“You used the past tense just then. ‘Half the misery I suffered …’ you said. Is your suffering over now?”
Ray gazed down at the wheelchair he was in. He chuckled.
“Would you consider me crazy if I told you that maybe it was?”
“Given that you’ll need a wheelchair to get around in the rest of your life?”
“Yeah, that.”
The angel of death named Calliel, my good, good friend, held up for a tick, and then he shook his head.
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“Perhaps I’m experiencing a runner’s high of some kind.”
“Come again? ‘Runner’s high’?”
“Don’t know that term? No? It’s the high runners—and other athletes, I suppose—claim to get after working out. Endorphins. You apparently feel high. Maybe that’s what made me say that my suffering was over.”
“Could be, could be,” nodded Calliel thoughtfully. “Say it was that—a ‘runner’s high.’ Would that necessarily preclude the possibility that something deeper inside yourself knows it too, and your ‘runner’s high’ is more appetizer than main course?”
I had to laugh. Ray did too.
“What’s so funny?”
“You used the word ‘preclude.’ You’ve been hanging around me too much.”
“That’s probably true. You’re rubbin’ off on me, Professor.”
“Didn’t you once call me the biggest pain in the ass you’d ever been sent to save?”
“Not once. More like three or four hundred times.”
“Ah.”
“Minimum.”
“And now? Am I still a pain in the ass?”
“What do you think?”
“I probably am.”
“That’s okay. I think the good Lord was right about you. You are worth saving.”
I watched as Ray smiled warmly.
“I remember coming back from PT one day and looking at the white board we used so I could teach you analytic geometry. Remember that board?”
“I do.”
“Do you know the day I’m talking about?”
“That I do.”
“You’d written an equation: ‘The limit of ass as “pain in the” approaches infinity equals Ray Wilms.’ Remember that?”
“Maybe one day it’ll win me the Fields Medal. Whaddya think?”
“I don’t believe angels qualify for it.”
“Bastards.”
“The nurses all had a good laugh.”
“It was one of the first days I’d ever seen you smile. It was a good sign.”
I won’t attempt to convey to you, dear reader, what Raymond Douglas Wilms went through after he shot himself. It wouldn’t do the suffering justice. That damn bullet somehow missed his heart; it ricocheted around his innards for a bit before flyin’ out his tailbone, severing his spine before it did. He died twice in the ambulance, and six more times on the operatin’ table. The man has some serious fight in him. He would need it the long months ahead as he healed—physically, emotionally, and, most of all, spiritually—and learned to live as a paraplegic.
Calliel suffered too. He prayed for help, and the good Lord sent me his way. I stayed with him at the house. I didn’t really do much, honestly. I just offered my ear for him to yell into, which he took frequent advantage of. It turned out to be enough. I knew it would. Calliel Hiccum is a fighter too. Ol’ Ray had met his match in him.
Now, Ray had plainly said, “Don’t leave me, Jeg,” which was exactly what Calliel had said to me just before he got hung clear back in 1879. It shocked me; it truly did. Could Ray sense my presence? He never met me; and even if he had been told about me, he couldn’t see me up there on that cliff. Calliel couldn’t neither. I had gone back to Heaven, but decided to come back to watch over him. That’s right, friend. Even angels have guardian angels. I wanted to make sure my two friends were going to be all right. They had, after all, gone through a true hell together. Sometimes that makes a friendship unstable; sometimes it unhinges folk. But listenin’ to them now, I was sure: Calliel was still Calliel, strong as a Clydesdale and stubborn as a mule, and Ray … well, we’d both taken to callin’ him “Raven Ray,” because he was as dark as one, and as smart, and as cunning. You might be tempted to say that didn’t make him strong, but you’d be wrong as a gallon of grape-flavored piss. The good Lord made all sortsa strength, and all sortsa courage. The Clydesdale and the raven came to respect each other as the raven got himself back together again and rediscovered his wings.
