“I never get these,” Jemma whispered. “It’s okay.”
“Mountain streams. Or just mountains, never mind the water. Dry mountains — they’re green on the bottom and white on top. You’re going to get this one.” Maggie was twisting in place like she had to pee, and derailed Jemma’s thoughts — she was trying to envisage a calm green mountain pasture — so she could only see a beautiful bathroom in her mind’s eye, a fancy-toilet-catalog bathroom. Maggie sat on a toilet of amber and gold and alabaster, peeing serenely. “Now here you go,” Emma said, stepping away, and Jemma finally got it. She hooked up the bag to the tube, and breathed in time with him, and found herself developing strange feelings for the dying boy. It wasn’t enough, just to squeeze the bag. She wanted to squeeze him in a big hug, or put her naked hands around his twitching heart and squeeze that, too. She yearned toward him — toward his pretty white lungs, his smooth red liver, his fat purple spleen. She was leaning a little over him, almost about to lay herself on top of him — she wanted him so badly all of a sudden, and that was the way to have him, pressing herself close against him, skin to skin — when Maggie pushed her roughly on the shoulder between compressions. “Watch it,” she said. Jemma blinked, shook her head, and blushed.
The dream ended not long after the tube went in. The boy could not stay out of the bad rhythm. After fifteen minutes Dr. Tiller called the makeshift bypass team — Dr. Walnut and Dolores. When they arrived someone else took over the bagging from Jemma, and Maggie, her hair in a sweaty flip, was excused from the chest when she started to drip on the sterile field. A couple of words slipped out of the corner of Emma’s mouth as they passed her where she stood, arms folded over her chest, in the doorway: “Good job.” She handed them each a list with their respective patients circled, and told them to spend the rest of the afternoon getting to know them.
“You,” Maggie said to Jemma, as soon as they were out in the hall. She jerked her thumb at the doorway to the conference room where Emma had spoken with them earlier. “In here now.” Jemma followed her in, and watched her, just for a few moments, as she stood with her hands on her hips, panting furiously, wet stains still growing on her scrub shirt. What was coming was obvious. Jemma gathered up her things and moved toward the door. “Oh, no, missy. You’ve got something to hear, first. That was my tube you took away. It belonged to me and don’t tell me, don’t you dare tell me that you didn’t see my name on it. I’ve got a list, and you don’t want to be on it.”
“See you later,” Jemma said. Maggie, hands still on her hips, stepped quickly to the door, looking much more like a ballerina or an aerobics instructor than a raging crabby-ass.
“How dare you! How dare you! You don’t even care about it. I heard you. I saw you. The whole thing was wasted on you.”
“I just want to leave,” Jemma said. Maggie put her face closer to Jemma’s and tried to thrust out her chin, but only succeeded in pursing her lips. “You’re making me sick,” Jemma said, because an intense wave of nausea was rising up from her belly.
“You make me sick, too!” Maggie said, and then her voice was drowned out by the noise of Jemma’s blood rushing in her ears. She felt dizzy; a strange green shade was drawn across her vision. For a moment she couldn’t see anything. She fell to her knees and vomited, her sight coming back only after her stomach was empty and she was retching miserably. She’d barfed on poor angry Maggie, who seemed to have thrown herself literally into a fit. Jemma adjusted her head and pushed some furniture out of the way to give her a safe space to seize in. Then she opened the door and screamed, “Emma!”
