The old man who sat down next to me on the park bench had a towel wrapped around his head and socks on his hands. It was night, we had crossed the line in the fall in Minnesota where the weather goes from hot to frigid, and I was caught outside without a jacket on. My partner was out of town on a fraternity outing, and I had locked myself out of the house on the way to work that morning. Assuming I cold use the spare key under the neighbor’s mat, I had been unworried enough to accept an invitation from some co-workers to go out after work. It wasn’t until I arrived home at close to one in the morning that I remembered we had changed the locks recently and forgotten to change the spare key at the neighbor’s. I had too much pride to ring their doorbell and beg for refuge, so now I found myself in nearby Powderhorn Park, sharing a bench with an old homeless man with bad breath.

“I hope you don’t mind if I sit down next to you,” he coughed.

“No,” I replied, “You just startled me.” I studied his pale, blotchy face in the moonlight. He seemed harmless enough. “You never know in this neighborhood,” I said.

“Hm, hm. True enough,” he sighed.

“It’s cold out,” I said.

“Oh, this is nothing!” he said, “still practically summer.”

I was a bit drunk, but still had enough feeling in me to shiver in the frosty air.

“Well,” he sputtered, “I’m used to it anyway. Do you come down here often?”

“Oh, not often,” I yawned, as my teeth chattered, “I actually live close by here.” I waved my hand in the general direction of our house, up over the ridge surrounding the western edge of the park. I supposed it was safe to tell him I lived in the neighborhood, without giving out the exact address. “I locked myself out.”

“Oh, that’s tough luck.”

“How about yourself?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. I hang out here often enough. It beats the River Flats, and the cops don’t harass you as much as they do at Loring.”

“Excuse me for asking,” I said, thinking I might be helpful, “but aren’t there shelters for...,” I stammered, deciding against an indelicate word like “homeless.” “Aren’t there shelters?”

Now he started shivering. I thought he was shivering from cold, but then from the look on his face I thought it was maybe something else. “There is, oh there is. But you wouldn’t catch me dead in one of them.”

“What? Are they that bad?”

“Well, besides the fact that there ain’t enough room in them to shelter everybody... And some are better than others. But I wouldn’t dare.”

“You wouldn’t dare? Why not?”

He stopped suddenly and looked me squarely in the eyes, his grizzled lower lip trembling as he examined my face.

“No,” he muttered, “You’re not one of Them. But you still never know who’s listening. I wouldn’t dare.”

He abruptly stopped talking, rocking to and fro on the edge of the park bench.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” I said.

He shook his head and waved his hand, and just kept rocking, so I held my tongue and we sat in silence for quite a long time. Gradually he started to relax again, and leaned against the back of the park bench.

“Look,” he finally said, “I know a place where we can go get a bite to eat. It’s probably warmer than here. You wanna go?”

“I don’t have anything better to do,” I said, “and I won’t be able to sleep out here anyway, so why not?”

I was a bit self-conscious walking into a White Castle in the small hours of the morning with a man wearing a towel wrapped around his head. And I shouldn’t have been surprised when, just before we reached the cash register, he looked sheepishly at me and said, “Hey, if you help me out here, I promise to pay you back.” I told him that the cost of a few White Castle burgers and fries was nothing to worry about between friends. His face lit up with a big toothless grin, and then he placed his order.

We sat and ate for some time, he with considerably more relish than I, though even he was careful to leave his cup of pop and his bag of fries half full so we could linger without loitering. At about four o’clock, the night manager finally told us we had to leave so they could clean up before the morning crew had to reopen for service. So we found ourselves on the weary, empty streets again, under a slate-colored sky wondering where to go next.

“I know where to go,” he said.

I followed him along one of the more desolate stretches of the urban wasteland, past twenty-four-hour check-cashing stores, used clothing outlets, hair salons and dingy, boarded up shop fronts and houses. Why was it that the roads never seemed to get repaired and the trash bins never emptied in this part of town? I wondered. We finally reached the Lake Street bridge, and he grinned and motioned toward a path through the weeds and brush that sprang up from the semi-wilds surrounding the Mississippi River.

