Fear Nothing Read Free Page B

wedge in one of the hospital loggia arches, he manages never to be looming over you. He moves with the grace of a much smaller man, and his voice is that of a gentle fairy-tale bear.
        “We're medicating him for pain,” Dr. Cleveland said, turning off the fluorescent panels overhead, “so he's drifting in and out. But each time he comes around, he asks for you.”
        Removing my glasses at last and tucking them in my shirt pocket, I hurried along the wide corridor, past rooms where patients with all manner of maladies, in all stages of illness, either lay insensate or sat before bed trays that held their dinners. Those who saw the corridor lights go off were aware of the reason, and they paused in their eating to stare at me as I passed their open doors.
        In Moonlight Bay, I am a reluctant celebrity. Of the twelve thousand full-time residents and the nearly three thousand students at Ashdon College, a private liberal-arts institution that sits on the highest land in town, I am perhaps the only one whose name is known to all. Because of my nocturnal life, however, not every one of my fellow townspeople has seen me.
        As I moved along the hall, most of the nurses and 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 oh'ect 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