Alan Foster - Exceptions to Reality

“No, wait!” Parker-Piggott squeaked as Flytrap closed in on him. He quickly saw that it would be impossible to give the slip to something with six eyes. “I can fix it! I can make it all back! Just give me another couple of weeks. No, no, a week, just one week!”

Four-arms sighed and lit a cheroot. It stank alarmingly of burning flesh. “Sorry, Parker-Piggott. If it was up to me…But I ain’t the one whose millions of botobs you were throwing around as if they were so much minced spiyork. They’ve run out of patience with you, Parker-Piggott. You should’ve been more careful with other folks’ money.”

“But,” Parker-Piggott screeched as Flytrap worked him into a corner from which there was no escape, “it wasn’t even money ! It wasn’t real! It couldn’t have been real!”

“Easy for you to say.” The surreal speaker let out a porcine grunt as the shrieking Parker-Piggott was enveloped by Flytrap. Ominously Four-arms thoughtfully switched on the big-screen TV and turned up the volume to a suitably ear-numbing level. “You’re not the one who lost twenty million schmerkels last week.” With a barely visible nod from his barely visible head, he gestured tersely for his partner to proceed.

“Call in his margin, Drouk.”

They did not kill Parker-Piggott. After all, only the business of the schmerkels constituted a truly objectionable matter. The punishment was designed to fit the crime. In consequence, he forfeited a particularly sensitive and precious 10.5 percent of himself, which could not be recalled by speculation on the relevant open market or by any other means.

As a bit of a consolation, the enchanting Jennifer Lowen agreed to accompany him to the Bahamas—until that first evening in the suite they shared. When she saw how his person had been discounted, she ran shrieking from the room and caught the first flight back to London. With a resigned sigh, he knew he really couldn’t blame her.

No matter how successful in the business, a man whose gibbl has been oblately norked loses something in attractiveness…

Wait-a-While

In the winter of 1989 my wife and I found ourselves in a bar in a sprawling Sheraton resort in Port Douglas, Australia. Port Douglas is a tiny laid-back tourist town located on the southern fringes of the World Heritage Daintree Rainforest in northwest Queensland. In most ways the Daintree is a typical tropical rain forest: a place of enervating humidity, riotously diverse flora and fauna, oppressively sauna-like heat, and mysterious dark nooks and crannies unvisited by humankind. Atypically for a rain forest, its plant life is more threatening to human visitors than are the local animals. The exception is a giant flightless bird called the cassowary, which looks more like a dinosaur than any other avian with the possible exception of South America’s hoatzin.

When my wife departed for elsewhere, I lingered awhile. I found myself listening (where do writers get their ideas?) to a conversation between a couple of local gents who had popped in out of the heat for a quick one. They rambled on about sports scores, the weather, road conditions, box jellyfish, and enough local lore to apprise me of the fact that they not only lived in the area but knew it well.

Eventually one of them started talking about two women, a mother and her grown daughter, who were known to conceal themselves in the depths of the forest, not wear clothes, and generally live off the land. In the course of the tale-teller’s talk I expected to hear derision, if not outright laughter. Instead there was more than a modicum of respect in the voices of both men. Respect for anyone, much less a couple of ladies, who would dare try to eke out an existence in a wild and inhospitable, albeit beautiful, place like the Daintree—with or without suitable attire.

The Daintree, you see, is and always has been a special place…

Michael Covey hadcome to Queensland looking for inspiration and had found only beer. Beer and overwhelming heat, suffocating humidity, subtle bigotry, and an all-pervasive tropical dulling of the senses inconducive to cogent thought, much less the novel he hoped to write.

The bar in the hotel was solid Daintree hardwood, cut from the center of a single tree. From where he sat near the far end it looked expansive enough to handle the landing of a small plane. Dark brown veined with black, it resembled a slab of meat hacked from some dinosaurian flank. Sparkling empty glasses dangled like crystalline grapes from crazed brass piping. Spotted throughout the vast Byzantine reaches of the restaurant, potted plants squatted forlornly, as if marooned in amber. Tinted windows kept the unyielding equatorial sun at bay.

Covey sat alone at the bar. It was midday, a time when the rest of the hotel’s guests were out swimming, diving, sightseeing, and shopping, their relentless desperation to enjoy themselves as remorseless as the sun. Through a vast picture window he watched a quartet of Japanese golfers putting their way through the tenth green, little mechanical windup figures in perfectly pressed slacks and shirts that somehow defied the pitiless humidity.

Lucky bastards. They don’t have to think for a living. The only thing that torments them is fear of failing to please a boss-san. He sipped cold lager.

The bartender was pale, blond, athletic, Aussie; fertile ground for skin cancer. Covey was lean, tired, nondescript; a surefire candidate for artistic anonymity. No matter where he went, no matter how often he traveled, the one thing he could not escape was the incontestable mediocrity of his talent.

“Hot,” Covey muttered.

“Too right.” A damp cloth shusshed over the counter, slick as skis on fresh powder. Ceiling fans whirred softly overhead, agitating the cold air-conditioned atmosphere that tried to hug the tiled marble floor.

Covey shifted his butt, straightening slightly on his stool, abruptly overwhelmed with the urge to confess. “I’m a writer. I make a very nice living because I have written twenty-four novels.”

“Good on ya, mate.”

“No, it isn’t. It isn’t good on me at all. It sucks. You want to know why?” Of course the bartender wanted to know why. It was his job. “Because all twenty-four are exactly alike. The titles differ, so do some of the details, but basically I’ve been writing the same goddamn book over and over again for the past twenty years. Each year they sell a few more copies, and each year I get a little more in royalties and a little more disgusted with myself. Because I know I can write something else, something better.” The sanctity of the confessional was interrupted by the arrival of a trio of middle-aged white men. They entered the bar cackling with midwestern twang. Covey tried to ignore them.

“That’s why I came here. To find inspiration. To expose myself to new surroundings, new ideas.” He held up the empty lager bottle. “So far I have found only this, and it is not worth even a novelette.”

“I tell ya, they were buck naked, the both of ’em!”

“Gawann, Fred.” The doubter wore plaid shorts and a white tennis shirt stretched taut over the anchored blimp of his belly.

“He’s tellin’ the truth, Jimmy. They weren’t bad lookers, either.” A dirty snigger punctuated the observation propounded by the third man. “Shoulda seen the wife’s reaction to ’em. Edith like to have peed in her pants.” The trio chortled as one, a Topeka chorus distinctly unmelodic. The sound grated on the smooth stone of the floor.

“We tried to get the driver to stop,” said the first speaker. “Dumb Aussie ignored us. Said we were seeing things. That there wasn’t nobody living in that part of the rain forest, naked or otherwise. But I seen ’em.” He leaned forward, squinching the belly. “Bill did, too.”