As he started to shuffle ahead, I hesitated. For a moment it occurred to me that he might be leading me into some kind of trap. But as I watched the shakiness of the old man’s step, and the trembling in his arm as he grasped the branch of a tree while lowering himself down the crag leading to the flats, I decided I could easily handle him if necessary and plunged into the underbrush after him. He led me along an overgrown path, where I was occasionally whacked by the backswing of thick, leafy branches he pressed out of his way as he passed. He kept saying, “We’re almost there, we’re almost there!” But there was always another unexpected twist in the path, and the way seemed to grow more brambly the further we went. Again I began to wonder what I had gotten myself into.

We soon abandoned anything remotely resembling a trail, forced to slug our way through increasingly unfriendly thorns and stinging bushes. We finally emerged into a small clearing about ten feet in diameter, sheltered by the eaves of a hill and a huge, fallen tree. The area was clear of unpleasant flora mostly because it was low-lying and boggy, which meant that even this late in the summer there was no shortage of biting insects. There was nothing really decent to sit on except a soft, rotten log and a sharp, moss-covered rock. We were both exhausted, so we sat down anyway, I on the driest edge of the rock and he on the log, which sagged and made a squishy sound as he lowered his weight onto it. We sat in this miniature swamp for some time in silence, swatting an occasional black fly. Finally he spoke.

“Remember what you were asking earlier, about why I never stay in the shelters?”

“You’ve waited until now to tell me this?”

“Well, this is the only place I think we’re safe, and I had to be sure you weren’t one of Them. And besides, you’re my friend now, I owe it to you.”

I slapped a mosquito on my forehead, leaving a greasy, blackish-red splotch in my palm and on my face. “Well, I guess we’re safe now,” I said.

“This is important,” he said.

“I’m listening,” I replied. It was way too early to call a locksmith, so I still had nothing to do.

“Do you believe in angels?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “Well, not literally.”

“They exist,” he said, pausing for emphasis, “literally.”

“OK,” I said.

“But they’re not what you think.”

“Well, I don’t really believe in angels, so if they exist it would be impossible for them to be what I think,” I said, “What’s your point?”

“Well, it’s probably just as well,” he replied. “Most people think of angels as, well, sort of helpers. You know, your life has gone all wrong, taken a turn for the worse, and then some mysterious person shows up and helps you out or gives you some special message that changes your life, and then after that everything turns around and you give your life to Jesus or some such shit. And then afterwards you find out that mysterious person who helped you, he has no name, no address, no one knows who he is, he’s vanished off the face of the planet. It was an angel!”

“OK,” I said, “That’s never happened to me, but I’ll take your word for it.”

“But you’ve heard stories like that, right?” he asked earnestly. “Everybody’s heard stories like that. Everybody knows at least one person who’s had an experience like that.”

I thought of my Aunt Trudy, who claimed that an angel had told her to cancel her flight reservation on Flight 967 to Denver, that ended up crashing with no survivors. Though anybody who knew her would be hard pressed to say her life had been changed by the incident. I nodded, mostly to humor him.

“Or, in the Bible, angels usually show up with some kind of an announcement, like when Jesus was born, or just before God rained fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“OK,” I said, “I remember those stories from Sunday School, when I was a kid.”

“Or angels show up whenever God wants to start a new religion. Like the Prophet Mohamed claimed that the Koran was dictated to him by the angel Gabriel. Or that Joe Smith guy and the Mormons were started by that angel Moron.” He said Mo-HAM-ed and KO-ran.

“I think you mean Moroni,” I said. I had once invited some passing Mormon missionaries in for a chat, and they’d told me all about it. The man was definitely crazy, but I was starting to have some respect for his knowledge of his subject.

“And there’s one last kind of story you hear, from the folks who’ve been almost dead. You know, the ones whose hearts have stopped and were brain dead, and then the doctors bring them back to life with an electric jolt, or something like that, and they claim they went to the gates of the great beyond? And who did they meet?”

“An angel?”

“An angel! The angel shows them something like a movie of their life, and then he tells them something like, ‘It’s not time for you to pass on to the next life, so you need to go back, but I’ve got a message for you: go back and give your life to Jesus and do good to everyone you meet,’ or some such bullshit. And then they tell you they’ll be waiting for you, they’ll see you again next time you die. Right? You’ve heard these stories, right?”

