“Where’s the fucking FFP?” Emma asked, not looking up.
“She doesn’t need it,” Jemma said, raising her hands and taking a few unsteady, jiving steps toward the bed.
“Are you crazy?” Emma asked, and then noticed who had spoken. She opened her mouth in surprise, but kept compressing ever more vigorously. Jemma felt but did not hear the cracking of the girl’s ribs. “You’re not supposed to be here,” Emma said flatly. One of the cracked ribs was scraping the pleura of the girl’s lung, putting a feeling in Jemma that was no easier to abide than the noise of nails on a blackboard. When Emma stopped compressions it was a relief. “Well, don’t just stand there,” she said.
I’m not, Jemma wanted to say, but as she approached the bed she found she could not talk at all. Her head fell back on her shoulders, her eyes rolled up toward the ceiling, and she moaned, overwhelmed with the green fire, which was stirring in her belly now like the worst nausea. She didn’t need to see the girl to find her; her illness was blazing, bright and wrong — it grabbed her, it commanded her. Jemma fell the last foot or so, her hands fastening just above and below the girl’s left hip as she landed on her knees beside the bed. Jemma’s mouth opened on its own, wider and wider until the fire came out, preceded by a bass, vibrating urp, a sound she had never made and did not know she could make.
It went up in a green fountain, broke against the ceiling, and came down, not like rain, but like a falling river, sweeping Emma and the nurse aside. The fire burned more violently than before — Jemma saw the ambu bag swinging wildly back and forth at the end of the ET tube before the tape on the girl’s upper lip curled up like a waxed mustache and the whole apparatus flew from her mouth to bonk Emma on the head, making a pain that registered in Jemma’s head as a dull blip — but it burned silently, and where Jemma knelt it was very quiet. Inside the girl it was very quiet, too, the silent aftermath of a final argument between the girl and the visiting liver, which Jemma understood, as soon as she touched her, she had rejected as utterly as an unsuitable lover. Jemma found herself arguing with the rest of the body, advocating for the liver, extolling its many virtues (and hadn’t the liver always been her favorite organ, the bright maroon spot in the dreary semesters of anatomy, physiology, and pathology?) and arguing that the body should take it back. She imagined herself in pajamas and pigtails, sitting in a room whose walls still held a few posters of kittens in baskets, where not all the stuffed animals had been banished under the bed to nestle against the pornography and the marijuana tin, where the panties of innocence and experience lay twisted together in the dresser drawer. She imagined herself sitting on the bed next to the body, dabbing now and then at the bleeding eyes with the tail of a stuffed tiger. He’s just so great, she said, meaning the liver. You guys belong together, really. He’s really good for you, and you’re really good for him. Everybody was talking about you two, about how well you went together. People were talking about homecoming. She went on, extolling his handsome, unique vasculature, his capacity to store glycogen, the marvelous complexity of his cytochrome p oxygenase system. The praise fell on uncaring ears. Jemma herself was not entirely convinced, liver lover though she was. She had argued with similar half-heartedness, years ago, in bedrooms similarly reflective of liberation and corruption, for the sake of unworthy boyfriends who had wanted another chance. And she had listened to similar arguments made by others on behalf of her first lover, and caved to them not believing them. This girl was made of sterner stuff than she; her mute rejection ended up convincing Jemma, so she turned to the afflicted liver, suffering almost to death under the lashing fury of the girl’s immune cells, and said, Who do you think you are, anyway? Have you no shame, sir?
Holding the poor thing in her mind, she understood what she must do: not convince the body that it must accept the unacceptable, but redeem the insufficient, wrong thing. Boyfriends could never be changed, only exchanged, but this liver was hers to remake. She gave it a shake, as if to say, Shape up, and it did. It put off weary failure and became strong and quite literally new — she burned off its old surface proteins and sugars and copied new ones off of the neighboring cells of the body. Intrepid T cells suddenly realized they were doing wrong, like someone who wakes from a dream of rage to realize they are punching their mother in the face. They gave up their work of destruction and slipped sheepishly into the bloodstream. With the liver jumping in her mind like a little shepherd dog, Jemma fixed the girl. The liver made clotting factors that Jemma multiplied by ten, one hundred, and one thousand, and rushed them in streams to all the bleeding places. It seemed to make a noise, like a grunt, as it tried to raise the oncotic pressure in the girl’s blood, to suck back the fluid that had given her a swishing, beach-ball belly. Jemma helped, and the belly collapsed. The girl arched in her bed as the fire raged in and out of her, burning the yellow out of her skin and eyes, unstitching the scars from her belly.
The fire contained inside her once again, Jemma felt seasick. Closing her eyes made it better, but then she could only walk into the wall. The big nurse took her hand and led her to the next room, and Jemma discovered that it was nice to have a helper in this enterprise she had thought would be solitary. Irene was the nurse’s name. Jemma had known it, but did not remember until their hands met. She was a smoking nurse, with a little emphysema, which Jemma took care of in the hall — she was so full of fire that she could not imagine that she couldn’t spare some for her helper, and in fact the only part of her that was weary was the part that could have held back — and a lazy thyroid, which Jemma infused with vigor as they approached the next patient, an infant recovering from a bilateral enucleation for retinoblastoma. Jemma opened her eyes on his eyeless face, and looked deep into his empty sockets. She saw his eyes rolling toward her from a great distance, two perfect white stones approaching bigger and bigger from the horizon. At last, greased with fire, they were rolling stationary in his head, and when they stopped, perfect clear blue matched and lined up with perfect clear blue, she half expected candy or quarters to come pouring from his mouth.
There was a double trio of craniosynostoses: two Crouzon’s, two Pfeiffer’s, and two Panda syndromes. Jemma wrapped each head in bandages of green fire, which muffled the screams of the children as their bones split apart and shifted, and their heads molded out of their Quasimoto shapes. Brains and minds constrained by the misshapen skulls sprang suddenly free of idiocy. There were a few other children stuck partway through a series of surgeries now never to be completed by dead genius hands, like a three-year-old boy born as jawless as an ancient fish, who’d been temporized with a strange, bony handle like the stiff beard of Tutankhamen — as Jemma fixed him a dozen chins surfaced and sank in her mind, collected on account of a relatively innocent fetish, staring at stranger boys in classrooms and supermarkets and wanting to bite their chins. For these few patients Jemma completed additions, but for most of the children on the seventh floor she replaced deletions. To a thirteen-year-old girl with a half a lung taken away on account of a carcinoid tumor Jemma restored tissue that shined swan white and billowed like curtains. She returned the gut of a three-hundred-pound seventeen-year-old who’d gladly suffered a gastric bypass then nearly died when a partially digested burrito leaked past loose staples into her abdomen. It made for a strange sort of barbecue, cooking that fat in green fire. It sizzled but did not smoke, sublimating into fire, not air, that turned and helped consume what it had just been. She confined herself in the two-chambered hearts of the cardiac kids, imagining new doors, and opening them onto new rooms. Why only four chambers, she asked herself as she worked, because she could just as easily imagine six, eight, ten, and twelve chambers, super-hearts with more room for blood and more room for love, but she restrained herself, though it was a little unsatisfying to construct a merely normal heart.