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.“Where’s the bitch?”“I’m Jemma.I’m your new student doctor.”“Where’s the bitch?”“Which bitch?”“You know.White coat.Mean little eyes.Teeth like a rat.The bitch.Like you, but a bitch.”“If you mean Maggie, she got transferred.They like to switch us around, because we’re learning.”“Transferred into a little boat? Set her floating like Captain Bly.Goodbye, bitch.Enjoy your fucking breadfruit.It’s a movie, you know.You can watch it any way you want.The old one or the new one—she remembers all of them.Or one with my brother as Mr.Christian and Uncle Poo as the Captain.Poor Uncle Poo.He was a different kind of bitch, like the ones that get slapped around.He was everybody’s bitch, but she made him so big inside he just yelled and yelled and in the end he had his day and Mr.Christian was stuck on this island without his pants.A girl shouldn’t see her brother’s thingie flapping in the wind, not when he’s all grown up.She’ll change the endings if you want, or even if you don’t.”“How are you feeling?” Jemma asked, hugging her clipboard and trying to look friendly.She thought that first impressions counted for a lot with teenagers.She beamed the thought at the girl in the bed: I’m not a bitch I’m not a bitch I’m not a bitch.“Same old deal,” said Magnolia, drawing up her long legs next to her, turning to her side and pushing her blanket off.She raised her slim arm and pointed with one long finger at five joints in succession, rating the pain in each one: left elbow, right elbow, left knee, right knee, right hip.“Seven,” she said, “eight, eight, seven, six.”“May I touch?”“Gentle,” she said, so Jemma hardly pressed at all as she felt the joints.Still, Magnolia gasped and moaned, but yawned once in the middle of a moan.Maggie, in truth an anxious and stingy personality, had warned Jemma at length about the wily medication-seeking behaviors of sicklers.She had five separate ways of deciding if pain was real or not, before she gave painkillers.“You got to look at the blood pressure,” she said.“You got to look at the pulse.You got to look at the pupils.You got to kick the bed—if they’re really hurting then they won’t even notice.” Jemma had stared out the window at the dark, empty water while Maggie talked.Every so often someone would think they saw a light in the dark, but tonight Jemma saw nothing but her own face and Maggie’s chinless reflection.“It’s always real,” she had said, not caring to hear the fifth method.“Sorry,” Jemma said.Magnolia gave her PCA button a push.“Are we done here?”“Almost,” Jemma said, listening to her chest and her belly, and catching a glimpse of her My Little Pony panties, a revelation, as she ranged her hips.How stupid, to think you could know anything about anybody in five minutes, even if you were pawing at them like a confused, horny monkey.But even if it was all pretend, it was nice to know, in that moment, that Magnolia was no hollow-eyed demerol fiend of the sort who are hated and pitied for their need, ER ghouls who pass from hospital to hospital, generating huge charts and huge ill will.With her menagerie of stuffed animals, and shelf of middle school romance novels as wholesome as the odor of her hair, and her innocent panties, she was suddenly one of the youngest fifteen-year-olds Jemma had ever met.It was something Vivian had taught her about adolescent girls, that an old twelve was older by far than a young fifteen or sixteen, and that the quickest, if most cursory way, to gauge this true age was by looking under their skirts, not for the Tanner stage but for the panties of innocence or experience.“Are you all right?” Magnolia asked, because Jemma had paused with her hand on the girl’s neck, palpating and palpating and swaying a little bit.“I don’t hurt there.I never hurt there.”“All done,” Jemma said, feeling herself blush.“Thanks for being patient.” She’d been having a daydream—prancing panty-ponies had shown her that Magnolia’s joints were glowing blue under the skin and she felt very certain that the cartilage was… depressed.It only needed an infusion of vigorous hope to bring the pain down to zeros all across the board.Was it a symptom of pregnancy, she’d asked Vivian, to lose control of your imagination? Stories kept creeping uninvited into her head—Ella and the thousand Arabian ostomy bags, Kidney and the Giant—and illnesses took on colors and shapes and causalities ridiculous and fantastic and plainly stupid.Cindy’s gut had been nibbled short by the worm of dissatisfaction; Jeri’s liver was shot through with veins of coal; Tir had a mouse in his head, nibbling the connections between hand and mind.“Schizophrenia, maybe,” said Vivian.“Pregnancy, no.”“Thanks for not being the bitch,” Magnolia said.“Can we turn up the PCA?”“I’ll talk to the team.”“That would be a no, then,” she said, and turned over again, drawing the blanket up over her head.She wouldn’t say another word, though Jemma stayed another five minutes trying to draw her out.The only answer she got was the happy chirp of the PCA when Magnolia pressed her button.Juan Fraggle was next, a boy who had failed despite great effort to die on the night of the storm.Harsh, unremitting AML chemo had decimated his immune system, and made him host to a nasty fungus which Dr.Sashay and others had only managed to tickle with the antibiotics they’d chosen.“Mucor,” she said of the fungus.“It even sounds like a fucking monster, doesn’t it? I could hear it snapping its fingers at me.” She tended to personify aspects of any illness, and then take personally their assaults, so this fungus was sassy, and that mutated cell was crazy, just as the ocean was critical, or the thunder was full of wrath.She’d hurried in that night through the storm, with saving him in mind.But when she consulted with Cotton and the resident on call and saw the boy, who on cursory inspection already appeared quite dead, she’d had the conversation with his parents—this is the time we’ve been talking about all these months, and now you must say goodbye.His family stood around his bed in a circle, eyes closed and heads bowed, some of them not understanding Dr.Sashay’s words but all of them appreciating her earnestness.They prayed for him, hands together until the hospital rose and they all fell down.In their first hours afloat, the eighth floor behaved no differently than the rest of the hospital.The children there, like those in NICU, all tried to die.Blood pressures bottomed out, blood was vomited or defecated by the pint, lungs blew out as suddenly as a tire on a quiet highway drive.Dr.Sashay and Cotton and all the nurses were distracted from Juan by these other emergencies; they had to tend to them themselves, since every child in the PICU was behaving similarly [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]