The Callahan Touch

by Spider Robinson

  After five or ten minutes, when the medication had begun to take hold and Jonathan was probably starting to acquire a rudimentary awareness of his surroundings, Les Glueham stepped up to the chalk line before the fireplace, raised his glass, and cleared his throat. The general chatter died away almost at once.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Les said, “to tooth decay!”

  There was something like a gleeful snarl of agreement from the room. Les finished his beer, threw his glass forcefully but carefully, and the fireplace echoed musically. Three or four other glasses floated in from various parts of the room, in support of Les’s toast, and then everybody went back to what they’d been doing.

  The next time I caught Jonathan’s eye, he held up a finger. I drifted over and nodded. “What…ah…was that all about?” he asked.

  First nibble. “House custom,” I said. “You can smash your empty in the hearth if you want—but you have to make a toast. Lots of folks toast whatever made ’em feel like busting a glass. Les there has been sentenced to root canal.” And I went back to my yarn before the question why don’t you try it? could even hang implied in the air.

  A few minutes later, Tommy Janssen toed the line. “I’m gonna tell ’em, Ish,” he said as the expectant silence fell.

  Isham Latimer shrugged his broad shoulders and smiled a strange wry smile. “Go ahead on,” he rumbled. “I won’t stop you.” His wife Tanya started to say something, and changed her mind.

  “I guess you all heard by now,” Tommy went on, “that Isham and Tanya got married up at her parents’ place in Oswego. I know most of you weren’t able to make it.” One or two people who had made it were seen to wince visibly, but Tommy plowed ahead. “Ish asked me to be Toastmaster at the wedding feast. Well, naturally, I was tickled to death. I mean, a white guy being asked to be party-master for a room full of mostly black people, how cool can you be, right? This was gonna go on my Liberal Credentials resumé. So I’m doing my after-dinner riffs, telling funny stories about Ish to a room that’s probably eighty-five percent African-American, and I start to tell them about Ish’s eye problems.” Catching Jonathan’s eye, Tommy explained to him, “See, Ish moved here from Halifax, and the day he arrived they diagnosed him for double cataracts.”

  Jonathan nodded. Second nibble.

  Tommy went back to talking to the room at large. “So I tell them, ‘Isham’s arrival in New York was not a totally happy one: the first day he got there, they said to him, “Congratulations: a strange white man is going to stick a knife in both your eyes!”’” People laughed, and Tommy nodded. “Yep, it got a pretty good laugh, about Force Five. But the next laugh was Force Ten. That was when a tall distinguished gent stood up in the back of the room, skin about two shades darker than Ish, and said, very politely, ‘Pardon me, sir…but I am the “white man” who stuck the knife into Mr. Latimer’s eyes.’”

  There was a general gasp, and then an ooooo of horror and sympathy…and then, slowly, laughs of embarrassment as we all realized that we were almost as surprised as Tommy must have been, ourselves. We too had assumed that an eye-surgeon would be Caucasian…

  Tommy nodded ruefully. “Yep. Caught white-handed. Bare-ass naked in front of a hundred strangers, three or four omelets on my face. Mr. Cool White Homeboy. Dr. Saunders came up to me at the reception afterward, and forgave me most graciously, but forgiving myself isn’t gonna be so easy. So my toast is to unconscious racism: one of the nastiest kinds.” And he pivoted and snapped his glass into the fireplace.

  There was applause, and a barrage of glasses saluted his self-criticism.

  Isham got up—just before Tanya pushed him—went over to Tommy, and put an arm around him. “You just keep tellin’ that story, my man,” he said, “and you’ll have it worked off in no time. People, I’d like to propose a toast myself: to men who know how to deal with guilt.”

  That brought even louder applause, and Tom and I had to hustle to meet the sudden demand for fresh glasses. So the second barrage was much raggeder than the first, more spread out. And then it stopped altogether as Jonathan screamed “HOW?” at the top of his lungs and made a wild attempt to hurl his half-full coffee mug at the fireplace.