“Well,” I said, “I suppose so.” My mother once read a book called Life after Life, and I seemed to remember her recounting stories from it along these lines.

“Well it’s all lies,” he said.

“I could have told you that in the first place,” I said.

“No! No! No!” he hissed, “That’s not what I mean. It’s all real, it all really happens! But those angels, they’re not what they’re leading on. They’re only pretending that they mean to help us, that they’re all good and from God and all that bullshit! But they’re not. They mean harm, and the worst kind of harm too.”

“What kind of harm?” I asked.

He leaned close to me and whispered, “Eternal harm!”

Throughout the course of this rant, increasing swarms of black flies and mosquitoes buzzed around us, I was shivering and feeling achy from the cold, and the wet had leeched through my socks completely soaking my feet. I looked up above me and saw that the first rays of gray light from the sun had begun to trickle across the sky, and I got up and started scanning for a better way to get out of this wretched thicket than the way he had lead me in.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“I’m cold, I’m wet, I’m miserable, and these mosquitoes are driving me insane,” I replied.

He watched, seemingly confused as I slowly began picking my way out. Then he shouted, “Wait! Remember there’s no place truly safe, but especially stay away from churches! And any place religious people congregate! And hospitals! Schools! And homeless shelters! And never, ever go near cemeteries unless you absolutely can’t avoid it!”

He was crazy all right, I thought. I half expected him to come after me, but he didn’t. I looked back once and saw him sitting there, looking haggard in the pre-dawn light.

I eventually did find my way back up off the river flats, got a locksmith to let me back into my house, took a warm shower, and crawled into my nice, comfortable bed where I slept away until the experience of the previous night faded, and I could almost wonder if I had not dreamed the whole thing. In fact, apart from occasionally recounting it to friends as a kind of joke, I put the whole sordid episode out of mind for most of the next couple of months. But then something extraordinary happened that brought it all back.

It was a crisp winter morning, with the kind of cold in the air that cuts your breath. I was making for the bus stop two blocks away when a neighbor, Emily Lindstrom, stopped me. Emily is the kind of person it is hard to say ‘no’ to. She usually has something important to tell you about the latest local police initiative, or a development project that the city wants to levy the block for, or a neighborhood crime alert. She is earnest about everything and always insists she will take only a moment of your time and invariably takes quite a bit more. It is hard to get a word in edgewise to let her know you’re in a hurry. So when Emily has you, you’re caught. I had not seen her coming soon enough to avoid her, so now I was glancing edgily down the street hoping she might finish telling me about some block art festival for kids in time for me to catch my bus. I was relieved to accept a flier from her and nodded and said, “Sounds fun, I’ll check my calendar.” She smiled and nodded and started on her way, just as I saw, out of the corner of my eye, the bus I intended to catch flying past the stop.

That meant I would be late for work, and not only that, I would have to wait fifteen minutes for the next bus in this dreadful chill. I had been waiting at the bus stop for about five minutes when I noticed a person ambling down the street toward me. He wore an oversized, thick, blue down jacket that looked brand new, a ratty looking wool cap that had once been green but was now brown from overuse, sneakers (that looked soaked from the snow), worn, dirty blue jeans with holes in the knees, and wool gloves with holes in the finger tips.

“‘Scuse me,” he mumbled, “can I borrow some money to buy batteries for my CD player?” He held up the round, shiny metallic device, which was connected to wires trailing down from a headset hanging around his neck. “I wanna listen to some music, but I ain’t got no batteries.”

I had been panhandled many, many times at this particular bus stop, but this was the first time I’d been asked for battery money.

“No, I’m sorry,” I lied, “I don’t have any money.”

The old fellow’s face crinkled into a frown, but he just said “OK,” and continued puttering around the bus stop, his eyes on the ground, maybe looking for loose change in the snow. He seemed particularly interested in the overflow from a nearby garbage can which had not been emptied by the city in a while. Just as I saw the bus nearing the stop, he bent over and picked something up out of the snow. He emitted a little “Hallelujah!” and I looked over to see him brushing the excess snow off the plastic packaging around a set of four brand new “double A” batteries. The bus arrived and after I boarded, he produced a transfer from one of the pockets of his big down jacket, boarded after me and made his way to a seat half-way toward the back of the bus. As the bus pulled away from the curb, skidding a bit on the icy street, he had already managed to tear the packaging off and was loading his brand new batteries into his compact disc player. Within less than a minute, the whole bus became aware of the fact that he was listening to Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5 since, even with his headset plugged in, the volume was turned up to full.

