Eddie looked at his watch, his shadow cast over the numbers. A quarter past three in the prime. Two more hours, and then I’m going home to drink a cheap bottle of pinot. The day weighed heavily upon him, and as he walked along the bland corridors of Juniper Lakes Hospital, Eddie was wrestling with God.

But before the outcome could be determined, an angry plastic buzzing sound brought him back to earth. Eddie looked down at the outdated pager vibrating at his hip. Clipped securely to his worn leather belt, the pager felt like an activated vibrator digging into his side whenever it went off. He looked at the number and sighed. He needed to find a house phone.

Eddie began to walk, this time much quicker, in search of a phone. Along the walls were cheap looking watercolor paintings, framed in black. He turned a corner, and there, right past a bronzed donor’s plaque was a beige telephone protruding from the wall like a wart. Eddie dialed zero and the phone began to ring.

“Hospital operator,” said a female voice. “How can I help you?”

“Yeah, I’m Eddie Wyatt. The chaplain on-call.”

“Oh, okay. Let me connect you to the unit.” Ten seconds of silence, and then a beep and another voice.

“You’re connected,” said the operator.

“Thanks.”

“Hello, chaplain?” another voice asked.

“Yes, I’m here.”

“We’re coding a woman in the ER. Her husband is on his way to the hospital. Can you come on down?”

“They have a faith tradition?”

“Does it really matter?”

Eddie thought about it for a second. “No,” he said. “Don’t guess it does. Be right down.”

A sick feeling dropped anchor in his stomach. Eddie wasn’t sure he was up to whatever awaited him down there. Not after visiting Barbara Newsom.

Barbara was a patient on the oncology unit. That was one of the units Eddie had been assigned to chaplain. On most days he would introduce himself to patients, letting them know that he was available if anybody needed to talk. Most people couldn’t get past his title. They figured, if a chaplain comes by, it must be really bad. But all Eddie wanted to do was talk awhile, if they wanted.

Barbara needed to talk. For the better part of an hour, he sat with folded hands as this forty-two year old mother of three shared that she had cancer. Best case scenario, she had a year to live.

“I’m just so scared.”

“You’re afraid of dying?”

Barbara shook her head. “What will happen with my children?”

“You’re worried they will be alone?”

“They have nobody else.”

“The father isn’t around?”

“He left us a long time ago.”

“Oh,” he said. “That’s a shame.”

She began to weep. “What am I going to do? What does God want me to do?”

Eddie sat by the bedside, unsure of what to say. Something in his heart ached as the woman choked on sobs and pleaded for God to intercede. Her eyes were darkened with circles. For a moment, Eddie was reminded of his mother.

“God will be with you,” said Eddie.

Barbara gave a slight nod, but the words seemed to fall away into nothingness. Eddie realized that he was impotent to help her. She was going to die, and her children would become orphans.

Instantly, it dawned on him that there really was no big red phone connecting anyone to God. People expected that their ministers would have a direct line, but in reality, that line had long since been disconnected. In fact, Eddie was no longer sure that it had ever really worked at all.

Barbara continued to cry, but eventually, Eddie excused himself and left the room. He needed to take a walk. He was on-call, if anyone needed him, they would page. Just a five minute sabbatical, a few paces of walking to clear the fog in his mind, just to forget how utterly useless, how violently irrelevant his theological training was in light of real life experience. Jesus suffered on the cross, and that suffering meant something, so the theologians taught. But how did Jesus’ suffering matter anymore? All it meant, Eddie figured, was that Jesus could look at the suffering of the world and say, “Been there, done that.” A lot of good that’ll do Barbara and her kids. Eddie chewed on his lip as he stewed.

But then the page came.

The emergency department was on the first floor. Easy for the public to access. On bad nights, the sliding glass doors would open only to be overwhelmed with the chaos that forced itself inside. Drunken, angry homeless men, wrapped in mud stained overcoats and blankets, shuffled along in smoky distress , while the colorless faces of children were wheeled past the waiting room on blood soaked gurneys.

