Fear Nothing

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 him socially 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 other organs, until he was riddled with it. In the struggle to survive, he had lost much of his thick white hair.
        On the cardiac monitor, the green line began to spike and through erratically. I watched it with dread.
        Dad's hand closed weakly on mine.
        When I looked at him again, his sapphire-blue eyes were open and focused on me, as riveting as ever.
        “Water?” I asked, because he was always thirsty lately, parched.
        “No, I'm all right,” he replied, although he sounded dry. His voice was barely louder than a whisper.
        I could think of nothing to say.
        All my life, our house was filled with conversation. My dad and mom and I talked about novels, old movies, the follies of politicians, poetry, music, history, science, religion, art, and about owls and deer mice and raccoons and bats and fiddler crabs and other creatures that shared the night with me. Our discourse ranged from serious colloquies about the human condition to frothy gossip about neighbors. In the Snow family, no program of physical exercise, regardless of how strenuous, was considered to be adequate if it didn't include a daily workout of the tongue.
        Yet now, when I most desperately needed to open my heart to my father, I was speechless.
        He smiled as if he understood my plight and appreciated the irony of it.
        Then his smile faded. His drawn and sallow face grew even more gaunt. He was worn so thin, in fact, that when a draft guttered the candle flames, his face appeared to be hardly more substantial than a reflection floating on the surface of a pond.
        As the flickery light stabilized, I thought that Dad seemed to be in agony, but when he spoke, his voice revealed sorrow and regret rather than pain: “I'm sorry, Chris. So damn sorry.”
        “You've nothing to be sorry about,” I assured him, wondering if he was lucid or speaking through a haze of fever and drugs.
        “Sorry about the inheritance, son.”
        “I'll be okay. I can take care of myself.”
        “Not money. There'll be enough of that,” he said, his whispery voice fading