The Ill-Advised Adventures
of Jim-Jam O’Neily
by Channie Greenberg
James Jackson Ariel (“Jim-Jam”) O’Neily is an adolescent virtuoso, a bright teenager who has a passion for invention. But he is also a loser who postures as a champion. He remains a regular target for his high school’s most popular kids and for his school’s fiercest intimidators.
Jim-Jam is nasty and sweet, vainglorious and insecure, book-brilliant and publicly stupid. He is often inadvertently funny. His life is far from perfect; he tiptoes around his disapproving mother and finds himself battling another highly capable nerd. He’s arbitrary in friendships, spews balderdash and focuses on profit margins. Jim-Jam is a rascal on the rise.
Chapter Twelve: Doctoring Electronic and Other Sorts of Spins
Barbra’s trunk grew rounder. She increasingly received congratulatory remarks. More bizarrely, as her system overloaded with hormones, the ordinarily staid Dr. Quinn displayed emotions. Soon, her entire department knew just how horrified she was by the idea of becoming a single parent.
She cried in her bedroom every evening of her first trimester. When in public, she admitted neither nausea nor hunger, but in private, Barbra Quinn allowed herself to feel physically and emotionally out of sorts. Self-pity became her favorite expression of her decades’ worth of unarticulated feelings.
When weeping, Dr. Quinn decided to forego all future alliances, both scholarly and romantic, with George. Women like her, who were graced with superior intelligence, needed to safeguard themselves against recurring episodes of loss. When not longing for her own or for her unborn child’s death, Barbra romanticized George’s demise. She liked to fantasize about using certain of her brother’s inventions to blast George all the way to Tarnation.
The other chemists in Barbra’s department didn’t know that she thought about using her savings to terminate her pregnancy or to flee to Hawaii. In the first case, she would take sick leave and come back thinner. In the second case, she would join a Honolulu dance troupe; Barbra had studied tap until she was ten.
In the end, she neither terminated her pregnancy nor her relationship to the university. Rather, she withdrew from her teaching duties. Someone else taught her mind-numbing sections of Chemistry for Poets, Chemistry I, Quantitative Methods, and Organic Chemistry.
Fortunately for certain corporate moneymakers, while Dr. Quinn wanted little to do with teaching about titrates, she retained her curiosity about the workings of certain organophosphates. Her efforts to synthesize inexpensive, assisted suicide aids and other questionable pills remained among her foremost interests. Dr. Quinn had deduced that failing to carry on that research would be tantamount to being a racecar driver who refused to secure her seatbelt, or to being a nurse on a locked ward who refused to wipe up the stuff that leaked from her charges’ orifices.
On random days, Dr. Quinn returned to her lab. Any idiot could educate freshmen, but only she could motor through her ten years’ of research on the mechanisms of magnetic properties, especially on the finite arrays of interacting electron spins, and her drug research. Whether she was living with hormone regulating substances or not, she could not allow lucrative endeavors to be completely sidetracked by gestation.
Behind a lab door labeled in neatly gilded letters, that lady scientist tested the gamma-hydroxybutyric acid levels of a pill produced by a multinational drug company. Although her delvings were not sanctioned by the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, her findings often popped up on the computers of physicians searching for responses to severe inflammation. Because of her visibility, Quinn’s pharmaceutical sponsors continued to underwrite her.
Happy to be siphoning at least half of Dr. Quinn’s funding, the university shrugged at the success with which Quinn placed specific products’ names into international pharmaceutical chronicles. Her bosses knew but chose not to comment on the fact that via scholarly prestidigitation, drugs banned in North America and in Europe could still hold significant market shares in Africa and in the Middle East.
Big Pharm took advantage of developing nations’ willingness to grease corporate channels at the cost of patients’ welfare. Few policy-makers within or beyond the ivory tower cared that the drugs Barbra Quinn developed might bring about cancer or something more awful. So, even though the end products of Barbra Quinn’s work were banned, her work, itself, was subsidized and encouraged.
* * *
Disbursements from Big Pharm covered Dr. Quinn’s copay on her labor and delivery bills. Bringing a child into the world hurt not only physically, but also fiduciarily. Before leaving the maternity ward, Dr. Quinn insisted on being sterilized.
After completing paid leave, Barbra renewed her efforts at glass blowing. She wanted to make vessels capable of containing colloids, and she wanted to make new efforts at getting her research published. Barbra knew she would never become a full professor, given university politics, but her stand of test tubes and beakers and her many placements in refereed journals screamed, to anyone paying attention, that she was a reputable chemist.
* * *
George was less reputable. When once more faced with him, Barbra Quinn thought to dial her newest legal spokesperson, Counselor O’Neily, to shout out to campus police, or to IM her daughter, Lima. She never expected that the gorgeous, shaggy man would reappear in her laboratory.
The chemist breathed deeply and loudly before reproducing her belly dance teacher’s instructions. That teacher emphasized the value of an integrated spirit and stressed the importance of corporeal transformation. She crooned that all of her students, as a result of her classes, ought not to become just abdominally powerful, but also to become fluent in understanding their inner workings. That teacher was constantly asking her followers to draw from their deepest powers.
