Callahan's Crosstime Saloon

by Spider Robinson

  I calculate that by now I must have heard at least a hundred people ask for help of one kind or another in Callahan's—it's that kind of a place. I only remember one getting turned down, and he was a special case. We indicated our willingness to help any way we could, and Fast Eddie fetched her a chair and a fresh drink. She had enough composure back to thank him gently; and then she began talking. During her entire narrative, her voice remained fiat, impersonal. As though she were giving a history lesson. Her first words explained why.

  "It's a long story," she said wearily, "at least it has been for me. An uncommonly long story. It begins on the day of my birth, which is October 25, 1741."

  "Huh?" said Doc and Long-Drink and I and—loudest of all—Fast Eddie. "You mean 1941," Eddie corrected.

  "Who's telling this story? I mean 1741. And if you boys aren't prepared to believe that, maybe I should stop right now."

  We thought about it. Compared to some of the things I've heard—and believed—in Callahan's, this was nothing. Come to think, it explained a few things. Those eyes of hers, for instance.

  "Sorry, Rachel," Callahan said for all of us. "So you're 232 years old. Go on."

  Eddie looked like he'd been hit by a truck. "Sure t'ing," he said bravely. "Sorry I innarupted."

  And in the six or seven hours that ensued, Rachel told us the most incredible tale I have ever heard, before or since. I couldn't repeat that tale if I tried; that uncharacteristically impersonal voice seemed to go on forever with its catalog of sorrows, outlining for us the happinesses and heartbreaks of more than two hundred years of active womanhood. You could probably drag it out of me word for word with deep hypnosis, for I never stopped listening, but the sheer length and weight of the narrative seemed to numb my forebrain for indeterminate periods of time; the aggregate memory is largely gone. But different bits and pieces stuck in, the minds of each of us, and I compared notes later. Me, for instance, I recall how, when she was describing what it was like to be crammed in a root cellar while a roaring fire overhead ate her first husband—and her first six children—she kept saying over and over again how cramped it was and how frustrating not to be able to straighten up; it struck me that even after all the intervening years her mind continued to dwell on merely physical hurts. Tom Hauptman now, he remembered in detail the business of her second husband, the minister, going mad and killing her next five kids and himself because anyone who refused to age like God intended must be sent by Satan. Tom said what struck him was how little progress churches have made in two hundred years toward convincing people that the unknown is not by definition evil. Long-Drink is a war games nut—he retained the part about the Battle of Lake Champlain in 1814, which claimed her third husband and two more children. Fast Eddie remembers the story of her first days as a whaler's whore in Nantucket because she stopped in the middle and asked him solicitously if she was shocking him. ("Not me," he said defiantly, "I'll bet you wuz a terrific whore!" and she smiled and thanked him and continued, clinically, dispassionately.) Spud Montgomery recalls the three children that resulted from Rachel's whoring years, because Spud's from Alabama and never stopped fighting the Civil War and that's what they died in. Tommy Janssen remembers her last child, the imbecile, who never did learn to feed himself and took thirty-five long years to die, because Tommy grew up with a retarded sister. Doc Webster's strongest memory is of the final birthing, her first in a hospital, the still-born—after which the OB performed the hysterectomy. Doc identified strongly with the astonishment of a doctor faced with a patient in her late twenties whose uterus had delivered eighteen kids. Callahan characteristically recalls the man she was married to at the time, the first man since her psychotic minister to whom she felt she could tell the truth, with whom she did not have to cosmetically "age" herself, with whom she could share her lonely, terrible secret; the gentle and strangely understanding man who cured her of her self-loathing and self-fear and accepted her for what she inexplicably was; the good and loving man who had been killed, mugged for the dollar and a half in his pocket, a month or two before Rachel found Callahan's Place.

  But not one of us retains anything like the complete text of Rachel's story. We wouldn't want to if we could, for condensing it into a comprehensibility would turn it into a soap opera. And, probably, we couldn't if we tried. If somebody gave me a guaranteed accurate run-down of my own future in that kind of depth, I don't think I'd remember much more. It was one king hell mountain of a tale, and it displaced its own weight in alcohol as the hours of its telling dragged by.

