My Hysterical Friend

“Hey Bobby!”

“What?”

“I’m going to Heaven.”

“Good for you…save me a penthouse, not too close to the elevator, with a view of the pool.” I couldn’t resist going on; I’m insensitive that way. “Bye the way, Saint Benjamin, there is no such thing as Heaven anymore. It’s out of fashion, outlawed, dead – shutdown and forgotten. Heaven has gone.…only God knows where it went, if he still exists, but I’ve heard some rumours.”

“And what’s more…” I laughed; probably shouldn’t have. “Even if there is a magic place up there, floating around on a cloud, just waiting for you – your name on a billboard and your favourite slippers put out - there’d still be only one way to get you up there. You would have to follow the rules.”

“Bullshit.”

“Just saying.” I shrugged. “You’ll need a pass.”

“I’m not even sure I’d be allowed; even if there was a heaven.”

I looked at my friend. It was a question.

“You know,” Ben said, “…I’m one of those.”

“So am I.”

“No. You’re one of them.

“Or am I one of the other them?”

“I think I’m just one of me.”

“Then I’m one of us?”

“You must be one of those.”

“Too many fucking labels,” he said. “I should be able to have the one I like.”

“You’re a one-off.”

“Fuck off already.”

Ben and I laughed our familiar laugh.

I looked up at a cloud. It was moving away from the fleet, on a different course. Odd. “Hereith endith thy sermon.”

“Thank God.” He had had enough. “Come on, let’s go for a coffee.” He got up. “I’ve got to show you something.”

“Not exactly a heavenly offer, but I’ll come along for a laugh, if you’re buying.”

Ben and I walked down to the Cuttings Corner Deli and sat at the corner table beside the potted Bamboo sticks. He ordered an Americano with a ton of sugar, and I got a Decaf - you never want to be too awake around my excitable pal.

“Are you sick?” I asked while we waited.

“Just tired.” Ben said. “Move your crap out of the way while I show you this.” He pulled a large roll of heavy paper out of some hidden place on him and spread it out across the table between us. We put a ketchup and a vinegar bottle on two corners to keep it laid out.

And that’s when my friend Ben showed me his get-to-heaven scheme, and it made no sense at all. That’s what I liked about it. Somehow, my friend, the mad scientist, was able to describe an impossible result emerging from equally impossible conditions that led, somehow, impossibly, straight to the Pearly Gates – or a least nearby.

“It’s so obvious, Bobby.” He liked waving his arms around. “Picture this with your gut, the smartest part of you by far; the only thing you should ever trust - the only voice you should ever hear. You’re riding a gigantic wave, surfing, across the ocean on a board. You travel thousands of miles, hypothetically, or in our example think decades of your life flying by as you skim across the surface.

Ben could see my attention drifting. “Snap out of it! This is important stuff!” He was getting excited like a frustrated little boy, and if he got too worked up, who knows, he might puke…so I refocused. “…But the particles, the matter, under your…” He struggled for a word. “The billions of gallons of matter supporting you isn’t moving with you - the ocean body of life is not following you; not going with you. When you reach the beach – the end of your trip – that’s it, you’re done.” He clapped his flying hands together. “But even though you are no longer in it, that entire universe of life still exists – still contains all the stuff you passed over. Miles deep, still there.”

I waited silently, then after a very long moment I looked at him imploringly.

Ben clenched his fists and smashed them together.

“Get it? I can’t live not knowing I’ve got somewhere to go.”

“Are you crying?”

He waved me off. “I just can’t, Bob.”

Sometimes when I think of Benjamin my mind travels back to the night my wife Danielle and I snuggled under our giant snuggling blanket in the oversized snuggling wicker chair on our wonderfully snuggly-ready old porch - at the old house. It was a perfect mid-July evening, and we were sipping hot, spiked, apple cider and watching the bats as they performed above, just for us, in the delicious, seductive, night air under the stars. The little creatures, or as Danny called them – the Frantic Frenzies - hunted and fed on the hapless bugs floating around in the beams of our flashlights. The bats were quick, like shooting stars; and they were magic, like faeries blinking from spot to spot instantly, and they were deadly accurate and totally focused and committed to their hunt.

