by Ellen Cooney
My jackets are loose, in cottons and light wools. My pants, black or dark gray, have hidden elastic waists, like sweatpants for professionals. Sometimes I wear Crocs like the nurses, but it’s usually sneaker-like flats.
Maybe, if you’re sick or injured and alone in a room you very much want to get out of, the first thing you’d notice, when I walk in, is my hair. It’s frizzy more than curly, needing most of the time a trim. The color is a gingery shade of light brown, no gray yet but I’m sure it’s on the way.
Maybe you’ll decide with my fizzy spray I am wearing a personal aura that happens to be part of my head. Or I might be wearing a wig, which was first blown about in a hurricane, then plugged for a shock in a socket.
My body has the shape of a pear. You may think I need to be advised to work out, but I get plenty of exercise walking halls.
Always, there is the collar, my fingers so adept at studding it in place, I barely know I’m doing it.
It’s never off me anymore. It’s there when it isn’t. I used to think going to work was like an actor costuming up—that every room of every patient was a stage. In my early days I was frozen all the time with stage fright: all those faces with backgrounds of pillows, all those eyes turning my way, all those people in all those beds, and what was I supposed to say to them?
As if I’d forgotten my lines. As if lines had been written.
And back would come the question, thudding in my head like the sounds of a dull old bell. I like to think I know so much, and then I don’t know anything. What to say when there are no words?
How do I do my job? What to say? What to say?
I believe in expecting light, even when it feels like a lie, because the eyes of souls see what plain old eyes do not.
Three
I arrived too late to make a visit to the chapel to sit in the hush and gather myself.
My apartment-for-one was in a development just a dozen miles away, but getting ready to go to work in the dark was still taking too long. Just before leaving I had a meal of toast and cheese, two plums, and plain yogurt with maple syrup mixed in generously. I had downed two large mugs of coffee.
Was that my breakfast? I still had no idea.
The drive is a straight line on our bypass of the nearby highway, but that took longer too. Stupidly, I’d tried to rev myself up—because the rev is in need of some revving—by blasting songs I hadn’t listened to since high school. I had saved those CDs: metal and rap and anything like a tunnel of noise to enter and want never to leave.
I’m sentimental about the days when I was cool. I loved being a teenager. I loved pretending I was someone else and really pulling it off. I had put into hiding the me I knew I was, like I was running a secret protective service for myself. Like I was keeping my own vigil.
When I finally got my family together in a room to tell them I would train for chaplaincy and be ordained, my parents and my sister and brothers dropped their jaws, in the same way exactly, and went into temporary open-eye comas. That’s how good of a secret I had kept.
Pearl Jam, I blasted in my car. Aerosmith, Guns N’ Roses, Metallica.
I was driving to work like I was seventeen again, riding around packed in a back seat, toking on every joint passed to me, slugging whatever we had for liquor, barreling along old country roads with turns as curved as boomerangs while singing my head off, being invincible, like the night was the only place to know you’re all the way alive, and who was I kidding? I was thirty-six and I was poking along below the speed limit nervously, like my body was impaired, like I was scared of the light of a bubblegum suddenly shining behind me, a cop on my tail. Like I had skipped middle age entirely and now I was old, all my systems slowed down, slowed down.
I didn’t know the words anymore to those songs. And then I couldn’t stop by the chapel for some stillness before facing whatever I was going to face.
“Welcome to the night shift, Reverend, where nothing ever happens and we’re paid to sit around and play games on our phones, ha ha ha,” a nurse said to me, my first night. In less than half an hour I was fully in on the joke.
All the same, I was hoping the hours ahead would pass like a smooth, languid river, bearing me gently along.
“May I not screw up anyone worse than they are already. May I do no harm that can’t be undone, probably by someone else.”
I never lost the habit of saying that when I’m about to go on duty. The new baby chaplain I used to be is inside me as just a small souvenir, but I don’t think she’ll ever stop piping up. If she materialized right now, like a little talking hologram, perhaps standing in the palm of my hand, in her brand new collar and a colorful stole and maybe vestments too, what would she tell me?
“I think your soul is broken,” she might say.
“And you don’t have a clue what to do about it,” she might say.
That would make her a truth teller. I knew it.
But it wasn’t as if I wished for a way to not be broken. Maybe I was too tired. Maybe I’d given up on something, in a practical, realistic manner. Out of necessity.
I wanted to call it quits. To accept I could not go on like this. That I’d come to the end of being here and doing what I do.
Every moment I didn’t tell my department I was leaving was a moment to hope I could keep on going as I was, as I had become.
I looked up. A plane was passing fairly low, almost invisible in the night-clouds; the sky was too overcast for stars. I raised my arm and wiggled my fingers in a wave.
A man I’d sat with had worked in an airport his whole adult life, as a baggage handler. “Intellectually disabled” were the words assigned to him. He was a loader of incoming luggage to conveyor belts. He understood the reality of his illness—that it was terminal. Just like a place in an airport.
He hadn’t asked for a chaplain. He explained he did not need a professional talking to him about what would happen to him when he left this world. But he felt that, since I seemed to enjoy his company, I might as well stick around and make myself useful.
