One Night Two Souls Went Walking

by Ellen Cooney

  It was a windy day, with gusts blowing almost as fiercely and wildly as a hurricane. I found the old man crying. But it wasn’t because he’d been left alone.

  His face was quite thin, his cheekbones pronounced, to the point of a gauntness that was hard to look at. Anyone would be able to tell that a fleshy and vibrant robustness had once been there. His bed had been cranked up a little, so that he wasn’t lying flat. The coverings had been pulled to the top of his chest and tucked fairly tightly below the mattress, with his arms inside, in a sort of swaddling.

  The walls of that room were a soft beige. The evidence of what he’d been up to was on the wall behind his bed, a few inches beyond the frame: a gash in the paint, surrounded by tiny nicks and scratches. The wall itself had not been penetrated, just chipped at.

  The old man had been losing the ability to sip water. An aide who was feeding him ice chips had briefly gone out of the room, leaving behind, on his bed table, the cup of ice and the spoon. The ice, he didn’t bother with, but he had taken the spoon in hand. He had managed to turn himself so he was facing the wall. He had attacked it, holding the round part of the spoon as a handle.

  When the aide returned, she had to summon help. The old man’s burst of strength was a surprise, especially when he put up so much resistance. He didn’t want to be stopped. He didn’t want that spoon taken away from him.

  Three staffers formed a team to get him settled down again. Before this, he’d been quiet, even subdued. He had shown no signs of dementia. He had not seemed capable of any act of destruction whatsoever.

  The attending physician hadn’t wanted to sedate him any more than he was medicated already.

  When resisting the staffers, the old man had shrieked and wailed, but refused to speak. He began to sob loudly as he was being tucked in, but when I entered his room, he went silent. He refused to accept any more ice. The aide at his side was dabbing his cheeks with a tissue. Silently, his tears were streaming down his face like water from a faucet that could not be turned all the way off.

  Meanwhile the wind was slamming against the building, against the windows. The aide left the room, with the ice and the spoon. I sat down at the edge of his bed, with the sense that something was happening that had never happened to me before.

  He was talking to me.

  Not in words. Not with a look, as his expression was blank, impassive. He seemed neither glad nor disapproving to see that I had come. Yet all the ordinary space that exists between two people who don’t know each other had somehow instantly dissolved.

  The daughter hovered in the background, witnessing, saying nothing.

  This man had not been destructive. He had not been trying to damage the wall. He had been trying to create an escape.

  His window drapes were closed, cutting off the window as a way out for his soul. He knew he was just a little while away from the end of his life. He was terrified.

  Not of dying. Of his soul being trapped.

  I happened to have a pen in my pocket. I took it out. The old man, I realized, wanted me to take up with the wall where he had left off.

  How can a soul speak to another soul?

  I couldn’t explain it.

  I gripped the pen as if holding a knife. I showed him that I was willing to cut a hole for him in that wall, as if, on the other side, there’d be open air, not the room of some other patient. I knew that what he wanted was a way out for his soul.

  He told me that.

  His bed wasn’t near the windows. Probably if it were, he might have asked for a window to be opened for him. He wasn’t scared about the hard-blowing wind. He didn’t want to escape it. He wanted to join it.

  The last thing he looked at was my hand, wielding the tool of the pen, as I rose to face the wall, ready to carry on the attack.

  His eyes closed when I was up on my feet beyond his field of vision. He was lying there picturing the hole expanding. I had made a delusion. I had done my job.

  In the moments after he died, I touched my fingers to his face, where his skin was still damp from tears. I believe he had imagined the powerful wind as the breath of God, and he was ready to feel that his soul was breaking loose, as a strong, big bird would firm itself up to rise.

  I believed so because he told me that too.

  Something in my brain had blocked that day. Or had tried to blot the memory out, because things need to have explanations or they didn’t really happen.

  Something like that. And now I was sitting at my desk, hands on my mug. I had limited myself to four shortbread cookies. The tin had been full. When my shift drew near to a close, should I return to the room of the lawyer?

