Purely by Accident

by Jim Beegle

  As Mark left that afternoon, it was Cecil this time who asked Mark if he would mind coming back for a visit the next day. Mark quickly agreed and left, genuinely sorry that he had to go.

  As promised, Mark returned the next day right after lunch, but this time he was carrying his briefcase with him. He entered the room and, unlike the day before, closed the door behind him. He rested his briefcase on the foot of the bed and pulled his chair closer to where Cecil was lying. The older man’s face fell in disappointment when he saw Mark’s actions, for he was sure his young visitor was armed with some type of legal document that would free him of any responsibility for the accident that he did not cause. It made good legal sense, but it still saddened him somewhat to see that Mark had returned only to get his signature on some papers. Even though their two previous conversations had been brief, Cecil had already begun to think of Mark as someone he could come to really enjoy. When Cecil looked up, to his delight, instead of a set of legal papers, Mark produced two brown twelve-ounce bottles that could only hold one thing—beer.

  Mark twisted the top off of one of the two bottles and handed it to the now smiling Cecil, saying, “Sorry they aren’t that cold. Yesterday you mentioned you like to have a beer every now and then, so I thought this would be a good time.” Mark took his now usual seat by the bed and continued, “Besides, I know what hospital food is like.”

  To show his appreciation and approval, Cecil took a long pull from the bottle.

  It was in the middle of the second beer, not cold at all now, that the topic of Cecil’s health came up. Beginning hesitantly, Mark said, “The doctor must have thought that I was a relative the other day and he told me some stuff he probably shouldn’t have.” Mark looked down at the bottle in his hand, wondering how to proceed. “He told me you were pretty sick before the accident.”

  “What exactly did he tell you?” Cecil asked, trying to sit up higher in the bed.

  Mark really wanted to say something else. However, lying came hard to him and he just said what he was thinking. “He told me you didn’t have too much longer to live.”

  “Did he tell you how long?” Cecil asked.

  “A few years, maybe more.” Mark said, trying not to sound like he knew differently.

  “A year at the most,” Cecil said in an even tone. If he was upset by having to admit to death’s closeness, his voice didn’t show it. Mark just nodded his head. “Look, Mark, don’t be so downcast. I’ve known for some time that I was sick. They caught it a few years ago when I was living in Panama. I wasn’t feeling very well so they ran some tests. Their prognosis was not very good. They told me I had cancer and that it was very close to my spine. The doctors weren’t very comfortable with trying to operate because they weren’t sure that they had the skills needed to do the surgery without doing some other damage as well. They were concerned I wouldn’t be able to walk again, even if they did get the tumor. Even if they did operate, the doctors told me they could not guarantee that the disease wouldn’t come back. They recommended that I seek treatment elsewhere. It didn’t seem like much of a choice to me at the time, so I moved from Panama to the Bahamas and had the surgery done about a year and a half ago.” Mark looked up at his new friend. “I am almost sixty-five years old,” Cecil continued, “I have lived a good, full and, for the most part, exciting life. I have few regrets at this point. I am not saying, mind you, that I wouldn’t like to live a good deal longer, but I am not afraid of what lies ahead.”

  Again Mark just nodded his head as if he understood. He reflected on Cecil’s words for a minute. “Do you have any family?” Mark asked after he composed himself.

  A look of pain passed over the old man’s face. Mark thought of withdrawing the question, then Cecil answered. “No, not anymore. I was married many years ago. She and I parted company long before I got sick. I found out through some friends of some friends that she passed away a few years ago.” He looked out the window of his room. “So, no, it’s just me now.”

  “I am sorry,” Mark said. And he really was.

  “Well, Mark, it was a long time ago and a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then.”

  They were quiet for several minutes after Cecil’s answer, each man lost in his own thoughts of what the next few months would be like—thinking of what was and what could have been. All the while the beer got warmer. They did not talk much more after that, but neither were they completely uncomfortable just to sit and sip their beers and enjoy each other’s presence.

  The following day the hospital discharged Cecil to his own care. Mark insisted that he be allowed to drive him home. He had gone to the effort to make sure that he traded cars with Amy that morning so as not to offer Cecil any reminders of what had happened a few days before.

  Cecil lived in an older but well-cared for neighborhood of north Dallas. The house was set back a good distance from the road, making it difficult to see from the street. It was further hidden by large, hundred-year-old cottonwood trees that protectively stood guard throughout the front lawn. Inside, the spacious house was decorated in the taste of a bachelor. Both the furniture and the art, for the most part, came from Central America. Cecil explained to Mark, as he looked around the house, that immediately after he retired he had moved around a great deal before finally settling in Panama about ten years ago. That’s where he had collected most of what was in the house now. Cecil got two beers from the refrigerator and led Mark out back to a well-shaded and comfortable patio. They sat for a long time drinking beer and talking.

  Mark told his new acquaintance about Micronix, the company he worked for. He laughed when he mentioned that he worked for them. He began telling Cecil the whole story of his employment with the company—a story which lasted for a good part of the afternoon and several more beers.