Danny and I hoped that special evening would never end, but it did, and we went to our bed and drifted off into a deep sleep, still in our snuggle, without a word.

Benjamin was a bat. Ideas, dreams, brilliant thoughts – anything he could catch and digest – his prey never had a chance. He was truly voracious.

“When I was a kid,” Ben was saying, “There were no doubts about the existence of a Heaven. The Heaven – the All-Inclusive Paradise. It was as real as my shiny new three-speed bike; the bicycle I know I prayed for. The place of my dreams was shown in glossy, hard-cover books and got on TV a lot. I even saw heaven on a billboard at a gas station once. But now I’m a lot older, and apparently there isn’t a heaven anymore. That’s what I’m told - nowhere to go. I’m disappointed; I waited a long time for this. This is no good, or as my Grannie used to say: “This won’t do.”

“She was right. It won’t,” He added.

My friend Ben lived on a sailboat, one of the few places left where the suffocating rules of the modern day didn’t apply, didn’t reach; a place, aside from everything else, where the free spirits of the world could live, in their version of peace. The water life and the boats were the home for the Benjamins in our lives, they were out of our way but living an existence that we, deep down, envied and secretly applauded. Benjamin and his world were the ‘what if’s’ and the ‘if only’s’ that haunted the rest of us. If he heard me saying this, I know what he would say: “What garbage, Bobby…get a life!”

I loved the man. Danny loved him too, although she loved his gal even more – probably because Jenny was an angel, and the rest of us weren’t even close. I knew that if we ever lost him, we’d be crushed into little bits, smaller and sadder versions of ourselves, and so I kept my eyes on our friend to delay what felt like the inevitable. Danny and I always feared the worst.

“Why didn’t you ever get married?” I asked Ben once over a couple of Ales while we sat one afternoon in the cockpit of his boat, Holly, bobbing at the wharf and lobbing random idle thoughts at each other. We’d gotten on to the subject of Holly’s new Diesel motor, a small, shiny, lightweight Japanese Yanmar that Harbour End had finally finished installing. It replaced the Atomic Four, the infamous ‘Atomic Bomb’ that had blown up more than a couple of boats we were familiar with. The older gasoline motor still existed and was still used by sailors, mostly the ones who didn’t want to fork out the cash needed for the upgrade. The Atomic Bomb lived on, but mostly in that infamous shadow. “Having to die is one thing,” my friend said. “But roasted alive in a rotting box of flaming gasoline is something I’ll avoid energetically.”

“Are you just avoiding my question or are you avoiding the whole marriage thing?” I prompted

“You’ve asked me that before, you nosy bastard.” Ben spat over the rail into the Pacific Ocean. You could still do that and not go to jail. The water was calm in the marina, so we were able to watch the drool stretch to a foot long and begin its trip out on the evening ebb. “Nobody fit in the V-Berth,” he answered and opened another couple of beers. “Until now.”

“Jenny?”

Ben produced a gappy toothed smile and pulled absently at his half shaven skin. “Years ago, whoever built this boat, built a woman’s heart into it. That someone knew my Jen would be here someday… and need a cozy bunk…and a cozy lover.”

Once the Yanmar was up and running, Ben and Jenny were seldom seen alongside their old wharf dock inside Fargers Point. But one day in the late fall we got a call from Jenny asking us to come down and join them for a drink and some ‘beauts’, the monster sized Dungeness Crabs they always brought in from their favourite, and secret spot. Our Ben and Jen never failed us. We always feasted on the best crab when they came back, but we never found out where the secret lay.

It was a gorgeous afternoon and the four of us stretched out on cushions on the cockpit benches, sipping our beers and wine, and quietly whispering our deepest thoughts and dreams to each other, like only true friends can.

This was almost the happiest day the four of us ever enjoyed together, until Ben came up from the cabin in his bathing suit. Before any of us could say a word, he struck a he-man post, handed his beer to me, and cartwheeled over the side.

