by Ellen Cooney
He thought it was awesome of me to be a reverend. He felt we shouldn’t be bothered by the years between our ages. He was nineteen but almost twenty, and he was incredibly mature, he pointed out.
We were lovers for almost four months. He came to my apartment by taking a bus to the entrance of my development. We met nowhere else; we never went out together. He often showed up with his big backpack full of groceries because I never had anything he liked. In my cabinets he stashed Goldfish crackers, Hostess cherry pies, Pop-Tarts. He fried slices of bologna on my stove for white-bread sandwiches with mayonnaise.
I never watched him eat those sandwiches.
“Call me Plummy,” he had suddenly said. Among his groceries were always plums.
Plums were so incredible, so supreme among fruits, he had realized: so tangy-sweet, so firm in the skin, so juicy. It was proof of the power of evolution, but didn’t Plummy sound too like the name of a guy who didn’t come from the middle of America, from a town so ordinary, its name should be, officially, Ordinary?
He thought Plummy sounded like he stepped into my life from one of those British television dramas where it’s always a bygone century and there’s a manor house, and though you end up rooting for the servants, somewhere on the show there’s a dude who went to Cambridge or Oxford, and his IQ is off the charts and he’s moral, and humble too, and everyone calls him something upper-class Englishy, like what they used to call their favorite teddy bear.
His mom used to watch those shows. Sunday nights. He’d sit nearby, teaching himself a new language to write code in, or blowing stuff up in a game where he couldn’t turn the sound on if she was watching TV, not even if he put on headphones. He had not been allowed to have a computer in his bedroom until he was almost ready to leave for college, because his parents knew he’d never come out.
But naturally he had one in there. He scrounged up a pitiful Atari from a storage room at his school, from the days when there wasn’t the internet yet. He sneaked it home and fooled around with it.
He imaged his first human brain at thirteen, when he created a Pac-Man rip-off. In his game, a brain was the main character. It had a mouth. It zipped around eating dangerous little villains who threw footballs like bombs, and just happened to wear uniforms in the colors of his town. The game was primitive and completely amateur, but there was never a chance for the villains to escape their fate of becoming, basically, cannibalized.
The only grown-up who saw it was a guy who worked at Radio Shack and let him hang out there. He needed to keep the game to himself, this guy warned him. It was a football-centered sort of town. His father coached at the high school. His mom helped out with concessions at the Friday night games he only went to because they made him show up and keep stats. His brothers and sisters used to tell him they’d grab him one day, put him in a car, and drive him to one of those places where families bring gay kids so they can be rewired from being gay. But it would be a place where they turn you into a football player, like it was run by retired professional athletes, and wasn’t that a funny joke, rewiring kids, like it would work, like it wouldn’t be some kind of torture, ha ha ha?
At fifteen he had a phase of being into nature. He built a game where you could form a tsunami in the ocean of your choice, depending on your skill level. It was tricky, but one thing leading to another, you could wipe out all kinds of places, even in parts of America that only have ponds and weensy lakes. You could target stadiums. You could tidal-wave a whole Super Bowl. He never showed that one to anyone.
To me, he could boast all he wanted about his old games. The first time we were taking off our clothes, yes, on the evening of the day I turned thirty, I did something I had never let anyone do. I let him undo my collar stud and slip the collar office.
The touch of his hands was a whole new answer for me to the question, What is tenderness?
No one knew about us. Well, my neighbors did. But it’s not the sort of apartment development where people make friends with each other. Many residents work at the medical center, but none were on my block. When I first moved in, I thought it was going to be temporary: the new baby chaplain in a one-bedroom unit at the smaller end of one-bedroom units. But every time I thought I should move, I just didn’t.
“Your brain is as awesome as all the rest of you,” he would say, and I’d laugh at him for how seriously he took me, all the time.
And he thought it was awesome I planned to never stop believing in souls, in spite of all the evidence there is no such thing. It’s like believing in music if you’re tone deaf, he felt. Or colors if you’re blind to colors.
The coolest thing in the world ever would be dying and finding out you’re not dead, he felt. Like one minute your heart stops and—wham—the next minute you’re far away, high up in outer space, hanging out with, like, comets. And everything you wanted to know about, like, everything, wham again! You suddenly know answers to questions you didn’t know to ask when you were alive!
What a dream come true that would be, he felt.
Then, when it was time for him to leave for faraway grad school, we said good-bye solemnly in my doorway.
He had postponed twice the date he was supposed to arrive for the start of the rest of his life. He had missed his orientation and he still had to go home for a couple of days to see his family. There’d be a crowd of them. It was going to make him lonely, so would I call him while he was there, and let him call me, even if I was at work?
“Yes,” I said.
For about a month, I missed him in a general, dragging, I-don’t-feel-well sort of way. I told myself I was maybe bugged by a low-grade virus I’d picked up in the hospital. I did not say yes all the times in grad school he let me know he wanted to see me. He called me a discriminator on the basis of age.
“Oh, grow up,” I’d answer.
I did not love Plummy. I just didn’t.