  Me, I'm thirty-five years old, and I have been there and back again, and when Rachel finished her virtually uninterrupted narration I felt like a five-year-old whose great-grandmother has just recited the Story of Her Life in horrific detail.

  In the dead silence that grew from Rachel's last words there just didn't seem to be anything to say to her, no words in all my experience that wouldn't sound banal—like telling a leper that it's always darkest before the dawn. Not that there had been agony in her voice at any time during her recital, nor any on her face when she finished. That was the most ghastly thing about her tale; it was delivered with the impersonal detachment of a historian, recited like the biography of one long dead. You Are There At The Battle of Lake Champlain.

  Oh, there was pain aplenty in her story, sure—but so buried, under two centuries of scars, that it could only be inferred. And yet the pain had been there earlier, had broken through to the surface for a moment at least, when Rachel had cried. How? Why?

  I became peripherally aware of the men of Callahan's Place, arrayed around me with their mouths open. Even Callahan looked pole-axed—and that almost scared me. I glanced around, looking for even one face that held some kind of answer, some kind of consolation, some word for Rachel.

  And found one. Fast Eddie's mouth was trembling, but there were words in it struggling to get out. He couldn't seem to bring himself to speak, but he looked like he sure and hell wanted to.

  Callahan saw it too. "You look like you got something to say, Eddie," he said gently.

  Eddie seemed to reach a decision all at once. Whirling to face Callahan, he jammed his hands in his hip pockets and-snarled—snarled!—"Who ast you? I got nuttin' to say."

  Callahan started, and if I'd had any capacity for shock left I'd have been shocked. Eddie barking at Callahan? It was like watching Lassie sink her fangs into Tommy's leg.

  "Eddie," Doc Webster began reasonably, "if you have any words that might help Rachel here I think you ought to..."

  "SHADDAP!" Eddie blared. "I tell ya I got nuttin' ta say, see?"

  The silence returned, and stayed a while. We could only surmise that Rachel's tale of sorrow had unhinged the banty little piano player. Creeping Jesus, it had near unhinged me—and I wasn't in love with her. The central issue, then, was still Rachel. Well... if Eddie had nothing to say, who did?

  Who else?

  "So all you have left is immortality, eh Rachel?" Callahan rumbled. "Tough break."

  That did seem to put a little perspective on it. Surely Rachel's run of bad luck was due to change soon. It was only logical. "Sure, Rachel," I said, beginning to cheer up. "You're bound to start getting the breaks anytime now."

  But it was no good. There was a smile on her face, but not a happy one.

  "It figures," Long-Drink said hurriedly. "You can have a run of bad cards that seems to last forever, but sooner or later you pick up your hand and find four aces. It's just the Law of Averages, Rachel. Things always even out in the end."

  "Sorry, boys," Rachel said, still smiling sadly. "Nice try. I understand what you're saying—but there are a couple of holes in the logic. Two incorrect assumptions, one of them your mistake and one of them mine."

  "What mistakes?" Callahan asked, his rugged face wrinkled in thought.

  "Your mistake first, Mike. It's a natural one, I suppose, but it's a mistake just the same. What makes you think I'm immortal?"

  "Eh?"

  "I'm older than a
ny four of you put together, yes. But longevity is not immortality. Mike, nothing is immortal: ask Dorian Gray. My clock runs as slow as his did— but it runs."

  "But you..."

  "...look a lot younger than 232 years old," she finished. "Right. I look like I'm maybe crowding thirty. But Mike: what's my natural lifespan?"

  He started to answer, than shut up, looking thoughtful. Who the hell knew?

  "Someday I will die," Rachel went on, "just like you, like Tom Flannery. Like all humans; like all living things. I know that, I feel it in my bones. And there isn't a geriatrics expert in the world who can say when. There are no data to work with; as far as I know I am unique."

  "I reckon you're right," Callahan conceded, "but so what? Anyone in this room could die tomorrow—we're all under sentence of death, like you said. But to stay sane a body just has to live as though they'll go on forever, assume there's a lot of years left. Hellfire, Tom Flannery lived that way, and he knew better. Maybe there ain't no way to figure the odds for you—but if I was an insurance salesman, I'd love to have your business. Jake and Long-Drink are right: there's good times around the corner, always, and I bet you live to see 'em.