  I was being paged. Something had happened. All hands on deck.

  Fifteen

  It was a winter of heavy snowfalls. At a factory warehouse turned into a discounted, surplus, general merchandise retail outlet, the snow that piled over and over on the flat roof was left to melt. The roof and its buttresses could pass a building inspection, but had never been structurally sound enough to withstand a lot of stress.

  The store was under new management. In previous years, following a snow- or rainstorm, day laborers were hired to go up on the roof with shovels or push brooms. This was the first year those chores were eliminated from the budget. Also eliminated was the job of the maintenance foreman, leaving the care of the building to some guys who were mostly still teenagers, hired at minimum wage, and basically their own supervisors.

  The disaster had been waiting to happen. It would not have been a disaster in human terms if this weren’t the night of what the store called its first-ever Spring Midnight Madness clearance sale.

  The doors were reopened at midnight. From then until dawn, prices were slashed considerably, and there were hourly specials in all departments, as well as raffles, free coffee and donuts, and giveaways of spring things such as Easter baskets and equipment for outdoor grilling. The sale was promoted intensely. The new managers had even rented billboards on well-traveled smaller highways.

  When the roof collapsed, some three hundred people were inside, and nearly half that number in the parking lot, where food-truck vendors, subsidized by the store, were charging next to nothing for tacos, chili dogs, soft-whip ice cream, fried dough.

  The implosion came with a warning. In the central area of the store, loose debris began raining down, sending shoppers scurrying, so that the worst section of the collapse did not entrap anyone. The first 911 callers reported that the building might have been bombed, which meant there was a fast, massive police and rescue response.

  Most of the victims were taken to two hospitals nearer the scene. The medical center was third in line, and still, as more ambulances arrived, the ER and its waiting room were packed, and in a state of chaos that would have been actual chaos if not so well controlled.

  By the time I arrived in the area of the ER, I saw that two clergy people were already there. I spotted a Congregational minister who frequently made night visits to members of his parish who were very sick, sleepless patients knowing they could phone him in the middle of the night—he was famous for being an insomniac. And my own colleague was here—yes, the guy of the cookies, waving at me. I remembered he was also a chaplain of the fire department.

  We spoke briefly. He was just stopping by. He was on his way to the scene, then back to bed. Hang in there!

  Then I saw a rabbi I know, on her way to the ambulance entrance. For the first time I’d been summoned to a crisis, I didn’t know what to do with myself.

  Then someone was tugging at my arm. A woman in a coat and head scarf that were heavily dusted from plaster had something to tell me. She looked dazed, but not injured. She told me that she’d ventured to a hallway just beyond the ER, looking for someone to tell her it would be okay if she went home, since she’d been brought in accidentally. She had seen an old woman alone on a gurney back there. It seemed to her that someone needed to be with that person. She had figured that, wearing a collar, I would want to know.<
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  A man was walking by us. He had on a denim jacket soaked red all over the front. He was glassy-eyed, in shock. But he paused for a moment.

  “Good evening, Reverend,” he said. “This here blood isn’t mine. There was kind of some trouble with sharp edges of things, I think.”

  A nurse appeared, took hold of him, led him away.

  “She’s very, very old,” added the woman talking to me. “I think she had a stroke. I’ve seen them before.”

  I thanked her. Taking a deep breath, I set myself in motion.

  The old woman in the out-of-the-way little corridor, lying on a gurney, had a sheet pulled up to her waist, and yes, she was alone. There wasn’t a hospital bracelet on her wrist—she hadn’t been processed. She appeared to be somewhere in her late eighties or early nineties.

  Her pale-blue eyes had the sharpness and clarity of a bird’s. She looked at me with a wary suspicion.

  I thought of the librarian. The nightgown of this woman was a flowery, flannel one, round in the collar with a fringe of lace. How many very old, very alone women had I been chaplain to, with the same garment or some small variation? Many.

  At the foot of the gurney was a pink quilted bathrobe.

  “Hi. I’m a chaplain here. Are you able to speak? Can you tell me something about yourself?”

