Life Expectancy

by Dean Koontz

  A little knife of sadness whittled at his smile. “I’ll grant you he was never a good father. But I know he loved me for what I did.”

  Lorrie said, “I’m sure he did, Punch. I think you did what you had to do.” With those words, she reminded me that we had come here to win him over, not to alienate him.

  Her approval, insincere to my ear but genuine to his, restored Punchinello’s faltering smile. “If things hadn’t gone all wrong that night in Snow Village, you and I might have had a future together, instead of you and him.”

  “Boy, that’s something to think about, isn’t it?” she replied, and matched his smile.

  “Syndactyly,” I said again.

  He blinked, and his witless smile morphed into puzzlement. “You never said how you knew about that.”

  “I wasn’t born with hand problems, but I had three fused toes on my right foot, two on my left.”

  More appalled than astonished, he said, “What in God’s name kind of rotten hospital was that?”

  I marveled that he could seem sometimes so sane and sometimes so flat-out crazy, that he could be smart enough to earn a law degree and learn German but could say something as stupid as what he’d just said. “It had nothing to do with the hospital.”

  “I should have blown it up, too.”

  With a glance, I consulted Lorrie.

  She took a deep breath and nodded.

  To Punchinello, I said, “We both had fused digits because we’re brothers. We’re twins.”

  He favored me with a look of amazement, then gave some of it to Lorrie. Next came a slow crooked grin, a squint of amused suspicion. “Try that one with some dope who’s never seen himself in a mirror.”

  “We don’t look alike,” I said, “because we’re fraternal twins, not identical twins.”

  56

  * * *

  I didn’t want to be his fraternal twin, not only because that made me the brother to a homicidal maniac, but also because I didn’t want to put Konrad Beezo’s picture in the family album and label it FATHER. Natalie Vivacemente Beezo might have been beautiful beyond imagining, perfection of the flesh, but even she was not welcome in my family tree.

  I have one father and one mother, Rudy and Maddy Tock. They—and only they—raised me to be the person I am, gave me the chance to become who I was meant to be. I was destined for baking, not for the big top. If their blood does not run in my veins, their enduring love does, for they have all my life given me transfusions of it.

  Other possibilities—that Natalie might have lived, that even if she had died, I might have been raised by Konrad—did not bear contemplation.

  Besides, those other possible lives all fall in the category of never-could-have-been. Think about it. Grandpa Josef—not my true grandfather—made predictions not about his real grandson, who was stillborn that night, but about me, the infant that Rudy and Maddy would incorrectly believe was their own. Why would he have psychic visions of events in the life of a “grandson” to whom he wasn’t in fact related?

  I can only believe that some higher power, aware of the quirk of fate that was about to occur, used my grandfather not solely or perhaps not even primarily to warn me of five terrible days in my life, but also, and more important, to ensure that Rudy would believe with all of his heart that this infant with fused toes, who would grow up to have no resemblance to his parents, was the child that Maddy had carried for nine months. Grandpa Josef told Rudy that I would be born at 10:46 P.M., measure twenty inches in length, weigh eight pounds ten ounces, and have fused digits. By the time I was handed to him, wrapped in a delivery-room blanket, Dad already knew me and accepted me as the son that fulfilled his father’s deathbed predictions.

  Some guardian angel didn’t want me to wind up in an orphanage or to be adopted into another family. He wanted me to take the place of Jimmy Tock, who had died on the way into the world.

  Why?

  Maybe God thought the world was short one good pastry chef.

  Maybe He thought Rudy and Maddy deserved a child to raise with the love, the sweetness, and the selflessness that they lavished upon me.

  The only full and true answer lies in mysteries so deep that I will never plumb them—unless they’re revealed to me after my own death.

  One thing I said is wrong. Jimmy Tock did not die on his way into the world: a nameless infant perished. I am the only Jimmy Tock, the only one who was meant to be, son of Rudy and Maddy regardless of the loins I sprang from. I was destined for pastries and for Lorrie Lynn Hicks and for Annie-Lucy-Andy, destined for more that I do not yet know, and every day of my life I fulfill the plan even if I cannot comprehend it.

  I am profoundly grateful. And humble. And sometimes afraid.

  In 1779, a poet named William Cowper wrote: God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform.

