Double On Call and Other Stories

By John Green

Double on Call..........................................................................5 The Odd at Sea........................................................................19 The Sequel...............................................................................35 Afterword..............................................................................61

Double on Call
God is weak and powerless in the world and that is precisely the way, the only way in which he is with us to help us. Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The chaplain is just a boy, just a shock of unwashed hair and a pair of glasses and an ill-tied tie. Hes been awake for twenty-seven hours. If the door to the meditation room were not glass, then he would lie on the carpet and sleep. He would lie across the diagonal qibla, a yellow arrow dyed into the thick shag of the carpet, pointing towards Mecca. Mecca is mostly east, a tad South. He would lie in the direction of Mecca and leave the pagers outside somewhere and sleep. With longing, he gazes across the chapel at that glass door, praying fervently that the force of his stare will render it opaque. But the door is glass, and besides, the chaplain has company. The man across from him is all biceps, rippling as he clenches his sts, all clear tears dribbling down the clear skin of his face. He hunches forward in a chair, facing the chaplain. The chaplains best attempts to correct his bad posture in pastoral situations are failing with the onslaught of fatigue. The man is whispering, praying. The chaplain tries to remember what to do. He sees his supervisor, a Unitarian who believes deeply in absolutely everything. He sees her in the way that people see things that are not there, the way that they see the faint reection
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of the Virgin Mother in a parking lot pool of motor oil. The chaplain is well acquainted with visionary hallucinations. He has studied their importance, from peyote-induced vision quests to Pauls vision on the road. Its just fatigue, he knows. When people see things, they are tired. No. Thats not right. When people are tired, they see things. The chaplain does not really see his supervisor, because she is not really there. She didnt fall, the man says. His name is Joseph, and his sts clench and unclench, his biceps undulating like pond water in an earthquake. The chaplain lived the previous summer, the last summer of college, in Alaska with a girl. He had seen pond water ripple in an earthquake, as if a sudden gust of wind came from beneath the waters surface, and then in milliseconds the ground shook lightly beneath the A-frame gift shop where he worked alone. It was the chaplains rst earthquake, and he ran for a doorframe, but it was over before he got anywhere. A woman came into the gift shop a minute later, and the chaplain said, Did you feel that earthquake? Is that what it was? the woman replied. I thought it was something. I know she didnt fall, Joseph. The baby, Josephs daughter Z, had a fractured skull. It was fractured in three places, a triangle of fault lines that came together in the upper left part of her head, just behind the temple. The area of the triangle that piece of skull was gone. When she came in, alone, ahead of her family, red-gray matter was visible, bulging from her skull. Her brain leaked out of her little head. It pulsed like a tiny heartbeat, like hummingbird wings. The chaplain thought, for some reason, that it might explode, that it might blow onto his powder blue chaplain jacket and that he would go home the next morning and hang up his jacket and crawl into his girlfriends bed and she would say, Is that blood? and he would say, no sweetie. Thats brain. But it didnt happen like that. It never did. Were really fucked, Joseph says. I mean, we are really fucked. You must be feeling pretty scared. That is his job, to name the feeling. Say
8 DoublE on Call

