Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) (8 page)

Tanya Latimer spoke up.
 
“What’s it like—living without pain?
 
Do you ever miss it?”

“What’s it like, living without a penis?” he responded.

“Huh?
 
Oh, I get you…how can I know, with nothing to compare it to?
 
Sorry—I guess it
was
a dumb question.
 
It’s just…well, black people in America have had more than our share of pain for so long, and done so many magnificent, unprecedented things with it, that I’ve sometimes wondered if we wouldn’t miss it, at least a little bit, if racism ever did magically disappear.
 
It isn’t just fear that keeps us from feeling totally comfortable hanging around white people; it’s also that—present company excepted—so many of them seem to us so vapid and dull and directionless.
 
I don’t know if I’d enjoy being like that for long.
 
Maybe pain has gotten good to us.
 
I’d be overjoyed to make the experiment, mind—but I do wonder sometimes.
 
Don’t you?”

Dave Goldblum-Matthias nodded vigorously—then remembered that Tanya is blind.
 
“Yes, yes—it’s like I’ve been thinking for a few years now: one day, if God is good, there will exist a generation of Jews in Israel who do not have a single living ancestor who can tell them of his own experience what it is like to be landless, homeless, stateless.
 
Jews like ordinary humans—will this be a wholly good thing?
 
Will they still be
proud
?
 
After all these weary millennia on the road, will we really be happy with roots—even in the Promised Land?”

Acayib frowned.
 
“Buck,” he said, setting money on the bar, “I owe you three drinks so far.
 
Another beer for me too, please, Jake, while I think about them.”
 
I served up Mary’s Milks for him and Buck, ignoring his money.
 
“I think what you’re both asking me,” he said finally, “is whether I’m really so sure I’d trade places with a normal.
 
Well, my immediate impulse is to say
yes
.
 
Every single normal I’ve ever discussed this with has been absolutely certain I was nuts to wish I could trade—and I’ve always felt that anything
everybody
agrees on has just naturally got to be wrong.
 
But now you’ve both got me wondering—”

“It’s differences from ‘normal’ that make a person special,” Tanya said.
 
“Look at us: I’m a blind spade and David’s a queer Jew, and we’re two of the happiest people I know.
 
Everybody here is at least a little bit bent, one way and another, and the devil himself ain’t as happy as we are here most nights.”

“Balance,” Acayib said thoughtfully, and took a long slow sip of beer.
 

“Salt in the cookies,” Dave said.

“Beg pardon?”

“You put salt in cookies to make them sweeter,” he explained.
 
“Gives the sugar something to work against.”

“Huh.”

“Are you scared
all
the time?” Noah asked.

“Just when I’m in some environment I can’t control,” he said.
 
“At home in my easy chair, I’m a laid-back kind of guy.
 
I guess you could say that at all times, I know whether it’s safe to relax or not.”

“It’s safe here, Mister,” Shorty Steinitz said earnestly.
 
“We’ll all keep an eye on you.
 
Won’t we?”

There was a ragged but enthusiatic chorus of agreement.
 
“You got it, Acayib!”
 
“Take it off your mind, Nazz—it’s covered.”
 
“You’re off duty for the night, partner.”
 
“We look out for each other, here.”

He blinked around at us owlishly, his mouth slack.

“Believe us, son,” Doc Webster said.
 
“Pain has its uses—but it is not worth the grief that comes with it.”

“But most of the time I’m like a ship in a war zone with no radar and one overworked lookout,” he said.

“Better that than a thousand lookouts with shrill voices,” the Doc said.
 
“I’ve been a doctor, man and boy, for almost forty-five years now—and I believe to my boots that the human pain system was one of God’s very worst designs, even worse than the scrotum.
 
A child could do better.
 
What good is an alarm system with no off switch and no volume knob?
 
For two million years of evolution, the overwhelming majority of our most poignant pains were urgent warnings of
situations we could do nothing about.
 
For all but the last century of that two million years, the agony attendant on an inflamed appendix served no useful purpose whatsoever, probably lowered the victim’s resistance even further.
 
It’s taken our minds two million years to adapt to our stupid bodies, and invent medicine.
 
Until we developed dentistry, what use was a toothache?
 
Were we supposed to bash ourselves in the mouth with a rock?
 
Why should passing a gallstone hurt so much—or at all?
 
Even now, with so many medical tools at my disposal, most of the pains my patients suffer are superfluous, redundant information, pointless misery.
 
Yet we
still
have no really satisfactory way to switch off the alarm, and all the ways we know to mute it have undesirable side effects.
 
I sometimes wonder if God felt He needed to
flay
us into developing intelligence.”
 
He coughed and looked embarrassed.
 
“Anyway, I suspect it might be better to have the alarm system permanently disconnected than to be unable to turn it off—or at least turn it down for periods of time without penalty.”

“If God had agreed with you, maybe we’d never have become intelligent,” Acayib pointed out.
 
“If we have.”

“Maybe not,” the Doc agreed, “and maybe we’d have become
alert
, instead—and who’s to say that wouldn’t be an improvement?
 
Have you ever spent much time in the company of someone with real deep, chronic intractable pain?”

“No,” he admitted.
 
“My parents went together in a common disaster.”

“Let me take you down to Smithtown General some night, and spend a little time in the Intractable Pain Clinic with me.
 
I think I can convince you that you’re a lucky man.”

“Dammit,” Acayib said stubbornly, “I
refuse
to be grateful.
 
I will
not
concede that Riley-Day Syndrome isn’t a fucking curse.
 
It’s
not
a blessing, it’s a sentence.”

“Do you know who Neils Bohr is?” Solace asked him.

“Genius.
 
