A brief chapter today, a transition of sorts. Maybe a sip of scotch, I dare say…
[Sting \\ Something The Boy Said]
Chapter 63
Colonel Goodman was in his office sitting at his desk, looking out his window, looking out over the city of Tel Aviv and the Mediterranean beyond. He’d been reading summaries of ongoing operations all morning but his mind kept drifting back to Harry Callahan and his return to California. What a blown operation that had been, the very definition of a clusterfuck, but what exactly had gone wrong?
The idea of ‘wounding’ Callahan, maybe with a grazing shot, was the first thing that had gone wrong – but probably because the entire premise behind it had been so morally out of bounds. Why had he approved such an outlandish plan? Then the fucking sniper had almost blown Callahan’s leg off. Brilliant! And so Didi had been locked out of Callahan’s life and years of work keeping him under observation had come to an end. The Watson woman, Harry’s assistant, had proven too competent, and once she’d figured out what was happening she’d moved all of Callahan’s assets out of reach. She moved to secure the residence in Davos and she’d also worked to get the planned recording studio in the village up and running. Goodman sighed, wishing he had one person on staff who was half as competent as this Watson woman.
So for weeks he’d been frozen out and he could only guess what Callahan was up to. Worse still, he was no longer in any kind of position to render assistance to Callahan if he needed help. But then Deborah Eisenstadt had come along out of the blue. The physicist had every imaginable security clearance and had even worked for Mossad on two occasions, but her allegiance to the State of Israel was questionable – so that had to be settled before he could move forward with his plan.
A Danish Jew, her life’s circumstances had pushed her to the Soviet Union and then to Armenia, until Anders Sorensen had snatched her up and married her. Funny too, because Sorensen had probably saved her life by getting her beyond the reach of the KGB. But Mossad had recruited her shortly after she arrived in Israel, ostensibly to keep an eye out for possible Soviet operations within the academic community, so her immigration to the U.S. had come as a blow. But now there was news almost too good to be true. Was Callahan coming into her life – even peripherally? Because if so then things had come full-circle and he might have access to Callahan once again.
He’d just finished reading the contact report from Ted Sorensen that had come in last night. Eisenstadt hadn’t mentioned her contact with Liz Bullitt so Goodman had to assume Eisenstadt had already learned of the acoustic shift and if her background was any indication she’d understood the implications of Imogen Schwarzwald’s discovery. As long as she didn’t actively begin work on the Shift she’d be safe enough, at least for now – but something else was bothering Goodman.
A Mossad operative in the consulate had passed along that Sorensen was headed to New York for a meeting today, and yet Sorensen had omitted that detail from his contact report. Why?
So now Goodman was worried, because…what was Sorensen up to?
So first thing this morning he’d sent word to New York to make sure Sorensen’s movements on the ground were detailed, and to keep him in the loop as the surveillance progressed throughout the day. Then Didi had called and he’d asked her to come down to the office for lunch. She’d been working down in the desert on the Shift Project and he hadn’t seen her in weeks – and besides, he was always curious about her work down there.
Still, something was wrong, and Goodman could feel it in his bones. Something was wrong with Sorensen. Something…big. Why would Sorensen keep things from him? Why now? And what was he up to in New York?
He knew he needed answers, too.
Didi appeared in his doorway and she smiled. He turned to her and nodded.
“Come. Sit. Tell me of the problems of the world,” he said with a smile.
“It’s a very complicated world, Papa,” she sighed as she came into his inner sanctum, “but you looked troubled this morning, not me.”
“No? Well, you look sunburned. Are you at least using sunscreen?”
She shook her head and grinned. “No, never.”
“You’ll not like the results,” Goodman said with a shrug as he pointed at two recent biopsies taken from the top of his left forearm. “Basal cell carcinoma, I think the doctor calls it.”
“Is it serious?”
“Serious? No, not really. It was caught early.”
“So, what’s troubling you?”
“You recall Ted Sorensen?”
“The producer at Paramount?”
Goodman nodded. “I’ve been running him for years. He grew up with Callahan.”
Didi’s eyes darkened. “I didn’t know that.”
“No reason you should have. They rarely see one another, and haven’t for, well, quite a while now.”
“And he reports to you?”
Goodman nodded. “Ever since his father moved here. Nothing major, just deep background on Hollywood, things he thinks we might be interested in. It’s all very informal, or at least it was until recently. But he’s keeping things from me, things he knows would be of interest to me.”
“And that is what is troubling you?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve had this feeling all morning long, like something bad is…”
“Papa? What is it?”
“I don’t know,” Goodman said as he reached for the television’s remote. He flipped it on and turned to CNN and his eyes squinted when he saw black smoke pouring from one of the World Trade Center towers. “Where is bin Laden?” he whispered as he picked up his phone and dialed a four digit extension. “Lev? Ben. Are you watching CNN? No? Well turn it on and find out where bin Laden is and let me know. Thanks.” He pushed down on the cradle and then dialed his receptionist. “Doris, get me the Prime Minister.”
Didi pulled her chair close to the TV and they both watched as a second airliner slammed into the unharmed tower…
“Shit,” Colonel Goodman sighed, just before his phone chimed. He reached over and picked it up: “Ariel. CNN now!”
He hung up and watched the grainy feed from a helicopter, and then it hit him. Sorensen had just landed in New York, at La Guardia. Coincidence? Or planned?
“I hate coincidences,” he whispered under his breath, fingers drumming on his desktop. “What the hell are you up to, Sorensen?”
By the time United 93 was down in a field in Pennsylvania, the Mossad, like the entire Israeli government, was in full crisis mode. Everyone knew bin Laden was behind the operation so now it was just a matter of running him down and taking him out – except he’d simply disappeared, gone to ground and now presumably somewhere in Afghanistan. But Colonel Goodman presumably had other matters on his mind, too.
Because when he learned that Ted Sorensen’s Gulfstream was headed for London, he also learned that Delbert Moloch was on board. Moloch was no friend of the State of Israel, but he had been causing problems all over Eastern Europe for years, and was now understood to be operating in South America. He had at one point been a Kremlin operative but was now living in Surrey, south of London. Exactly what he was doing, and who was paying for his services, still remained a mystery.
Yet if Moloch was now operating with Sorensen then this very clearly fell within his purview. But now, with everything else happening in the United States today, Goodman simply made the decision to move a few pieces on the board. This sort of mission compartmentalization ensured operational security, yet the lack of back-up would perhaps unnecessarily expose his agent to greater than normal risk.
So with well-founded misgivings, he immediately sent his daughter to London to find out what was happening with Sorensen and Moloch, then he got on the phone and called Boston.
+++++
Out among the slender pines and white-limbed birch trees northwest of Boston, at the dead end of Millstone Road you come upon MIT’s Haystack Observatory – the facility rather like a needle in a haystack out there by itself in the forests of central New England. Debra Sorensen thought as much, anyway, as they passed the Millstone Hill Radio Telescope. But that was nothing compared to the huge, white dome that suddenly appeared out of nowhere. She was sitting beside Deborah Eisenstadt, while Professor Gene Sherman sat in the rear seat working on lesson plans and lab assignments for the coming term when she first saw the dome, and Sherman looked up when he heard Sorensen gasp. He put away his papers, lost in thought, still lost on…the Matterhorn.
The observatory’s undergraduate liaison led the group on a short tour of the facility and then Sherman and Sorensen listened as Eisenstadt went over the basic premises of radio astronomy and what Haystack and Millstone were working on – before driving over to Mario’s for a quick bite.
“So, Dr. Sherman,” the girl said, “what did you think of the light in Sagittarius?”
But Sherman simply shrugged before he reconsidered. “I’m still puzzled about the duration of the event,” he said. “If it’s some kind of periodic pulsar, it is of a type we’ve never encountered before, so that’s of interest. So too was the nature of the light emitted, but we’ll be studying this event for years, if not decades.”
“Do you think you could use my recordings?”
“Of course. I’d love to go over them, so if you have time please send me a copy.” He looked at the girl, still unsure of her motives. She didn’t appear to be the studious type, yet her grades were spot on. But…why was she here? “So tell me, what did you make of the event?”
“I think there was an embedded pattern in the sequence, and I’d like to know what it is.”
Sherman nodded but he looked away. “What kind of pattern,” he said, his voice barely a whisper.
“The number seven repeats in a number of ways…”
“Yes, yes, there’s been a lot of speculation about that in the newspapers. Numerology, the Kabbalah and all that, but did you see any deeper patterns?”
“No, not really.”
“Okay,” Sherman said, somewhat relieved, “well, perhaps we should head back to the city. I’ve a dinner appointment,” he added, looking at Eisenstadt and nodding, “and I don’t want to be late.”
After they dropped Sorensen off at her father’s hotel, Eisenstadt turned to Sherman. “What was that all about.”
“Hm-m? What do you mean?”
“About patterns in the pulsar’s light.”
“Oh, just a thought.”
“Well, you dropped her like a hot rock after that. Why?”
“Tell me, Deborah, about this father of her’s. Is that why you wanted to roll out the red carpet for this girl.”
“In a way, yes, but she’s also family.”
“So you said. If she applies I take it you’d like my endorsement?”
“Only if freely given, Gene. No pressure on my part.”
“Well, frankly, I doubt you’ll hear from her again, at least concerning coming to school here. She’s not the type, and my guess is this is just a passing fancy to her.”
“Do you think that’s a fair assessment, Gene?”
“Fair or not, she doesn’t have the intensity. She’s not a scientist, Deborah, and you know it.”
Eisenstadt sighed, but she nodded. “Well, I suspected as much, but I needed to be sure. That’s why I called you.”
+++++
Didi Goodman watched the south end of runway 04 at London’s Stansted Airport, waiting for Sorensen’s Gulfstream to taxi to the Harrods Aviation FBO on the west side of the airport. She needed to pee – desperately – but she simply had to hold it now. The Gulfstream taxied to a stop and she watched Sorensen and another man walk down the air stairs and climb into the black Range Rover they’d already identified, and geotagged, so she relaxed a little.
“They ought to come out this way, to the M11,” her driver said. Padi Chomski was Mossad and was also nominally assigned as a commercial attaché at the main Kensington Gardens Embassy, but as soon as Moloch’s name entered the equation he had been detached to help Goodman. The sun had been down for almost two hours and and it was beginning to rain, but as they were waiting to intercept the Range Rover Chomski saw an ambulance head out to the Gulfstream…
“Do you think we should tail the Rover or the ambulance?” he asked.
“We follow Moloch,” Goodman said, her mind focused on anything but her bladder.
“Are you alright?”
“No, I haven’t taken a pee since Tel Aviv…”
“Get out now…do it on the side of the road!”
She hopped out and did the deed and Chomski dropped the car into drive and took off after the Range Rover as soon as she was buckled in. They followed the Rover onto the A406 to the A10 into central London…
“They’re headed to Embassy Row,” Chomsky sighed a few minutes later. “What the fuck is going on here?”
And indeed the Rover pulled up to the Argentine Embassy on Brook Street and Goodman watched Moloch and Sorensen disappear inside. “I didn’t see that coming,” she grumbled as they watched the Rover disappear. She was pulling out her binoculars when there came a tapping on her window.She looked up and saw a Constable and had started to roll down her window when she noticed the black Walther in the man’s hand.
The man double-tapped the Israeli agents before he tossed a time delayed grenade inside the car, then he walked off into another dark and rainy night, disappearing in the mist. The deep red sphere overhead followed him for a while, before it too vanished into clouds overhead.
Next up: Intermezzo–Madness and the Desperate Flight of aquaTarkus
Rounding out this little parable of ethical relativism, you might even have time for tea. Excuse the grammar goofs, please. Tough time seeing right now.
[Andy Bey \\ Someone To Watch Over Me]
Part II: the echoes of hollow laughter in marble halls
“Hold your legs up,” the Bexar County sheriff’s deputy told Harwood, and once his legs were shackled the deputy pulled him roughly from the van. Once he was out on the pavement the deputy began pushing Harwood through the sally port into the inmates entrance, but no one noticed rough treatment down here in the basement – and no one cared if they saw anything out of place. They waited for an elevator with other inmates and deputies, and when the elevator came they all rode up in silence to the fourth floor holding block, and he was quickly locked up in a small holding cell.
He’d had a jerk-water public defender who hadn’t objected once to questionable evidence presented at his trial and Harwood then knew his trial was a slam-dunk, a show trial. The DEA had rammed the case through pre-trials and before a judge in record time, and from then on he knew he was being made an example of how not to fuck with the Feds, and physicians were the intended audience. What had surprised him was Quintana, and how the cartels had simply dropped him like a hot rock. Still, he’d decided on silence, banking on the cartel having people on the inside who’d keep him relatively safe. And who knows, maybe the’d even be able to keep him alive.
Today’s appearance was for sentencing, but by this point he really didn’t give a shit. He’d gone from being a physician in a lucrative American practice to taking care of illiterate peasants in Mexico’s central highlands, and now it looked like he’d spend the rest of his life in federal prison. Not exactly how he’d seen things working out once upon a time, but what hurt most of all was leaving McKinnon down there, because just before the Federales came for him she’d told him she was pregnant.
So now it looked like everything he could have possibly done wrong in this life he’d managed to do, because on top of everything else he’d have a kid he’d never know…and maybe that hurt most of all. But yeah, he’d moved the cartel’s product for years. He’d been part of an intricately planned and executed supply pipeline that was moving Mexican heroin and Chinese fentanyl through San Antonio to Dallas, New Orleans, and Atlanta, and yeah, he’d made a shitload of money along the way but that was the game. Moving product through hospitals had worked, and worked well, for more than a decade, but someone somewhere along the distribution pipeline had ratted out the scheme. Probably a very bloody jailhouse confession, but none of that mattered now.
Another deputy came for him a few hours later and walked him down a marble hallway to a courtroom, and then he was pushed through another door into the courtroom. And there he was.
J. Alan Wentworth III, the federal prosecutor ramrodding his case through the system. Wentworth was short, fat, baldheaded and bespectacled – a paragon of every modern virtue imaginable. He was playing the game, alright. Throwing sevens every time, and always with an ace up his sleeve. He was asking the court to consider the death penalty, or at the very least life without parole, because if they didn’t come down hard on physicians law enforcement would never get a handle on the problem…
The problem with your thesis, Mr. J. Alan Wentworth III, is that law enforcement is in on the scam at every fucking level, from cops on the beat to the guards in the jails; all of them were feeding at the cartel’s trough – but there was no way Harwood would be allowed to say this in open court. This simple truth was so readily apparent even a dime-bag dealer could figure it out: pay anyone enough and they’ll look the other way, and every fucking time, too…but Wentworth had a quota to meet, a conviction rate to maintain, and that more than anything was dictating the outcome this afternoon. Harwood was just a mid-level executive in a thriving international manufacturing and distribution operation, but instead of working for one of the big pharmaceutical outfits he’d chosen to work for the cartels. Too bad anti-trust laws didn’t apply, because the irony was a little too rich.
Harwood wasn’t exactly surprised when, a half hour later and due to the aggravating circumstances of his crimes, he was sentenced to life in prison at ADMAX Florence, the notorious and justifiably dreaded super-max facility in central Colorado. When asked by the court if he had anything to say prior to sentencing he declined to speak, and so was simply escorted from the courtroom straight to the elevator – this time by a nattily dressed US Marshall to a black Ford Explorer.
Harwood was driven to the basement parking garage at a nearby office building and led inside a basement level office, and then right into a restroom. Not at all sure what was happening now, the marshal handed Harwood a gym bag and the keys to the Ford, then the cop turned around and walked out of the restroom, and he left Harwood standing there – almost in a state of shock. Not knowing what else to do, he opened the gym bag and found an envelope, two changes of clothes and some toiletries, as well as a new pair of Adidas running shoes. He opened the envelope and found an airline ticket, cash, credit cards and a French passport.
“Quintana,” he muttered to himself with a smile, then he changed into the street clothes and dumped the orange jumpsuit in a dumpster on his way to the Explorer. The NAV system was already programed for the airport and he put on a ball cap and sunglasses the cop had left on the driver’s seat and he drove right to the airport. Once there he parked the car in the long term lot and went straight into the terminal. He checked the envelope and found a boarding pass so went right up to and then through the TSA security screening and then he walked out to his gate, for an AeroMexico flight to Mexico City. His assigned seat, he realized, was in the business class section, and he suddenly felt as if he was inside a particularly nice dream.
When his flight was called he halfway expected a dozen DEA agents to come crawling out of the woodwork…but no, nothing happened, and that was positively surreal. He walked out the Jetway and boarded the 737Max and a flight attendant brought him a Bohemia and a slice of lime, and he did his best to ignore the people boarding the flight because he just knew that any moment now he was going to wake up and this was all going to turn out to be a really nasty trick of the mind.
But no, the main door was about to close – when, apparently, one more person ran into the cabin, and Harwood watched as Quintana boarded and came to the seat next to his own.
“Mind if I sit here?” the number three man in the Sinaloa Cartel asked.
“No, please,” Harwood said, then he watched as Quintana put a small carry-on in the overhead bin.
Then he sat and took the offered Bohemia from the flight attendant, and Harwood watched as the main door was pivoted into the closed and locked position, and he looked out the window as the Boeing was pushed back from the gate. When he could stand it no longer, he turned to Quintana and smiled.
“Did you have a nice visit?” he asked the capo.
“Yes. And you?”
“I’d have to say, all in all, that it was an interesting trip.”
“Perhaps someday we’ll have time to sit over dinner and talk.”
Which meant, Harwood understood, now was not that time. He nodded and smiled and looked out the window as the Boeing turned onto the active runway and dashed into the evening sky.
He ate his dinner in silence and watched intently as the jetliner lined up to land in Mexico City, and just before Quintana left him he advised that he not forget his two bags in the overhead bin, and Harwood thanked his friend then watched him leave. He pulled the bags down and walked out the jet and through immigration and then he opened Quintana’s parting gift.
Another envelope on top…
A ticket to Paris on Air France, departing in an hour and a half. Enough cash to live comfortably for several years. Documents to provide a completely new identity along with the academic degrees and transcripts of post-grad work to back everything up.
And then there was a note from Quintana.
‘Silentium ac fides super omnia.’
There wasn’t a whole lot else to say, was there? He’d never talked, never sought a plea bargain right up to sentencing, and maybe that had come as a surprise to Quintana. Maybe that was why he’d risked it all to come up the States, to see this through to the end. To see what kind of man this Harwood really was.
Maybe. Maybe not. Harwood would probably never know the answer to that one, would he?
He walked over to the First Class lounge and went inside, checked-in for the flight and saw that he was indeed flying alone. Not knowing what else to do he sat and watched jets come and go until his flight was called, then he walked out and boarded the 777 and made his way up to seat 1A.
A simply gorgeous flight attendant came by and introduced herself, offered him a glass of champaign and a warm towel for his face, then she smiled and sashayed up to the galley. After three months behind bars the sight of such a woman was enough to leave him in puddles of despair.
He heard the main doors close a few minutes later and looked down at his hands.
How long had it been? Three months since he’d last operated on a patient? Three months since he’d given up on ever doing anything like that again?
Three months since he’d seen McKinnon?
How would she look now? Would she be showing?
Dare he even try to get in touch with her? Wouldn’t the DEA be monitoring her every communication? Especially now that he’d managed to flee?