  This time he’d taken the bait whole. The cure was begun.

  △ △ △

  Every head swiveled his way, so we all saw. He had pulled the mug back too far, and lost control just as he tried to throw it; it shot up almost straight up in the air, disappeared briefly through the hole in the ceiling, reappeared again, and smacked down flatfooted on the bartop behind him, right in front of the Duck. During its entire flight, the mug had remained as perfectly upright as if it were a cheap special effect, trailing a column of coffee and whipped cream on the way down. The trail vanished as the mug hit, then reappeared twice as long, then fell again, then reappeared half as long, and finally subsided. Not a drop had spilled on the bar. Without batting an eye, the Duck picked up the mug, finished it, and saluted Jonathan with the empty mug.

  The business was so preposterous that Jonathan elected to ignore it. “Tell me how,” he bellowed again to the room at large, and looked around for something else to throw. I started to reach for a glass, thought better of it, and handed him a bag of beer-nuts instead. “‘How’ what?” I asked.

  He flung the bag at the fireplace, and sure enough his aim sucked: he got Bill Gerrity in the forehead. “Ow,” Bill said, and I guess his voice must have been Jonathan’s first clue that Bill is a man, for Jonathan looked startled. (Bill is an unusually convincing transvestite.)

  Again it was just too weird to deal with; Jonathan ignored it and answered me. But he didn’t shout. “How to deal with guilt,” he said, and sat back down in his chair and swiveled it around to face the bar and buried his face in his hands and began to sob loudly.

  There was a general murmur which somehow managed to convey sympathy without pity. Merry Moore moved toward him, and then stopped. Nobody second-guessed her. This was her line of work.

  “That is one of the tough ones,” I agreed. “There aren’t any easy answers for that one.”

  “Some people seem to find it very easy,” he said bitterly into his hands. “They say Dr. Mengele slept like a baby in his old age. Somehow even Geraldo Rivera lives with himself. Could it be a missing chromosome, do you think? And if so, do you know a competent gene-cutter?”

  From the bitter emphasis on the next-to-last word, I inferred that my would-be robber du soir was in genetics or one of the other biosciences himself, and held a low opinion of his own skill thereat. I started thinking about some of the things a gene-splicer could be feeling suicidally guilty about, and felt a fine sweat break out on my forehead—which had not happened when he’d come in waving a hogleg.

  “No,” I said. “But I know a pretty good home remedy. It can taste like hell, and it’s not a cure, but sometimes it can afford symptomatic relief.”

  “Oh, bullshit!” he snarled, slapping his palms against the bar. “I’ve already had so much of that, I can’t hit the wall with a bag of nuts, and it doesn’t help a fucking bit!”

  I shook my head. “You misunderstand. I wasn’t talking about booze. Or drugs.”

  He glared at me. “What then? Religion?”

  “Action,” I said.

  “What kind of action?” he asked automatically.

  “Right action.”

  He looked at my face a long time to see if I was putting him on in some way. I saw the anger begin to ease in him as he decided I was not. “Like what?”

  I turned to the fount and made him a cup of Celebes with no booze. “Well,” I said, setting it before him, “usually if you’ve got the guilts, it’s because you did a disservice to someone or something you care about.”

  He nodded tensely and took a sip. “So?”

  “So you go and do a service for someone or something you care about.”

  Pain rose up in his face. “And what if they’re dead, and you can’t?”

  “Oh, it doesn’t have to be the
same someone,” Merry said. “It’s best, but sometimes the guilt is nonspecific and it can’t be. Or like you say, sometimes it’s too late. That doesn’t matter so much. The point is just to release the pressure—equal and opposite reaction. Slow and steady, ideally. What I’m aiming for myself is to achieve balance, equilibrium, about half an hour before I die.”

  His face was now a mask of pain. “And what if you’ve caused more pain than you could feel yourself in a single lifetime?” he asked her. “Like Mengele. Or Hitler.”

