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 Twenty: Taking Delight
Reinvigorated by her new strategies, Counselor O’Neily’s next most important task was to rehearse her son. It wasn’t as hard as it might have been, since he was compelled to remain at home. Mom made Jim-Jam parrot the answers she had written to questions about the manner in which his class’s Harvest Festival Queen was selected, his role in the procurement and sale of illegal pharmaceuticals, his motives for importing exotic, dangerous lizards, and his patriotic rationale for designing a new weapon.
She prepared him to speak in a way that hid his interest in capital gains and that squelched his specialized vocabulary. It might or might not suit his cause for the judge to notice his flair for biochemistry, his love of molecular physics and his proclivity for marketing. So, Mom made Jim-Jam rehearse until he sounded inept. She was troubled, however, since the voice she was forcing onto her child might make him not only sound harmless, but also worthless to their government.
Coaching witnesses is an endemic behavior, one for which the opposition would be prepared. Undoubtedly, the persecutors, too, were busy teaching their testifiers strategic ways to answer questions and teaching them about the kinds of questions they should expect from the defense. Both sets of attorneys would have to be careful not to overstep laws concerning preparing witnesses. If, for instance, the prosecution failed to limit its coaching such that Mom or her coworkers could establish some violation of legal ethics, Jim-Jam’s case could be permanently thrown off of the docket. Such sloppiness was rare, but not unheard of. Mom could hope for a mistrial.
She cried a bit more into her coffee. Maybe, in the same way that the approaching month promised a lunar eclipse, there might be a useful mistake made by the folks trying to jail Jim-Jam.
Larry, the law student intern, was redirected to the O’Neily house. There, he helped Mom make Jim-Jam understand the importance of articulating his actions as neither war crimes nor other offenses against humanity. Jim-Jam’s protests to the contrary, Larry additionally, helped Mom strong-arm Jim-Jam into supplying her team with the entirety of intelligence that supported Jim-Jam’s antimissile keychains.
Mom knew that a parole-less life sentence was more dreadful than losing revenue. She knew, too, that given the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, if found guilty, Jim-Jam would have to serve at least twenty-five years of any punishment received and that a judge might rule against any forgiveness, essentially sentencing her baby without provision of release.
The data that Larry and Mom subsequently gleaned from Raymond Charles High School’s Master of Stationary and Peripatetic Sciences impacted Mom so extensively that she had begun to add whiskey to her coffee. In her backyard, her child had been developing a weapon that could have blown up more than their neighborhood. Over and above that crime, to fashion that armament, Jim-Jam had been in communication with criminals of the lowest order. Last, Jim-Jam had hidden, on their property, several bags of highly illegal weapons-grade chemicals.
Mom’s team ignored that Atkins, who was imprisoned at the time, ought not to have to have had access to information about such armaments. They also overlooked that certain nefarious parties had access to Jim-Jam’s research since Jim-Jam neglected to mention that his computer had been hacked.
* * *
One afternoon, when temporarily freed of courtroom rehearsals, Jim-Jam redirected his attention to the still troubling problem of the pH of the soil around his family’s home. If only his lime-enrichments had allowed Galega officinalis, Goat’s Rue, a powerful galactagogue, to flourish, he could have sold those plants, rooted, dried, or as seeds, to the International La Leche League and could have made enough money to finish his abandoned research on naphthalene solubility. Jail time or no, he needed to complete his rustproof anti-tank keychains studies.
Jim-Jam put his head on his desk. He nodded off without regarding his many collectibles. As he eased into snores, he altogether ignored the sign on his wall that probed, “What’s white and powdery and makes people happy?” Eventually, he awoke, discovered it was night, and crawled back to his house.
“Snow,” answered George, as he broke into Jim-Jam’s outbuilding later that night. The transient’s surveillance was paying off; occasionally, the Cracker Jack, Social Fulminator left his research center and went home. An emptied science hut was a boon since George was sure that the particulars of Jim-Jam’s research were stored there.
The hobo rubbed his long-since healed pinky. Once, a Komodo dragon had bitten off that chunk of his hand. Given the location of the bite and the time frame of the accident, George was certain that O’Neily had never become wise to George’s trespasses.
Yet, that night, when Jim-Jam had pondered powdery white substances, unfathomably, he had returned to his research shack. He rolled his eyes at George: “Hate freedom that much?”