The jet pushed back and taxied out to the active, then it turned onto the runway and lumbered into the sky, turning to the northeast to fly up the east coast of North America on its way to the Old World. He saw Washington DC down below just after his second dinner of the evening, then New York City and Boston before the long crossing. His seat was turned into a cozy little bed and he slept the miles away, waking up in time for a lite breakfast and a mid-morning arrival in Paris.
He waited until almost everyone else had deplaned before grabbing his bags and heading out the Jetway into the terminal. He made his way to immigration and as he was now a citizen of France he walked right through the ‘Nothing To Declare’ line and then out to queue of people lining up to ride into the city.
And then he felt an arm slip into his.
“Well hello there,” Patty McKinnon said, a coy little smile crossing her face. “Fancy running into you here.”
“Yes, small world.” She leaned into him and they kissed with a ferocity that might have escaped most of the people standing in line, but hey…this was, after all, Paris. And they were home.
A minor diversion down another road less traveled. A two part trail with time for tea.
[Neil Young \\ The Needle and the Damage Done]
Copper Canyon
Part I: fight or flight
He checked his rearview mirror again. Nothing. But he was sure he was being followed; he could feel it in his gut and that was all he needed to know. He made it to his house on East Summit Street and pulled into the garage, hitting the button and closing the overhead door even before he turned off his truck’s motor. He went inside and showered, then made a reservation at the Marriott in the French Quarter for tomorrow night, staying four nights, then he called Quintana on one of his burner phones.
“I’m blown.”
“Too bad. So, the truck goes to New Orleans as planned?”
“Yes. I’ll put the product and other stuff you requested under the seat.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“Bueno. The boy will be there in an hour.”
He hung up and powered-off the phone, then went to the bathroom and shaved his head and then his face, even trimming his eyebrows unrecognizably short. He grabbed his go bag and waited for the courier to show up.
Once the truck was gone and headed to New Orleans he called an über to pick him up at Barbaro’s and then strapped a huge prosthetic stage belly around his waist and slipped out the side door, putting his ragged old go bag over his shoulder and now walking with a cane, hunched over and limping like an old man. He passed a black Ford Explorer parked down the block from his house, two DEA agents looking at his house through binoculars. He limped past the Ford and made it to the pick up just in time.
The über took him to a large self storage complex just west of Lackland Air Force Base and he went to his unit and opened the door. His motorcycle, a new BMW R1250GS, was already packed and fueled, and he had fifty thousand dollars stashed inside the foam seat, and another 300,000 in Mexican pesos in the tank bag. He unhooked the battery charger and started the motor, and while the engine warmed he changed into a one piece riding suit after he discarded the fake latex belly. With that done, he locked the unit before he drove out onto Highway 90, westbound for Del Rio and the Mexican border.
The sun was still up on this hot September evening as he approached Uvalde, Texas, and he stopped at the Whataburger on the east side of town, then he topped off the bike’s fuel tank, paying cash now for everything before continuing on to Del Rio. He filled up the tank again before crossing, uneventfully, into Mexico. He found a quiet looking inn on the south side of town and put the cover over the bike before he set the alarm, and once in the little room he didn’t even bother to get out of his riding gear; he just flopped down in the bed and promptly fell into a deep sleep.
He spent three days making his way to Chihuahua, and once there he found a mechanic to change the oil and the filters, then, after another night in a sleepy little inn he turned west into the mountains, not quite sure where he was going but confident he’d know the right place when he got there.
+++++
He stumbled into the village of Batopilas on his seventh night in Mexico, and he was by then beyond exhausted. He pulled into a very upscale looking lodge and inquired about a long term stay.
“How long did you have in mind?” the proprietor asked.
“I’m a writer,” the man lied, “and I’m looking for someplace quiet to spend a few months.”
“We have two casitas for rent by the week, but soon it will be the off season and I am sure we could work something out.”
“Sounds good. Now, how about tonight?”
“Of course. I’ll just need your passport. Will you be paying cash, in dollars?”
“If you prefer, certainly.” He handed over his passport, one of two bogus passports he had with him.
“Ah, Dr. Eugene Smith, of Duluth, Minnesota?”
“Yes,” he lied.
“Are you a physician?”
“I am, yes. General surgery.”
“And you are writing about surgery?”
“No, I’m writing a novel about the Gulf War. I was in Iraq.”
“I see. Well, unlike Iraq it is quiet here, that much I can assure you.”
“Perfect. And is there a bank in town?”
“Yes. There are two, and in addition to the dining room we have here at the lodge, there are several restaurants in town. And of course breakfast is included with your room.”
“Internet?”
“Just here in the main building. We have a computer, but it uses a dial up modem, I’m afraid. The canyon walls are too steep for satellite coverage, and out village is still too small for other services. Here are the instructions, and the computer is in that room,” the proprietor added.
“Alright.”
“Will you need help with your luggage this evening?”
“No, I’ve got it.” He paid cash for a week’s stay then returned to the bike and carried his bags to his room, and then he showered and changed into lite summer street clothes before returning to the bike. He pulled the seat off and removed the tool kit stored inside the seat and while he checked his tire pressures he also removed his stockpiled cash and put the lead foil packets inside his tank bag before setting off down the street to find a restaurant. Every muscle in his body ached, but his ass most of all.
After dinner he fired off an email to Quintana from the restaurant’s computer, and then returned to his room to wait for the firestorm.
He woke in the middle of the night with gut ripping cramps accompanied with a spiking fever and chills, and he knew he’d picked up a nasty GI bug. And then he realized he’d not remembered to pick up any Ciprofloxacin before he left Texas. He shrugged, knowing there wasn’t a lot he could do right now, so he concentrated on drinking bottled water between bouts on the toilet until 0600, when the front desk supposedly opened. By 0530 there was blood in his stool and he groaned: he was going to need antibiotics and this tiny little village couldn’t possibly have a doctor – or a pharmacy.
“The closest clinic is in Guachochi,” the proprietress advised, “at the Mission Hospital.” She handed over a bottle of bismuth subsalicylate with a smile, and he popped the top and took a long slug right there at the desk.
“How far is it?” the man groaned as his gut did another barrel roll.
“Are you on a motorcycle?”
He nodded. “Yup. Lucky me.”
“It will take all day, I’m afraid, but if you leave soon you will avoid the rains.”
“Rains?”
“Yes, but there may be some snow at higher elevations.”
His eyes wide open now, he had to confront the reality that he wasn’t back in Texas anymore, and that there wasn’t a pharmacy just down the street across from a well-stocked supermarket, and that he had for all intents and purposes run from that life with the DEA and probably the FBI hot on his tail – but at least here he was a free man. “Alright,” he sighed. “Do you have a hotel safe? I want to leave a few things if you do.”
“Of course,” the woman said. “I’ll have some rehydration fluid ready for you.”
“Thanks.”
He went to his room and put his riding suit back on, then put his dollars in a small Pelican case and locked it before heading back up to the desk. The woman gave him a bottle of ORF, or oral rehydration fluid, and she gave him a couple of packets of the mix to add to bottled water as he crossed the mountains.
“I guess I’ll see you tomorrow night,” he said as he walked out to his bike. He put his helmet on and fired up the engine, then entered the clinic’s address into the GPS as he stretched – but no…he ran for the restroom off the lobby and made it just in time.
+++++
He pulled into the clinic parking lot a little before eight that evening, and he was shaking now, and he knew he was borderline hypothermic. The bike’s engine heat, and the heated grips on the handlebars, had been the only thing between him and death for the past two hours. Snow in September? In fucking Mexico? Well, mountains are mountains no matter where you find them, but having to stop every half hour to shit on the side of the road had only added insult to injury – and now he was near the end of his rope.
He just got the bike on the side-stand and made his way through blowing sleet to the clinic entrance and passed out just inside the door.
+++++
He felt the stinging pinch of the IV, heard the calm, reassuring voice of a physician giving orders to a nurse and he relaxed – until he remembered he was in Mexico and these people were speaking English! Had the DEA caught up to him?
He grimaced and opened his eyes, and he saw a youngish American girl drawing blood from a stick in his right arm and another, even younger girl looking at his EKG, then this girl turned and looked at him.
“Oh, you’re up!”
“Where am I?”
“Guachochi. At the Tarahumara Mission Hospital, and I’m Dr. McKinnon.”
“Shouldn’t you be, oh, I don’t know, in Glasgow, maybe?”
She smiled. “Med school in Mexico City, my public service commitment here,” she shrugged.
“UTMB Galveston,” he smiled.
“You’re a doc? Where at?”
“Minnesota. Taking a year off to do some riding.”
“Oh,” she said, her voice suddenly dull, flat, and comprehending. “Well, your core temp was 95.6 so I put some heat packs under your arms and I’m running Cipro wide open. You should be good to go in the morning.”
“Thanks.”
“What’s your specialty?”
“General surgery?”
“Really? I’ve got a kid with a hot belly and no cutter. Think you can do an appendix?”
“When? Now?”
“You should be hot to trot in an hour,” she said, knocking his knee with her clipboard. “And look at it this way…you do me a favor and I’ll do one for you.”
“You got a gas passer?”
“A nurse practitioner. Well, kind of.”
“What does that mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know. You’ll figure it out.”
He shook his head and looked at his watch; he’d been out for several hours – but he really was feeling a lot better. He shivered once and the nurse draped a hot blanket over him and he fell into a deep sleep…again.
+++++
The overhead lights weren’t the best but the instruments were clean and the OR was spotless, and he stood over the eight year boy and checked off his landmarks for the incision, making a few dots with a marker on the boy’s belly before he swabbed betadine over the site.
Patty McKinnon had taped hot packs to his axial pits and inside his thighs and at least he wasn’t shaking now, so when the anesthetist, a girl from San Diego named Debbie Surtees, gave him the go ahead he made his incision and dissected muscle to expose the kid’s appendix, and forty five minutes later he closed the incision and just made it back to his bed before he passed out. Again.
He woke in the middle of the night and saw two bags of antibiotics and a bag of platelets running. “What the Hell?” he wondered.
McKinnon came in an hour later and when she saw he was awake she pulled up a chair. “Your white count is in the basement, Dr. – uh – Smith. And your right nut is as hard as a golf ball. Some of the cord, too.”
“Fuck.”
“My surgeon will be here tomorrow, and we should do an orchiectomy first thing in the morning.”
“All my stuff is over in Batopilas…”
“At the Lodge?”
“Yeah.”
“I know Martin. I’ll have ‘em put your stuff in storage ‘til we can run over and pick it up.”
“We?”
“You won’t be riding that bike for a while, if you know what I mean.”
“We?”
“Yeah. We’ll treat you here, and you can work off your bill with the rest of the indentured servants working here.”
“I’ve got to be in Creel tomorrow morning.”
“That isn’t going to happen.”
“You have internet here?”
“If you don’t mind me asking, which cartel got to you? Sinaloa?”
He nodded.
“Quintana?” she sighed.
“That’s right. How’d you know?”
She chuckled. “Half the docs working in Mexico these days got sucked into their fentanyl operations. There used to be a shortage of doctors down here. No more.”
He nodded, if only because he’d already figured as much.
“I can get in touch with him if you like, but I’ll need to know your name, I think.”
“Trinity. Just tell him Trinity. He’ll know who you’re talking about.”
She looked away and shook her head. “Sooner or later you’re gonna have to trust someone.”
“I’m not there yet.”
“How long you been on the run?”
“A week.”
“Shit. No wonder…”
“Did you run an AFP?”
“Not yet. Our tech has to get supplies from Creel to run that one.”
“Sorry…it’s just a lot to wrap my head around.” He took a deep breath and shook his head. “I thought I felt something down there, like a burn, a pulled muscle kind of thing.”
“Probably the cord. We can decide on chemo after we look at the histology, but retroperitoneal radiation is probably warranted.”
“Uh-huh. Where? Not here, I assume?”
“No, not here. We do limited chemo, but I do mean limited.”
“So? Where?”
“I assume going home is out of the question?”
“Yup.”
“You could go to Creel, but…”
“Yeah…but no buts, please. Say no more. What about Mexico City?”
“Oh, yeah, of course, but there’s a good medical school in Chihuahua and the hospital has a decent radiology department.”
“What would you do, Patty?”
“I’d wait until I had the pathology report, ‘Gene.’”
He grinned. “You know, I was thinking when this blows over about heading over to someplace like Sudan or Ethiopia, joining MSF and maybe working over there.”
“Why?”
“Something about practicing medicine in the states, I guess. When I joined the group I was working with I was told we were a volume business, that the aim was to spend just enough time with patient to get a handle on the exact medical problem, then get ‘em in and out of surgery as fast as possible. I guess within a year I felt like I was flipping burgers at MickeyDs. I didn’t know my patients, not at all. It was like go into the OR and see a patch of skin already draped, get in and get out and go to the next OR for the next case, then off to the office for exams before heading back to the hospital to finish my paperwork. Pretty soon I realized I couldn’t even remember one patient’s name from the last couple of years.”
“Flipping burgers,” McKinnon sighed, shaky her head in disbelief. “That’s good. I’ll have to remember that one.”
He looked out a little window and nodded. “I think I felt useless.”
“Do you have any idea how many times you say ‘I’ when you’re talking?”
He turned and looked at her. “What…a little too much narcissism for your taste?”
“Just curious,” she shrugged, “but was someone holding a gun to your head when you decided not to get to know your patients?”
“Yeah. The office manager was, and the partners sure were…”
“Really. My-my. So, it’s off to Africa you go where, guess what, you won’t speak the language so there’ll be no way in hell you’ll ever get to know anyone…”
“And I sure won’t be part of another volume enterprise, will I?”
“What’s that got to do with medicine? You were treating sick people, right? I mean, isn’t that the point?”
“I don’t know that there is a point anymore.”
“Ah. The heart of the matter. You’ve lost your way.”
He looked away again and sucked in a deep breath, but finally he nodded his head just a little.
“So…you think you’ll find your way back by going to deepest, darkest Africa? Sound about right?”
“I don’t know what I’ll find…”
“Yeah? But isn’t that the point?”
“What?”
“The point, Gene? To find yourself?”
“You make it sound so…trite…?”
“Hey, if the shoe fits…”
“You like kicking people when they’re down, don’t you?”
“Like it? No, not really, but sometimes people listen when they’re face down in the mud. And who knows, if they’re lucky maybe they’ll even listen to themselves.”
His eyes blinked a few times and he nodded. “Anything else, Doc? Any more words of wisdom?”
She hooked up a syringe in his line and shot in something. “Get some sleep, okay? We’ll operate first thing in the morning.”
“What about my things?”
“I’ll take care of it.”
His eyes suddenly felt full and very heavy, and later, sometime in the dark he felt gloved hands running a catheter. More strange voices came and went and at one point someone drew blood, then he was aware of being lifted onto an operating table and then the strangest thing of all; he seemed to be aware of a mask sliding down over his mouth and nose – followed by an all consuming darkness that was not at all enjoyable…
+++++
“Well, Dr. Frankenstein, it lives,” he heard someone say and he managed to open his eyes.
“McKinnon? That you?”
“Yes, it is, Dr. Harwell. Can you rate your pain for me?”
‘She knows my name,’ the scared little voice inside Gene Harwell’s head screamed. ‘What else does she know?’ He strolled along her razor’s edge, with ambivalence on one side of the blade and utter fear on the other, all while trying to think of how to reply to this simplest question.
“Let’s just say I’m still deep in the land of I don’t give a flying fuck, and let’s leave it at that.”
“Okay, we’ll call it a nice, fat zero. Know where you are, by any chance?”
“In the wonderful land of Oz, and I’m about to pull back the curtain.”
“Memory intact. Sense of humor sucks,” she wrote out loud on her chart. “Know who the president is?”
“Snidely Whiplash, esquire.”
“Good one. I’d never have thought of that. Think you could handle some water?”
“If it comes out of a bottle, maybe.”
“Good situational awareness, too. Okay, five by five, Harwell.”
“You got a path report yet, smart ass?”
“Diffuse seminoma and teratoma in the left testes, no cells in the cord so no radiation needed.”
He felt a roaring surge of relief and then a few tears running down his face, so he cleared his throat before he spoke. “Thanks, McKinnon.”
“No problemo, Gene. Oh, Quintana is okay with things, he says to just lay low here for a while and he’ll be in touch. Martin is bringing your stuff over tomorrow.”
“How long you going to keep me here?”
“You could go home today, but…”
“…but no home to go to. I got that.”
“I’ve got a spare room at my place if you want to bunk out there for a while. There are plenty of places to rent around here, too. Like three, maybe four.”
“Ah. So, any port in a storm, huh?”
“How’s the pain now?”
“I’m feeling it now. Versed is wearing off.”
She picked up a syringe from a bedside tray and hooked it up to his IV and sent a little morphine down his line. “That’ll take the edge off for a while. You have any trouble taking Oxy?”
“Yeah. I don’t take it, period. You got naproxen?”
“Sure.”
“That’ll do.”
“You want me to get my spare bedroom cleaned up?”
He nodded her way, then grinned: “Yeah. That’ll do.”
+++++
He started easy, riding a few miles around local roads, then a few mining trails, but his groin still hurt when he pushed too hard. He worked three weekends at the hospital before he decided he’d had enough domesticity in his life. It wasn’t that McKinnon was hard to take, either; in fact, the opposite was true. She was bright as hell but should have gone into psychiatry, not general medicine, but her constant psychoanalyzing had grown stuffy and was often downright obtuse. Even after a couple of weeks with her she seemed to alternate between voracious horniness and bouts of moodily introspective analysis and he never felt like he belonged.
Probably because he didn’t. And maybe they both knew it.
But he’d liked Batopilas, and something about the place still seemed to pull at him. Maybe it was the steep-walled, tree-lined valley, or how the town was clinging precariously to a ledge just above the edge of the river, or even how the tiny village was defined by narrow cobbled lanes and red-tiled roofs, everything surrounded by overhanging trees and the roar of the rushing water just below. He wondered what it would feel like to stay in a village like that one and write and to call a place like that home. Maybe he could open up a little clinic there, too…
Yet when he told McKinnon he was leaving she seemed to come undone.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” he told her. “I haven’t been here a month…”
“But I’ve had this feeling for you since the moment I saw you,” she said, coming on hard. “Look, I don’t want you to go.”
He shook his head. “Yeah, I get that and yeah, I like you too. I’ve enjoyed spending time with you…”
“Then stay!”
“And what happens when I decide to head to Africa? What then?”
“We both go.”
“Simple as that, huh? You just pack up and head out?”
“Yeah. Simple as that. I’ve looked into it, I know what we’d have to do and we’d be a perfect team. Medicine and surgery…I mean, they’d love to have us!”
“Patty, doesn’t it bother you that I don’t love you?”
“No, not really. You’re a guy and guys are like that. I do know that we fit together, that we’d be a good team…”
“And what about you? What about love?” he asked.
And she shrugged. “We haven’t been together long enough for that, Gene, not really, but yeah, when I’m around you I’m happy. And it’s like I can’t imagine being happy unless I’m around you, and I don’t know what you call that…”
“Infatuation, maybe?”
“But I’m not a teenager, Gene,” she said, and perhaps a little too defiantly – like maybe she had ‘daddy issues.’ Still, he had Quintana to worry about, because if he bolted on the cartel now he might as well hang it up. He knew too much and they’d never let him go without an understanding of some kind.