  The stroke appeared to have been fairly minor. But the old woman’s mouth showed that it had not yet worn off. One corner of her mouth went upward a little, as if pulled by an invisible string. She looked frozen in half of a smile, or half of a grimace. She did not seem to be in pain.

  Her reply was mumbly: the guttural voice of anyone under Novocain in a dentist’s chair. But she was getting it across to me that she didn’t want to be here. She had been brought against her will, and didn’t she have the right to decide herself if she wanted treatment in a hospital? Where she lived was no great place, but it was home to her. She was ninety-one. At her age, did she not have the right to say no to being in a hospital?

  Slowly, her face showing signs of strain, she lifted both arms a couple of inches, indicating she was not in paralysis.

  I smiled at her warmly. Yes, I was saying with a nod. There are such things as rights.

  “I’ll be back in a minute. I promise,” I said.

  The first nurse who wasn’t too busy to speak with me was not an ER nurse. She’d been pressed into service from a unit where patients are not in a state of consciousness—and as a longtime coma care person, she was overwhelmed by what she viewed as uncontrolled mayhem. She welcomed the chance to turn away for a few moments from the collapse victims.

  The old woman’s name was Mrs. Marjorie Copp. She was a widow and had lived for many years in a senior care facility I knew of as a place that’s always understaffed and overcrowded.

  An ambulance was called when a staffer observed her with symptoms of a stroke. She was treated briefly by an ER physician who wanted her admitted as an inpatient for observation and various tests. It seemed the stroke was not her first. The danger was big: there could be another one on the way, a major one. The brain of Mrs. Copp could have been holding a time bomb in need of defusing.

  She was not in the medical center’s computer system. A call had been made to her facility, to gather some information. But the call went to voice mail and so far had not been returned. Mrs. Copp herself had not been able or willing to answer questions about her background and health. She had arrived with no insurance card, no forms about treatment, no medical proxy, no anything. Probably soon, someone would figure out how to get her admittance taken care of. Of course she couldn’t stay in this hall indefinitely.

  “But she might not want to be admitted,” I said.

  The nurse looked at me in a very critical manner, as if saying, “You have got to be kidding me.”

  Her uniform was nursing whites, pristine. She was out of her element, and tense and tired, and she might have been harboring personal disappointments and bitterness she couldn’t stop from slipping into her job. Her voice took on a cold, disapproving tone as she shared with me her belief that Mrs. Copp was in a state of dementia.

  In an effort to reach out to her, the nurse had addressed the old woman as Marge instead of Marjorie.

  “She got pretty cross with me. And she asked me if I thought she looked like someone with blue hair, and a beehive,” said the nurse.

  “Blue hair?”

  “That’s what she said. And bees.”

  “Hang on,” I said. “That’s from television. That’s Marge Simpson. She might have meant she doesn’t like that nickname. You know what I’m talking about? The show? The cartoon? Marge Simpson’s hair is a blue beehive?”

  The nurse did not seem to think I might be right in making that connection.

  “It’s dementia,” she said. “Marge also swore to me she saw a dog. Right here. Believe me, there wasn’t one.”

  I did not let on my reaction to that. “A dog? Did she say what it looked like?”

  “She didn’t, just that it was strange.”

  “Strange like unfamiliar to her? Or strange like it was weird looking?”

  “She wasn’t talking about a real dog, Reverend. You know how it is with these cases. They lose their bearings, they get angry. They think they’re the ones that are sane and everyone else is out of it. Don’t you think you should be sticking to your own job?”

  I let the sting of that question linger in the air. I wasn’t taking it personally.

  “I’m sorry,” the nurse said. “I didn’t want to sound mean. I do feel bad for that old lady. I’m only trying to say she’s not the right judge for her care. Excuse me now, I have to get back to the disaster people.”

