by Ellen Cooney
“She started to hate hospitals,” the girl said. “I don’t know why. Did she say?”
I shook my head no, then she smiled for the first time, her white-pasty lips somehow perfectly right.
“The ER’s on the first floor,” she said. “That means they didn’t take her up in an elevator. So she didn’t have to hear the ding of her top floor in any hospital. She told you about the elevator, right?”
“We only had a little time.”
“Did she tell you I didn’t come see her the last two times I said I would?”
I reached out my arm while looking at her directly, watching to see if she was okay with being touched. She was. I placed my hand just below her shoulder, as if I thought she might tip over sideways and needed to be propped.
I took a chance. “She only told me she loved you.”
The Goth-girl looked away for a moment. Tiffy. Tiffany Dawn. She didn’t cry.
“Really, Reverend, did it happen in, like, peace and quiet?”
“I promise you, yes,” I said. “She wasn’t in pain or distress. She was a lovely lady and I’m blessed I had the chance to meet her.”
“She was funny, too. But maybe that part of her didn’t show.”
“Oh, but it did. I’ll tell you, someone in the ER mistakenly called her Marge, instead of Marjorie.”
“She hated that nickname!”
“I know,” I said. “So she said to that person, “Hey, do I have blue hair …”
I was interrupted. “Like Marge Simpson! Get out! She really said that?”
“She did.”
“Oh my God, she loved that show.”
I said, “Would you like me to walk with you to meet the folks you came with?”
“Nah, I got it. I’m okay.”
She had turned to leave, after giving me another smile.
“Thanks,” she said, looking back at me. “I’m glad I found you.”
“Me too,” I said.
But then I had to catch up with her before she turned a corner and reached a stairwell. It was a good thing she had declined my company. I felt I should avoid stairs, at least for a while.
She knew what I was going to ask. I didn’t have the chance to say it.
“When you die, and I don’t know how she came up with this, it’s like, life has an elevator,” the girl said. “It can only go up. When it dings your top floor, it’s time to step off. She always said she hoped her ding would be, like, a really sweet sound. Like the sweetest sound there ever could be, and it’s only with that one ding.”
“I believe it was,” I said.
“Yeah, I got that. Thanks again.”
And then she was gone. A great-grandchild? A niece of a nephew or niece?
Ding went the elevator I had to ride in. I wondered where Marjorie Copp believed she’d be stepping to. I wished I knew that.
Twenty-five
Once when I was in seminary, a lighting fixture attached to the ceiling went haywire, blinking and sparking and turning brighter for several moments, in some sort of power surge that only affected that one light.
It was an evening class. The windows were bare. The dark, moonless night was pressing hard against the glass, as if it were alive, and trying to come inside. We were exhausted. The class was three hours long. We’d gone into overtime half an hour ago.
The book we were discussing was called something like A Philosophy of the Soul for Dummies. It was a collection of arguments that basically laid out the case for its nonexistence, as a thing.
The evidence gathered in the book made sense. The professor weighed in on the side of the authors, like a prosecutor making a case. She was prodding us, and things grew heated. Everyone became an instant philosopher-theologian, quoting all sorts of texts, through centuries.
A woman who was also working on a psychology degree said that it’s all about having a mind, which of course means a function of your brain, plus your genes, plus where and how you grew up, plus where you went to school, etcetera.
A guy who was auditing the seminar from his program in comparative theology said that he was the son of a hard-core Buddhist and a hard-core Hindu, and he had learned from the experience of growing up that everyone should just plain make up their own minds about what to believe, because you have to believe in something, or you’ll never want to get out of bed in the morning, and it’s all just delusions anyway, which is not to say all delusions are bad.
A former student of physics said it was impossible for her to believe in souls, as she already knew that nothing was real unless you could measure it.
I had thought about telling them about my fairy and my childhood physician and my theory of X-rays, but I didn’t. We had reached the point when everyone wanted to call it quits.
But we were not in a state of being fully depressed. Most of us were going to be on very intimate terms with people in the act of leaving life. And people who were suddenly new mourners.
How could we face the mourners of the one who was gone, if all we had, in our own minds, was something like, “Well, an end is an end and that’s it, and we’re done here”?
Like, “That’s it, folks, like the end of a life is the same as the end of an old cartoon, as spoken by Porky Pig”?
Those questions were raised by a woman who was already going out to a hospice care place to shadow actual chaplains. A young Catholic sister from the Philippines, new to our class, and also to America, asked what the woman was talking about, because who is Porky Pig?
So that had to be taken care of. Then someone else, a stocky, balding man in his sixties, about to be ordained after a long career as an investigator with the IRS, talked about how he had scorned all religion when he was a kid, but he changed his mind about believing in souls on the day he turned fifteen.
He didn’t call it “believing in souls” right away—that came later.
This man wasn’t utterly pessimistic about everything, as a rule. He’d had plenty of proof in his old job that there were more people who do not commit tax fraud than there were people who do. Or so he would continue to believe, he had told us.