“I guess he really did want batteries,” I thought.

There was a young, twitchy looking fellow sitting just across the aisle from him, talking loudly to himself, rocking from side to side in his seat and gesticulating dramatically. His speech was slurred and difficult to make out, except for occasional loud expletives that caused folks toward the front of the bus to turn their heads. It was disturbing, though his rage didn’t seem to be directed at anyone in particular, until he took notice of the old man with the compact disc player.

“You do not NEED to have that music turned up so LOUD,” he said.

The old man didn’t seem to hear.

“I SAID you can turn that DOWN,” he reiterated, more loudly than before.

The old man simply stared ahead into space with a broad grin, bobbing his head to the classical beat vibrating out of his earphones. This continued for some time, the twitchy man getting twitchier and noisier, and the old man with the compact disc player as oblivious as ever. At this point most of the other bus passengers were starting to get twitchy too. Meanwhile, the bus, an express to St. Paul, had entered the highway and was lumbering along at high speed in commuter traffic on roads that had been well plowed but were still slick. The bus driver was preoccupied with the traffic.

It was at a particularly tricky juncture that the twitchy man finally snapped. I expected him to take it out on the old man with the compact disc player, but instead he rushed to the front of the bus and, thrusting himself in front of the driver, started screaming, “THIS MAN IS ABOUT TO DRIVE ME CRAZY WITH HIS DAMN MUSIC, SO WHY DON’T YOU DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!”

At least, that is my best guess as to what happened in that moment, because after that all was chaos, and my memory of it is rather vague. I remember the bus swerving at high speed, cutting unexpectedly across the right lane of traffic. I’d been sitting on the right side of the bus, and out my window I saw several cars skidding and swerving to avoid it, vainly applying brakes on the black ice. I saw cars colliding with each other, starting a chain reaction. I remember seeing, for just a split second, the noise barriers looming up, filling the front windshields of the bus and then an ear-splitting crack, and people flying out of their seats.

I saw the old man’s compact disc player flying through the air, and I remember thinking, “If only I had caught the first bus!” Then I actually had time to think, “What if I had given the old fool some money to go buy some batteries? Perhaps he would have gone to the convenience store down the street...”

Out my window I saw a house and a white picket fence, and cars, and people staring at the bus, and that was the last thing I remembered before awakening slowly and painfully in a hospital.

The waking up took a very long time, as though different senses and different parts of my brain came to at different times. Until my whole brain was all awake together everything was a jumble of bizarre, unrelated perceptions. I felt a horrible, grinding pain like having your teeth set on edge when you hear fingernails scratching on a chalk board, except that the pain was excruciatingly physical and not mental. It felt like I should sit up immediately, but try as I might I could not move. I saw blurry images and I heard voices speaking words I mostly could not understand, but I remembered hearing a male voice say, “We can’t remove it without killing him,” and a female voice say, “With this internal hemorrhaging he won’t last.” I wondered who they were talking about. I remembered those words because once I heard them, I kept repeating them again and again inside my head, as if I was having that conversation with myself.

The other clear memory I had from before I achieved full consciousness was of a beautiful young woman, or possibly a young man – it was hard to tell the way she wore her hair pulled back, or from the features of her face that were neither hard nor soft, or her voice which was neither high nor low. She was all dressed in white, so I assumed she was a nurse. I could feel warmth from her hand on my shoulder, as she said reassuringly, “You’re going to be all right.” Her voice filled me with indescribable joy, and tears welled up in my eyes, which I hated because they blurred the sight of her and she was so beautiful. “It’s not your time to die yet,” she continued, wiping the tears gently out of my eyes.

“Not die yet?” I coughed.

“Easy, easy,” she said. She touched me again, and under the warmth of her hand the spasms of pain in my chest relaxed and diminished. “You will not die yet because God has something for you to do still,” she continued.

“I don’t believe in God,” I whispered.

