by Ellen Cooney
Did I have a husband, or a boyfriend?
I had shaken my head. The truth.
If I had a boyfriend, would I bring him in, if he’d go out in the middle of night, so he, the surfer, could meet him, and see if he was decent or something, just to check?
Yes. I would do that.
When I was his age, did I know anyone that I, like, grew up with, and they were my only friend and they died?
I had not had that experience. Did he want to talk about it?
No, he was only being abstract, like the question just popped into his head. And by the way, it was interesting that, if I wasn’t kind of old, but not, like, old, just more like, grown up, I’d look just like Annie in Annie, for having kind of the same hair. He had noticed that. Did I know what he meant, that dumb movie, but the orphan girl was kind of all right?
I knew what he meant, yes, thanks a lot for putting that song in my head.
Right, that song. Tomorrow and the sun coming up and bet your bottom dollar. That song sucked. Was it okay to say “sucked”?
Sure. He could say anything he wanted.
It was something like a little after midnight when we had that conversation. The colonel strode in, looked around, and strode out, probably needing to see for herself if he was keeping his part of the pie bargain.
By then he was looking tired. He had started receiving visitors in the daytime: student nurses on their breaks, a guy in Maintenance who grew up in Los Angeles, teenage girls who came to the medical center after school as volunteers. I knew it wasn’t all about feeling sorry for him, for being so pale and broken and needy. It wasn’t about how he was connected to a tragedy that for a couple of days was all over the news.
I had heard that a TV show displayed photos posted online by a couple of the boarding-school boys, when their ascent up the rocks was beginning. They were laughing. The light flashes from their phones made it seem they were shining, as if brightly lit up by white flares.
There was something about him I hadn’t been able to describe to myself. I wasn’t sure what it was. But something under his surface was very, very strong. It was almost magnetic, in a way. I felt that his soul was powerful and unbreakable, as a wave breaks, yet still remains water.
He was really the one who took care of making a connection with me. I had said it was okay to say the word “sucked,” and there he lay, fighting with himself to keep his eyes open. He reminded me of little kids in Pediatrics insisting they do not need a nap, because someone’s coming for a story hour, or there’s going to be a puppet show or someone singing, and they don’t want to miss out on the pleasure of the waiting.
But then he looked more awake than he ever had before. For a moment full of dread to me, I wondered if he might ask me, Did I believe he’d ever be able to walk again?
“Ask me what’s holy,” he said.
I expected a teenager-cynical remark from a boy with a need to say something offensive. I would not have held it against him.
“Okay,” I said. “What’s holy?”
“Waves,” he answered.
“Okay again. What kind of waves?”
“The kind that come to life in the Pacific Ocean.”
His parents bought him his first board, a beginner one for babies, when he was nine. They weren’t surfers or even swimmers. The ocean was what you looked at from your deck and your windows. They had predicted he wouldn’t stick with this new thing, as he hadn’t stuck with anything he had asked them to buy him, like the camera that cost a fortune when he wanted to learn photography, and the four-wheeler he had wanted to ride in the hills. He never took the camera from its box. The four-wheeler, he stalled the first time he was on it; he never went near it again.
He didn’t know how he knew he belonged on a surfboard. You know how there are newborn turtles that crack out of their eggs in the sand and go right on a rush to the water, when they don’t even know what an ocean is, being like two minutes old? It was like that.
“I’m learning how to surf in my head now. I wanted you to know that,” he said.
When I left his room that night, I went to my office and turned on my computer, a desktop, wide-screened. I looked up surfing things. I learned these words: hollow, tube, clean, glassy, messy, point break, A-frame, peak. I went on YouTube and watched the trailer for The Endless Summer. When I reported that, he told me it was the greatest surfer movie ever made, even though it was so old, it was ancient.
But on this night he didn’t even flicker his eyelids as I watched him sleep. Sooner or later he would be wheeled on a gurney, out of the medical center. I knew it was going to hurt to say good-bye to him.
I turned to leave his room. The theme music of The Endless Summer had just come into my head, so I was walking the hallway to the sounds of those strings, rolling along, the guitars like voices, talking about air and sunlight and paddling out on a board, and how cool it was to be part of an ocean, watching and waiting for a perfect wave.
Right away, as if a radio played, and the next song came abruptly, way too early, I heard the swell of the background-music orchestra in The Hunt for Red October.
It occurred to me this might have been the film the librarian didn’t watch, because it’s all about a submarine.
I know that movie very well. Plummy brought it to my apartment on DVD. I only just then thought of it. He made me watch it with him something like three times. I had to poke him in the ribs to get him to stop saying lines along with the actors, even when the words were in Russian. It’s the best movie about a submarine ever made, he had told me, even though it’s so old.
“This is a strange night,” I was saying to myself.
I went all the way back to the room of the librarian. Her sleep-breathing was regular, easygoing. In the soft slack of her face she looked untroubled. I breathed a wish that her dreams were good ones.
I wrote a note on the whiteboard that’s supposed to be only for medical notes.