  Way to go, Bill.

  From behind his slow crooked grin and his squint of amused suspicion, Punchinello said, “Tell me about it.”

  “We’ve brought along someone who might be more convincing,” Lorrie said.

  I went to the door, opened it, leaned into the corridor, and asked Charlene Coleman, the earthly instrument of my guardian angel, to join us at the table.

  57

  * * *

  Charlene Coleman, maternity-ward nurse on the night that I was born and still on the job at fifty-nine, has not entirely lost her Mississippi accent after all these years in Colorado. She’s as sweet-faced now as she was then, and certainly as black.

  She has gained some weight, which she attributes to years of free pastries from my father. But as she says, if you want to get to Heaven, you’ve first got to get through life, and you need some padding for all the hard knocks along the way.

  Few women have more presence than Charlene. She is awesomely competent without being smug. She is determined without being bossy, morally certain without being judgmental. She likes herself but is not full of herself.

  At the table, Charlene sat between me and Lorrie, directly across from Punchinello.

  She said to him, “You were a red-faced, pinch-faced, fussy little bundle, but you turned out the kind of handsome that breaks hearts without trying.”

  To my surprise, a blush brought color to his prison pallor.

  Punchinello seemed pleased by the compliment, but he said, “Not that it’s done me any good.”

  “Little lamb, never question the gifts God gave you. If we don’t make anything of our gifts, that’s our fault, not His.” She studied him a moment. “What I think is you never really knew you were a good-looking boy. You don’t quite believe it even now.”

  He stared at the hand that had once been cursed with syndactyly. He spread the fingers, worked them independently of one another, as though they had been separated only yesterday, as though he were still learning how to use them.

  “Your mama was beautiful, too,” said Charlene, “and as sweet as a child, but fragile.”

  Looking up from his hand, he returned by long habit to the mad fantasy that his father had concocted: “She was murdered by the doctor because—”

  “None of that,” Charlene interrupted. “You know crazy when you hear it, as sure as I do. When you pretend to believe things that aren’t true, just because it’s easier than dealing with the facts, you turn your whole life into a lie. And where’s that get you?”

  “Here,” he acknowledged.

  “When I say your mama was fragile, I don’t mean just because she died giving birth, which she did, though the good doctor tried everything to save her. Her spirit was fragile, too. Someone seemed to have broken it. She was a frightened little thing, afraid of more than just childbirth. She grabbed my hand and didn’t want to let go, wanted to tell me things, I think, but was scared to hear herself say the words.”

  I sensed that if Punchinello had not been chained to the table and that if the posted rules of conduct had permitted it, he would have reached out to Charlene, as his mother had done. He stared at her, transfixed.
His countenance was a pool of sorrow, with drowned hopes in his eyes, and on the surface floated a childlike longing.

  “Though your mama died,” Charlene continued, “she gave birth to healthy twins. You were the smaller. Jimmy was the bigger.”

  I studied him as he gazed at Charlene, and thought how different my life would have been if she had scooped him up to save him instead of scooping me.

  The possibility of our lives exchanged, his for mine, should have made it easier for me to see him as my brother, but I could not get my heart around him. He remained a stranger to me.

  “Maddy Tock,” Charlene told Punchinello, “had difficult labor, too, but it turned out opposite from what happened to your mother. Maddy lived, and her baby died. Her final contraction was so painful she passed out—and never knew her child was stillborn. I took the precious little bundle and put him in a bassinet in the crèche, so she wouldn’t see his tiny body when she woke…and wouldn’t have to see him at all if she decided not to.”

  Curiously, when I thought of that stillborn infant, I mourned him as a lost brother, as I could never mourn Punchinello.

  Lorrie said, “Then Dr. MacDonald went to the expectant-father’s lounge to console Konrad Beezo for the loss of his wife, Rudy Tock for the loss of his child.”

  “We were shorthanded that night,” Charlene recalled. “A mean virus had been making the rounds, people were out sick. Lois Hanson was the only delivery nurse available besides me. When we heard Konrad Beezo shouting at the doctor, so bitter, accusing, and such shameful profanity, we both thought of the twins, but for different reasons. Lois, she figured the sight of his babies would calm Konrad, but I’d come off a marriage to a cruel man, and I knew I heard the same violence in this one, rage that can’t be put out by kindness, that could only burn itself out in fury. My only thought was to get the babies safe. Lois took you down the hall toward the lounge and got herself shot to death, but I went the other way with Jimmy here, and hid out.”

