She started at the top; it seemed like the right place. In the psych ward she found Thelma asleep, a three-month-old magazine spread across her vast chest. Jemma went past her. The first two rooms she looked in were empty. But in the room called Sage she found all three anorexics gathered together vomiting in the moonlight. Jemma hardly knew them; even when she was on the team that covered this floor, they’d been Vivian’s responsibility. Their families were all gone; none of them had been the sort to get many visitors, especially during bad weather. They had only each other and Thelma, whose great wonderful fatness they could look at no longer than they could stare into the sun. They restricted more and more, and as the weeks passed began to binge, something all three, high, pure anorexics who had defeated their bodies by becoming creatures of pure will, would have disdained in the dry world. Jemma remembered the discussions from rounds, the team wondering how to keep them from shooting powerful coherent arcs of vomit out the windows that the angel would not keep shut, or how to keep them from tearing out their TPN IVs. Dr. Snood, desperate, had kept one of them sedated for a week while she was fed through her nose, but when she awoke she took off the weight as easily as she would an ugly sweater.
By the time Jemma visited them they had made themselves ghastly-beautiful. From the door she saw them gathered under the window, around a plastic tub that stored toys by the bushel in the playrooms. They held hands and brushed up against one another languidly, arching their necks and throwing back their heads to swallow their fingers before adding another unit of barf to the big bucket. They were surrounded by the remains of their feast, vanilla-ice-cream puddles glowing in glass dishes shaped like leaves; candy-bar wrappers in neat heaps; chicken skin and chicken fat glistening in patches around them in a circle, and bones under their feet. Jemma trod on two large cupcakes as she approached them, her green hands clasped behind her back. They did not notice her until she was quite close. Their pajamas, altered, short, hanging dresses of sage, pumpkin, and ocher, and their hair, brittle but long and styled with particular care into identical sets of heaped and cascading curls, their dramatic poses, their bare feet among bones, their long, sharp nails, and finally their number all gave them an ancient Greek air; though they were exquisitely frail, and close to dying, they seemed as powerful as they were pathetic, three purgies discharging their eternal duty. Jemma, nearly upon them, felt a little afraid, but still laughed out loud. They all turned at once, and spoke from left to right.
“It’s a stomach flu,” said the first one, defiantly. “Who are you?” asked the second, more meek. The third, finger in mouth, merely stared.
“I am the great fatty,” Jemma announced, then brought her hands forward, and struck. Green fire spilled into the air as she grabbed at them. They all shrieked identically, and tried to escape, but she was too close for them to evade her, and they were too weak to break away. They were so thin she could hold all of them in her arms. In three blows she made them right, all four of them burning together. First she restored their organs, heart and lungs and guts ruined with months of self-consumption; no sooner had she wanted it done than it was done, the three girly shrieks climbing into song as Jemma pushed with her mind and her spirit. Then she restored their flesh. She filled them with fire that burned for an instant and was gone, leaving muscle and fat in its place; they popped out of her arms, but remained bound to her by fire. Lastly she restored their minds — already they felt covered with abomination. She weeded their brains, reaching in with fire fingers to rip out that perception; right or wrong, truth or distortion, it was hers to command, and must come out with her, and when she commanded it to scatter on the dark air it must do it.
When she released them they threw up their arms, as if in praise or surrender, and then fell to the ground, strong bones cushioned by newly upholstered fat. She left them sleeping beside the vomit tub, scattering candy wrappers back and forth between them with their breath. She wiped her feet and moved on.
In Pickie Beecher’s room she fell, hands-first, on the Pickie-shaped lump in his bed, but it was only an artfully arranged pillow, bitten through in places and leaking stuffing. She cast it aside and went out, looking in all the empty rooms and not finding him there. When she closed her eyes and thought about him she thought she could sense his special wrongness at the periphery of her consciousness, a little blot on her mind, but she could not figure this sense into an idea of where he was. She walked by Thelma again, still asleep, though snoring loudly now in the way of the obstructive sleep apneic. Jemma reached out to touch her, knowing that she could shore up the muscles of her pharynx if she throttled her just so, but then she wondered if what was in her might run out, and if children didn’t have a greater claim on it than adults. She passed Thelma by and walked on to the rehab floor, creeping past a pair of nurses seated at their rocket station. Monitors and thin plastic towers stuck up fortuitously, hiding Jemma from their view, but she felt regarded by the giant yellow alien head mounted on the wall behind them, which seemed to follow her as she went in halting, sneaky cartoon steps along the blue-black carpet, under the light of bright false stars.