Whenever Barbra did as her teacher advised, she felt transformed into a “vessel of well-meaning cosmic energy.” So, upon sighting George, she did not run to embrace him, but dashed within to make use of her teacher’s techniques. For about two minutes, Dr. Quinn triumphed in ignoring her former paramour.
George seemed preoccupied with smoothing his rumpled suit. After an expansive silence, he made a pithy allusion to Dr. Quinn’s brother’s thoughts on engineering weapons capable of making armies hallucinate. Shrugging at his stone-faced former lover, he unapologetically asked her help in communicating with Sebastian. George believed that Jim-Jam O’Neily’s keychain system was on the right track but the wrong train.
Sebastian Quinn’s research was generally inaccessible as Dr. Sebastian refused to share his test results on viable forms of dimercaprol and of pralidoxime. He also rebuffed all attempts to involve him in projects whose funding did not include the plain mention of unlimited cola and chocolate drops for investigators. That brilliant man contended that bench workers ought to be able to rely on being fueled by tasty comestibles.
Additionally, Sebastian Quinn, who had long ago excused himself from the academy’s constraint-filled halls, popped up regularly at scholarly conferences. At those meetings, he took pleasure in refuting cutting edge research on weapons of mass destruction. He’d gesture excitedly and would often literally expectorate that blood, blister, and nerve agents were laughable in the face of phosgene oxime.
At such events, Sebastian would also frequently spew that even nettle-based remedies were as nothing when it came to large-caliber guns efficient at firing off anticholinergic deliriants. He’d contend, further, that it was stupid of his counterparts not to grasp that peripheral nervous systems remained a weakness among armies. Correspondingly, he’d disgorge words about the pleasure he anticipated once he was able to make large numbers of military personnel simultaneously insane.
* * *
Barbra Quinn’s willpower turned flimsy. Upon hearing George mention her brother without first offering up any words of remorse to her, she broke her concentration to glare at him. When he asked, next, if he could meet their daughter, she gave him a very epigrammatic nod.
Satisfied that their meeting had been productive, George left.
Dr. Barbra Quinn cradled her head in her hands. After crying, and then crying some more, she made phone calls. She disbelieved George’s reasons for his disloyalty. She knew it was not her habit of drink and doubted that she had stopped being attractive to him since holiday parties still found her the object of unwanted advances.
Even had Barbra accepted that George was reacquainting himself with her only to gain access to Sebastian’s new oximes formulae, which, in point of fact, Barbra couldn’t supply, she would have had a hard time pushing away her daughter’s daddy. His few sentences had conjured new palpitations in her and had made her freshly short of breath. Apparently, she still yearned for his affections. George was more than the totality of his frayed hat, splotched coat, and body odor. To the lady scientist, George was the entirety of his learning. Nothing was sexier to her than smarts, except for smarts housed in a bad boy. Bad boy smarts were irresistible.
* * *
Later that night, George used his left foot to kick open the corner of Barbra’s office door. Toes protruded from his shoe, and grey tufts sprouted from beneath his cap. In the interval between his initial re-emergence and this, his second visit, Barbra had apparently continued to measure acids and bases. Her devotion to their craft was frightening.
Her countenance had become frightening, too. Her hair had greyed, and her face had become lined. Her skin hung from her upper arms where once muscle, which she had built up through recreational swimming, had pulled it taunt.
Likewise, the height of that woman’s intellectual prowess seemed to have passed. The current Barbra Quinn was no more than a glorified lab assistant who eked out a livelihood by prostituting herself to drug companies.
More maddening, if idle talk was to be believed, Barbra was using part of her time to create means for medical professionals “to perform the ultimate kindness.” She seemed to have ceased caring about rulings handed down by the associations of hospital ethics committees and about disciplinary actions that the university could take against her.
Likewise, the new Barbra Quinn seemed cavalier. When George had first entered her office, he had readied himself for caustic glances, for slaps, for other physical provocations and for scathing words. He had not been prepared for silence. In truth, Barbra’s lack of epithets, that is, her seeming apathy toward him, was excruciating. Although George had had it in mind to nuzzle her once delectable fingers, as a ploy, not a show of passion, he had not anticipated that she might have morphed into a unapproachable brute.
Given the noise in his head, George hadn’t observed the blaze detonating Barbra Quinn’s face when he had first showed up. He had also, somehow, missed the tears in her eyes and the quiver of her arms. It had never occurred to him to belatedly thank her for sacrificing so much of herself on his behalf.
Alone, in her laboratory, George gazed at his reflection in a window. He could use a trim. His shave and haircut looked as hasty as they had been. It was no wonder Miss Eleanor, at Home Away, had been reluctant to pass a cup of coffee to him, let alone to serve anyone else at his table.
For a long time, especially during the public library’s off hours, George had used Home Way as his go-to place. That building had heat, a vermin-free kitchen, and sturdy, World War II army cots along with the sweetest volunteers in Upper Buckwheat.
Usually, when the shelter’s Miss Eleanor passed George some coffee, he’d grab her wrist and kiss her palm. He couldn’t understand why she shot him daggers or failed to acknowledge his importance.
Copyright © 2020 by Channie Greenberg
