“I certainly am not,” Jemma said.
“Dr. Sundae says you might be.”
“Dr. Sundae is very impressionable.”
“How do you know you’re not Jesus?” asked Juan Fraggle.
“Don’t you think a person would know if she were Jesus?” Josh Swift countered.
“I used to worry,” said Juan, “that I was the devil, but I didn’t know it. Nobody knew it but the devil, and one day he was going to come for me and say, Son.”
“How could you be the devil and not know it?” asked Josh.
“Because I wasn’t actually the devil, I was his son. But I was the devil like Jesus is God. It was really complicated.”
“My mom always said Jesus would be a girl next time,” said Ethel Puffer.
“And your names are kind of the same,” said Valium.
“And you have long hair like his,” said States’-Rights.
“You’re white like Jesus,” said Jarvis.
“I think you are Jesus,” said Cindy Flemm, “and you’re just too scared to admit it.”
“Or you’re just testing our faith,” said Shout. “Testing who can see you for you who you are, so you know who deserves the goods.”
“I’m not Jesus,” Jemma said again, patiently.
“Okay, Jesus!” said Jarvis, and then they all began to chant it, “Okay, Jesus!” Even Pickie chanted, though solemnly. Jemma called ineffectually for them to be quiet. After asking them for the fifth time to stop she leaped down from her table and hovered over Kidney. She clapped her hands over the child’s head; a silent flare of green fire burst from between her fingers and fell over the girl’s hair.
“Could Jesus do this?” Jemma asked. Stiff rods of flame grew out from her fingernails, and she curled them in an I’ll-get-you-my-pretty gesture over Kidney’s face. Jemma meant the gesture to be empty show — the child was well, there was nothing to fix — but she realized, pretending to be about to strike, that she could. Feeling certain she could dash the girl’s face to the floor, she stepped back, dropping her hands. The child was still flinching away but not crying.
“But he was fierce too,” Pickie said.
“Look,” said Jemma. “I’m just me, but I swear if I hear any different, you all will be the first to know.” That seemed to satisfy them. The lesson began with all of them composing themselves in their spots on the floor, being quiet and becoming aware of their own breathing. There were no animals to experiment on, no lame bunny for every child to lay his hands upon. Instead, Jemma had a wounded teddy bear. She’d stabbed it herself, a couple thrusts with a scalpel in its round belly. She’d pulled out a little stuffing, and pried out one of its eyes with a spoon. She put it in the center of the circle, knowing no one could heal it except with a needle and thread, but thinking its plight might draw out a spark from someone.
They all furrowed their brows quite impressively at the thing, but no one glowed, or shot sparkles from their eyes. Kidney fell asleep. They could not heal the bear, but they had better luck with an imaginary puppy, which they constructed together, piece by piece from his wet black nose to his short thumping tail. As soon as it was complete they began to afflict it with nose-rot, dog-dropsy, a broken paw, a broken heart, sudden blindness, bald-ass syndrome (courtesy of Jarvis), tooth-rot; a rhabdomyosarcoma arising from its right leg; dog-Down’s syndrome; prune-belly; apricot-head; bloody tears, and the flu. What one child afflicted, the next must lift. Jemma imagined the sad thing twitching in the middle of their circle, and called out what she saw as the children related their almost universal success until Pickie broke the puppy’s heart and Ethel could not (or would not) heal it.
“It’s an awful way to die,” she said. She was folded up in the only perfect lotus of the group, and her eyes were shut tight, so her make-up made it look as if she had no eyes at all, just deep empty black sockets. “It hurts so bad, and his heart can’t take it. His intestines are turning to dust. He’s walking in a circle ’cause he can’t get comfortable. Every time his heart beats it feels like somebody just stabbed him in the chest. That’s seventy or eighty stabs a minute!”
“Then I fix him and he’s fine,” Jemma said, but not everyone was convinced, and Kidney, awake again, wept for the puppy. For another fifteen minutes she had them consider the color green, and fill themselves up with green, and imagine their every organ turning green until it had to come leaking out of their ears. Fully half of them fell asleep, and Pickie Beecher would not participate at all. “I do not like that color,” he said.
For the last fifteen minutes of class she had them don imaginary clogs and she taught them a few steps, swearing them to secrecy lest her name become underlined on Maggie’s list. The clogging went better than the healing. Each of them picked up the steps with minimal instruction, and Jarvis did not proclaim clogging to be something practiced by the strictly gay, and Ethel and Pickie looked happy and almost normal as they danced, but then who could clog gloomily?
After they’d all gone on to their next class, Jemma remained behind in the conference room, seated again on the table, holding the bear and staring at the places where they’d been sitting, imagining she could see the spots of warmth on the carpet. She put her face in her hands and held them all in her head, considering the thin green strands that bound them to her. She didn’t know if they were real and invisible, or entirely an illusion, part of the hangover from what she’d done. But they were with her, these twelve and all the others, bits of them always in her head. Pickie Beecher was different, equally present if not more so, a black mote floating in her mind. Already a singular and unique wrongness, he was even more noticeable because he was alone now, because he alone marred the perfect health of the hospital. Jemma found that she always had a very strong suspicion of where he was.
You took Him away from me, Ethel said, her face rose and dove in the darkness like a tin midway duck. Josh Swift asked, Can you make my hands bigger? I don’t think Wayne really likes me, said Cindy Flemm. Kidney and Valium and States’-Rights and Shout spoke all together, You can have all the new bones, every one of them. Just give us back our father. Jarvis said, You’re the weirdest bitch in the whole wide world. Thank you, said Magnolia. Thank you over and over, like forever. Juan Fraggle asked, Did you eat my fungus? Marcus Guzman said, I saw everybody, when I was gone. Pickie Beecher said, You can’t catch me! You’ll never catch me! and ran away at great speed, covering miles and miles but never leaving her head. She had not rounded on anyone since Thing Two, except in her head, and the phantoms she’d visited while lying in bed had engaged her in conversations that still echoed. She sat there a little while longer, hesitating to go outside, not particularly eager to meet all the stares, and listened.
* * *
Rob was still teaching his class when Jemma went to fetch him. They were going together to the lobby, to listen to Father Jane give another talk. Jemma would rather have taken a nap, but Rob had insisted. “Just come and listen,” he said. “She really knows what she’s talking about!” He had been going faithfully to her auditorium services every Saturday and Sunday. Now she was too popular for the two hundred-seat auditorium and lectured in the lobby.
Rob taught in the big third-floor playroom. He’d moved all the toys and tables to the sides of the room, and laid down mats in strips along the floor, to make space and comfort for tumbling. He taught gymnastics in the afternoon to children of every age, and in the morning he taught calculus to a half dozen little eggheads.
He was walking down the mat against a busy traffic of somersaulting children, leaning down to speak encouragement or push on a bottom paused on the top of its arc. The tumbling children passed all the way to the end of the room, then started back the way they’d come. They started to learn cartwheels next. Rob demonstrated, rolling off his hands and feet so smooth and swift that Jemma wondered why he didn’t just travel like that all the time. The children fell in shrieking, laughing piles when they tried it, except for Jarvis, who was as clumsy as anyone on his first pass, but improved drastically each time he tried again, so by his fifth turn he was approximating the grace of his teacher. When the end of class came he had to be restrained to keep him from tumbling more. From fifty feet away Jemma could see how angry he was, and read off his lips the curses he mumbled.