On his fifteenth birthday he received as a gift a little blue transistor radio, which he had hoped for, but didn’t expect. His family was in dire straits financially. His joy was nearly overwhelming, because at last he could go to school and not be the only kid who didn’t know the words to Top Forty songs. But when he turned the radio on, the first station he came to that wasn’t just static was playing a song that freaked him out.
It was the great Peggy Lee, he told us, singing “Is That All There Is?”
Until that moment, he was a normal kid who thought emptiness was all about your belly and how it was time for a meal. Or nothing was on television except reruns and the news.
He had felt hollow, just hollow, by the time the song finished. It was hard to describe, except to say he felt that his body was some kind of barrel, and it was empty, just terribly, completely empty.
“I’m an empty barrel” had seemed to him like something you shouldn’t be saying when you’re only fifteen.
Or ever.
In fact that’s why he decided to be a minister, after all these years, like he was finally getting around to it.
To say it was a bummer of a song did not even begin to suggest what it could do to you. The song haunted him still, and to prove it, he sang us some lines, in a deep, reverberating, beautiful voice, which up until then, no one knew he had. It turned out that he belonged to an a cappella group with friends of his who were still with the IRS. Singing was a way of coping with life in general, he felt.
He sang,
Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is, my friends,
Then let’s keep dancing.
Let’s break out the booze
And have a ball.
Everyone knew it was a coincidence that the light in the ceiling went crazy right afterward. Everyone knew the fixture had an
electrical problem that was equal to an illness, and sooner or later the maintenance people would take care of it. Of course it hadn’t happened that a soul from who knows where had somehow entered the wires at just that moment to display itself.
But we were all, Look at that!
The professor, at the head of our seminar table, stood up. In the hush that came over the room, we forgot about the outside darkness, and the fact that we’d be leaving the building to enter it. We forgot about being exhausted.
“Reverend Professor Pearls,” we called her. She was about the same age as the former IRS man. She had a way of being profound and making it look easy, and also of looking elegant all the time, as if the wearing of a black clerical skirt-suit and a full white collar meant the height of dressing well. Once when she was asked why she wore a collar, she said she’d chosen to do so because she grew up in a family where the women were expected to practically never go out of the house without a string of pearls around their necks. She wore her collar as her string of pearls.
Standing there, she glanced up at the ceiling light, tipping her head at the sound of the buzzy sparking, as if to better hear it. She didn’t say a word about the “malfunction.” She was simply acknowledging it, appreciating it.
She looked at the IRS man. “I feel the same way about that song,” she said. “I wonder if anyone can come up with another one, before we call it a night. And let me say, for those of you who’ll one day sit with people on their way to leaving this world, please don’t have that song in your heads.”
There was a silence. No one looked interested in becoming a spontaneous singer.
Then the sister from the Philippines rose to her feet at the other end of the table. She was taking chaplaincy classes in addition to her program in nursing—her order ran clinics and outreach programs in Manila. She was a very small woman of thirty or so, in a blue-and-white habit that was not strictly traditional, but could almost pass as a laywoman’s suit. She wore her veil with its white band pushed back on her head; her bangs formed a straight line across her forehead. So far in her brief time with us, she had appeared deeply shy, and easily intimidated, as she was going through a phase of being self-conscious about her English. It was surprising to see her step up like this.
She didn’t sing. But she had something to say. She was nervous. The treble of her light, soft voice was a little shaky. She told us she’d never heard of the song, but it scared her.
A solemnness came over us as the sister bowed her head and held up her hands, clasping them together, palm to palm. She was giving us a benediction.
“People are so sad,” she said.
“People are so hurt,” she said.
“So please let us not be empty like empty barrels,” she said.
All along, the ceiling light kept doing its thing. And together with Professor Pearls, we answered her, as if this had been planned, “Amen.”
Twenty-six
The overhead light in the librarian’s room wasn’t going haywire and fizzing, but it was acting up, in random patterns of blinking and going partially dark in little blots, like sunspots.
She was very much awake, sitting up in her daffodil nightgown, freshly bathed and completely ready to tell me what was on her mind. To a casual observer, she seemed like any elderly patient waking around the crack of dawn, waiting for the big event of the arrival of breakfast, still a ways off.
I saw right away that some sort of change had taken place in her since I’d slipped away from her all those hours ago, dragging the weight of having no words to say, feeling I had failed her. But what it was exactly, I didn’t know. A brightness was in her eyes I had not seen before.
I did not even receive a hello. Angry as she was, she wasn’t letting herself slip over an edge into losing her self-control. She was fully the boss of herself, even though she sounded a little lashing and shrill.
Why wasn’t anyone from Maintenance coming to fix that light?
Look what was going on! Her own blood was trying to kill her and if that wasn’t bad enough, it was taking them forever to dissolve her clot, and she was getting the feeling she’d have been better off if she had called for a plumber.
