Life Expectancy

knew.
        With increasing urgency, Josef declared, "Five days. You've got to warn him. Five terrible days."
        "Easy, Dad," Rudy repeated. "You'll be okay."
        His father, as pale as the cut face of a loaf of bread, grew paler, whiter than flour in a measuring cup. "Not okay. I'm dying."
        "You aren't dying. Look at you. You're speaking. There's no paralysis. You're-"
        "Dying," Josef insisted, his rough voice rising in volume. His pulse throbbed at his temples, and on the monitor it grew more rapid as he strained to break through his son's reassurances and to seize his attention. "Five dates. Write them down. Write them now. NOW!"
        Confused, afraid that Josef's adamancy might trigger another stroke, Rudy mollified his father.
        He borrowed a pen from the nurse. She didn't have any paper, and she wouldn't let him use the patient's chart that hung on the foot of the bed.
        From his wallet, Rudy withdrew the first thing he found that offered a clean writing surface: a free pass to the very circus in which Beezo performed.
        Rudy had received the pass a week ago from Huey Foster, a Snow Village police officer. They had been friends since childhood.
        Huey, like Rudy, had wanted to be a pastry chef. He didn't have the talent for a career in baking. His muffins broke teeth. His lemon tarts offended the tongue.
        When, by virtue of his law-enforcement job, Huey received freebies- passes to the circus, booklets of tickets for carnival rides at the county fair, sample boxes of bullets from various ammo manufacturers-he shared them with Rudy. In return, Rudy gave Huey'cookies that didn't sour the appetite, cakes that didn't displease the nose, pies and strudels that didn't induce regurgitation.
        Red and black lettering, illustrated with elephants and lions, crowded the face of the circus pass. The reverse was blank. Unfolded, it measured three by five inches, the size of an index card.
        As hard rain beat on a nearby window, drumming up a sound like many running feet, Josef clutched again at the railings, anchoring himself, as if he feared that he might float up and away. "Nineteen ninety-four. September fifteenth. A Thursday. Write it down."
        Standing beside the bed, Rudy took dictation, using the precise printing with which he composed recipe cards: sept 15,1994, thurs.
        Eyes wide and wild, like those of a rabbit in the thrall of a stalking coyote, Josef stared toward a point high on the wall opposite his bed.
        He seemed to see more than the wall, something beyond it. Perhaps the future.
        "Warn him," the dying man said. "For God's sake, warn him."
        Bewildered, Rudy said, "Warn who?"
        "Jimmy. Your son, Jimmy, my grandson."
        "He's not born yet."
        "Almost. Two minutes. Warn him. Nineteen ninety-eight. January nineteenth. A Monday."
        Transfixed by the ghastly expression on his father's face, Rudy stood with pen poised over paper.
        "WRITE IT DOWN!" Josef roared. His mouth contorted so severely in the shout that his dry and peeling lower lip split. A crimson thread slowly unraveled down his chin.
        "Nineteen ninety-eight," Rudy muttered as he wrote.
        "January nineteenth," Josef repeated in a croak, his parched throat having been racked by the shout. "A Monday. Terrible day."
        "Why?"
        "Terrible, terrible."
        "Why will it be terrible?" Rudy persisted.
        "Two thousand two. December twenty-third. Another Monday."
        Jotting down this third date, Rudy said, "Dad, this is weird. I don't understand."
        Josef still held tight to both steel bedrails. Suddenly he shook them violently, with such uncanny strength that the railings seemed to be coming apart at their joints, raising a clatter that would have been loud in an ordinary hospital room but that was explosive in the usually hushed intensive care unit.
        At first the observing nurse rushed forward, perhaps intending to calm the patient, but the electrifying combination of fury and terror that wrenched his pallid face caused her to hesitate. When waves of thunder broke against the hospital hard enough to shake dust off the acoustic ceiling tiles, the nurse retreated, almost as if she thought Josef himself had summoned that detonation.
        "WRITE IT DOWN!" he demanded.
        "I wrote, I wrote," Rudy assured him. "December 23, 2002, another