Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) (19 page)

“What saved us was, we were telepathic at the time.”
 

The late returns from the grunt poll indicated I had just about everybody but Buck and Acayib, now.
 
Even Nikky was nodding.

“Because we were telepathic, we were able to outthink the Beast, and keep him off balance, and most important, distract him at the crucial instant.
 
If he’d had as much as a second’s warning, he’d have been out of the solar system by the time that bomb went off.
 
If we’re going to take out a creature that’s even tougher, I figure we’d better get telepathic again.
 
Problem is, we no longer have the MacDonald brothers to help us connect.”
 

That went over Buck and Acayib’s heads, of course, so I paused to briefly explain about Jim and Paul MacDonald, the telepathic brothers who, in time of crisis, had been able to bootstrap all of us up to their level of telepathic awareness—and had been murdered by the Beast for their pains.

“Jim and Paul always claimed that everybody has telepathic potential—that all the equipment is in place in all of us, and it’s just a question of learning how to use it.”

“I think we’re all born
knowing
how to use it,” Doc Webster said.
 
“Then all these telepathically-deaf-and-dumb giants start
yapping
at us, insisting that we learn to use sound and facial expression and gesture, and before long we forget how to really communicate.”
 

“You may be right, for all I know, Doc,” I agreed.
 
“Jim used to say it’s a matter of learning how to shovel the shit out of the communications room…that what you have to do is unlearn a lifetime of tricks you’ve picked up for
suppressing
telepathy.
 
He said it’s fear that holds us all back from telepathy, and that the best recipe he knew for dealing with fear was just what we do here most of the time: drink and think and share and care together.”

“Whoa,” Buck said.
 
“Hold it right there.
 
What makes you think you’re smarter than your ancestors?”

“Pardon?”

“If I accept your premise—that we all have telepath machinery in us, waiting for us to invent an owner’s manual—then it has to follow that at one time the whole race was telepathic.
 
Function begets organ.
 
An organic system simply can’t evolve a couple of million years before it gets used, right?”

I thought about Atlantis legends, Eden myths, Dreamtime legends.
 
I glanced quickly at Callahan, but he was poker-faced.
 
“Could be.
 
Make your point.”

“Once we were all telepathic.
 
Then at some point we decided it was a good idea to invent speech, and facial expression, and gesture, and a thousand little tricks to suppress telepathy, and force them on all new humans at birth.
 
What makes you think there wasn’t a damned good reason?”

That one stopped us all for a moment.

“That’s a hell of an interesting insight,” I said finally, “but it doesn’t
get
us anywhere, and it doesn’t address our present problem.
 
I still say getting telepathic is our only move.”

“Yeah, but Jake,” Long-Drink McGonnigle said, “how exactly do we go about it?
 
I know we agreed, back on the night you opened this dump, that the best way we knew was to keep on doing just like we’ve been doing all these years, loving one another and sharing good times and getttin’ faced together and like that.
 
But we’ve been
doing
that stuff, for months now, and I can’t say I feel any more telepathic than I did on Opening Night.
 
How are we gonna we meet a three-to-nine-hour deadline?”

I sighed.
 
“Well now, Drink, there you take me into deep waters.
 
All I can tell you is, somehow I know we’ve got it in us—if we can just find the handle.
 
Getting drunk is the best start I can think of.
 
Anybody else got any ideas?”

General silence.

“Mike?
 
Mary?
 
Jump in here any time.”

They had nothing to contribute.

“Nikky?”

Nothing.

“Boss?
 
I gotta idea.”

Fast Eddie had an idea?

“Like de Beatles said: we oughta get back.”

“I don’t follow you, Eddie.
 
You mean Translate back in time, and—”

“Nah.
 
Get back to where we started.
 
How we started.
 
Why we started comin’ here inna foist place.”

“By God, Eddie,” Doc Webster said, “I think I see what you’re driving at.
 
I’m one of the oldest regulars, so I know how most of us joined this crazy company—but even I don’t know all the stories.
 
And just about everybody else knows fewer of them than I do.
 
Buck and Acayib don’t look awful clear on just how
they
got here.”

I was beginning to get Eddie’s point.
 
“You think reviewing how we all came to be here together will help somehow, Ed?”

“We need a fast hit o’ magic.
 
Magic is what got us all togedda.
 
Let’s tell magic stories.”

There was a murmur, consisting mostly of the rising-and-falling type of grunt, and an occasional “That feels right to me,” or “Sounds like a plan.”
 
I glanced at Zoey, and she nodded.

I had no better idea.
 
“Okay.
 
Let’s give it a try.
 
The first step is to lubricate everybody’s throat—who needs a fresh drink?”

The next five minutes were busy but uneventful.
 
I remember thinking that for the first time, passing booze over the bar felt less like distributing refreshment and more like issuing ammo.
 
Zoey’s quiet support buoyed me as I worked.
 
We can talk a lot without words.

“All right,” I said finally.
 
“Who wants to go first?
 
No, wait, I know who I want to go first.
 
Better than half the stories I know about how people first came to Callahan’s Place trace back to one man: Doc Webster.
 
You steered me here yourself, Doc…and somehow I never got around to asking you how
you
found the Place.”

A rumble of agreement indicated that others had long wondered, too.
 
“Hell,” Long-Drink said, “I always figured Mike just ran into Doc one day, and built a bar around him.
 
It’s what I’d have done.”

“Drink,” the Doc boomed, “one of these days an aroused citizenry will build an entire
network
of bars around you.”
 
He sipped at his glass of Peter Dawson scotch, placed it where he could reach it conveniently, and sighed.
 
