Читать книгу Life Expectancy - Dean Koontz - Страница 11

4

Syndactyly is not merely the name of the affliction with which I was born but also the theme of my life for thirty years now. Things often prove to be fused in unanticipated ways. Moments separated by many years are unexpectedly joined, as if the space-time continuum has been folded by some power with either a peculiar sense of humor or an agenda arguably worthwhile but so complex as to be mystifying. People unknown to one another discover that they are bonded by fate as completely as two toes sharing a single sheath of skin.

Surgeons repaired my feet so long ago that I have no slightest memory of the procedures. I walk, I run when I must, I dance but not well.

With all due respect for the memory of Dr. Ferris MacDonald, I never became a football hero and never wished to be one. My family has never had an interest in sports.

We are fans, instead, of puffs, éclairs, tarts, tortes, cakes, trifles, and fans as well of the infamous cheese-and-broccoli pies and the Reuben sandwiches and all the fabulous dishes of table-cracking weight that my mother produces. We will trade the thrills and glory of all the games and tournaments mankind has ever invented for a dinner together and for the conversation and the laughter that runs like a fast tide from the unfolding of our napkins to the final sip of coffee.

Over the years, I have grown from twenty inches to six feet. My weight has increased from eight pounds ten ounces to one hundred eighty-eight pounds, which should prove my contention that I am at most husky, not as large as I appear to be to most people.

The fifth of my grandfather’s ten predictions—that everyone would call me Jimmy—has also proved true.

Even on first meeting me, people seem to think that James is too formal to fit and that Jim is too earnest or otherwise inappropriate. Even if I introduce myself as James, and with emphasis, they at once begin addressing me as Jimmy, with complete comfort and familiarity, as though they have known me since my face was postpartum pink and my toes were fused.

As I make these tape recordings with the hope that I may survive to transcribe and edit them, I have lived through four of the five terrible days about which Grandpa Josef warned my father. They were terrible both in the same and in different ways, each day filled with the unexpected and with terror, some marked by tragedy, but they were days filled with much else, as well. Much else.

And now … one more to go.

My dad, my mom, and I spent twenty years pretending that the accuracy of Josef’s first five predictions did not necessarily mean that the next five would be fulfilled. My childhood and teenage years passed uneventfully, presenting no evidence whatsoever that my life was a yo-yo on the string of fate.

Nevertheless, as the first of those five days relentlessly approached—Thursday, September 15, 1994—we worried.

Mom’s coffee consumption went from ten cups a day to twenty.

She has a curious relationship with caffeine. Instead of fraying her nerves, the brew soothes them.

If she fails to drink her usual three cups during the morning, by noon she will be as fidgety as a frustrated fly buzzing against a windowpane. If she doesn’t pour down eight by bedtime, she lies awake, so mentally active that she not only counts sheep by the thousand but also names them and develops an elaborate life story for each.

Dad believes that Maddy’s topsy-turvy metabolism is a direct result of the fact that her father was a long-haul trucker who ate Nō-Dōz caffeine tablets as if they were candy.

Maybe so, Mom sometimes answers my father, but what are you complaining about? When we were dating all you had to do was get five or six cheap coffees into me, and I was as pliable as a rubber band.

As September 15, 1994, drew near, my father’s worry expressed itself in fallen cakes, curdled custard, rubbery pie crusts, and crème brûlée that had a sandy texture. He could not concentrate on his recipes or his ovens.

I believe that I handled the anticipation reasonably well. In the last two days leading up to the first of those five ominous dates, I might have walked into more closed doors than usual, might have tripped more often than is customary for me when climbing the stairs. And I do admit to dropping a hammer on Grandma Rowena’s foot while trying to hang a picture for her. But it was her foot, not her head, and the one instance when a trip led to a fall, I only tumbled down a single flight of steps and didn’t break anything.

Our worry was kept somewhat in check by the fact that Grandpa Josef had given Dad five “terrible days” in my life, not just one. Obviously, regardless of how grim September 15 might be, I would not die on that day.

“Yes, but there’s always the possibility of severed limbs and mutilation,” Grandma Rowena cautioned. “And paralysis and brain damage.”

She is a sweet woman, my maternal grandmother, but one with too sharp a sense of the fragility of life.

As a child, I had dreaded those occasions when she insisted on reading me to sleep. Even when she didn’t revise the classic stories, which she often did, even when the Big Bad Wolf was defeated, as he should have been, Grandma paused at key points in the narrative to muse aloud on the many gruesome things that might have happened to the three little pigs if their defenses had not held or if their strategies had proved faulty. Being ground up for sausages was the least of it.

And so, less than six weeks after my twentieth birthday, came the first of my five ordeals….