what the person is feeling, validate it, and allow them to feel it. It has shit to do with Jesus. Good thing, too, because the chaplain is not much for his Lord. He studies Islam, specically Islamic conversion narratives, how people came to understand their communities as Muslim. His specicity within a specicity is the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. While most people presume that Islam spread entirely by the sword, he would say, Islam grew in many parts of the world completely independent of military force. And then he would tell you about conversion narratives, about Su saints and their magic before kings, about stunned emperors who accepted the Prophecy of Muhammad and the legitimacy of the Quran. For good measure, to prove that hes not one of those Christians, he would bring his diatribe home to the true religion of the sword, to Constantine, who encouraged Christianity because it seemed to help his soldiers in battle. One good thing about monotheistic peasants, the chaplain would say. They love a good suicide mission. Joseph begins to cry very hard, and the chaplain knows he has nailed it. Joseph is letting the grief in, acknowledging his fear with tears. He killed his little girl. Two years old, with beautiful brown skin as clear and perfect as her nineteen-year-old daddys. The women mother and grandmother had gone off to Church, and he had stayed home to look after the baby. He was not much for Church, Joseph. Never made him feel any better. The story comes out from Joseph in bits and pieces, staccato gunre. He told the paramedics that she fell out of the high chair. He told the Mom that she fell out of the high chair. But everyone knew that she had not fallen. Clearly, he is fucked. He cooked breakfast. An omelet with just cheese. And the baby would not stop crying, screaming for her Mommy. The baby never wanted anything but the mother. She had breast fed the baby for too long. She had never given Joseph enough time with the baby, and the baby didnt like him, didnt give a shit about him.
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He picked the baby up. He sang to it. To her. He put the baby back in her high chair. Still, she cried. Fine, Z, he said, Fine. Just sit there and fuckin cry. See if I give a shit. He left the room, watched TV, came back, held her, played horsey with her, bouncing her up and down in his immensely safe arms. She cried. He sat her down, and she wailed. Mommy. Mommy. Mommy. And so he picked up the frying pan still hot and he smacked her across the side of her face. And she became very quiet and, in slow motion, fell out of the high chair and bled onto the linoleum. These things, for reasons the chaplain suspects involve television, are invariably described to him as having happened in slow motion. The cops come, as they always do. It takes them a bit, even after all this practice, to nd the interfaith chapel on an administrative wing of the hospitals third oor. I dont want to interrupt, one of the two says, interrupting. But we need him as soon as youre done. Well be outside. They stand a foot outside the chapels door, effectively ending condentiality. The chaplain whispers, I dont suggest you talk to them without a lawyer. There is a brief prayer. The prayer part is not the chaplains specialty, and he only does it when asked, or when compelled by the drama of a situation. He is Episcopalian, and Episcopalians pray from the Book of Common Prayer. They do not extemporize. Still, he comes up with something. He says, we a lot, and Joseph a lot, as hes been taught to do. Make your presence felt, Lord. Bring comfort where there is fear. Bring hope where there is despair. Nothing new. He should offer to sit with Joseph for the questioning. He should give unqualied love and support to this suffering man. But the poor chaplain is tired. He thinks that perhaps it would be nice to have a cigarette before anyone dies. Baby Z has other family members in the hospital as well. There is a mother who stands to lose a daughter to brain trauma and a husband (three months
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theyve been married) to a life sentence. A live-in grandmother, the babys primary caretaker. Aunts. Great-Aunts. Cousins. All women, and all wearing large hats, having come to the hospital directly from a Saturday morning Church breakfast. Their vigil is now sixteen hours old. When the mother came in, the chaplain had to restrain her, because security was elsewhere and the woman was trying to get at the bed in the trauma room. He pulled her back to the doorway. The hospital believes it is important for parents to be present for all phases of a childs treatment, but not too present. The mother asked, Is she going to have to spend the night? And though he was not supposed to give medical information or advice of any sort, he said, yes, because he had seen the little girls brain. Is she going to die? He copped out on that one. I dont know. Before his cigarette, the chaplain drops by the PICU to check on the nurse caring for the baby. Hey, he says. She is Irma, married to a man who used to have erectile dysfunction something serious but now pops an effective, if expensive, blue pill twice a week. She recently had breast reduction surgery and you can not imagine how painful it is, how long it takes to recover to the point where you can raise your arms over your head to hook an IV bag. She is very talkative, and his job is to listen, so he has learned a lot about Irma. You wouldnt believe these people. These Im not being racist, of course these black people with their screaming and crying and falling out. It must be pretty horrifying for them, to be losing a baby girl. Oh, of course. Of course. I dont mean He shouldnt have said that. He is tired and careless. He has put poor Irma on the defensive. Or maybe he shouldve said it. Maybe he shouldve said more. He stumbles toward common ground. People grieve differently.
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Yes! Irma says, relieved. Exactly. Just different. Not better. Not worse. Right! How is she doing? Z? Yeah. Oh, you know. She may die before they do the brain function tomorrow. Mmm. Her heart rate is dropping. Drops like thishmmkeeps dropping like this Id say maybe seven thirty? Okay. And the brain function test tomorrow? the chaplain asks. Theyll come in the morning. Theyll see what I see. Fixed, dilated. Dead. Theyll take her off the pipe, then. In the morning. If she gets there. Right. Okay. Thanks, Irma. What time you get off? she asks. Eight, the chaplain says. Hope she makes it for ya. Irma makes a thin lipped expression. A smile of some kind. Me too, the chaplain confesses. Long night? No. Well. Yes. Yes, really. Yours? Not so bad, Irma says. Just this one. I have two others, but both very stable. So its just this one. But this family Good people, the chaplain says. Should he say that? Hes tired. Yes. Very good folks. Good people, the chaplain mumbles. Bad things. Keep happening. He should never say that. He should save it for his counseling session on Wednesday. There are appropriate outlets. I dont envy your job, she says. Get some sleep.
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Call me if I can be helpful. Sleep. Yes,m, he says. He turns, so his back is to Irma when she says, Oh. Hey. Happy Easter. He swivels back toward her. Oh, right. Yeah. Well, ofcially I guess, it is. Happy Easter. He slams his st against a blue button. The doors open, and he jogs down the hall, forgetting his cigarette break. There is no stopping him now. A minute later, he sits in a small room, the sleep room. The bed, sheets, and blanket are all hospital issue. The alarm is set for seven forty two. Four hours. Eighteen minutes. He throws jacket, shoes, and pagers on the ground. He lies down over the sheets, so he will not have to remake the entire bed, and pulls the blanket over his head. He is thinking that he should perhaps loosen his tie when he falls asleep. There are two pagers. The trauma pager goes off when a child is coming to the hospital with serious injuries. The chaplain and the social worker take care of the families while paramedics, nurses, and doctors work to stabilize the patient. Down there, in the Emergency Department, the name of the game, for chaplains and neurosurgeons alike, is stabilization. The chaplain pager goes off when someone wants him specically, for a baptism or a prayer or a death. All things being equal, he prefers the trauma pager, because it is more melodious, playing a song that sounds an awful lot like Dixie. Also, the trauma pager is some sort of walkie talkie, so he gets information on the situation. The chaplain pager usually just has a phone or room number. Neither pager portends particularly good news. They never call him to have a look at a beautiful, healthy baby growing up in a deeply communicative and functional family with an abiding religious faith that sustains them in times of trial, none of which are particularly trying. One night out of seven, usually, he spends 24 hours in the hospital with the pagers. But this night is his second in a row. The dreaded double on-call. Its beeping. Well I wish I was in the land of cotton, and he is awake. Level 2.
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Fourteen year old male. Nine minutes. Three fty six. Asleep for half an hour and, if anything, more tired. Nine minutes. If he hurries, he can smoke that cigarette hes been meaning to bum, and he will smell like smoke, but they wont notice. They never notice. Jacket, pagers, shoes back on and a quick glance in the mirror to diagnose and treat a wicked case of bedhead. Down stairs, two at a time. I am still so young, he thinks. My knees are still so good. These knees can take anything. Doog! Lynn cries out. The social worker. Lynn, the late 20s, pre-burnout social worker with hair in tiny tight dreadlocks. Lynn, who hates chaplains but likes him, because the chaplain himself hates chaplains. With Lynn, he acts as he does outside of the hospital, like a recent college graduate who sometimes has unprotected sex with his girlfriend, to whom he is neither married nor engaged. There is no pretense of ministry, of pastoral care. Hey, Lynn. Do you have a cigarette? Of course. Doogie Howser, boy chaplain, smokes? Tonight he does. Rough with the high chair kid? Yeah. Chillin with the Dad? Till the cops found us. Shame about how hes gonna die in jail, she says gleefully. So whats this Level II? Oh, whatever. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, losing consciousness only briey. God, Doog, you look like a train wreck. Im on a double. Yesterday and today? Do they require that? No. Im covering for the Sister. What the hell does a nun have to do on a Saturday? Her mother. Sick or something.
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They couldnt nd anyone else? Theres never anyone else on weekends. Everyone else has families. And Churches. Hows your girl? Shes good. Good. Her eyes are getting bluer. Hows yours? Shes okay. She wants to move in. Bluer eyes? Yeah. Theyre green. I mean, theyve always been green. But theyre starting to turn blue. Very strange. You want her to move in? Dunno. Ive never had a live-inwhatever. Partner. Me neither. Either. Right. The grammar. It slips. Go to bed, Doogie. Ill get this one. The kid is ne. Hes fourteen. Hell cuss when they put the catheter in and thatll be the extent of it. Sold! Call me if you want me. The chaplain lets his cigarette fall to the concrete and steps on it to put it out. He steps on like he imagines James Dean doing it, although he has never personally seen a James Dean movie. Back in the sleep room, he realizes why the pager went off. In his rush to bed, he had failed to take the necessary precautions. This time, instead of throwing his jacket and shoes and pagers willy-nilly around the room, he is careful. The shoes go perpendicular to the bed, the left one on the right and the right one on the left. The jacket is folded into quarters, and laid on the small end table. The pagers, trauma on the left chaplain on the right, are aligned parallel to the alarm clock, about four inches behind it. The alarm is set to radio, not buzzer. This is the routine, and the routine needs to be followed. The routine arose the one night that nothing happened. Twenty-four hours on call, and no child died, no child needed an emergency baptism, no one wanted
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prayer or healing. He woke up to the radio at seven forty two in the morning, with eighteen minutes to dress and fold the blanket. He looked around the room and memorized the precise location of everything. A Grief Observed on the nightstand, beneath the chaplain jacket, which was folded into quarters. The shoes, arranged backwards, halfway down the bed. You are either religious, the chaplain likes to say, or you are superstitious. It did not work, of course, because neither superstition nor religion works. They are not intended to work. But it had worked once, and so the chaplain honored that night with his every on-call. He is not an Easter chaplain. Hes more of an Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, Jesus dead on the Cross resurrected only metaphorically chaplain. For him, the only season is Lent and the only gospel Mark. And not the canonical version either, with its Hollywood ending tacked on a century after the gospels rst appearance. The oldest versions of Mark do not end with Jesus triumphant ascension into heaven. The original gospel ends with three women running from an empty tomb, as scared as anyone would be whos just seen a ghost. The real good news according to Mark ends with the word afraid. The rst gospel in chronology, Mark is an important source for both Luke and Matthew. And John, well John is no gospel at all to the chaplains mind, because gospels bring good news, and John brings only Baptists. For him, the last words of Jesus were not it is nished, (John) or Father, into your hands I commit my spirit, (Luke) but rather, eloi eloi lama sabachthani, the only untranslated Aramic in the entire New Testament. For the chaplain, they are the only wholly true and accurate words of the historical Jesus. My Father. My Father. Why have you forsaken me? The chaplain, given over to bouts of excessive narcissism, sometimes mumbles the words to himself over schoolwork or girl trouble, although in truth he has known no pain approaching crucixion.
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He often wishes that he could summon a noble reason for having become a chaplain at so young an age. The vast majority of people do their four hundred hours of clinical pastoral education after their second year of seminary. It is a requirement in most denominations, a sort of church-sanctioned hazing that weeds out the uncommitted. The chaplain had applied to C. P. E. at a small childrens hospital in the Midwest just two weeks after applying to The Divinity School at the University of Chicago. He was accepted into the C. P. E. program, in spite of his inexperience, because he showcased to his interviewers a theological sophistication rarely seen in undergraduates. He could quote Tillich and Barth and Otto and Buber and the other usual suspects, but was passionate mostly about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian who died in a Nazi concentration camp. The chaplain considered Bonhoeffers writings from Flossenburg to be among the great works of twentieth century literature. Not Ulysses, certainly, but perhaps Rabbit, Run. And he accepted their offer, although why has never been entirely clear to him. He intends to go to divinity school only because he can see no other way to study Islamic conversion narratives for free. That does not explain the chaplains willingness to dive into C. P. E., particularly at such an awful place as a hospital devoted solely to sick children. The chaplain has a good life, an easy life. He is well educated, modestly well-to-do, and awkwardly handsome. He has faced no particularly compelling struggle, aside from frequently being dumped by women he wished to marry. His friends and family are in good health. And, sometimes, when one is not blessed with crisis, one must manufacture it. He is no Easter chaplain, and yet it is very nearly Easter morning. The chaplain mourns as he sleeps, grieving the loss of Lent. He wishes that every day might be Ash Wednesday, that he might walk for the rest of his days with an ashen thumbprint of a priest on his forehead. But as he sleeps, Easter approaches. Peter
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Cottontail hops down his bunny trail. There is no Easter Sunday service at the hospital. They tried one for a few years, but they were badly attended. Seven forty two, and he wakes to a sweet, soft voice of the American Midwest introducing some adult contemporary love song. The chaplain folds the blanket, smooths the sheets, and walks to the pastoral care conference room. He brews a pot of coffee, although he does not drink coffee. He waits. Gary is coming. It is Easter Sunday and Gary will come and take the pagers and pour himself a cup of coffee, and Gary will be chaplain for a while. The chaplain will go home and sleep for a long time. He will lay in bed with his girlfriend, a woman who loves him very much but may not love him for very long. He will wake up around noon, and perhaps watch television. He will read, maybe. Check his E-mail. Gary comes at eight oh four. Not bad, for Gary. The Lord is risen! Gary greets the chaplain. Theres a braindead girl in the PICU, the chaplain says. Sweet, Gary responds, sarcastic. He is much older than the chaplain, but tries to speak in the boys vernacular. Gary is very concerned for the poor chaplains soul. Her father killed her. On purpose? Is there another way? Lord mercy. Yeah. Did you pray with him? Yeah. I did. I dont think I could do it. With a murderer. I should, but I dont think I could wish him peace. I didnt have to. The chaplain leaves the hospital, gets into his car, nds a single, stale
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cigarette, and lights it. He pays three dollars to a machine for the privilege of parking near the Emergency Department, and begins his long drive home east, the risen sun too bright in his eyes.

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The Odd at Sea

Generally, people have two questions. They cant come right out and ask them, because its an awkward thing. And so theyll say, How are you feeling? or What are you hearing from the doctors? Or, Whats the good word? But what they mean is, Are you going to die? And if so, when? So lets dispense with that to begin with. Yes. I am going to die. In a related story, so will you. My mother feels very strongly about me living until Christmas, which is seven months away. Mom thinks that this will represent some kind of success. She talks about Christmas all the damned time. Just this morning, she was in before work, and she was feeding me this shake elixir that contains antioxidants and proteins and shark cartlidge and a bunch of other shit that doesnt cure cancer, and shes sitting next to me, the blue vinyl reclining chair pulled up close to my bed, and she says, Im looking forward to another Christmas with us all together as a family, and youll be home. Wont that be nice? She says another. She does not say a last. Because if she somehow gets this Christmas with me, she will then want one more. This is my moms whole Cancer Strategy: Set goals, reach them, and then set new goals.
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I smile and nod and drink the Shake of Poison Chalkiness. But I dont really see the benet of Christmas to someone whos dying. Its like, Here are some toys. Enjoy them. For a week. And then youll be dead. Id rather she just save the money, honestly. I feel bad enough about being such a ridiculous nancial burden on this family. You might argue, Well, if youre very expensive, and I am very expensive, and youre dying, and I am dying, then maybe you should just off yourself now. Whats the difference between now and a few months from now? That is very reasonable thinking, at least on the surface, but it fails to incorporate Einsteins theory of relativity. The theory of relativity is very complicated and very weird, of course, and honestly I dont understand it, but it boils down to this: If you take a walk to the bathroom, you are not only walking through your house. You are also walking through time. And the manner in which you travel through space-time changes time itself. And so it is possible for two people to experience time differently. EXAMPLE: Say you and I were born at the exact same moment 16 years and 39 days ago. Now, say that you have spent the last 10 years ying in a super-fast spaceship at an average speed of 100,000 miles per hour. Because you have been in the spaceship and I have been on the ground, you will have traveled through space-time more slowly than I. You will be about three seconds younger than me. Basically, you will have traveled, very slightly, into the futureor, at least into my future. I am not making this shit up. Here is the corollary to Einsteins theory of relativity that I discovered: If you travel more slowly through time than everyone else, you will age more quickly. And this hospital, where Ive spent 95 of my last 350 days, is like a little world that rotates around the Sun slower than the rest of the world. Time is slowed down in here. And I realize I am expensive, and that I am possibly not the best
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nancial investment for my mom and my insurance company and my nation and my world. But my time is more valuable than yours. My time lasts longer. Dr. Karling told me a story about it once. When she rst nished school, she worked at some cancer hospital for old people for a few months. And the rst time she ever had to tell someone that they hand cancer and they were dying, it was this old guy. And she comes in to his hospital room, and hes lying there by himself, no TV on or anything. And she gets the big eyes and the pursed lips that people get when they tell you bad news. And she says, Unfortunately, the tumor is a very aggressive malignancy. She explains it for a while and then says that it is terminal, and the guy looks at her with empty eyes and says, How long? She hems and haws for a while about how it could be weeks or months or even a year, but she nally says, Perhaps one month. The guy looks at her quietly for a long time. Hes got the cancer grimace on his face, the pain that comes from cannibalizing yourself. And he just stares at her, his face the picture of cancer pain, and then nally he opens his mouth and whispers, A month? She nods. An eternity, he says.

