Life Expectancy

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 were 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."
        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.
        Determined not to be baited into losing my temper, I said, "Only maybe if my folks wanted to press charges. And they