Fiction -
The Funniest Hospital in Town
“Do you believe in God?”
I stared at his collar, a strip of white gleaming below yellow, aging teeth. Everything else he wore was black. With his chubby middle, he could be Tweedle Dee dressed for a funeral. I guessed he was here because the hospital assigned him to visit the heart patients.
“What does it matter?” I answered. “James, the brother of Jesus, says that even the devils believe there is a God, yet they tremble.”
His jaw fell. He wasn’t used to unbelievers who’d read the Bible.
“But there has to be a God.”
He was shifting from believe to God, from defense to offense. A clever chess player’s ploy. “Well, Mister Barbulay...”
I paused to let the Mister settle. His eyebrows—looking like two over-large and poorly positioned mustaches—stiffened.
“...you could say I’m agnostic.”
The mustaches eased.
“But how can you explain the beauty and complexity of nature without a God?”
“Ah,” I said. “The argument by design.”
He began to fiddle with the crucifix in his hand.
“Darwin has shown us, Mister Barbulay, that natural selection can produce complexity out of simplicity. Chaos theory tells us that complicated fractals arise from random disorder.”
I could see his teeth grinding.
“Besides, how can you call three tigers hopping onto the back of a baby gazelle, chewing its flesh away, beautiful? And please don’t quote Paul’s letter to the Romans. The man doesn’t impress me.”
Excuse me, Father Barbulay.” Nurse Blair walked in and turned toward me with a paper cup in her hand. “Mr. Sanders, it’s time for your heart meds.”
At least she didn’t say it was time for our heart meds. I gulped the pills down, holding the cup in my right hand. My left hurt from too many needle misses. The wall speaker summoned Nurse Blair. The beep-beep of the heart monitor skipped, then got back into beat.
“Don’t be concerned, Mister Barbulay. It does that often.”
“Mister Sanders, excuse me for being blunt, but you are on death’s door. Believing in God matters now more than ever.”
“Oh yes. ‘Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.’ Deathbed confession. Have you ever wondered, Mister Barbulay”—I so wanted to say Bar-Belly&—”how the thief at the Cross could end up in paradise with Jesus the same day they died, when three days later Jesus tells Mary Magdalene he hasn’t yet ascended to his Father? I know. Purgatory. You guys are so slippery.”
“But Mister Sanders, how could the universe have started without a God?”
“Ah, the First Cause argument. Well, Mister Barbulay, it all goes back to the Big Bang.” “But everything has a cause. Who started the Big Bang?”
He rubbed his cross, flipped it over, rubbed it, flipped it over again.
“Nothing. Causation started in the split second of the Big Bang. So did time. Without time there is no before or after. Without a before or an after, there can be no cause.”
“But a Big Bang requires a cause. That cause was God.”
“Mister Barbulay. What caused God?”
“Nothing. God is the First Cause.”
“Then, Mister Barbulay, if all things require a cause, God must have had a cause. But if all things don’t require a cause, then neither did the Big Bang. We can either believe in a Big Bang without a cause or a God without a cause. I prefer science.”
“But Mister Sanders, don’t you want to go to heaven?” He was rubbing the cross even harder. How could his thumb not hurt from the chafing? My thumb was rubbing too. Both of my thumbs were rubbing. Together, we must have looked like two chirping crickets.
Suddenly, as if a bomb exploded, the whole damned ceiling slammed down on my chest. My ears started to ring. There was a loud buzz. A pop. A siren wailed up and down. Was it an ambulance? Wait a second. That’s not a siren. It’s the heart monitor.
Like the suction of a vacuum against your hand, I felt a powerful sucking against my scalp. It got stronger until I thought my head would pop. Then whoosh, like toothpaste spurting from an over-squeezed tube, I squirted out through my head. I found myself staring at rows of small holes. Little black punctures in a cream-colored metal panel. About ten rows vertically. Twenty holes per row.A woman’s voice spoke through the holes. “Code Blue. Code Blue. Room 563. Doctor Jorgenson. Doctor Ruiz. Code Blue.”
I turned from the talking holes and looked down. Mister Barbulay. I could see the little bald circle on his head he tidily hid behind a wave at the front. Nurse Blair was leaning over some patient, pumping her hands up and down on his chest. The man’s face was eggshell white. His lips were blue. Eyes closed, his thumbs were jerking against his fingers. The jerking stopped.
Two doctors ran in through the doorway, pushing a squeaky-wheeled machine. They tore open the patient’s gown and rubbed something on his chest. Nurse Blair and Mister Barbulay stepped back. Then it hit me. The man they were working on was me! Yet I felt detached, so calm and airy-light. My chest. It didn’t hurt anymore. I hadn’t felt this good since I was twenty.