Not that I said so to him. Both of us were careful to not let the subject come up. I’d remind myself I never fell in love with him. Like I actually knew what I meant.
We promised we would stay in touch, and we did: emails, texts, phone calls, video calls. For six years. Also, I promised him that anytime I knew of an oob, he would be the only person in all of science I informed.
Seven
Of course we’re not supposed to play favorites among the patients. I keep promising myself I won’t, and I always do.
I knew the librarian would be looking at her clock, expecting me to come see her first thing, as usual. I would have to keep her waiting. I was paged almost as soon as I took off my coat and hung it on the hook in my office.
A patient I hadn’t seen before was asking for a chaplain—and not just asking, but demanding one.
He’d been causing all sorts of trouble. Would I come right away?
On that unit, I met with a nurse whose husband ran an auto shop she was also involved in. She liked to compare everyone to people dealing with getting their cars fixed.
The patient, a lawyer in his fifties, was the type of customer who’d come into the bays in spite of the sign that said you couldn’t. He would look at a wrench in the hand of a mechanic and tell the mechanic he was holding it wrong. He would order an expensive engine oil that was only expensive because of the brand name, then he’d watch it go in like he suspected they’d switch in a cheap one. He’d try to pay his bill with the only credit card they didn’t accept, like there wasn’t information about credit cards all over the place, including when you called to make your appointment.
In his brief time in the hospital, he antagonized everyone involved in his care, starting with a lab technician who told him that if she ever had to draw his blood again, she was going to take it all and he would not be able to stop her; he’d have to sue the medical center to get it back.
With me, as the nurse predicted, he was courteous and polite and even pleasant.
I found him calmly lying flat in his bed, covers to his chest. He was freshly shaved and showered, and wor
e a hospital johnny. The room was dim. He held out his hand to me for a firm, friendly handshake. I saw that he was not ill or wounded. He was scheduled for release in the morning.
I took my place in the bedside chair, and the first thing he told me was that he considered himself a rational man. He believed in facts, in evidence. He described his life as a comfortable one, well-ordered and satisfying, filled with challenges and a measure of happiness that basically, when he added everything up, came out greater than the sum of his disappointments.
He was quick to say he had little to complain about concerning his marriage, his children, his colleagues, his friends. In his personal life, while he valued the importance of emotions, he was pretty much the same as he was in his profession. He always kept faith with his powers of clear, careful thinking, and evidence, evidence, evidence.
He sometimes attended his wife’s church, a historic one, noted for its organ and music. He had never cared for services. Church was where he discovered how it felt to be deeply moved by J. S. Bach and Mozart. He’d come to believe there was a part of the human brain that could be stirred only by a certain kind of music. Until three days ago, being spiritual was all about Bach and Mozart.
He would leave the hospital early, before breakfast. He had waited to ask for a chaplain until now, his last night, so he could wake to go home with a sense of something accomplished and done with, like a verdict in a trial that would not be appealed.
His overall health was excellent. He was proud of himself for keeping his body cared for, finely tuned.
Only in the last few hours, alone in his room, was he able to collect his thoughts. He felt it was fortunate to be somewhere no one knew him—having visitors would have been unbearable, for there was only one thing to talk about. He finally felt ready.
He delivered his story quietly, his voice steady. He was brought to the emergency room after feeling ill—he didn’t need to share the details. All that mattered was the fact that he was taken into surgery.
It had all been uncomplicated, minor, routine. But while he was under anesthesia, something went terribly wrong, resulting in cardiac arrest. He would not bring a lawsuit against the hospital to compensate him for his ordeal.
At the moment his heart stopped beating, and before it registered on a monitor, he woke, floated upward, and found himself looking down at himself on the operating table.
He did not have the sense that he was viewing his body as a brand new corpse, lifeless as it was. Otherwise, he might have been moved to sorrow or anger. He looked at his body in an objective, impersonal way, and he saw that the man on the table no longer had a connection to him. Of the surgical team around that body, he took little notice. They had nothing to do with him, which was true of all the equipment, the cloths, the masks and gowns, the instruments, the sounds of beeps and chatter and someone telling a joke he didn’t quite catch, but it seemed to be funny.
He didn’t think he was freed from his physical self by any special occurrence, or the action of someone else. It all felt perfectly natural, probably the way a butterfly feels when it suddenly knows it will cling to a leaf no longer as a non-winged bug, or crawl on the ground afraid of being stepped on.
A deep, abiding serenity had entered him, along with the knowledge that he was weightless, like an astronaut outside of gravity. He remembered a thought that came to him as a revelation, and made his peacefulness expand to a level of emotion he could only describe as pure joy. It was not like anything he’d ever experienced before. No music was playing, but whatever was going on made him think that Bach and Mozart hadn’t really known anything about music.
Then he went for a walk.
He had never been to the medical center before. Far from home, he’d been attending meetings connected to a professional matter. He was stricken ill when he was packing to check out of his hotel.
An ambulance had brought him. In the emergency room, he was sedated for his surgery. Nothing was in his memory of being wheeled to surgery.
