"She stole a kiss from Chase. What have you done lately?"

All right, Dr. Wilson, all right, bald little cancer kid's brave, I got it.

I put the remote down, glance at my watch again, and sigh in disgust. I wish the motorcycle dealership were open so I could take another test drive. God, this afternoon, getting out of Princeton, the perfect weather (hideous ragweed excepted, of course) -- right on the threshold of fall, all the green of summer but without the heat, and just getting out of my own head for a while. Just being able to forget. No hay fever, no case, no surgery, no Cameron snipping at me, no Stacey lurking around every corner.... no remembering to brake with my left foot, no feeling off-balance all the time, no dragging my leg along. No cane.

Is there such a thing as bravery, anyway? Or is it all just denial raised to a higher level? A kid who should be out doing whatever nine-year-old girls do these days, and instead she's fighting this hideous disease. For what? For another year of baldness, of central lines, of ten pills a day, of crushing on Australian doctors?

I love my mother, she told me.

Is that for real?

Survival -- that's what biology's all about. It's the deepest instinct, hard-wired into our brains. An animal will chew its own leg off if it's caught in a trap. Didn't some hiker amputate his own arm with a spoon or something when he was trapped under a rock?

Is bravery just a way of dressing up animal instinct so that it sounds better to us? Just a way of excusing our stupid, irrational selves? We can't say, I want to live because my primitive limbic system says I want to. We say, I want to live for my mother, for my child, for... for something.

Is bravery just choosing the less scary alternative? We know what it's like to live; we don't know what it's like to die, so we go with the familiar.

I think for a minute, haul myself out of my chair, and stump over to the bookshelf. I hold the top of the shelf for balance as I look over the spines. Finally I find the tattered paperback I'm looking for: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. Might as well go back to the source. I flip to Chapter 3:

he would be a sort of madman or insensible person if he feared nothing, neither earthquakes nor the waves... while the man who exceeds in confidence about what really is terrible is rash.... The rash man, however, is also thought to be boastful and only a pretender to courage; at all events, as the brave man is with regard to what is terrible, so the rash man wishes to appear; and so he imitates him in situations where he can....

The man who exceeds in fear is a coward; for he fears both what he ought not and as he ought not, and all the similar characterizations attach to him. He is lacking also in confidence; but he is more conspicuous for his excess of fear in painful situations.

The coward, then, is a despairing sort of person; for he fears everything....

... to die to escape from poverty or love or anything painful is not the mark of a brave man, but rather of a coward; for it is softness to fly from what is troublesome, and such a man endures death not because it is noble but to fly from evil.

to die to escape from poverty or love or anything painful.... I snap the book shut and throw it back on the shelf. I walk back over to the chair, but before I sit down I look around the apartment. I should try to get some sleep while my sinuses will let me, but just thinking about work makes them ache.

Work. Why won't they just leave me alone? At least I'm alone here. And then, for the briefest of moments, I get the sensation that I'm not alone -- that if I go into the kitchen or into the bedroom, Stacey will be there --

I shake my head. God, that was weird. I pick up my cane and my mug and head off to the kitchen to make some tea.