Exceptions to Reality

by Alan Dean Foster

  One large vine was wrapped tightly around her neck.

  The anguish that welled up unexpectedly in his throat far exceeded anything he felt in his arm or feet. Anger glazed his eyes as he rushed forward.

  Leea turned to him, her ethereally beautiful unblemished face wide-eyed with shock. Schneemann rose slowly. Then he threw back his head and shook his clenched fists at whatever gods hid behind the mist-shrouded sky, screaming in guttural, uncontrollable, wretched German.

  “You rotten, rotten bastard.” Covey eyed the other man carefully as he approached. “What the fuck happened?”

  Schneemann suddenly became aware of his presence. “It was an accident. She would not listen. I only wanted to talk and she would not listen. She ran from me. Toward the Dreamtime, she said. Where she would be safe. Crazy, crazy! Gott in himmel. She ran and she fell.” He looked down. “There.” He inhaled massively then turned and, before she could retreat, grabbed Leea’s wrist.

  “You. Leea. You are all that is left. You come back with me now.”

  The girl stared at him, half mad with terror and despair. “N-no. I don’t want to go with you. I don’t want to.”

  “You must. Now.”

  “No!” She dug her heels into the mud, sliding forward as he dragged her, beating at him with her free hand. He took no notice of the feeble resistance.

  The air went out of him when Covey tackled him around both legs.

  They went down in a damp, muddy heap. Covey struck out blindly, furiously, slamming fist after fist into the German’s face. With a roar like a wounded rhino, Schneemann threw him off.

  Rolling over, Covey saw the guide grinning insanely back at him. The big man was back on his feet, tense as a panther, a knife clutched in his right fist. In Covey’s eyes the short, thick blade loomed as large as a ceremonial sword. Reaching up, he felt blood streaming from his nose.

  “So little writer wants to fight, eh?” Covey scrambled to his feet, only to find himself caught between the drop-off and his opponent. “You verdampt swine, you niggly little son-of-a-bitch. Ten years I spend looking for these two. Ten years of my life hacking and sweating at this stinking jungle, and you, city man, you find them. And then she don’t listen to me.” His face contorted and he began to sob anew.

  “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 fam
iliar 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.

  That night he died about ten minutes earlier, in his own bed.

  There was no mistaking it. Some things a man can get wrong, like the fullness of his stomach or the nature of a new dog, but dying is not one of them. When he came to at seven fifteen the next morning, long after his alarm had sung out the hour and subsequently gone silent, he knew that something was very, very wrong. He moved cautiously at work, doing nothing strenuous, taking it as easy as possible. That evening he skipped his run through the park and had an American Heart Association–approved heart-safe meal for supper.

  In spite of all his caution and preparedness, at ten forty-three exactly he experienced a profound cardiac seizure, then died.

  That was twelve years ago. Nothing had changed since then. His life had settled into a daily routine of frenetic, satisfying living followed by nightly expiration. Seeking anonymity for himself and his condition, he had moved from the heartland of Des Moines to the enchanting indifference of San Francisco, a city where a man could dwell every day in beauty and die every night in peace. By its very nature his was a tentative existence, but not a particularly fragile one. Every night he died, and every morning arose strong and eager to contemplate a new day.

  Periodic checkups revealed the presence in his chest of a normal heart. Only he knew the singular difference. He bought home-care monitoring equipment and assiduously checked the readings on following mornings. Each time the indications were the same. His heart stopped, followed by his breathing, and the little lines on the compact screen of the electrocardiogram flattened out like the waters of the lower bay on a July evening. Each morning without prompting it all started up again: brain waves first, then heart, then lungs.

  If there was reason behind the recurring phenomenon, a scientific or religious explanation, he was unable to determine it. If some inimical deity had it in for him, it chose not to reveal itself. The exact moment of death varied from day to day, but never the ultimate consequence. Each night he died. Each morning he lived again.

  He had no social life, but other than that, managed something akin to a normal existence. Another individual might have spent his daylight hours brooding on his misfortune, bewailing his strange fate while losing himself in drugs or strong drink. Not Farrell. There was too much in the world to take pleasure in: the sunlight on the bay, the fog that smothered the Golden Gate, the manic musical babble of many tongues that filled the streets of the great cosmopolitan city, dinners in Chinatown, paper cups of cold crab with horseradish sauce consumed at the Wharf, the springy sight of laughing young women enjoying their lunch breaks. Women he could never know because to do so would be unfair to them. All that, and so much more. All the small ingredients of life that filled up existence like slices of apple in a pie, from the sight of a house sparrow with a newly scavenged nest-twig in its mouth to the smell of freshly laundered sheets hanging outside a neighborhood window. He accounted himself a rich man with a full life, because his plight had taught him how to fully enjoy that which everyone around him seemed to ignore.