  About ten years ago, Mark admitted, he was running the management information systems department for a local bank. In fact, it was at the same bank where he had met his wife several years prior. Both were in their early twenties. They had offices on the same floor of the bank’s main building in downtown Dallas and ran into each other often while at work. Mark had never really had any serious long-term relationships before meeting Amy. However, when the two started dating, Amy was just beginning to “come out” again, as she put it, after a long relationship with another employee of the bank had gone sour. They married less than a year later.

  After years of working for the bank, Mark had become bored with the routine of making sure numbers were all in their right and proper columns for people who had no knowledge or appreciation of how much work was involved in getting them there. When a college friend offered to let Mark buy into, and work for, a new start-up software company he was forming, Mark jumped at the chance. Under protest from Amy, Mark took the full ten-thousand-dollar balance of his 401k and joined Micronix Software, Inc. He was thirty years old at the time and ready, he had decided, for a fresh challenge. The first few years were lean and there were several times that his partners had lived more on the incomes of their wives instead of the pittance earned from the business. However, like most things that people have a strong vision for, they persevered.

  Three years into the venture they hit pay dirt. Micronix had developed some software for the publishing industry that proved to be a breakthrough product not only for publishers, but for the young software company as well. They were finally on their way. While they worked over the next two years to bring an updated version of their software to the market, they also managed to do something very few companies like them had been able to do. They produced another new software package that had the same kind of impact that the first one had. Unlike most beginning software companies, Micronix wasn’t a one-hit wonder. Lighting had indeed struck twice for them. At the beginning of their fifth year, Micronix went public, trading on the NASDAQ under the symbol of MCX. Now, for the first time in their lives, Mark and his partners’ interest became divided between software code and the closing sto
ck market reports.

  Two years after going public, Micronix had been approached by a larger Fortune 100 company, DECCO, headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. DECCO was a large company with interest in software and hardware manufacturing. It was an old and well- established company by the standards of the high-tech world. The history of the company and its products spanned more than forty years. The founders, now deceased, had long since turned the company over to a board of directors and professional managers.

  Negotiations between the two companies proceeded for two long months. Finally, a deal was struck and the young and founding owners of Micronix passed the title to their company over to DECCO.

  Mark’s three fellow owners and friends had decided to take their money and leave the business altogether. DECCO, fearing a brain drain from their newly acquired prize had offered Mark a job, as a Senior Vice President with DECCO, running Micronix for them. He had considered it for a little while.

  He recalled his life before Micronix, when he was caught up in the chase of the corporate world. It wasn’t that he lacked the drive or the motivation to do the job, then or now. It had nothing to do with the responsibility or having a large number of people reporting to him either. It was more that, as he had gotten older, he had begun to realize how much the men and women who held those jobs were becoming less human and more robotic—saying things they neither meant nor understood. Saying them only because it was the new management fad or the “program of the week” from headquarters. He hated the dishonesty involved in that kind of lifestyle. He turned the job down. When Amy discovered that he had taken a pass on the position, she was furious with him.

  Amy thrived in that kind of world. Her life and career had been made of a succession of upward steps. She had risen through the ranks of what was then The National Bank of Texas from the position of a copywriter in the advertising department, a job she had held while still going to college, to her current job as an Assistant Vice President for International Product Marketing. The National Bank of Texas had grown, through acquisitions and mergers, into The International Commerce Bank or, as most people called it, IBC. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind, least of all Mark’s, that, before too much longer, Amy would hold a Director’s position with IBC.

  Following Mark’s decision to turn down the Senior VP position, Amy had claimed, in anger, and most likely out of spite, that she had still been in shock over the breakup of the previous relationship when Mark had proposed to her—insinuating that her decision to marry him had been a mistake.

  “I was weak and easily influenced by your attention,” Mark remembered her shouting at him that night. Moving the argument from a career discussion to a review of their marriage was one of her favorite tactics. “I was hoping that I could light a fire under you and make you see your potential, but I can see now how wrong I was about you.”

  Her words had hurt him deeply. Mark felt like the child who had been told that his existence was simply an unplanned accident. Not that this had been the first time in recent memory that she had said things like that to him. On his own, he had spent that night and several nights hence, in the guestroom. It took a long time for the frost to melt from that episode and, even now, several years later, things were not as they had been before that argument.

  Mark told Cecil that he had made a small profit from his ten thousand dollars, even though he was not a majority stockholder. The money realized from the sale of his shares was good, but not enough to allow him to totally retire. Besides, the idea of retiring in his thirties did not appeal to him. Neither did the idea of going to work somewhere else. So Mark chose to stay on at Micronix and continue to do the same work he had been doing before DECCO—overseeing the day-to-day production of the latest upgrade to the software.

  “And are you happy with that arrangement now?” Cecil asked him.

  “I was at first, yes, but not now.” Mark took a long pull on the beer. “DECCO has infiltrated just about every layer of the old Micronix. That in and of itself is not bad. It’s the things the infiltration has brought with it that are bad. Now there are layers upon layers of people who have to approve every move you make. By the time we can get enough people to make a decision and finally get a new product to the market, the market has moved on without us.” He thought for a long moment before continuing in a voice that was almost a whisper. “And now they are about to commit a mortal sin.”