He wanted me to speak to him as if he were about to depart on a plane, and I had accompanied him to a certain gate. I could only talk about what I observed there: a counter, seats for people waiting, the airline people in their uniforms, enormous windows looking out at the tarmac, a runway. I was forbidden to mention the checking of bags or having a carry-on. The thing about this gate was, no baggage was allowed.
“The gate of all departures,” he called it.
It was a secret of his, but he had come to the conclusion a chaplain is the one you tell your secrets to. So it was good, he felt, I hadn’t left him alone when he told me to please go away.
You had to say “all” for the gate of departures; it was there for everyone. It didn’t matter who you were. People who didn’t understand it would sooner or later happen to them were people who were being retarded.
He hoped I wouldn’t get mad and yell at him for refusing to go along with everything you’re supposed to go along with in terms of heaven and hell. He could never understand how anyone could think yelling and being mad and feeling bad and scared is holy. He actually knew of people, and not just little kids, who were so afraid of hell, they’d cry out in the night like they were dreaming of fires and the devil.
He did not believe in the devil or hell and that was because of John Lennon.
“I would never be mad or yell at you,” I promised. “I’ll be doing the opposite.”
And he wanted to know, Did I know that song about heaven and hell by John Lennon, who used to be a Beatle? Someone who was nice to him used to sing it to him.
The song was “Imagine.” In a weak, wavering voice, he serenaded me with a stanza—his own version of one.
Imagine your own heaven.
It’s easy if you try.
No hell is below us.
Above us there’s always the sky.
In all the years of his job, the same thing over and over, lifting and heaving the luggage of stran
gers, he had never flown on a plane. He was raised in foster care. From the age of eighteen, he had lived in a group home. Sometimes, in the van of a social services agency, he and his housemates went out for a movie and ice cream with folks from other groups. Or an amusement park or a lake with a sandy beach where they had their own section. For a while he had a girlfriend. He gave me a big, hearty grin when he told me he was not a virgin with his body. He was only a virgin about flying.
He didn’t welcome questions. But eventually he accepted how curious I was about where he’d go when his plane lined up outside the gate, and his time for boarding drew near.
“When I leave my body and walk to the plane,” he said, “I’ll have a free ticket to fly anywhere I want, forever.”
I made a promise to always remember him. He called it a vow. Near the end, he began to allow me to talk about myself, the same way someone waiting for a flight might turn to the stranger in the next seat to strike up a conversation, perhaps out of boredom—especially if the stranger was in a white collar. He felt that “chaplain for everyone” sounded nice, like a stretch of sandy beach that wasn’t divided in sections, or a neighborhood where all the houses got invited when they had block parties in the summer and barbecued in the road and had contests, like the one with big guys picking up heavy dumbbells, which he had watched from a window, and knew he could have nailed.
He felt that “being ordained Episcopal” was nice too. He didn’t know much about it, but they had to be okay, because obviously they let ladies take the collar, a good thing, or we never would have met.
One afternoon I looked in his doorway as I passed by, when his meds had increased and he was drowsing in and out of consciousness, and couldn’t speak coherently. He was mumbling harsh sounds that didn’t form words, in a voice that was somewhere between a groan and a growl. It seemed he was having a terrible dream, but in front of my eyes, there came over him a shine of peacefulness, and I knew it wasn’t only from his drugs. I realized he was singing to himself and there it was, that other thing, a flicker, a glimmer, a piece of something that can’t be broken, real.
My last words to him were about the weather: a blue sky, all clear, all systems go. After he died, I looked out his window at the white-out of a blizzard. The sounds of howling wind and snow made of ice needles had not come through the drapes to reach him.
At his funeral, a supervisor of his home told me he’d made a request of his housemates. Whenever they looked up at a plane, would they remember him? And instead of saying the dumb thing people say when someone dies, about wishing their soul would rest in peace, he wanted everyone to think of him and say, like a solemn prayer, “May his soul have kick-ass adventures, flying and flying and flying.”
Four
Hurrying as I needed to, I had to pause by the linden tree not far from my entrance to pay my respects to Bobo Boy.
The season was early spring, the ground unfrozen enough for a trench around the base of the trunk. The linden is wide and massive, and a light wind was blowing, rattling the branches where nubs of new leaves were pale little polka dots. He had loved this tree; it was his favorite place to pee. It felt awful to me that the ceremony of his ashes-planting took place while I had to be sleeping.
Bobo Boy was a rock star at the medical center. I could almost hear in the wind the click of his nails, the whip of his tail in the air, the excited and urgent panting, for he was often excited, and everything to him was urgent.
That dog was absolutely unsuited to his job, if you looked up the normal qualifications for a position in the field of therapy animals.
After his training, he came to decide that no one should tell him how to go about doing what he did. He hated short leashes, but he tolerated a long one. He would not wear the usual Velcroflap vest of his branch of medical services. He made it seem noble to put up resistance, as if an ancient canine code was telling him that a dog who wore clothing wasn’t really a dog.
He had different humans with him at different times, taking the part of his handlers. The medical center had contracted with an outside agency that houses and trains the dogs who go out on assignments. All were sprung as rescues from shelters.
