Exceptions to Reality_ Stories - Alan Dean Foster [37]
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 had come 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