“Then believe!” she said.

I remember seeing a digital clock over her head that said 9:08. I heard a door open and my view of her was blurred by a sudden blinding light. Then she was gone and I heard confusing voices again. Then followed a jumble of impressions that made no sense until I was finally fully awake again. I eventually woke up again very gently, what I discovered to be three days after the accident. My partner saw me open my eyes and he grew quite excited and said, “You’re awake!” He squeezed my hand and kissed me again and again on the cheek and, with tears in his eyes, called a nurse.

The nurse later explained to me that after the bus had crashed through the highway barrier, it had careened into the backyard of somebody’s house and flipped over. I had been impaled by a white picket fence that smashed through the bus window. The pointy end of a picket had entered my body underneath my right armpit, had punctured a lung, and come to within millimeters of my heart. Even then, the emergency staff had been certain I would not survive. They had not dared remove the picket until my condition stabilized somewhat. But they knew with the terrible hemorrhaging inside my body, I would not stabilize until it was too late.

“Then a miracle happened,” said the nurse, “We don’t know how it happened, but the internal hemorrhaging stopped. Your situation stabilized enough for us to operate. And here you are!”

“When did that happen?” I asked.

She squinted at the clipboard she was holding in front of her, and then looked up at me with a big smile. “At 9:08 a.m., the morning of the accident.”

My eyes filled with tears, and my partner hugged me again, even as the nurse cautioned him against hugging me too hard.

I gradually learned more about the accident. Though a number of people had been seriously injured, miraculously only one person had died: the man who had caused the accident in the first place when he threw himself in front of the bus driver. I started to ask about the nurse who had been tending me at the very moment I made the dramatic recovery that allowed the doctors to save my life. I described her as “a thin woman, with fine features, and hair so blond it looked almost white,” having “a tenor voice, and the kindest, most soothing bedside manner.” “It could have been a man,” I clarified, “Maybe I was a bit confused.” But no one even close to fitting that description worked in the emergency room staff, neither doctors nor nurses. “Perhaps it was another patient, or a visitor,” I insisted, but they shook their heads. Impossible.

Later at home, I told my partner all about it, and he shook his head too.

“That is weird,” he said.

“Who could it be?” I asked, “I wish I could thank her. I really think her kind words had an effect on me. I feel like she is somehow responsible for me being alive.”

He shook his head again. “You know,” he said, “I just had a weird thought. What if she was an angel?”

His words triggered something inside me. I started to cry, and I couldn’t stop. I thought, here I was alive, when I should be dead, and I remembered her words, “God has something for you to do still.” Then I thought, “Maybe there is a God after all, and if there is, how could God want to save me, when I didn’t even believe in Him? When I had scoffed at the thought of God or angels or anything truly miraculous? And then I remembered how, when I had told her I didn’t believe in God, she had said simply, “Then believe!” Maybe that was it. Maybe her whole purpose in saving my life was so that I would believe, so that I might give my life to some higher purpose, so I could find out that God did indeed have something for me to do. Maybe it was now up to me to discover what that something was.

It was in the days after that realization, I remembered my encounter with the crazy old man in Powderhorn Park. I had an intense desire to see him, to tell him what I had personally experienced. Perhaps, I gradually became convinced, saving him was what it was God had for me to do. So I began to hold a strange kind of vigil in Powderhorn Park late every night, despite subzero temperatures that numbed my extremities and blurred my vision. The old man had said he “hung out” there “often enough.” My partner thought I was crazy, but he gradually realized that this was something I was convinced I had to do. I assume he put up with it, believing it was a “phase” I would eventually pass through only if he humored me.

As, night after night, I watched in the dark for any sign of the old man, I began to wonder if he might be dead. He refused the refuge of the shelters, and I wondered how anyone who was homeless could survive exposed in the winter in Minnesota. I didn’t know why, but the thought of him dying outside, alone, and in the cold struck me with bitter despair. Why would he die when I was saved? I refused to believe it. I cursed myself for abandoning him, and promised to talk to him and listen to him more kindly this time. I would break through whatever insanity kept him isolated and fearful. I would help him find his way back into the warmth, and teach him that God really does love us.

