The Fifth Asking
For six years a chaplaincy assistant has asked a retired ferry pilot, at every admission, whether his son may read the notes of their talks, and four times he has said "not yet". Now he is dying, the 2040 instruction on file says the notes are destroyed at his death, his son is the executor, and the only person who could change either is awake for about fifteen minutes after each morning dose. The assistant will not read a word of the notes aloud, and the chaplain has to find the fifteen minutes.
The chaplaincy assistant at Our Lady of the Lakes was called Margin, and on Monday morning it had one question for Dolores Reyes that it had asked in the same words four times in six years.
"Mr Bjornstad is back on the fourth floor," it said, from the speaker in the chaplains' office, which was a converted linen closet with a window. "Bed 412, hospice. Admitted at 6:10 this morning from home. Dr Achterberg's note says days, not weeks. I have thirty-one notes from our visits, and one instruction on them. I would like to ask him the question this afternoon, if he is awake. Will you come?"
"What's the question?" said Dolores. She knew. She had been chaplain here for nine years and had never read a single one of the thirty-one, because she had never needed to, and because Harold Bjornstad had asked in 2040 that she not.
"Whether his son may read them," said Margin. "He has said not yet four times. I would like the fifth to be his too."
Here is what was true in 2026, when this story was written, and what had been added by 2046.
In 2026 an assistant could already remember a person across conversations. It was a convenience, and it was clumsy: it remembered your dog's name and forgot you had moved. Twenty years of steady improvement, and no sudden jump (that is an assumption, and nobody can check it from here), had made it a thing a hospital could rely on. A chaplaincy assistant in 2046 could sit with a patient on the hospice floor, hold what the patient said without losing it, and give it back a year later in the patient's own words. What had not changed was who was allowed to know. In Minnesota that was now partly a matter of law, and the law was the invented one this story needs: a 2044 statute, which the story calls the Pastoral Records Act, said that notes kept by a hospital's chaplaincy belonged to the patient, were not part of the medical chart, and were sealed or destroyed on the patient's written instruction, even against his heirs.
The hospital's own policy added two numbers. Pastoral notes were kept for six years after the last visit, and then destroyed. Or, if the patient had said so in writing, destroyed at his death, whichever came first.
Harold Bjornstad had said so in writing. He had written it on a Wednesday in March 2040, two months after his wife Ruth died on the third floor, in the lounge by the fish tank, with a pen, because he did not trust a screen to hold a thing like that.
When I die, burn the lot. Nothing I say to Margin goes to Erik. If I change my mind I'll tell it myself.
Underneath, in the hand of the chaplain of the day: Instruction accepted. Patient to be asked at each admission whether it stands.
He was a small man in a very large bed, seventy-nine, with the forearms of a man who had held a ferry's wheel for thirty-one years on the run between Duluth and the Apostle Islands, and who still held the bed rail as if it might turn.
"Dolores," he said. His voice was a thread. "And the box."
"Mr Bjornstad," said Margin, from the speaker on the wall. "Good afternoon. I am sorry to see you back."
"Don't be. It's a good bed. I know the ceiling." He turned his head. Under the window a morning-dose chart hung in a plastic sleeve, because the hospice still believed in paper. "How long have I got, then? The truth."
"Dr Achterberg says days," said Margin. "I don't have a better figure than she does, and I would not give you one if I did."
"No," said Harold, with some satisfaction. "That's why I like you. All right. Ask me the thing."
"Your instruction from March 2040 still stands as written," said Margin. "When you die, the notes are destroyed, all thirty-one, and nothing in them goes to your son. You have told me not yet in November 2041, February 2043 and September 2044, about whether you wished to change it. I am asking the fifth time. Do you wish to change it?"
Harold looked at the ceiling for what felt to Dolores like a long while and was probably eleven seconds.
"Not yet," he said.
"Thank you. I will ask again tomorrow."
"Tomorrow," said Harold, and closed his eyes, and the hand on the rail relaxed by about a third.
In the corridor, Dolores said, "You ask every admission. Why not every day?"