So he stayed. He understood that, really, without Quintana’s blessing he had to stay put for the time being. And by that point he’d also recognized that McKinnon and Quintana had a bond of some kind. Like maybe she’d gotten him out of a tough spot before, and he owed her. Big time. At least…that’s what it felt like. On the other hand, he had money in banks down here, and a lot of it. He was safely out of reach from both the DEA and the FBI. He had a roof over his head and McKinnon was fun to hang around with.
And he was finding that even after a couple of weeks he missed medicine. His Spanish, after living in San Antonio for almost ten years, was already more than passable – but now he was quickly improving in this immersive setting – and so he was able to talk to his patients – without the commercial restraints imposed by corporate medicine. And he liked working that way – finally. It was what he’d always imagined medicine would be like. Or…should be like, he reminded himself.
He liked riding around the mountains but he also recognized he was living in a really hostile environment, too. At medium elevations vast fields of poppies were growing every he went, and at lower elevations marijuana cultivation was in full swing. And – everywhere he went he ran into armed guards, in many cases just kids with AK-47s and itchy trigger fingers. Rival clans were staking claims and some were encroaching on other clan’s grows, with turf wars the obvious result, and that made him think about his role in this house of cards.
There wouldn’t be cartels without users and all this semi-clandestine production was aimed at supplying the North American market. With almost two thirds of the people in the United States and Canada now being regular users of marijuana, and with domestic cultivation for all intents and purposes illegal, the cartels had been handed a market so insatiably vast it was almost beyond comprehension. It was no wonder the cartels were paying lobbyists in the U.S. to keep these products illegal, yet the handwriting was on the wall. U.S. tobacco companies had been buying up land in Northern California for decades, and why? Because it was prime land for marijuana cultivation. Not to mention federal taxes on marijuana related products could crush federal budget deficits. But it would severely limit the profitability of the cartels, so…
But riding these hills was dangerous now. Kidnappings were more frequent, and some kids had been known gun down bikers just to take their motorcycles for a joyride. And there were often no repercussions because the cartels owned cops. The only reason he could ride around the area was simple enough to understand: he was under the protection of a capo, one of the Sinaloa cartel’s commanders. He was therefore quite untouchable, so he rode around and kids with Ak-47s waved at him as he passed – though he usually stopped and talked with them, too. He learned about what they did, about their command structure, and he listened as they talked about their gripes – and their hopes and dreams. He found that a bunch of these kids were working while they were sick as hell, so he started loading up his saddlebags with medical supplies and he started taking care of the kids out there.
People in the smaller villages along his route heard about that, too.
So when he rode through these hamlets people waved him down. He learned that most of these people didn’t trust doctors, or hospitals, but for some reason they trusted him, and probably because he’d treated their kids. And pretty soon he was treating people along a vast network of tiny villages along dirt roads in the boondocks, and the administrators at the Mission Hospital grew quite interested in his successes. When he ran across a case he couldn’t fix out on the road he put the patient on the back of his bike and took them to the hospital, and he fixed ‘em there.
And pretty soon he began to feel the one thing he’d been missing in his life: purpose.
So he lived with McKinnon and soon enough weeks turned into months, and months into a year, and still, at least three days a week he hopped on his bike and rode off into the boonies. He worked weekends in the OR, usually three to four surgeries a day, some days more, rarely less. He stopped caring about McKinnon’s perceived flaws and he started listening to her hopes and dreams, and her fears. He started caring for her, too.
He found her ovarian cancer and he did the procedure. He nursed her through chemo, and he held her hand as she regained her health. They took walks together, short walks in the beginning but longer ones as she got stronger, and her hopes and dreams turned into quiet talks about a future together, just the two of them. Maybe here in Mexico or maybe somewhere in Africa…it didn’t matter to her as long as they were together.
So on a Friday night in April one of the Jesuits at the mission said the words people say when they promise to stay together until death do they part, and standing there in the candlelight surrounded by his new life, Gene Harwood felt something he’d never really expected to feel after he left his home, and his country. He felt happy, and that even came as a surprise to the DEA agents who’d had him under surveillance for two months.
Another short segment as the arc progresses from mind to screen. Cardamom tea after a long day of CT scans and the intrusions of random unwanted needles. It feels good to write.
[ Yes \\ South Side of the Sky \\ acoustic ]
Chapter 62.4
They heard screams. At least two people screaming, and Callahan looked at Eisenstadt – both now clearly confused.
“Where’s that coming from?” he asked.
Eisenstadt canted her head as if trying to fix the location, then she started for Harry’s bedroom. Harry clambered from the piano into his wheelchair and followed, getting to his bedroom in time to see some sort of commotion in his bathroom – and then, yes, there it was. Fresh sea ice everywhere, all over the slate floor and in the shower, too…which was where Deborah and Liz were now…but he saw there was also a little girl in the shower and she was still screaming hysterically.
Eisenstadt handed a towel to Liz and then turned her attention to the girl, and as Harry rolled into the bathroom Liz saw him and literally flew into his lap. She was quaking now and clearly terrified so he held her close until she calmed a little, still keeping an eye on Deborah and the little girl – both now standing under the shower’s steaming spray. Then he recognized her: she was the same little girl he’d encountered on the Titanic, but something was different about her now.
She’d seemed nonplused when he ran into her, but now she was anything but. Now she was close to the edge.
He turned to Liz and stroked her hair. “Liz…where were you? Can you tell me what happened?”
He felt her shake her head against the skin of his neck, heard her quiet sobs as she came down, so he held her closer still.
“Oh Harry,” she whispered in his ear, “don’t ever let me go… Promise me, you’ll never let me go.”
“I’m here, kiddo,” he whispered as he stroked the back of her head. “It’s okay…I’m here.”
She squeezed him – and hard – then she palpably relaxed just a little…but a moment later he heard her snoring and her arms fell from his side. Her skin was still quite cool and her clothes were damp, but he was also virtually trapped in his wheelchair and the confinement he felt was now crushing, almost demoralizing.
But the little girl’s cries had as quickly stopped, too, and now it appeared she too was sound asleep. Deborah could see Harry’s predicament and so she toweled the girl off, then shook her head and stripped her clothes off so she could completely dry her off. With that done Eisenstadt muscled her to Harry’s bed and got her covered, then the two of them got Liz dried off and in bed, too.
“Is that the same girl you saw on Titanic?” Deborah asked.
And Harry nodded. “Yeah, but she almost appears younger.”
Eisenstadt shook her head and sighed. “Why is she here?”
“I sincerely hope you don’t think I know the answer to that one, Kiddo.”
Which only made Deborah laugh – at least a little. “Harry, can you imagine? A few minutes ago this child was on the Titanic…and now…here she is?”
“Hey. Better here than there.”
“Perhaps. But…perhaps not. We must understand why she is here, Harald.”
“Did she say anything to you in there?” he asked, nodding his head in the direction of the head.
“No, not really. She babbled on about the president. Something she had to tell the president.”
“Clinton? Now that’s a good one.”
“Harald, she said she needed to see the president.”
“Okay, let’s go to the White House with a crazy naked kid and see…”
“Harald. You can stop now.”
“Have you noticed? When you’re getting your dander up you call me Harald…”
“I do not.”
“Uh-huh, whatever you say, Slick.” He crossed his arms over his lap and grinned at her. “Well, they obviously need sleep – and you obviously need another scotch, so…” Callahan sighed as she ambled off to the kitchen.
She poured two more while he put a heavy log on the fire and sat on the hearth, and yup, she came right back to his side and put her head on his shoulder.
“Thank you, Harald,” she said, giving him a little elbow in the ribs.
“You’re welcome, Doc.” He looked at his watch and growled then: “Well, we missed it.”
“Shit happens,” Eisenstadt said, and for some reason Callahan thought that was about the funniest thing he’d ever heard in his life.
+++++
When it was time to get Liz up they went to the bedroom and the little girl was gone. Just gone, like she’d never been there and everything else was simple imagination…except her wet clothes were still in the bathroom. Deborah took them to the washing machine and put them on with a small load of Harry’s things, and when she came back into the room Liz was sitting up in bed – and now wondering what she was doing in Harry’s room.
“Do you remember anything?” Harry asked.
She looked away and shook her head. “I’m not sure what’s going on, Harry, but it’s like I know some kind of memory is there – but I just can’t reach it.”
“Been there, done that,” Harry sighed. “Deb? You better get the rest of your things packed. Liz? Can you make it up to the house?”
“Can I borrow your bathrobe?” she asked carefully, holding the sheets up to cover her breasts.
“Oh, right…uh, whoa…yeah. I’ll go put on some coffee…” Callahan said as he rolled out of his room. Liz looked at Eisenstadt and they both laughed.
+++++
Harry slept all the way back out to Sea Ranch after he and the doc dropped off the girls, and he woke with a start when they pulled up to the driveway. The doc got Harry’s wheelchair set up and helped him settle in, then he pushed Harry up to the house. DD had finished cleaning up the mess in Harry’s bathroom and just for kicks she’d cleaned the house too, again – but she watched him carefully as he rolled through the living room and out onto the deck.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen him like this,” she said to the doc as he came in behind Harry.
“He didn’t say a word coming back. Just fell asleep.”
“You think he’s depressed?”
“With a capitol fucking D, babe. I’ll take him into work with me tomorrow. He’s got the appointment for his leg, remember?”
“Has he had anything to eat?”
The doc shook his head. “Nope. Zero interest. He hardly ate the other night, and even Bennett said something to me about it.”
“You thinking anti-depressants?”
“You know me. I hate that shit; it ain’t right to go fucking around with the brain. He needs to get back to work, feel invested in life again.”
“I think I’ll fix a carbonara. He usually eats that.”
“Good idea,” said the doc.
“You go talk with him, see what’s up.”
“I better pour a couple of fingers, ya know?”
“Those two have been putting it down. Maybe we ought to slow that down a little?”
“Really? Harry? Drinking scotch?”
“Two bottles in four days.”
“Shit. Better make that two Cokes, okay?” Watson sighed as he turned and walked out to the deck, and he stood beside Callahan and watched him for a few moments…
“I’m not sure I can do this, Doc,” Callahan finally said.
“Do…what, Harry?”
“I’m not sure I can do ‘alone’ anymore, ya know? It was easier in the city, but out here? The only company out here is the wind and the waves, maybe a passing gull.”
“Don’t forget the sea lions.”
“Thanks, Doc, I needed that.”
“So, what are your options. You were talking about music, spending more time in the studio, working on youth programs. What happened to all that?”
“I can’t do it, Doc. Not by myself.”
“Hm-m. Maybe, Harry, that’s exactly what you need right now. Ever consider that?”
Callahan shook his head. “I’ve done ‘alone’ Doc. For most of my life, I think.”
“What about Deborah?”
“What about her?”
“You know, Harry, here you are talking about not wanting to be alone, yet when she got out of the car at the airport she came up to you and it was like some kind of a wall came up. I’ve never seen anyone in my life that wanted a kiss more than she did, while you for all intents and purposes turned into a glacier. Cold and hard, fracturing and falling into the sea. What on earth was going through your mind right then?”
“Fujiko. June. And even my boy.”
“Ah. The ghosts of Christmases Past.”
“Yeah, you could say that.”
“Tell me something. Can you see yourself with her?”
“Who? Deborah?”
“Yeah, meathead. Deborah.”
Callahan sighed. “She’s comfortable, Doc…ya know? She fits. So yeah, I could see her with me?”
“You could? Or you can?”
“What’s the difference, Doc?”
“Commitment, for one thing. Trust also comes to mind.”
“Trust?”
“Yeah, trust. As in: can she trust you to be there for the long haul?”
“We started to talk about it, but things went sideways.”
“Oh? What happened?”
“Liz came over.”
“Liz?”
“Yeah. And that’s the hard part, Doc. I think she’s…”
“She’s got a crush on you. Yeah, everyone’s got that, Callahan. She has since she was three. So what? She’s a child. You’re not. And remember that, would you?”
“I promised Cathy, and even Frank, that I’d take care of her.”
“Okay. Fine. Does that mean wedding bells and babies, Harry?”
“No, of course not.”
“Okay. So…what’s the problem?”
“She gets jealous,” Harry said.
“Jealous? Who, Liz?”
“Yeah, but I think even Deborah did, too.”
“You got to set boundaries, Harry. They both need to know where you stand, as in zero ambiguity. Got it?”
Callahan nodded. “Yeah.”
“Say you two,” DD said, coming out on the deck with Cokes and some nachos, “who wants dinner?”
“I’m not real hungry,” Harry sighed.
“Tough shit,” DD snarled. “I got bacon going for a carbonara, so get ready.” She wheeled around and zipped off to the kitchen, leaving Callahan with his mouth hanging open.
“What’s it like living with her, Doc?”
“Oh, like living with any other hurricane, Harry. She’s a force of nature, so you either get out of her way or get used to the wind.”
+++++
He called Eisenstadt after dinner. After DD cleaned up her colossal mess and folded his laundry.
She picked up the phone and right away he could feel the pain in her voice. “I’m sorry,” he said straight away.
“Sorry for what?”
“For the way I was at the airport. I’m really sorry.”
“How was the drive back to the house?”
“I slept. How ‘bout you? Did you sleep on the plane?”
“No. Liz and I talked the entire trip. About you.”
“Oh, no…”
“Oh, yes. And do you know what was said?”
“Uh…”
“She’s afraid for you, Harry. Afraid you will live your life by yourself.”
…
“And she’s afraid she’s to blame.”
“To blame? How so?”
“She loves you, Harry. Like a daughter loves her father, she loves you. And she wants to see you happy.”
“What about you, Deborah?”
“I’ve told you how I feel, Harry. Nothing has changed.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I am sure!” she barked. “Yes, I love you, you silly man. I could hardly breathe when we walked away from the car. And I could not handle the thought of you all alone out there…”
“When can you come back?”
“Come back? To visit, or to…”
“Deb, come back if you’re going to stay, but only if you plan to stay. Otherwise, I’m not sure I could stand the pain.”
They came to a long pause, a space where neither knew what to say, but Harry knew what she was waiting for.
“I love you, Kid,” he finally said, and he could feel her release from across the continent.
“I love you too, Meathead.”
They laughed for the longest time after that, and Harry slept well that night. So well he never noticed the blues gathered by his bed with their instruments.
Standing inside a rabbit hole…what must that be like? And is there an event horizon between the real and the unreal? What kind of gravity would pull you hardest there? How would it feel to meet the White Queen, or the Red?
Alas, dear reader, time for tea. Tea for two, I dare say. Or will it be three?
Only time will tell.
[Herb Alpert \\ This Guy’s In Love With You]
Chapter 62.3
After DD and the doc left, Callahan stoked the fire while Eisenstadt poured two glasses of scotch, and he checked his watch, wanting to take in the pulsar again. He regarded Eisenstadt as she came back into the living room, still not sure what to think of this woman. With her Coke bottle eyeglasses on she looked decidedly frumpy and bookish, yet with them off she had a pleasant, easy going demeanor he found…decidedly – comfortable. Sure, she was five years older than he was, but in the great scheme of things that hardly mattered…
And then he caught himself. ‘Why am I even thinking of this stranger in these terms?’
And only one thing came to mind, really.
‘Because I really dislike being alone. Especially now that I’m not going to work every day.’
And, he had to admit now, seeing Sam Bennett in his current state had shaken him up.
So…he sat on the hearth with his back to the fire and he wasn’t at all unhappy when she came and sat right beside him again.
“How you doin’?” he asked as she slid in close, handing over a tumbler.
And she leaned into him, put her head on his shoulder. “I feel better now.”
“Oh?” he said. “So I’m not the only one feeling this way?”
“I like the way I feel with you, Harry. Comfortable, like somehow we belong.”
He nodded. “It seems funny that we have a history. Copenhagen and all that…”
“I am not too old for you?” she wondered aloud.
He smiled. “As long as you don’t want babies I think we’ll be okay.”
“Dear God. Babies. I would never have been a good mother.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“I was too focused on my studies, and I hardly could manage being a wife, let alone a mother. Now, of course, all that has changed. I’ve been teaching for twenty years and I hate to say it, but I think that enough is enough.”
“What are your plans?”
“I hadn’t really made any, as strange as that may sound. I have my place in Cambridge, and I have a small cottage out on the Cape that I go to when it is warm enough, but all-in-all I’ve led a quiet life since Anders passed. Teaching has been enough for me, I think.”
“And now?”
“I like the way my head feels – right here beside you,” she said as she rubbed her head on his shoulder. “I think I might enjoy this a little too much.”
There came a knock on the front door and Liz announced herself before she made her way to the living room, and when she found Harry and Deborah sitting by the fire she grinned. “Fix me a scotch, Harry?” she asked.
“Got ID?” he growled.
“Oh, c’mon Harry! I’m nineteen! I can handle it!”
“You know,” Callahan grinned, “I think your twenty-first birthday will be memorable for a bunch of reasons, and maybe chief among them getting snockered, but I made a promise to your mom…”
“I know, I know. And here he is, ladies and gentlemen. I give you Harry Callahan! Protector of ladies’ virtue everywhere!”
“That’s me,” Harry sighed. “So? Did you come down to check out the pulsar, or my liquor cabinet?”
“No, I wanted to tell you I’m flying back to Boston with you, Professor Eisenstadt.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Harry said, and Deborah nodded in agreement.
“I really should get my degree, one way or another, but a Harvard degree…”
“I agree,” Eisenstadt said. “You are off to a good start, but it is only that. You must finish what you begin.”
Liz nodded. “So, what time is the doc coming down to pick us up?”
Callahan looked at his watch. “Six hours. The pulsar should kick off in a half hour. Are you packed?”
“Yup. Would you guys mind if I hang around and watch the light show from here?”
“Not at all,” Deborah said, standing and going over to the kitchen. She returned a minute later with a tumbler of something and handed it to Liz.
“It’s ginger ale, Harry,” Eisenstadt grinned.
Harry shook his head. “You two are going to make it real hard for me not to play the asshole.”
Liz took a sip then wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Geez, why do you even drink stuff that tastes like that? That’s revolting! It’s like battery acid with a little Tabasco thrown in for good measure.”
“See,” Harry sighed, holding up his hands, “I was just trying to protect you for the vices of old age.”
Liz put the drink down and and went to the piano; she started playing random notes but these efforts soon began to coalesce around a theme…
“Where have I heard that?” Harry mumbled – just under his breath.
“It’s what you began playing last night, just before…”
But now when Harry looked at Liz she was completely entranced, and for some reason he recognized what was happening to her – and what she was playing…
“Someone or something has linked up to her,” Harry whispered. “She’s being fed these notes. Did I look like this?”
Eisenstadt nodded, then out of curiosity she turned and looked behind and yes, there it was. The pink sphere. “Be very still now, Harry,” she barely whispered, “but the sphere has returned. The pink one.”
“Swell.”
The sphere was absolutely tiny now, no larger than an aspirin tablet, but it was bright – and spinning madly. It remained fixed near the ceiling, apparently locked into communicating with Liz and unconcerned with anything else going on in the room, so Deborah stood and walked across the living room until she was standing directly under the glowing orb. She walked to the hall closet and picked out a broom and returned, then held the bristled end up and inserted the straw ends into the sphere…
And there was no reaction at all, none whatsoever.
And when she removed the broom the bristles appeared completely undisturbed.
