“I think your soul is broken,” she might say.
“And you don’t have a clue what to do about it,” she might say.
That would make her a truth teller. I knew it.
But it wasn’t as if I wished for a way to not be broken. Maybe I was too tired. Maybe I’d given up on something, in a practical, realistic manner. Out of necessity.
I wanted to call it quits. To accept I could not go on like this. That I’d come to the end of being here and doing what I do.
Every moment I didn’t tell my department I was leaving was a moment to hope I could keep on going as I was, as I had become.
I looked up. A plane was passing fairly low, almost invisible in the night-clouds; the sky was too overcast for stars. I raised my arm and wiggled my fingers in a wave.
A man I’d sat with had worked in an airport his whole adult life, as a baggage handler. “Intellectually disabled” were the words assigned to him. He was a loader of incoming luggage to conveyor belts. He understood the reality of his illness—that it was terminal. Just like a place in an airport.
He hadn’t asked for a chaplain. He explained he did not need a professional talking to him about what would happen to him when he left this world. But he felt that, since I seemed to enjoy his company, I might as well stick around and make myself useful.
He wanted me to speak to him as if he were about to depart on a plane, and I had accompanied him to a certain gate. I could only talk about what I observed there: a counter, seats for people waiting, the airline people in their uniforms, enormous windows looking out at the tarmac, a runway. I was forbidden to mention the checking of bags or having a carry-on. The thing about this gate was, no baggage was allowed.
“The gate of all departures,” he called it.
It was a secret of his, but he had come to the conclusion a chaplain is the one you tell your secrets to. So it was good, he felt, I hadn’t left him alone when he told me to please go away.
You had to say “all” for the gate of departures; it was there for everyone. It didn’t matter who you were. People who didn’t understand it would sooner or later happen to them were people who were being retarded.
He hoped I wouldn’t get mad and yell at him for refusing to go along with everything you’re supposed to go along with in terms of heaven and hell. He could never understand how anyone could think yelling and being mad and feeling bad and scared is holy. He actually knew of people, and not just little kids, who were so afraid of hell, they’d cry out in the night like they were dreaming of fires and the devil.
He did not believe in the devil or hell and that was because of John Lennon.
“I would never be mad or yell at you,” I promised. “I’ll be doing the opposite.”
And he wanted to know, Did I know that song about heaven and hell by John Lennon, who used to be a Beatle? Someone who was nice to him used to sing it to him.
The song was “Imagine.” In a weak, wavering voice, he serenaded me with a stanza—his own version of one.
Imagine your own heaven.
It’s easy if you try.
No hell is below us.
Above us there’s always the sky.
In all the years of his job, the same thing over and over, lifting and heaving the luggage of strangers, he had never flown on a plane. He was raised in foster care. From the age of eighteen, he had lived in a group home. Sometimes, in the van of a social services agency, he and his housemates went out for a movie and ice cream with folks from other groups. Or an amusement park or a lake with a sandy beach where they had their own section. For a while he had a girlfriend. He gave me a big, hearty grin when he told me he was not a virgin with his body. He was only a virgin about flying.
He didn’t welcome questions. But eventually he accepted how curious I was about where he’d go when his plane lined up outside the gate, and his time for boarding drew near.
“When I leave my body and walk to the plane,” he said, “I’ll have a free ticket to fly anywhere I want, forever.”
I made a promise to always remember him. He called it a vow. Near the end, he began to allow me to talk about myself, the same way someone waiting for a flight might turn to the stranger in the next seat to strike up a conversation, perhaps out of boredom—especially if the stranger was in a white collar. He felt that “chaplain for everyone” sounded nice, like a stretch of sandy beach that wasn’t divided in sections, or a neighborhood where all the houses got invited when they had block parties in the summer and barbecued in the road and had contests, like the one with big guys picking up heavy dumbbells, which he had watched from a window, and knew he could have nailed.
He felt that “being ordained Episcopal” was nice too. He didn’t know much about it, but they had to be okay, because obviously they let ladies take the collar, a good thing, or we never would have met.
One afternoon I looked in his doorway as I passed by, when his meds had increased and he was drowsing in and out of consciousness, and couldn’t speak coherently. He was mumbling harsh sounds that didn’t form words, in a voice that was somewhere between a groan and a growl. It seemed he was having a terrible dream, but in front of my eyes, there came over him a shine of peacefulness, and I knew it wasn’t only from his drugs. I realized he was singing to himself and there it was, that other thing, a flicker, a glimmer, a piece of something that can’t be broken, real.
My last words to him were about the weather: a blue sky, all clear, all systems go. After he died, I looked out his window at the white-out of a blizzard. The sounds of howling wind and snow made of ice needles had not come through the drapes to reach him.
At his funeral, a supervisor of his home told me he’d made a request of his housemates. Whenever they looked up at a plane, would they remember him? And instead of saying the dumb thing people say when someone dies, about wishing their soul would rest in peace, he wanted everyone to think of him and say, like a solemn prayer, “May his soul have kick-ass adventures, flying and flying and flying.”
Four
Hurrying as I needed to, I had to pause by the linden tree not far from my entrance to pay my respects to Bobo Boy.
The season was early spring, the ground unfrozen enough for a trench around the base of the trunk. The linden is wide and massive, and a light wind was blowing, rattling the branches where nubs of new leaves were pale little polka dots. He had loved this tree; it was his favorite place to pee. It felt awful to me that the ceremony of his ashes-planting took place while I had to be sleeping.
Bobo Boy was a rock star at the medical center. I could almost hear in the wind the click of his nails, the whip of his tail in the air, the excited and urgent panting, for he was often excited, and everything to him was urgent.
That dog was absolutely unsuited to his job, if you looked up the normal qualifications for a position in the field of therapy animals.
After his training, he came to decide that no one should tell him how to go about doing what he did. He hated short leashes, but he tolerated a long one. He would not wear the usual Velcroflap vest of his branch of medical services. He made it seem noble to put up resistance, as if an ancient canine code was telling him that a dog who wore clothing wasn’t really a dog.
He had different humans with him at different times, taking the part of his handlers. The medical center had contracted with an outside agency that houses and trains the dogs who go out on assignments. All were sprung as rescues from shelters.