You might be wonderin’ what, in the end, which we’re fast approachin’, saved Ray, what brought him around. I think it was two things. The first he spoke of only a couple of times, but I know it had to have put a big dent in the brittle shell of cynicism surroundin’ his healin’ spirit. While doctors struggled to save him, he saw and spoke to his dear sister Patty. She was, he told us later, the only one who could change his mind about things.
Now, the funny part is this: not once did he ask Calliel if she was real or just a figment of his imagination. Not once. But it was obvious, according to Calliel, which one Ray considered it, because Calliel said Ray woke from his coma a changed man. He no longer railed against the idea of God or that there was somethin’ beyond our five senses, or that some part of us survives our physical demise. Ray’s fear of Oblivion, and his sleeplessness, also passed, which he credited to his sister. Calliel didn’t ask him about her or press him for details. Nor did he preach at Raven Ray. He was there to be his friend and to see him through his recovery. And it was that, I believe, that got Ray over the finish line.
Calliel was there at the hospital every single day. He helped Ray, talked to him, encouraged him, cajoled him when necessary. They had their fights, oh yes they did. Some were real donnybrooks. But then something started happenin’. The fights became fewer and fewer. The storm clouds were slowly passing, and the sun was comin’ out, and the seed of that friendship finally got a little light and sprung up from the soil and fought like hell to grab ahold and make a place for itself, you bet it did!
Patty pointed the way, and Calliel made the road. I’ll never forget the day when Ray took his first step on it. I’ll never forget Calliel’s face when he came home. It was a face reflectin’ total exhaustion, sure enough, but also shinin' out in victory.
A few months into Ray’s recovery, his colleague and friend at the college, Al Snow, died. Al had been just like Calliel. He was always there at the hospital, at Ray’s side. They’d talk about math, and teachin’, and publishin’, but also about what it meant to live a good life, what it meant to be the best person they were put on Earth to be. When Professor Snow admitted believin’ in a soul and the afterlife, Ray, accordin’ to Calliel, didn’t jump on his materialist high horse, as he always did in the past, but listened with great intent, and asked intelligent—one might say seekin’—questions in return.
When he heard about his friend’s death he wept for days. We worried he might seek refuge in the depthless shadows of cynicism once again. Calliel did not take that opportunity to preach at him, and Ray did not beg to know if Al had gone to Heaven. He merely said, “He was the best human being I’ve ever known. I truly hope to see him again,” to which Calliel only smiled. Ray not only avoided those rancid shadows, he shunned them.
Ray was still too weak to go to the funeral, and so asked Calliel to go in his stead. This Calliel did. Al Snow was the executor of Ray’s estate; that duty passed to Al’s widow, who also made regular visits to the hospital to check on Ray and to encourage him, even after she buried her husband of forty-five years.
Calliel’s steady presence was over time a great comfort to Ray. I believe Ray came to accept Calliel’s ultimate role, but he never spoke of it. Calliel had been sent to save Ray before his death, which was imminent. It could have been Patty’s influence, I suppose, but Ray seemed unconcerned about dyin’ beyond finishin’ several manuscripts, which he did, and then to completin’ a letter that he wanted published in t
he newspaper at the college he had worked at. It was quite a letter, and it made quite a stir after it was printed. Here it is:
To all students at San Diego Cooperative College, past and present:
You may have known me. You may have taken one of my classes. You may have—God help you—chosen mathematics as a major and—God help you more—had me as your advisor. Given an affirmative response to even one of these possibilities, please allow me to apologize to you. I am Professor Ray Wilms. And I am an asshole.
I treated you like dirt, because that’s what I thought you were. You may or may not have been; I don’t know. I didn’t give you a chance to prove otherwise. Chances are a few of you were decent people. It didn’t matter. I spent most of my career making you feel small simply because you couldn’t speak the language of mathematics as well as I. It would be the same as someone fluent in Swahili treating you like garbage because you weren’t. You’d call them an asshole, and you’d be absolutely right. Worse, it would make that person a dumb asshole. That’s what I am—a dumb asshole. I’m sorry for that. I’m very sorry.