The social highlight of my week is this meeting with a rotating cast of characters that happens every Tuesday in the little playground room between the north and south wings of Tower 3 of the hospital. The carpet in there is all yellow and orange and made in shapes, and there are toys for little kids strewn about, and the wallpaper features such academic challenges as the alphabet and the numbers from 1 to 10. Childrens hospitals are not designed for teenagers. The meeting is called Teens for Wellness, presumably because calling it, Teens for Dying in Four to Six Months would have been too depressing. Its like therapy. You go in and you talk about what a bummer it is to die, and other people nod their bald heads and talk about what a bummer it is to die, and then
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after an hour you hold hands and repeat after the group leader and then you go back to your room and wash your hands really really well, because you have a compromised immune system, and God only knows what kind of infections Snotty McKidneyCancer is carrying around. The group leader is Sister Janice, a Catholic nun who is 175 years old. So I drag my IV-ed ass down the hall at three oclock this afternoon to go to Teens for Wellness, mostly because I know that otherwise Sister Janice will visit me in my room later, and I would rather deal with her in group form. But when I walk up I can see through the glass wall that Sister Janice has been replaced by some skinny guy with big round Harry Potter glasses, but hes wearing the same powder blue lab coat Sister Janice does, so I assume hes a chaplain. He is sitting in one of the blue plastic little-kid chairs, leaning forward, talking to Pete, a black guy I know a little. Weve had chemo next to each other, and were roommates for a night a couple months ago. Theres also a girl Ive never seen beforewell, either a girl or a boy with earrings. Its hard to tell baldies apart. I open the dooreight chairs have been placed in a circle. I sit a chair away from the chaplain and a chair away from Pete. HeyLuke, right? Pete says. I nod and shake his outstretched hands. Nice to see you, Pete, I say. Hows it going? he asks. Okay, I answer. Im thinking I should say, Still dying, but I never say the things I want to say. So wheres the good Sister? Pete asks the new guy. Well talk about that when everyones here, the guy answers, his eyes glancing around the room. He leans forward and says, Hey, Im John. Im a student chaplain on this oor. A student? Pete asks. Yeah Im, he pauses. He seems not to know what he is. New, he nishes. We sat there in silence for a little while until it became clear that there were
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not going to be any more Teens For Wellness on this Tuesday and then John says, Im afraid I have some bad news. I half-think hes going to look at me with big eyes and pursed lips, the way they always do with bad news, and tell me that I am even dying-er than previously believed. But he does not. He looks at the ground and says, Sister Janice has passed away. She had a heart attack last Wednesday, and died on Friday. Her family was with her and her death was very peaceful. Im sorry. Shes dead? Pete asks. The chaplain opened his eyes wide and purses his lips. Yes, Im afraid so. Well, Pete says, She was 175 years old. At least, I say. And Pete laughs. He nods his head at me, like Ive done something cool. Im sure its a difcult loss for you, the chaplain says. My stomach is tying itself in knots. I felt like shit all day but now it feels like my stomach and head are engaging in some kind of knot-tying contest. We know a lot of dead people, Pete explains, and it occurs to me that this is true. Dead kids from Dying Kid Summer Camp. Dead Kids from Dying Kid Trip to Disney. Dead kids from the hospital. Dead kids from moms My Kid Is Dying support group. It is difcult for me to get worked up about a dead kid, let alone a dead old lady. Well, the girl pipes up for the rst time. She is a little cute when she talks. Something about her mouth. I think its very sad. The chaplain nods seriously. Shit, I feel bad. I should maybe go. Did you know Sister Janice well? he asks. I never met her. My parents just brought me here from Minnesota, she says. I laugh in my head. I try to laugh hard in my head. Poor Sister Janice. The only people who miss her never knew her. I should talk. I talk. So youre the new Sister Janice, I say. Well, sort of, he answers. IIll be leading these meetings for the next
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several months, at least. Luke, are you all right? You can tell that the chaplain is new, because he says several months as if it is a limited period of time. But its not. Several months is an eternity. It is everal seternities. No. several manatees. Oh. Shit. Its never fraternities. weatherable yearnities. God damn it. Dont forget to call Mom. They better call Mom. They better know shes at work. They know. She tells them. They know. What is this? Pureed something. Wet. Ugh. Jesus. My hands soaking in it, dripping down my arms underneath my shirt. On my pants. Wet chunks of it everywhere. God. Its in my nose. The carpet against my neck, scratchy. Oh, shit. Its my brain. God look at the brains all over me. They have to call my mom. At work. I dont want the girl to see. I can see the girl seeing. Shes looking down at me. I must be on the porridge. Shit. Flooredge. On the oor. Its hell all over the place. Girl, make them call mom at work. Jesus Christ, why is my brain coming out my mouth?

It was ve forty-ve in the morning. I stared at my alarm clock, which Id had since fourth grade. In my long and distinguished career as a college student, Id never once woken up at ve forty-ve in the morning. Even my all-nighters nished before this. And now, one week after graduating, I was staring at my alarm clock and seeing, for the rst time in the 14 years it had been in my possession, what 5:45 AM looked like. I sat up, folded the futon back into a couch, and then I pushed it back against the wall. The oors in the apartment slant precipitously, and so every night as I sleep the futon slips toward the entertainment center on the opposite wall. Every morning, I wake up and push the futon back against the wall, and every morning, I think that maybe Sisyphus enjoys his work, as I enjoy mine. Jen thinks it is ridiculous. To begin with, she dislikes the futon. And admittedly, the futon is a piece of shit. When I tried to buy it from this guy in town at his garage sale, he said, Honestly, I cannot in good conscience accept money for that thing, and let me have it for free. Nonetheless, Jen feels as if I got ripped off. I can feel each metal bar underneath its thin mattress. The monkishness of it sort of appeals to me, but monkishness does not appeal to Jen. And I cant sleep in her dorm room more than two nights a week, at least not

The ceilings in my apartment are six feet and three inches from the oor. The carpet is about a quarter inch thick; I am about six feet one inches tall; and my hair, which cannot be tamed, is an inch and a half high. I cannot wear shoes inside. I have a bedroom, which I use as an ofce. It contains a card table, a computer, and a poster. For my birthday last year, Jen framed a blown-up version of my favorite photograph. Woody Guthrie is standing somewhere, a cigarette dangling out of his mouth, a guitar around his shoulder. Painted onto the guitar are the words, This Machine Kills Fascists. Broadly speaking, this poster is why I am religious.
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ofcially, because I am not a student anymore. She argues that I can get rid of the futon and buy a regular bed. The futon, I respond, reminds me that The Things Of The World Are Not The Real Things. I brewed coffee and got dressed, retying my striped tie four times before I nally got the front part to be longer than the back part. I did not think about the job I was starting. I thought about Jen, and about our ghts, and about the futon, and about Reverend Colson, and about which things matter, and about what machines kill fascists, and about the lowness of the ceilings, and the earliness of it all, and how quickly the smell of coffee can ll a small place, and whether it was
27

absolutely vital to iron this shirt, since Id be wearing it for like 30 hours and soon enough it would be wrinkly anyway. As I walked out the door at 6:04, I grabbed the powder-blue chaplain jacket theyd given me three days before, on my rst day of orientation. My IDin the picture the jacket sort of swallows me up so I look young and small-headed and my eyes are open too big like Im scaredis clipped to the jacket. I get into the car and drive an hour and fteen minutes past cornelds and rotting barns and the occasional tree rising up out of the corn, stark and windblown. And then I start to think about it. Orientation lasted three easy days. I met my three fellow student chaplains, all of whom were in their thirties or forties. I met my supervisor, a Unitarian Universalist. We picked out of a hat to learn which oors wed be working on. Everyone got two oors. I got the heart oor and the brain oor. That seemed a little gratuitous. Me: Heart and brain? What else is there? Roy: Theres lungs. Ive got lungs. Mo: And kidneys. Im on kidneys and rehabilitation. Me: Kidneys? KIDNEYS?! I want kidneys. Supervisor: Kidneys is no picnic. Me: Tell that to heart and brain! Mo: But God wants you to have heart and brain. Me: God did not participate in the selection process. Mo: Sure He did. God makes every decision. Me: God is weak and powerless in the world and that is exactly the way, the only way, in which he is with us to help us. Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Mo: God wants you on heart and brain. Mo. But we were smiling. We were always smiling. The only thing I had gathered
28 thE odd at sEa

