“Dude,” Chandra said, smiling and looking happier than Rob had ever seen him. That was a miracle, anyway, to make glum Dr. Chandra grin and skip and clap his hands like an ingénue candystriper. “That shit’s all over. The days of putting your head down and muddling through are over. Something else is coming now.”
“Well,” Rob said, “I see what you mean. But it’s different for me. It’s all part of the same thing. It has to be, or else the bad part is unbearable, and not even this”—he put his palm against his chest, meaning to indicate his body and his health and his life, everything that Jemma had restored to him—“is enough to make up for the bad part. You know?”
“All I know is that there should be a parade,” Dr. Chandra said, scrawling ALL BETTER in a last chart and snapping it shut. “We should throw Tiller or Snood or Dolores out the window. Or even Jemma, but that would be in a good way, like they do to the little short person when a crew team wins a race.”
“Not her,” Rob said.
“But something. We have to start with something.” Dr. Chandra walked to the window, opened it, and threw the chart out.
“Hey, Tiller’s going to throw a fit.”
“Fuck her.” He took another chart from the table and sent it sailing over the water. It skipped once on the surface before it sank. “What’s in here? A bunch of old news.” He threw another one.
“You’re crazy,” Rob said, and laughed.
“It’s not enough,” Chandra said, throwing one more chart. “It’s not big enough. If you help me, we can do something bigger.” He looked around the unit, fastening his eyes on one of the nurses busy redecorating one of the patient bays.
“I won’t help you do that,” Rob said. But instead of grabbing the nurse, Dr. Chandra went into another room and started to drag the bed toward the window.
“Come on!” Dr. Chandra said. “Don’t just sit there.” So Rob helped him wrestle the huge, heavy bed, up to the window, and together they pushed at it while two nurses shouted at them, one discouraging while the other encouraged. The bed became stuck when they had it half out. Rob pushed and pushed, but Chandra backed up and threw himself at the thing, hitting it with his chest and his arms, and then launching wild kicks at the foot rail, so it budged in spastic measures, and finally tipped, and fell. One nurse cheered, the other groaned. Chandra looked at the bed, floating a moment then sinking past the deeper reaches of the hospital, and said, “Good fucking riddance.”
35
When is a hospital not a hospital? Not when it is floating — that had already been illustrated, Jemma thought, by their first trimester at sea. The everyday business had been executed so routinely, sometimes, that it was almost possible to forget the extraordinary circumstances, and imagine that the I’ve been here forever feeling was just the usual product of an extended call.
You could call the place by any other name, and it would remain what it was — calling it the Excitatorium or the Clown Palace would not dispel any of the terrors it contained nor would any be added to it by naming it the House of Pain, or Chez Poke and Prod, or Elmo’s Grief.
You could take away the fancy machines and it would be lessened but not changed in the way Jemma was thinking of. She’d heard the stories told by well-traveled Samaritan attendings, of IV solutions suspended in used beer bottles, and the dreadful improvised barium enema rigs that must do in a potentially fatal pinch. Jemma removed and replaced these factors and others in her mind, singularly and in combination, long before the event that she thought of as Thing Two, and others were calling the Harrowing of the Hospital, or the Other Thing, or the Good Thing. Pickie Beecher called it the Night of the Great and Awful Jemma.
Take away the children and nothing would change — she knew that, too. The unfulfilled ambitions of an empty hospital make it even more intensely hospital-like. A hundred nurses with no data to fill the many boxes of their flow sheets, surgeons sharpening their knives in anticipation of a feast never to arrive, radiologists staring forlornly at their empty light boxes; in their lonely boredom they’d manufacture a hospital-feeling so intense Jemma was sure it would be palpable and oppressive. Leave the children and take away the sickness and then… what?
When she was stuck deep in her surgery rotation she had daydreamed of destroying the hospital, the surgeons, and surgery in general, dreams in which she set the surgeons’ heads on fire with her mind, or gave voice to a high shriek of protest that made their eyeballs pop, or became so furious and despairing that she collapsed into herself like a black hole and sucked after her into the void the whole building and everyone in it, especially the surgeons, who came to her little by little, piece by piece. She had never dreamed of making them and their art superfluous, but that’s what she had done. Now they had a hospital full of well children, none of whom had lapsed back into sickness despite the predictions of the gloomiest doomsayers of the Committee. So Jemma kept asking herself, Was it still a hospital that they were living in?
She answered sometimes yes and sometimes no, and decided at last that the answer was different for every person. For the children who had thrown off the habits of illness as easily and as thoroughly as their sickbed sheets, the answer was no. For parents and doctors and nurses and students, all those who had been just doing the work for the past three months, who had their sanity in some measure invested in the hospitality of the hospital, the adjustment was more gradual — there were nurses still taking every-four-hour vitals, and half the teams were still rounding, though some days it was very hard to find the children, who were scattered all over the hospital at forty and more activities.
“Is this a hospital or a summer camp?” Dr. Tiller had demanded from out of the audience at a Committee meeting, called on their eighty-first day at sea, to decide what to do with the hundreds of children no longer distracted by the miserable entertainments of their illnesses.
“Which would you prefer?” asked Vivian. Dr. Tiller shook her head, but said nothing. She was one of those people who was having trouble adjusting.
“But we must teach the children,” said Monserrat, for the fifth time.
“And amuse them,” said Dr. Snood. “Though not too frivolously, Carmen,” he said to Dr. Tiller. “And rest assured, drafting a new charter doesn’t mean decreasing our readiness to resume care when that becomes necessary.”
“Well, don’t expect me to teach basket weaving,” said Dr. Tiller.
“I can do that,” said John Grampus. “I’m good at that.” Jemma, just another observer, didn’t participate in the unanimous vote to formulate a program of education and amusement, and only offered an opinion in the debate over content which followed when Dr. Snood forced one from her. She kept waiting for him to yell at her, for some sort of punishment appropriate to what she’d done, but Dr. Snood was like everybody else — he presented her with smiles and smiles punctuated by a sudden look, caught from the corner of her eye, of puzzled fear.
Over six hours the Committee produced a list of subjects to be taught and diversions to be offered: the standard reading and writing and math; literature in English, Spanish, and Cantonese; biology; chemistry; rudimentary physics; the history of the old world, and a class set aside for speculation on the possibilities of the new one to come; health and hygiene and sex education for the curious and non-curious peri-pubescents; music and art and film appreciation and history, as well as group and individual music lessons (almost every resident and attending played an instrument well enough to teach it) and a band and a junior orchestra if recruits could be found; physical education of the old, dodgeball and rope-climbing sort; gymnastics; ballet; jazz and modern dance; clogging (one of Jemma’s two suggestions to the Committee); tai chi; basketball on a court to be set up in the lobby; soccer on the roof; daily matinees and evening screenings of suitable films (another list to follow); a thespian association of adults and children to present plays and musicals in the rapidly crowding lobby; and other activities — the list, when finished, was long, and hopeful, and the act of composing it left the composers in an almost universally pleasant mood, even Dr. Tiller, but not Dr. Sundae. The body would still not commit to formal religious instruction, though Dr. Sundae struck her fist on the table and declared, “We are afloat in a sea of wrath!” Neither would they adopt Jemma’s proposal that the walls between the surgery suites be knocked down and the entire complex turned into a roller-boogie rink.