  I wiped the sweat from my forehead as inconspicuously as I could. God damn it, I thought, healing the wounded is one of the reasons I opened this place—but for one this bad to come in on Opening Night is sure one hell of a—

  —and then I saw the Duck out of the corner of my eye, and sighed. Sure.

  It was in fact the Duck himself, stranger to our ways, who answered Jonathan. “You start by doing what Tommy just did,” he said. “Telling the story on yourself, and taking whatever comes back.”

  Soft sounds of agreement from the rest of us.

  “As soon as you’re ready to,” Tommy amended quietly. “It hurts—I know. But it is good when you get it over with.”

  Jonathan looked around at us, on the verge. “All of you really want to hear this?” he asked.

  Nods, murmurs, one way or another everybody said yes.

  “You’ll listen nonjudgmentally.”

  Doc Webster folded his hands across his great belly and said, “No, we’re human beings. But good judges come in a spectrum between fair and merciful, and I’d have to say this group definitely falls on the merciful end of the range.”

  “We wouldn’t forgive Hitler,” Long-Drink said by way of clarification.

  Jonathan, of course, assumed the Drink was using the word “wouldn’t” in the subjunctive, rather than the simple past tense. “In that case, it…ah…might be touch and go,” he said.

  “But we heard him out first,” Long-Drink added.

  Jonathan wasn’t listening. We all shut up and waited for him to make up his mind.

  He looked down at himself finally, and made a heart-breaking little giggle. “What am I worried about? I’m armed, for God’s sake. Sure, why not? I’ve held it in for so long I think I’m finally ready to vomit.” He lurched to his feet.

  I handed him a beer. He blinked at it. “For the toast, after your story,” I explained. He picked it up and took it with him to a spot just before the crackling fire. As he stood there, he became a lecturing professor, the way Paladin used to be able to just become a gunfighter without moving. A lectern seemed to appear before him, with a faulty lamp and no lip to hold the papers. Not a successful lecturing professor.

  “All right, let’s get right to it,” he said, gesturing with his beer. “Have any of you…no, wrong question. How many of you have lost a friend or loved one to AIDS?”

  Damn, I thought, I was afraid of that. And I raised my hand.

  Even though it was only 1988, everyone in the room raised a hand, I’m sorry to say. But not as sorry as Jonathan was to see us do it. He flinched, and gestured with his glass again, as if to wave away our answer. Then his shoulders slumped, and he abandoned even symbolic defense.

  “Well, I’m the stupid son of a bitch that gave it to them,” he said.

  Ten seconds of absolute silence…

  △ △ △

  …representing not disbelief, but simple surprise. We were the former patrons of Mike Callahan. In our experience, preposterous statements tended to be true. I’m not saying we’ll believe anything—but we’re prepared to.

  “I thought it was some Air Canada steward,” Long-Drink said at last. “Gay Tan something.”

  “A very active assistant,” Jonathan said. “But I am the originator. Accept no substitutes.”

  Doc Webster cleared his throat, making it sound like no easy task. “You’re saying that you—you personally—”

  “—introduced AIDS to the human race. That is correct. I suppose I should have introduced the human race to AIDS as well, but my manners always were weak. Still, the word got round eventually. Yes, to answer your question without evasion: I personally loosed AIDS on the world. Mea maxima culpa.”

  A silence so total that I heard the fridge compressor switch itself off in sympathy—then a ROOBA-ROOBA! that took a long time to fade.

  “How de fuck did youse do dat?” Fast Eddie asked.

  “Point of order, Eddie,” Doc interrupted gently. “Details like that can wait. A long time, as far as I’m concerned. Jonathan, tell me this first—did you do it deliberately?”

  Jonathan pursed his lips. “I’d have to say a great deal of deliberation took place. Not very astute deliberation, perhaps—”

  Doc frowned. “You know damn well what I mean—” He caught himself and went on in a softer tone. “Did you do it intentionally?”

  Jonathan sighed and slumped his shoulders. “No, that I did not.”

  “Well, then—” Long-Drink began, but Jonathan interrupted and kept talking over him until he shut up.