If I could, I’d apologize to each and every one of you personally. The problem is, I probably don’t remember you. There have been too many of you, and my offenses against you, as a collective, are close to numberless. Please accept this letter, as inadequate as it is, as my pathetic but real attempt to mend fences. I don’t deserve your forgiveness, and I don’t expect it. I simply want to offer my remorse, such as it is, and let it go at that.
You may have heard that I tried to kill myself. It’s true. I shot myself in the chest with a loaded .38. I have no idea how I survived. Some of you may be crestfallen over that. I don’t blame you. I shot myself because, very simply, I couldn’t stand who I’d become. I couldn’t see a way out of the horrible little cage in which I’d boxed myself. That’s the long and short of it. The asshole didn’t want to be an asshole anymore.
I survived. Want to know how? A friend saved me. Oh, I didn’t count him as one for a long time. I despised him, in fact. But he refused to leave my side; and when I pulled the trigger, he was there right away fighting to save me. That may surprise you—that I had a friend. Believe me, it surprised me too.
Many of you are mourning Professor Albert Snow’s death. I am, too. He was there for me as well, but I couldn’t count him as a friend. He was always a father figure to me: a mentor, a true teacher. He put up with me and tried to get me to see that there was a different way to live life, to treat people. I’m writing this letter to his memory. I’d like to think he’d be proud of me.
I won’t be coming back to SDCC. I’ve retired. I’m stepping onto a new path. I’m frightened. It’s a path for human beings far superior to me. My friend tells me I’m worthy of it. I don’t know. If you’re lucky enough to have someone real, someone genuine in your life, and they believe you’re worthy of those elevated highways, do me a favor, won’t you? Dare for them.
As for me, here I go …
Professor Raymond D. Wilms
Calliel brought in the college paper every day soon after, because the response was like the Mississippi River in spring. There were a few former students who wrote back, sayin’, “Good riddance!” among other, nastier things, that’s true. But most of those who wrote in had very surprisin’ things to say to our good professor: “You were tough and uncompromising. Because of that I got into Yale. Thank you, Professor Wilms.” “I never met a smarter man than you, Dr. Wilms. You were never an asshole to me. You made Calculus accessible. Thank you.” “I know some students didn’t like you. I wasn’t one of them. You were fair and real and didn’t mess around. I always felt walking into your class that I was entering a real college classroom and it was time to get damn serious. I appreciated that.” “You pushed me. I’ll never forget your homework assignments—sixty problems a night! But because of that, my graduate work was much easier. Thank you.” “I know some students didn’t like you. I remember what they said about you behind your back. I wasn’t one of them. It was obvious you loved math, and because that love showed so clearly, it made me wonder why. I too ultimately fell in love with mathematics, and now teach math to high-school students. I have taken your stern demeanor and love and made them my own. I’ve been named Teacher of the Year twice now, and it’s because of you, Professor Wilms.”
The responses came in for weeks, and dominated the Letters to the Editor page, to the point that it became, for a while, two pages, then three. Raven Ray shed more tears those weeks, but they weren’t tears of pain or bitterness or anger. I’m convinced he took real hold of his healin’ then, and even more after the math department’s secretary, Betty Landis, started showin’ up every morning to sit a spell with him, and even more still when students, past and present, started comin’ in as well. A few became regulars, and soon it was a daily sight to see Professor Wilms propped up in bed teachin’ ‘em. A woman named Delia Simpson came in, and the main line busted that day. I remember one of his graduate assistants comin’ in late for a few weeks to get help on his dissertation. Raven Ray, readin’ spectacles halfway down his nose, clothed in nothin’ but a hospital gown, was stretchin’ those long-unused wings of his—and findin’ out they wasn’t the only ones he had.
He didn’t mellow or grow some vacant smile. He didn’t back down from an argument. That dark personality of his didn’t suddenly get lighter, nor did his dim view of humanity. He was still a damn righteous pain in the ass. But, as Calliel pointed out, he was no longer an asshole. Calliel and I discussed the power Ray Wilms, as an angel, would have. It would be potent, even frightening. There were many who could use his unique talents and superior intelligence. He could save many Calliel or I couldn’t. I suggested that Calliel talk to Ray about it. His response? He gave me a lopsided grin and said he had had that conversation with Ray, but Ray hadn’t had that conversation with him yet.