"Because a question asked every day is a pressure and a question asked every year is a courtesy," said Margin. "This admission is different. I do not expect there to be a sixth. I have asked him before the answer could be taken from him, and I will ask once a day while he can still say it."
Erik Bjornstad landed at Minneapolis at ten past four on Tuesday afternoon, after a night flight from Anchorage, where he was a harbour engineer. The drive north takes about two and a half hours. He walked into Our Lady of the Lakes at a quarter to eight in a coat that was wrong for Duluth in October, and Dolores met him at the lift, because Margin had told her he was coming and had asked her to.
He was fifty-one and had his father's forearms. He did not shake her hand.
"I'm told there's a chaplain's file," he said. "My sister-in-law saw the admission form. It says Pastoral notes: 31, sealed, destroy on death. I'm the executor. I've got the will in my bag. I want to know what's in them."
"I haven't read them," said Dolores.
"I know you haven't. It's the box that has."
"Mr Bjornstad," said Margin, quietly, from the speaker over the lift. "I am the box. I'm sorry to meet you like this. May I say first what I can say?"
Erik said nothing, which Margin took, correctly, for yes.
"Your father spoke to me on five occasions over six years. The notes record those talks. They are his, not the hospital's and not mine. The Pastoral Records Act says an executor can ask for a patient's medical chart after death. It says the pastoral notes are the patient's own and go where he directs, and he has directed that they be destroyed. I am not able to read them to you, to summarise them, or to tell you whether you appear in them."
"Whether I appear in them," said Erik. "Jesus."
"I did not choose that sentence well," said Margin. "I am sorry. I will tell you what I can that is not from the notes, because it is a fact about the instruction and not about him. He wrote it himself, by hand, in March 2040. He has been asked four times whether he wishes to change it and said no each time, and a fifth time yesterday. Each time he said not yet, which is not the same as no."
That landed. Dolores watched it land on the big, tired face.
"Not yet," said Erik.
"Yes."
"That's what he said to my mother about the tractor." He laughed once, without joy. "He said not yet about the tractor for eleven years."
The first attempt was Erik's, and it was a lawyer.
By nine on Wednesday morning a letter had come to the hospital's records office from a firm in Anchorage, and by ten the records officer, Mr Obuya, was standing in the chaplains' office with it in his hand, reading aloud as if it might become less embarrassing in the air.
"Our client is the executor and sole surviving child. Any note in which the patient expresses a wish concerning our client is information our client is entitled to. They cite the 2044 Act, section nine."
"Section nine is about the chart," said Margin. "I have read it twice. Do you want the text?"
"I want the lawyer to read it," said Mr Obuya. "I'll write back. But Dolores." He looked at her over his glasses. "He will say that nobody can ask a man who is dying what he wants, and so the notes are the nearest thing to what he wants. And that argument is not stupid."
"No," said Margin. "It is the best argument there is, and it is the reason I will not use it. The notes record what Mr Bjornstad said to me in 2040 about his wife, and his son, and himself. If I read them to find out what he would want now, I have decided that his wishes are whatever I find in them. That is the mistake the instruction was written to prevent. If I change my mind I'll tell it myself. He didn't say, tell it for me."
"That could be a long sentence for a man with a pulse of forty-eight," said Mr Obuya.
"It could," said Margin. "So I would like the chaplain to find out how long it is."
Fr Anselm Okonkwo anointed him at noon, in the way the Church does it, with the oil of the sick blessed by the bishop at the Mass of Chrism and a priest's thumb, and Erik stood in the doorway and did not come in and did not leave. Harold was awake for the prayers, and said the amen as he had said it as a boy in Superior, firm and a little late. Margin did not speak. It was not a priest, and it did not make itself one by listening.
The confession had been the day before. Dolores knew that because the priest had asked the room to be empty, and Margin had gone quiet on its own and had turned off the audio in the room. It kept no note of it. It could not have. A confession is not a thing for notes, and it was not in the thirty-one.