After an encounter with Bobo Boy, you could forget he had a handler at all. He had a talent for breaking loose, his ears perked up, and it would seem that patients were calling him to come to their beds, in a hospital version of sounds no human could detect.
A poster once hung in an outpatient waiting room. A receptionist with a good sense of humor tacked it up, and people enjoyed it, until someone official turned up to order it removed. There was a new decree that all waiting areas would only have framed, glassfronted prints and only photos of scenes of the national parks, of which there are sixty-two, as all of us learned. The office in charge of wall hangings sent out a memo saying every park was represented, geysers and foliage and bubbling streams and mountain ridges and close-ups of flowers, and not a person or a creature of any kind. The memo did not say why.
The banished poster was made up of drawings by European medieval artists who created animals they might have read about, or heard of, but had never seen, not with their plain old eyes.
There was a crocodile, a lion, an elephant, and a giraffe. Each was put together so wrongly, so fantastically, you had to marvel at the accomplishment, especially when you realized the artists had blended in elements of creatures familiar to them. The head of a garden snail, greatly enlarged, was on the crocodile. The giraffe resembled a tall-neck donkey, the lion an enormous tawny cat, the elephant a gray pony with a trunk that looked a lot like a snake. You laughed at them, while acknowledging the strange beauty.
That was Bobo Boy: a drawing by someone a long time ago in a faraway place who’d never seen a dog.
He was small enough to barely make it as a lap dog: a chunky longhair with a body like a large form of pug, mostly a dark shade of tan, with lighter beige splotches here and there, randomly. His tail was long and wiry. His skinny legs seemed borrowed from a whippet; he was always looking like he’d trip on his own little feet. His round face, while making you think of a Yorkie, also made you wonder if somewhere in his ancestry, impossibly, there was a relative who resembled an owl.
He liked pillows. Many times I came upon him as he lay around the head of a patient, curled and looking proud of himself, like a hat with breath and a heartbeat. He had taught himself to do this after spending so much time with people whose bodies could not be crawled on or nestled against, due to surgical incisions still raw, or burns or other wounds far from healed.
If someone’s head was off-limits to him, he’d go sidelong against the torso, burrowing in, so patients would stop worrying about their own condition, and worry instead, at least for a little while, they might cause him to be smothered. If they didn’t want to pat him, because, “I’m not a dog person, especially when a dog looks so weird,” they’d let their hands touch his fur, as if accidentally, to make sure that as he lay beside them, he was still alive.
I often went looking for him, to be sort of my assistant. Sometimes when he was sitting at a bedside with me, he’d be summoned to Pediatrics, or an oncology unit, or a recovery room where someone was taking too long to wake up post-surgery. If my bedside visit was a long one, for a patient who had no one else, and had entered the land of last moments, Bobo Boy returned to me with whatever he saw and smelled and heard and now knew about. His handler would go away for a much-needed break, and he’d place himself under my chair, wearily, heavily, sometimes sorrowfully. He would need to hide. He would need a break too. He would lie there as quiet and still as a pile of yarn.
He did not have the chance to grow old, although he’d been aging. The director of the agency came to see me in my office, to sit with me and cry. There had been an unexpected diagnosis. No war could be waged against the damage taking place in that body. The war was lost as soon as it began.
He was so good at playing dead, the people from the agency who were with him when he died tried to fo
ol themselves into hoping he was pretending. But then as always, it was the moment afterward that mattered more, because the stillness kept on being still. They had waited through the winter for the trench to be dug, so his ashes could circle the linden as he had done himself, nose to the ground, so many times.
“Hi, Bo,” I was saying, like ashes have ears.
I had heard there was another one coming up through the ranks. But I was in no hurry to meet him.
Five
Why didn’t I walk away when I was banished to nights? I used to think people on the night shift were different from everyone else, as an owl is not a songbird. I know better now, but maybe it’s a little bit true.
You can’t pick what you get attached to. I never asked to be rooted in the medical center like a walking, breathing tree. It just happened. I was only supposed to be here a few years, the new baby newly ordained, eyes on a future in a small or medium hospital with maybe ivy on walls of brick, in a neighborhood of houses, schools, a library, cafés, a park.
Trees can be transplanted. There are lots of medical centers. There are smaller hospitals. I had enough savings to carry me through not working for a while. I had the luck of a family of people who would help me out financially, and never call it a loan.
Already I could have been looking for another “here” for myself.
The neighbors here are office parks, steel and glass and stone, ghost towns in the night. Everywhere the landscaping is the same, businesses and hospital alike: shade trees, paved walkways, carpets of lawns that are never weedy or sick, flower beds quilted with wood chips giving off heir strange, oily perfume.
A budget ax had come out.
Our department was small to begin with, but now it was smaller than tiny. Those of us spared from the firings decided to take turns on all the shifts. But no plan for rotation was in place. I could say that nights fell to me because I’m the only one single and not a parent. I could say I’m the only woman. I could say a lot of things. When we were full we had lay chaplains and part-timers. My place on the ladder was higher than the middle. Then the ax chopped all the rungs below me.
