful of the populace, was giving way to an exhausted sort of acceptance.
And she was as bad as any of them. Tonight she had been sitting for an hour already with nothing to show for it but a slew of generalities (rudeness… intolerance… war) and a few mild particulars (novels about shoes… grade-school beauty pageants… closeted politicians). Two weeks ago she’d have had ten major and twenty minor categories already delineated in that time, arranged neatly in two columns, and she’d have started to arrange them in ranks and associations. Tonight they were all over the page, clustered like flying insects around a drawing of Ishmael’s back. “Nothing bad about that,” she said, looking at the drawing, and thinking of him. She had put him aside for her work, and now she wished she had not. “I understand,” he said, and went off to do more of his own private work, reading and research, trolling for some personal affinity or flash or recognition that would suggest to him what he had used to do, and who he had been, in the old world.
That was what he said he would do, but in fact he was with Thelma, the big nurse who den-mothered the kids on the psych ward. It wasn’t exactly a date. He had gone up to talk to her, and brought her some fancy candy that the angel had designed for him. He had no idea why he was attracted to her. He did not think large women in their fifties were his type, but he was always being surprised by affinities — mobbed all of a sudden by a violent attraction to some nurse or doctor or patient or piece of furniture. He did not understand the feelings. They were different from what he felt for Vivian — they were not tender, and he knew he did not love these people, for all that he wanted to shove himself, body and soul, into their bodies, or draw them into him until they disappeared. At the height of his lust he wanted to enter them only so he could tear them apart when he exited — he imagined standing and stretching to his full height, and throwing them off him in strips of flying flesh.