“Impossible? Jemma, Dr. Claflin, how can you stand there and complain to me of impossibility? Do you think Dr. Whipple found it easy to teach his procedure? I’m sure he wanted to say, Well, I just sort of fiddle with the pancreas, and tie some things off, and remove a lot of sausage, and it sort of happens, oh my! Easy is what you want, but it’s not what you’ll get, and as long as I have any say in it your welfare state of the soul will never pass here.” He was not in the Committee room, and so did not have his little gavel, but he slammed his fist into his palm.
It was stupid, she knew, and like her, to find this reason to be miserable amid all the blossoming optimism in the hospital, but still she settled down in bed and languished under the nausea, wondering if she had not invited it back. Then she heard the tapping at the window. Like the rest of the windows on the fourth floor, it was always about half in and half out of the water, sometimes more and sometimes less, because the buoyancy of the hospital was only relatively constant, something Rob had proved early with a series of marks on the glass. Jemma looked at the window and saw only the blue sky and the edge of the water, but the tapping came again.
She climbed up on a chair to look better, and almost fell back, and did make a little scream, little sibling to the scream she’d voiced for Ishmael. There was a claw tapping just at the edge of the glass, and as she watched a giant white crab scuttle up to cover the whole bottom half of the window. It was fat, and without a spot of color except a blush of pink in its chittering mouthparts, which worked furiously as it regarded her with two dull, globular black eyes. It moved its backfins to steady itself when it drifted down, and tapped again at the glass.
“Hello there,” Jemma said. The very word mouthparts was usually enough to make her feel sick, even when she wasn’t pregnant, and the sight of them always made her feel unclean. She’d always hated crabs, and never partaken in any of the childhood feasts because she could never be convinced they were not just big bugs. This was the ugliest, scariest crab she’d ever seen, but she put her hand against the window, and tapped its message back to it with her finger, because the sight of another living creature lifted her spirits. It didn’t occur to her until later that it might have been sizing her up as a meal, imagining her as carrion, or that it was tapping at the glass because it was trying to get her with its claw. As soon as it drifted away she rushed out to tell someone about it, her nausea forgotten. She found a hundred other stories.
No one could agree on what it meant, but everyone agreed it must mean something. As Dr. Sundae put it, “Only a fool would deny the significance of a leaping whale.” It was assumed, after weeks of staring into the empty sea, that all the animals had perished when the rain washed out the seas, though the angel stated, when questioned, that every low animal everywhere, on sea or land, had been “preserved.” Were the fish preserved at a deeper level of the ocean, and had the waters now receded to that level? Had they been sequestered in a bubble at some warm latitude, and released now because the time of the waters was almost over? What about the mammals? Kidney asked the angel for a dolphin — English translator and was supplied with a box on a string to fit over her mouth, and a plug for her ear. When the dolphins came again she hung out of a PICU window and asked them, Where have you been? Where are you going? Where is everyone else? in squeaks and clicks and whistles, then listened with her head cocked at the weird spray of sound that shot back. She shook her head and furrowed her brow. “They just keep laughing,” she said.
40
The five candidates stood behind podiums on a new stage, in the middle of the lobby and under the shadow of the big toy. Jemma was in the crowd — the whole hospital had turned out to listen, even the NICU inhabitants, tricked out in soft jumpers, all of their sporty strollers parked in a bloc by the gift shop. Jemma found her attention drawn to them, when the candidates, even Vivian, started to bore her. The babies were all quiet but not still. They reached their fat little hands from stroller to stroller, stroking the big head of their nearest neighbor, or sucking on a finger or fist not theirs. They babbled softly at each other. Sometimes it seemed like they were commenting on the speakers. Anna stood near Jemma with Brenda hanging on her chest in a snuggly. The child was sleeping soundly and did not point at anybody.
It was a lively but poorly organized debate. Father Jane was moderating, asking questions submitted by the hospital population for each of the five, Dr. Snood, Dr. Sundae, Vivian, Ishmael, and Monserrat. There had been another debate three days before, diffidently moderated by John Grampus, between the score and more of people running for the lesser seats on the Council.
“We’ve been afraid all this time,” Vivian was saying, “to consider why the old world passed away, or to try to discover what the new one has to be like. I think it’s time to put this attitude behind us.”
“Some of us never had that bad attitude,” said Dr. Sundae. “There have been voices crying from the wilderness of obfuscation from the very first day. I’m talking about myself, of course.”
“Of course,” said Dr. Snood. “Dr. Sundae, I can still hear your complaints. But who doesn’t agree that the saving of lives must take precedent over idle speculation?”
“Idle speculation? Have you looked out the window lately, Doctor? Do you think anyone left on this Earth would speculate idly on that?” Dr. Snood opened his mouth to reply, but Father Jane interrupted him. She was armed with his gavel, and kept jumping in just when things started to get exciting.
“Honorable Candidates!” she said. “Please be nice. Let’s move on to the next question. Where do you see this community in one month? In two months? In three months? Ms. Vaca will speak first.”
Monserrat tapped at her microphone — she’d been doing that each time she spoke. “I think it is a stupid question, and I apologize to the person who asked it, because I know you are not stupid, and I am not saying you are stupid, no, no.” She smiled beautifully, shining her teeth all along the crowd in a hundred and eighty degree arc. “But the question, yes, it is stupid, because it simply cannot be answered. Or instead, it can be answered, but to nobody’s good. I can tell you what I think could be happening one month from now, and two months from now, and three months from now, but who cares? We could be anywhere, we could be doing anything, it depends on you.” Now she pointed, describing with her finger the same arc her teeth had just described, but in reverse.
“It depends on you what happens. If you want us to be unhappy, to be sleeping all during the day and forgetting about the children, letting the babies cry and the teenagers go hungry, then we can do that. If you want us to all be living in cardboard boxes here in the lobby, then we can do that. If you want us to keep building this place into something wonderful, a city like the great Disney World where I went in my youth and I thought, if only I could live here. I said to my mama, I want to live here. Please don’t make me leave! And my mama made this filthy, filthy thing at me.” Monserrat raised a hand and rubbed her thumb and first two fingers together in a money grubbing gesture. “And she said to me, Honey, you ain’t got the money to live here forever. But that is what you could do, you could make a place so delightful that every child here would turn to you — yes to you,” she pointed imperiously at Father Jane, “because now you are her mama, we are all of us her mama — she would say to you, Mama I never want to go away from this place, I am so happy. Do you know how incredible that is? How much of a miracle? It’s as much as what Ms. Jemma did, and as much as all the deadly waters, if we can make this place so happy, and make these children so happy that they do not even remember their old sadness, and by that I mean the old sadness of before, and the sadness of losing that. Do you understand me? Do you see it like I do? You, do you see it?” She pointed at a lab tech, Sadie the urine-tutor, who sat in the front row. Sadie coughed and blushed and nodded.