about ministers was that, per hour, they spent more time smiling, and less time being happy, than most people. Most people are required to work for a few months as a chaplain before they can get a masters degree in divinity (I am rather fond of the idea that I will one day be a Master of Divinity). But Alex, a Baptist, has been in divinity school for three years. Alice, a Presbyterian, has been working as a young minister since I was in middle school. And Mo was already a minister; he had a church and everything; he just wanted to get his masters degree because it meant a raise. Things of the World and whatnot. I pulled into the free staff parking lot two blocks from the hospital and then followed my photocopied map to the pastoral care ofce on the third oor. Im the rst to arrive except for Lynn, our supervisor, whos been on call all night. Shes seated with her head down on the oak conference table, a cup of coffee next to her. Morning, I said. She looked up. Hey, kid. Arent you just the picture of punctuality? It was busy? I asked. I didnt want to know the details, really. A kid choked on some candy and died, and the familyMom and Dad were recently divorced and the kid was staying with Dad and so Mom blamed him for giving the kid candy. Shes running around the ED calling him a murderer. All night. They didnt leave till 7:15. Jesus fucking Christ, I said. She nodded. By the way, important thing to note: The chaplain on call has to start the coffee at seven sharp. So no sleeping in. You get the coffee on. Got it? Yesm. Lynn looked over at the coffee maker, perched atop a microwave, and then said, Okay. Its 8 AM. Congrats. Youre the chaplain on call. She reached into her powder blue jacket, and slid two pagers across the table, then put her head
29

back on the desk. Lynn had explained on the rst day of orientation that the chaplain on-call carried two pagers. The trauma pager went off when a child was coming to a hospital with serious injuries. A large trauma team would then congregate in the Trauma Bays on the rst oor, and then the chaplain and social worker took care of the families (and sometimes the patients emotional well-being) while the paramedics, nurses, and physicians worked to stabilize the patient. It was all about stabilization in the ED, for chaplains and neurosurgeons alike. The other pager, the chaplain pager, went off when someone wanted a chaplain specicallyfor baptism or prayer or, most often, for death. As Lynn told them, Neither pager portends particularly good news. You rarely get called to have a look at a beautiful healthy baby growing up in a deeply communicative family with an abiding religious faith. I left her there and went back into the room with the fridge to deposit my turkey sandwich lunch. Jen made me three the day I started; this is the last of them. When I turn around, Lynn is standing there, her blonde hair perfect in its big bob, her powder blue jacket seemingly tailored to her thin frame. Oh, kid, Ive got some bad news. I waited. You know Sister Janice? I knew of her. She was the Catholic chaplain at the hospital, and worked there fulltime, but shed been out sick during my orientation. She died. Oh, Lynn, Im so sorry. Yeah, sucks. So weve got ourselves a problem, which is that the Good Sister did all the Sunday on-calls. Oh, I said. And she is departed. Right, I said. And it would beI mean, Im not entirely opposed to the idea, but I just think it would behow should I phrase thisit would be less than ideal to have the hospital staffed once a week by a deceased individual.
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I tried not to laugh. For one thing, employing a dead person would create a very complicated tax situation, she went on. I started laughing now. On the other hand, I cant ask Mo or Roy or Alex to do any Sunday on-calls, because they all have kids and close relationships with their churches. I nodded empathetically. Or tried to nod empathetically. I would have a lot of opportunities to practice this nod. So youve got to do all the Sunday on-calls, I said, nishing her thought. Im sorry. Thats hard. What, me? No no no. My dear, dear child. I dont do on-calls on Sunday. Sunday is my day for entertaining my many gentlemen callers. Oh, I said, understanding. She nodded at me. The same Goddamned empathetic nod. Ill pay you, she said. I do need the money, I said. But I didnt need the money. What I needed was the work. I had a good life, an easy life. I was well-educated and reasonably well-off, born to a privileged race and a privileged gender in a privileged country. I had faced no particularly compelling struggle. I had a pretty girlfriend, who I liked a lot. My parents loved me. My friends and family were in good health. And sometimes, when one is not blessed with crisis, one must manufacture it. And that is why I said yes. That is why I agreed to double my on-calls. Well, and also I didnt know yet. I didnt know what could happen. I had never really stopped to think about what its like to live half your life in a place where the worst possible thing happens every single day.

I am aware that I am not dead for a while before Im aware of anything else.
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My eyes can see. I can see that there is a person in the room. Its not that I dont recognize the person so much as that I dont realize that it is possible to recognize people. Its not that I dont know where I am so much as I just dont know what a place is, or what a person is, or that a person can occupy a place. I cannot think straight, basically. My thinking becomes curved. But I know that Im alive. Quel surprise. Every time this happens, I wake up, and every time, I am surprised. Presumably, this will continue indenitely. Until I am not surprised. What nally brings me around is the catheter, this little plastic tube they put up your urethra and into your bladder that basically does your peeing for you. Many medical professionals have told me that catheters do not hurt. I have been told this so many times, in fact, that its a wonder you dont see more doctors and nurses walking around with tubes shoved up their dicks. The plain fact of the matter is that a catheter does hurtin fact, it hurts enough to straighten out my thinking. Im Luke; the person is my mom; the brain I puked was not brain but puke; I have cancer; this is a hospital; and I dislike the thing that they have inserted into The Frightful Hog. I mean, to begin with, anytime theres something inside your penis, something is amiss. One of the psychologists they have here told me once that the average person my age knows about 4,000 nouns. When the tumor starts curving my thinking, I know fewer, but when Im coherent, I know 4,000 nouns, give or take. Of those 4,000 nouns, from aardvark to zygote, there is not a single one that Id enjoy having inserted into my penis. Whether it is a person, or a place, or a thing, or a small plastic tubeit does not belong inside my penis. They say that cancer kids have a high tolerance for pain. Maybe so. But I have a very low tolerance for constantly-feeling-like-you-need-to-pee-only-youcant-pee-because-there-is-a-tube-stuck-two-and-a-half-feet-up-El-Presidentewho-is-only-one-and-a-half-feet-long. Still, I come around slowlyremember, everything happens slowly here. It
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takes a while for the words to get in my brain, and then another while for them to get into my mouth, and then another while for them to get out of my mouth. Hours, probably. Hey, Mom, I say. She is stroking my forehead with her thumb. She has long nails that curve a little at the end. Theyre painted purple with little stars. She works as a manicurist, so shes got to have good nails. Sweetheart, she says. Sweetheart. I can hear the stomach-clenching. Im okay, Mom. Its justthe way things are. You cant give up hope, she says to me, although she is not saying it to me. Course not. It was a good day, really. Cute girl in my meeting today. Mom smiled. A little Casanova still! Not so little anymore, I said, defensive. She didnt know, though. She didnt know how time slows down for me, that I was ageing faster than her. Can you drink, sweetie? Shes still rubbing my forehead, up to my hair. Im too old for this, but I cant very well stop it. Too tired. I manage to lift my head a little so I can see that in her other hand, shes holding the Shake of Nastiness. Yeah, I say. I can drink. It tastes like ground chalk and aluminum foil stirred into very sour milk. But I lift my head and mom puts the straw in my mouth, and I slurp as fast as I can. After a while, mom says shell sleep here and I tell her to go home and get some real sleep. Its past midnight. She says okay. This happens every day, pretty much. She offers to stay; I say go; she goes. So she goes. Maybe this is supposed to bother me, but I like sleeping in a room alone, actually. Although one is never really alone here. You never know when a nurse is going to come take your blood or switch your IVs or whatever. This is my main complaint, really, aside from the general, overriding complaint re. my impending doom: This place manages to have simultaneously no privacy and no social life.
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Like, youre never alone here. But also, youre never with people. Its possible this isnt a hospital specic problem, come to think of it.

34

thE odd at sEa

The Sequel
It is a fearful thing to love what ction can touch. The Odd at Sea

The Invocation
If any of this is going to make sense, you need to have at least passing familiarity with a particular feeling. I dont know the word for the feeling if there is one, but its that feeling you getor I hope you get it, anywaywhen you realize the smallness of you, and the largeness of Everything Else. Im not saying God necessarily. Im saying youre outside at night and its raining and you dont have an umbrella and youre running to get inside but then you stop and maybe you hold your hands palms up and feel the rain pound against your ngerprints and soak through your clothes and your wet hair against your neck and you realize how amazing it is while the thunder cracks. Im saying theres a certain slant of light on winter afternoons that makes you feel a weight on your chest. You see a Shakespeare play or read the Quran or visit the Grand Canyon or hear a song or smell pure vanilla extract or whatever it is, and you feel the immensity of it. The terrifying wonderfulness of everything. If youve never felt that, then dont bother. You will think I am merely lying, which I cant bear. Not after all this.
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One
The words would come into my mind just as the thing happened. The rst time: Im eight, playing four-square with Polly, and she spikes the ball over my head and I run down the driveway chasing after it, the red ball bouncing huge arcs, and I hear the words describing what I am doing: The neighbor girl chases after the ball, dashing out into the street, not looking and not needing to, running there at the far end of the cul-de-sac. I knew all the words in that sentence, but I would never have strung them together that way, and it struck me as odd that I would be the neighbor girl, some bit player in the description, and that this snippet of story would come to me in a way that I could not myself make up. It seemed odd, but then again, so did other things. I remember thinkingit must have been nearly the same time as the four-square-arcing-ball incidenthow odd it was that you are born either a girl or a boy and never get to switch. But even smaller things: that pepperoni is round, that orchids smell, that you say bear just as you say bare. It is all odd at rst, and then it becomes normalnot because it is normal, but because repetition uns the peculiar. And so it was with the words I would hear. I mean, I wasnt hallucinating. I would hear them in the soundless way the imagination hears. And only occasionally. Once a month, perhaps. Often with Polly, but not always. Sometimes with my parents, as I walked next to mom in the supermarket, and the voice says, Marinas daughter nds herself pinching the wool of her mothers slacks as they walk through the cereal aisle, trying to feel the fabric rub between her ngers without having to touch her mother. Just every now and again. She drinks from the water fountain, her father holding her beneath the armpits, and she counts the swallows until she is satedone two three four ve six seven eight okay enough. Just often enough to be normal. Their daughter between them on the canoe, in the center, her legs wrapped around the cooler full of his beer, and there is a blue heron, and Marina points to it and the girl cannot stop staring, bowled over by its size as it spread open its wings,
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thinking that she could hide behind either of its wings and never be seen again. Just often enough for me to believe the silent voice must be my own. I mean, I was sixteen when the ction was revealed. And of course in retrospect it seems obvious, but at the time I was busy rolling around in the sixteenness of everything: the school newspaper, and Clay Warsley, and whether I liked or disliked the dimple in my chin. I was sixteen. The people around me were hurling dripping handfuls of paint at the blank canvas that was me, and I was watching the painting come together. And I thought I was painting it, of course. Of course I did. I was sixteen. Admittedly, I am only seventeen now. But some years are longer than others.