“All right, children, brush your teeth and hop under the covers, and Grandpa Sam will tell you all how he met the big man with the smelly cigars.
 
Eddie, a little bullshitting music, please.”

Fast Eddie took his stool, and began something that managed to convey the essence of “As Time Goes By” without ever quoting or even paraphrasing it, a music most conducive to nostalgic reminiscence.

People gathered round, pulled up seats, lit up smokes, and generally settled in to listen.
 
Bill Gerrity tossed a couple of logs on the fire, and the room filled with the unmistakable tang of birch.
 
Ralph Von Wau Wau curled up by the fire, and began to emit that soft sound for which we have not yet found it necessary to invent a word, which is the dog’s equivalent of a cat’s purr.
 
The CounterClock ticked.
 
The Doc folded his hands over his vast belly, thought in silence for perhaps twenty long seconds, and then began to speak.

Doc Webster’s Story

I’d been a doctor for seven years [
he said
].
 
ER resident down at St. Eligius in Brooklyn.
 
Married four years.
 
I was just starting to feel settled enough to think about kids, and Janet told me she wanted a divorce.
 
Couldn’t have shocked me more if she’d burst into flame.
 
I’d thought things were fine.
 
Asked the usual questions.
 
No, no other lover.
 
No, she didn’t think I was having an affair either.
 
For a long time she couldn’t explain it and couldn’t explain it, and then all of a sudden she started to talk, and she talked for about half an hour nonstop, and the gist of it was, I wasn’t a very nice person anymore.

That shocked me even more than her asking for a divorce.
 
It was as if she’d suddenly started talking in Martian.
 
Not a nice person?
 
Hell, everyone who knew me said I was a barrel of laughs.
 
Best punster in the hospital.
 
Didn’t she realize what a damn saint I was, breaking my ass in Emergency seventy hours a week?
 
How hard it was, how much I needed to veg’ out and relax when I got home?
 
Sure, I got a little impenetrable, sometimes.
 
Brusque.
 
Distracted.
 
Was that any reason to break up a good partnership?
 
And so on.

Then Janet said her piece again, and I said mine again, and fifty reps later we each hired a lawyer.
 
She got the good one.

I was convinced she’d lost her grip on reality.
 
So, for my own reality-check, I began quietly taking people aside at work—everybody I knew, pretty much—and asking them to tell me honestly what they thought of me.
 
They were all very polite, talked a lot about my medical skills and my reaction-time in a crisis and my administrative efficiency, everybody without exception mentioned my wonderful sense of humor…and when you added it all up and filtered the bullshit, they all said I wasn’t a particularly nice person.
 
Words commonly used included “distant,” “facade,” and “arm’s length.”
 
To me they came through as noise.

Okay, so my colleagues didn’t like me much better than Janet had.
 
Surely my
patients
knew what a nice guy I was.
 
They had to.
 
All I’d ever really wanted to be, when I came right down to it, was a nice person: that was why I was in medicine in the first place, and in trauma work in the second place.
 
Who could be nicer than a guy who saves your life?
 
Especially when he could just as easily be doing face-lifts, or autopsies, or playing golf.

Of course, I knew it would be awkward getting one of my patients to tell me honestly what he thought of me as a human being.
 
What trauma case wants to risk annoying his doctor?
 
So I decided to start with a patient
not
under my direct care, a patient I knew about because everyone at that hospital knew about him, a guy I
knew
I had gone out of my way to be nice to.
 
I went up to Six East, and knocked on John Smiley’s door.

John Smiley was an insult to medical science.
 
He had arrived at that hospital so chopped up he had no business being alive, and his condition had been deteriorating steadily since.
 
Every day, for three years.
 
From the nipples down he was meat, and the meat was going bad.
 
He needed a new operation of one kind or another every month or two.
 
Usually the kind a surgeon would call “interesting.”
 
He held the world’s record for number of appearances as the subject in
JAMA
articles: just about every organ and system in his body came up for discussion at some point.
 
He was one of the—thank God—rare spinal cases who loses everything
but
pain sensation.
 
He couldn’t feel a caress, below the chest, but he could count his stitches and track every gas bubble and tell you if the catheter kinked up.
 
He had long since become immune to every analgesic the hospital could legally supply.

(
Doc paused, sipped his scotch, and frowned at his memories.
)

I can see him now.
 
Laying in bed, sheet always pulled up to his collarbone so he wouldn’t make people feel faint.
 
Wasted, of course, but you could see he’d been a big tough guy once.
   
Redhead, face like a pirate.
 
Effect enhanced by the eye-patch, and the cheek scar.
 
Still had arms and shoulders like a sailor, too, from hauling himself back and forth on the bed by that silly trapeze thing.
 
When he grinned, you pictured a parrot on his shoulder.
 
He grinned a
lot
.

He’d been a fireman.
 
He and his partner were taking a truck back to the barn, and as they pulled in, the counterweight-wire on the garage door snapped.
 
The emergency braking system failed, and the door came down on the cab like God’s Axe.
 
His partner got lucky, died before he knew he was in trouble.
 
John got the booby-prize: he lived.

There was some kind of Catch-22 in the insurance.
 
I never did get it straight.
 
The other guy’s wife got her death settlement.
 
But John was four minutes past the end of his shift, or wasn’t supposed to be driving, or some bullshit, so there was no disability for his wife.
 
Not a red cent.
 
Not until he died; then she’d get rich.
 
Meanwhile, his total financial asset was Medicare.
 
It didn’t cover half the treatment he needed, let alone the private room.
 
He got them anyway.