Exceptions to Reality_ Stories - Alan Dean Foster [52]
“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