That light was giving her a headache! Eyeballs are not supposed to throb and hurt, which hers were doing, for the first time ever! And she was worried about what could happen if she ran out of time, not for the length of her life, but for being here. Any day now the Medicare people would come nosing around, and her insurance people too, because you can’t be old and have just Medicare anymore, because, look at this country! Look how the United States of America is a place where being sick became, Let’s give more money to titans of capitalism!
She wasn’t any socialist! She was a plain old garden-variety Democrat! She was mad! They count how many days you’re a patient, like you checked into a five-star hotel, if five stars are the most a hotel can get, she wouldn’t know! Do not even get her going about the medical insurance racket!
And her light was broken! The last straw! Did I ever see those famous videos of the girl parrot who’s mad? I should check them out sometime. I should Google “angry parrot.”
They were a big hit at the assisted living place! In one, the parrot is watching the guy she lives with stomp on a cage and smash it—imagine that, smashing a cage. The parrot cusses brilliantly! She flashes her head feathers! She says the F word, again and again and again, and truly, the F word has never been uttered so well!
And today, in case I was missing the point the librarian was trying to make, today had only just started, and already, this was how she felt!
She was the kindred spirit of a girl parrot who used to be inside a cage all the time!
“It’s okay,” I said to the nurse in the doorway, who looked alarmed, for good reason. “We’re just talking.”
I sat down in the chair, bedside. I forgot how exhausted I was. It occurred to me that I should have doubts concerning what she’d told me about her years in the back room of her library—that she had never hauled back her arm and hurled a book at someone saying certain things and looking at her a certain way. I saw her shininess. I noticed, for the first time, that a tiny drop of dried blood was inside the tape on her hand that secured the needle for her drip.
The tenderness I felt for this woman was inside me head to feet, like warm melting wax on a candle. This was not how things were supposed to go. I had expected to find her weak and sad and needy and maybe coming out of a dream that was still in the act of frightening her.
Everything I planned to say about the submarine, on my way here, vanished, and didn’t matter, as if I had amnesia about it, and that was all right.
She looked at me, not as someone looking at a chaplain for help with her broken soul, but as someone who had once again made her a little breathless, and dry mouthed too. She turned toward the pitcher of water on her bedside table. The cup was empty. I started to rise to fill it for her, but I never made it.
That was when the old man appeared.
I saw that he was a stranger to the librarian. I’d never been his chaplain, but I knew him vaguely. He was a widower who lived alone, and in the last several years he’d been in and out as a patient, like an old car often rattling or wheezing or fully breaking down—but still in pretty good shape overall. Probably there was not one part of his body that had not undergone repairs.
He had a history of being admitted with a spiking fever or some alarming infection, or he’d be close to respiratory failure, and just when it seemed his condition was dire, he’d bounce back up. I had seen him in the past strolling hallways. He’d greet me cheerfully and hold up his hand to his head, telling me with the gesture that he was tipping his hat to me, and it didn’t matter that his hat was invisible.
There he was in the doorway. His height was barely five feet. Straight in the spine, and quite solid, he gave the impression he never in his life considered himself unusually short, and if he’d ever been teased or looked down on, well, he’d never walk away
from a bully. His very white face had a pinkness, like a brushed-on pastel at his cheekbones, not like from a fever. He was clearly a man who blushes easily and feels proud of it. And that face was as round as a gnome’s, as if he’d come to life from standing as a statue in a flower bed. He was grizzled with white-gray stubble that didn’t seem pointy and rough, but soft enough to touch. I felt that the sight of him could give just about anyone the urge to go over and pat him.
His striped pajamas were loose and faded, his terrycloth robe well-worn and frayed. His feet were in hospital-issued slippers. But the librarian was looking at him as if she wanted to pat him too—as if this were not a hospital, and he had fixed himself up for a social call.
You’d think she had spent the last several moments speaking to me about something happy.
“Hello!” she said brightly.
And in he came, acknowledging me with a smile and another tip of his hat. He must have been out for a pre-breakfast hallway saunter. The voice of the librarian had beckoned to him.
“Good morning,” he said to her, his voice in the roll of a lilt. “I was just after thinking being stuck in this place might be driving me somewhat insane. And you right down the hall all along and I hadn’t a clue.”
“My goodness!” said the librarian. “Are you Irish?”
“I am.”
“Well I never. There were many Irish coming into the library where I worked, for many, many years.”
“You’re bookish!” said the little old man, glancing at the stack on her table, beside the water pitcher. “As am I!”
“I have always said that except for the writers of my own race,” said the librarian, who suddenly had something of a lilt in her voice, “the Irish are the best in the world with the English language.”
The old man beamed at her. “And it’s a language that wasn’t ours to begin with!”
“Likewise!” said the librarian.
The broken light kept on being broken and neither of them cared. I could see that I was being turned into something like a spare tire in a trunk, if this room were a car.
The light overhead kept blinking.