“That cannot be?” she muttered, so she pushed the bristles back up and all the way through the sphere this time, and again the bristles appeared untouched. She swatted at the sphere with the bristled end and the sphere didn’t budge, so she flipped the broom and swatted the sphere with wooden handle – and the broomstick passed right through the sphere – and neither the sphere nor the broom reacted at all.
Eisenstadt looked at Harry and shrugged.
Though Harry, for his part, picked up his glass and drained it.
Eisenstadt came back to the hearth and sat by him once again. “It is as if it isn’t really here,” she whispered.
“Could it be some kind of projection? Maybe like a hologram?”
“Possibly. But there is another possibility, and one that disturbs me even more. There are theories concerning the possible existence of parallel dimensions, but what if there was a way for elements of one dimension to intrude on another?”
“I’m just curious,” Harry sighed, “but when you were growing up, did you eat your porridge with a slide rule?”
“Only on schooldays.”
“Figures.”
The sphere began moving now, and once again it slipped silently to the piano, hovering just above the closed cover.
“Help me up, would you?” he asked Deborah, and once he had his walker underhand he slid over to the piano and pulled up the cover, exposing the various bridges and dampers – and the soundboard – and the sphere reacted immediately by spinning up to an even greater velocity.
Then Liz started playing the last movement of the Fourth, music she had seen only once – so Callahan really knew she had to be receiving instructions as she played…
…and then Harry realized she was playing his mother’s original score, the original phrasing unedited by von Karajan, and he stepped back from the piano in time to see Liz’s body shimmer in the air for a moment – and then disappear.
Harry looked up and watched the sphere – now spinning so fast it was hardly visible – and then he turned to Deborah. “I think we’re going to need a shitload of towels,” he grumbled.
A fairly brief snippet here. Maybe one cup of tea on the tea-meter?
[Paul McCartney \\ Every Night]
Chapter 62.2
He woke up with a start, sat up and looked around the room – not really knowing where he was – or where he’d been.
Callahan recognized his bedroom and for some reason he felt a surge of relief, then he realized he was sweating profusely and terribly thirsty. “And why do I feel so disoriented?” he growled at his shaking hands.
He swung his leg out of bed and pulled the wheelchair close, then swung himself onto the seat – very nearly missing the seat and just saving his ass from another fall – and he grumbled all the way into the head, peeling off his soaked t-shirt and tossing it into the hamper as he passed. Then he positioned himself before the countertop and hoisted his body up to brace and turn on the shower– and that’s when he saw the markings.
He saw a bunch of puncture woulds, and each looked like a site where a large bore needle had been inserted…and then he noticed that the injection sites – if that’s what they were – were grouped in threes, and that these groupings formed perfect equilateral triangles. And he could see at least five groupings like that on his torso. He shook his head, not at all sure what might have caused these as he started to look at his leg.
He washed up and brushed his teeth in the shower, but something on the insides of his gums didn’t feel right so he just rinsed with mouthwash and sighed. Something was seriously wrong, but he still had no idea what that something was, or even what it might be.
He hopped out of the shower and dried off, then unfolded his walker and made it to the dresser in his bedroom. There was a mirror there as well, and he saw more of the same triangular groupings under his arms, but he just couldn’t see his back, nor the backside of his leg. ‘Gotta call the doc,’ he sighed, thinking he might have picked up the measles.
Then he remembered Deborah…Eisenstadt.
He pulled on his usual SFPD gym shorts and put a sweatshirt on over his t-shirt, then he got into his wheelchair and rolled into Lloyd’s old bedroom…and he found she was still asleep. He reached over and gave her a nudge and she woke with a start, and he could see enough to realize she too was covered in sweat.
She sat up and immediately grabbed her head. “Oh, God! I have a headache!” she cried.
And yet Callahan could already see several of the triangular groups on her upper arms.
“What are you staring at?” Deborah said when she saw Callahan.
“Those marks, on your arm,” Callahan said. “I hate to ask, but I need you to check my back.”
“What?”
“Here, look at my arms,” he said, holding his arms out.
“You have the same marks, too?”
“Yup. A bunch of ‘em, from my shoulders right on down my leg.”
She rolled out of bed and came around to his back and he leaned forward in his chair enough for her to pull up his shirts…then…
“Yes, there are six groups of three on your back,” she said. “In a simple rectangular pattern, too.”
“They look like puncture wounds, right?” he added. “Yet I don’t feel anything. You?”
“No. Nothing.”
“I woke up covered in sweat, and so did you. Is your headache…?”
“It’s gone. Completely. So…perhaps this was a circulatory event? Did you have a headache?”
“Not that I noticed,” he sighed, “but I feel like I’ve gone ten rounds with Mohammed Ali.”
“Who is this?”
He shook his head. “Not important.” He saw the same marks running down her legs and not one showed any sign of bleeding – or any evidence of other mishap, for that matter – and he thought it looked like these sites had been created by a machine of some sort. “What else could account for this kind of precision…?” he whispered.
“The sphere,” Eisenstadt said. “The angry blue sphere. I feel certain it has something to do with this…entity.”
“Did you see something?”
“I feel as if I should, but Harry, this is very strange. I feel a memory is there but that somehow it has been, or is somehow being suppressed.”
“I hate to say it, but yeah, it’s like a missing hole in my memory. I know something is there, but I just can’t find it.”
“This is nothing new, I’m afraid. There was a conference recently where I teach…”
“MIT, right?”
“Yes. This conference concerned the psychopathologies of the so-called UFO abductee, and I attended a few of the sessions, those that concerned specific references to time dilation, but many of the psychiatrists attending did not want to generalize these phenomena. While some could trace an etiology back to some sort of underlying schizoaffective disorder…”
“Uh, Doc, sorry, but you’re going to need to tone it down a notch…”
“Ah, yes. Well, some physicians present did not feel comfortable about calling the abduction phenomenon a medical, or even a psychiatric condition.”
“Which means?”
“These physicians have concluded some of these events are grounded in reality.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I know. I feel the same way, Harry, but…” And here she paused, perhaps gathering her thoughts. “What is the last thing you remember from last night?”
“We were on the deck and Sagittarius started…” he said, his voice suddenly a flat monotone.
“And?”
“And…then I woke up?”
“Just so. It is the same with me. Something has happened. To us, I mean.”
Callahan felt heavy, almost like he was coming out of a trance, then he heard the front door open, followed by DDs almost adolescent “Yoo-hoo! Anyone home?”
“Is the doc with you?” Harry replied.
“Yessiree-Bob, you betcha!”
“Oh dear God,” Callahan moaned. “She must’ve gotten laid last night…”
Deborah tried not to laugh but DD walked into the room just then and when she saw Harry with his shirt askew a prudish eyebrow arched high. “Well, well, well,” she sighed, “did somebody not have enough fun last night?”
“Come take a look at this,” Harry snarled, and as DD knew that tone she snapped to.
“What am I looking…oh shit, Harry! What the hell did that?”
“They’re all over Deborah, too,” Harry growled. “Where’s the doc?”
And then, as if right on cue: “Holy shit!” Doc Watson barked. “Where’d all this water come from?”
+++++
Delgetti and Sam Bennett walked up to the door and Callahan was there waiting for them.
“Shit, Harry,” Captain Bennett grumbled as he smacked Callahan’s leg, “I like the look, but why not get a peg-leg?”
“Because I might be tempted to kick your ass!” Callahan replied with a smile. “Howya doin’, Cap?”
“I keep forgetting how far it is out here,” Del added as he took Harry’s hand. “Harry? How’s it hangin’?”
“To my knee, shipmate. You look kinda thirsty, but I may have something out back to take care of that.”
He led Captain Bennett through his house but it was obvious his old captain’s legs were bothering him…then they reached the stairs to head down to the patio where everything was set up.
“Harry? I’m not sure I can make it down those stairs…” Sam sighed.
“Well Hell, Cap…I know I can’t but I’ve got a spare chair. Why don’t you take this one. I just got it and it’s got a motor and it’ll go just fast enough to get you into trouble.”
“I don’t know, Harry. I just don’t know.”
Harry looked up at Delgetti and grinned. “Del, why don’t you run down and grab a couple of brews.”
“Sure, Harry…” his old friend nodded, understanding the moment all too well.
“Harry? I’m not doing so good, ya know?”
“It’s hard without Elaine, I guess?”
Sam broke down when he heard that. “Oh Harry, you have no idea…but now, livin’ in a home? That’s what it is, Harry, ya know? Just a fuckin’ warehouse for old geezers waitin’ to shuffle off, ya know?”
“Sam…?”
“And don’t you spout off about getting a hobby or making new friends. Ain’t no friends left, Harry, except you guys. Hell, if Delgetti didn’t come down on weekends the only people I talk to all week are the aides who drop by to see if I’ve shit myself.”
“Is it as bad as that?” Callahan asked, shocked at the change he saw in Bennett.
“It’s fuckin’ worse, Harry. There ain’t nothing worse than bein’ alone, not now, not at this stage.”
“Not how you thought things would turn out, is it?”
Bennett looked away. “We used to look at you, at all those women you had coming and going and we used to worry about how you’d end up, and now here I sit. I think that’s called irony, Harry, and it fucking sucks. The big one.”
“So…have you thought about photography?” Callahan said jokingly.
“Yeah, maybe we could go down to the valley and shoot porn.”
“There ya go. Pop wood and you wouldn’t even need a tripod.”
They laughed and Del came up with a beer for his captain, and Harry asked DD to find his spare wheelchair.
“I’m gonna let Sam use this one today,” he said when he saw the question in her eyes.
It took a few minutes but they got Bennett down the outside path and out to the grill and Sam just couldn’t resist; he strapped on an apron and started tossing ribeyes on the fire, suddenly back in his element. Callahan looked at his captain and grinned.
“It’s the simple things, Harry,” Delgetti said, coming up beside his old wheelchair. “I haven’t been able to get him interested in anything, but look at him now. Maybe all any of us want is to be useful, you know?”
“I do, as a matter of fact.”
“Sorry man. I freaked out when I heard about the leg. What are you gonna do now?”
“Music. That’s all I’ve got left, Del.”
“Hear that. Can I grab you an Oly?”
“Only I you’re joining me,” Callahan smiled…just as Deborah Eisenstadt came over, with two fresh bottles – the bottles sweating now that they were out of the ice. She passed them over and made her way back to Bennett.
“Who’s the, uh, new girl?” Delgetti asked.
“She’s some kind of physics professor at MIT…”
“Yeah, she looks like it, too.”
Callahan laughed. “Ah, she’s alright. Good company, anyway.”
“She’s stayin’ out here with you?”
“Staying in Lloyd’s old room. She came out with Liz…”
“Liz? Is she here? Man, I’d love to see her!”
“Yeah, she’s around here somewhere.”
“Physics professor, huh?” Delgetti grinned. “Cute legs, but Harry, ain’t she a little too stringy for you?”
“Del! I haven’t been home a week! I wasn’t exactly expecting to get laid anytime soon, ya know?”
Everyone on the patio stopped talking.
Everyone turned and looked at Callahan.
“Oops,” Harry whispered, and he saw that Captain Bennett was glowering at him. “Well, all’s right in the world, I’d say.”
“Yeah,” Delgetti sighed, “you still got a raging case of foot in mouth disease, Harry.”
+++++
Harry played the piano after dinner, and Liz danced with Sam for a while and the sight got to both Del and Callahan. Eisenstadt even danced with Bennett, at least until he put his hands on her butt – but everyone laughs at old men when they do stuff like that and tonight was no exception to the rule, and soon enough all the guests were loading into cars and heading south, leaving DD and Eisenstadt to load the dishwasher while Harry and the doc cleared tables and carried stuff up to the kitchen.
“So,” Doc said after the hard part was wrapped-up, “what about those puncture wounds. They still not itching?”
“I hadn’t thought of them ‘til you mentioned it, Doc,” Harry said. “But no…”
“Then they used sterile fields. Did you notice any kind of residue on your arms or torso?”
“Residue?”
“Like some kind of antiseptic. Betadine, or something like that?”
“No, nothing, nothing at all,” Deborah said. “And that is odd, isn’t it?”
“Odd, yes,” Doc Watson sighed. “And it means whoever did this has some serious understanding of the human biome.” He shook his head, clearly perplexed. “I’m just curious, Harry, but what aren’t you telling me?”
Callahan looked at Eisenstadt but she simply shrugged.
So…Callahan told DD and the Doc about going back in time to visit his mother as she played the closing notes of the Fourth, then about finding himself on the Titanic just as she slammed into the iceberg…
“Are you saying that’s where all that water came from?” the doc cried. “No way, man!”
“Yeah. Way, man. Then we went out to look at the pulsar and the next thing I know I’m in bed. With these triangles all over my fat ass.”
“Harry!” DD cried. “You do not have a fat ass!”
The doc rolled his eyes.
“You’re still leaving out something, Harry,” Eisenstadt sighed. “Again.”
“I am?”
“The spheres, Harry. You haven’t mentioned the spheres.”
Callahan nodded and took a deep breath, then he told them about their encounter with the blues and the single pink sphere…
…and when he finished DD was incredulous while the doc seemed curiously unphased.
“You both saw these things, these spheres?” he asked.
“We did,” Deborah replied, “and I am not so sure these are simple mechanical devices. I think they may be some kind of transport mechanism…”
“Honey?” DD sighed, “maybe we’d better have some of the good stuff?”
Doc went to the kitchen and poured four shots of Drambuie and carried them back out, and he found Harry struggling to get a fire going but decided against helping. It took a while, but Harry worked his magic and soon a nice fire was blazing away in the fireplace. Deborah went and sat beside Harry on the stone hearth, and DD noticed how close she sat to him. The doc did too.
“A transport mechanism, you said?” the doc repeated.
“One of the blue spheres definitely seemed to react to our actions,” Deborah said as she nodded. “That one seemed more hostile, until the pink one intervened.”
“And they came after these events with your mother and the ship?” the doc asked. “What happened to set this off?”
And Harry nodded. “I was playing something…it was just coming to me, at least I thought it was, but now I’m not so sure.”
“What do you mean?” Deborah asked.
“You said, what, those doodling notes I was playing…”
“Had form and structure,” Deborah said.
“And…harmony,” Harry added.
“Yes! Harmonic structure…like the sound itself…”
“Is the gateway she mentioned,” Callahan sighed. “And the harmonic structure is bound up within those last few notes.”
“You mean,” the doc interjected, “that the last notes you discovered open up…”
“Something the spheres do not want us to play around with,” Deborah said, looking down at Harry’s fingers. “Harry, you hold the key. You know that now, don’t you?”
Callahan shook his head. “Can’t use it. No way.”
She leaned into him. “Good for you, Harry. Don’t tempt the fates.”
“I can’t tell whether you’re making fun of me or not,” he grinned.
“I’m proud of you, I think. It’s the right decision. Nobody should…” she started to say, but then she thought of that Old Man. Because what was he if not a time traveler?
“Nobody should what?” DD asked.
“Tempt the fates,” Callahan repeated…but he too was thinking about Lloyd and the Old Man…and of a looming battle between father and son.
First, a little housekeeping. Please note that the previously posted chapter 62 (actually 62.1thru 62.3) was actually supposed to be chapter 61 etc., so unless I’m totally lost now, with this post we’re actually up to the real chapter 62. Actually speaking, anyway, this is the actual 62.1, and the last 62.1 was actually supposed to be 61.1, and if you’re not actually confused yet, don’t worry because I’m actually confused enough for both of us.
Is it just me, or does it seem like Prince Vlad has a really bad case of projectile dysfunction? Maybe he should take lessons from Will Smith?
Okay…I’ll shut up now.
But, alas, if not for music matters, I’d have nothing else to say.
(King Crimson\\ I Talk To The Wind – Duo Version)
Chapter 62.1 (actually…)
It is four in the morning and Callahan can’t sleep. Everything he tries to think about, every distraction he comes upon always takes him back to the same point in time – to what caused his mother to die – because she had – obviously – chosen death. And now that Liz and Deborah Eisenstadt were here – and picking at all the old scabs covering this wound – he was beginning to feel very uneasy about all the other unknown events surrounding her passing.
His mother had been fighting what he’d always regarded a rearguard action against encroaching dementia, but what if he’d been wrong about that all along? ‘And not just me,’ he thought, ‘all of us. But me and Dad most of all.’
The single most important manifestation of her dementia, of her presumed psychosis, had been the repeated appearance of the “Old Man,” only now Callahan knew the Old Man was real. And not just real, but more than likely a time traveler. And if that was the case just what had the Old Man been doing to her? What outcome had he been trying to shape?
So…he’d realized that she hadn’t been some kind of garden variety schizophrenic after all? Maybe the Old Man had become more like her own personal tormenter, and maybe as his appearances became more and more frequent she’d grown depressed and felt undermined by his constant, unwanted intrusions? ‘I mean…who wouldn’t,’ he sighed as he sat at the piano, his fingers playing random notes in the deeper registers. “I know I wouldn’t be able to handle something insidious like…” he grumbled.
“What couldn’t you handle,” Eisenstadt said, padding into the living room in her bathrobe and fuzzy pink slippers.
“The things my mother had to put up with,” he replied, his hands never leaving the keyboard.
“What are you playing? It’s beautiful.”
“Playing? I wasn’t…I’m not – playing anything.”
“You could have fooled me. There was structure and melody, and an almost melancholic longing in these notes.”
He closed his eyes and started playing again, only now he was very much aware that specific notes were coming to him. He straightened up and addressed the keyboard and opened his mind and time seemed to dissolve as he played now, and he could just hear the crashing surf below and then a cool breeze flowing through the room…
“Harald?”
“Mom? Is that you?”
Another passing breeze and then faint laughter, like children on a distant playground.
“What are you trying to tell me?”
His eyes closed, he reached out through the music, the notes pulling them together through space and time.
“I can…I think I can hear you now…”
He could hear her grand old Bösendorfer now, hear her playing and he knew he was hearing her in the compound, at Avi’s house.
He opened his eyes and it was like he was flying through cloud, his eyes watering as he crossed gulfs of cold hard time…
…and then… she was there…and she was…
…playing the Fourth. And yes, there was von Karajan, staring in disbelief as she played, and von Karajan wept in astonished understanding as her music was carried along on the breeze…
Callahan was behind and above his mother now, looking down on her as she scored this crucial last fragment of her final concerto, at the music he now know so well, and he watched as she made her way into the final passage.
But no, this was different. She…no…this wasn’t the music von Karajan had given him.
He moved closer, looked at her penciled notes on the sheet music and he could see the harmonic interplay take shape in the air above the piano.
He moved closer still and she turned and looked into his eyes. “Do you understand now, Harald?” she said to him. “Do you see where I am taking this?”
“I think so, Mom.”
“We can never do this again, so you must understand the harmonic structure, now, before you leave…”
He pointed to a section of notes. “I’ve never seen anything like this, Mom. What is it?”
“This is the key, Harald. This is the gateway, and you must now become the keeper. Sit beside me now and play the notes with me, form the chord in your mind. Do you see it now?”
“Yes. Yes, I do,” he said as he played.
“Then go now. Go, but Harald, you must never come back here. Promise me, now, that you will never…!”
“But Mom, I…”
“I know, I know. But Harald, you must guard what you have learned here because this will become very dangerous for you. Now…promise me…before they come for us!”