  “How is that?” Cecil asked with interest.

  Rousing himself from this introspection, Mark answered, “We are going to release a product that we know is not ready; it’s full of bugs. To make matters worse, it’s late getting to market.” Mark paused another long moment. “It’s just hard to see that happen to something I had a hand in building.”

  Unable to speak any words that would soothe Mark, Cecil decided to change the subject. He asked Mark if he and Amy had any children.

  “No,” Mark told him, “it’s just the two of us. It’s a matter of timing, I guess. At first, we were both pretty busy. She was trying to establish her career and I was trying to get a business going. We didn’t feel it would be right to bring children into the world when we couldn’t spend time with them.”

  “And what about now?” Cecil inquired.

  “Oh, now we are just too busy. Amy travels a good deal with her job—a lot of it out of the country.” He laughed as a thought crossed his mind. “If I were the one who could get pregnant and carry the child, we might have decided to be parents.”

  Not wanting to dwell on the deteriorating state of his marriage any longer, Mark turned the conversation to Cecil and his life. Cecil began his story by also going back about twenty years. However, twenty years prior took Cecil only as far back as his forties, and he did not divulge too much about his career—only that he had also worked with computers. “‘Data processing’ we called it back then,” he told Mark with a laugh. Cecil admitted that, in the wild days of the oil boom in Texas in the late seventies and early eighties, he had made some pretty daring, but shrewd, investments. The money he had earned had allowed him to retire before he was fifty. Wise and less daring investing since then had allowed him to live a fairly comfortable life.

  His wife, Cecil told Mark, had already left him by the time he cashed out. He had no other family or job to tie him down anywhere, so he decided to travel. His itinerary consisted of stays in the Middle East, South America, Europe, and then, finally, Panama, where he lived for several years.

  “I never really intended to stay in Panama for ten years, but the sun was warm most of the time and the beer was usually cold, and I had no pressing need to be anywhere else, so I just stayed. Time doesn’t move there the same way it does here. It’s pretty easy to misplace a year or two,” Cecil said with a laugh, before continuing his story. “About four years ago, I was sick and had to be admitted to the hospital. It was then they diagnosed the cancer.”

  Explaining a bit of background, Cecil told Mark that The Commonwealth of the Bahamas was once a part of the United Kingdom. While it was today an independent country, there were still vestiges of British influence. The two things that had most attracted Cecil were the people’s delightful habit of stopping whatever they were doing for tea at four o’clock every afternoon and their insistence on maintaining first-rate medical facilities.

  Continuing the story of his cancer, Cecil explained that, from the beginning, his treatment had not gone well. The doctors in Panama had incorrectly diagnosed the seriousness of his problem and the rate at which the cancer was spreading. Tests performed after a very lengthy surgery in the Bahamas determined that the cancer was both malignant and aggressive. The doctors tried to remove all of it they could find and, after the surgery, they started him on different treatments designed to arrest and discourage the cancer from spreading. None of the treatments worked very well, but Cecil stayed in Freeport on the island of Grand Bahamas as long as the doctors there thought that they could help him. Finally, about a year and a half ago
, the doctors admitted to him that they had done all they knew to do. It was then, Cecil told Mark, that they informed him he had just a couple of years to live. The doctors he saw later in Nassau suggested that he put his affairs in order, settle someplace where he could get good treatment, and try to enjoy his remaining time.

  “So,” Cecil concluded, “I moved here to Dallas. I was born close to here and I thought it fitting that I should die here too. I have really enjoyed being back. Surprisingly, all things considered, I am in otherwise pretty good health. Well, that is, until recently.” He smiled at Mark and held up his plaster-casted arm. Mark smiled weakly and let Cecil enjoy his little jab.

  As Cecil relayed his story to him, Mark could not help notice that Cecil had become more relaxed and open. Mark did not overlook the effect of the beer, but something else had occurred to him as Cecil began talking about being sick. Mark could not help but wonder if he were the first person that Cecil had ever told most of this too—especially the part about the cancer.

  “Are you in much pain?” Mark interrupted. Cecil looked at his arm and Mark laughed. “I mean, other than that?”

  “I wasn’t at first. But in the last six months or so it has gotten worse. I drink a few more of these,” he held up an empty beer bottle, “than I used to. My doctor tells me that if it gets much more difficult to bear she will begin giving me morphine.”

  Mark raised his eyebrows at that statement.

  “Well, it’s not like I have to worry about becoming addicted now is it?”

  “No,” Mark finally replied, “I guess not.”

  “When it gets too bad…” Cecil’s voice trailed off. “Well, she promises me it will be quick when it comes.” He paused and let his statement hang between them. “And if it doesn’t,” he continued with a smile, “I’ll sue her.” With that, the dark spell that always descends upon people during a discussion about death was dispelled and both men laughed.