“See you before I go off duty,” I wrote, as if I had any idea what I’d say to her about the broken pieces of her soul.
“Love, your chaplain,” I wrote.
Twelve
The gift shop in the night was as frozen and dim as any store in its downtime. I was passing by on my way to the new wing for free food—passing in a hurry, as I’d done countless times before. I happened to turn my head in the direction of the window displays. This was a random, accidental thing.
It was sitting on a shelf: a blue vase in the shape of a baby’s bootie.
The shelf was crowded. The vase was wedged between an oversize coffee mug covered with smiley faces and another vase: a bug-eyed, green-and-yellow frog, which for some reason wore a red bow tie. Compared to those objects, the bootie was small and almost boring. No flowers were in its hollow, but then, the flowers they sell are kept in a separate area.
To fit the vase, stems of most flowers would need to be trimmed short. The flowers would be small, perhaps with buds the sizes of buttons. The shade of blue was light, pastel. Probably the vase was porcelain. Something about the texture made it look as if it were knitted.
I had come to a stop. Within the shop were balloons on ribbons of strings, popular with visitors who tie them to beds of patients. Get well soon! More smiley faces. Pink ones. Blue ones. Congratulations! Yellow ones, meant to signify sunshine. Red ones in the shape of a Valentine heart. A cartoon one of a dog with a caption of “BE GOOD AND HEEL,” and a line through the second “E.” An “A” was just above it.
A few balloons were white and tinsel-silver. They looked shiny in the shadows: round little clouds of an indoor sky.
I re-heard the lawyer’s voice, steady, confident: a presentation of evidence.
I saw a man carrying flowers in a blue vase that was shaped like a baby’s bootie.
Yet the lawyer had not been anywhere near here, unless he’d left his bed in his unit, in his hospital johnny, for a walk through the halls, all the way to the gift shop. And he had seen the bootie vase, and th
en it turned up in the story he told me, a story like a story of a dream.
There wasn’t really that “unless.” He could not have taken a walk that had placed him where I was standing. He could not have looked at the shelf I was looking at.
I decided he must have seen, perhaps when he was being brought into the hospital, someone who had purchased one of the bootie vases, with flowers, and happened to be carrying it. What I encountered here was a coincidence.
And I was thinking, coincidences are so awesome!
And off I went, proceeding to the new wing. It was quicker to reach by going out a side door and crossing a courtyard. The night air was so chilly and sharp, I was jolted to alertness, all the way down to my bones.
I found the new wing as a wall of windows and a lighted interior where it looked like the gala for the opening was still going on, but with a different set of people, most of them in scrubs and whites.
The lobby was high and wide and expansive. The wing wasn’t finished yet; it would soon be housing offices and a new outpatient clinic. When I stepped inside, I noticed a rack of brochures about its construction. I slipped one into my jacket pocket, feeling that reading it would be the price to pay for a meal.
The café tables and chairs set up for the gala were still in place. Several were occupied and it was easy to see who was who: doctors were with doctors, nurses with nurses, night clerks with night clerks. Two people from Housekeeping were at a table farthest away. I didn’t see a familiar face. I headed for what was left of the buffet. It was mostly baked goods and yay for that.
There were still some paper plates, left by the caterers. I found some cheese chunks and grapes on an appetizer tray, which I could call my lunch. Then I loaded my plate with desserts.
I didn’t want to sit at a table alone, nor did I want to go back outdoors before eating something. I knew I could have chosen any group to sit with. I knew I would have to be welcomed, new to the night shift as I still was. But I couldn’t choose which one.
Which was fine. I didn’t feel like taking part in conversations. I opted to wander around and find somewhere private.
Carefully clutching my plate, I crossed the lobby and stepped into a hallway lit by pale, milky night-lights. At the first doorway I looked into, I suddenly drew back, startled. The plate fell to the floor. I had lost the ability to hold it, the same as if my hands had turned to water.
The room was unfinished, still in a state of almost emptiness. Streetlight-type lamps from an adjacent parking lot gave just enough illumination through the bare windows, where the glass still had its manufacturer’s stickers. I was seeing, on the wall I faced, a mural of a cloud.
A painter’s canvas tarp was spread out like a carpet on bare, rough floorboards. The tarp was gray. Small, dry pools of white paint were everywhere on the cloth, as scattered snow would look on a patch of rocky ground, on a plateau that was situated somewhere mountainous, like a roof at the top of the world.
The other walls were bare white panels of sheet rock. There was a hook on the unfinished ceiling, and suspended from it was a construction worker’s powerful halogen light. The wattage must have been huge. When turned on, it would create a spotlight to be directed at the enormous cloud.
It was a perfect example of a cumulus, puffy and flat-bottomed, rising in rounded peaks, adrift against a background of pale-blue sky.
Frozen where I stood, I was aware that I should pick up the plate and the cake and tarts and cookies and cheese and grapes that slid off it. But I was incapable of cleaning up my own mess. My knees would not bend.
I couldn’t think. I didn’t even know what it meant to think a thought. When I finally felt unparalyzed, I walked away. No security cameras were in place; I checked.
