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.“They think I’m stupid upstairs, too, but they’re nicer.They’re just nicer people.”“You know more than me,” Jemma offered.“You’re a student,” he said simply.“Sort of.I guess there aren’t any students any more.We’re all in the program now, caught in its clutches.The program—I’d been counting down the days left in residency and now it’s going to last forever.It’s not that different than before.You never get to leave and there’s no life outside, and everybody’s horribly depressed because nothing good ever happens here, and it’s the ugly truth about the program that they pretend to care about you eating and sleeping and learning and not wanting to die every minute of your work day, but really they care about you only as far as they can kick you or as deeply as they can fuck you, and nobody pretended more lamely or cared more superficially than our director.How are you? he’d say, and stare at you with his zombie eyes.Call me Dad.We’re all one family—what a horribly unfunny joke.I used to be so jealous, sometimes, watching all the regular people outside—I’d sit in the park and even the homeless people seemed as happy and free as fat little hobbits.But now”—he clapped his hands together, startling Jemma, who always had trouble staying awake around hour twenty-four, and was starting to drift—“just like that, the hospital ate the whole fucking world, and now nobody will ever get out or go home.Do you ever wonder if it would be more pleasant around here if Dr.Tiller were dead? It’s probably a sin to think like that.The angel says it’s okay, but I don’t believe her.”Jemma wasn’t sure if she should continue with the signout, so she said, “The angel’s a good listener.”“Yeah,” he said.“What about Bed 3?” She told him the night’s story on that patient, and on the others he was responsible for, 5 and 8 and 13 and 17 and 18, and then his ten babies upstairs.She became lost in her notes, not sure who had thrown up and who hadn’t, or who had spiked, or which baby got the weird purpuric blotch that was shaped just like lost Australia.Chandra was sympathetic.“They’re all kind of the same, anyway,” he said.When they were finished she went upstairs to start her official morning rounds before Dr.Sasscock could find her—she had carried some of his patients overnight, too.Brenda was lounging in her isolette, looking quite relaxed and even, in her own way, rather healthy.Sound asleep, she nonetheless lifted an arm to point as soon as Jemma stepped up on the dais.“Hello, little thing,” Jemma said.“I get to visit you every morning now, you know, and be your own special moron.Your very own moron, to do a little dance for you when you’re sad, to lie down at your feet when you need to lord it over somebody, and when you are hungry you can say, Hey, moron, peel me a grape!” The baby dropped her arm, but continued to stare while Jemma felt her head and listened to her chest and belly.She had grown—now she was a thirty-six-weeker, almost big enough to be born, and almost big enough to have gone home, in the old world.Jemma had pictures of her in her new camera, and stored on the computer in the call room, documenting her many visits.Day by day and week by week she looked more human, though never much like a normal baby, with her toaster-shaped head and her train-wreck face and her many-fingered hands, not to mention the tubes that grew as certainly as her more natural appendages.There was still not much body to cover, and not much work involved in a full exam, even as her improving health allowed more detailed probing and firmer poking.But Jemma, when she was done with her exam, felt suddenly tired.It often happened this way.The first twelve hours of call were all right.Fifteen was a logy hour, but sixteen through twenty were fine.Zombie time started at hour twenty-four, and the big crash came in the morning of the next day, at hour twenty-five, when she could hardly remember her name and might fall asleep on her feet if she stopped moving for too long.She felt the crash impending now; to ward it off she closed up the isolette and put her head down on top of the box, meaning to keep it there ever so briefly—sometimes three minutes of sleep could keep you going for another hour.She fell asleep immediately, her hands relaxing where they hung at her sides, and her mouth opening a little, so her breath clouded the plastic.There now; goodnight, Jemma.Sleep well, for you’ll not sleep long, and since I am not a preserving angel I’ll not be able to catch you when the drop attacks come during walk-rounds, the creeping sleepiness that you feel coming more completely over you as the endless seconds pass and Emma tries to make you understand the differences between the three types of total anomalous pulmonary venous return.The big velvet sheet drops down over you, somehow managing to cover your feet and legs and belly and chest and shoulders before it covers your head and your eyes, and then you’ll be on the floor, awake already as soon as you’ve hit, all the insensitivists peering at you, disappointed at the already dissipated scent of a likely intubation.Sleep on, hard and deep.The customary morning bustle of the NICU will proceed around you, and the nurses will pay you, for the most part, only cursory attention.Nobody bears you any ill will, though one or two of them understand that you must have a pile of work to do, and yet they do not wake you because the prospect of your suffering pleases them just a little.Anna, arrived to feed the baby, doesn’t wake you, either, but her motives are pure: she thinks you need your rest, thinks you look worn out and a little ugly, and while she is waiting for the formula to run down through the tube, does your hair for you, and you will wake in half an hour with none of your morning work done but with a hairdo, three braids coiled on top of your head in a pattern that seems to your fuzzed-up mind as complex as the worst congenital heart lesion, that makes you, in your blue-green scrubs and dancing clogs and canary-colored robe, the very picture of post-call glamour.After rounds, Jemma hid in the PICU staff bathroom rubbing on her eyes, a measure usually sufficient to drive a headache away, but one that looked so alarming to people who saw her driving the heel of her hand into her orbit, and who heard the curious, wet noises that her eyeball made when she did it, that it required privacy.She sighed, pressing harder with both hands, and saw floating bits of color in the dark behind her eyelids, here and there an emerald sparkle among them.She saw her brother’s face flash unbidden in the same darkness, pale and dead, how she imagined that his open-casket funeral face would have looked—the face a natural death would have given him [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]