Two
- Hannah al-Hajji. - 17 - Yes. - Who do you say that I am? - Yeah, youre such an expert in knowing what people are not. Its extremely not impressive. I continue to be not amazed by your unning. - Uh huh. - Rahim had this action gure, okay? This, like, three-inch tall Power Ranger. They were big when he was a kid. They were, like, crime ghters or something. I dont know. But he had this red power ranger ever since he was a baby, but all the painted parts had long since worn away, so actually you couldnt tell it was a Power Ranger. It just looked like a miniature red plastic person. - He was three years older. - He lived at home till I was born and then they had to move him into this facility. Spring Hill. So, whatever, we visited him every Sunday. Sundays were identical: We went to church, then we went to lunch with Polly and her parents, then we spent like thirty to forty-ve minutes with Rahim, then we went home.
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And the thing I did every single week was I brought him his Power Ranger, and then he would hold it. Like, I dont know if he was really holding it, because his sts were permanently clenched, frozen and turned in upon themselves. When I was little I used to think it would hurt so much to have his sts like that, but then as I got older I realized that if it did hurt, it was the least of the hurts. - He was my freaking brother. - No. No, dude. You are dead wrong. This is the ction.

room, his forehead against the table, one hand clenched around the beeper. Every 24-hour period, one of the chaplains was on call, which meant that you carried a beeper around the hospital with you, and if it went off, you had to go attend to a calamity of some kind. Gary, I said. He was 30, maybe. A black guy, a pastors son going into the family business. Taylor, he answered, without looking up. How was last night? With his forehead still on the table, he slid the beeper across the table toward me. I was on call now. Long, he said. Drowned girl. Swimming pool. Her parents just left. You want some coffee? I asked. Yeah. I got the coffee started and then took my shower. I got dressed and walked back to the conference table. I sat down and took a sip of coffee and then Gary asked if I wanted to pray. I said okay and we held hands across the table with the beeper between us, and he said, Lord, we commend to your care the spirit of Zariah Smithson, and we pray for all those at which point the beeper started shuddering and then began to sing. This beeper would play a little song that sounded almost exactly like Dixie, and then a voice would tell you approximately what youd gotten yourself into this time. You never really had to do much unless the beeper went off, but the problem was that the beeper went off constantly. I cut off the prayer to baptize a kid with liver failure. The baptisms were the best part of the gig, even though they only ever asked you to baptize somebody if that somebody was likely to die before a real minister could be found. Around ve oclock that afternoon I took a break from visiting kids in the ER and ended up downstairs in the basement cafeteria. I was dipping a banana into
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Three
I was 21, a couple months out of college, and I was working as a student chaplain at a childrens hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana. I lived at the time in the walk-in closet of a basement apartment with three guys from college in what realtors described as a gentrifying neighborhood, by which the realtors meant that the murder rate went down every year, except for those years in which it went up. I was drinking a lot. If I had two days off in a row, I would take the train home from my on-call, and I would get home around 10 in the morning, and I would wake everyone up and then we would drink and play Mario Kart, and then after a while we would drink and play Trivial Pursuit. I would wait till I was sweating booze, and then I would crawl into the sleeping bag that lay atop the bare twin mattress on the oor of the walk-in closet, and I would sleep for 12 or 14 hours. One does not need reasons to drink, of course. But I had some. On the morning in question, I came into work at 7:30, half an hour early, because I wanted to shower, and the hot water in my apartment lasted about thirty seconds. I took the elevator up to the third oor, walked past the frosted glass walls of the interfaith chapel and into the pastoral care ofce. Gary, one of my fellow student chaplains, had been on call that night. He was sitting in the conference
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Key Lime yogurt. Eating at the cafeteria was bad luck, but eating elsewhere else was also bad luck. The beeper went off mid-banana. In Dixie Land where I was born Sixteenyear-old female Level One en route six minutes. Patients are almost always preceded by their parents, because no matter how fast an ambulance can drive, terried parents can drive faster. So I was surprised, standing just inside the sliding doors of the ambulance bay, that no one had arrived for her. The minutes ticked down; the trauma team got in place. I was standing next to the social worker, a woman in her 50s named Lynn who has developed the ability to work really hard despite deep down inside not really giving a shit, which is the only way that you become a person in your 50s working as a social worker at a childrens hospital. I saw the ambulance pull up, lights on and sirens off. The driver ew out and ran to the back, and quickly they were wheeling her in. One of the paramedics was shouting as the doors glided open. He talked all the way in to Trauma Bay 2, where they moved her from the gurney to a bed. Boys and girls, meet Hannah al-Hajji. Hannahs sixteen. Shes a Sagittarius who enjoys long walks on the beach, boys who arent any good for, being ejected from vehicles in single-car accidents, shoe shopping, and arterial lacerations on her left thigh with possible head trauma. Shes awake, alert, a real pleasure to be around, and her pulse is 84 with a pressure of 90 over 60. I got a look at her once she was in the trauma bed, still strapped to the ambulances backboard. Neck brace. Huge blood-saturated bandages wrapped around one leg, the blood dripping from the gurney. Her clothes in a bag, the jeans black with blood. She was beautifulthick, light brown hair in lazy curls to her shoulders. Big, brown eyes. They were blinking. Lynn and I hung back by the entrance of the Trauma Bay, partly to stay out of the way and partly to stop any family members
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who might rush in. But of course no one came for her. On that much, everyone agrees. Dr. Bell said, Hey, Hannah, can you hear me? I saw her mouth form a yes. Youre doing great, sweetie, Dr. Bell said. Youre doing awesome, and were gonna take care of you. And then a nurse said, Line in, line in. They were working on the leg. They pushed some tubing or something into the wound and Hannah thrashed around like crazy with Dr. Bell saying, I know. I know. Stay with me, and I could Hannahs lips moving, and I assume that she was praying. The ambulance paramedics shufed out of the room, walking past us, and Lynn says, Her parents? Yeah, so check this out: She says they were in the car with her, but they werent at the scene. She was ejected a couple hundred yards from the crash, too. Weird. I squinted at him. Suicide, maybe, he said, then wandered off to the staff room with the free soda. Lynn followed him out the door. I stayed. It was Lynns job to nd the family, not mine. My job was to watch. Dont just do something, my supervisor liked to say. Stand there. I saw the asphalt stuck half-inside her cheek. I saw her toes wiggle when she was asked to wiggle them, and I saw her lips moving silently, and I saw Dr. Bell looking up into the pale ourescent light above, rearranging it so that she could better see Hannahs split-open outer thigh, the cut running up three inches from the outside of her kneecap, the bleeding stopped enough now that I could see into her leg, where it looked like meat. Hannah began to mumble. Whats that, Hannah? Dr. Bell asked absentmindedly, and then turned to tell a nurse, When is that OR available? This is ridiculous. Tell them we need a room, Holly, and not in some vague undetermined
45

future. Hannah was mumbling still. The paramedic holding Hannahs head, a girl my age named Anne, leaned down. Im sorry, Anne says, I dont understand. But listen, baby, you just sit tight and were gonna get you upstairs and stitch you up and youll be ne. But she wouldnt calm down. She tried to sit up, so I took a step forward. She mumbled again, louder this time, but her jaw wasnt moving as shed like it to. And then I could hear her. Egg. A. Oont, she says. A. Gay. Unt. I came to the bedside now and put a hand on forearm, an attempt at both comfort and restraint. I guessed at what she was feeling, and spoke to her for the rst time. Youre not alone, Hannah. Were all here with you, to take care of you. This is Anne. The doctor is Dr. Bell. Say hi, Dr. Bell. Hi, Dr. Bell, she said. Im Nate Taylor. Were all here with you. She seems to be listening, but then when I dont say anything for a moment, she says, wassit ean? Wassit ean? An nursing assistant gingerly placing Hannahs clothes into plastic bags said, Shes saying whats it mean, and then added, I got a two-year-old. Talks just like that. Uh huh, Hannah said. wassit een? Dr. Bell pulled me back by the collar of my powder blue chaplain jacket and whispered in my ear, her breath hot. Thats good, keep her talking. What does what mean, Hannah? I asked. A. Gay. Oont. A gay aunt? I ask. Even Hannah laughed. She tried again. Egg, she said. And then she closed her jaw a little, wincing. Zay. Her jaw relaxed again. oot. Egzayoot, Anne said. Whats that mean? And then louder, Does anyone know what egzayoot means? Its a stage direction, I said to Hannah. My palm sweating against her
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forearm. Exeunt. It means They Exit. Its the last word of many plays. Its almost like, the end, you know? She just closed her eyes and said nothing more as they nally got her up to the OR. I was half-asleep in the waiting room when the surgeon came out nally, and I stood up. Youre the chaplain? And I said, Yeah. Howd she do? And he said, Wheres the family? Not here yet, I said. Where the hell are they? I looked at the clock on my cell. I dont know. Its been three hours. Social workers trying to get in touch. No one is here? Correct. Jesus. Poor thing. She did ne. Barring infection, shell be home in two days. I mean, provided someone picks her up. What is it with families these days, chaplain? When will she wake up? An hour? My cell rang. It was Lynn. Hey, Lynn. Come have a cup of coffee with me, she says. Im in the lounge. So you know that restaurant Juan Pablos down on Lafayette? I nodded. Okay. Okay. So an empty SUV crashed into some old lady in the parking lot of Juan Pablos. The restaurant calls 911, says a car with no one inside it just ran over one of their regulars. You with me so far? I nodded. Cop comes to investigate, on his way into the minimall he happens to see a hand coming out of a drainage ditch on Lafayette Road. He gets out and heres this marginally conscious girl with blood
47