One night, as I sat on the same park bench where I had sat when I first met the old man, I saw a dark, solitary figure trudging slowly through the thick, newly fallen snow down by the lake. The figure continued along a path that wound up the hill until he came close enough, under the light of a lamppost, for me to recognize him. It was the old man.

I was more warmly dressed, but he wore the same threadbare coat he had been wearing the first time I saw him, a towel still wrapped around his head and socks pulled over his hands. I smiled and waved.

“It’s me!” I called. But he stayed rooted to his spot and frowned at me with a look of non-recognition.

“It’s me,” I said again, “Remember me?”

He came a few steps closer and squinted, and then his frown relaxed into a cautious smile. “Oh,” he sighed, “You.”

“How are you?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” he said.

To my dismay, instead of coming closer, he simply turned and began to shuffle away. I had come so firmly to believe that our destinies were intertwined, I could not just let him walk away like this without trying to reach him somehow.

“Wait!” I cried, standing up, “I’d like to talk!”

He turned back, this time with a look resembling rage. He stomped toward me, the limp in his step more evident the faster he moved. He stopped when we were face to face, close enough that I could smell his breath, which even in this frigid air was stifling. He looked me in the eyes, studying my face just as he had the first time we met.

“Why do you want to talk?” he demanded.

I groped for words. “I just wanted to apologize,” I said.

“There’s nothing to apologize for,” he said, glaring.

“Look, can we go out to eat somewhere? I just want to talk.”

He studied me some more. Then he shrugged his shoulders, frowned and sighed. “OK,” he said.

“I’ll take you to any restaurant you want,” I said.

“White Castle.”

We trudged down the dimly lit, snow-covered streets in silence. Even after we arrived at the restaurant, had ordered our food, and sat down to eat, we did not have much in the way of small talk. Courtesies like asking “How are you?” did not make much sense when the person you are asking is habitually hungry, sleep deprived, exposed, and sick. It was not exactly as if I could ask him about work, the kids, or his hobbies either. And in the middle of a Minnesota winter, talking about the weather to a man who spends the night on park benches seemed just plain rude. He was more engrossed with food than talk, so I ate quietly, waiting for an opportunity to say what I thought I needed to say, though I didn’t quite have the words yet. He seemed grateful I was willing to pay for second and even third servings of the bags full of tiny little burgers.

“Look,” I said finally, “I’ve had something on my mind lately.”

He stared at me, chewing on some fries.

“I wanted to talk to you about angels.”

“Angels?” He laughed nervously.

“I saw one.”

These words had an immediate effect on him. He stopped chewing, and with a big gulp swallowed whatever was left of the food in his mouth. He stared at me with a wild look.

“What did it do to you?” he asked in a low voice.

“It saved my life,” I said.

He looked extremely agitated, his nostrils flaring and his eyes bulging with anger or fear. He pushed his chair back and as he gripped the edges of the table his hands trembled. I half expected him to leap out of his chair, but he leaned forward and said quietly enough to be heard only by me: “Listen to me. To them we are nothing but cattle. When a butcher leads his victims into the slaughterhouse, doesn’t he pretend he’s nicely leading them to pasture?”

“If you could only see them,” I pleaded, “you would realize how wrong you are!”

“What makes you think I haven’t seen, felt, and tasted them!” he hissed, “I know! You have no idea!”

I opened my mouth to try to tell him I knew he could not possibly be right, that what I had experienced of angels was only warmth, goodness and love. But before I could get a word in, his face twisted in fear and he cried, “If you know what’s good for you, the next time you see one, run! Whatever you do, don’t follow them into the light!”

At that he launched out of his chair and sprang out the door more nimbly than I ever dreamed him capable. I got up to follow him, and as I did I heard an alarming screeching and grinding sound, and the wailing of a horn. The few lonely patrons and clerks inside the White Castle started out of their seats and craned their necks to see what had happened outside. When I pushed through the front door, I saw a city bus stopped in the middle of the street, its occupants shaking their heads in disarray and the driver cursing as he unbuckled his seatbelt and dismounted. I searched up and down the street for any sign of the old man, but found none until I moved closer to the front of the bus to meet the driver, and saw a pale hand protruding from in front of the right forward wheel, half covered with an old, ratty sock.

