Alan Foster - Exceptions to Reality

“No more Anna. No more Anna! She wouldn’t listen to me,” he bawled. “I just wanted to talk!” The sobbing snapped like a worn tape. A rictus of gut-seated pain, the kind that twists bowels and haunts eyes, made a horrible, inhuman mask of his face. “Ten years, little writer. Ten long, terrible years tearing me to tiny pieces. Ten years in which to think too much.”

“She’s dead.” Covey’s gaze hung on the point of the knife as intently as if he were tracking the movements of a weaving cobra. “What do you want from the girl? Leave her alone!”

Schneemann stared at him out of eyes that were dull and empty, like a shark’s. “What do I want from her? What do I want from her? You stupid brainless American shit, she’s my daughter !” With a rasping cry of inhuman rage and frustration, he threw himself forward, a black-maned juggernaut wielding a knife that gleamed like death itself in the hazy light.

Covey tried to block the thrust. As he did so he lost his footing in the mud and fell. The knife sliced air above his head as the onrushing German tried to redirect his bull-like charge. His legs struck Covey’s sprawling form, and the bigger man tripped over him.

He went over the drop without a sound.

“Christ.” Covey scrambled to the edge on hands and knees. Schneemann lay on his back on a barbed pillow of wait-a-while, the knife protruding from his chest like fresh new rain forest growth. His eyes stared sightlessly at the sky. Drizzle filled the sockets, masking the pupils, spilling over both sides of his face in tiny twin waterfalls. The naked woman who had given birth to his daughter lay nearby, in death enshrouded by the rain forest she had loved: the greenery that had sheltered her, fed her, and ultimately protected her from her abusive, enraged lover for ten long years of hiding and wandering.

The wait-a-while would hold them close even as it kept them apart.

Fighting to catch his breath, Covey rose slowly and turned. Leea was nowhere to be seen.

He ran to the edge of the dense undergrowth. “Leea! Leea!” Ignoring the thorns and vines that tore at him, restrained him, deliberately held him back, he searched for her all the rest of that dreadful day and all the next, screaming her name at the silent, uncaring trees.

“Leea! Leea, I love you! Le-aaaaa! ”

Two days later his food ran out. He kept going, eating what fruits he could scavenge, trying and failing to kill small animals. Eventually he was reduced to scrabbling for lizards and insects, until they, too, were insufficient to replenish his strength.

He lasted three more days before he collapsed, half blind and utterly spent, on the soft, moist leaf litter that carpeted the forest floor.

“Leea…,” he sobbed. Something crawled onto his neck and bit, testing him. He did not have strength enough remaining to swat it away. The rain started; the warm, omnipresent rain, running into his ears and eyes. At least, he thought wearily, he would not die of thirst. He had heard that it was a bad way to die.

He slept then. Later, he dreamed that something touched him, and he struggled one final time to open his eyes.

For a local eccentric to vanish without warning was sufficient to raise a knowing alarm, but the disappearance of a foreign tourist was enough to bring out the police and forest rangers in full strength.

They found a collapsed, temporary shelter of sticks and leaves. Then they found the bodies of Boris Schneemann and his long-missing paramour. Carefully they hacked the bodies free from the tangle of wait-a-while, which even when severed seemed reluctant to let the dead couple go.

Of the American writer of modest reputation and desperate desire they found no sign. No tracks, no broken branches to show that he had once passed this way, no blood or bone. Then the Big Wet arrived with a vengeance and the search had to be called off. Nothing could move in the Daintree until it ended, hopefully sometime in March.

The consensus among the rain-forest-wise citizens of Mossman and Port Douglas was that with luck they might find his body come next year, perhaps washed down from the hills by the rains. He’d gone troppo for sure, stumbling madly off into the forest without direction or knowledge, searching for his hoped-for inspiration.

What they did not, could not know, was that Michael Covey found it, though it was not of a kind he had ever imagined. It lay just a little farther on, just a shade deeper back in the dark green depths of the Daintree. If one looked long and hard enough, one could find anything in the Daintree. Even the Dreamtime. Even inspiration.

Even innocence.

The Short, Labored Breath of Time

The fantasy oeuvre is replete with stories of heroes who die and then return to save the day. Or the empire or the critical battle or the important righteous marriage. Tolkien’s Gandalf is just one example. The great majority of these fictional heroes are resurrected for some great or noble purpose. Often their return to life forms the turning point of the novel.

Yet there is nothing extraordinary about death. It comes to all of us. It’s coming for you and it’s coming for me. Death is a common, ordinary, everyday occurrence. Despite this, only a small percentage of those facing their demise are adequately prepared for it either mentally or spiritually—never mind physically.

What if for one individual death was not only a common, ordinary occurrence—but a daily one? Subject to all the discomfort and trauma that dying brings with it?

And you think you have trouble getting up in the morning just to make it to work or school on time…

Farrell was dying.It was something of a surprise. He usually died between ten twenty and eleven thirty PM, though he had died as early as nine forty and once as late as ten minutes to midnight. Each time he thought he was ready for it, and every night he discovered anew that he never was.

As the familiar pain, the little preliminary warning electrical shocks, began to splinter his breathing, he grasped at his chest with one hand and raised the other to check the time. Seven fifty-five. A new record. He regretted it for several reasons, not the least of which was that he would miss his favorite news program. Not many began before nine. Of far more importance, he was still several blocks from home.

The pain abated, and he felt a little better. The couple that had hesitated to look in his direction tucked themselves tighter beneath their black umbrella when he smiled in their direction. Good. The last thing he wanted was help. Dying he was used to, and knew how to deal with. Help could prove fatal.

Lengthening his stride, he turned the corner and headed up the last sloping sidewalk. Below, the lights of the city beaconed through the steady rain. Though no downpour, it was heavy enough to discourage casual strollers. Not Farrell, though. Dying every day, a man learned to appreciate every component of existence, every smidgen of reality. That was a belief that had grown stronger over time, ever since he had begun dying.

He was twenty-six when he died for the first time. Back then, the sharp, unexpected pain in his chest had been terrifying. Frantic co-workers had rushed him to the nearest emergency room, but the doctors were unable to save him. Full cardiac arrest, they had proclaimed solemnly to weeping friends and family. Despite his youth, he never had a chance.

When he awoke or was raised or however one chose to designate the phenomenon, in the hospital morgue at five thirty the following morning, it was pronounced a miracle. Unable to find anything wrong with his heart or lungs or general systemic health, the astonished but delighted physicians had no choice but to consent to his wishes and allow him to return home. He felt fine all the rest of that day, even when running his customary three miles before dinner.