Life Expectancy

by Dean Koontz

Bantam hardcover edition published December 2004

Copyright © 2004 by Dean Koontz

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2004059476

PART ONE

WELCOME TO THE WORLD, JIMMY TOCK

1

On the night that I was born, my paternal grandfather, Josef Tock, made ten predictions that shaped my life. Then he died in the very minute that my mother gave birth to me.

I am thirty years old and can’t for certain see the course of my life, but rather than a graceful arc, my passage seems to be a herky-jerky line from one crisis to another.

Apparently, being a lummox is part of my charm, an almost winsome trait, as you will see.

At most I am somewhat husky.

If sometimes I make an outsized impression on people, it’s as likely as not because I fell on them. Or stepped on their feet.

Perhaps light reflects oddly from me or bends around me in a singular fashion, so I appear to be more of a hulk than I am.

In my case, the trouble was toes. Two were fused on the left foot, three on the right.

I escaped being named Flipper when successful surgeries restored my toes to the normal condition. In my case, the fusion involved only skin, not bones. The separation was a relatively simple procedure.

This was August 9, 1974, the day Richard Nixon resigned as President of the United States.

“Comedy and tragedy, the very tools of the clown’s art—that is the essence of life,” Beezo declared. “Comedy, tragedy, and the need for good bread,” Rudy said, making a little joke, including his own trade in the essence-of-life professions.

“Twenty inches…eight pounds ten ounces…ten-forty-six tonight…syndactyly…”

Josef’s face was drawn, seemed almost shrunken, as if Death, in a sneak-thief mood, had begun days ago to steal the substance of him, ounce by ounce.

“Five days,” said Josef, his hoarse voice raw with suffering, parched because he had been taking fluids only intravenously. “Five terrible days.”

“James. His name will be James, but no one will call him James…or Jim. Everyone will call him Jimmy.”

Josef could not have known. Yet he knew.

“Five days. You’ve got to warn him. Five terrible days.”

“Five dates. Write them down. Write them now. NOW!”

“Nineteen ninety-four. September fifteenth. A Thursday. Write it down.”

“Warn him,” the dying man said. “For God’s sake, warn him.”

Nineteen ninety-eight. January nineteenth.

“Two thousand two. December twenty-third. Another Monday.”

“Two thousand three,” Josef said urgently. “The twenty-sixth of November. A Wednesday. The day before Thanksgiving.”

As tears welled, Josef said, “Poor Jimmy, poor Rudy.”

This was awe, the complete yielding of the mind to something grand and formidable.

Josef said, “Don’t trust the clown.”

“The sixteenth of April,” said Josef.

As though that narrow beam were a piercing needle and his life were a balloon, Josef Tock let out an explosive breath and slumped back upon his pillow, dead.

The time on my grandfather’s death certificate matches that on my birth certificate—10:46 P.M.

Dad arrived in the expectant-fathers’ waiting lounge to the crack of a pistol as Konrad Beezo shot his wife’s doctor.

Dad thought that he, too, would be shot, but Beezo said, “Stay out of my way, Rudy Tock. I have no quarrel with you. You’re not an aerialist.”

“She died during delivery, but it wasn’t my fault.”

Without a weapon or a plan, but suddenly with the heart of a lion, he opened that door and went after Beezo.

Although his imagination spun a thousand bloody scenarios in mere seconds, he says that he did not anticipate what was about to happen, and of course he could not foresee how the events of that night would reverberate through the next thirty years with such terrible and astonishing consequences in his life and mine.

2

On that stormy evening in 1974, with Richard Nixon gone home to California, and Beezo on a rampage, my father found a nurse sprawled in the hallway, shot pointblank.

No makeshift weapon could hope to be as deadly as the well-flexed hands of an angry baker. Sheer terror spawned this lunatic notion; curiously, however, terror also gave him courage.

Stepping out of the delivery room, Dad came face to face with the homicidal clown. Simultaneously Beezo flung open the door from the crèche and charged into the hall, a blanketed infant cradled in the crook of his left arm.

So cradling the baby and brandishing the pistol, Beezo demanded of my father, “Where are they, Rudy Tock?”

When Beezo reached the door to the expectant-fathers’ lounge, he hesitated, glanced back. “I’ll never forget you, Rudy Tock. Never.”

Beezo pushed through the door and disappeared.

I grew up in a home filled with laughter. Regardless of what happens to me in the days ahead, I will have had the laughter. And wonderful pastries.

In this account of my life, I will resort at every turn to amusement, for laughter is the perfect medicine for the tortured heart, the balm for misery, but I will not beguile you. I will not use laughter as a curtain to spare you the sight of horror and despair. We will laugh together, but sometimes the laughter will hurt.

Perhaps Beezo’s wife and child had died at birth. Perhaps the infant in his arms hadn’t been his own but had been instead little James—or Jennifer—Tock.