He was down for a long time. I figured we were in about twelve feet of water – two fathoms? – and bent over the side I could see what looked like mud being stirred up and a bright yellow rear end moving around.

When Ben surfaced with a huge gasp, like a whale breaching alongside, I hauled him up and out and he shook like a dog, kneeled before Jenny, and handed her an oyster shell.

Jenny laughed. “Aw, sweetheart, thank you so much. There’s dinner tonight. Come here you oaf.” Ben got a really good squeeze out of it and Jenny got soaked, and we all laughed again.

“Open it up,” Ben said, and he showed her the oysters halves were loose.

Jenny smiled and opened the shell. A shiny ruby ring fell out into her lap.

“Well…….?”

Jenny said ‘no’, and Danny I went home early.

The next morning, we went to the Marina to see how our friends were doing, hoping a patched-up pair would greet us. But Holly was gone. The slip was empty. When we returned to the house, Jenny was waiting at our door. She was in tears. We got her inside and settled her down, as best we could, with a coffee and a fresh baked muffin.

“I was going to tell him, but I never had the courage and last night he wouldn’t listen or talk to me. He asked me to leave, and I went back to my place.”

We knew our part, at this moment, was simply to be with Jenny, and wait. Finally, she spoke. “I have a tumour, in my head, and it’s not getting better.”

“God…” Danny ran to her friend and buried her in her arms.

“It’s never getting better.” The tears were coming and Jenny collapsed against my wife. “I couldn’t say yes to Benjamin.”

All I did, all I could manage, was go to the two women clinging to each other in the middle of my living room floor. I moved them to the couch where they collapsed together. “I simply loved him too much. To do that to him.” Jenny was shaking her head and Danny cupped it in her hand, tried to calm her friend. “And now he’s gone.” I heard through the sobs.

A month after she came to our door, Jenny was admitted to the hospital’s Acute Care unit and Danny and I were moving her things from her cabin to a storage unit.

Three weeks later Ben showed up at our house, late at night. He looked tired and wrecked, and we brought him in. “I heard about her from a guy in Port Bitterbay, for God’s sake.” He didn’t know where to start. “It’s okay,” I told him. “You’re here.”

“What I did to Jenny…I’m pretty sure heaven is out of the question now.” He forced a bad grin. “Where is she?”

I told him. “I’ll go in the morning. if she’ll see me.” He said. “No, Jen has to see me.” He tried a laugh. “I had the shell with the ring stuffed in my bathing suit. I figured that looking so well endowed wouldn’t hurt my cause…shit.”

Benjamin stayed for an hour and then left for the dock.

The fire that night in the marina was the worst seen in the harbour since the blaze in 1948. The flames were seen on the other side of the strait, in Port Kennedy, in another country; and the heat melted the insulation off a mile of local wiring and the whole town went down.

The next morning the entire downtown area, hosed down and dripping – still steaming – smelled like an old barbeque. Thirteen people had died overnight.

Danny and I arrived at the hospital at the Emergency Ward at ten the next morning and were led in to where they had Ben on a stainless table. We could hear the generators from deep inside the building – they were still fighting.

“It was one of the older boats with the gas engine,” the Doctor said.

“Atomic Four,” I said.

“I guess…Ben somehow got a mother and her baby off, they’re in the hostel…then he went back for others…”

The chirping turned into one unbroken, sick moan and the line became flat as it ran across the screen until the peaks and valleys disappeared and there was nothing. The screen blinked and the line was there but the blips had vanished - nothing left but the line advancing across the screen, running off the right side of the screen and then starting back at the left.

“He’s gone.” The doctor motioned and a nurse pulled the sheet up and over Ben’s shoulders and then over his face.

I couldn’t help myself. “What an awful fucking way to watch a friend die.” I said much louder than I expected to or wanted to. “It’s like watching a hand wipe a blackboard clean after class.”

“Sorry, but look at it, all the peaks have disappeared, the signs of life have disappeared.”

“But it’s not flat.” I put my finger on the screen and ran it straight across below the flat line. “That’s flat but it’s not level.”

The nurse walked up. “What’s going on?”

“The line’s not flat.”

I caught the doctor roll his eyes.