  I had worried that in spite of the revelation that we had both been born with syndactyly, Punchinello would receive Charlene’s story with skepticism if he didn’t reject it outright. Instead, he appeared not merely to believe it but to be enraptured by her account.

  Perhaps he warmed to the romantic notion that he had much in common with the betrayed title character in Alexandre Dumas’s The Man in the Iron Mask, that he was the equivalent of a heroic peasant while I, his twin, had ascended to the throne of France.

  “When I discovered that sweet man, our lovely Dr. MacDonald, had been murdered, and Lois Hanson, too,” Charlene continued, “I realized I was the only living soul who knew Maddy’s baby was born dead and Natalie Beezo had given birth to twin boys. If I did nothing, Maddy and Rudy would have a tragedy at the center of their lives, an awful thing to get around. And the baby I saved would be put at the mercy of the state, sent to an orphanage or foster homes…or maybe claimed by relatives of Konrad Beezo every bit as crazy as he was. And all his life people would point and say, That’s the son of the murderer. I knew what good honest people Rudy and Maddy were, and I knew the love they would shower on their boy, so I did what I did, and Lord Jesus forgive me if He thinks I played God.”

  After closing his eyes and absorbing the nurse’s tale in silence for a half minute or so, Punchinello turned his attention to me. “So what happened to the real you?”

  I didn’t at once understand what he meant. Then I realized that “the real you” was Mom and Dad’s lost infant.

  “Charlene had a huge straw purse,” I said. “She wrapped the dead baby in a soft white cloth that night, put him in the straw bag, and took him from the hospital to her minister.”

  “I’m Baptist born and raised,” Charlene told Punchinello, “one of the joyful denominations. I’m a Sunday-go-to-meetin’ girl dresses better for church than for Saturday night, from a family likes to praise the Lord in gospel songs. If my preacher had told me I’d done a wrongful thing, I would have undone it, I suppose. But if he had his doubts, compassion swamped his judgment. Our church has its own graveyard, so my preacher and me, we found a pretty corner there for Maddy’s baby. Buried him with prayer, just the two of us, and about a year later, I bought a little headstone. When the spirit moves me, I go there with flowers, tell him what an admirable life Jimmy here is living in his place, how proud he’d be of the fine brother Jimmy has become to him.”

  I had been to the cemetery with my mom and dad, and had seen the headstone, a simple two-inch-thick rectangle of granite. Carved in it are these words: HERE LIES BABY T. GOD LOVED HIM SO MUCH HE CALLED HIM HOME AT BIRTH.

  Maybe it’s our free will misdirected or just a shameful pride, but we live our lives with the conviction that we stand at the center of the drama. Moments rarely come that put us outside ourselves, that divorce us from our egos and force us to see the larger picture, to recognize that the drama is in fact a tapestry and that each of us is but a thread in the vivid weave, yet each thread essential to the integrity of the cloth.

  When I stood before that headstone, such a moment took me like a swelling tide, lifted me, turned me, and brought me back to shore with greater respect for the un-mappable intricacy of life, with more humility in the face of mysteries unresolvable.

  58

  * * *

  Bitter cold compressed the snow from flakes to granules that clicked against the prison windows as if the ghosts of the inmates’ victims haunted the day and tapped for their attention.

  With Charlene having told all that she had to tell and having returned to the hallway, Punchinello leaned toward me and asked with apparent earnestness, “Do you sometimes wonder if you’re real?”

  The question made me nervous because I didn’t understand it, because I worried that he would take us off on some crazy tangent from which we could not comfortably approach the request that had brought us here. “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t know what I mean because you’ve never doubted that you’re real. Sometimes I’m walking down a street, and it’s like no one sees me, and I’m sure I’ve become invisible. Or I wake up in the night convinced there’s nothing out there beyond my window, nothing at all but darkness, a vacuum, and I’m afraid to open the drapes and look, afraid I’ll see a perfect emptiness, and that when I turn from the window, the room will be gone, too, and I’ll cry out but won’t make a sound, just float there with no sense of touch, no taste or smell, deaf and blind, the world gone as if it never was, me with no body that I can detect, no heartbeat I can feel, and yet unable to stop thinking, thinking, furiously and frantically thinking about what I don’t have and what I want, about what I do have but want to be free of, about how I am nothing to anyone or anyone to me, never real and yet all these memories, these churning, insistent, hateful memories.”

