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.”“One, two, three,” he said, pointing at each of her toes and then her fingers and counting up to twenty.“More than this? How many times has piggy been to market?”“Maybe a few dozen.”“How many have I read, do you think?”“Many more,” she said, looking back at the film.“Thousands and thousands and thousands, Dr.Claflin.Now, what do you see in this film?”“I guess it’s normal.”“You guess? Is that what you’ll write in your report?” He picked up the dictaphone receiver and held it out at her.She could hear the tinny voice of the angel: “Name me, Jemma Claflin.Oh, give me a name and I will serve you.” Dr.Pudding frowned and hung it up.“It’s normal,” Jemma said.“Wrong,” said Dr.Pudding, clapping his hands in front of her face.“If you see it, never let anybody talk you out of it.” He smiled at her, his face in the dim light a tight ghastly friendly mask.“Thanks,” Jemma said, realizing as she left the room that she had just thanked him for trying to humiliate her.But shame hardly distracted her from her anxiety; it got worse after the hurried lunch with Vivian and Ishmael, and persisted through the evening and the night.“Are you awake?” she asked Rob, a few minutes after he had come in and collapsed next to her without undressing.He was clammy and smelly but she clung to him anyway, her anxiety palliated a little by the pressure of his bottom against her hips.“No,” he said.“Something weird is happening,” she said.“Understatement of the year.Understatement of all eternity.”“I mean particularly.I think I caught something from Pickie.”“Scabies?”“Crazines.““You’re not crazy,” he said.“You haven’t even heard my symptoms,” she said.“I have this feeling…”“Like you want to drink some blood?”“Like I’m forgetting something hugely important.”“That’s an intern thing,” he said.“Did I dose that drug right? Did I make that kid NPO? Is the chest tube on suction or water seal? It’s just normal.”“Something bigger,” she said.“Like something’s wrong and I’m not doing what I should do about it.”“Exactly.It’s an intern thing,” he said.“Congratulations, Dr.Claflin.My little baby’s growing up.” He scooted closer against her and said it again, his voice trailing down as he spoke.“Welcome to the club… always worried… always about to die… it’s all you can do sometimes to not fuck them up worse…”“That’s not it,” she said.She didn’t speak again, and within minutes he was snoring, but she asked herself over and over, What is it? A variety of problems presented themselves to her as she lay in the dark: Jeri was so very hairy; Sylvester’s pneumonia was sure to prove resistant to the single agent therapy upon which Dr.Snood had insisted; Dr.Chandra was still sleeping too late, and she had figured out that morning that he made up some of his lab results, but hadn’t told anyone of her discovery; her parents were dead and her lover was dead and were they waiting even now for her to join them?; she was not what she should be, she had not done what she was supposed to, this was obvious, inescapable fact; Calvin had a vision for her that she had never understood let alone fulfilled—don’t follow me but follow me your time will come behold my feast behold my offering behold the human grace but sister yours is the harder part; she was inferior to Rob, he loved her better than she loved him, purely, deeply, truly in ways that she had reserved for and lost with her dead, and he was a better doctor, like Vivian was a better student and a better doctor and a hotter mama, both of them were better because they cared more for the work, and subscribed with perfect honesty to the Committee ethic, they just did the work while Jemma just pretended and prevaricated, rounding with false vigor, presenting with false enthusiasm, caring with a false heart, no wonder Snood hated her, he saw right through her; Rob and Vivian were better friends anyway, and better people, open to receiving others into their circles of wonder and grief, sharing their hope and their fear over beer or tea or one of the strange new juices Vivian was always ordering up out of the replicator mist, while Jemma said nothing, they were already part of the project and she was a bystander because trusting is the first deadly sin, sharing is the second; the world had ended, after all, and wasn’t that a big enough problem, and wasn’t anxiety just punishment for a person who said, La la la, it was over already, for me, for a person who felt nothing and cared nothing for what was lost, and who, though she was on the boat, had still managed somehow to miss it? She submitted herself to all these problems in a spirit of open humility, yet nothing changed in her anxiety.These things might be true or not but none was the secret bother.She sat up, exhausted but totally awake, lifting Rob’s arm to smell deeply of it, then let it drop.She could bite his ass (gently) and not wake him, but if she made the faintest peep of a pager-imitation he’d be up in an instant, reaching for the phone.She got out of bed, put on her shoes, and went looking again for her mystery boy.It had been a couple days since she’d searched.But she felt the same if not worse after an hour of it, failing to catch even a glimpse of him.She had always had a hard time mustering sympathy for the victims of panic attacks, patients who slouched into the emergency room short of breath, with chest pain and tingling in their lips and fingers.You were supposed to ask them, Are you experiencing a crushing sense of doom? Now, with her hands and lips starting to tingle, and a bubbling sense of anxiety rising ever higher in her, she was better inclined toward them.She paused by the blood bank, examining a dirty sock abandoned in the hall.It was too small to belong to the child she sought.She heard a scream and the noise of breaking glass.Maybe Pickie was conducting a raid—she ran to the blood-bank window.The teller was cleaning up a spill.“It’s all right,” she said to Jemma.“Just some clumsiness and a waste of some prime O neg.” When Jemma saw the blood gleaming against the linoleum two thoughts bloomed in her head: first she remembered blood on the green linoleum of her parents’ kitchen; then she realized her period was late.She felt equal parts “Aha!” and “Oh no!” Surely every moron with a functional uterus was able to keep track of these things, even the smallest-brained furry mammal knew when she was late.But Jemma had never been late before, and the only time it had ever been even a little different was a month before—the flow had been a little decreased, and the color a little changed.Now that made sense, too [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]