After an encounter with Bobo Boy, you could forget he had a handler at all. He had a talent for breaking loose, his ears perked up, and it would seem that patients were calling him to come to their beds, in a hospital version of sounds no human could detect.
A poster once hung in an outpatient waiting room. A receptionist with a good sense of humor tacked it up, and people enjoyed it, until someone official turned up to order it removed. There was a new decree that all waiting areas would only have framed, glassfronted prints and only photos of scenes of the national parks, of which there are sixty-two, as all of us learned. The office in charge of wall hangings sent out a memo saying every park was represented, geysers and foliage and bubbling streams and mountain ridges and close-ups of flowers, and not a person or a creature of any kind. The memo did not say why.
The banished poster was made up of drawings by European medieval artists who created animals they might have read about, or heard of, but had never seen, not with their plain old eyes.
There was a crocodile, a lion, an elephant, and a giraffe. Each was put together so wrongly, so fantastically, you had to marvel at the accomplishment, especially when you realized the artists had blended in elements of creatures familiar to them. The head of a garden snail, greatly enlarged, was on the crocodile. The giraffe resembled a tall-neck donkey, the lion an enormous tawny cat, the elephant a gray pony with a trunk that looked a lot like a snake. You laughed at them, while acknowledging the strange beauty.
That was Bobo Boy: a drawing by someone a long time ago in a faraway place who’d never seen a dog.
He was small enough to barely make it as a lap dog: a chunky longhair with a body like a large form of pug, mostly a dark shade of tan, with lighter beige splotches here and there, randomly. His tail was long and wiry. His skinny legs seemed borrowed from a whippet; he was always looking like he’d trip on his own little feet. His round face, while making you think of a Yorkie, also made you wonder if somewhere in his ancestry, impossibly, there was a relative who resembled an owl.
He liked pillows. Many times I came upon him as he lay around the head of a patient, curled and looking proud of himself, like a hat with breath and a heartbeat. He had taught himself to do this after spending so much time with people whose bodies could not be crawled on or nestled against, due to surgical incisions still raw, or burns or other wounds far from healed.
If someone’s head was off-limits to him, he’d go sidelong against the torso, burrowing in, so patients would stop worrying about their own condition, and worry instead, at least for a little while, they might cause him to be smothered. If they didn’t want to pat him, because, “I’m not a dog person, especially when a dog looks so weird,” they’d let their hands touch his fur, as if accidentally, to make sure that as he lay beside them, he was still alive.
I often went looking for him, to be sort of my assistant. Sometimes when he was sitting at a bedside with me, he’d be summoned to Pediatrics, or an oncology unit, or a recovery room where someone was taking too long to wake up post-surgery. If my bedside visit was a long one, for a patient who had no one else, and had entered the land of last moments, Bobo Boy returned to me with whatever he saw and smelled and heard and now knew about. His handler would go away for a much-needed break, and he’d place himself under my chair, wearily, heavily, sometimes sorrowfully. He would need to hide. He would need a break too. He would lie there as quiet and still as a pile of yarn.
He did not have the chance to grow old, although he’d been aging. The director of the agency came to see me in my office, to sit with me and cry. There had been an unexpected diagnosis. No war could be waged against the damage taking place in that body. The war was lost as soon as it began.
He was so good at playing dead, the people from the agency who were with him when he died tried to fool themselves into hoping he was pretending. But then as always, it was the moment afterward that mattered more, because the stillness kept on being still. They had waited through the winter for the trench to be dug, so his ashes could circle the linden as he had done himself, nose to the ground, so many times.
“Hi, Bo,” I was saying, like ashes have ears.
I had heard there was another one coming up through the ranks. But I was in no hurry to meet him.
Five
Why didn’t I walk away when I was banished to nights? I used to think people on the night shift were different from everyone else, as an owl is not a songbird. I know better now, but maybe it’s a little bit true.
You can’t pick what you get attached to. I never asked to be rooted in the medical center like a walking, breathing tree. It just happened. I was only supposed to be here a few years, the new baby newly ordained, eyes on a future in a small or medium hospital with maybe ivy on walls of brick, in a neighborhood of houses, schools, a library, cafés, a park.
Trees can be transplanted. There are lots of medical centers. There are smaller hospitals. I had enough savings to carry me through not working for a while. I had the luck of a family of people who would help me out financially, and never call it a loan.
Already I could have been looking for another “here” for myself.
The neighbors here are office parks, steel and glass and stone, ghost towns in the night. Everywhere the landscaping is the same, businesses and hospital alike: shade trees, paved walkways, carpets of lawns that are never weedy or sick, flower beds quilted with wood chips giving off heir strange, oily perfume.
A budget ax had come out.
Our department was small to begin with, but now it was smaller than tiny. Those of us spared from the firings decided to take turns on all the shifts. But no plan for rotation was in place. I could say that nights fell to me because I’m the only one single and not a parent. I could say I’m the only woman. I could say a lot of things. When we were full we had lay chaplains and part-timers. My place on the ladder was higher than the middle. Then the ax chopped all the rungs below me.
When I knew I would stay, I tried to blame it on falling in love with a room and my part in making it.
The chapel. It’s not everything but it’s a lot. I had taken up the cause of the renovations, so that the original box of a room expanded and turned into something that didn’t look corporate, like a small, midlevel conference room that for some odd reason had chapel stuff inside.
I saw it turn into an airy, gentle sanctuary, sending out a message of, “Come on in, everyone’s welcome, sit down and take a break from all the rest of this place.”
I chose the new colors myself: pale mauve and a creamy almost yellow, the walls in two tones, replacing a cold, hard white that was merely several coats of a primer. Ordinary lighting fixtures became electric candles in sconces; the wood was upgraded to solid, friendly oak. The simplicity and the warmth, I’m proud of—the chapel became a home to me, not only for all the vigils that go on there, or the services when a service is called for, or regular meditations with Buddhists and all the rest of our gatherings, or the hours of sitting with someone in the shock of new grief, or the hope that a grief won’t be coming.
I rest there. I have napped there and I take off my shoes if I lie down on a pew, my jacket bunched up as a pillow. It’s the zero on a number line to me. It’s the fixed, still point in an always spinning world where we see things and hear things and smell things and know things the outside world does not.