Dead-Line

"Where has all the time gone?"

Uncle Vincent had put the question to no one in particular. After a moment, he turned to me with a skeletal grin. He was pale as the sheet covering his gaunt, withered frame.

A nurse had called me at home twenty minutes ago. She said I should hurry, that my uncle was close to death. Now, I stood at his bed waiting for his last breath.

"I mean," he said, "It's been thirty-six years."

I shrugged, not knowing what to say, thinking these the last ramblings of someone about to enter the next world.

"What day is it?" he asked with sudden urgency. As if it mattered. "December Ninth?"

"Yes, Uncle," I said. "The Ninth."

"And the time?"

I squinted at the glowing red numbers on the alarm clock on the bare dresser next to his bed.

"Ten," I told him. "Exactly ten o'clock."

"Day or night?"

I squinted at him.

"Is it ten o'clock A.M.?" he asked. "Or P.M.?"

"P.M., Uncle Vincent, " I answered. "Ten o'clock at night."

"The time is near, then," he gasped. "Only forty-five minutes."

"The time is near to what, Uncle? Forty-five minutes to what?"

"My death," he said, as if I should have known.

I swallowed. I was his only family now that his brother - my father - had died last year. Dad had made me promise to look after him, not let him die alone. Uncle Vincent had been the black sheep of the family, an eccentric intellectual with little common sense. He could have become anything - doctor, lawyer, scientist. But he had wasted his life trying to become a writer, becoming a pauper and a drunk instead.

As usual, I didn't know what he was talking about and tried to calm him

"Thirty-six years," he said, marveling.

"Thirty-six years," I repeated. "Thirty-six years from what?"

He looked sharply at me and then smiled. There was still mischief in his grin which belied his doctor's prediction that his heart would not last out the night.

"Thirty-six years," he told me, "from the day I learned the exact date and time of my death."

After a pause, for effect, he went on:

"Tonight: December the Ninth, Nineteen Ninety Nine. Twelve, Nine, ninety-nine. At ten forty six, P. M."

I glanced at the alarm clock on the dresser. A red light glowed: 10:02.

"How?" I swallowed. "How do you know something like that? The exact time?"

"It dates back," he said, "to the time when I worked for that cheap tabloid, True Weird News. It had a run back in the sixties right up there on the grocery store check-out line magazine racks next to the National Enquirer. It was a time in my life when I actually believed I was a writer." He chuckled to himself. "True Weird News."

He was distracted momentarily by the flutter of old memories.

"So?" I asked, now interested as ever in another story from the old man. Maybe his last. Uncle Vincent had always told a good story. Even as a kid, I remembered how he made you feel like you were really there, living it.

He looked at me with attentive eyes, waiting for the next inevitable question.

"How did you learn the exact date and time of your death?" I asked.

He sighed, and gestured for me to prop him up on is pillow. If he was to tell a story, he had to be comfortable. He had to be able to look down upon his audience.

After returning to my chair at the side of his bed, he looked around at the alarm clock.