The Ill-Advised Adventures
of Jim-Jam O’Neily

by Channie Greenberg

Table of Contents

Chapter Eleven: Relative Responsibilities

Upon waking up at Upper Buckwheat County Hospital, the strong-armed legal caretaker, who was also Jim-Jam’s mom, learned that she had been unconscious. That interval began at Mrs. Preenberry’s, continued for the duration of her ride in an ambulance to the hospital and petered out after she had been settled into a general care ward. Counting IV lines to steady her nerves, she contemplated just how long it would take parents of certain Raymond Charles High School children to realize that their offspring had not been hospitalized due to “contact with vipers.”

Sooner or later, those moms and dads would apprehend that the predators in their offspring’s nightmares had had legs as well as toxins and had been a biology project of Jim-Jam O’Neily’s. Under those provisos, the lawyer estimated that it would take very few hours before Interpol stormed their community to demand that the local police surrender Jim-Jam’s Komodos.

Medical logs indicate that Attorney O’Neily lost consciousness a second time.

Later, after her release and after a small number of phone calls, Mom O’Neily certified that Jim-Jam’s grotesque squamates had gotten relocated to the county zoo, to an extremely remote enclosure not open to the public. Both Mom and the zoo’s executives had determined that the lizards were too dangerous to display. Unlike the pandas and great apes that had made the news at other biology gardens, Komodos would not hesitate to make lunch of any small children that fell into their domain.

Mom put Jim-Jam on lockdown, too. He was limited to home and school and was escorted between the two by either Mom or Mrs. Preenberry. Jim-Jam was also prohibited from engaging Mom in plea bargaining, from communicating ideas for alternate representation, or from requesting a more lenient sentence.

The Hero of Subparticles, High Supreme Crawdad Dissector, and Genius of Umbrella Rib and Runner-Personal Computer Motors hated his new circumstances. He couldn’t continue his research on Komodo ear wax, and he remained frustrated in his attempts to manage keychain salinity and humidity. Jim-Jam needed more supplies but had no way to enter stores or, apart from that, to import goods. Mom was intercepting all of his mail and had cancelled every one of his physical post boxes.

A desperate Jim-Jam drew up new schematics; without materials, there would be no jiggling of his prototype. He wanted to get to the level of development where he could fit his keychains with remote-control devices, namely with mechanisms adept at launching armor-piercing shells or concrete-puncturing fuses. Such missiles could be controlled from great distances. He decided that if he could not achieve proper mastery of the toxic substances with which he wanted to equip his gadgets, he would, instead, fit them with weapons of mass destruction.

That new direction in mind, Jim-Jam weighed smearing his rustproof, antitank key chains with shushing oil and then baking enamel coverings over them. To implement that idea, all he would need was an industrial-sized kiln. He wouldn’t have to fidget in his workshop.

Jim-Jam leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Somewhere, there must be an owner of a small forge that owed him a favor. O’Neily dialed the proprietor of the small metal works plant in the next town. Perhaps, that aluminum door and window maker, that man who was rumored to dabble, at times, in fashioning mailboxes, packing crates, and patio furniture, could be persuaded to direct his welders, stampers, and materials engineers to assemble Jim-Jam’s fobs without raising an alarm about crafting warhead activation devices. O’Neily called the shop.

Someplace else, a shipment of ocean critters, which Jim-Jam had been regularly receiving from an international marine association, went missing. Allegedly, the problem was related to the do-gooders’ inability to get Captain Albatross to join them for a photo shoot. To suggest that the nonprofit organization’s public relations machine was “a tad aggressive” was like saying that “those sea wardens kept more loads of sea creatures than they dumped.”

The good news was that since Jim-Jam no longer had to supply his 4-H pals with feed, he no longer had to continue his association with those duplicitous bleeding hearts. There was no more reason for him to pose as Captain Albatross or to trade with the green earth organization for tons of free seafood. O’Neily could permanently separate himself from the environmentalists’ mounding electronic bunkum, which continued to multiply in his inbox and which continued to resist his attempts to unsubscribe.

In view of those details, Captain Albatross sent the crews of Thar She Blows and of Where-Away electronic missives that Captain Albatross’s mother ought not to be sent those crew members’ not-yet-in-the-mail-will-be-posted-when-we-hit-shore, gratis tickets for a Pacific Ocean cruise. Captain Albatross had no further need for their underwater films. Pure and simple, he was cutting his ties to oceanic peaceniks as well as his dependence on the sailors of Thar She Blows and of Where-Away.

* * *

Later, when Mom eased the particulars of Jim-Jam’s punishment, Smart Boy returned to the municipal library. He was stupefied by George’s lack of opposition to his presence. George had even left the microfiche reader, specifically, and the library, in general, free.

Instead of camping out on the sofa behind that machine, the former academic had gotten busy with showering at the town’s YMCA and with taking a much wrinkled suit out of a bus station locker. He then walked to his former university. Revenge had finally propelled George toward “making nice” to a former research colleague who was also a former lover.

* * *

Seventeen years after being deserted by George, Dr. Barbra Quinn still borrowed from him in cooking, karate, and new math. She still fondly remembered the rhythmic movements in which they had once engaged, too. Conversely, her association with that exiled academic had cost her a much-desired and needed promotion. Yet, her lawyers had been unable to corroborate that her advancement had been denied by reason of her advocacy on George’s behalf.