“What the….”

Something shattered on the floor behind me; someone had dropped something.

The black line was moving across the white screen as it should, but as I watched, it was ever so gently angling up, lifting up, like a plane rolling down a runway. Taking off. Every time the screen flashed and refreshed, the line continued upward toward the far corner – ever so gently, but steadily.

“The small concrete-block room was silent and cold.

“He’s dead, right?” It sounded painfully crude, but I needed to ask.

The doctor pushed some bandage wrap aside, peeled one of Ben’s eyelids back and shone a small flashlight into the exposed socket. He gripped a wrist.

“Totally gone,” he said.

“There’s nothing wrong with your machine?”

The doctor pulled his mask down. “Why,” he asked in a weary voice.

“That line is going up as it goes across.”

“Sorry, it’s not something the ECG could do, even if we wanted it to. The pixels in the screen can only generate that horizontal line, and the blips and peaks that you were seeing earlier. It is a simple screen, not even close to what your television has in it.

The doctor put a hand on my shoulder. “There is nothing to look for. You are not seeing what you think you are seeing.” The doctor turned the screen face away from my view. “You’re not the first to confuse what is going on during these last moments of a loved one’s life. It’s a form of deep hysteria and it’s perfectly normal.”

The only sound other than the solid death beep coming from the ECG was the sound of glass bits being swept up behind me.

“Can we just stay here for a minute.”

The room emptied – the overhead light dimmed.

I could only see a bit of Ben’s face through the thin sheet and the layers of cloth bandages he’d been wrapped in to keep his skin on him.

I turned the monitor back.

“Holy crow Benny, just look at you go - you’re on your way. God speed my friend…you’re soaring now.”

“Is there something going on?” Danny was at my back, pressing and kneading my shoulders. I turned to her and she looked down into my eyes for what seemed like a long time.

“Jenny died.” She said, looking down at her phone.

I felt a sudden shudder run through me. “When?”

“Six minutes ago.”

“Let’s go now. Get a coffee,” I said. “There is something I’ve never told you…he wouldn’t let me.

“Something a hell of a lot stronger than coffee please, “Danny said.

I looked back to the screen and the advancing line. I can’t believe I smiled, but the thought came to me, at that moment, in that room. I couldn’t hold it back.

“The ‘One-And-Only’,” I said, as quietly as I could, so it wouldn’t echo in the room where he was lying. “There’s your label, Benny my perfect friend. Hope you like it.”

It’s ten years to the day since Benjamin and Jenny passed and I decided to finally write this all down. Danny and I still live in the old house with our flashlights and bats and cushions. She retired from the library last year, but I still putter around the town cleaning eavestroughs and cutting grass – it’s a better living than you might expect.

We found some family references in Jen’s belongings when we cleaned out her cottage, but only an uncle in Sweden responded to our contacts and he was too old and frail to make the trip overseas. Benjamin had no family – I already knew that.

The young lady with the baby that Ben saved was also very pregnant at the time of the fire, and her young son drops by now, once and awhile, to say hi and help with chores - his name is Benjamin.

Ben’s crabbing buddy Garnett took us out to Paradise Island on a beautiful morning last August. As we rounded the point at the Park, our skipper pointed to an outcropping of pink rock coming up. He slowed the boat to a crawl, watching the shoreline intently until bringing us to a stop about a hundred yards off the shore.

“This is it,” Garnett said. “This is their secret spot.” He laughed. “Yes, they did some crabbing here, but we were all pretty sure the fishing was secondary.” Garnett had a face like a worn baseball mitt and his squinty eyes were buried deep in the leather flesh. But I could see the tears that he was wiping away. “They were so in love, I’ll tell you. It would have been embarrassing if it hadn’t been so fucking beautiful.” He wagged his head. “Sorry, I talk awful…”

Danny dropped Jenny’s ashes, and I did the same with Ben’s at the same time, side by side, into the quiet bay water. We watched as they mingled and sank together, down to where the oyster shells waited.

“Better go,” Garnett said. “There’s a chop building out there and that always means something to a little boat like mine.”

……………………