  But tonight was different. Tonight was bad. At the age of thirty-eight, he had been dying daily for more than twelve years and had learned how to manage it as well as anyone could learn how to manage such a situation. His one horror, the only circumstance he truly feared, had him dying in a bed controlled by strangers. His own apartment was safe, a secure hotel room was safe, even a locked rented car was adequate. If he died out here on the street, though, someone, some well-meaning Samaritan, would find him. Find him and call 911. Paramedics would rush him to a hospital, where with luck he would be placed in a morgue by sorrowful doctors to await final treatment and identification.

  But what if they did not wait? What if he was given immediate preparation for burial, the blood siphoned from his veins and arteries to be replaced by embalming fluid trickling from long plastic tubes? Would he still wake the next morning, and if so, how would his body react to the absence of that life-sustaining red fluid? Would it put him in a nether state, neither dead nor awake? What if apathetic authorities signed off on an expedited cremation? Or worse, a quick interment, leaving him to wake each morning in the inescapable confines of a sealed coffin, gasping for air, unable to die until that night, unable to live until death overcame him?

  The pains surged afresh, worse than before, bending him double as if he had been kicked in the stomach. Gritting his teeth and clutching his chest, he staggered onward. Another couple of blocks, just a couple of blocks, and he would be at the locked door of his building. Another few minutes and he could stumble, safe and secure for one more day, into his apartment, there to expire on the floor if need be. All he asked was to be allowed to make it inside the door. The rain hammered dank cold against his bare head and neck. He wore only black jeans, expensive running shoes, a cotton-wool pullover, and a lightweight coat. It did not matter that he was soaked through. In more than a decade of dying he had never had a sick day. A tiny, ironic smile creased his mouth. Pneumonia would be a novelty.

  The next spasm hit behind his sternum like a sledgehammer, knocking him to his knees. He just did manage to grab one of the city’s ubiquitous free newspapers racks to break his fall. Sprawling out on the sidewalk, unable to move, with the rain splashing on his upturned face, he wondered dazedly who would find him. Despite the crushing, familiar agony he found he could still smile. He had one hope. This was San Francisco. With luck, no one would come near him until morning, by which time he would be fully recovered from the terminal nocturnal episode. Then he could pick himself up and go on with his life. His only other fear was that he might have torn his jacket.

  “Hey. Hey, mister, what’s wrong?”

  Blinking away melting raindrops, he slowly turned his head and found himself staring up into a hooded face. Not Death itself, unless Death had chosen a guise utterly deviant from that described in the traditional literature. She could have been twenty-five or forty. It was hard to tell through the pain and the night and the rain. He settled on a guess of not quite thirty. Curls of black hair had been plastered against her forehead by the downpour the rain hood could not entirely keep at bay. As she bent tentatively over him she reached up to brush one strand out of her eyes.


  “Go away.” It took most of his remaining strength to gasp out the admonition. From experience he knew he had very little time.

  She started to straighten. Looking around and seeing no one else, she hesitated, then bent over him once again. “You don’t look so good.”

  “I—I’m fine. I’ll just lie here for a while until I get my strength back. Go away. Please.” Within his chest his heart was beating only intermittently. It would not be long. In a very few minutes it would stop altogether. He would be dead.

  “I’ll call for help. My apartment’s in this building right here.”

  “No!” Alarmed, he forced himself to raise an arm. Panic gave him the strength to reach out and grasp the hem of her raincoat. “No ambulance. No paramedics, no hospital. I just need—to rest.”

  Honest concern racked her face as she chewed on her lower lip. “You really look bad.” Something within her came to a decision she knew was wrong. As it so often did, it rolled up against her identity and stopped there. Crouching, she worked an arm beneath his shoulders and strained to lift.

  “Leave me—leave me alone,” he whispered tightly.

  “Sorry. My mother didn’t raise me to be that kind of a person. My friends keep saying that one day it’s gonna get me killed. Not by you, I don’t think. Right now you don’t look like you could kill an ant.” She grunted softly as she heaved against his body weight. “Come on, use your legs. Help me, if you won’t help yourself. Otherwise I’m calling nine-one-one.”

  What else could he do? He did not want to die there in the street, to be whisked away by listless sirens in the night. Summoning forth a tremendous effort of will, he accepted the offer of her strong, willing arms and body to leverage himself erect. With her help he managed to stumble into her ground-floor elevator. It carried them up several flights. When the door slid aside, she half carried, half shoved him down the hall to her apartment. As she locked the door behind them and started to take off her raincoat, he felt his vision going. In his immediate line of sight stood a couch, a table, three chairs all of different manufacture. The table was closer but the couch worth the extra effort. Only the upper half of his body made it.