“It’s no use,” Jemma said. “He’s already dead.”
“Possibly true,” Emma said, “But not for you to decide.”
“Don’t you smell it? He’s already rotten inside.”
“Compress or go home,” Emma said. Jemma continued, pressing ever more violently on the thin chest.
“I just want to stop,” Jemma said. “I want it all to stop, right now.”
“Get her out of here,” said Dr. Chandra. “Jesus, Emma, you’re a fucking sadist.”
“She’s okay,” said Emma. The child underneath Jemma’s hands was changing with every push, the bloody flower in his mouth blooming in ever more intricate detail, rose, peony, zinnia — Jemma thought she caught the scent of flowers underneath the odor of ischemic gut. The mother called out again, “Regresse, regresse!” The whole family was outside the door now, mixed in with a crowd of residents and nurses and students and a few stray parents — codes always drew crowds. Pickie Beecher’s face peeked out from behind Marcus’s mother’s knee.
“It’s unbearable, what you’re doing,” Jemma said, softly at first, but then she looked right at Emma and shouted it at her face. “It’s unbearable! It’s fucking disgusting!” Emma finally called for someone to replace her. Janie, her only friend among the PICU nurses, who just two nights before had scolded Jemma for nearly writing a fatal potassium order, then hushed the whole thing up so Emma never discovered it, tried to take Jemma’s arm. She shook her off. “Don’t touch me,” she said, and Janie pulled her hand away.
“Hey,” Janie said, shaking her arm. Her hand hung at her side, limp as a filet of beef. “What’d you do?”
“It’s disgusting,” Jemma said again, “and not fair. What did he do to you? Why does he deserve this? Nobody deserves this. You’re torturing him.” And she wanted to ask, of the people in the room, of the air, of the hospital, of the great blue lidless eye of the sky that watched them suffering every day, What did we do to you? Why are you torturing us? She was complaining for herself and for the boy, though they were hardly kindred assaults, to be deprived of everyone you ever loved, and to be violated by well-meaning physicians and nurses, yet somehow in that moment she saw the two of them as suffering twins, laid out side by side, whaled upon by mortality, by long thick needles, and electric shocks.
She was almost crying — her parents and her lover rose again in her mind, mangled, bleeding, and burned, all three of them putting a hushing finger to their lips. Fuck you, she said to them tenderly. Don’t tell me that. And when her brother rose up out of the sea she said, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry! and began to weep bitterly.
“Do the fucking compressions, Jemma!” Emma shouted, reaching toward her. Jemma brought her hands down together, two fists, to strike at the boy’s chest. The room lurched and a light flared in her head. She thought it was the crying and the pregnancy, and was sure she was about to pass out. She reached for the passing out, trying to embrace it. If she just passed out then it would all be over, but she couldn’t do it. She was dizzy and lightheaded but not the least bit tired anymore.
“What was that?” asked Dr. Tiller, and Janie said, “I still can’t move my hand!” and Dr. Sasscock, standing way at the back of the crowd, asked, “What’s wrong with her eyes?” Maggie, who had left her bed as soon as she heard the code bell and now was standing near the crash cart, cried out, “I told you so!” and threw a laryngoscope at Jemma, who never even saw it coming, and only realized she’d been hit when blood began to drip down her forehead into her eyes.
“It’s not fair!” Jemma was shouting. “It’s disgusting!” She was striking the boy again, harder and harder, and no one moved to stop her. They were all leaning away from her, the code in full arrest now, shielding their eyes every time she struck his chest, and she realized finally that the flashes were happening outside of her head. Every time she struck, a green light flared out of her hands to light up the room. She held up her hands and looked at them through her tears. Her scalp was bleeding freely, and the blood was dripping down her cheeks to fall on his face and his mouth. She touched her hand to her forehead and understood suddenly that she could make it better. It was a piece of knowledge granted to her entirely apart from her reason. Deduced of nothing, a spontaneous fact, it was inserted into her mind and her heart. Any place else but in the extremity of a breakdown, she would have mistrusted it absolutely. If she had been more herself she would have known right away that it was too good to be true. As it was, temporary insanity provided her with enough faith to give it a try.
Even as she was fixing it, she became aware of the wound in her head as a wrongness. It was a like a note among notes; though she was not aware of it as a sound, she described it that way to herself. As it faded, and after it was gone, other wrongness, different wrongness, captured her attention. She knew it: with her new sense she recognized Jarvis two rooms down as surely as she would have had she laid eyes upon him. Similarly, she knew her cardiac kid upstairs and Brenda. The varied wrongness of the hospital, on the other floors, in the other wards, was a subtle presence in her head; the wrongness in Pickie Beecher, watching in the crowd, was loud as a shrieking mosquito; the wreck of the boy underneath her was a nightmare instrument, a cat-piano, a dachsophone, but the wrongness in Rob Dickens, four rooms down, was loudest of all. She felt the yearning again, understanding that it was not just wanting but wanting them to get better. She wanted them all. She wanted this boy so badly but she wanted Rob more.
“Get out of her way!” shouted Maggie. “Don’t look at the sparkles!” Only Pickie Beecher got in front of her as she passed through the door, but he didn’t try to stop her. He raced ahead, pushing people out of her way until she was standing by Rob’s bed. Pickie took up position behind her, facing the door.
Because she was confused, because she did not know how to manage what was in her, and because she just wanted to do it, she lay herself on top of him. She thought and whispered words that she thought should fix him: Let it be, let him be better. The green fire still flickered over her arm, but it did not touch him. She stood again and looked back at Pickie, who stood near the door, saying nothing now, and looked at her with a blank face. She turned back to Rob and pulled off his blanket; it was an insufficient uncovering. She took his gown and his diaper and tossed them on the floor.
As she laid herself on him again the nurses came into the front of the crowd, and stopped in front of Pickie. “Oh God, she’s trying to fuck him!” said one of them. “She’s gone crazy!” She wasn’t trying to fuck him, though she knew what she was trying to do involved a most uncommon intimacy. Let it be done, she thought. Let it be gone. Let something come down on him and make him new again. He lay under her, heart beating faster and faster, still unconscious, still only breathing with the machine. She stood up again.
A nurse was trying to get past Pickie Beecher. “Maybe we should just let her,” another was saying. “It’s not like she’s hurting him. Maybe we should just give them some privacy.” The crowd was still growing behind them, one by one. Jemma sensed them, wrongness added to wrongness, everyone wrong in ways different from the children, and from Rob, wrong in ways she could barely recognize as wrong, let alone describe.
“Get back, or I’ll kick you,” Pickie said. Jemma lay down again on top of Rob, taking his hands in her own and raising them, over her head, grinding her hips into his, pushing her face into his face. She spoke a different word this time, “No.” She spoke it to his swollen brain, his empty eyes, his spastic limbs. She spoke it to the staring dead eyes of her first lover, to her brother’s eyeless face, to the house burning up her mother, to her father’s livng corpse reaching and reaching for comfort. She spoke it to the drowning waters, to the correcting God. She’d spoken it before, on cruel nights, on crueler mornings in the days after each of the people she’d loved had died, waking with a corner of the pillow in her mouth, understanding she was awake in the same world she’d slept from, moaning No, no, no for an hour in her bed. She’d wanted so much, then, to have the power that the feeling ought to have given her, to shape her no into undoing, or at least into vengeance, cold comfort better than none. No and no, over and over, forever.