One of the founders of quantum mechanics.”

“Correct.
 
Listen, now: Bohr’s Codicil to Logic says: ‘The opposite of an ordinary truth is a falsehood.
 
But there also exist
great
truths—and the opposite of a great truth is
another great truth
.’”

“Run that by me one more time.”

“‘Love is great.’
 
‘Love sucks.’
 
Both eternally true.
 
See?
 
It’s a great truth, one capable of contradicting itself yet emphatically existing.
 
‘The blues make you feel sad.’
 
There’s another.”

He was looking thunderstruck.
 

“How about, ‘Civilization is a great invention,’?” Dave offered.

Marty Matthias-Goldblum, Dave’s husband, giggled suddenly.
 
“‘True and self-contradictory,’ huh?
 
I’ve got one that’s a single word.”

We all looked expectant.

“Gay.”

The result was a rumble, about a third laughter and two-thirds applause.
 
Dave gave his husband a kiss, and the same mix recurred.

“And you, Acayib,” Solace said.
 
“You feel no pain.”

Acayib burst into tears, long enough for us all to see that there
were
no tears, and then hid his face in his hands.

The giggles and cheers faded to silence.

“Acayib, my new friend,” I said, “go ahead and fret about your condition if you feel you must.
 
Maybe things do have to balance, and you have to punish yourself for being unpunishable, I don’t know.
 
But don’t worry about worrying, if that makes any sense.
 
Okay?
 
Don’t take on any more pain, more mental or spiritual pain, than you absolutely have to.
 
There’s too much of it in the world for guys like you to be manufacturing more than God intended.
 
Listen to what Mary McCartney told her son Paulie: let it be.”

He looked up at me, and then around at all the concerned bystanders—all of us, that is.
 
I was interested to note that despite the absence of tears, his eyes were still red and weepy-looking.
 
I wondered if he knew that…since he could not feel his lids stinging.

“Jake,” he said finally, his voice hoarse, “what do I have to do to hang out here?”

“Show up.
 
Be kind.”
 
I tried to think.
 
What else?
 
“Be merry.”

“By God, I will!” he cried, and the earlier laughter and applause returned redoubled.

***

When he was ready for his third drink, I suggested God’s Blessing, judging that he could use a little caffeine with his ethanol.
 
He watched The Machine do its magical thing with great interest.

“That must be hell to clean, after closing,” he ventured.

“Not at all,” I told him.
 
“I push the ‘goodnight’ button, and it hoses itself down inside with a decalcifier solution and a rinse cycle.
 
Maintenance consists of replacing beans, booze, sugar and cream as they run out, and there are little warning lights to cue me.”

He took a sip.
 
Atherton tablelands Bush Gold, mixed with the Bushmill’s 1608.
 
People smiled as they saw his expression change.
 
“My God,” he breathed.
 
“That thing is the apex of technological civilization.”

“That it is,” I agreed.
 
“The whole world will have one—just as soon as they deserve it.”

“You people deserve that?
 
You must be pretty special.”

“Ve certainly like to sink so,” said Ralph von Wau Wau, who had climbed up onto a barstool to order a saucer of scotch.
 
(Actually I don’t have classical barstools—it was more of a real tall armchair.)

I waited to see how Acayib would handle this, his first full step into the Twilight Zone.
 
If you want to learn something about a new acquaintance, introduce him to your friend, the talking dog…

Acayib didn’t hurry.
 
Nor did he glance around to see where the ventriloquist was.
 
He took a good long look at Ralph, and thought about things, and what he finally replied was, “Well, you won’t get an argument out of me, cousin.”

Ralph grinned.
 
(Unlike most of his breed, Ralph can grin without drooling.
 
A side-effect of the surgery that made it possible for him to speak.)
 
“You react wery well to surprisess, friend Acayib.”

“What’s so surprising about a German accent?” Acayib asked.
 
“You’re a German shepherd, aren’t you?”
 
And he took a long sip of God’s Blessing.

Ralph—well, barked with laughter.
 
And so did all within earshot.
 
Acayib tried to keep a straight face…and failed.

“I should have warned you, Acayib,” I said.
 
“Some of my clientele are a little out of the ordinary.
 
As Tom Waits once said of his band, ‘They all come from good families…just over the years, they got some ways about ’em that just ain’t right.’
 
Take Ernie Shea over there, the fellow who tossed that paper airplane that set you alight when you walked in here…we call him ‘The Lucky Duck,’ or ‘Duck’ for short, because stuff like that only happens to him on days that end in ‘y.’
 
Ernie’s half Pooka, on his mother’s side: if he tosses a coin it’s liable to land balanced on edge.
 
Or fail to come down.
 
And then there’s Naggeneen the cluricaune—sort of an Irish combination of Bacchus and Pan.
 
Hey, Nagganeen, where are you?”
 
Not a question one often had to ask, cluricaunes having the personality of an exploding cigar.
 
I finally located him, passed out on one of the (new) rafters, and pointed him out to Acayib.
 
“There he is.
 
He doesn’t usually fold this early.”

Acayib frankly gaped, realizing too late that his brave acceptance of a talking dog had been the equivalent of That Fatal Glass of Beer.
 
A talking dog can be rationalized, if you work at it, slowly—but a three-foot man with four feet of white beard, dressed in crimson cap and forktailed coat, smoking a villainous old pipe while sleeping folded up on a rafter, is something else again.

“Naggeneen’s paranormal power is the ability to teleport himself around—and most particularly, to teleport alcohol directly to his stomach.
 
From anywhere in this building.
 
He’s an easy customer to satisfy—and a jolly old soul, when he’s conscious.
 
Have I exceeded your weirdness quotient, yet?”