The Short, Labored Breath of Time 1 page

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 familiar 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.

“Okay now, if you won’t let me call anybody, maybe I can–hey, you asleep?” Approaching tentatively, knowing that she had already broken every rule for sensible behavior by a single young female living alone in San Francisco, she touched the man’s back. He did not move. Drunk, stoned, or…?

Rolling him over, she saw the shuttered eyes, the motionless mouth. First she put a hand over his lips and then she put an ear to his chest and then she stood right back away from him and put both hands to her face. A little squeak of a smothered scream filtered out between her fingers.

“Omigod. Omigod. You said you’d be all right. You said there was nothing wrong.” As much as the thought of doing so terrified her, she knew she had to make sure. She couldn’t do anything more unless she was sure. Advancing as hesitantly as a lizard patrolling a branch, she approached the immobile form a second time, forcing herself to bend down to listen to the stranger’s silent chest, putting an ear close to his unmoving lips. What she found was unequivocal. No heartbeat, no movement of air.

A strange man was dead in her apartment. And she had only been trying to help. She ought to have ignored him, lying there gasping in the street. Turned away to pick up her mail. Why didn’t she? Why, why, why?

How could she cope with what had happened? How did anyone cope with something like this? She thought he had just been sick, just needed a few minutes of respite from the cold and indifference of the street. Now…

Whirling, looking around wildly, she snatched up her purse and fled from the apartment. Carol was out of town. She had a key, could use her friend’s place to get herself together. In the morning she could call to have someone come and take the body away. What could she have been thinking? But she hadn’t expected him to die.

She did not sleep much, and not very well. When she awoke she took a long, hot shower in Carol’s sunlight‑washed, plant‑filled bathroom. Dressing, she moved to pick up the phone, and hesitated.

No. She ought to be in her place when the ambulance and the police came. They would want to ask questions. There was no avoiding it.

As she gingerly pushed open the still‑unlocked door to her apartment, a strange sound greeted her. No, not strange, she corrected herself. Unexpected. A distinctive crackling, popping noise. It came from the vicinity of the kitchen. Automatically she looked in that direction, but could see nothing. Her gaze swiveled left.

The couch was empty.

Carol, she decided, her head pounding. Carol had come home in the night, found the door to her friend’s place standing ajar, gone inside, discovered everything, and in her firm, efficient way had Taken Care of Things, leaving Marjorie to sleep off the misadventure in her good friend’s bed. Carol was in the kitchen now, making breakfast, waiting for an explanation. Deserving one, too. Feeling better, Marjorie headed purposefully toward the kitchen, with its reinvigorating view over the rooftops of the city, already preparing in her mind the rationalization she intended to offer to her friend.

A man was standing there, frying bacon and eggs. A half‑familiar face. A dead man, wearing one of her bathrobes. Crazily, she noted that it was too short for him.

“Oh, good morning.” He smiled at her. He had a very agreeable smile, set in a passably handsome face. She fainted.

When she regained consciousness, the first thing she did was apologize. She did so without thinking, because concern for the feelings of others was such an integral part of her. “I’m sorry. I’ve never done that before.” The second thing she did, as soon as she realized where she was lying, was to get off the couch. “You’re dead.” Keeping well away from him, she walked slowly over to the den table and sat down heavily in one of the chairs. “No. You were dead.”

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, as if he understood. “You’re a good person, Marjorie Parker. I wish I could say that you saved my life, but I would’ve come around this morning anyway. What you did was save my death.”

“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’t be much of a life, Joel.”

This time when he looked up it was to stare out the window. “See that?” He nodded at the view, sun‑washed but uninspired. “Ever take the time to notice how beautiful it is? Cracked paint, sunlight, blue sky, the fog trying to push its way through the Gate. Kids playing on the street, houseplants flourishing on window‑sills, sticks and stones and unbroken bones and words can never hurt me because I’ve got nothing to lose. Ordinary stuff. Trite things. You know, there is wonder in triteness. I remember reading an old aphorism, ‘Live each day as if it was your last.’” He turned around to meet her gaze. “That’s no aphorism, Marjorie. That’s me. Joel Farrell. That’s my life.”