It seemed like a violation, to pry open Maggie’s mouth and look into her throat, and it would have been unforgivable, Jemma was sure, for her to intubate her classmate. It had to be done — it took a half hour to get her to stop seizing, and by that time she was so loaded with meds she was only breathing five times a minute. But she was so chinless that she proved difficult even for Emma to do. She got hooked up — the nurses descended on her, overcoming their distaste for adults — she was really only as big as a ten-year-old, anyway — to stick her for blood and an IV and hang her fluids and get her on the monitor. If you didn’t look at her face, her expression still impatient and dissatisfied even after eight milligrams of ativan, and two hundred each of phenobarbital and fosphenytoin, and another hundred of pentobarbital, she could have been a child in the fancy ICU bed, vacated just that morning by a CP/DD moaner-groaner with pneumonia who, kicked back to the ward, left behind one of his mobiles. A dozen winged monkeys floated over Maggie’s head. Emma wound up the mobile after Maggie was all tucked in, and, wings flapping, the monkeys circled and the box played a tinny version of “Yesterday.” Jemma watched her for a little while, imagining it was her in the bed, overcome with toxemia or hyperemesis or simple fatness or demon-baby syndrome, while tourists from other wards, drawn by the novelty of a sick adult, passed by the glass walls of the room and cast their eyes on the sleeper. Maggie was all covered up, but Jemma knew that when it was her a boob and a succession of dirty panties would be displayed to the passers-by, and, seeing her, they would all appreciate what a simple blessing it was to be awake and ambulatory and unintubated.
“Don’t you have somewhere else to be?” the nurse asked her finally.
“Feel better,” Jemma said to Maggie. She left the room and hesitantly embraced her new duties. Emma had done her the grueling honor of assigning her ten patients, five downstairs in the PICU, five upstairs in the NICU. Downstairs she had Jarvis, Marcus, and three others — a fifteen-month-old boy whose father had beaten his head against a barbecue, a fifteen-year-old girl who, undergoing treatment for leukemia, had gotten a bag of infected platelets infused into her veins the day before the flood and swan dived into septic shock and respiratory distress syndrome, and a post-op cardiac patient, a girl born a week before the storm with no left side to her heart. Upstairs she had three preemies, a three-month-old with leprechaunism, and little Brenda.
Out on the floor she’d thought she’d come to know how rounds were perpetual, but at least out there was always a chance to sit down, at some point during the long day. In the units she was in near constant motion, circling from room to room, bay to bay, and even from floor to floor, going constantly from patient to patient, because there was always something acutely wrong with them — if she collapsed at a table in some hidden corner of the PICU her pager sounded immediately. Rob had told her about the circling; on him it had a calming effect. “Sometimes at night,” he said, “if I’ve been going long enough, it feels like I’m everywhere at once, in every bay, upstairs and downstairs, and it’s like I can almost hold the whole place in my head, and all the collective fucked-upness of the kids becomes very individual and distinct, and it’s like I know everything about them, and can almost predict who’s going to code next.” Jemma said that sounded like a pretty bad trip to her.
But she felt it too, or something like it, that very first night. She was ostensibly covering both units, and even though it was largely a sort of pretending — Emma took care of most everything, or advised Jemma over the phone about even the smallest points of management — it was as overwhelming as it was exhilarating. Emma moved in her own circles, and Dr. Tiller was attending. Jemma succeeded spectacularly at avoiding her, and developed, before Rob’s sensor of fucked-upness, a Dr. Tiller proximity alarm that steered her away from particular bays just in time; a bit of dread in the air would push her away, or she’d see the distinctive shadow of Dr. Tiller’s headdress stretching around the corner on the wall or floor. Moving away from Dr. Tiller, or in search of Emma to get a question answered, she started, after she had accomplished a few dozen circumnavigations, to feel something akin to what Rob described: the place started to seem whole in her mind, yet the children became more distinct from each other. She could visit the bays and rooms and shape an imaginary child in her head before she arrived there in person, even if she could never distinguish the unique anatomic pathologies of the cardiac patients — she mixed up tetralogies and tricuspid atresias and simple VSDs in a way that seemed ill-fitting for the daughter of a cardiac surgeon. But beyond what Rob had described, there was something else, a sense that, though she was perpetually in motion, she was floating in the still center of the hospital. True, it was in the character of the intensivists to consider themselves the most important doctors in the hospital, and to consider the drama of the rest of the hospital inferior to that of the unit. But also, since the Thing, the patients, instead of striving to leave the hospital, seemed to strive to enter the PICU, and every time a child improved enough to move out of the unit another came immediately to take its place. Jemma, fatigued by hour twenty-three of wakefulness into a pretty trippy state of mind, thought she could feel the great lines of attraction, grooves in the unbodied essence of the hospital, along which critically ill children moved as certainly as the stars in their courses.