“Alright Mom, I promise,” he cried as he reached out for her…
…but she was receding now, disappearing inside the cold embrace of the same dense white cloud, yet even now she was reaching out for him and he saw her calling out a name. He strained to hear what she was saying then he recoiled in disbelief as he found himself tumbling through a black void, surrounded by shimmering blue fingers of dancing electricity…
And when he landed in a dazed heap he looked around he felt a damp wooden floor underhand and this place was very cold. Very, very cold. And when he raised his head and looked around it looked like he was laying inside a wooden bucket of some sort, and he felt ice cold condensation rolling down the planked walls of the bucket…
Then he felt a small hand on his shoulder, and he heard a little girl’s voice whispering close to his ear.
“You’d better stand up now,” the ticklish little voice said. “This is the bad part.”
He looked up, saw a little girl standing beside him and he took her offered hand and tried to stand – and suddenly he realized he was standing on two legs now.
But there were two men standing in the bucket too, and one of them was rubbing his hands as if to ward off the cold…
Then the little girl tugged at his shirtsleeve. “Could you pick me up, please. I want to watch.”
“Watch? Watch what?” he said as he lifted her up to his waist, and she pointed out into the mist.
“There. If you look real hard you can just about see it now.”
He turned and realized he was high above the foredeck of a large ship steaming through the night, but just then one of the men by his side crossed himself…
“Sweet Jesus,” the man said as he picked up the cold brass growler by his hand.
Harry turned and looked at the little girl as sudden understanding turned to panic. “Where are we?” he muttered.
“Iceberg!” the lookout cried into the growler. “Iceberg, dead ahead!”
“Don’t worry,” the little girl sighed, “it only hurts for just a little bit, but it’ll be over soon.”
Callahan watched as the iceberg came out of the mist and he knew there wasn’t anything he could do so he simply gave way to the moment and held on. The Titanic grazed the spur just beneath the waterline and shattered fragments of ice rained down on the deck, and he turned in time to see officers running into the wheelhouse to close the watertight bulkheads and now everything felt just like a nightmare.
“But it’s not,” the little girl said.
“It’s not what?”
“A nightmare. But don’t worry. No one will believe you, so it doesn’t matter.”
He swallowed hard but in the next instant he started falling again, and a billion years later – or was it just a second? – he was on the floor in the living room of his house and he felt like he was drowning in freezing water.
He heard screaming and when he looked up he saw a blinking owl, then the owl was by his side, helping him into his wheelchair and that’s when he realized his house was awash in seawater, and that the floor of his living room was covered in shattered fragments of ice…
“My God, Harry!” Eisenstadt cried. “What has happened? Where were you?”
“What do you mean…where was I? I was right here!”
“No! No, you’ve been gone for several minutes?”
“Gone?”
“Oh God! Harry! Do you know what this means?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Harry! You left this time! You…traveled in time – just like the Old Man Liz mentioned!”
“No…no way…”
“The music, Harry! This music! The Fourth is the key!”
“Where did all this ice come from?” Callahan asked as he surveyed the wreckage around his chair.
“It must come from your movement through time…”
“I was on the Titanic. With a little girl.”
Eisenstadt stepped back from him as she stared at the ice in disbelief. “The Shift. You experienced the Shift.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The Aubuchon Shift, Harry. You’ve found the gateway…to the Shift!”
“The…gateway,” he repeated – but his eye had been drawn to a shimmering blue sphere that at first appeared to be smaller than a golf ball hovering near the ceiling. “What is that?” Callahan said, pointing at the ceiling.
Eisenstadt turned and looked up at the sphere. “Have you seen anything like this before,” she whispered.
“No Ma’am, I can’t say that I have.”
“Do you have any idea what…?”
“No Ma’am, I sure don’t, but I think I’m going to a gun store first thing in the morning.”
“You know, I’m not sure that will help matters.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right…but I’ll sure feel a lot better than I do right now.”
Another sphere appeared, then another. The first sphere started spinning rapidly, and it grew brighter the faster it moved.
“Harald? Is it my imagination, or does that one seem angry?”
“It’s your imagination,” Callahan growled – as two more spheres arrived. “Definitely your imagination.”
Another sphere arrived, but this one a subdued pink color, and the spinning blue sphere simply disappeared. Moments later the the other spheres began leaving, and soon only Harry and Eisenstadt remained in the room – facing the pink sphere and not at all sure what to do next.
“I’d do just about anything to have my leg back right now,” Callahan whispered to Eisenstadt. “You think we should offer it a glass of scotch?”
Which caused the pink sphere to silently drift across the room towards Callahan. He guessed it was about a foot in diameter – yet as it came closer it also seemed to be growing in size – but then the sphere drifted by his face and moved across the living room, finally settling above the Bösendorfer. It hovered there, then began – apparently – to examine the instrument in minute detail.
Callahan turned to Eisenstadt. “I think I could use another scotch. How ‘bout you? And maybe a towel?”
She shook her head, her eyes focused on the sphere as it drifted around and then settled under the piano. It moved to the keyboard a minute later and it appeared to take great interest here, lingering over the keyboard for several minutes, then the sphere drifted across the room and it spun up for a few seconds – then disappeared.
“Well…fuck,” Callahan muttered.
“Harry, you are a man of few words, but at least they are well considered.”
“Right, if you say so, Doc. Now, if you don’t mind…? I need a really big scotch, so if you wouldn’t mind…?”
She turned to Harry and grew quite serious: “Harry? You mentioned the Titanic. Where else did you go? Did you talk to anyone else?”
“No scotch, huh?”
“Oh, alright, alright, I see I have created a monster. Now…start talking, and leave nothing out!”
He looked at his piano while Eisenstadt went to refill his tumbler and grab a towel, and after she returned he looked at the last dying embers in the fireplace…
“I talked with my mother…”
“You spoke to her? You actually interacted?”
He nodded. “And she told me not to come back again. Made me promise, as a matter of fact.”
“Did she say anything else?”
“When I was leaving,” he nodded, “she said ‘Dana Goodman.’”
“That’s all?”
“Yup. I couldn’t hear her real good, but I’m pretty sure that’s what she said.”
“Goodman…Goodman…?” Eisenstadt repeated. “Where have I…”
“You mentioned her earlier, Doc. When you were talking about Claire…”
“Yes! Claire Aubuchon! She was a passenger on the Titanic, just a little girl at the time, but she was there…”
Callahan grinned. “Yup. I met her.”
“You what?”
“I met her, up in the, oh, hell, what do you call it…like a crow’s nest…where the guys standing watch were stationed…”
“And Claire was there? With you?”
Callahan nodded. “Yeah, and I got the impression this wasn’t her first time there.”
“You were a detective, correct? Can you find this Dana Goodman?”
Callahan shrugged. “I’m not sure how much access to information I still have right now. I’m retired, but actually retired cops have a fair amount of residual power. I can still carry the badge and the gun but I’m not sure how much computer access I have.”
“This might be a good time to find out, Harald.”
“Call me Harry, okay Doc? My mom called me that, and I never really liked it.”
“Okay, Harry. Tell me…do you have a computer?”
“No…well, there might still be a couple up in the studio.”
“Internet?”
Callahan shrugged. “I don’t know if everything is still hooked up.”
“Would Liz know?”
Harry shook his head. “My, uh, my son hooked all that stuff up.”
“Oh. I see. Well, perhaps we should go see…”
They heard someone in the kitchen…opening a cabinet door and taking a glass down from a shelf. Then the refrigerator door opening, followed by the hissing sound of a large bottle of Coke being opened. Then they heard the sound of liquid pouring into a glass – and Harry looked at Eisenstadt and both shrugged.
And then the Old Man walked out of the kitchen, and Callahan saw he was still wearing the same loden cape, still carrying the same ornately carved cane as the other times he’d seen him, only now he walked with an easy familiarity over to the sofa and sat down heavily.
“I do miss Coca-Cola,” the Old Man sighed after he took a long pull from his glass.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Callahan growled.
“Oh, nothing, Pops. Just a sign of the times. So, how’s the leg?”
“It sucks. Why?”
“You ever figure out who shot you?”
Callahan shook his head.
“Wanna know?” the Old Man asked.
“Not really.”
“Okay, Pops…”
“Why do you keep calling me that?”
The Old Man smiled. “Oh, no reason. Just a sign of the times.”
“What the Hell does that mean?”
The Old Man shrugged. “So, tell me about the sphere?”
“The sphere?” Callahan snarled. “What are you talking about?”
“The sphere that just left. What color was it?”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Pops, listen. Just take my word for it…I need to know.”
“There were several blue ones,” Eisenstadt cried in exasperation, “and then a pink one appeared.”
“What did she do?”
“She?” Callahan growled. “What the fuck do you mean by that?”
“It seemed to study the piano,” Eisenstadt replied calmly, ignoring Harry’s sudden, inexplicable reticence.
“That’s all?”
“Yes. Then it left,” Eisenstadt added.
The Old Man put his glass on the cocktail table and sighed. “Well then,” he said, “as much as I’d really like to stay and shoot the shit, I must be going.”
“Of course,” Harry said, almost baring his teeth, “please…go.”
The Old Man stood and then he looked at Harry’s missing leg and shook his head. “Sorry the leg is still bothering you,” he said, then he tapped his cane on the floor twice and disappeared.
Eisenstadt looked at the spot where the Old Man had just been sitting, then she looked over at Callahan. “What was that all about?”
“I’m not sure,” he sighed as he toweled his face dry, then he wheeled over to the cocktail table and looked at the glass. “Could you see if there are any plastic bags in the kitchen? Like maybe a baggie or something like that? And a paper towel?”
“Alright.”
She came back a moment later with both and he took the paper towel and picked up the glass, obviously checking for fingerprints as he held it up to the light. After rotating the glass and holding it up at various angles he carefully placed the glass into the plastic bag and sealed it.
“Are you going to check for fingerprints?” She asked.
“I am, yes, but I think I know who he is now.”
“Pops? He called you Pops, did he not…?”
“Yup. And Lloyd used to call me that, at least when he was happy he did.”
“That is your son?”
Callahan nodded.
“What happened to him, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Oh, not much. He killed a musician and then disappeared.”
“Ah. A nice, well adjusted boy…”
“He was indeed. He was his mother’s son.” Callahan grimaced and then looked away, out into the night. “Could you push me out onto the deck, please?”
“Of course.”
He looked at his watch and nodded. “It’s about time, I reckon,” he said as she pushed him out into the wind.
He locked the wheels and stood up, holding onto the rail to steady up for a moment, then he searched the southern horizon for Sagittarius…
“There it is,” Callahan said, pointing to the steam coming from the teapot, then he looked at Eisenstadt…who was shivering now as cool breezes off the sea settled over her. Without thinking he put his arm around her and pulled her close – just as the first burst of light pierced the night.
The blue sphere stopped spinning just then – as it moved in slowly towards Callahan.
So…anyone wanna talk about Will Smith at the Oscars? Good, nor do I. Music, however, always matters.
(Sting \\ Russians v.2022)
Chapter 62.3
Callahan and Eisenstadt were sitting in the living room; the fireplace in the heart of his house was blazing away – sending flickering shadows of amber ghosts in desperate flight all around the room. Callahan was nursing his second Diet Coke of the evening, yet after taking one last sip he shuddered and put the glass down. “This stuff tastes like pure unadulterated panther piss,” he growled.
She smiled. “Do you have any single malt?”
“Doubtful. I used to keep some here for guests, so if there is any it’ll be over in the cabinet above the ‘fridge.”
Deborah went over and checked the cabinet, and he heard her gasp as she took in the choice. “Oh my. Someone very interesting has been stocking your liquor cabinet, Harry.”
“Doc likes his scotch. Probably him, if you get my drift. You into that stuff?”
“I am. Would you like to have a snort?”
“Sure. What the hell…anything beats this stuff.”
She came back a moment later with two glasses of caramel colored liquor and handed one to Callahan. He took a tentative sniff then a sip, and he nodded. “Pretty good. What is it?”
“Aberlour. A decent 16 year old. Very smooth, don’t you think.”
He shrugged. “If you say so. Never been into it.”
“Oh, it’s just something to take the edge off, I think. Sit in front of the fireplace and think about the day, kind of look back…”
“Look back. Yeah, I like that.”
“I know you don’t want to do it, Mr. Callahan…”
“Oh, come on, it’s been what? – four days now…so you can call me Harry, and I promise I won’t bite.”
“Alright…Harry. What is that? Short for Harold?”
“Harald, with an ‘a’.”
“So, so the Danish spelling…from your mother’s side, I assume?”
“Yup.”
“Did her mother, your grandmother, play the piano?”
“Yes. I think she played at the concert level. Quite accomplished, at least that’s what Mom told me, but she passed away when my mother was still pretty young.”
“Do you think your mother, well, that she traveled when she played?”
“I’m not sure, Doc. She’d play and there were times I just saw her sitting there, almost like she was catatonic. All I can remember is that it really scared my dad and me when she got like that. It was spooky, but, well, have you been around many mental cases?”
“Only in faculty meetings,” Eisenstadt said, smiling wistfully. “Sorry. No, but please, do go on…”
Callahan nodded absent-mindedly. “I’ve seen a few. Jumpers. People in emotional shock. But in a way most people who set out to murder someone, well, they’re usually emotional basket cases, in one way or another…”
“That’s right. You were a homicide detective, were you not?”
“Yeah, for most of my time in the department I was in CID…uh, that’s the Criminal Investigations Division. When most cops first go into the division they usually get assigned to thebunko, or the theft and fraud division, but some go to vice. You do well there and you get assigned to homicide. It’s supposed to be a big deal but looking back on it I kind of wish I’d stayed on the street…”
“Oh? Why is that?”
Callahan sighed and looked into the fireplace, at glowing embers under burning logs. “Being a cop…well…it’s like living in a sewer. People who do stuff, commit crimes, they’re like all the people who just don’t fit in, ya know? They’re the people on the outside looking in. Usually not real bright, some just plain broken…”
“Makes sense. If you’re reasonably intelligent you find it’s rather easy to make a good living…”
Callahan smiled, then he nodded. “Until you run into a stockbroker or a physician with tons of money and then you realize he committed the murder. Or the well-off old lady who takes in and kills an old man for his Social Security checks. There’s just a screw loose, Doc. I don’t know how else to say it. You can look ‘em in the eye and see it. Something wrong, something off way down deep, maybe something that happened to ‘em a long time ago, but they really just don’t fit in…”
“You saw a lot of bad things, didn’t you?”
He nodded, but for a while he couldn’t take his eyes off the embers. Then he held up his glass of scotch and looked at the fire through the liquid…
“Do you have nightmares about such things?”
Callahan nodded again, more slowly now, and he found himself back in San Paulo. Looking into Jennifer Spencer’s demon-haunted eyes. “Painting a carousel,” he muttered, his mind going round and round…
“What? What did you say?”
Harry shook himself back into the moment. “Oh, nothing. I was just thinking about a case.” He chuckled as an ember snapped and popped and he watched as a fragment arced through the air, landing on the slate floor. “A nut case, as a matter of fact. I have a self-portrait of her hanging in the bedroom.”
“The one with the eyes?” Eisenstadt asked.
And then Callahan frowned. “I have a hard time getting her out of my mind.”
“Why her?”
“She was broken, ya know? Damaged goods. But in a way she was so easy to love.”
“And you loved her?”
He nodded. “For a while.” He looked at the ember on the floor, a soft glowing red thing that was about to fade away, and he took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “We were just too far apart, I guess. Close, but not touching.”
“Sounds painful.”
He shook his head again and smiled. “It’s amazing how many cops end up marrying people they meet on a call. You know, like a girl comes home from work and finds her place has been broken into and here comes the cop, and there it is. Something sparks. Or someone is in an accident and the cop pulls them from the wreckage, and some kind of connection is made. A good connection. We’re there when people are at their most exposed, their most vulnerable, and we’re often the only ones around that don’t take advantage of them. Not like all the repair shops or contractors and insurance agents they have to deal with in the aftermath, let alone all the other scammers. Sometimes we’re the only one there who’ll tell ‘em with a straight face what’s going on and what comes next. I liked to think that what I did was to simply go out and find the truth, and that maybe the truth would be some kind of comfort, or that maybe the truth would actually turn out to help someone.”
“And…was it?”
“As I said, I liked to think that…”
“But now you’re not sure?”
Callahan leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. “There’s something going on out there, something happening. Frank and I, well, more like a bunch of us, I think, uh, we stumbled on something. At first we thought it was like some kind of rot eating away inside…”
“Inside? What are you talking about, Harry?”
But Callahan shook his head again. “Frank and I, we couldn’t be sure, but it was like maybe police departments were being undermined, maybe even compromised, but from the inside out. Penetrated, at least in the beginning? Then…subverted?”
“By whom?”
“That’s the problem, Deborah. Whenever it was like we were getting close to…hell…that’s not right. We never got close to an answer. I don’t think we even got close to asking the right questions, and whenever we tried it’s like we were attacked from every angle. Drug dealers. Low life scum. Then from the inside, by rogue cops. And then cops working with dealers. So we gave up, and I mean we publicly gave up and yet…no one seemed to care in the least, especially no one in city government…”
“And so you think they were in on it, right?”
“Maybe, maybe not. The thing is, it felt pervasive. Like it was everywhere, like law enforcement at every level was being compromised.”
“Was?”
Callahan shrugged. “Yeah. And I assume it still is.”
“So, why were you in Israel?”
“I used to think I knew the answer to that one, but now I’m not so sure.”
“Oh?”
“Did you know Avi Rosenthal?”
She shook her head. “Was he related to Saul?”
“Yeah, his brother. I still don’t know the whole story, but he was – apparently – married to my mom before the war, but I think that was a marriage of convenience. Then about twenty, twenty-five years ago he basically took Mom back to Israel. They lived in a government compound outside of Tel Aviv; that’s where Mom was when she died.”
“What did this Avi Rosenthal do?”
“I’m not real sure, but I think it had something to do with their version of the CIA.”
“The Mossad? Really?”
Callahan shrugged. “Maybe. He was a physicist but got involved in planning. War plans. At least he let on once that was what he was working on.”
Eisenstadt sighed, her mind working overtime now: “Do you think there’s any possibility that he knew about this thing your mother did? This manipulation of time?”
“If he knew he didn’t let on.”
“If he worked with Mossad he wouldn’t.”
Callahan looked at her carefully then, trying to get a read on where she was going with this line of questioning: “So, what are you thinking?” he finally asked.
“Harry, I am at heart a physicist. I look at complex systems and try to understand why they behave the way they do…”
“Okay. So, you look worried right now. Why?”
“I have two fears, really. The first concerns this thing that you taught Liz. This remote viewing thing you do. It is a curiosity, yet one with an immense potential to wreak havoc. Yet what most concerns me is that we somehow extend this ability and that we actually are able to travel back in time. Now…what if this Avi Rosenthal knew of your mother’s ability? Then what? Well, if he worked for Mossad we have to assume that the Israelis know of this generally and have since been working to extend your mother’s ability to utilize remote viewing into actual time travel. Yet I lived and taught there for almost twenty years and never heard even a whisper about such a project.”
“Okay. That’s one fear. What’s the other?”
“This I have a more difficult time understanding. It is little more than a feeling right now, a feeling with no basis in reason.”
“Alright. So, fire away.”
“It concerns this thing in the sky. This pulsing light. And to me it is a question of timing, and because of what we were just talking about at dinner. What did you say to your friend, the doctor? That this pulsing might not be a natural phenomenon, that it might be a signal? And if this is so, it might quite possibly be a warning of some kind? And here we are, the three of us – and quite possibly the Israelis too – working on some kind of practical ability to move through time. So, my second fear is exactly this: what if this warning is no coincidence?”