There had been no denying Dr. Quinn’s position on George’s dismissal; she had declared to the faculty senate, over and again, that it was erroneous for the school to divest George of lab assistants and research subsidies and to cancel his employment, let alone to withhold tenure, just because his single lab accident had cost the university hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Into that bargain, Quinn had reminded those of her peers who sat in judgment over her man that his studies had yielded in-depth interpretations of biopolymers, especially of base pairs. Much cancer research, copious amounts of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease work, a significant number of investigations on metabolic disorders such as diabetes and liver disease, and important scholarship on HIV/AIDS had moved forward because of George’s findings.

George was beloved, Quinn prompted, in both medicine and chemistry. The university’s public relations force adored him, too, since his devotion to eliminating human agony was frequently highlighted in newspapers. Indeed, long before coverage of his workplace catastrophe had aired, he had been a mass media darling. Failing to renew his contract meant sacrificing a publicly favored personality.

Then again, no one could authenticate that the university’s ombudsman’s office had instructed the Chemistry Department’s chair to disallow Quinn a promotion. No one could make evident that the university’s provost had, similarly, obtained a court order to censor broadcasts about George’s work in general; his lab accident, specifically; his subsequent dismissal, or Dr. Barbra Quinn’s involvement in the case. All of the guilty parties lied under oath at the same time as the school’s advocates made a case that news about George was still being disseminated. Those lawyers made no mention that stories featuring George after the time of the explosion, unlike stories featuring him before the accident, were buried beneath accounts of plane crashes, royal babies, and sales on Khitty Khleen litter.

Dr. Quinn could only imagine what it would have been like to have been able to tape the purported conversation between the provost and the chair or to have taped the alleged similar one between the director of the Office of Academic Affairs and the head of the College of Sciences. She had no means, either, to prove to anyone that her school had unjustly taken away all of her connections to graduate students; hearsay does not constitute admissible evidence.

While she crusaded for him, George embittered her life. Amongst strings of kisses, George protested that Dr. Quinn could not adequately befriend him well as long as he remained a professional chemist. He wanted to pose as a patient, to work fast food, or to warm his fingertips at hobos’ campfires. Martyring his career would make certain of his standing in the annals of modern-day science.

Initially, Barbra Quinn had disagreed with him and had urged him, instead, to vacation in the wilds of health food formulations or in any other inadequately cultivated realms of big business. She assumed that her heart’s other half, a gentleman ordinarily grizzly in appearance, but perkily adolescent in private matters, could eventually overcome their university administrators’ apprehensions and return to working on behalf of the sickly.

George’s response to her idea was to pause in kissing Barbra and to tell her that she was less worthy of him than was a sample of snot preserved in thin sheets for microscopic examination. George then shouted that he no longer cherished her and that he found her copycatting of his vices highly annoying. What’s more, given that she was welterweight-sized, those excesses did not endear her to him as companionable, but forced him into the role of nursemaid every time that she blacked out. Even more dismaying to him was that Barbra had gotten so accustomed to her liquid meltdowns that she had stopped trying to make small talk with or to toss accusations at George.

He also remarked that Quinn’s scientific activities lacked the grandeur of those of her brother. “Everyone” in the world of chemistry knew about talented Sebastian Quinn, the world-class molecular chemist, who was revered for his untraditional applications of carbon monoxide, of diphenylchloroarsine, and of pheyldichchloroarsine.

That man was infamous for his findings as for his insolence. Before settling into marriage, Sebastian had also been known as a seducer, as had been made clear by the large number of graduate students who had suddenly “chosen” to give up their intellectual vagaries for domesticity after learning under him.

Although once raffish, Sebastian never took a liking to George. Specifically, he could not forgive George for walking away from his responsibilities to George and Barbra’s unborn child. At least, even as a married man, Sebastian made payments to all of his babies’ mommies.

After George abandoned her, Dr. Quinn took to crying in her lab and her office. For the first time in her life, her workplace — i.e. her sanctuary — had become a place of heartbreak.

* * *

That George left before being formally terminated shocked everyone and no one. The other scientists in the department had long known that George disdained other chemists as well as scorned his allies in medicine. That he had left Dr. Quinn behind, however, was, in their esteem, a different matter.

Those other scientists watched Barbra’s belly bulge during the course of George’s hearings. They noted, too, that Dr. Quinn persisted with her crusade on behalf of the academically smart man, who was stupid about relationships and an ignoramus per responsible parenting.

Privately, those scientists eschewed their school as much as had George. Whereas they upheld the supremacy of quantifiable observations, their university’s investigative committee seemed more interested in fictions. If a brainiac like George could be so easily removed from office, so, too, could they. To safeguard their jobs, those thinkers gave assorted school commissioners generous holiday gifts that year and for many years thereafter.

Eventually, George’s case was arbitrated. The prosecutor intimated that the man’s habit of imbibing might have caused the explosion. The defense was at a loss as how to express alternative findings.

George’s contemporaries tsk-tsked; reckless behavior resulting from alcohol dependency was worse than George’s known practice of publishing junior instructors’ research under his name. Even other international chemists, who suspected that the majority of George’s reports were stolen and who had stated, in academic conferences’ backrooms that George’s enviable media presence, not his scholarly brilliance, kept him in the system, wanted no relationship to a known addict. That most of them abused prescriptions seemed not to matter.

Proceed to Chapter 12...

Copyright © 2020 by Channie Greenberg