Agency

In Which Jim Is Not Afraid of Dying

later that evening

Jim ejected the tiny cassette tape and set his dictaphone down. He left Pink Floyd's dramatic audioscape spinning on the turntable, but he was finished with his project for tonight. In fact, he was almost finished altogether.

In both the literal and metaphorical sense.

He chuckled to himself. The cannabis dulled the pain in his guts, but it also made him introspective and silly.

His eyes roved across his thinning hands (he was losing weight rapidly), marvelling at the marks of age: new creases, dark spots. The closer he looked at them, the less they felt like his own. These hands didn't seem connected to the person he'd been in his youth. And, he supposed, they weren't. Hands were just a grouping of cells and cells completely regenerated every decade or so.

It was a trip to think about.

He wasn't vain, but he was keenly aware of time's ransom. Our bodies deteriorate, but our souls do not. They abide.

If he closed his eyes, shutting the evidence of his body out, he could place himself all the way back in time, into his little boy body again.

He'd been wiry, tall and handsome for a kid. His mother called him her 'highlander' which had not amused his mostly English father, but she was intent on lighting the genetic pathways that led back to her family's ancestry. It must have had an effect, because he could still remember her cuddling him in her lap, reciting Scottish poems into his hair.

...Wee willie winkie
Went all aboot the toon
Up the stairs and doon the stairs
In his nightiegoon
Rapping at the windies
Keekin through the locks
Are all the bairnies in their beds
For noo it's eight o'clock!...

He marvelled that he could still feel himself there, in her lap, her breath shifting his plentiful, dark hair - always sticking up in the wrong direction.

In his mind, James Ross still smiled with two front teeth as large as standing stones. His eyes were still blue and lit with a tireless excitement.

While time and tea had tamed his teeth and his eyes were now dull and gray as a winter sky, his essential nature would shine on, no matter how old he got. In some way, he would always be a boy in his mother's lap.

That was a comfort.

He pulled himself out of his reverie and decided to see how Berenice had coped with putting the girls to bed.

They were a handful. Spirited would be the kindest way to put it. He'd never say as much to Berry, but it was clear that those children lacked boundaries -- the kind of borders parents are responsible for creating. He didn't blame them, but those girls didn't know where they stood or how far it was safe to go.

Berry, always at work. Berenice, here, but always on her last straw.

He held his gut as he ascended the stairs. Even through the cushion of the cannabis, things were in turmoil down there. The snake had developed fangs.

As he arrived on the first floor, he could hear thumping and squealing from upstairs.

"Hey!" he shouted up the staircase. "Go to sleep, girls, or I'll tell Santa not to bother this year."

Sure it was only April, but that one never failed.

As expected, the thumping and squealing stopped, and things were (at least temporarily) silent. He nodded and moved slowly to the kitchen to see if he could convince Berenice to make him his tea.

She wasn't in the kitchen. In fact, she wasn't anywhere on the first floor. He wondered if she'd still been upstairs when he'd called up the Santa threat, but then saw the plume of smoke rising from the backyard. She'd be back there spoiling her lungs with those french cigarettes of hers.

He had a sudden epiphany and wanted, very much, to go tell her to stop smoking before it was too late, and the snake got to her too.

He opened the door and stepped outside to sit with her.

What a mess they'd made of this yard.

"I have a monster in my guts," he confided opaquely. "It's eating me from the inside out."

She looked at him and smiled uncertainly.

"Jim, have you been smoking dope? You've been acting a bit..."

"No, no," he said. "I mean, yes, I have. But I'm trying to tell you why."

His eyes searched hers for understanding. There was only a question there.

He sighed. Okay. He'd have to say the words.

"Cancer. I have cancer in my guts."

She lifted her hand to her mouth.

"Oh, Jim, no," she said. What a stupid thing to say, she thought. But what do you say? What can you say?

She reached for his hand.

"Tell me everything. How long have you known? Why didn't you tell us? Have you had treatment? No, of course not. We'd have known. Are you going to have treatment?" Her barrage of questions was like an incantation designed to keep the truth at bay just a few moments longer. "Does Berry know?"

Jim shook his head.

"I'm not ready for him to know. If you can, unless it's rotten of me to ask, can you not tell him yet, Bee?"

She opened her mouth to tell him, no, she couldn't keep a thing like this to herself, but he stopped her, tears springing to his eyes in an uncharacteristic display of emotion.

"He'll be an orphan. When I go, he'll have no parents left in the world."

She gripped Jim's hand even harder.

"He's a grown man, Jim. He'll be fine."

Jim just shook his head to dismiss the tears.

"Maybe. I hope so."

They sat in silence for another moment until she asked, "How do you feel about it? For yourself, I mean. Are you scared?"

Jim considered this. No, he still wasn't scared for himself. He decided he would tell Berenice everything in a way she could understand.

He held out his little glass pipe and lighter.

"Here. Try a little bit of this. And I'll tell you why I'm not afraid of dying."

Jim and his daughter-in-law leaned against the stair railings and got just a little bit high on legal cannabis. Together, they watched the stars, and he revealed the mysteries of the universe to her.