“Swell…”
“Yes. Just so. But there is another point to consider. If your mother knew of this ability before the war, what if others learned of her ability? Perhaps very unscrupulous people, perhaps, for instance, scientists working for or inside the Third Reich…?”
Callahan shuddered. “That would explain Israel’s interest, wouldn’t it? The Nazis could manipulate time, and…”
She nodded: “Just so, yes. And now let me add one more piece to the puzzle…”
“Oh, no…”
“Oh, yes. There was talk, before the outbreak of the war, of a kind of “shift” that had to do with time displacement. It was, and by rumor only, called the Aubuchon Shift. From what I have been able to uncover, there was a Claire Aubuchon involved with the Manhattan Project. She lived in Los Alamos, New Mexico during the war, and she worked with a physicist at Berkeley named Ted Sealy. They were working on how the blast waves from atomic bomb detonations would impact the wings of the delivery aircraft, the B-29; in other words, they were working on both the physical effects and the acoustic dynamics of a large blast wave. And Harry, this is the crucial point here, she was working on harmonic properties and their impact on structures and then she supposedly came upon some kind of “shift” and then she quite literally dropped out of sight. Years later she marries a man named Ben E Goodman with all kinds of degrees in medicine and physics yet I cannot find out anything about this Dr. Goodman. No academic records, no work records, nothing…”
“Goodman? Did you say Ben Goodman?”
“Yes? Why?”
“My contact within the Mossad these days is Colonel Benjamin Goodman.”
“Interesting. Does he, by any chance, have a daughter?”
“Yup. Didi. Didi Goodman.”
Eisenstadt shook her head. “This Claire Aubuchon had a daughter. Dana Goodman is her name. She lives in Los Angeles.”
“You think they’re related, don’t you?”
“Possibly. Or…something worse.”
“Worse? What could be worse?”
“That they are copies. Copies of this Claire Aubuchon. And this is what troubles me, Harry. This Aubuchon was a passenger on the Titanic yet she had a child in the 1950s? Is that so? Is that even possible?”
“So…you think she was actually traveling?”
“I have no idea, but this husband of hers, this man with no discernible background, has a baby with her when she is far too old to do such a thing? No, Harald, there are far too many unanswered questions here, questions that make no sense, and then you tell me of this other Goodman in Israel…”
“She’s been handling my finances for a long time.”
“What?”
“His daughter knows where everything is. Everything.”
“You must act now to secure what you have. And Harald. There is something else I must tell you.”
“Yes? Well, fire away…”
“My father, in Copenhagen, was your grandfather’s best friend.”
“My grandfather?”
“Aaron. Aaron Schwarzwald.”
“Seriously? Now isn’t that…”
“A coincidence?”
“A coincidence, yes.”
“I am not so sure I believe in such things anymore, Harald. The odds that Liz would look me up in Cambridge and then bring me to your house defies statistical interpretation…”
“Meaning what?”
“I have no idea, only that something most unusual is taking place.”
“Unusual, how?”
“It is like we are being guided…”
“Funny, I didn’t take you as the religious type…”
“And I am not, Harald. Yet perhaps there are people guiding us, or shaping events so that we come together…”
“So, people with god-like powers?”
“Perhaps it seems that way to us, but to me this implies people who have mastered the observation of people across lifetimes…”
“You mean time travelers, don’t you?”
She nodded. “Yes, I suppose I do. This also means that you and I may hold some sort of special place in this scheme, that you and I coming together is part of a plan.”
Callahan sighed and held up his glass. “I think I’m going to need another one of these,” he said.
“Ah, you see? This is a most useful creation, this scotch. Sit back and go over the day, or perhaps even a lifetime…”
“Lifetimes.”
“Just so, yes. We must start with your mother, Harald. That is the first road we must take.”
“You know Robert Frost?”
“The poet? No, not really. Why?”
Callahan looked at his empty glass and twirled the last remaining drops in slow circles, looking at one drop as it collided and reformed in ways both unpredictable and reassuringly familiar. “I shall be telling this with a sigh, Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”
“And this means what, Harry?”
“That we have been acting in very predictable ways, and if we’re going to survive this thing then we’re going to have to start taking the road less traveled.”
“We need to be unpredictable? Is that what you’re saying?”
He nodded, and then he tossed the last remaining drops of scotch onto the fire. “Yes. Just so.”
Back to Harry. Again. Sorry about The Otter and The Fox, but sometimes stories just come and they beg to be put to the page and who am I to resist? So…I spent a day putting pen to paper (well, you know what I mean, right?) while tinkering with this next segment of 88.
So, a little music to go along with your tea? Aber natürlich, meine Damen und Herren! Vielleicht ein bisschen Nachtmusik?
(Where Do The Children Play \\ Cat Stevens)
Chapter 62.2
Callahan had approved of Cathy Bullitt’s final architectural renderings for Harry’s rambling Sea Ranch Studios well before her passing, though construction had been delayed pending final approval by the dreaded and reviled California Coastal Commission. Harry’s property holdings at Sea Ranch included four residential lots; the original lot he purchased overlooking the sea at the end of a cul-de-sac, where the main house was built, and this was the house conceived to take in sweeping views of the sea and the rocks below. Because Sea Ranch was a residential community, turning the main house into a large recording studio had proven a legal impossibility, yet Cathy’s work-around was simplicity itself. She designed three new residences, each with a dedicated recording studio attached, and each new residence was only casually linked to the others by discreet walkways that wound around and through the rocks and scrubby pines on the sloping site.
Her original plans for the Callahan House looked, in plan view, or from overhead, like a series of irregularly sized hexagons, each drifting down the gently sloping hill towards the cliffs overlooking the sea. She chose her building materials with great care, executing the design with extensive use western red cedar and redwood inside and out. Each hexagonal roof gently sloped seaward, and each roof was clad in standing seamed copper. Walkways and patios around the main house were originally fashioned from flagstone and discrete exterior moonlighting bathed the walks and patios and even the surrounding trees with a cool blue-green ambiance at night.
And the new residence-studios followed these simple motifs. Copper roofs, redwood and cedar construction mimicking the hexagonal original, sweeping walls of glass to absorb the views and to bring a sense of their surroundings inside each structure. And the same lighted flagstone walkways linked each studio into a semi-inclusive whole, with the routes of their meandering ways dictated by existing trees and rock outcroppings. The residences varied in size, ranging from a single very simple two bedroom affair to an extremely large six bedroom residence with a music studio large enough to handle large ensemble groups, including a small orchestra, in the same session.
Harry had been using the first studio, the one built into his original residence, for years. Lloyd and Tod Bright had both used this studio, so had the grunge rock band Bright, and this before Harry was shot and lost his leg. Cathy had designed this original studio with modest additional accommodations, enough to handle a small entourage, but this soon proved a hindrance. Construction had already begun on the first residence/studio before Harry fled to Switzerland, and DD had seen this project through to completion. She’d put work off work on the remaining residence/studios until uncertainty surrounding Harry’s future began to resolve, but one of her first actions after Harry returned was to get these additional projects moving again. Harry wanted his Sea Ranch Studios to fully come alive, and he envisioned summer music camps taking shape and somehow turning the area into a haven for artists, but particularly for young musicians. DD had her marching orders and construction was soon in full swing.
The final paperwork consummating Callahan’s retirement from the Police Department was officially tendered after his departure for Davos, and with that accomplished Callahan officially consigned that part of his life to the past. Captain Sam Bennett was still living in Santa Cruz and Callahan had long made it a point to visit with his oldest friend at least a couple of times a year, but after his return DD informed Harry that Bennett was residing in an assisted living facility after his wife passed. Harry called Delgetti and Carl Stanton when he learned of that, and they vowed to get together with their captain soon.
Liz temporarily opened her house after she returned from Boston; this was Frank and Cathy’s original place located next door to Harry’s. Curiously, Deborah Eisenstadt stayed in Lloyd’s old bedroom for the rest of her week there – while the three of them gathered around Harry – and his ornate Bösendorfer – in the piano room that was perched above the rocks and the breaking surf below. She was entranced by the sea everywhere she looked and made it clear she never wanted to leave. And it was around Harry’s piano that they gathered and began to play with time, and while blissfully unaware of the consequences, they began playing with the very fabric of the universe, with the music of the spheres that Imogen Schwarzwald had only glimpsed within her Fourth Piano Concerto.
+++++
“You say you have von Karajan’s notes?” Eisenstadt said after Harry finished playing the first movement.
“I do, yes,” Callahan said – reluctantly.
“What do they…?” she started to ask, but then she stopped and collected her thoughts for a moment. “You mentioned you received these notes, and the score, directly from von Karajan, did you not?”
“Yes. I visited him in Salzburg not long before he passed. That was several years ago, but I still remember the afternoon quite well.”
“And you spoke of the Fourth Concerto with him?”
“Yes, of course.”
“You said your mother had just finished playing this piece when she passed. Did he tell you about the circumstances surrounding her passing?”
Harry thought back to the afternoon and sighed. “You know, I’m not sure whether he did, or if it was Avi who told me about that.”
“Did von Karajan seem evasive at all? When he talked to you about the Fourth?”
“Hard to say. He was in a lot of pain, but yes, he seemed, well, it felt like he was leaving something out, something like a painful memory.”
“I am not so sure I would trust what he said, Harry,” Eisenstadt sighed. “Many accused him ofbeing active in party politics during the war…”
“Party? What, uh, and which war?”
“You don’t know?” Eisenstadt replied. “Harry, von Karajan registered as a Nazi, though he was declared a mitläufer during the denazification hearings after the war.”
“A…what?”
“A mitläufer, a fellow traveler, or perhaps simply an opportunist; yes, that is the better choice here. He chose not simply to stay in Germany during the war, but to actively work there. He conducted the official state orchestra and at all manner of state functions. He profited from the Nazi regime, Harry.”
“Okay. So he was declared an opportunist. Does that disqualify the importance of his work on the Fourth?”
“No, of course not. I am, however saying we might take his recollections as a place to start our investigations, and that we need to look into this matter further.”
“What…matter?” Harry asked, now feeling a little uncomfortable about where this talk was headed.
Liz Bullitt, just then sitting beside Deborah, wanted to warn the Old Owl to go easy on Callahan, that any talk of his mother was to go down a trail fraught with all manner of hidden dangers.
“Your mother’s death, Harry,” Eisenstadt continued, looking him hard in the eye. “We must consider this an open question.”
“What do you mean?” Harry said.
“Right now? Only that we, the three of us, need to go back and examine this moment.”
“You mean…?”
“I do. And I think I understand how difficult this will be for you, but Harry – I have a feeling. What do you call the word? A hunch? Isn’t that what you Americans say? A nagging suspicion – that all is not as it should be.”
“With what?” Harry growled.
“With the very last movement of her Fourth, with the last moments of her life. What if your mother stumbled upon something, something dangerous, and what if van Karajan saw and understood that? Perhaps he changed something before the work was performed? To protect her, perhaps…”
“Or to protect all of us,” Liz whispered.
“Just so,” Eisenstadt sighed. “That is what I am most afraid of, Harry. I think that there is a harmonic structure within everything, and quite possibly your mother came upon a key to our understanding of this structure.”
“There’s only one way we can find out, Harry,” Liz added. “You know where all this happened, who was there and even when. You’re the only person who can take us back to the moment – to the moment she originally played those final parts of her original score.”
Harry was sitting quietly behind the Bösendorfer’s keyboard, and now he looked down and took a deep breath, but his hands remained crossed on his lap. Lost in thought, he knew what was being asked of him, and even knew how to get there, but there was something else bothering him.
“Have you ever considered,” he mumbled, “that if playing that music killed her, that it might, no…that’s not quite right, is it? If we find our way into that music, and if we play that music as you suggest, that it will – not might, but will – kill us all?”
“If she played the music and it killed her,” Eisenstadt thought out loud, “why wasn’t von Karajan also killed?”
“Maybe proximity?” Liz said. “Proximity to the vibrations of the chord? When it was played?”
“If that’s true,” Callahan sighed, “then won’t whoever plays the music, well, you know, die?”
Eisenstadt shrugged. “We have too many questions as it is, Harry. Now we must have answers. Answers that only your mother can provide.”
The doorbell rang and Harry heard a key in the door…
“That’s got to be DD,” he said. “Liz, can you give me a hand here?” he said as pulled himself closer to his wheelchair.
“Yeah, got it,” she said, and she helped Harry get settled in his chair just as DD and the Doc came in.
“Hope we didn’t interrupt anything important,” DD said, now carrying bags of groceries into the kitchen. “And Harry, I’ve got a list of people that are coming tomorrow. Just a few old hands from the Cathouse and a few cops you might remember.”
“You have friends…from a cathouse?” Eisenstadt asked with an arched eyebrow. “Really?”
“Oh yeah,” Callahan grinned, “we go way back. Free mustache rides guaranteed, too.”
Liz shook her head. “Oh, Harry…really?” she said as she pushed him into the living room.
“Oh,” DD added, “I’ve got one of those motorized wheelchairs coming first thing in the morning, so be here. They’ll go over charging the batteries and all that while they set it up.”
“Any word from the prosthetics lab?”
“Appointment on Monday, in Palo Alto,” the Doc said. “First I could get, and I had to pull some strings, too.”
“Thanks, Doc,” Harry nodded.
“You been watching that shit in Sagittarius?” Doc asked.
“Yeah. Same thing four nights running.”
“Spooky, man. Heard some talking heads last night yakking on and on about it. Calling it some kind of periodic pulsar. Some astronomer in Japan is calling it a magneto-star.” The Doc put his bags of groceries in the kitchen then came out to the living room. “Oh, excuse me. I didn’t know you two were over here,” he said to Liz and the Owl. “Sorry for the expletives.”
“You must be kidding,” the Owl hooted. “After an a few hours with Harry my vocabulary is wilting under the load.”
The Doc chuckled at that. “You should hear us in the OR. The scrub nurses tell the smuttiest jokes…”
“Oh sure they do, Doc,” Harry sighed. “Like the one about…”
“No, Harry, not here!” Doc cried.
Everyone laughed.
“So,” Harry asked DD as she came into the living room with a bowl of freshly peeled shrimp, “who on earth did you find from the department to come out here?”
“Oh, that’s a surprise,” she shot back. “So, Professor Eisenstadt, are you still returning Sunday?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so. I must earn a living, one way or another.”
“Well, unless you’ve made other plans, we’ll get you down to the airport,” DD added.
“Oh, I can not ask you to do that. There must be…”
“No, there’s not,” the Doc countered. “It’s either us or you’ll have to use your thumb.”
“I see. Well, in that case, I’m most grateful.”
“What time’s your flight?”
“Noon, I think.”
“Okay, we’ll pick you up at 0630. Harry? Wanna ride in with us?”
“Sure, Doc.”
DD then came back with plates for everyone and bowls full of cocktail and remoulade sauces. “Okay everyone…dig in. Harry? Want an Oly?”
“No, I want you to sit down and relax. You’re making me tired just watching you run around!”
“I’ve got to go fix a Diet Coke. You wanna beer or not?”
“Diet Coke for me too, then.”
A hush fell over the house.
“Did you say Diet Coke, Harry?” the Doc asked.
“I did. Yes.”
The Doc then came over and felt Callahan’s forehead. “You feeling okay, Harry?”
“And the horse you rode in on, Doc,” Callahan muttered. “DD…this is a good remoulade. How’d you make it?”
“Oh, you like it?”
“Yeah, better than the cocktail sauce.”
“Cup of mayonnaise, two tablespoons of coarse French mustard, equal parts finely diced celery and onion. Oh, and a dash of Tabasco, too.”
“Damn, Harry,” the Doc groaned, “and now you’re asking for recipes? And drinking Diet Coke? We better check your testosterone levels, and pretty fucking soon…”
Liz laughed at that. “Yeah, Doc, you fuckin’ tell ‘em!”
“Oh, shit. There I go with the expletives again.”
“I hate to ask,” the Owl said, “but could one of you start a fire? I’m getting chilly now…”
“I’ll get it,” Liz said. “What was that you used to say, Harry? The coldest winter I ever endured was the summer I spent in San Francisco?”
“Ain’t that the truth?” DD sighed. “Beginning to feel like we’re gonna have another foggy night.”
“I hope not,” Eisenstadt said. “I’d finally like to see that pulsing star.”
“You haven’t seen it yet?” the Doc asked.
“I have great difficulty staying up so late these days, and when I get back to Boston I will have to contend with light pollution as well.”
“Perfect night for tomato bisque and grilled cheese sammies,” Liz said.
“Yeah,” Harry added. “Sounds good.”
“So,” the Doc asked Harry, “you working on a new piece?”
“Who…me? No, no, I was just trying to play Tom Lehrer’s Vatican Rag.”
“No shit? Man, I haven’t heard that one in ages. Can you play it?”
“No, no…I couldn’t remember the words, so really, what’s the point?”
“True. So, what do you make of this pulsing star theory, Harry?”
“Me? Hell, I got no idea, Doc. It seems pretty regular, ya know? Like you could almost set your watch by it, and that’s the weird thing, at least to me.”
“Yeah,” the Doc sighed. “One of the gas-passers I work with in the OR is an amateur astronomer. He thinks it’s a signal of some sort.”
Eisenstadt looked up at that. “Possible, but not likely, though that would depend on the possible trajectory of the light path.”
“What do you mean?” the Doc asked.
“If it is indeed a natural phenomenon associated, say with a pulsar or other magneto-star, the light would be omnidirectional. If, on the other hand, it is a signal of one kind or another that would assume a more focused beam of light directed along a path with a known recipient, or recipients. The implications of this, needless to say, would be staggering.”
“Oh, I agree. It would be staggering, alright…but that alone doesn’t mean it’s not possible.”
“Of course not. The problem,” Eisenstadt added, “will be trying to figure out if the light is omnidirectional or a more focused beam…”
“What about the type of light, say try a spectroscopic analysis? What that prove or disprove one hypothesis or the other?”
“If it was coherent light, possibly, yes,” she replied. “And by that I mean a singular correlation between packets of energy.”
The Doc shrugged. “You lost me, Dr. Eisenstadt.”
“The light would need to come from a non-variable light source, such as you might find emitted by laser, or possibly even a phased maser. But the energy required to emit such a signal over astronomical distances is not insignificant, Doctor. As a frame of reference, I doubt if all the power generated on this planet would be sufficient.”
“Shit,” the Doc sighed.
“Just so. Shit,” Eisenstadt smiled. “You might tap into or somehow focus the light of a star, but the resources involved to construct such a device again implies energy technologies several orders of magnitude greater than what we have envisioned here. Of more immediate and practical interest is how far away this light source is from our solar system; only then should we consider the type of light.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“If the source is local, say within 100 parsecs, that might be grounds for further inquiry. If, on the other hand, the light comes from a globular cluster in the Sagittarius Group that implies the light is ancient, say eight to fifteen thousand years old. For an artificial light source to be focused on our planet, and to arrive just now…well, the odds defy the need for further comment or investigation.”
“If it was somehow, what would that imply?”
“That this alleged civilization knew enough about the complex gravitational and tidal interactions within planetary groups in the entire galaxy to make precise predictions of stellar drift. In other words, their scientists would have had to take into account not only where we were thousands of years ago, but where we would be when the signal arrived. Such computational power in inconceivable, Doctor.”
