“You may not pass!” said Pickie Beecher. He inflicted a wrongness atop the wrongness that was one of the nurses; it bloomed at the edge of Jemma’s contracting perception, a strobe flash, or a single, high note, a piccolo played by a soprano with a lungful of helium. “No,” Jemma whispered, and “No,” she said. “No,” she shouted, and “No,” she screamed. It came suddenly, and seemed to happen apart from all her pushing and fretting. One moment she was grinding her body into his body, the next she felt like she was floating on top of him, a green sea between them. Cold green fire ran over them both. She pulled at his tube, flinging it across the room. She pulled the bolt from his head and flung it similarly, shattering the glass door, holding her hand up at the blood he spouted. It stopped like obedient traffic, turned around and vanished into his head. A blister of skin formed over the wound.
It was quick. In the time it takes to do up a long zipper she’d poured an ocean of fire into him, soothed his swollen brain, reunited sundered axons, and popped out the plum-sized dent in his skull. He sat up, taking in a deep, whooping breath and making clawing motions with his hands. He opened his eyes but did not notice the room, the crowd, the nurse writhing on the ground with a broken shin, his nakedness. Jemma could tell he only noticed her. “What happened?” he asked.
30
I hardly know my own part, so why do I feel like my sister’s should be harder? She has always been ordinary. We do not have the same complaints, though she has always been sympathetic to my complaints, even when she didn’t understand them. I say, The world heaps me. She says, I am fat. I say, I am the root of all evil. She says, I am lonely. And she is fat, and she is lonely, and though she likes everybody, no one likes her, while I hate everyone and have a hundred friends.
One summer when she’d had a particularly rough day, I told her it didn’t matter that people she liked didn’t like her; the one person she did like more than anybody else would be her friend — I had promised — beyond the end of time. She thought I meant Jesus, but I told her I meant me.
Repeat after me, I told her, You suck-ass motherfucking cock-sucking pavement-fucking fuck-faced slimy-crotch bitch, go fuck yourself with a moped and shit in your own mouth. I had her memorize eight different phrases and even combine them all together into a marathon-length cuss-fest that she could barely complete without breathing in the middle. If she replied with this whenever someone called her fatty, I guaranteed they would stop.
They’ll just think I was crazy, she said.
But they’ll leave you alone.
It’s easy for you to say. Nobody thinks you’re crazy or fat. You’ll go to eighteen proms and wear seventy-five different tuxedoes and get elected Emperor of Maryland.
Say it again, I said, and she did. But she could not, when challenged, speak the words. So I kept composing cusses for her, and I designed a ritual to make sure it really never did fucking matter what somebody said to her or how they treated her, nothing would touch her and nothing would hurt her because she was protected. One night we went out her window and down to the little clearing where one of our dogs was buried. Kneeling by an arrowhead-shaped piece of slate that marked his grave, we burned candles and beef fat and I sacrificed one of her stuffed animals, an old bunny named Moronica.
Whatever they say, I chanted, let it come back to them. Whatever they say let it be silent. Whatever they say let it matter less than nothing, and let every mean thing they say or do come down again on them a hundred times worse in the after-time. I put a kitchen knife through Moronica, dipped her in wax and fat, and then we buried her. There in the ground she would become a scape-bunny, the absorber and repository of every ill ever done to Jemma, storing it all up like a battery until the after-time, when she would rise to give it back to everybody who had ever perpetrated a cruelty upon her, a truly terrible rabbit.
And the next day she went out in the world again, and nothing was different, but overnight I dreamed of her protected, surviving when the rest of the world vanished in flame, and she was queen of the world when all her old classmates were dead or worse than dead. I could not, and can’t, reconcile my sister with my visions of my sister. And why should I see her, wielding fire and killing angels, and angels bowing down to her, when what I really need are dreams to instruct me in my own purpose?
31
“Did you hear?” Frank said to Connie over their customary breakfast. “A child was raised from the dead last night.”
“From the nearly dead, actually,” Connie said. “And it was a man. You have always got things just slightly wrong. Always just a little, but enough to totally miss the point.” She smiled at him and took his hand. Their marriage had been in a shambles when they entered the hospital with their daughter two nights before the storm, but the Thing had reintroduced them each to the other’s best qualities, and they had fallen in love again, feeling a little guilty for it, amid all the misery. Their daughter had Crohn’s disease, and came into the hospital to have a fistula repaired, accompanied by both parents not because they couldn’t stand to be away from her, but because neither had trusted the other to be alone with her. They had both been expert slanderers, in their old lives.
“But a miracle, nonetheless,” he said. The angel had made him the usual omelet, asparagus and mushrooms and havarti cheese.
“Well, there are miracles and then there are miracles,” she said. “Raising someone from the dead — that’s a miracle. Saving them from certain death, that’s just good medicine. Baba, did you salt my eggs?”
“Maybe,” said the angel.
“How many times do I have to tell you? Salt on the bacon, pepper on the eggs. What do you say? Was there a miracle in the hospital last night?”
“Every day in this place is a miracle,” said the angel. “You are seated upon a miracle. You live inside of a miracle.”
“A typical non-response,” said Frank. “Deborah! Get out of bed!”
“Leave me alone!” their daughter called back from her room. They had an outside suite on the seventh floor, with a balcony off the room that Frank and Connie shared, intact family-hood being a state of relative privilege within the hospital, and Deb having gotten well enough, after a post-Flood series of surgical complications, to be discharged to a residential section. She was not asleep, though her father accused her of being slothful, and called her schlaftier, German being their secret language, where with her mother it was Japanese. Each of them spoke a different language to her when she was a toddler, ostensibly for the sake of her edification, but she suspected that even then they were getting ready to hate each other with a grand passion, and laying up language in store for the day when they would need to talk shit about each other to her when they were all eating dinner together. Now they kissed at the breakfast table with their mouths full of bacon and eggs.