One day near the end of his hospital stay he got a visit from a woman who said she was one of Patty’s old girlfriends. Her name was Willette. Apparently she and Ray had stayed in contact over the years. Ray’s letter actually made it into national circulation; Willette had read it and flew down from Seattle to visit him in the hospital. She told him she had an extra room in her house, one that was wheelchair accessible. Would he like to fly up after he got out and stay for a while? Ray, new man he was, agreed immediately.
The day of his flight he asked Calliel to drive him to Cabrillo National Monument. He had an hour to spare, so why not? Now, starin’ around at the city, he said:
“You sure you don’t want to come along? You’d like Seattle.”
Calliel shook his head.
Ray studied him. That good ol’ boy has a stare that can penetrate steel.
“I’ve never forgotten your role, you know—the one you told me when we first met.”
“That I’m an angel of death?”
“You came to save my soul before I died. That’s what you told me.”
“Yes, I did.”
Ray looked up. There was a big jet flyin’ overhead. He gazed back at my friend.
“Should I schedule a different flight?”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“Am I going to die on the plane? Tell me, Calliel.”
“I don’t know, Ray. I honestly don’t.”
They stared at each other for a long time. The sound of the jet faded away, leavin’ only the breeze blowin’ up over the cliff.
“Angels don’t lie?”
“I’m one, and I’ve told a passel. I’m not lying now, Ray. I honestly don’t know when you’re gonna die. I only know it’s sooner than later. When I met you I thought it would be within a week or so. That’s how it usually works.”
“Would you tell me if you knew?”
“If I knew it, you would too. When it’s time to die, you’ll know it just before it happens. You won’t feel any pain. You’ll be scared; you’ll be terrified. Try to remember, if you can, that I’m there waitin’ for you on the other side. I prom
ise you that.”
“We should be getting to the airport.”
“Agreed.”
“Calliel?”
“Yes?”
“My life is … better.”
Calliel smiled.
“I’d forgotten about that.”
“I didn’t.”
“Is it, Ray? Your life? Is it better?”
Raven Ray glanced down at his wheelchair one more time—one very serious, considered time—then looked up and nodded.
Chapter Seventeen
Compass
~~*~~
WHEN I was a boy, my grandfather gave me a compass. It wasn’t the kind that points north, but a good, solid, silver mathematical compass.
Grandpa had worked as a surveyor for Larimer County. He spent his adult lifetime plotting boundaries and drawing maps. The compass, he told me, he had used over a period of fifty years—half a century.
I remember how proud I was to be entrusted with such a vital bit of his life. It was equipment that felt heavy by the sure hand that used it and the psychic sediment of long workdays and lonely miles spent on the road, of exacting precision offered time and time again, of wisdom and the pride of a job well done, and love of the job itself.
Beaming, I put it into its fine cherrywood case with red velvet interior and thanked him. Over the following years I would open the case and pull the compass out only when a problem serious enough for it presented itself for my consideration.
I cherished it. It was an essential and treasured part of my life. But when I lost myself, I lost it. I was moving into my home from an apartment at the time, and somehow it got displaced. Try as I might, I never found it. I missed it terribly. As the years passed and the curtains of materialistic bitterness shut out more and more light, I thought of it less and less. Eventually I forgot about it.
~~*~~
I woke up.
That’s how you come to Heaven. You wake up. I found myself in an unfamiliar bed that felt nothing of the sort. I gazed up at a vaulted ceiling composed of sturdy wooden beams, then glanced right to see raindrops pattering pleasantly against a mullioned window near the bed. It was dark outside, a stormy somberness steadily dissolving under the gathering light of morning. I pulled the covers aside and swung my legs over the bedside and stood. A big stretch overcame me, and I reached for the ceiling, yawning and taking in a big breath of air. The pajamas I was wearing were white with big red strawberries on them, identical to a pair a long-since-gone girlfriend gave me. I lowered my arms and inspected them, then went to the window and gazed outside.
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