Callahan had been listening to this exchange but just then something occurred to him: “Unless of course they were time travelers,” he said.
And Eisenstadt turned her owl’s eyes to Callahan and they blinked rapidly as another set of confounding thoughts cascaded through her mind. “If so, why not just come and tell us? Why bother with signaling us?”
“I can think of at least two reasons,” the Doc sighed. “The first is the simplest. We’d need to be technologically advanced enough to give a damn, to act on what we found.”
“And the second?” Eisenstadt said, her eyes narrowing a bit.
“That there’s an internal conflict within that civilization.”
“What do you mean?” she replied.
“Well, that perhaps there are factional differences. One group wants to send the signal and the other doesn’t…”
“Or,” Callahan said, “that this civilization wants to signal us but they don’t want another group to know that they’ve done so.”
“Another group?” the Doc posited. “Or another civilization?”
“And if that was the case,” Callahan said as he looked down and studied his hands, “then the signal is a warning.”
Eisenstadt smiled – yet inside she was torn. “All of this is of course assuming that your little green men are behind sending such a telegram to us in the first place.”
But Callahan looked at Liz, and both nodded.
Because the means to get to an answer might be waiting for them just a few feet away, in notes on sheets of music penned by his mother thirty years ago.
A wee tale for the change of seasons, maybe a little bit of allegory tossed into the mix.
(Ripples \\ Genesis)
The Otter and The Fox
Looking back on the events of the past summer, as the old man was wont to do from time to time these days, he found himself wandering down among the stacks in the deeper recesses of memory. Such musings were not at all uncommon and in a way he took a simple but curious comfort from these outings, and while many of these excursions were good for a smile others were not so pleasant. And as is true enough for us all, there were more than a few that brought a tear to his eye.
He was a meticulous old man and this was no doubt due to his upbringing. His father had been an aviator in the Great War, as the first big war of the twentieth-century was called, which was the one that happened before historians came up with the clever idea of numbering our wars. By the time the second big war rolled around his father was an admiral in the American Navy and he was still, nominally at least, an aviator. When the old man thought about his father it was usually when he folded his laundry or brushed his teeth, because his father had been very meticulous when teaching his son how to do those two most important things. Briefs had to be folded just so, socks in another manner altogether. Shirts were never folded; no, they were picked up from the laundry and immediately placed on wooden hangers and hung in the appropriate closet, and with an inch between hangers. The rod in his father’s various closets had always been marked at one inch intervals but, his father added when he passed along such wisdom his son, if you didn’t have a ruler you could use two fingers placed side by side to approximate the distance. Slacks needed three inches – or four fingers when you had small finger – like the father’s son had in those days.
His father never explained why these things were so. No explanations were necessary where his father was concerned.
The old man’s mother was an even more curious creature. Her father had some modest successes as an Episcopal priest, her mother much more success as a poet who also taught literature at a woman’s college in Western Massachusetts, which was, coincidentally and speaking in approximate terms, where her father and mother met. His mother seemed to exist on another plane, at least as far as this marriage was concerned. Her father seemed to wrestle with his demons during every waking moment, these demons coming to him in the form of bourbon whiskey and very young prostitutes. Her mother, on the other hand, was a saintly wraith who spent her every waking moment either preparing lectures for her students or writing poetry. This might explain her success as a teacher and a poet, and perhaps her father’s demonic proclivities as well, but suffice to say that the old man’s mother passed along a somewhat eclectic crop of incidental talents. She was, after all, an artiste.
By the time the old man graduated from high school he had lived in Manila, Honolulu, Annapolis, Honolulu again, and finally San Diego. He went to college in 1960 at the University of California Los Angeles and he studied both architecture and engineering. While there he learned to sail and he learned to fly small single engine airplanes, and on a dare once he went sky-diving. He did not repeat that mistake. He finally learned to ski and loved the snow and the mountains all of which in no way accounted for his decision to attend the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. He rented a room in a little house a block off the drag owned by two women who spent a lot of time together, usually around a potter’s wheel or at their kiln off the little one car garage out back. Among other things, they taught him about the joys of making guacamole, and their cheese enchiladas were beyond heavenly. He finally figured out what their secret ingredient was, too. Love. pure and simple – with maybe just a pinch of cilantro.
He was doing an internship over summer vacation in ’66; he was picking up a book at the architecture library and had just started back for his car when the gunshots started raining down on the South Mall. He saw a girl running for the door he had just entered to and when he turned to open the door for her he watched as the side of her head exploded into a misty rain of blood and bone. He pulled her in, pulled her to cover and he held her while she died in his arms.
He called his father a few hours later and he cried.
And his father told him to be a man, that real men didn’t cry at times like this.
The girls made him cheese enchiladas and fresh guacamole later that evening, and they helped him keep it together by teaching him all about the medicinal properties of Jose Cuervo tequila, thick wedges of juicy green limes and a whole shitload of salt. He had to admit sometime during the night that tequila was really very evil stuff and best left to others.
He graduated from the school a year later and moved to Seattle – because he missed the sea and wanted to live close to the mountains. He figured it was either Seattle or somewhere in Norway, and at least Seattle was close to La Jolla, where his parents were bunking out now that his old man had retired his flag.
The late-60s was an interesting period on the West Coast generally and while Seattle was no different it wasn’t exactly Berkeley or Haight-Ashbury, either. The “wood-butcher” school of incoherent architecture was taking off about that time, with untrained urban-anarchists retreating to the Cascades to build houses in the woods that more often than not looked like a cross between a submarine and a pile of melted candles. Maybe this period was a revolt against the revolting ranch-style houses of the period, and maybe that was a good thing, too. It got people thinking outside of the box for once, and maybe it all had something to do with Tolkien and Middle Earth, or maybe it was all the talk about Don Juan and his “magic mushrooms” which were floating around the edges of the scene just then. Well, hell, psychedelics were all the rage around Portland and Seattle in those days, so what harm could a few mushrooms be…?
He didn’t have a job lined up but that didn’t stop him. He went from firm to firm, talking to partners and dropping off copies of his portfolio and it didn’t take all that long; within a couple of weeks he had several interviews lined-up. He’d always wanted to concentrate on residential architecture and that proved a point in his favor. Most firms like to work on big projects, and for all the obvious reasons, but they usually keep a couple of Birkenstock-wearing creative types in a dark corner to work on residential commissions, and that’s exactly where C. Llewelyn Sumner found himself working in the fall of 1967. He rented a little two bedroom bungalow in the North Queen Anne neighborhood because it was an easy bus ride to work, and he set up a drafting table in the spare bedroom and bought just enough cookware to make cheese enchiladas and guacamole because, really, what else did you need?
C. Llewelyn Sumner wasn’t an ugly specimen, he was in fact fairly representative of genus Homo Americanus. Neither tall nor short, skinny or fat, his mother had always bought his clothes “off the rack” – and most frequently from the nearest JCPenney – and this was by the late 60s a habit fairly well ingrained in Sumner. He typically wore Perma-Pressed slacks the color of peat-moss, neither brown nor maroon but trapped someplace in between, and he invariably wore madras shirt sleeved shirts, once again of the ‘never needs ironing’ variety. And yes, he wore Hush-Puppies, though he never wore them with white socks – because his father had him taught proper sock etiquette from a very early age. When Sumner went to work he always slipped on a tan corduroy sport coat before he left his little bungalow – just because. Once at his drafting table the coat disappeared until it was time to return home.
Perhaps because of his mother’s contributions to his being, he possessed a rather florid artistic sensibility. His first designs were intricately rendered prairie-ranch style houses, sprawling hipped-roof affairs with four foot roof overhangs and vast expanses of glass the defining characteristics of this early period of his work, and as they were unusual yet very attractive he gained a following. The firm was therefore happy with his work, too, if only because nothing breeds success quite like a steady cash flow.
After a year at the firm one of the senior partners asked him to join a group the coming weekend on a kind of client interview. About all he knew going into the weekend was that the client (and his wife) were fabulously wealthy and that they wanted a very serious new house to be the focal point on a little island in the San Juans they’d just bought. They would be departing from Bellingham early on Saturday morning, and this presented a minor problem for C. Llewelyn Sumner, as he had no car, and actually had very little interest in them.
Yet the only automobile that did interest him was the little Porsche 911, but the prices were just a little out of his reach. Still, he went to a local dealer and kicked a few tires until a salesman approached. Sumner told the salesman what his proposed budget was and the salesman took him over to look at one of newer versions of the model, the 911E. It wasn’t an “S” model but it was a Porsche, and the price was right on the bleeding edge of doable, so the next day after work he picked up a tangerine colored 911 and drove home with a big, fat smile on his face. His neighbors were envious. Girls started looking at him as he drove to work. He found he was happy, or at least happier than he had been in quite a while, and he thought it odd that purchasing a car could do that to a person.
So he woke up extra early that Saturday and made the hours long drive up to Bellingham; everyone hopped on the client’s sailboat and they took off for the Sucia Island group. The client was a bigger than life character who was considered something “big in the timber biz” and he had a bunch of money, too, and mentioned that more than once that morning. His wife was charming, articulate, and obviously loved her husband – in fact she doted on him constantly. When they arrived at the client’s island a small but very substantial pier had already been put in place, and power had already been run to the island – “at great expense!” added the rich man – and two wells for water were up and running. A small bulldozer was working on clearing a roadway from the pier to the proposed building site, and as this was a Saturday, Sumner knew with overtime rates being paid to the operator that the client was obviously in a hurry to get things done.
So, the four of them walked the quarter mile to the site and Sumner looked at all the various views – of Mount Baker to the east and the Olympics to the southwest and it was hard to say which was the more dramatic. From a designers perspective the setup was almost surreal…unobstructed views…and not a single neighbor…just the sea and a few other islands sprinkled in the area, and most of those were wilderness preserves. Sumner pulled out a compass and a notepad and got to work taking notes, and an hour later the group was on the way back to Bellingham.
And it was kind of funny. On the trip back, Sumner had the impression that Mrs. Client was hitting on him just a little and besides feeling a little awkwardhe just carried on trimming sails and thinking about the island site. He drove back to his bungalow full of ideas and so jazzed was he that he went straight to his drafting table and got to work, drawing all through the night and into Sunday morning. When he arrived at work on Monday morning the partner involved asked Sumner if he had any ideas and Sumner just unrolled the floor plan and several elevations and let his drawings answer the question. The partner involved was flabbergasted at Sumner’s productive capacity and immediately called the Client and his Wife and they rushed down to the office. Sumner set about producing a rendering of the house sitting among the pines on the island, and he had that ready to go just before the Clients arrived.
Client was thunderstruck, almost speechless when he saw the first rendering, and Mrs. Client was moved to tears. She proclaimed Sumner a genius, and with that accomplished the Clients signed on the dotted line, turning over the design and construction oversight to the firm for a more than generous commission. And by all appearances every one of the firm’s partners was more than pleased with Sumner’s work to date and by unanimous decision he was made a junior partner on the spot.
C. Llewelyn Sumner decided he needed a house of his own, but he had run into a problem by choosing to live in Seattle. Seattle is itself a fairly diffuse concept, with the major suburbs spreading across the sound to Bainbridge Island and Bremerton, inland to Bellevue and Redmond, and north to Everett and even as far north as Bellingham. Boeing was the beating heart of the area, the aircraft manufacturer having facilities spread all over the area, and new companies were relocating to Seattle as the commercial aviation sector boomed with the success of the 707 and 747 models.
So while Sumner was now confronted with the very simple problem of where to live, he had to admit he liked living close to downtown. He liked living in a city that felt like a community, and the Queen Anne neighborhood fit the bill. But he was going to have to work on the island site several days a week and for weeks at a time and that meant three hours a day in the car just to get the Bellingham and back, and he’d need to rent a launch to run out to the island and back… And that didn’t sound all that good or even fun.
So he mentioned the problem at work, and one of the other new hires chimed in with an oddball suggestion.
“Buy a boat,” a girl named Tracy said. “Take it up there and anchor off the island, and drive home when you need a change of clothes.”
“A boat?” said C. Llewelyn Sumner.
“Sure. I do. I keep mine down at Shilshole,” she added.
“You live on a boat?” he repeated, incredulous now and with his arms crossed over his chest.
“Yeah. Why don’t you come down after work and I’ll show you around.”
“You live on a boat?” he said again, mystified and now shaking his head.
“Chuck, just stop it, okay?”
His face was a blank until he realized she’d called him ‘Chuck.’ “What did you call me?” he growled.
“Chuck. You know, your first name is Charles, so I just thought…”
“Don’t you dare call me that ever again,” he snarled, now red-faced and trembling.
“Sure thing, Charles.”
“My name is Llewelyn.”
“Sorry, but I can’t say that one with a straight face,” Tracy said, breaking into an impish little smile.
“Try!” Llewelyn said as he turned and stormed back to his table.
He worked on the foundation plans for the rest of the day and as he was packing up to leave Tracy came over to his table and blocked him in.
“Hey, what’s up, Chuck.”
He ignored her as he rolled up his drawings.
“I’m just curious, Chuck, but have you ever been, you know, like…laid?”
He turned and looked at this red-hair-freckle-faced girl like she was a contagion, but he decided against a reply and just shook his head, then he pushed his way past her and made for the parking lot. She, of course, followed. She was having too much fun to realize she was poking at a sleeping bear with a sharp stick.
“Come on, Chuck! Buy me dinner and I’ll show you my…boat…”
When he got to his car he stepped inside and put his things away then drove home, and she did not follow him, though he’d halfway expected she might. When he was getting out of his car his next door neighbor said hello, and that they were headed to the boat show, and that piqued Sumner’s interest. “Where’s it at?”
“Oh, down at Lake Union. Mainly sailboats this time of year. You wanna go with us?”
He made up his mind right then and there. “Would you mind?”
“No, no, hop on in. Plenty of room.”
It was only a few minutes away and soon enough he was walking around amongst a few dozen manufacturers displays, including an interesting boat from Finland, a chunky double ender with a huge pilot house, and he’d never seen anything like it down in LA.
“What is this?” he asked the representative.
“Well, it’s not really in production yet, but the people back in Finland are trying to put together a consortium to build this design as a production boat.”
“Mind if I take a look down below?”
“No, no, that’s why we’re here. Help yourself, and I’ll be right here if you have any questions.”
“Thanks,” he said as he climbed aboard. Teak decks, huge airy pilot house, easy to get on and off – he thought as he walked around the deck. Then he went below…
“Oh sweet Jesus,” he said as he went from the pilot house down to the galley, and he turned right around and walked back over to the rep. “Is this boat for sale?” he asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“How much?”
The rep handed over a flyer with the vessel’s details and drawings on it, and a price was listed down at the bottom of the page.
“How much do you want for a deposit?” Sumner asked.
“You want to buy it now? You haven’t even been out on her?”
Sumner shook his head. “Would ten percent down be alright,” he asked as he pulled out his checkbook.
“Suits me,” the rep said, shaking his head. “Let’s get started on the paperwork.”
Sumner would take delivery after the show ended, in ten days. He bought some basic gear for cooking and cleaning, including a little inflatable boat called a Zodiac that he’d seen on a Jacques Cousteau TV special. And it was at this point he realized he was going to need some help moving the boat off Lake Union through the locks, before he could even think about the trip north to Bellingham. The next morning he talked to the firm’s partner he’d sailed with on the Client’s yacht and of course he recommended that he talk to…Tracy.
So, when he picked up the boat from the dealer on Lake Union he did so with a little red-headed fire-plug of a girl by his side, and the funniest part of that whole thing was she hung around off and on for a few years, more like a kid sister than a girlfriend, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying on her part. But, oh yes, they moved the boat up to Bellingham and he put the boat in a marina there and her big brother came up to drive them back down to Seattle. She’d come around from time to time after that and sometimes they’d go out to dinner or to a movie and whenever her friends asked if the tall guy was her boyfriend she’d just shrug and dance coyly around the edges of their assumptions, you know, like a ‘…wouldn’t you like to know?…’ kind of coy.
A few years later Boeing discontinued their SST project and it seemed, taken with the ongoing social miasma of Vietnam and all the other breathless disappointments of the late sixties, that the world was coming to an end…and who knows, maybe it was. Boeing laid off thousands and shit always rolls downhill. Other businesses either drastically cut back their payrolls or simply shuttered their doors and closed up shop, including the firm where C. Llewelyn Sumner worked. So, he thought, maybe just one world was ending, and another was beginning?
But by the time Sumner packed up his things and left the firm he had several important commissions to his credit, and while it was a risky move he decided to strike out on his own. Tracy asked to come with him but he just couldn’t afford a partner yet and he told her so. The best he could do, he told her, was to let her set up as an independent in his office until things improved, but instead she chose to head down to San Francisco and check out conditions there. They left on friendly terms but both were a little disconcerted by the change.
He’d not been allowed to make copies of the works he had produced while at the firm, and that was a blow – yet in a way those designs resided in the most secure space imaginable, in his mind. But then the old firm went into receivership and the assets liquidated. He purchased his originals from the administrator for a song, and he felt a little better about matters.
He opened his office in a tiny house on Seaview Avenue, out near Shilshole marina, and the tiny house sat in what was now in a commercially zoned district and had, for a while, been a bicycle shop. The office was cold and damp, sitting as it was just yards from the rocky shoreline, of he kept a wood stove going almost year round, and he loved the juxtaposition of the damp and the dry.On on the strength of all his earlier commissions at the firm he’d built a following, and a cult like following blossomed after an article about his work appeared in a nationally circulated magazine dedicated to architecture and interior design. A local photographer who expressed a deep admiration for his work asked to shoot his favorite projects and to co-produce a book with him if he’d write a bit about each. After the book came out, clients came to him from as far away as Montana and Colorado, and as the economy improved after the war wound down his business took off.
It wasn’t too many years later that one of the partners at the old firm came by looking for work, but by then Tracy was back and she was on his payroll, who along with a secretary-bookkeeper was all he could afford. But that was the nature of the business, and everyone knew it. Business was cyclical and architects lived to prosper during good times but had to be ready to hunker down when things inevitably slowed.
He still lived on a boat, but he had upgraded to a 43 foot Nauticat, having a small office with a drafting table installed as she was being built in Finland. There was more room now for people and things but he continued to lead a spare life on his own, and he was really a rather frugal person.Tracy lived a few slips away but she understood that C. Llewelyn Sumner had decided long ago that his would be a celibate’s life. He saw life through his parent’s eyes, his father’s most of all, and what he saw was endless cycles of violence and suffering. And then one night he told Tracy he couldn’t stand the idea of bringing children into such a world, and he told her about all those murders under the noonday sun in Austin and how there really weren’t any answers to be had for those who sought comfort in knowledge. Human beings could be lovely people, he said, but there was pointless savagery lurking just under the skin.
“What about you?” she asked him one night as they took their long evening walk on a nearby beach. “Would you wish now that your parents had never conceived you? That you’d never been born or lived to take a single breath?”
And he had to think about that one for a minute.
“You know…I’m here. I’m alive, and I can appreciate that for what it is. The universe came together in a moment and made me, and one day I’ll go back into the universe. What’s different is that somehow, for some reason I’m aware of the universe, aware of existing, and it’s a beautiful thing to be alive, to be cognizant of beauty and to create beautiful things, but when I look around I see so many terrible things. It’s hard to find a balance between the two. So hard that sometimes I feel any kind of balance is impossible.”
