“Sorry,” Jemma said. “Many delays.”
“I’ve been bored to death. You can’t watch movies on this thing, you know.”
“Sorry.”
“And we’ve got a meeting in twenty minutes.” Jemma said she knew that. “Well, I guess we’ll just have to skip to the good part, damn it.”
“My gums are bleeding,” Jemma said as she climbed up on the table. She took off her robe and her scrub top and lay back with her head pillowed on the little pile of clothing.
“That’s normal. Look out, this shit’s cold.” She squirted a dollop of ultrasound goop on Jemma’s belly. Jemma shuddered, but didn’t gasp.
“And my teeth feel loose. And I’m double-jointed all of a sudden. Is that normal, too?”
“Yes, of course. Don’t you remember anything from OB?”
“Sorry. I forgot about all the bloody-mouthed toothless contortionists I met on the ward.”
“Shut up. This is harder than it looks.” Vivian had done a four-week ultrasound rotation at the beginning of her fourth year, but was still very uncertain of her skills. “Are you excited?”
“Maybe,” Jemma said quietly.
“Liar. You’re totally excited. I’m totally excited. Shit, that’s your gallbladder. Where’s Rob?”
“It would have been too obvious, the two of us traipsing around down here. I said I’d bring him the tape.”
“Wait… that’s colon. Wait! No, that’s colon, too. When’s the last time you had to poop?” She moved the transducer around Jemma’s belly, now in wide sweeping arcs, now in tiny steps. Jemma closed her eyes and tried to look, too, imagining a mystical green eye peering through her belly to reveal a perfect baby floating asleep inside her. She saw the little quarter-baked thing, smaller even than the brave twenty-four-weekers she’d seen out in the world upstairs. It had Rob’s blue eyes and her own false red hair. She got a pretty good picture, but it was all just her imagination. She had tried and tried to see it the way she could see Vivian’s heart beating in her chest, but it was still like looking at her own nose. “Jesus, you’ve got a big colon,” Vivian said. “No… no… yes! Wait… yes! There it is!” She swung the monitor around so Jemma could see. “Open your eyes, you fucking moron. What are you afraid of? He’s fine. A beautiful baby boy.”
“Nothing,” Jemma said. “I think I wanted to be surprised.”
“Fuck that,” Vivian said. “DR surprises are bad news. Will you open your eyes or do I have to pry open your lids?” Jemma looked, just one eye at first, but wept from both of them as soon as she saw the image. It was just a mess of static, and yet it managed to contain in it, ghosts among the snow, the faces of everyone she ever loved.
I see him, too. Oh yes, hello little thing. It wasn’t really so long ago when there seemed to me no greater disaster than a baby in the womb, a seed of corruption and an innocent who would be abused even by the very air of his first breath. Go back! Undivide, and involute, and shrink back to safety. How I puzzled over the means of it. Now I am proud, and wish I had an ear to put on Jemma’s belly, because that is what you are supposed to do, immortal ears of the spirit seeming invasive to me now. Still, I listen, and speak. Hello, little one. Let me be the one to tell you it is finally good news again, to be born.
You stir, and turn your face to me, though your eyes are too young to open. Go away, you say. Leave me alone. I know it isn’t time yet to wake up.
45
Jemma was sure that anybody would have been better at this than she was. Ishmael would have brought a sense of friendly anonymous majesty to the job. Dr. Snood, for all his prim snide fussbudgetry, would have been their best approximation of a statesman. Dr. Sundae was grim and wrathful and dull, but Jemma had no doubt she would have proved an expert wielder of authority — without any office at all she still inserted herself into Council meetings and ordered people around, and was lobbying hard for the position of chief magistrate. Vivian would have had the whole place performing complex musical numbers, or water ballet. It was easy to imagine her lifted on a ninety-foot-high plume of water while below her shirtless constituents sang her name and formulated rhyming theses of causation, regret, and redemption. Even Monserrat, a tamale in one hand and a hammer in the other, would have led them all, somehow.
But me, Jemma thought, I just sit here. That was what she was doing at the moment, just sitting there at the head of a Council meeting. They were in the same room as always, but they had brought in a new set of tables after the election, a small one with room for four where Jemma sat with Ishmael, Monserrat, and Vivian, and a large C-shaped one, where across from them Dr. Tiller, the Secretary, and the other eleven members of the Council sat. Jemma tried not to stare out the huge windows. There was a school of flying fish that seemed to be trying to attract her attention.
They were talking about how to use the ER space. The discussion was heated, but Jemma had found that their discussions were always heated. These were the sort of people that could argue passionately about the contents of the salad bar.
“I think it would make things feel more normal,” Monserrat was saying, “if people could go to the market again. Imagine it: waking up on a Saturday to go buy fresh carrots and parsley and rutabagas for your family.”
“It could be a new social center,” Dr. Snood said. “Someplace for people just to run into one another, and discuss things. A place for serendipitous conversations — great things can come of those.”
“I understand the virtues of raw vegetables,” Dr. Tiller said. “But it seems to me that it would all just be for show. People will return to their rooms with bags of groceries and then toss them out the window. Who’s cooking here? Who has money to pay for these things? Will we print our own money with which to buy our unnecessary staples?”
“We should think twice,” said Dr. Sundae, from the audience, “before filthifying ourselves with lucre.”
“The vegetables will be for free,” Monserrat said. “It will be like a paradise. You come up to my carrot cart, you ask, you receive.”
“Does anyone else see a big wedge of classroom space filling up with cabbages?” Vivian asked.
“Or a bar,” said Ishmael. Drs. Sundae and Tiller hissed at him. “A coffee bar,” he said.
“Nothing wrong with a real bar,” said Frank, and Connie seconded her husband vigorously.
“Why not make it what it already is,” said Karen. “A place where people can come to meet, and kiss, if they want. But not in secret, or not necessarily in secret.”
“A sex club?” Vivian asked.
“Nothing so crude,” Karen said. “A kissing marketplace. Just a place to go kiss. A kissy place.”
“Just call it a sex club,” said Vivian.
I should veto something, Jemma thought to herself, but the discussion had not degraded or escalated sufficiently to really require her intervention. Not much did require her intervention, and she had not forced any ideas of her own through their pseudo-legislative process since their very first session, when she had struck a blow against the surgeons which, while she didn’t regret it, did not make her as proud or happy as it had. She watched the fish for a few moments. On that day the hospital had rotated so the Council room was in the stern. The fish were playing in the wake, and seemed to be competing in a contest to jump the whole wide thing. She laughed when two of them, jumping from opposite sides, knocked into each other. Then she noticed it was quiet, and that everyone was looking at her.
“Let’s leave the sex club in some undiscovered basement,” she said. “You all seem to be asking the same thing, though. Do we have enough space for people to hang out and feel normal in? Maybe the answer is that we can’t ever have enough space like that.” She sat back in her chair and folded her arms. “I’m a fake,” she’d told Rob, and “This was an accident,” and “I wasn’t actually elected,” and “What were they thinking?”