Alan Foster - Exceptions to Reality

“You know what you are?” Her nervousness translated as excitement. “You’re a nut, that’s what you are. A crazie. One of San Francisco’s finest. I should’ve listened to you. I should’ve left you lying there in the street.”

For the first time he looked directly into her eyes. She drew in an involuntary little breath, staggered by a sense of sorrow and compassion the likes of which she had never experienced before. It was as if something had squeezed her insides. As well as being bottomless, she noted that his eyes were a very deep shade of blue. Corn-fed midwestern blondness, she thought.

“Why didn’t you?”

She found herself having to look away as she sputtered a reply. “I—I don’t know, not really. I’m always doing stuff like that. Stupid stuff. Usually it’s animals, but sometimes it’s people. I just can’t…” She made herself look back and meet his eyes again. “I can’t stand to see anything suffer.”

He nodded slowly, as if he understood. “You’re a good person, Marjorie Parker. I wish I could say that you saved my life, but I would’ve come around this morning anyway. What you did was save my death.”

“Please.” She turned back to him. “I wish you’d stop talking like that. I’m having a hard enough time with this as it is.”

Contemplating the remnants of his wonderful breakfast—all breakfasts being inherently wonderful because they came at the start of a new day—he took a deep breath and then fixed her with an impenetrable mournful contented happy stare.

“Okay. I’ll prove it to you.”

She was instantly on guard, standing away from the hard cool humming reality of the refrigerator. “What do you mean, you’ll ‘prove’ it to me?”

He gestured toward the window and the bright summer sunshine outside. “You can come over to my place tonight and watch me die.”

With great deliberation she set the half-empty carton of milk aside. “First of all, watching somebody die isn’t my idea of an agreeable evening. Second, that’s the damnedest pickup line I ever heard.”

He chuckled softly as he mopped yolk with the last of the toast. Every bite, every swallow, was a mixture of joy and delight, of taste and smell and the delicious tactile sensation of simply swallowing. A small miracle. “I’m sitting here in your bathrobe, eating breakfast in your kitchen, after having spent the night, in a manner of speaking, in your apartment. If you prefer, I can come back this evening and die on your couch again.”

Her expression was rock solid. “Still not my idea of a hot date.”

Rising to carry his dishes to the sink, he nodded sagely. “I understand. Do you think it’s easy for me? How about dinner, then, and maybe a movie?” Running the hot water over the dishes, he offered her a wan smile. “It’ll have to be the early show.”

Lowering her defenses, which largely consisted of trying to be funny at serious moments, she eyed him evenly. “This is for real, isn’t it? You’re not kidding about this?”

“No, Marjorie.” He applied soap to his juice glass and used a sponge to scrub it out. “I’m not kidding.” As he set the dripping tumbler into the rubber rack to drain, he flicked its rim with a fingernail. A single musical note hung in the air, perfect and immutable. “Don’t worry. Whatever I am, whatever I’ve got, it’s not contagious. Like I told you, I’ve done a lot of research on my—condition. As far as I’ve been able to determine, it’s unique.”

A part of her shouted warnings, but she could not keep herself from moving a little closer. He cooked, he washed dishes. What other special traits did he possess?—besides the single small drawback of being crazy. “What do the doctors say?”

His glance fell. “The doctors don’t say anything. I don’t have to consult with them. I know what’s wrong with me. I die. Every night, seven nights a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year and an extra day during leap years. There’s no fancy Latin term for that in the medical literature, although I’m sure some surgeon with half a dozen degrees could come up with one. Officially my condition doesn’t exist, so there can’t be any cure for it. I’m a walking, waking, dying impossibility—except, I’m still here.”

She wasn’t sure what impelled her to reach out and put a hand on his shoulder. Probably the same impulse that led her to rescue stray cats and give spare change to the winos who slept in the alleys off Union Square.

“Maybe if they studied you, tried to—”

He whirled on her, but the look on his face was so piteous it wholly mitigated the sharpness of his gesture and she was not afraid, did not pull away. “Studied me? And prodded and probed and poked and analyzed and took tissue samples to culture?” He made scissoring motions with the middle and index finger of his right hand. “Snip, snip—another nip for the lab. Think they’d ever let me go? No. Too ‘valuable’ to medical science, they’d label it. ‘Matter of national security,’ the spin would say.” Angrily he pushed the washcloth over his plate. “No thanks. I’ll live with it,” he finished sardonically.

Her hand fell from his shoulder. “It can’t be much of a life, Joel.”

This time when he looked up it was to stare out the window. “See that?” He nodded at the view, sun-washed but uninspired. “Ever take the time to notice how beautiful it is? Cracked paint, sunlight, blue sky, the fog trying to push its way through the Gate. Kids playing on the street, houseplants flourishing on window-sills, sticks and stones and unbroken bones and words can never hurt me because I’ve got nothing to lose. Ordinary stuff. Trite things. You know, there is wonder in triteness. I remember reading an old aphorism, ‘Live each day as if it was your last.’” He turned around to meet her gaze. “That’s no aphorism, Marjorie. That’s me. Joel Farrell. That’s my life.”

Motion caught her eye. A pigeon was settling on the projecting brick of the condominium building next to hers. Pigeons did that all the time. She just never really noticed. Leaning back against the sink counter, she impacted his field of view. He was almost finished with the dishes anyway.

“Dinner and a movie sounds great.” She hesitated, then decided it was foolish to try to dance around the issue that had and would continue to dominate their relationship. “You’ll have—enough time?”

His grin was brighter than the June sunshine that was steadily intensifying outside. “I have all the time in the world.”

She’d never met anyone like him. Sure, it was a cliché. In the case of Joel Farrell, it just happened to be true. He was warm and funny and considerate and thoughtful. The computer search service he ran out of his home marked him as a man of intelligence, and his taste in day trips—museums, exhibitions, wildlife cruises, concerts of every imaginable type of music—marked him as an intellect. He was well, even widely, read, and could quote poetry, plays, and film with equal facility. Every time she thought he had revealed all of himself, he surprised her with something new. Joel Farrell had more sides than a hexagon, something he explained to her at the Exploratorium. Each of them shone, each was polished to a high sheen. He was wonderful to be around, and since he had deliberately chosen to cultivate many casual but no close friends, she had him mostly to herself.

Except late at night and early in the morning, when death claimed him for its own.

“Doesn’t it hurt?” After several weeks of dating she had finally screwed up enough courage to spend the night at his place and observe the inevitable. She had lain there in bed next to him, her head propped up on one hand and elbow, and had watched as he twitched and grimaced until his eyes closed, his voice stilled, and his heart stopped. The last thing he had said before dying was “Marjorie—don’t worry.