conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled Life Expectancy about Jimmy, Tock, Rudy with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In the dazzling new thriller from the master of dark suspense, the hand of fate reaches out to touch an ordinary man with greatness. So long as he is ready. So long as he is, above all, afraid. Jimmy Tock comes into the world on the very night his grandfather leaves it. As a violent storm rages outside the hospital, Rudy Tock spends long hours walking the corridors between the expectant fathers' waiting room and his dying father's bedside. It's a strange vigil made all the stranger when, at the very height of the storm's fury, Josef Tock suddenly sits up in bed and speaks coherently for the first and last time since his stroke. What he says before he dies is that there will be five dark days in the life of his grandson -- five dates whose terrible events Jimmy will have to prepare himself to face. The first is to occur in his 20th year; the second in his 23rd year; the third in his 28th; the fourth in his 29th; the fifth in his 30th. Rudy is all too ready to discount his father's last words as a dying man's delusional rambling. But then he discovers that Josef also predicted the moment of his grandson's birth to the minute, as well as his exact height, weight, and the fact that Jimmy would be born with syndactyly -- the unexplained anomaly of fused digits on his left foot. Suddenly, the old man's predictions take on a chilling significance. What terrifying events await Jimmy on these five dark days? What nightmares will he face? What challenges must he survive? As the novel unfolds, picking up Jimmy's story at each of these crisis points, the path he must follow will defy every expectation. And with each crisis he faces, he will move closer to a fate he could never have imagined. For who Jimmy Tock is and what he must accomplish on the five days his world turns is a mystery as dangerous as it is wondrous -- a struggle against an evil so dark and pervasive only the most extraordinary of human spirits can shine through.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a plot for a story about Jimmy, Tock, Rudy with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Life Expectancy (novel): James Tock was born in Snow County Hospital in Colorado and at the exact moment his grandfather, Josef Tock, a pastry chef, dies of a stroke.\nThough crippled by a stroke earlier in the week, moments before his death, Josef recovers miraculously to impart on his son Rudy ten cryptic predictions: that his grandchild will be named James—but notes everyone will call him Jimmy.\nJosef also predicts five terrible days to come in his grandson\'s life.\nCoherent though bizarre his speech may be, Josef Tock does not recover from his event, but expires right when the baby is born.\nEarlier in the evening, Rudy Tock made the acquaintance of a strange man, Konrad Beezo.\nBeezo is a clown for the very circus Tock\'s pass is for, and is a fitful, spiteful, creepy, chain smoking individual half in his clown costume.\nHis wife Natalie, a trapeze artist of some renown and born of a good family, is lying in childbirth, says he, and her relatives have virtually disowned her for marrying him.\nHe speaks glowingly of his soon-to-be-born son, who is to be named "Punchinello", and will carry on the fine tradition of clowning.\nHe speaks venomously of his father-in-law, using many colorful epithets.\nTock is only too grateful to leave Beezo.\nHowever, the grief for his father\'s death was short-lived.\nBeezo, upon learning Natalie died in childbirth, goes insane ranting about her family sending assassins to kill her and begins shooting, killing a doctor and a nurse.\nTock, in perhaps the one moment of heroism in his meek baker\'s life, convinces the mad clown his enemies have left, and momentarily quells his anger.\nJimmy Tock writes the story, a loose autobiography of personal experience, reminisces, and second- or even third-hand accounts of events, transcribing it from a series of tapes on the eve of his fifth and final terrible day.\nThe narrative is given in an often self-deprecating, comically understated manner.\nHowever, certain experiences stand out starkly, most noticeably blundering into a harrowing, yet almost surreal, bank robbery by a trio of plastique-wielding crazed history buff clowns led by none other than Punchinello Beezo—in which Jimmy gradually realizes he\'s falling for a comely fellow hostage and a dangerous game of chicken with a severely disturbed stalker on an icy road the night his wife Lorrie, the former fellow hostage is about to deliver their first child (on the second predicted date).\nThe man after the Tocks is none other than Konrad Beezo himself, looking for retribution for his imprisoned, and accidentally-gelded son.\nHis mad obsession with the family frames both this terrible day and the next predicted day for Beezo desires a male Tock child as his prize, a new son to raise in the fine clown tradition.\nThe lunatic will do whatever he must to collect what he believes due him, including numerous facial reconstructive surgeries to assume new identities and escape the grasp of the law.\nJimmy believes that everyone in the world is tenebrously yet inexorably connected to one another, just as his toes were at birth.\nThis phenomenon is often called "Six degrees of separation".\nPunchinello, who is currently imprisoned, is asked by Jimmy and Lorrie, who aided in his conviction and sentencing, to donate one of his kidneys to help save the life of Annie Tock, the daughter of Jimmy and Lorrie.\nPunchinello only agrees to the donation in return for multiple favors that are frivolous by comparison to the precious kidney.\nAs the deal is about to be complete, Punchinello asks that Jimmy kills Virgilio Vivacemente as one last favor.\nAs the prophecies are fulfilled one by one, and he survives each, Jimmy learns many things about himself—as well as Konrad, Natalie, Punchinello, and Konrad\'s father-in-law, Virgilio Vivacemente, the vain, sadistic patriarch of the world-famous acrobatic clan who casts his long shadow over the lives of both the Tocks and the Beezos.\nSome of Jimmy\'s revelations are beautiful; others fearsome; still others shake his meek, lumbering pastry chef\'s life to the foundation and cause him to reflect on the true meaning of syndactyly—as both an ailment and a life\'s philosophy.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Life Expectancy
  He brightened. "Gee, that would be wonderful. When you're reading Constance Hammersmith, you've got to have Hershey's bars."
  Leaning forward with keen interest, clinking his chains as he folded his hands on the table, Punchinello said, "So I'm just dying to know. What brings you here?"
  He raised both hands, spreading the fingers wide. They were nice hands, well formed, though at the moment they trembled violently.
  His eyes filled with tears, which he shed copiously, silently. He made a bowl of his hands and poured his face into it.
  Beyond the windows, the sky had darkened, as if some celestial editor had cut the day from three acts to two, eliminating afternoon, splicing morning to twilight.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.. End with the sentence '
  And no matter how meticulous the surgeon has been, once you've been shot in the gut—well, when you wear a bikini, you turn heads but not always for the same reason that Miss America does.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Together, the five of us took all the money out of the box and piled it on the table so we could smell it better.
  There were twenty-five packets of twenty-dollar bills. Each packet contained a hundred bills. Fifty thousand bucks.
  The box also contained an envelope. From the envelope, Lorrie extracted a plain white card with handwriting on one side.
  I'm not the goddess Jimmy said I am. For one thing, I've got a pinched nose. For another thing, my teeth are so straight and symmetrical that they don't look real.
  And no matter how meticulous the surgeon has been, once you've been shot in the gut—well, when you wear a bikini, you turn heads but not always for the same reason that Miss America does.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last four paragraphs.. Start with the sentence 'I was back in the Roseland where the sun had set, where the sky was largely purple, and where the once-blazing galleons in the air had burned down to sullen red'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I was back in the Roseland where the sun had set, where the sky was largely purple, and where the once-blazing galleons in the air had burned down to sullen red.
  Gasping for breath, I got to my feet and watched for a moment as the celestial sea turned black and the last embers of the cloud ships sank into the rising stars.
  Although I was not afraid of the night, prudence argued that I would not be wise to linger in it. I continued toward the eucalyptus grove.
  The transformed sky and the winged menace, as well as the spirits of the woman and her horse, had given me something to think about. Considering the unusual nature of my life, I need not worry that, when it comes to food for thought, I will ever experience famine.