The glow in the air fascinated me. The curtains were shut, and the ceiling light next to my face couldn’t explain it. Every object was brightly illuminated, but not enough to hurt my eyes. The room had become a luminescent watercolor, brushed in fluorescent blue and flame-tipped orange.
The ringing in my ears died down. The buzzing got louder. As it grew it turned into the rush of a wind, a wind that was extracting me from the room. It was gentle yet insistent, like the tug of a young girl at your sleeve, eager to show you her first flower garden. I had no desire to fight. But where was this girl taking me?
The light in the room began softening, like when you turn down a rheostat to dim a lamp. Nurse Blair, Mister Barbulay, the patient, the doctors, the room itself—they were dissolving, the way bright tincture stirred in a glass of water turns violet, then pink, then washes away. A blanket of dark velvet wrapped around me. Yet I had no fear.
Straight ahead I saw a light, very faint at first. I could tell now that the dark velvet was a tunnel. Some force was propelling me, rocket-like, through this tunnel at high speed, toward the light. The light got brighter—not larger but brighter—filling everything it touched the way warm water in a tub circulates until every pore of your skin is equally enveloped. This was no ordinary light. It spoke to me. Not with words, but deep inside my head it called, summoning me by name. Then, still standing, I found myself suspended in gold liquid light.
Have you ever held a caterpillar on your palm under the morning sun, making a soft cushion for its tiny feet? Using one finger you brush its furry back, each stroke telling it you are a powerful friend who fully understands its plight. You promise this fragile finger of consciousness, staring up into the wide sky, that you will shelter it when its call to metamorphosis comes.
“Are you God?”
The Light stroked my head.
Soon I was pulled to the side, toward shifting forms I couldn’t make out. The forms coalesced into three fuzzy shapes. Like candle wax dripping until it is solid, the shapes hardened into the figures of my wife, dead for four years, and my parents, who long ago had passed. They looked so young.
“Millie. Mom. Dad.” I ran forward. I squeezed them into me.
So much to say. So much to ask.
“The light. Was it, was it God?”
The three stared at each other. My dad answered first.
“We don’t know, son. Some believe it is God.”
“Others,” added my wife, “think it is the soul’s Higher Self.”
“And some think it’s an angel, or a guardian spirit.” Mom always had believed in angels.
“But the feeling of peace and love.”
“The more analytic among us point out that the brain is releasing massive quantities of endorphins at the time of death. This could account for those sensations.” Good old scientist-Dad.
“Others think it’s the buildup of carbon dioxide and lack of oxygen to the brain as neurons and glial tissues die.”
“And the tunnel?”
“Some have proposed that as the retinal cells collapse those in the periphery die first, giving the sense of darkness in the shape of a tunnel.”
“But...”
“And the light may be the firing of rods and cones at the center of the visual field, responding to oxygen deprivation.”
“But...”
“The sensation of floating above your body, even that of feeling an unseen presence, has been duplicated in temporal lobe seizures,...”
“But...”
“...by pilots experiencing hypoxia, by military personnel spun in a centrifuge under high g-forces, by persons taking psychedelic drugs.”
“You mean I’ve lived a decent life, died, and hovered over my body. I was hurled through a tunnel. I basked in a light. I’ve gone through all this. And now, even here...?”
Slam. The ceiling fell back on my chest. I smelled something like burning skin and felt an excruciating electric pain between myself and the fallen ceiling. I opened my eyes.
“That was a close one, Mr. Sanders.” Doctor Ruiz stood to my left, a paddle in each hand. Nurse Blair was patting my forehead with a wet cloth. I looked up at Mister Barbulay, his face now blanched, white as the collar under his chin. He continued to rub the crucifix.
I still felt the pressure of Millie’s body against mine, my mother’s hand as smooth as it was when she was thirty, my dad’s arm around my shoulders. My face remembered their kiss.
I thought. And I thought still more.
There was a tingle in my stomach. It wasn’t nausea. More like a butterfly. A tickle. The tickle expanded until my ribs started to shake. It mushroomed up into my face, stretching itself into a grin. I giggled. I giggled again. Tears came to my eyes. The giggles came one after another, a brook where each rush of bubbles pushes the other aside until the stream has turned into a torrent.
The torrent struck the ceiling and boomeranged off the walls. It spilled out through the doorway and splashed against the ears of those taking notes at the nurse’s station. It gushed down the corridors. Before long, whether by relief, stress, or infection, nurses and patients, friends and relatives, doctors, priests, nuns, even Mister Barbulay—anyone within earshot of Level Five of Our Lady of Peace Hospital—they were all joined together into one unified symphony of uncontrolled laughter.
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Copyright @Vic Burton 2010