pouring out of her pants like a fountain. Cop sits with her while the ambulance comes. She tells the cop she was in the backseat. Her parents in the front. Then they disappeared. Like, to use the parlance of your profession, they were raptured, although nota bene she is a Muslim. So the girl sees that the car is headed for Juan Pablos and she doesnt gure she has time to crawl into the front seat and put the brakes on so she rolls down the window and jumps out a just before impact and lands on a big hunk of glass bottle. I tried to think it through. It didnt make sense, but childrens hospitals are in the business of not making sense. Everything there was impossible, none of it could be reconciled to the real and actual world I went home to, the world where people study for tests and make friends and play soccer and complain about cafeteria lunches and worry about their hangnails and drive fast and drink bad vodka and play Mario Kart. It was impossible to believe fully in both worlds, and the end result for me was a kind of chronic inability to believe in either. My coffee had gotten lukewarm, which was how I like it. I drank it all in four sips. Weird, I said nally. So Im telling the paramedics, you know, she was driving and jumped out of the car. Maybe shes delusional, you know. Bipolar. And theyre nodding, but turns out this is only the tip of the delusional iceberg: Both seatbelts are buckled in the front seat for starters. And her cell phone? Anne brought it to me and I started calling the numbers. First mom and dad. Then dad cell. Then mom cell. I call grams. Then I just start at the top. I call Ashleigh. I call Caycey. I call Cory and Corys mom and Des and Drea and Durden. And what, no ones home? She handed me the cell, covered in a purple sparkly shell. Call, she says. Call anybody. I scrolled down to mom cell and hit send. It rang once, and then, The number you are calling has been changed or
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disconnected. I scrolled to the Ls and called a Lutz. The number you are calling has been changed or disconnected. Weird, I said again, although honestly it wasnt that weird. Lots of people go crazy. Explains the lack of parents, though. Lynn reaches across the table and grabs my wrist. Oh, but wait, she says. The license plate? A forgery. The state never issued it. The VIN on the car? There is no VIN on the car. Her drivers license? Fake, according to the cops, even though it sure as shit seems real. Look, even has the hologram. I turn the license in the light and watch the word Indiana appear and disappear over her face, the picture dominated by a huge smile, and the smile reminded me of the over-thetop way little kids smile under duress. I was utterly charmed by the smileI concluded from it that she was who I wanted her to be, a girl whose every act was a tiny rebellion, and who had now seen t to execute the largest-scale rebellion possible. It turned out otherwise, of course, but that smile cast the die. Im just saying the girl has gone to pretty elaborate lengths to disguise her identity, Lynn says. My cell alarm beeped. She should be up, I said. You wanna talk to her? Nah, cops said theyd be here in an hour. Theyll call me if they need me. Want a cigarette? I shook my head no and headed upstairs. God bless Lynn. She could give up on anybody.

Four
We had just come from lunch at Juan Pablos with Polly and her parentstheyd moved to Carmel years before. It was weird to see Polly now; we went to different schools and didnt really have anything to talk about because the only thing we ever had in common was physical proximity. We were driving to Spring Hill when I reached down to my left and found the Power Ranger not there, and I said, Mom, do you have the Power Ranger? and she said, No, you have it, and I said, I think I might have left it in the
49