Five paralytics, two amputees, one serene vegetable, and a girl named Musette, twenty years old but with the physical, intellectual, and emotional repertoire of an eight-week-old; none of them could withstand Jemma, though their parents offered unexpected assaults on her. “What are you doing to my baby?” was the question that they asked as they sat up out of sleep, or as they clawed at Jemma, or threw syringes like darts, or tried to whack her with a spare IV pole. “Watch and see,” Jemma told them, striking them too with the green fire; to disconnect their voluntary musculature was as easy as flipping off a switch. They crumpled to the floor and watched with unblinking eyes as their children flew from bed in a Christmas-morning leap, or as bones grew in slender filligree from pale stumps, to bud and bloom in green fire that took the form and then the substance of muscle, ligament, and tendon, fat, fascia, and skin. Jemma’s mind performed new motions determined by the problem: the spinal lesions of the paralytics glowed in her head, galling and bitter and ugly; she smoothed her thumb just over the spot on their spines while doing something that made her feel as if her brain was sneezing, shoving violently at either end of the wrongness and holding every fiber of the bundle in her consciousness, counting them like the hairs of a head and commanding them to unite. Bone and flesh had to be encouraged, delicately at first, and then ecstatically, to venture into the air and fill up the felt, phantom image with a real thing. The vegetable required a shout, spoken silent on Jemma’s lips, but sounding louder than any word previously spoken inside the child’s head. She sat up with a start, folding violently from the hips, and her eyes flew open with her mouth. “I’m awake already,” she said sullenly. “Jeesh.”
Fixing Musette was a stranger task. She lay in her bed, gnawing on her fists and looking out the window at the moon, her gown rising up just below her breasts. Rivulets of drool ran down her wrists and arms to drip from her elbow. She made a constant noise, a low little moan interrupted every few moments by a cough or a giggle. Her mother was on the floor, her head at Jemma’s foot, an IV pole dropped at her side.
Jemma put her hands on Musette’s head, her fingers disappearing into a thick mass of greasy black curls. It was easy to make over her mushy brain, to burn it until it was perfect, but harder to restore the lost, neverborn personality. Jemma thought it would be, like everything so far, a matter of will; she only had to want it enough, to push hard enough, and it would grow inside of Musette like the ruined tissue of her cortex. So Jemma pushed hard; this patient burned brighter than any previous. Musette’s lungs, chronically wet and infected from aspirating her own saliva, dried up; her skin, blighted by acne, cleared; the greasy fountain in her scalp, which formerly put out such volume that she left stains wherever she lay her moaning, idiot head, slowed to a trickle, just enough to put a lustrous shine in her hair. Jemma kept pushing even when these things were done, because she still sensed only blankness inside. Musette’s snaggly, sharp teeth straightened and dulled, hairy moles leapt away from her skin like black ladybugs taking flight; still she was blank. It wasn’t until Jemma, hopping with frustration, accidentally stepped on the mother’s face that she realized what she must do to put the child right. As her foot touched flesh she understood how Musette must be filled. She slipped out of her clog and felt along the mother’s face with her bare foot, working her big toe into the lady’s mouth, then pushed her hands deeper into Musette’s now enviable curls. She could not put a name to what flowed into her toe, up her spine and over her shoulders, down her arms and hands into her fingers and into Musette, but she felt as if she were transplanting and transforming the desires and daydreams of the woman at her feet, every aspect of a lost child meticulously imagined during twenty years of caring for the body holding its place. What the mother had dreamed became real, or what the mother had guarded was returned to the girl who had lost it.