A belated Google search had revealed to the Keeper of Knowledge Both Useful and Not-Yet-Understood that George had moved around a lot within Upper Buckwheat County, that he had been involved in various nefarious activities, many of which made Jim-Jam’s own actions seem pedestrian, and that George’s social and physical markers made him seem related to Lima Quinn. Jim-Jam had not, as yet, linked Ralph’s disappearance to the vagrant.
George, too, rolled his eyes. The light from Jim-Jam’s cellphone could be ignored. He blinked, however, when Jim-Jam directed a laser at him. George escaped by breaking through the research hut’s only window.
The sound of shattered glass brought Mom to Jim-Jam’s workplace. She wordlessly surveyed the mess, scanned Jim-Jam for injury, and then returned to bed. Morning would be time enough for Jim-Jam to clean up the mess. Mom didn’t even bother pulling him by his ear back to their house.
* * *
Days later, Jim-Jam flipped open his cell phone to dial the public library. When a librarian picked up, Jim-Jam asked to talk to George. He figured that his mentor had returned to his couch. Jim-Jam wanted to reify the parameters of their relationship but did not want to do so at the library.
George, though, could not be found. He was not reclining near the microfiche nor freshening up in the men’s bathroom. He had not gone back to the library. Rather, he had drowned at the hobo camp in his own vomit; in the end, George had suffocated in his excesses.
His asphyxiation and his ensuing respiratory impairment had concluded a binge. George had never expected his pigeon to catch him since he never believed that childish O’Neily would ever notice his trespasses. Like Sebastian Quinn, Jim-Jam O’Neily had proven difficult to manipulate.
After he puked, George had been unable to call for help. The vast quantity of alcohol in his system had caused his mammalian diving reflexes to stop working. There had been no slowed heart rate. No vasoconstriction had taken place. Nothing had freely passed throughout his thoracic cavity. Merely, George’s severe shortage of air intake had killed him.
On top of George having been staggered by O’Neily in O’Neily’s hut and having been freshly disappointed by Sebastian Quinn’s unwillingness to share research insights, he had begun to be troubled by thoughts of matrimony. Just before his death, George had been debating, afresh, whether or not he ought to chase domestication.
Although Barbra had raised their child, he was confident that, if asked in the company of a counselor or some other suitable peacemaker, the ugly chemist would still agree to marry him. The ferocity with which she had recently greeted him evidenced her enduring passion.
George would merely have to close his eyes during their intimacies as Barbra had grown almost as old-looking as he. It would be a worthwhile union, as his sacrifices of the flesh would provide him with an instant family, i.e. credibility.
What’s more, a recognized spouse and a legally accepted child could also provide him with a font of vitality. A spouse could relieve the fatigue he experienced when working on his plot against the local hospital’s emergency department. A dumb child, especially one who adored him, could enhance his self-esteem. George had supposed that reintegration into regular society and exhaustive therapy would enable him to seem as though he had rerouted.
However, having to prostrate himself to the desires of those loved ones — whether compromises meant taking out the trash, helping with homework, or performing intimate obligations — would tap his resources faster than being stricken by lightning. The onetime chemist wondered if he really could raise himself above the station of “rogue.”
The people, who currently best loved his scientific ideas, were not kin or even former research colleagues, but were suspicious sorts with whom George linked with via the Internet. He wasn’t sure Barbra would approve of those associations. As he had contemplated, George had fingered a piece of paper inscribed with a number and kept in his jacket’s pocket.
So far, he had failed to identify a single venue willing to pay him for the knowledge he had stolen from O’Neily. It was not his way to sell to governments, either local or foreign. He was afraid, too, of negotiating with the redoubtable arms dealers who kept contacting him (he knew that the smaller ones couldn’t afford his fee.)
George’s ruminations about unwilling research partners, about untested marital partners, and about unapproached business partners ended up being moot. When he passed on, an empty bottle of Shiraz, an empty bottle of Merlot, and a partially full bottle of 80 proof vodka, were found at his feet, but no directions, written or otherwise, testified to his will for his business.
* * *
Eleanor, at Home Away, might have been able to prevent his death had there not been human obstructions. That coffee-serving angel had often, during George’s reoccurring funks, encouraged him with her kind words, sugary smiles and overall friendliness. She never knew that she mattered to him as she considered him a misogynous lowlife whom she tried to avoid as much as possible. The night of his death, George had not visited the shelter.
Correspondingly, George had never created his insurrections against the powers that be in general and, more unequivocally, against the local hospital. He never got to test Jim-Jam O’Neily’s miniature armament controls, either. Above all, he never got to meet Lima.
Copyright © 2020 by Channie Greenberg