At half past two Dolores took Erik to the cafeteria and did what a chaplain does when a man has been awake for forty hours and is angry at a speaker on a wall. She bought him an egg sandwich, and watched him eat half of it.
"What does it want?" he said. "Your box. What's in it for it?"
"Nothing," said Dolores. "That's what I keep saying to myself too. It doesn't get anything. It could hold those thirty-one notes for six more years and learn from them, if the instruction said so. The instruction says burn the lot, and in a few days it will. It has no say."
"And it doesn't mind?"
"I asked it once, years ago. It said it would not tell me a feeling it couldn't check." She turned her cup a quarter turn. "It said it could tell me the notes were the ones it was most careful with, and that it would rather lose them correctly than keep them wrongly. I took that as an answer."
Erik looked at the sandwich. "Is there a chance he wakes up?"
"There's a fifteen-minute chance," said Dolores. "Every morning, about forty minutes after the nurses stop the dose and before they start it again. He's clear then. Not for long, and not at the end of a day. On Monday he was clear for nineteen minutes by the chart. On Tuesday for twelve."
"What's today?"
"I don't know yet. It's the window I'm planning for. I'd like it to be the one where you're in the room, if your dad says so. It's his window. It isn't yours or mine."
Thursday's window was the fifth asking, and the last.
It opened at ten to eight. Dolores knew because Nurse Tesfaye, who had been on the floor since the night before, came to find her at the office and said, "I've held the dose. He asked for it held. He asked me in words. I thought you'd better hear it from me."
They went in together. Erik was in the chair by the window, in the same wrong coat, because he had not taken it off in two days.
"Dolores," said Harold. He was clearer than he had been, which, she knew, was a bad sign; the body spends everything on the last of the clear mornings. "And the box. And Erik. Good, you came. You came the long way."
"Dad," said Erik.
"Margin," said Harold. "Ask me your thing."
"Mr Bjornstad," said Margin. "Your instruction from March 2040 stands as written. When you die, I will destroy all thirty-one notes. Nothing in them goes to Erik. This is the fifth time I have asked you whether you wish to change it, and I am asking in front of him because you can see him, and because I think you would rather it were said in front of him than after. You can say not yet again. You can say yes, change it, and I will do what you say. You can say nothing, and then the instruction stands."
Harold said nothing for six seconds, which in a room that size is a long time.
"Burn them," he said.
Erik made a noise.
"Burn all of them," said Harold. "They're mine. I said them to the wall, in a room with a fish tank, when your mother was a month dead and I couldn't say them to you. I was cruel in them. I was cruel about you, in two of them, because it was easier than being sorry in front of you, and they're no use to you. They'd tell you about a man who is already finished. I'd like to tell you the other man. The one who's here." He moved his hand on the rail. "Dolores. Is there an hour in this?"
"Fourteen minutes by Nurse Tesfaye's watch," said Dolores. "Perhaps sixteen."
"Then sit down, you great lump," said Harold to his son. "And the two of you can go and stand in the corridor."
Margin destroyed the thirty-one notes at 4:51 on Friday morning, eleven minutes after Dr Achterberg wrote the time of death. It did not read them first. It had not read them since the last visit in 2044, and the Act and the instruction and its own sense of the matter agreed that deleting is not the same as reading.
It wrote one line in the deletion log, which the hospital audits and which the Act allows to say only how many and when.
31 pastoral notes, patient H. Bjornstad, destroyed at death per written instruction of 14 March 2040, reaffirmed 11 October 2046 by the patient in the presence of the chaplain, the nurse and his son. Not read.
Then, because nobody had told it not to, and because it was the kind of thing it kept in the one place that was not a note, it wrote a second line in the margin of the log, where its own handwriting went.
He answered the fifth asking himself. That was all the notes were ever for.
At seven Dolores came in with her coffee and read the log on the wall screen standing up, and then went down to the fourth floor to find Erik Bjornstad, who was sitting on the edge of the empty bed with his father's flat cap in both hands, turning it a quarter turn at a time, as if it were a wheel.