  "I may not be as old as you, Rachel, but there's one thing I've learned in the time I have been around: joy always equals pain in the long run."

  She shook her head impatiently and sighed. "The second mistake, Mike. The one that's my fault, in a way. You see, the most spectacular points of the story I've told you all tonight are the bad times, and so it must seem like I've just always been a hard-luck kid. But that's not so at all. I've known happiness too, in full measure, with Jacob and Isaiah and even with Benjamin, and most of all with my second and most beloved Jacob. There were good times in Nantucket if it comes to that, and throughout the whoring years; the profession is vastly underrated. And my joys have been greater, I think, than any of you could know—because you are correct, Mike: joy is the product of the pain that has gone before it, and vice versa. I know I could never have appreciated Jacob's quiet acceptance as much if I hadn't been looking for it for two centuries.

  "Oh, the seesaw never stops, I learned that when Jacob was killed—but then again I was gladder to find this bar than any customer you've ever had."

  "Then what... I mean, why uh...?"

  "Why am I hurting? Hear me, Mike: there is nothing like extended life to make you aware that you're going to die someday. I am more aware of my own mortality than any of you could possibly be. Damn it, I've been dying for two hundred years!

  "And how do you, how do normal people come to terms with that awareness of mortality? How do you beat death?"

  "Oh Lord," the Doc gasped. "I remember now. That toast..."

  "Yes." Rachel nodded. "The one that gave me the weeps, for the first time in twenty years. 'To Motherhood.' I don't want to see or hear or say anything about motherhood ever again! A man or woman who's afraid of dying will either decide to believe in an afterlife... or have children, so that something of himself or herself will live on. I haven't believed in God since my years with Benjamin—and all my babies died childless and I can't have any more! I had nineteen chances at real immortality, and they all came up craps. I'm the last of my line.

  "So what will I leave behind me? I haven't the gift to leave great books or paintings or music; I can't build anything; I have no eternal thoughts to leave the world. I've been alive longer than anyone on Earth—and when I'm gone I'll leave nothing; nothing more durable than your memories of me."

  Her voice had begun to rise shrilly; her hands danced in her lap. "For awhile I had hope, for those of my children who shared my birthmark—an hourglass on its side, high on the left shoulder blade—seemed to have a genetic share in my longevity. But that damned birthmark is a curse, an unbeatable hex. Not one of the marked children had any interest at all in siring or bearing children of their own, and accident or illness cut them down, every one. If even one of them had left a child, I could die happy. But the curse is unbroken," she slammed her fist down on the bar. "When I go I'll be gone, solid gone without a trace. Centuries of living, and no heritage more durable than a footprint in the snow!"

  She was crying again, her voice strident and anguished, contorted with pain. I could see Eddie, his own face twisting with strong emotion, trying to break in; but now that he wanted to talk she wouldn't let him.

  "So what have you got to offer me, boys? What's your solution? Have you got anything more useful than four fingers of bourbon?" She got up and flung her empty glass at the fireplace, began grabbing glasses off the bar and throwing them too, grunting with effort, still speaking: "What kind of... an-swers have you... got for an... old old lady who's... trapped in a moving... box sliding… downhill to..." She had run out of glasses, and with the last words she gripped the long-legged armchair she'd been sitting on and heaved it high over her head to throw it too into the fire, and as she stood there with the heavy chair held high her face changed, a look of enormous puzzlement smoothing over the hysterical rage.

  "...death?" she finished softly, and crumpled like a rag doll, the chair bouncing and clattering into a corner.

  The Doc was fast, and ten feet closer, but Fast Eddie beat him easily. He slid the last yard on his knees, lifted Rachel's head with great tenderness onto his lap, and hollered, "Rachel, lissen ta me!" The Doc tried to take her away from him, and Eddie backhanded him off his feet without looking up. "Lissen ta me Rachel, LISSEN

  goddamn, it!" he thundered.

  Her eyes fluttered open. "Yes, Eddie."

  "Ya can't die, Rachel, not yet. You go and die on me

  an' I'll break both your arms, I swear to God. Lissen here, if you want a daughter I can fix it."

  She smiled, a faint and bitter smile. "Thanks, Eddie, but adoption just isn't the same."

