Fear Nothing Read Free Page B

nurses’ aides spoke my name or reached out to touch me.
    I think they felt close to me not because there was anything especially winning about my personality, not because they loved my father—as, indeed, everyone who knew him loved him—but because they were devoted healers and because I was the ultimate object of their heartfelt desire to nurture and make well. I have been in need of healing all my life, but I am beyond their—or anyone’s—power to cure.
    My father was in a semiprivate room. At the moment no patient occupied the second bed.
    I hesitated on the threshold. Then with a deep breath that did not fortify me, I went inside, closing the door behind me.
    The slats of the venetian blinds were tightly shut. At the periphery of each blind, the glossy white window casings glowed orange with the distilled sunlight of the day’s last half hour.
    On the bed nearest the entrance, my father was a shadowy shape. I heard his shallow breathing. When I spoke, he didn’t answer.
    He was monitored solely by an electrocardiograph. In order not to disturb him, the audio signal had been silenced; his heartbeat was traced only by a spiking green line of light on a cathode-ray tube.
    His pulse was rapid and weak. As I watched, it went through a brief period of arrhythmia, alarming me, before stabilizing again.
    In the lower of the two drawers in his nightstand were a butane lighter and a pair of three-inch-diameter bayberry candles in glass cups. The medical staff pretended to be unaware of the presence of these items.
    I put the candles on the nightstand.
    Because of my limitations, I am granted this dispensation from hospital rules. Otherwise, I would have to sit in utter darkness.
    In violation of fire laws, I thumbed the lighter and touched the flame to one wick. Then to the other.
    Perhaps my strange celebrity wins me license also. You cannot overestimate the power of celebrity in modern America.
    In the flutter of soothing light, my father’s face resolved out of the darkness. His eyes were closed. He was breathing through his open mouth.
    At his direction, no heroic efforts were being taken to sustain his life. His breathing was not even assisted by an inhalator.
    I took off my jacket and the Mystery Train cap, putting them on a chair provided for visitors.
    Standing at his bed, on the side more distant from the candles, I took one of his hands in one of mine. His skin was cool, as thin as parchment. Bony hands. His fingernails were yellow, cracked, as they had never been before.
    His name was Steven Snow, and he was a great man. He had never won a war, never made a law, never composed a symphony, never written a famous novel as in his youth he had hoped to do, but he was greater than any general, politician, composer, or prize-winning novelist who had ever lived.
    He was great because he was kind. He was great because he was humble, gentle, full of laughter. He had been married to my mother for thirty years, and during that long span of temptation, he had remained faithful to her. His love for her had been so luminous that our house, by necessity dimly lighted in most rooms, was bright in all the ways that mattered. A professor of literature at Ashdon—where Mom had been a professor in the science department—Dad was so beloved by his students that many remained in touch with him decades after leaving his classroom.
    Although my affliction had severely circumscribed his life virtually from the day that I was born, when he himself was twenty-eight, he had never once made me feel that he regretted fathering me or that I was anything less than an unmitigated joy and a source of undiluted pride to him. He lived with dignity and without complaint, and he never failed to celebrate what was right with the world.
    Once he had been robust and handsome. Now his body was shrunken and his face was haggard, gray. He looked much older than his fifty-six years. The cancer had spread from his liver to his lymphatic system, then to