restaurant, and she said, Hannah, and I said, Sorry sorry sorry sorry, and my dad said, Are you sure? and I was looking around everywhere for it, and I knew Id taken it to the restaurant because I was always super-paranoid about leaving it in the car as if someone would take a tiny unpainted red action gure from the back seat of a car or something. Pretty sure, I said. So then my dad pulled a dramatic and somewhat cranky u-turn and we were driving down Lafayette back toward Juan Pablos and no one said anything else, and then the words came. As Marina and Ibrahim drive back toward Juan Pablos, she thinks about how long it has been since she had champagne. I was wondering who hadnt had champagne in a long time when the voice surprised me. It had always used vocabulary I knew, but now, it breathed a new word to me. Exeunt. And then in front of me, my parents disappear. The guy who knew the meaning of exeunt looked stretched out to me, everything about him too long. They Exit. And then they did and then the minimall ahead, and as I scrambled out of my seatbelt we jumped a curb and now the parking lot was too close and I was like, crap, I should have kept my seat belt on and then I saw we were going to hit something hard and like an idiot I jumped out the window head rst. My head hurt bad enough that I didnt start to think about what had happened until I saw the blood coming through my jeans. It wasnt like they had faded slowly into the ether. They didnt wave goodbye or make a noise. They just werent there anymore. I kept thinking they must be in the wrecked car. But then I would remember what Id seen, the empty front seat, the driverless car. And then I would tell myself they couldnt disappear, because it was impossible. And all the while, the blood roaring out of me no matter how tight I hold my open palm against the rip in my jeans.
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And then I decide to let it all go. The bleeding didnt hurt, not really. I just took my hand away, and I stared at it a second, watched it run in little rivers down into the dry ditch, and I watched the skin of my arms go pale, and I found myself not caring very much about continuing to be a person, and I put my head down on the grass and turned my face toward the low, clouded sky. I didnt feel scared, really, because I was sure of what Id seen. No no no. Not like I was going to be with them, exactly. I just felt like the central people who would be really bummed out about it no longer existed. I felt lightheaded. I think I vomited a little, like on my shirt. When I closed my eyes the world spun so I just stared heavy-lidded at that sky. Then I heard the siren. And for some reason I raised my hand. I didnt even especially want to or think about it and I have regretted it many times since. - No, thats not the same thing at all. - Its the difference between blacking out your windows and letting night fall. - Oh, my God you are always asking me to tell you the fricking story and I am telling you the fricking story and now you are trying to tell me what the story is about? Its my story. My telling it to you is conditioned upon you hearing it without taking it. Okay? - Right, so okay. My hand was up, over the seeding unmown grass, and I waved with just my ngers as the siren got loud. The cop stopped. She put both sts into the wound, pushing so hard I puked again, and then more sirens, and then the ambulance, and then the white light burning through my eyelids in that bed that I thought for sure was The Light, and then Mr. Long Face Bluejacket dening exeunt, and then nothing for a long time. I tried to die the whole time; I kept telling myself Dont ght Dont ght Dont ght, and when the purplemasked man with the wire rimmed glasses told me to count from 10 to 1 starting at 10, and I said Teh... and then my vision lled with black dots, and then the black dots became my visionwhen that happened, I honestly thought I was
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going, so you can imagine my disappointment when all of a sudden I was feeling something, a sweaty hand on my shoulder, and I was not dead, and there was Mr. Exeunt again. I blinked, and he was still there. The impossibility of it settled in enough that I realized they couldnt have disappeared. People dont disappear. My parents, I said. Are they here? Who are your parents, Hannah? he asked. His hand still on my shoulder, the paper gown soaking up his sweat. I want to move but cant. Marina Starke and Ibrahim al-Hajji, I said. Mom never wanted to take his name or his religion, and he never wanted to force them upon her. The Exeunt guys eyebrows came together for a moment, like he knew something, and I said, What? And he said, There was no one in the car with you, Hannah. The phone numbers you programmed into your phone are all disconnected. Your parents Im sure they want and need to know youre okay. And I need your help to contact them. I shook my head. I felt again this desperate desire not to be here, not to be a person anymore, and it was a feeling Id never felt before, although then again, these early days were sort of an era of never-befores. Marina Starke and Hasim al-Hajji, I said. We live in Quail Hollow. 8110 Armitage Trail. I always lived there. All the neighbors know me. Call them. Mom and Dad and I were at lunch with my friend Polly Portent and her mom, Ima. And then we left to visit my brother but we had to go back before I forgot hit Po And the guy was like, You were at dinner with Ima Portent? Your mother is Marina Starke? I wasnt feeling great, but I summoned the energy for one exclamation point. Yes, thats what Im telling you! Are they here? Is Polly here? Hannah, he said. He was all serious now. His thick lips were pursed into parallel lines. Ima Portent is the protagonist of a novel. The Odd at Sea. Ive read
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it, okay? Youre using the plot of that novel to construct your identity. That woke me up a little, shook some capital letters out of me. Dude, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?! MY NAME IS HANNAH AL-HAJJI. MY MOM IS MARINA STARKE. Yes, the guy said, calmly. Oh so calmly. Its easy to be calm when its not your life. I didnt know this guy, but I knew one thing about him: His parents were either alive or they were dead. So of course he was calm. He was calm like you were, like the cabbie was, like everybody is who can answer the essential questions. Yes, Exeunt said again. Your mom is Marina Starke. She works as an insurance adjuster. Your Dad owns an Arabic translation service, even though he didnt learn Arabic until he was an adult. Your next-door neighbors for many years were Polly and Ima Portent. I mean, Hannah. Her name is Im a Portent. Thats, like, not a real person name. Its a novel name. A bad novel. But yes, you grew up next door to Ima Portent and her daughter Polly, and you have a crippled brother. How do you know about my brother? Because hes the star of The Odd at Sea. I took a little while to try to process what this guy was telling me, but when I nally responded, it was all at once. Dude you are fucking crazy I dont even know who you are youre like 20 I mean what are you a fucking 20 year old doctor. Im the chaplain. What is that I dont even know what that means. Im, likefor tonight anyway, Im like the minister for the hospital. Listen nutso get me a doctor or a cop or somebody who is not just some asshat trying to make me fucking crazy so they can save me. Which, even in retrospect, was precisely what he was up to. I just didnt quite comprehend the he yet.
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to the bookstore, if it was still open. She didnt answer. I ran down the four ights of stairs from Hannahs room to the Emergency Department. I took the stairs two at a time, thinking that I was still young, that my knees were still good, that the best and worst of it were in front of me. I found Dr. Bell talking to the mother of a kid with an exceptionally bad ear infectiona writhing, howling black kid kicking the bed. I went in and knelt next to the kid and told him that it wouldnt hurt much longer, and as soon as I said it he calmed downI could almost feel his body slacken, and for half a second I thought I might not be a shitty chaplain after all, whereupon Dr. Bell said to the mother, There it goes. Thats the medicine kicking in. As long as we can stay ahead of the pain, he should be ne. Just give him another pill around 4 AM, and then keep up with the drops. Should work ne now that weve got his canal open. Dr. Bell and I left together, and as we walked down the hall, I said, Are you super busy? Is that a rhetorical question? Uh, no. Do you have like ten minutes for a walk? Dont ask me out, Taylor. I cant go out with a minister. My rabbi would kill me. Im not asking you out, I said, rolling my eyes. She stopped walking and swiveled, looking up at me. Anti-semite, she smirks. Theres no winning with you. Yes, Dr. Bell said as she slapped the silver plate to open the doors outside. Thats the idea. Once we got into the open air, the irtation endedit was more theater for our fellow employees than anything else. (I ostensibly had a girlfriend, although it would be more accurate to say that a girlfriend had me.) As we walked across the emergency parking lot, I told Dr. Bell I wanted to go
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We were both busy breathing the unkempt air of outside. The dirty, delicious air with its suspended particulates, its u viruses, its infectious bacteria. It was a warm, humid night in Columbus. We walked through the hospital playgrounda place that is always empty even in the daytime, not for lack of children but for lack of well ones. We were far enough away from the streets and the buildings to see our moonlit shadows, the black over the silver as we walked past the shadows of still swing sets. And that air, thick enough to chew. Dr. Bell broke the silence. So I hear the leg trauma girl is nuts. Indeed, I said. We made it out onto this street designed for college studentshead shops and bagel stores and all-night convenience stores selling nothing but candy and beer. I told her about the girl and about The Odd at Sea. Thats funny, she said. I know that book. Yeah? Well, I never read it, but the guy who wrote it is from here, isnt he? It is, yeah. Its about this insurance adjuster lady who is having an incredibly boring affair with her female next-door neighbor. Id read it a summer ago. I was living on campus, working for a professor who was writing a book about whether or not one word in Richard III should be deleted from the text of the play. (Really). That summer, this beautiful girl named Ellen was slowly dumping me. It took her the full fourteen weeks to complete the excision, and after our ghts, I would read. Back then I was willing to read absolutely anything so long as it was not Richard III or about Richard III, and because my standards were so low, I ended up reading The Odd at Sea, which I found in the 50-cent used hardcover rack at the college bookstore. It was signed. I gured any signed book, even a terrible one, was worth a couple quarters. I read the book in two nights. It was only about 200 pagesjust a series of character sketches about this woman Marina and this kid Polly. Parts of it were just regularly overwritten, but parts were so-bad-its-good, enough to keep you
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reading on nights when the only other entertainment available to you is having extravagantly painful arguments with a nice-looking girl who cannot quite bring herself to love you. The best thing about The Odd at Sea, to be honest, was its title, that wonderful pun on Homer. I kept thinking the title would pay off, that Polly and Marina would go to the beach one day, rent a tubby sailboat, and then get dragged out by the tide to face Cyclops and Sirens. But this was not to bein fact, there was not a drop of water in the whole damned book. We came to the bookstore, which was three houses joined togetherall of them still furnished, but now with a winding and endless collection of used books stacked high against every wall. The store was eccentrically cataloged in a way that only the owner understood, and so if you wanted to nd any particular book, you had to nd him. Fortunately, he was sitting behind a cash register at the messy entryway. Im looking for a book, I said. He glanced up at me and then back down to his reading. Bibles on the second oor, in the blue bathroom. Hes not that kind of chaplain, Dr. Bell said. Hes the conicted kind. Oh, then our gay erotica is in the basement. I laughed. The book Im looking for is called The Odd at Sea. I dont remember the auth Hoosier authors. Second oor. Yellow bedroom. Authors name is Elliot Garmin. Terrible book, by the way. Great, thanks. We walked upstairs and wandered until we came to a canary-colored room with a sagging full bed covered with a yellow paisley bedspread. Dr. Bell found the book, a dust jacket-less hardcover, the title printed in block navy blue lettering down the dimpled spine. The authors name was almost microscopic: Elliot Garmin. I
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pulled the book out and ipped through. It too was signed. Elliot Garmin liked autographing. You know anything about this guy? I asked Dr. Bell. No, just that he was one of the like four other Jews in Knox County when I was growing up. I think he lived in Mount Vernon? He did? Where does he live now? Hes dead, she says. Well, see, that is a potentially relevant piece of information. I thought it kind of went without saying, she answers. I mean, I dont know if youve noticed, but pretty much everyone we both know? Is dead. I laughed. I should introduce you to xxx, I say, and even though she laughed, I regretted saying it. I would do anything for a laugh. You are dark, Taylor, she says. You are one dark-hearted servant of your Lord. The book cost three bucks. When I got back to her room on the fourth oor, Hannah was sleeping. Her rhinestone cell phone was gone from the bedside table. In its place sat a Marion County Sheriff business card. I tucked the book in her arm. I walked down to the basement, got a banana from the cafeteria, and then ate it in the deserted Gastroenterology Lab waiting room on the second oor. The Gastroenterology Lab waiting room was a bad luck place to eat, of course, just like every other place. But I gured it was safer than the cafeteria, which had already failed me once that night. I was standing up to throw away the banana peel when the beeper starts playing its wistful tune. Fucking Gastroenterology Lab waiting room. Terrible place to eat a banana. What had I been thinking? I could hear the fatigue in the dispatchers voice when he said, Level 1 trauma. Eight minutes. Fifteen year old male. Shot himself.
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And so Dr. Bell and I came together to make the mutual acquaintance of another former person. The night descends into a steady drip of visitors, none of whom I want to see. The female cop, the one who found me, asking if I have a history of mental illness and then telling me my phone is evidence. The social worker, middle-aged, clicking a pen sponsored by an anti-depressant manufacturer, refusing even to entertain the idea I might not be crazy. The Jamaican nurse, who calls me baby. The surgeon, who says Im physically ne, emphasizing the word so as to remind me that I am not ne. When they leave, and I am alone, I feel the panic clawing at my stomach. I feel disgusted by the printed cotton gown tied around me like its a shroud. I want out desperatelyout of the gown that scares me every place it touches my skin, out of this bed and this room and this building, out to nd my parents, out to understand why the contacts in my phone dont exist anymore, out of here. But I cant leavethe slightest shift of my body makes the pain explode out of my leg, pain so bad that it puts dots in my eyes. I wonder again why I raised my hand when the cop drove by. As bad as I nd the uninvited visitors, the aloneness is worse. I just want the panic to be interrupted. It is impossible to fall asleep with the panic washing over me constantly, each moment of it still feeling entirely unprecedented, despite the moment that I know came before and the one I know is coming. This endless newness of no one coming for me. Yes, it is impossible to sleep. But the drugs make it impossible not to sleep. I wake up at 3:30 with the panic eating its way through my body, trying to escape up my esophagus. I turn my head to see what time it is, but between the clock and me is a book. The Odd at Sea. By Elliot Garmin. Published in 1996 by Garmin Enterprises, LLC. Signed by someone purporting to be the author, thin
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and shaky lines of ink claiming in cursive: e garmin. I turn past two blank pages and the book begins as I did: The neighbor girl chases after the ball, dashing out into the street, not looking and not needing to, running there at the far end of the cul-de-sac. It goes on. Polly Portent stands in her square-within-a-square, pleased with the power of her spike. When the girl returns, Polly says, I told you I could spike it! Spikes are against the rules, says the neighbor girl. Nuh-uh, says Polly. Spikes arent never against the rules. I had no idea whether this faithfully recounted our conversationI remembered only the balls decreasing arcs as it bounced down Pollys driveway in front of me, and the voice telling me about it. But as the book crept on, the panic was replaced by awe: The Odd at Sea was about me. Well, not meI was either the neighbor girl or my mothers daughter. But it was about Polly and Mom. It said that Mom and Dad fought at night after dinner many days, which they did and probably all parents do, but not all parents ght about the business of Arabic translation, and the importance of nding a real job with benets. Other people went to the grocery store, but they didnt buy halal beef and then eat cold pork hot dogs on the way home. Other people have friends named Polly, but those Pollys dont prefer vanilla milk to chocolate milk, or drink beer on their thirteenth birthdays in the cobwebbed underbelly of my parents deck while I lay next to her, drinking Sprite, so nervous about my proximity to sin that my heartbeat thunders in my eardrums. I was on page 43 when a nurse came in to give me pain meds in a little paper cup. You gotta get some sleep, baby, the woman says. Have you ever read this book? I answer. I hold it up to her under the bedside light, and she shakes her head no. Not a lot of time for reading. Hows your pain, baby? Irrelevant, I tell her.
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 And then shes standing in the uorescent-lit hallway, and I cannot see her through the open door but I can hear her talking quietly with someone else, saying, As soon as she gets her psych eval in the morning, shes goin straight to 7. Poor thing, says the other one. I dont know what seven is, but I gather its in my best interest not to nd out. I can see how it will go: No matter how hard I try to explain what happened, it will look exactly like I am crazy. Elaborately, brilliantly crazybut still crazy. I will be stuck forever in a bed like this one, taking drugs designed to put my neural alphabet back in order. I will be a case study in unshakeable delusions. They will write about me in journals. And I will never convince anyone of anything, because you cannot prove that the impossible has happened, even when it has. The pill kicks in half an hour laterit doesnt remove the pain so much as it removes me from the pain. Even so, standing up killsI feel my stomach turn and think I might puke, but I hold on to the rail alongside the bed and then swing the leg forward. I grab the book and shufe toward the door, and the pain gets so deep into me that I cant keep myself from crying, and then I am out in a hallway, and then, there, yes, collapsing into a wheelchair. It takes me a moment to get the wheels unlocked, but then I roll slowly down the deserted hallway, quiet but for some snores. I look into each dark room as I pass by, but its hard to tell anything about the people in the beds except for their approximate size. Five doors down, I nd someone who looks about my length and wheel into the room. The creature is unfortunately a boy, his tussle of chestnut hair turned away from me as he sleeps on his side. Im looking for a suitcase or something, but he seems to have come here with as little forethought as me, unfortunately. Im trying to turn the chair around when I notice a tuft of something coming from a drawer on the bedside table: a periwinkle polo shirt and a nice pair of khaki
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cargo shorts. (Theres a pair of gray boxer briefs, too, but I think Id just as soon go commando.) A boy after my own heart, really. I grab his hat off the bedside tablea red OSU hatguring I might need, like, to disguise my face. I empty the pockets of the shortsan uncapped pen, some receipts, a Snickers bar, and then in his back pocket a wallet. I ip it open just to know: Clayton Palis. I leave him a note. Clay, Hate to do this to you, but I just love your style too much not to borrow it. I hope its nothing serious, h a-h I stuff Clayton Paliss shirt and shorts between the chair and my good leg. Ideally, of course, Clayton Palis would be a girlshed be 5 4 and a size 6 and have a hospital closet stuffed with Dior dresses and 34B bras, but then again, ideally, I wouldnt be ctional. Anyway, a girl could do worse than Clayton Palis. Im wheeling at a pretty good pace when I come to a circular desk at the end of the hallway and the Jamaican nurse scampers up from behind a computer and literally jumps in front of me. She is a sizable woman, at least half the width of the hallway. Back to your room, she says sternly. I cant fall asleep without a cigarette, I answer. The lie occurs to me as I tell it: I have never smoked. Poor thing, she says. The poor, poor thing. But you cant smoke. Its bad for your circulation, and you lost a lot of blood, and Ive had a really bad day. I just I start to choke up. The tears arent fake, exactly. But theyre only real in a technical sense. Really need a cigarette.
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The woman shakes her head. The poor, poor thing, she says again, and then stands aside. I wheel myself to the elevator. And this is the rst gift of my ctionality: the freedom to lie, to inhabit and abandon stories as needed. To become a hermit crab of stories. To make myself up.