I burst out of the first exit I came to, which opened to the medical center’s interior.
Unlike the lawyer, in a maze of hallways, I knew where everything led. I moved swiftly, my head low, as if rushing to an emergency.
I ducked into the first ladies’ room I reached. After washing and drying my hands, and deliberately not looking in the mirror, because I didn’t want to know what my expression was like, I remembered the brochure.
A slip of paper, like an errata sheet, fell into the sink. I grabbed it eagerly, with the sense I was about to discover, somehow, an explanation. And then everything would be clear, would be logical.
As if I’d be given a message saying, “Dear Reverend, the cloud on the wall has nothing to do with the cloud of the lawyer!”
On the piece of paper was information about the room, which was intended to become a staffed, after-school play space for children of people who’d be employed in the new wing. No such thing existed in any other part of the medical center. It was a new-wing-office-people perk.
The painter of the mural had been called away to another project. The room as a whole would eventually contain sky murals of the four basic units in the twenty-four hours of a day. The cloud was afternoon. Morning would be a sunrise, twilight a sunset, night a glittering field of stars. The painter, it was hoped, would return as soon as possible. With the completion of the space delayed, please would everyone touring the new wing stay away from that area, as the painter had left behind some equipment?
Information about the painter was also given. She seemed to be very well known to people who know about such things. She had volunteered her work; someone close to her had once been treated at the medical center.
I crumpled the brochure and the paper into a wad, and dropped it in the wastebasket. What if I went to the lawyer’s room and woke him? What if I told him there was something he needed to see?
What if he stood next to me in that doorway, looking into the room of the cloud, all of him, flesh and bones and his plain old eyes to see?
What would he say? And what might be broken inside him?
I thought of the little boy who couldn’t imagine numbers going off into infinity, and gave up on math.
I thought of the man so awful to nurses and med-techs, but respectful to me, in my collar. I had not sat bedside with him to judge him. I thought of him as a boy who grew up to be able at last to imagine.
He was just like the baggage handler. He imagined his own heaven.
I had noted on the errata-like insert that the painter came from the state where the lawyer lived. Probably that wasn’t a factor. But it might have been.
Maybe he had somehow known about this room. Maybe in his unit, he’d heard about the room. Maybe people were talking about it when he was in the ER, or post-surgery in a recovery room, lying there in the strange zone between awake and out of it, like a lying-down zombie, and the details went straight to the part of his brain that handles new information. His brain could have gone ahead and forwarded the information to his soul—I liked to think so.
Brains are so awesome!
“You didn’t travel out of your body, because there’s no such thing.”
“I have evidence about your story.”
Was I supposed to return to his room and say those words to him?
I was only his chaplain a little while. But I was his chaplain still. I could hear his voice, what it was like when he talked about joy, about Bach and Mozart not knowing anything about music, about himself becoming a pi, and what he now knew he could look forward to.
I imagined the lawyer looking at the unfinished room for children of office people. I imagined him facing the fact that, because of me, he would have to make a change to his story of his walk through the maze. I imagined him analyzing evidence. I imagined what would break inside him and always be broken.
“I reached the gate of infinity,” he might say. “And it’s a wall? That’s it? Just some paint on a wall?”
Thirteen
As usual, the altar table was covered by a white linen cloth. In the center was a wide, white ceramic bowl in use as a planter, a gift from a small group of Quakers who had lost their meeting house in a fire, and used the chapel for free—my department just didn’t
tell the medical center about it. The Quakers made sure the bowl was always filled.
Tonight it was new-spring miniature hyacinths, pink and grape and light orange, their leaves firm and pale. Their sweet flowery smell rested lightly in the air.
On either side of the bowl were white candle lamps in small brass holders. The light of the filaments was almost gold, holding steady, unflickering. Sometimes I wish I’d kept count of how many times I had changed the batteries. I feel I have an inner monitor keeping track of when the lights are about to go out, the way other people might always know about moon phases, or what’s going on with tides.
I have never told anyone I love this place as if it were a person. It felt good to say that verb.
“I love.”
My hope to sit alone in a pew for a few minutes did not come true. I had been followed here, not that I had known it, until the resident appeared.
She sat down in the pew beside me. She was the person I’d spoken with about the lawyer.
Maybe she’d been heading for the chapel anyway. She was wearing fresh blue scrubs, no white coat. I could not recall her name. Her badge was obscured by the white towel draped over her shoulders. Since I’d seen her, she had showered. Her hair was shiny brown, like a chestnut shell, and it was still very damp, reaching down the sides of her face as straight as if she’d ironed it.
She was a little older than my age when I started out. But there was no comparison between her and the baby-chaplain me. This woman looked confident. She looked like, wherever she went, she would know how to do whatever was needed.
“I hate to waste time blow-drying,” she said quietly. “I kind of got splattered by a patient a little while ago. But hey, it goes with the territory. You know what a great thing about nights is? You can walk around with a towel and no one cares.”
There was a silence. She had a seniority among the residents, I recalled. She wanted to tell me something. Person to chaplain.