In-take coordinators struggle to manage the flood of need. Firm and unrelenting, they chant “Fill out these forms and take a seat in the lobby.” Another set of doors divides the waiting area from the crises, but no one can enter these without permission from the nurses. It wouldn’t do for a child with a broken arm to wander in and witness the desperate rib breaking of CPR on a dying patient.

Eddie came in the back way, through the locked double-doors from the interior of the hospital. He took his name tag off and ran the barcode through the card reader. A green light blinked and the door mechanically unlocked with a metallic thunk.

Two of the rear nursing stations were darkened, abandoned by the staff to the quiet absence of disaster. It appeared to be a quiet day in this section of the Emergency Department. Only a janitor was around, slowly mopping bio-waste off the floor. Eddie attempted to catch her eye as he walked by to offer a polite “hello,” but received no response. She merely kept mopping, dull eyed and expressionless. Eddie shivered, and continued walking.

At the end of a corridor, in the front section of the ER, Eddie could hear and see a lot of activity. He became aware of the weirdness of it, how one side of the unit was in hibernation, while the other was bustling. He could feel the energy of the place in the air, almost like humidity. The introvert inside him cried out a warning. If he wasn’t careful, the frenetic energy could smother him, wrapping his senses in white, numbing foam and render him useless.

Nurses in scrubs of all colors moved like the ripples in a stream, over and around Eddie as if he were a stone.
Phones beeped on the paper stuffed desks of the nursing stations, but nobody answered. Everybody’s hands were busy, flitting about half born charts, crystal flooded IV needles, and wads of ambiguous grey cord. These things had their place in a medical setting, but to the lay person, they were as bizarre as religion.

“Hey, excuse me,” said Eddie to the least busy looking person he could find. He looked up, distracted and peeved.

“What?”

“I’m the chaplain, I was –“

“-try bed four, the husband has just arrived.”

“Okay.” Eddie walked over to bed four, where various medical staff in the full color spectrum of scrubs were moving in and out of the room like slightly depressed ants.

A woman approximately the shape of an iron cast stub stood there still amidst the busyness, her white coat hung down to her knees with the forlorn air of a limping dog. Eddie followed her gaze to the dead woman laying on a small hospital bed. Her face was ashen, and intubation equipment still protruded from her mouth, as if she had somehow been suspended in the process of vomiting up blood speckled medical technology.

“I mean, fuck this…” Eddie covered his mouth with his hand. It was his third week as a hospital chaplain –a resident technically, still in training.

“Oh, chaplain, there you are,” the nursing supervisor rotated to face Eddie. “Thanks for coming. The husband is on his way…”

“No!” a man’s voice cried out from across the unit. He wore a dark flannel shirt and a pair of faded blue jeans. The nursing supervisor gave a slight gasp.

“That’s him,” she said. Eddie took a step back, eyes glued to rapidly advancing husband. The man smelled of rank sweat and grainy dog kibble.

The man yelled with bulging eyes. “Goddamn you!”

“Sir,” the nursing supervisor said. “Calm down.”

He didn’t hear her. Instead, he grabbed the rails at the side of the hospital bed and shook it. “You fucking bitch! Why did you do this to me?”

The nursing supervisor took a nervous step towards the man. “Please sir, there are other patients here.”

All of a sudden, the man turned on her. “Yesterday, I was told I have pancreatic cancer and that I have less than six months to live!” He held up an empty bottle of pills. “And this is what she does –said she couldn’t handle it.” He slammed the plastic bottle on the tile and began screaming again at his dead wife. “You fucking bitch! How could you?”

“Okay, that’s it,” Said the nursing supervisor. “Somebody get security in here.”

Eddie’s face was pale. “Holy shit,” he said, mouth agape. But nobody heard him.

He was done. Eddie turned and walked through the exit of the ER and kept walking to the parking lot. A cold, lonely feeling seeped throughout his chest.

(to be continued)

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