  Back I went to the little hall. Mrs. Copp was staring up at a lighting fixture in the ceiling. The effects of the stroke had worn off a little bit more. Her mouth was relaxing, settling back to its own shape. She was grasping the top of the sheet in its fold at her waistline. Her hands were fisted. The knobs of her knuckles were prominent, like a miniature set of ridgetops. The backs of her hands were blue-veined, skin-shiny, and almost translucent.

  Those hands looked delicate, breakable, old.

  “Hi, again,” I said.

  She tugged at the sheet, so that it came loose from the end of the gurney. Her feet were in clean white socks. Her bathrobe was hanging off the edge. It was the same shade of pink as cotton candy.

  “Please,” she said. “I want to sit up.”

  I held out my arm for Mrs. Copp to use like a pull-up bar. She managed to raise herself, and as she did, a smell of urine came wafting my way. The old woman seemed not to be aware of it.

  She was quite small, even tiny. Her white hair was straight and wispy-thin, in short, slightly uneven bangs, as if she had trimmed them herself, perhaps without looking in a mirror, perhaps with a hand that had trembled.

  Her mouth was toothless. When she reached toward the underside of her pillow, I had no idea what she meant to do, until she produced the set of her dentures.

  She’d been hiding her teeth. Maybe they were in her mouth when the ambulance people came into her room to take her away. Maybe she’d been allowed to retrieve them from a glass of water. In the ER, she might have concealed them, out of anxiety they’d be taken away from her.

  She was able to insert her teeth without looking like the effort caused her discomfort. At once, as soon as she opened her mouth to speak again, the top plate loosened and slipped, in a whisper of a click as it landed on the lower.

  So she inserted a thumb into her mouth to hold the plate in place. She was not embarrassed or apologetic about it. This was her body. It was just doing what it was doing.

  The corner of her mouth that wasn’t locked anymore formed an actual smile. But now she had to talk around her thumb.

  She had a sense of humor, this lady. I was about to wish with all my heart I had a tube of teeth adhesive in a pocket of my jacket, placed there for just this occasion.

  “Should I … call … you �
� my chap … lain?”

  “Yes. That’s what I am,” I answered.

  “Then, Chap … lain … I must ask … you … impor … tant … ques … shun.”

  “What is it, Mrs. Copp?”

  “Got … goop?”

  She said it exactly like the “got milk?” in the famous milk commercials. I felt myself melting with tenderness for this person, thumb in her mouth, sitting there showing me what her soul was like.

  “I don’t have goop but I can find you some,” I said.

  Mrs. Copp shook her head. She didn’t want me leaving her side again.

  “I want,” she said, “a … taxi. Get out … of here. I can … pay.” I let that go by for the moment.

  “I’m wondering, Mrs. Copp, if there might be something to take care of before we talk about anything else. It seems to me you might be dealing with some, you know, wetness. I wonder if we should think about finding you something else to wear. I bet I could rustle something up.”

  “Gown”.

  “You mean your nightgown?”

  “Not wet.”

  I didn’t want to make a fuss about the odor. It was true that I had seen no evidence of wetness. I’d been assuming it.

  “Got diaper. Soo … per … preem … ium,” said Mrs. Copp, a little proudly. “Trank … quill … ah … tee.”

  She was wearing a diaper! The brand was Tranquility!

  I gave her a nod. “Would you like me to arrange for a clean one?”

  No. She wanted nothing from the hospital. She held out her hand for her robe, and I passed it to her.

  “Clean things can be taken care of later. Can I help you put this on, Mrs. Copp?”

  “Marge,” the old woman said. “Call me … Marge.”

  “Oh, but I heard from the nurse you spoke with that you don’t like to be called that.”

  “I don’t like … that show, Chap … lain. But right now I … feel I am a … car … toooon.”

  “You are not a cartoon, Mrs. Copp.”

  “Will you … help me?”

  “I understand that you don’t want to be a patient in a bed here,” I said. “But there are things that need to happen. It’s complicated because everyone’s so busy. The thing is, your body went through some trouble and it’s reasonable for the doctor to be concerned about you. I’ve been told they’re waiting for information from your residence. I promise you I’ll stick by you.”