Exceptions to Reality_ Stories - Alan Dean Foster [51]
He nodded casually, still smiling. “Yes, I was. Would you like some bacon and eggs? I made some toast, too.” He glanced back toward the kitchen. “They’re not cold yet. You weren’t gone very long.”
“I’m not hungry, thanks. Marjorie Parker.”
“Joel Farrell. If you don’t want anything, I hope you don’t mind if I eat. I’m always famished in the morning. I’ll pay you for the food.”
“Sure. Whatever. Go ahead.” She tracked him with her eyes as he walked back into the compact kitchen. After sitting for several moments to make sure she was in control of herself, she rose and followed him as far as the portal between the two rooms. “Farrell. Not Jesus Christ?”
Sitting down at the two-chair kitchenette set, he heavily salted and peppered his eggs before digging in with knife and fork. “I don’t think so. At least, I’ve never been given any reason to think so. Just Joel Farrell. From Iowa, originally. And you’re Marjorie. Thank you, Marjorie, for helping me and for not calling an ambulance.”
Moving to the refrigerator, she opened it and took out a half gallon of skim milk. Sipping straight from the carton, she watched him eat, her eyes never straying from his face. “So. You do this sort of thing often?” To her mind it sounded incredibly inane. She had, of course, no idea she was being accurate.
His smile faded and his expression turned solemn as a saint’s. Holding a slice of buttered whole wheat toast in one hand, he paused with it halfway to his mouth. Something in her manner, or maybe it was something about the moment, or maybe just a bad attack of no longer caring, compelled his answer.
“Yes, actually. I do it every day.” He bit into the toast, chewed. It was delicious. Everything was delicious in the morning, when the day was new and death was still fourteen or fifteen hours away. “Every night, really.”
She blinked. A thin white mustache of lingering cow juice clung to her upper lip. The sight was delicious, he decided. It made her look like a little girl trying to look like a woman. “Do what every night?” she asked him.
His shrug was almost imperceptible. “Die.” The bacon was particularly good, he mused. Slab-thick and pungent.
“Oh right, sure.” Leaning against the scored white enamel of the old fridge, she crossed one leg over the other below the knee and clung to the carton of milk as if it represented all the security in the world. “You mean you pass out or something.”
“No.” He chose his words deliberately. “I die. My heart stops, then my breathing, and every electrical impulse in my brain fizzles like a socket in the process of shorting out. I know. I’ve checked it all many times, studied the alternatives. It’s not narcolepsy, it’s not a recurring fragmentary coma, it’s not a voodoo stasis. It’s death. Usually happens later at night, and then I’m alive again by sunrise. Last night was an exception. I’m not usually caught by surprise, much less outside my place.” He gestured with the half-eaten toast. “I live two blocks up the street and one over.”
“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,