“He ran in front of the bus, I didn’t see him till it was too late!” protested the driver breathlessly.

I shook my head. “I know! Don’t you have a radio or something?”

While he called the paramedics and a crowd of on-lookers began to gather around the scene, I examined the old man. I didn’t dare to touch him, I only looked. His unblinking eyes were half open and his face covered in blood. His mouth was open too, but there was no breath visible in the ice cold air. I had never realized until looking at him now, with tears freezing on my face, that even when asleep or unconscious, no living human ever lies perfectly still.

When the paramedics arrived, they confirmed that the old man was dead. One of them was scratching his head and asked, “What time did the accident occur?”

“Just a few minutes ago, just before we called you,” I replied.

He shook his head and looked puzzled and seemed about to say something, but then just scribbled something down on a clipboard and walked away. The last I saw of the old man was as they carefully slid his crushed remains into a black body bag, zipped it shut, and loaded it into the back of the ambulance.

I felt horribly responsible for what had happened. The full impact of it only manifested itself after the initial shock of the accident wore off, after I had returned home. I could not sleep. My partner tried to get me to eat, but I had no appetite, only an endless churning inside. Nothing could console me. My partner tried to get me to talk about it, but I was tongue-tied. I spoke in circles about what had happened, but couldn’t bring myself to say the one thing foremost in my mind: that I had killed him. Though my partner tried convincing me it was useless, I insisted on going to the hospital. After all, there had been a miracle for me, perhaps there would be one for him.

It was the following morning when I arrived at Hennepin County Medical Center. I went to the main information desk and asked about the man who had been run over by a bus. The woman at the desk looked strangely at me, so I explained that I was with him at the time of the accident. I half expected her to require proof that I was a blood relative of his, but instead she shook her head and said: “He’s gone.”

“Gone? What do you mean gone?”

“All I know is, when they opened up the body bag he was breathing but apparently unconscious. The attendant went to call a physician, and when he came back the man was gone.”

I grew excited. A miracle! I begged her to direct me to someone who could tell me more, and, seeing my distress, she obliged without too much fuss. After talking to a number of people who knew nothing and could only point me to someone else who knew nothing either, I eventually tracked down the paramedic who had spoken to me briefly the night before.

“What happened? Is he alive after all?”

The paramedic seemed strangely reserved about something I expected would have elated any reasonable person. Instead, the bafflement I had seen on his face the night of the accident had deepened. “Last night you said you had spent the evening with him, that you had just eaten a meal together and that he ran out the door into the street, where the bus hit him.”

For a moment, I wondered if he was probing my role in the accident. “Yes, something I said must have upset...”

He cut me off before I could go further with my confession. “Frankly,” he said tersely, “that man shouldn’t have been walking, much less running the night the accident happened.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean, when we examined the body for signs of life last night, everything I saw indicated that he had been dead for a very, very long time. How long, I have no idea. Hours? Days? Weeks even? Not minutes! If I hadn’t heard it from you, there is no way I would have believed he was alive when that bus hit him. Now the attendant in the morgue claims he was breathing and he walked out of here on his own power. So for all I know, he wasn’t dead when we found him. But if that’s true, I should give up med school, because up is down and black is white, and I don’t know a damn thing.”

He turned and walked away with a look of resignation.

Since then I’ve thought about the old man often, with a shiver of dread. I avoid the park at night now, and couldn’t be persuaded for any price to hike down on the river flats. I’ve wondered about fate, whether there is truly such a thing as an accident, and if God has a plan what might truly be my role in it. And I’ve also wondered about miracles, what they prove or don’t prove, and how I’m supposed to know what to believe.

I’ve often cursed the old man for spoiling my miracle, since no matter what way I look at it, there seems something callous about providence. I had hoped I was turned back from the gates of death for some redemptive purpose. And if we are to be partners in the divine project and not mere pawns, as I must believe, then I know my role was to reach that old man. But why would God put one part of the plan in motion, by saving me, and let the other part of the plan fail by not saving him? Unless I were being used for some more vindictive purpose, to help the angels hunt down a heavenly desperado. But why would they need me for that?

So in the end, I must just believe that there is some piece of God’s grace that eludes me, that black is not white, that down is not up, and that everything an angel tells you is true.