Motion caught her eye. A pigeon was settling on the projecting brick of the condominium building next to hers. Pigeons did that all the time. She just never really noticed. Leaning back against the sink counter, she impacted his field of view. He was almost finished with the dishes anyway.

“Dinner and a movie sounds great.” She hesitated, then decided it was foolish to try to dance around the issue that had and would continue to dominate their relationship. “You’ll have–enough time?”

His grin was brighter than the June sunshine that was steadily intensifying outside. “I have all the time in the world.”

She’d never met anyone like him. Sure, it was a cliché. In the case of Joel Farrell, it just happened to be true. He was warm and funny and considerate and thoughtful. The computer search service he ran out of his home marked him as a man of intelligence, and his taste in day trips–museums, exhibitions, wildlife cruises, concerts of every imaginable type of music–marked him as an intellect. He was well, even widely, read, and could quote poetry, plays, and film with equal facility. Every time she thought he had revealed all of himself, he surprised her with something new. Joel Farrell had more sides than a hexagon, something he explained to her at the Exploratorium. Each of them shone, each was polished to a high sheen. He was wonderful to be around, and since he had deliberately chosen to cultivate many casual but no close friends, she had him mostly to herself.

Except late at night and early in the morning, when death claimed him for its own.

“Doesn’t it hurt?” After several weeks of dating she had finally screwed up enough courage to spend the night at his place and observe the inevitable. She had lain there in bed next to him, her head propped up on one hand and elbow, and had watched as he twitched and grimaced until his eyes closed, his voice stilled, and his heart stopped. The last thing he had said before dying was “Marjorie–don’t worry.

“Don’t worry. I’ll see you in the morning. Nothing to concern yourself about. I’m only going to die.” And he did.

She was sure she would not be able to sleep. But he looked so peaceful lying there, not moving, not breathing. Astonishing herself, she drifted off around two thirty. The emotional tension must have exhausted her, she decided later. How else to explain enjoying a good if brief night’s sleep alongside a dead man?

When she awoke, startling herself awake with remembrance, he was making breakfast for her again. Not bacon and eggs this time. Unlike her own provincial cupboard, his larder gave birth to eggs Savoyard and chive hash browns with sour cream. She was sure she had gained at least five pounds since she had started going out with him, and that despite having to eat early every night. As for Joel, he never put on an ounce. Nothing like being dead, he had joked darkly, to keep off the extra weight.

“Sure it hurts.” He was checking on the poached eggs. “Whoever said dying doesn’t hurt never tried it themselves.” He shrugged, working beater and pan, concocting sauces. “Sometimes I feel like the guys who handle poisonous snakes for a living. After a couple dozen, or a hundred, bites you acquire some immunity to the toxins. The bite itself still hurts, but you don’t die. Lucky bastards.” The two sauces were almost ready.

She nodded, and decided to wait until after they had finished eating to tell him that she was in love with him. He did not take it well.

“You can’t be in love with me, Marjorie.”

It was Saturday and they lay out on his porch, soaking up both the sun and the spectacular view of the bay from his apartment. Across the water eclectic house‑boats gleamed Tom Sawyer white in the treed crotch of Sausalito. Alcatraz was a rough gray diamond set in a diadem of gray‑green, and cargo container ships piled high with the amputated abdomens of eighteen‑wheelers plied the watery boulevard between Oakland and Manila, Richmond and Seoul, San Francisco and Hong Kong.

“Tell that to my heart.” Reaching over from her lounger, she put her hand on his bare arm.

“Your hormones, you mean.”

The hand twitched but stayed. “That was cruel, Joel.”

He turned over to face her, and the desperation in his eyes was underlined by the raw emotion in his voice. “Oh God, I’m sorry, Marjorie! I didn’t mean that. I wouldn’t hurt you for the world.” His fingers stroked her cheek, her neck, the sweat‑beaded hollow between her breasts. They were trembling. “I–I can’t love you back. You know that. I can’t fall in love with anybody. It wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be fair. ”