“A real disease, Pickie,” Jemma said. “Come on. Start over.”
“Every disease is equally real and unreal, now,” he said. He filled his mouth with candy corn, and would not talk anymore, but Ethel raised her hand and offered to speak on an illness she had been researching.
“Atrocious Pancreas Oh!” she said. “In 1679 there was an epidemic that wiped out a third of the population of Cairo.” Jemma sighed and lay down in the grass while the kids talked of Crispy Lung Surprise and Chronic Kidney Doom. When she turned on her side and rested her head on her outstretched arm she saw that while she had been eating Rob had assembled his junior tumbling class behind her for practice on the grass. They had improved considerably over the weeks. They cartwheeled up and down the field, every toe nicely pointed, and did round-off drills in perfect formation. Half of them could do back handsprings, and three or four were doing back-flips. Rob walked among them, shouting or running after the ones who approached the edge of the roof, demonstrating form for them, and grabbing at the flying legs of an airborne pupil, to push them and help them rotate faster, and make the flip. Her own class got pulled into the fun, one by one they got sucked away from the circle, starting with Pickie, who abandoned the game he had started to somersault, slow and intrepid toward Rob — it took him forever to strike, but Rob never saw him coming. When Jarvis heard them all laughing he rose and traveled by back handspring to the other side of the field. Soon it was just Ethel and Kidney, trading descriptions of imaginary illnesses over Jemma’s prone body and eating pomegranate seeds.
“Class dismissed,” Jemma said belatedly, when they finally grew quiet, but they only lay down next to her, Kidney curling at her feet and Ethel laying her bald, black head on Jemma’s leg.
“Nap time,” said Ethel. She didn’t close her eyes, though. She watched the tumbling children, calling out every once in a while to no one in particular, “Don’t break your neck!” Jemma stretched her arm out farther, and stretched her whole body, then shifted her head so her cheek lay against the grass. She closed her eyes.
There was a hospital floating in her mind as surely as there was one floating out in the world. The hospital in her head was shaped the same as the one in the world, and inhabited by the same people, and sometimes they happened to float almost in the same place, so her image of the hospital was superimposed upon its subject. Then she thought she knew everything that was happening inside, what everyone was doing, even how everyone was feeling. She could hear the humming and clicking of the great toy in the lobby, and the unexhausted wonder of a child standing here or there around it, trying to comprehend how all its gears and spokes and pistons fit together, and which part was the prime mover that drove all the others. She sensed or imagined a pair of lovers in the emergency room, and suddenly a half-dozen bright spots of hanky-panky flashed among the other floors. Someone was contentedly polishing the new wooden floors in the old surgery suites, putting the finishing touches on the conversion she’d ordered. A math decathlon was finishing in the playroom — old accomplished geeks cheering on fresh incipient geeks from wooden bleachers constructed just for the event. A floor above, in the old NICU, it was naptime, and the crèche mothers were circulating among their sleeping charges, a few of them still considering how strange it was not to have suctioned a single baby all day, or all week, or all month.
Upstairs in the old PICU, all the sick rooms had become classrooms. A half-dozen kids sat in each one, together with one or two teachers — Jemma didn’t care to know what they were talking about. It looked a little boring, judging from how many children were staring out the window at the rippling wake of the hospital. A daydreaming child was accosted by a teacher — he asked what she was looking at out there that was so interesting. The child said she was keeping watch for land. Up another floor, in the old medical ward, it was toddler teatime at the nurses’ station. On the seventh floor the long halls were occupied by a pinewood derby track — Vivian had successfully argued against the continuation of old-world organizations like the Boy Scouts, but some of their institutions and traditions could not be squelched: hats and badges and uniforms were forbidden, but the pinewood racers must roll, and though Vivian herself burned a few of the little brown fascist jumpers, a secret cookie society proliferated. In the old heme-onc ward three of the negative pressure rooms had been consolidated into a dancing salon. They were large rooms to begin with — three of them together made a huge space. Five girls and two boys stretched at the bar, rehearsing already for a show their teachers had composed and choreographed for them. They moved with a practiced harmony that was made more striking and lovely by the sparkling light thrown up on them from the water — everybody’s students were doing better than Jemma’s.
In the old rehab gym Maggie was clogging with her students, smiling when she danced and scowling when she stopped. She was trying to teach them self-defense, too, screeching when no one else could learn to fling their shoe with her force, speed, or accuracy. She hung a bedpan from the ceiling and showed them how she could land her shoe in it from ten, twenty, and thirty paces, the last time hitting it so hard it swung up and broke through the suspended ceiling to strike against an air duct. Outside and down the hall Thelma, still at her desk, and still reading her magazines, looked up at the noise.
And on the roof, on the edge of the field, just a few yards beyond the slowly reaching shadows of the sycamore tree, you lie in the sun with your face in the grass, two children using you for a pillow, and you are seeking and finding that place where you don’t quite know if you are awake or asleep. Rushes of wind bring the shouts of tumbling children to your ears, rushes of imagination bring up the sighs of lovers or the cries of math-champions or the shrieking of jawless, bitter, angry medical students. Despite Maggie’s eternal pain the hospital is a pretty happy place, isn’t it? Put out your feelers and seek for discontent — you may not find it anywhere but here, on the roof, in you. What else do you require, to believe in it, or to be happy, you fiancee, you never-bride — O Jemma you are halfway there but still you say no, no, no. You hold the whole hospital floating and rotating in your mind, hold everyone who dwells there, feel their hope and their happiness and, falling asleep now for real into a dream of swimming candy tuna, you still say to yourself, Something terrible is going to happen.
46
Years before, Jemma had watched while one of her television heroines, a lady who had recently emancipated herself from her brother and the rest of her huge Mormon family, broke out of a giant egg in a sparkle-spangled bodysuit and sang a song called “I’m Coming Out.” The televised event was supposed to launch her career as a sensuous superstar, but she was too wholesome and inbred-looking ever to succeed at that. Though it had failed, to nine-year-old Jemma just observing it had been a moment of transcendence, and she had always wanted to do it herself. Her brother beat her to it, emerging in unsexy Mormon drag from the papier-mâché egg into which Jemma had ambivalently sealed him to startle the audience of one of the last talent shows his high school was ever to produce. He wore a meticulously recreated spangle-suit and a pair of unnaturally big and white false teeth. Everyone thought it was hilarious, and he was praised for it where anybody else would have been lynched.
“Isn’t this a little too dramatic?” Rob had asked her, when he heard her plan.
“Maybe,” Jemma said. But she had wanted to do it for so long, and circumstances seemed to have conspired to provide her with just the right opportunity: she had a pregnancy to disclose and a roller-boogie contest to win. Well, not to win — it wasn’t a winnable or losable sort of contest. Jemma hadn’t wanted that, and the whole thing was her idea. She had readdressed the issue of turning the surgical suites into a roller rink in the very first session of the new Council, wanting to test both the legitimacy and the limits of her authority. The idea had barely registered last time; this time most everybody thought it was smashing, and Jemma found it was in her power to ignore or override the people who didn’t like it. People were picking partners before the first floor plank had been laid, or the first disco ball replicated. Jemma had wanted to dance with Rob, but by the time she asked him he was already committed to Magnolia. Jemma thought it was probably within her power to take him away from her, but didn’t. She chose John Grampus instead.