The medical center I’d grow up to be part of was not yet built. My doctor’s practice was connected to the brown-brick hospital where I was born, like everyone else in my family. Ivy was all over the walls. The entrance had an awning like a fine hotel or apartment building.
I never said no to going along when my parents or sister or brothers had to be treated for something—that was how I learned to say I’d stay out of sports. I could say I was saving myself from all those injuries.
My doctor felt I’d make a good physician. He said so all the time. But which kind? He’d list specialties, like a guessing game. For bones? For blood? For organs? For skin? I’d shake my head. He retired before I had a chance to tell him that the only one he never asked me about was the only one that was right.
Two
Welcome to the night shift, where nothing ever happens.
The medical center is huge in its awayness: steel and glass and stone, lights muted in the deep surround of the dark.
In the background are towers of firs that maybe remember, in their roots and tree-bones, how all this land not so long ago was a forest. On a moonless night like this one, you can smell some pine on a breeze and not know where it came from, unless you knew already—those trees are a solid wall, invisible.
Once at Christmas a high school came with a crane truck owned by someone’s father. They strung lights in some of the boughs, and patients began asking for their windows to stay uncovered when dusk came hard and fast, way too early. It wasn’t just the season. Night outside a hospital window, when you’re the one in the bed, is not like other kinds of dark.
The lights were only there about a week. But before I enter the building I think the wires and bulbs are still in place, and juice will somehow return to the batteries, and look! There they are, bursting back on in little explosions, red, yellow, blue, white, green, some holding steady, some blinking like eyes.
I believe in expecting light. That’s my job.
“I believe in expecting light,” I say, as if it doesn’t matter they can only be words to hang on to, out of habit, when there are no other words, when I am looking at darkness.
And so here I was, turning off my car, at a little before eleven, heading for the start of my shift. I was in my first month of nights. I was upside down and inside out, with the drag inside me of a profound sort of jet lag that felt it would never leave me.
I don’t wear clerical black, but I wear a white collar, a full one, and lightweight clerical blouses in colors that more or less match fruits and vegetables: peach, celery, plum, cranberry, asparagus, yam, lemon.
My jackets are loose, in cottons and light wools. My pants, black or dark gray, have hidden elastic waists, like sweatpants for professionals. Sometimes I wear Crocs like the nurses, but it’s usually sneaker-like flats.
Maybe, if you’re sick or injured and alone in a room you very much want to get out of, the first thing you’d notice, when I walk in, is my hair. It’s frizzy more than curly, needing most of the time a trim. The color is a gingery shade of light brown, no gray yet but I’m sure it’s on the way.
Maybe you’ll decide with my fizzy spray I am wearing a personal aura that happens to be part of my head. Or I might be wearing a wig, which was first blown about in a hurricane, then plugged for a shock in a socket.
My body has the shape of a pear. You may think I need to be advised to work out, but I get plenty of exercise walking halls.
Always, there is the collar, my fingers so adept at studding it in place, I barely know I’m doing it.
It’s never off me anymore. It’s there when it isn’t. I used to think going to work was like an actor costuming up—that every room of every patient was a stage. In my early days I was frozen all the time with stage fright: all those faces with backgrounds of pillows, all those eyes turning my way, all those people in all those beds, and what was I supposed to say to them?
As if I’d forgotten my lines. As if lines had been written.
And back would come the question, thudding in my head like the sounds of a dull old bell. I like to think I know so much, and then I don’t know anything. What to say when there are no words?
How do I do my job? What to say? What to say?
I believe in expecting light, even when it feels like a lie, because the eyes of souls see what plain old eyes do not.
Three
I arrived too late to make a visit to the chapel to sit in the hush and gather myself.
My apartment-for-one was in a development just a dozen miles away, but getting ready to go to work in the dark was still taking too long. Just before leaving I had a meal of toast and cheese, two plums, and plain yogurt with maple syrup mixed in generously. I had downed two large mugs of coffee.
Was that my breakfast? I still had no idea.
The drive is a straight line on our bypass of the nearby highway, but that took longer too. Stupidly, I’d tried to rev myself up—because the rev is in need of some revving—by blasting songs I hadn’t listened to since high school. I had saved those CDs: metal and rap and anything like a tunnel of noise to enter and want never to leave.
I’m sentimental about the days when I was cool. I loved being a teenager. I loved pretending I was someone else and really pulling it off. I had put into hiding the me I knew I was, like I was running a secret protective service for myself. Like I was keeping my own vigil.
When I finally got my family together in a room to tell them I would train for chaplaincy and be ordained, my parents and my sister and brothers dropped their jaws, in the same way exactly, and went into temporary open-eye comas. That’s how good of a secret I had kept.
Pearl Jam, I blasted in my car. Aerosmith, Guns N’ Roses, Metallica.
I was driving to work like I was seventeen again, riding around packed in a back seat, toking on every joint passed to me, slugging whatever we had for liquor, barreling along old country roads with turns as curved as boomerangs while singing my head off, being invincible, like the night was the only place to know you’re all the way alive, and who was I kidding? I was thirty-six and I was poking along below the speed limit nervously, like my body was impaired, like I was scared of the light of a bubblegum suddenly shining behind me, a cop on my tail. Like I had skipped middle age entirely and now I was old, all my systems slowed down, slowed down.
I didn’t know the words anymore to those songs. And then I couldn’t stop by the chapel for some stillness before facing whatever I was going to face.
“Welcome to the night shift, Reverend, where nothing ever happens and we’re paid to sit around and play games on our phones, ha ha ha,” a nurse said to me, my first night. In less than half an hour I was fully in on the joke.
All the same, I was hoping the hours ahead would pass like a smooth, languid river, bearing me gently along.
“May I not screw up anyone worse than they are already. May I do no harm that can’t be undone, probably by someone else.”
I never lost the habit of saying that when I’m about to go on duty. The new baby chaplain I used to be is inside me as just a small souvenir, but I don’t think she’ll ever stop piping up. If she materialized right now, like a little talking hologram, perhaps standing in the palm of my hand, in her brand new collar and a colorful stole and maybe vestments too, what would she tell me?