I dont know how long it took me to get back in the chair. An hour, maybe. Fortunately, I had nowhere to be.

Outside the hospital, I wheel past some people in lab coats smoking cigarettes, down a super-sketchy, too-sharp ramp, and out onto the sidewalk. I roll past a playground, struggling to go straight because Ive never used a wheelchair before, and also because Im stoned out of my gourd on whatever is supposed to keep my leg from hurting, and also because my leg hurts so bad that every single time I inhale, I feel entirely condent that I am going to exhale an endless stream of puke. The empty rectangle I pushed past was ringed by a well-manicured hedge, which provided the only cover I could see. I put Clayton Paliss clothes in my mouthnot ideal, I realize, but my choices were limitedand gripped the siderails of the chair with my arms. I pushed myself up and out, trying to launch my body over the hedge so I might have a bit of privacy as I changed. Instead, I landed in the hedge, and had to roll over it, my leg tearing open, an earthquake on my side, and then this wave of nausea, and I had just enough time to rip Claytons shirt and shorts out of my mouth before I vomited. I lay there for a while, just breathing, just letting the pain hurt, and then I sat myself up, extricated myself from the gown, and eased my way into his clothes. I had to crawl wit my arms around the puke and then back through the bush, and as the branches tugged at the leg of the shorts I closed my eyes and stopped and waited for a while, and thought about how stupid it was to try to hide behind the hedges when its dark out anyway, and who gives a shit if some kid with cancer staring out of a fth oor window sees you naked?
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Afterword
Thanks for reading these early and largely unsuccessful attempts to write about illness and tragedy and life in a childrens hospital. I wrote Double On-Call in late 2001, and then revised it several times through the rst few months of 2002. After having it read by my mentor Ilene Cooper and another editor at Booklist, the magazine where I worked, I submitted it to a few Christian Fiction literary journals. No one was interested in publishing it, but I did get some helpful feedback. Double On Call is embarrassingly autobiographical (right down to me fancying myself awkwardly handsome and theologically sophisticated, when I am in fact neither). I worked for six months as a student chaplain at a childrens hospital, and while many of the details recounted in this story are ctional, many are not. My publisher Julie Strauss-Gabel once told me, The fact that something happened doesnt mean you should leave it out of a novel, but it also doesnt mean you should leave it in a novel, and I fear that I left far too much in that story. I really liked the story when I wrote it (I can tell because I went back to it and revised it extensively several times), but now it feels gratuitous and discursive and frankly a bit nihilistic.
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Theres also a lack of awareness of audience that I guess I developed while working with Ilene on Looking for Alaska. Double On-Call was a story I wanted people to read, but I wrote it for myselfto process (and perhaps even to boast about) horrible things Id witnessed. But even though Double On-Call is by far the most autobiographical thing Ive ever let strangers read, its also the most cold and distant. I think at the time I thought this narrative distance was a sign of proper literary ction, but in reality I was probably trying to protect myself from the reality of experience. I couldnt go there, as chaplains used to say. I could write about it in a cold and clinical and distant way, but I couldnt really bring the reader into the experience. As the hospital stories got more and more ctional, it became easier somehow to go there, but I could never quite manage it until I ditched the chaplain character entirely and focused on imagining what it might be like to be the kid. All that noted, there are a few things from the story I dont mind too much. I like the somewhat complicated picture of the young father, although we dont see enough of him. And I like the last lineenough that I repurposed it in The Fault in Our Stars, making it one of the last lines of An Imperial Afiction. The idea of conating the Son (of God) and the Sun (that gives light to earth) is nothing new; its no coincidence that Jesus has long been called the Light of the World. (Im reminded of that great T. S. Eliot line: Light, the visible sign of the Invisible Light.) But even if theres not much fresh in it, I still like the line, and it mustve clung to something in my brain for ten years, when I nally found a place for it. I wrote The Odd at Sea in early 2007, when the story that became Paper Towns seemed irrevocably stuck and muddled and unnishable. Id tried several times to return to the world of Double On-Call or some version of it, but The Odd at Sea was the rst time I wrote more than 1,000 words straight that I liked. My idea was that the young man narrating half the story would become progressively more overwhelmed by his brain tumor, and that his personality would change (like
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Caroline Mathers in The Fault in Our Stars) and that his ability to use language would shrink until he could only use a few dozen words to describe his experience of the world. (This is kind of the opposite of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and its a ne idea, but unfortunately for me I am not James Joyce.) As a chaplain, I became really bothered by people talking about the human soul as a stable thing that exists while you are alive and then departs all at once upon your death, because in a hospital, you quickly learn that there are gradations of death. Does a brain dead person have a soul? What about a person in a persistent vegetative state? What about someone with late-stage dementia? And if a person whose dementia is so bad that they are gone, as people often say, on what dayat what momentwere they separated from their soul? If a disease attacks your brain and makes a formerly gentle and cautious person cruel and impulsive, has the disease taken the soul? Anyway, all of this stuff was on my mind a lot at the hospital and in the years afterward. (I only worked there for about six months, but it was denitely the six most important months of my professional life, and I have spent a lot of time thinking about it and trying to gure out how to make sense of it/whether there is any sense to be made.) My idea was that The Odd at Sea would portray the soul as Ive seen itappearing slowly during the course of a human life and then disappearing slowly, rather than imagining the soul as a metaphysical but still tangible thing that one is born with (or as many believe, that exists upon conception) and has until one dies. Some of this worked its way into The Fault in Our Stars, but most of it didnt. Maybe Ill come back to it someday, but I dont know. Maybe in the end its a boring argument about semantics, like debating how many angels t on the head of a pin. Still, the vast majority of people (including many agnostic and atheist people) believe in some conception of a soul, and I think we need to consider what we mean when we talk about it. So that was the idea there. A few things from The Odd at Sea did stick around for The Fault in Our Starsthis was my rst time trying to write about
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a support group with a rotating cast of characters, for instance. There was no such support group at the hospital where I worked (at least that I ever heard about), but Ive attended support groups (as a mentally ill person, not as a group leader) many times, and so I felt comfortable in that world. That really became the launching point for The Fault in Our Stars. The Sequel is in many ways a very different story from the others and concerned with very different stuff, but we still nd ourselves in a childrens hospital with a young chaplain and a young social worker. (Also, I kept using the same names. I dont know why.) I wanted The Sequel to be about ctionality and how we construct meaning in a world that doesnt seem to have anyhow we fathom stars into constellations, basically. And I really liked the idea of a young woman somehow surviving a novel (I still like the idea, actually). But I could never quite bring Hannah to life, as if her being a ction inside a ction was one layer of complexity too much for my simple-minded storytelling brain to handle. And without Hannah coming alive and trying to solve big problems in an interesting way, there was really nothing to write about except the premise, and premises always get boring if theres nothing more to them. I wrote more than 30,000 words of The Sequel, but everything after what you read here is rambling and basically incoherent as I desperately tried to stumble upon a plot of some kind. But I did return to the question of how made-up stories work in our lives, and why they matter so much to us. And I returned, too, to the mysterious relationship between reader and writer: We are making something together, and each of us is profoundly dependent upon the other if the something is going to be worthwhile. The year I spent on The Sequel felt wasted; so did all the months I spent on Double On-Call and The Odd at Sea. (And this is not even to mention the year I lost down the rabbit hole of the Desert Island Book.) But I was working toward what I called the hospital chaplain thing all along, as it turns outit just wasnt about a hospital or a chaplain. Such is writing, I guess.
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One last note: It seems to me that in all these stories there is a streak of nihilism, which in some ways was maybe a bigger shortcoming in these stories than all the problems with structure and theme and voice and characterization and everything. All my early attempts to write about the mortality of young people were written in great anger and hopelessness. I believe there is real and valuable hope to be found in the famous Bonhoeffer quote that beings Double On-Call. The problem is, I didnt believe it. I found nothing but despair at the childrens hospital. I was confronted for the rst time with the fact that the universe is (or at least appears to be) completely indifferent to the lives of individual humans. And all the kinds of existential hope Id come across in my life up to then (both secular and religious) could not stand up in the face of the plain truth that many children who have done absolutely nothing wrong suffer and die. That has always been part of the human story, and it always will be. But a story that merely acknowledged this horror could never be any good. I hold the unfashionable belief that ction ought to be useful: it should entertain us or bolster us or make us feel unalone or help us to imagine others more empathetically. I still agree with William Faulkner, who said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech that the poets voice need not merely be the record of man; it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail. Even if I were a far better writer, Double On-Call could never be anything but a record. So the real difference between these stories and The Fault in Our Stars is, for lack of a less cheesy word, hope. I nally came to believe that nihilism wasnt the only response to a universe indifferent to the lives of individuals, and that embracing hope does not mean ignoring or denying the reality of suffering. This happened partly because of my friendship with Esther Earl, who taught me that a short life can also be a good and full and heroic life. And it happened partly because I learned that love between two people will last as long as one of them is around to feel it.

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Distributed for the Project for Awesome 2012 www.projectforawesome.com Cover design by Sarah Turbin www.wasarahbi.tumblr.com Layout by Karen Kavett www.karenkavett.com