“And you do know you didn’t answer my question, right?”
“I’m here. I like being alive. So no, I wouldn’t wish that. I’m glad they decided to have a child.”
“And you don’t think a child of your own would feel the same way?”
“That’s hard to say, Tracy. The world I see coming doesn’t look like this one.”
“Because you’re a pessimist?”
“No, I’m not sure that I am, not here in this moment, anyway. But the future looks grim to me.”
“What do you think the future looked like to your parents?”
“Limitless,” C. Llewelyn Sumner said. “Endless, bright possibilities.”
“Chuck, you’re so full of shit.”
He chuckled at her sarcasm. “I learned it all from you, kid.”
“Gee, thanks,” she sighed. They walked further from the marina on drying sand, and as the tide went out more and more sand appeared. “Maybe you should get a dog. Just go down to the pound and pick one, maybe one they’re getting ready to put down. You know, save a life, make a new friend?”
“What brought that on?”
“Oh, just look at this beach! Imagine throwing a tennis ball and letting a dog run after it. Imagine the joy, the companionship.”
“But you’re not talking about a dog, Tracy. You’re talking about having a baby, about the joy and companionship having a baby would bring to your life.”
She nodded. “I know,” she whispered. “I’ve always wanted to have a baby with you. From the first time I laid eyes on you.”
“That explains it!” he snarked.
“Yup, sure does.”
“So? Where do we stand?” he sighed.
“Give me a baby, Chuck. Marry me if you want, or don’t. I won’t make any demands on you one way or the other. I’d just like to have a part of you, ya know?”
“It’s not right to bring a kid into the world without a father.”
“What’s right or wrong about it, Chuck? If you want to be a father let’s do it that way. If you don’t, let me do it the other way, the right way or the wrong.”
“Could I at least think about it, or did you just want to drop trou right here and do it right here on the beach?”
So of course she had to sing a few bars of Why Don’t We Do It In The Road and that made him smile a little, but he was kind of being serious, too.
“Right now, you mean?” she asked. “Right here, right now?”
“Isn’t that what you want, Trace?”
She nodded. “Yeah, but what about you?”
“I’d like you to be happy, Trace. Maybe more than anything else in the world.”
She took his hand and they turned to walk back to the marina, but it was the way he said it that hit home. The whole ‘I’d like you to be happy’ thing meant there was nothing in the world that could make him happy, but that didn’t matter, not really.
She’d been right all the time about him, too. He didn’t know the first thing about making love. No one had ever taught him a thing about it and he’d never done anything about it. Maybe he’d been with someone before and maybe he hadn’t; she didn’t want to know because that didn’t matter at all. Not now.
She continued to work at his office for a month or so, but then one day she came in and said she was off to Arkansas to work for a firm there, and almost without a word she packed up her things and she came up to him after her little car was loaded and she kissed him once, rubbed his cheek with her open hand while she looked him in the eye, and then she was gone.
Well and truly gone. And he knew it just then, that he’d never see her again. He could feel it, a dull pain somewhere smack dab in the middle of nowhere. When he went down to the marina that night after work her little sailboat was still there, but now there was a For Sale sign on it, and a broker’s number to call if interested. He sighed as he walked over to his boat and once he was inside he looked around and for the first time in his life he couldn’t hear a thing. He was surrounded by pure silence for the first time in forever and he couldn’t even hear his beating heart and everything was suddenly so unnerving and he didn’t know what to do now.
And it was like that after she left. Silence, everywhere.
Clients came and he listened. He sat at his drafting table and he turned out one miracle of design after another. Architects came from Germany and Holland and Japan to study his designs, and two more monographs dedicated to his work were published – one in German and the other in Japanese. He started to dress better, better suited to his station in life, anyway, and as the years passeddraftsmen came and studied with him for a year or two and then they moved on but there was never another Tracy.
He went to his father’s funeral, then his mother’s, and he inherited some money after the dust settled and he decided to build a house of his own across the sound near Port Townsend. He was beginning to slow down now, and his hands were bothering him more and more. He decided to keep his little office down by the water going for another year or two, but time had taken a toll. He was tired of the grind. Of selling his work, of trying to convince people that he was the best architect for their needs.
And one morning he looked in the mirror and he saw his father looking back at him. Or someone who looked like his father. “But that someone is me,” he realized, and for some reason that made him uncomfortable.
Because he knew his father had been incapable of love. And once he’d as much as said so. He didn’t believe in it, he said. It was all about the heat of the moment, just like war, but this thing called love was about creation, not destruction, and so we’d simply dressed up our animal instincts along the way, dressed them to suit the heat of the moment. And as he looked at the old men in his mirror he thought then that his father had probably been right all along. There was no such thing as love…there couldn’t be, because love just didn’t make any sense at all.
‘But,’ he wondered just then, ‘did life really make sense without love?’
‘What about that girl in Austin?’ he recalled. ‘I watched her die. I saw her death. I reached out that door and pulled her to safety, and I held her while she died. Did she ever love anyone? Did she even get the chance to love anyone?’
And he reached into the mirror, pulled the old man he saw there closer until he could really look into his eyes.
“Who are you, old man? Do I know you? Did I ever really know you?”
They turned away from each other just then, and they walked away in callous disregard – one for the other.
Soon enough he was spending more and more time across the sound over in Port Townsend. His new house had been a success, a complete statement of everything he’d ever considered important as an architect. He loved the spaces within, loved the way he managed to bring the outside inside. He loved the way the house blended in to the surrounding forests and mountains. He loved everything about his design, and about the reality his vision had brought to life.
And one day, when he was over at his tiny old office he was sitting at his drafting table after talking to a new, well a prospectively new client, when two teenagers came in the door, the two teenagers followed by an older gentleman – who somehow, for some reason, seemed a bit familiar.
Then he recognized the older man. He was Tracy’s older brother.
And then he looked at the teenagers. Twins, a boy and a girl.
And as they walked up to him his mouth began to feel dry, his heart to beat a little faster.
“May I help you?” he asked them.
“We need your help,” the older man said.
“Indeed? How may I help you?”
“You designed a house years ago for my parents, a very large place out on one of the Sucia Islands.”
“Oh yes, the Clarendon house. Of course.”
But then he realized something he’d missed once upon a time. Something important.
Tracy. Her name. Was Tracy Clarendon.
“The house burned down over the winter. No one was out there, no one was hurt, but my dad is gone now and my mother wants to rebuild the house.”
“I see,” C. Llewelyn Sumner said. “So, how can I be of service?”
“Mother would like you to come up and see if the site needs work, if the foundation can be reused, and the contractor we’ll be using needs several sets of the original plans. She’d like you to supervise the work again, if that’s alright with you.”
“You’re Tracy’s brother, aren’t you?” C. Llewelyn Sumner said, out of the blue.
The man looked away for a moment, then he stepped forward and held out his hand. “Yes. Yes I am. I didn’t think you’d remember me. I’m Forbes, by the way.”
“Yes, yes, of course I remember,” C. Llewelyn Sumner said as he shook the man’s hand. “How nice to see you again.”
“Yes. Nice.”
“And these are your children, I take it?”
And Forbes Clarendon shook his head just a little as he searched for the words he’d rehearsed on the drive down. “No, sir. They’re yours.”
And yes, there was some kind of recognition between all concerned inside this moment. C. Llewelyn Sumner knew that what Tracy’s brother had said was true. When he looked at the boy he saw the same eyes he’d seen in a mirror not so long ago.
“Yes, I think I knew that,” he said to the boy. “And how is your mother?”
Forbes cleared his throat then, and he looked away once again before he decided to answer the question. “She passed away last year. Cancer. The kids have been staying with me the past year and a half.” He paused for a moment, then continued. “It’s what she wanted.”
“Understandable,” C. Llewelyn Sumner said, and to him perhaps it really was. “The last I heard she’d moved to Arkansas.”
Forbes Clarendon shook his head. “No. She went out to the island.”
“So she…never left?”
Again, Forbes simply shook his head.
“Then I’m a little confused,” Sumner said. “Why now?”
“I wanted to meet you,” the teenaged boy said. “I wanted to know you, who my father was.”
“Alright. So, what would you like to know?”
“Why didn’t you want us?” his daughter asked.
And C. Llewelyn Sumner looked away, looked for just the right words he needed to address the moment. “When your mother left,” he began, “she didn’t tell me she was pregnant. She simply told me she’d found a better job in Arkansas and then, well, she just left…”
“So…you never knew?”
“About you?” Sumner said to his children. “No, I’m afraid today is the first I’ve heard about you.”
“That’s not exactly what Mom said,” the girl, his daughter, said. “She…”
“I think your mother probably wanted to protect me,” C. Llewelyn Sumner said, “from you. From what she thought was my indifference. And I suppose, in a way, she may have been thinking about protecting you.”
“So…what do you feel right now?” his daughter asked.
“Confused. Maybe a little hollow inside, like I’ve missed out on so many things, and, well, I think I’ve lost my bearings a little. And I’m afraid I feel a little sorry for your mother. She never trusted my feelings, never trusted me enough to come and tell me what she had done.”
“I understand,” Forbes said, his voice gentle and full of understanding, “this must all come as quite a surprise…”
“Again, I’m simply confused. If Tracy wanted you isolated from me,” he said to his children, “why the change of heart?”
“Because I can’t take care of them any longer,” Forbes said, “and Mother is no longer in a position to help?”
C. Llewelyn Sumner shook his head. “Okay. So. What are you asking?”
“We wanted to ask and see if you could take them now,” Forbes said.
“I see. What about the house on the island?”
“As I said, Mother would like you to rebuild it.”
“Is she not well?”
“Alzheimer’s,” Forbes whispered. “But it’s early stage.”
“I see,” Sumner sighed, now knowing the house was probably a ruse. “Well then, perhaps the four of us should go have a bite to eat and talk about all this.”
“Talk about what?” his son said. “Either you want us or you don’t!”
“I think I know how you feel,” C. Llewelyn Sumner nodded. “And, well, maybe it’s as simple as you say, but first I’d like to know what you want. I’d like to know how both of you feel about all this, because if moving in with me is the last thing in the world you want…”
“This isn’t their decision,” Forbes stated, interrupting Sumner. “Look. I’ve lost my job. I’m about to lose my house – and I simply won’t be able to take care of them any longer. And with the house on the island gone…?”
“So, if you’ll pardon my asking,” Sumner said to Forbes, “what are your plans?”
Tracy’s brother shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m kind of at the end of my rope, if you know what I mean.”
“Well then, as I’ve not eaten since breakfast I’m rather hungry, so I hope you’ll be able to join me,” Sumner said as he moved towards the front door. “I usually just hop across the street to the Boathouse, if that’s alright with you?”
After the short walk they were all were taken out to the skinny little patio right over the water and it was still rather sunny and warm, so after everyone was seated he looked over at the marina and he could just about see the slip where these two children had been conceived, and in his mind’s eye he felt Tracy walking beside him on the beach. Then he felt the moment when things had turned serious between them, and he remembered their moment with a smile.
He shook himself back into the present and turned his smile at Forbes. “So, what have you been doing to make a living?”
“I worked at Boeing,” he said – and that was really all he needed to say. Working at Boeing was like living on the flanks of an active volcano…you just never knew when…only that it would.
“So no retirement, just severance?”
“That’s right.”
“Can you do electrical work?”
Forbes nodded. “Yeah, sure.”
“I know a couple of contractors that’re hiring, if you’re interested.”
“I appreciate it, but I couldn’t commute from Bellingham…”
“Of course not.” Sumner turned to his children then. “You know, someone is going to have to make some introductions. Assuming, of course, you have names…”
“I’m Charles,” the boy said grumpily.
“Elizabeth,” the girl said, extending her right hand with a smile.
Sumner sighed. “Okay, so a handshake it is. And I’m assuming you’re 17 years old now? And that makes you, what, getting ready to start your senior year?”
“Yeah,” Charles said. “And that means I’m not going to be able to play football this year…”
“Oh?” Sumner said. “Why’s that?”
“Weren’t you listening? Newsflash, pops, but we’re losing our home.”
Sumner looked at Forbes. “What’s the situation with the house?”
“I’m underwater on three months, and back taxes. About fifteen large, I reckon.”
“And your mom can’t help?”
“She can’t, and her guardian won’t authorize it.”
“So, Charles, I think I know where you stand, but Elizabeth, what about you? Where would like to stay?”
She shook her head. “Uh, I must’ve missed something, but, well, what’s the choice here?”
Sumner shrugged. “Seems pretty simple to me. You guys can either come and stay with me at my place over in Port Townsend or I can see if your Uncle’s situation is reparable. If it is then I assume you could stay there and finish out high school where you’re at.”
“Look,” Forbes interrupted, “I can’t ask you to do that…”
“And you haven’t, have you? As far as I can tell, I’ve contributed exactly nothing to my children’s lives…”
“What would you like?” Elizabeth blurted out.
“Well, thank you for asking, Elizabeth. Frankly, I’d like to get to know you both, and also I’d be more than happy to do what I can to help you along your way. If that means helping out your uncle then so be it. But right now I’m most concerned about what would make you happiest.”
And Elizabeth turned to her brother then. “See. I told you he’d be like this,” she whispered.
“Charles?” Sumner asked. “What about you? What about next year?”
“I’m trying for a scholarship at UW.”
“Football? What, wide receiver or DB?”
“Both, I think.”
“Forbes, what do you think? Has he got a shot?”
“Yes, he’s pretty good, and his coaches think so too.”
“Okay, so football is a priority,” Sumner said, and Charles visibly relaxed. “Elizabeth? That leaves you? What do you want to do?”
She looked at her brother then, and her uncle, then she sighed. “I’d like to know you better. I’d like to live with you next year.”
Charles stiffened again.
Sumner leaned back in his chair and nodded. “Forbes? Scribble down the address of the house, would you? I’ve got to go make a call, if you’ll excuse me for a moment.” When he had the address he went to the desk and called his attorney, told her what he had in mind and to work out the numbers, then he went back to the table – just as their meals came.
“So, Elizabeth, what about you? College in the cards for you?”
She nodded. “Yes, then veterinary medicine.”
“Oh?”
“She’s been into animals her whole life,” Forbes added. “She’s been…”
“I can talk to, ya know?” she growled, leaning away from her uncle.
“You remind me of your grandmother, my mom,” Sumner smiled.
“Oh, is she…”
“No, I’m sorry, but she passed a couple of years ago, but you would’ve like her.”
“That’s just so unfair,” she said, settling back in her chair. “So many…”
“Yes, but we can’t live back there, can we?” Sumner said. “All we can do is face tomorrow head on, and let’s live it like we mean it.”
“Okay,” she said, “you’re right.”
“So, vet school?”
“I’ve been working as a vet tech after school, Saturdays and summers, too…”
“Have a dog yet?”
“We did, when we were little, but not the past couple of years. Besides, I want a horse – no, really, I want a bunch of horses…”
“Interesting. I’ve got about eleven acres out at my place. No barn, but those aren’t hard to do.”
“You mean it, really?”
“Why not? As long as I don’t have to take care of them…”
She almost flew into his arms then, and when she whispered “Oh, Daddy,” into his neck a couple of times he felt his world spinning round and round and out of control. About the time they were finishing up their desserts the hostess brought him a note and he nodded. “Well, okay Forbes, we just have a few papers to sign at the office then you can head back to your house.”
“What did you do?” Tracy’s brother asked.
“You’re caught up now, Forbes, through the end of the year, anyway. Charles, the choice is yours, but this is pretty good Bread Pudding, and I’m not leavin’ ’til I finish!”
+++++
Elizabeth moved in with him a few weeks later. He designed a barn and fenced in some pasture and bought her a mare, and while all this was going on he returned to the island to survey the damage to the original house. The concrete foundation had been damaged and neglected since fire crews left the scene, and Mrs. Clarendon moved to an assisted living facility, so she’d never move back to the island. The decision was made to clear out the remnants of the old house and sell the island, and Sumner was sorry to see the house end up like it had.
He made one last trip to the island after the remaining demolition was complete, and he took Elizabeth with him – if only to listen to her memories about growing up on the island, with Tracy. He realized he’d made a tremendous mistake by not committing to Tracy, and the sense of loss had, at times, begun to feel a little like a personal calamity. Elizabeth came to him kind of like a little miracle, yet he couldn’t help but think of her as a kind of consolation prize. He’d missed out on the Grand Prize when he’d shuffled away from marriage and commitment and all that, but Elizabeth was his daughter. He moved quickly from the realm of obligatory feelings to knowing real love when he saw her, and he hoped in time she would feel that way too.
When football season rolled around he made it a point to go to all of his son’s games and yes, he was talented. Maybe something would become of it, but love came harder between the two of them. His son approached warily, not quite sure who his father was. Charles decided later that year he wanted to go to Michigan State and when he was awarded a football scholarship back there that all but cemented their future relationship. Distance would take care of that.
Elizabeth went to the University of California at Davis, and just like that, after a whirlwind year of indecipherable emotions and roller coaster turmoils, they were gone. And so as quickly as they came to him they disappeared. Now, however, he had a horse to deal with.
And one afternoon he rode the horse down to the shore, more just to watch the water than anything else, and to wonder about the nature of such things. Husbands and wives, sons and daughters, all the predictably unpredictable things that went along with those four words. How almost all of them had escaped him, how close he came to never knowing what that life was all about.
He heard a commotion down on the rocky beach and he tied off the horse then picked his way down through the brushy scree to the water’s edge and he saw an otter and a fox locked in mortal combat, their bodies intertwined in a whirling dance of death, and he watched them, fascinated. Why? Why do this? Why fight like this, knowing it might only lead to your own demise?
And he watched in awe of whatever had compelled this struggle.
And soon it was over. The otter emerged victorious – yet as it pulled itself away from the dead fox Sumner could see that its wounds were severe, indeed, the otter appeared to have been mortally wounded. She limped off a few feet and then fell over into nothingness, and he walked down to their bodies if for no other reason than to bury them. When that was done he heard a gentle mewing and went to investigate, and he found what he assumed was the dead fox’s pup curled up amongst the rocks. He stood tall and looked around, hoping to find signs of the other parent…
And then he heard distant cries up the beach and went to investigate, and he found that the otter had left a pup behind.
So…they had fought to protect their young, and they had…but at what cost? How senseless, he thought, were such outcomes? Yet…how inevitable.
C. Llewelyn Sumner didn’t really know what else to do, so he gathered some grass and lay the pups side by side on this little makeshift bed and he clambered up through the scree to Elizabeth’s horse and he carried them back to his house. He made sure they were warm and he heated some milk in a saucepan and he helped them along by dipping the tip of his little finger into the milk and letting them lick away, and it worked.
“Now what do I do?”
And she came to him then, as she did from time to time. Tracy came and they spoke for a while. About what he must do now, because everything was there, everything he needed to know. Later that evening he rubbed the little pups when they cried. “It’s alright,” he told them as he fed them both, “I’m here now. Everything will be fine so just go to sleep. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
Admirers of his work still came calling, and even long after his practice wound down people still came to see the builder and his dreams. He had always worked to bring the outside inside, so these visitors weren’t exactly surprised when they found C. Llewelyn Sumner sitting in the sun on his deck – with a fox curled up on his lap or an otter sleeping on his shoulder. They found, in fact, that the sight rather suited such a lonely man.
Adrian Leverkühn Writes 