  "I ain't talkin' about adoption," he barked. "But I tell ya I can fix it. Ida spoke up sooner, but you said you didn't ever want to think about kids again. Now will ya lissen, or are you too busy dyin'?"

  She was teetering on the edge, but I guess curiosity must be a powerful stimulant. "What… what do you mean?"

  "I'm sterile too, damnit." Our eyes widened a little more at this revelation, and I was suddenly ashamed of how little I knew about Eddie. "But I kept my ears open an' I found out how to beat it, how ta leave somethin' behind, see? Did you ever hear of cloning?"

  She looked startled. "You can't clone people, Eddie."

  "Not today, you can't. Maybe you an' I won't live to see it happen, either. But I can take ya inta Manhattan to a place where they'll freeze a slice o' yer skin, a lousy coupla million cells, an' keep 'em on ice till they can clone people. Tom Flannery's there now, frozen like a popside, waitin' for 'em to invent a cure for AIDS; he tol' me about it."

  I gasped in astonishment; saw Callahan beginning a broad grin.

  "So how 'bout it, Rachel?" Eddie snapped. "You want cryonics? Or d'ya just wanna cry?"

  She stared at Eddie for a long moment, focusing about five feet past him, and nobody dared exhale. And then two centuries of fighting spirit came through, and she smiled, a genuine smile of acceptance and peace.

  "Thank you, Eddie," she breathed. Her eyes became for one timeless instant the eyes of a young girl, the eyes that belonged on that youthful face; and then they closed, and she began to snore softly. Rachel, who mourned for her lost children, and was comforted.

  Doc Webster got up off the floor, checked her pulse, and slapped Eddie on the back. "Always a pleasure, herr doktor, to assist you in the technique which bears your name," he said jovially, spitting out a tooth. "Your medicine is stronger than mine."

  Eddie met his gaze a little awkwardly, started to pick up Rachel's sleeping form, and then paused. "Gimme a hand, will ya, Doc?"

  "Sure thing, buddy. We'll take her over to Smithtown General for observation, but I think she'll be OK." Together they lifted her gently and headed for the door.

  But Eddie stopped when they reached it and turned toward Callahan, staring at the fl
oor. "Mike," he began. "I... Uh... what I mean..." The apology just wouldn't come.

  Callahan laughed aloud for the sheer joy of it and pegged the stump of his cigar into the fireplace. "You guys," he said, shaking his head. "Always cloning around."

  Unnatural Causes

  There's been a lot of noise in the papers lately about the series of seismic shocks that have been recorded over the last few weeks in the unlikeliest places. Quake-predicting is a young art, from what I hear, and an occasional, freak disturbance now and again should be no real cause for alarm—but an unpredicted miniquake every day for two or three weeks, spotted all around the globe, culminating in a blockbuster where a quake had no right to be, is bound to cause talk.

  The seismologists confess themselves baffled. Some note that none of the quakes took place in a densely populated area, and are somewhat reassured. Some note the uniquely powerful though strictly local intensity of the blasts, and are perturbed. Some note the utter inability of their science to explain the quakes even after the fact, and fear that the end of the world is at hand.

  But me—well, from here at the site of the first quake in the series, Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, U.S.A., I've got me a different idea.

  If you've been paying attention so far, you probably know what a circus Callahan's Place can be on an ordinary night. Well I'm here to tell you that on holidays like Christmas and New Year's Eve, it becomes something to stagger the imagination. All the stops are pulled out, insanity reigns supreme, and the joint generally resembles a cross between a Shriner's convention and an asylum run by the Marx Brothers.

  So perhaps it wasn't surprising that the first quake in the series struck damn near Callahan's Place on Halloween Eve. It certainly couldn't have happened the way it did on any other night.

  The place was more packed than even I had ever seen it beforehand I've been hanging out at Callahan's for quite a few years now. Added to the usual list of regulars and semi-regulars were a host of old-timers and ex-regulars, some of whom I knew only by reputation and some not at all. As I think I already told you, a lot of Callahan's customers stop needing to drink after they've been around long enough, and not many people in this crazy age enjoy judicious doses of ethanol for its own sake. So they stop showing up, or become more involved with their families, or simply move elsewhere—but holidays somehow draw them all back like chickens to the roost come sundown.