In his new state, in his lightness, he was aware of the hospitalness all around him. He was eager to get away.
He went through corridors lined with doorways, many of them, the same ones over and over, as if he were trapped in a maze. The people he passed gave no indication they saw him, or felt his presence. He remembered a man with an arrangement of flowers in a blue vase that was shaped like a baby’s bootie; a young woman in scrubs, pushing an empty wheelchair; a patient in a bathrobe on a stroll, while attached to his IV stand, the wheels of it squeaking a little.
He saw by this evidence he was invisible, without the mass of any object, which neither pleased nor worried him.
It was all simply natural. He was airy, he was light, he had no sense of time. He had no way of knowing how long he wandered and found no exit. But a creeping sense of claustrophobia was taking hold of him. He had never suffered from such a thing before. He began to be afraid he would panic.
How he was freed from the maze, he had no idea. He only knew that suddenly he was in the presence of a white cloud of beautifulness.
He was beholding a cloud, he told me. There was a cloud and it was in front of him, and in its center, somehow, was a light shining brilliantly, with a warm, soft radiance, unlike any other light he’d ever seen.
Looking down, he realized he was standing on what seemed to be some sort of wooden platform, or perhaps an ordinary floor, on which a carpet lay. The carpet fabric was light gray. It was splashed here and there with bits of white. He was puzzled about that, until he figured out that what he stood on wasn’t flooring.
It wasn’t as if he had feet anymore. He became aware that everything around him had not been made by human hands. Where he stood was a plateau, high up in a mountain range. The color gray was like a rocky ground, the bits of white like scattered snow. He had never climbed a mountain, but it seemed to him he must have done so many times. It was all extraordinarily vivid, right down to small details. He felt he had arrived at the roof of the world.
“I was standing on the roof of the world, Reverend. That’s what I call it. But I knew it was not of this world.”
Meanwhile, as he approached the cloud, he heard harsh, insistent, frantic voices. They were somewhere behind him, out of sight. Come back! Don’t you dare get away from us! Get this guy back!
Very crude obscenities were also uttered, which the lawyer chose to leave out. But they made no difference. He ignored the voices. He only wanted to go forward. He wanted to enter the cloud. He now knew that the trauma of working his way through the maze was necessary. The roof of the world, of course, would not be easy to reach.
There came to him an excitement, a rush of desire, a whole new level of exultation. He didn’t know how he knew this, but he knew that the cloud was a passage into infinity. What he might see when he entered it, what he might find out, he didn’t consider. He was still too earthbound, but he knew it was going to be far beyond anything imaginable.
It amazed him now that when his heart stopped, his whole life wasn’t flashing by him. He had never actually thought about it, but it had seemed to him something that would go on automatically, just because people tend to say so.
He had only one memory during his experience. He saw a glimpse of himself as a boy in a classroom, looking at a blackboard where the teacher chalked the symbol for pi. He was being told that the number for pi contains decimal places no one could count, because pi is a number that never, under any circumstances, comes to a stop.
When he was very young, he had hoped to become a mathematician. He was good at arithmetic. He liked the clarity and the evidence of numbers. But the idea of a number with the ability to last forever was too much for him to handle. He simply could not believe it.
Facing the cloud, so close to him, so close, he understood that he was finally going to know what pi means. He was going to become a pi.
And all along, the voices at his back grew louder, more insistent. He could not pretend that those voices were not a threa
t to him, and when he felt human hands grabbing hold of him, he was mystified and furious. He couldn’t understand how anyone could seize an invisible man, and he resisted with all his might. He felt he was being cuffed and shackled for a crime he did not commit.
That was where the lawyer ended his story.
For the first time he looked at me directly. I wondered if he felt he had made some sort of confession. A look of relief was in his eyes, and though he kept himself carefully guarded, I saw what seemed a new lightness in him, as if he’d put down a burden and lay there with leftover traces of feeling his body had no weight.
We smiled at each other in the hush. He didn’t ask me if I believed him. He didn’t tell me he felt he was changed inside himself, as a butterfly can never again be a caterpillar.
He shook his head no when I suggested he might want to read testimonies of other such events and find out about research on the subject. His expression was inscrutable except for the softness of the smile.
Then he said, “I had thought, when I sent for you, I’d need help.”
There was a pause. He seemed to think I knew what he meant. Did he want me to pray with him? Speak with him about a heaven that doesn’t have to be called heaven? Speak to him about his soul? Or how he’d go back into his life a changed man, from his meeting with his beautiful cloud?
“I wrestled with myself about forgiveness,” he said. “I was afraid I could never forgive my surgical team for bringing me back. But I have done so. I see that as a spiritual matter, and I assure you, I’m glad to be alive. It crossed my mind that the next time I’m in church, I should sit up and pay attention whenever they’re talking about Lazarus.”
“Because, from now on, that will have meaning for you?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “I’m grateful you took the time to hear me out. I’m sure you appreciate knowing about my experience, exactly as it happened.”