  “I have tried that particular escape hatch a great deal already, thank you very much—the damn thing just isn’t big enough for my hips. I get stuck halfway through and the hatch closes. All right, a prosecutor probably couldn’t make a charge of first-degree murder stick in criminal court. But even an incompetent could get a conviction for multiple manslaughter, reckless endangerment, negligence resulting in mass death, felonious stupidity—”

  “Yeah, okay,” said the Drink, “but what I mean is, you did something dumb…not something evil. Right?”

  He recoiled slightly, then shook his head and plowed doggedly on, his voice rising. “It transcends dumb. If a class action were brought against me in civil court, and the judge assigned a minimum value for every life I’ve taken or will take, he’d fine me the gross national product of the planet—it took mankind three hundred years since Leeuwenhoek to destroy smallpox, and I’ve replaced it single-handed—”

  “Brag, brag, brag,” the Duck said.

  “—you don’t understand—all of that is nothing—I killed my mate—”

  “All right, save the speeches for your summation,” I said. “Let’s get to the evidence. You’re already sworn, we’ve heard the charges, let’s hear your theory.” I rapped it out as brusquely as Judge Wapner might have on The People’s Court. It startled him, and thus derailed his growing hysteria. He frowned at me, and took a deep gulp of his beer, and finally nodded heavily.

  “You’re right: let’s play the trial out properly. This should be interesting—if the converse of the usual relationship obtains, then a man who prosecutes himself has a genius for a defendant, yes? Very well. Let’s establish motive first. Question: Doctor Crawford, are you a screaming faggot? Answer: yes, I am.”

  “Objection, Your Honor,” the Duck said to me. “The characterization is both argumentative and spurious: defendant is not presently screaming.”

  I was struck by the fact that he’d given us his last name in the same breath with which he’d outed himself. “Sustained.”

  “Besides,” Marty said, “you look more like a homosexual than a faggot to me.”

  “And he’s an expert witness,” Marty’s wife Dave said.

  Jonathan blinked at us all. “Ah…very well, then. I’m homosexual. I’ve known I was gay since I was twelve years old. Question: how did this sexual preference affect your professional life? Answer: it made me a driven man. I was monomaniacally determined to be…ah…a credit to my gender. I had the recurring fantasy that I would make some great and noble contribution to the world, and then, as they were handing me my Nobel prize, then I would come out of the closet, and proudly announce that I was a homosexual.”

  “Relevance, Your Honor?” the Duck asked me.

  “I’m trying to establish a pattern of behavior,” Jonathan said. “A motive for taking stupid risks, failing to take proper precautions, willful refusal to think things through—”

  “I’l
l allow it,” I said. “But move on.”

  “Question: where were you in January of 1940? Answer: in federal prison in Atlanta, Georgia.” He made a brief, bitter smile. “No, that’s not self-incrimination, judge. I was there as a medical researcher, fresh out of school, determined to do something marvelous and stun the world. I had talked two of my professors into backing me in a series of experiments with which I hoped to wipe out malaria. When I say ‘backing,’ of course, I mean I had all the ideas and did most of the work, and they arranged the funding and got their names on the title page of the paper. Much good that it did them; the experiments were completely unsuccessful. Question: without boring the jury with details, what did these experiments involve? Answer: we injected prisoners with monkey blood, and in some cases vice versa.”

  “Volunteers?” I asked.

  “Yes. They agreed to risk malaria. Not certain death. But they volunteered, and malaria could have killed them, and…ah…did in fact kill some of them.” He looked at Isham and Tanya. “Most of our subjects, by the way—and nearly all those who died—were black.”

  Isham met his eyes. “Your Honor,” he said to me, “the racial composition of the prison population in Atlanta in 1940 falls outside this defendant’s sphere of responsibility.”

  “Not entirely,” I said. “He stated that he was old enough to vote. But this court has no evidence that he did not do so, and rules this issue…uh, Doc, what’s that big grey thing with the long nose and the two tusks?”