  Despair is the abandonment of hope. Desperation is energized despair, vigorous in action, utterly reckless. He was telling me that everything he had learned from the use of guns and explosives to the German language, from the rules of law to Norwegian grammar, had been learned in desperation, as if in acquiring knowledge he would acquire substance, reality. But still he woke in the night, certain that a devouring void lay beyond his window.

  He had opened a door on himself, and what I saw within him was both pitiful and terrifying.

  His words revealed more than he realized. He had shown me that after the deepest self-analysis of which he was capable, he still did not understand the most important thing about himself, still lived a lie. He presented himself to me—and to himself—as one who doubted his own reality and therefore the meaning of his existence. In truth, it was the existence of the world he doubted and only himself that he believed to be real.

  They call it solipsism, and even a pastry chef like me has heard of it: the theory that only the self can be proved to exist, extreme preoccupation with and indulgence of one’s feelings and desires. He would never be capable of seeing himself as one thread in a tapestry. He was the universe, and all the rest of us w
ere his fantasies, to be killed or not, as he saw fit, with no real consequences to us or to him.

  This kind of thinking did not begin as madness, though it might end up indistinguishable from insanity. This kind of thinking began as a choice—it was taught as a philosophy worth consideration in the finest universities—which made him a more formidable figure than he would have been as a poor lost boy driven mad by circumstances.

  More than ever, he scared the crap out of me. We had come here hoping—needing—to touch his heart, but we could no more move him than we ourselves could be moved to make a sacrifice by the mumblings of a phantom in a dream.

  This was the fourth of my five terrible days, and I knew now why it would be the worst of the five to date. He would refuse us, and by his refusal we would be condemned to endure an unendurable loss.

  “Why did you come here?” he asked.

  Not for the first time, when words failed me, Lorrie knew the right thing to say. She played to the fundamental lie by which he convinced himself that he was a victim rather than a monster.

  “We came,” she said, “to tell you that you’re real and that there’s a way to prove it to yourself once and for all.”

  “And what way would that be?”

  “We want you to save our daughter’s life. You’re the only one who can, and that’s as real as anything can get.”

  59

  * * *

  From her purse, Lorrie withdrew a photograph of Annie and slid it across the table to Punchinello.

  “Pretty,” he said but did not touch the picture.

  “She’ll be six years old in less than two months,” Lorrie said. “If she lives that long.”

  “I’ll never have children,” he reminded us.

  I said nothing. I had apologized once for effectively castrating him, although a surgeon eventually completed the job that I had not quite finished.

  “She had nephroblastoma,” Lorrie said.

  “Sounds like a grunge band,” Punchinello replied, and smiled at his weak joke.

  “It’s cancer of the kidneys,” I explained. “The tumors grow very rapidly. If you don’t catch them early, they spread to the lungs, liver, and brain.”

  “Thank God she was diagnosed in time,” Lorrie said. “They took out both kidneys and followed up with radiation, chemotherapy. She’s free of cancer now.”

  “Good for her,” he said. “Everyone should be free of cancer.”

  “But there’s a further complication.”

  “This isn’t as interesting as all the baby-switching stuff,” Punchinello said.

  I didn’t trust myself to speak. I felt as though my Annie’s life hung by a thread, a filament so fine that I could cut it with one word too sharp.

  Lorrie proceeded as if he hadn’t spoken. “Without kidneys, she’s been on hemodialysis, four-hour sessions three times a week.”

  “Six years old,” Punchinello said, “she doesn’t have a job to go to or anything. She’s got plenty of free time.”

  I couldn’t decide whether he was merely as graceless as he was uncaring or whether he was needling us and enjoying it.

  Lorrie said, “At the center of the dialysis machine is a large cannister called a dialyzer.”

  “Could that Charlene person get in trouble with the law because of what she did?” Punchinello asked.