Callahan's Place 09 - Callahan's Con (v5.0) (39 page)
So we did.
*
*
*
Lex’s skin rash and scale infection both finally cleared up, and we trucked him back home to the Florida Strait on the last night of Fantasy Fest.
He sat up in the back, waving like the Queen of England and rippling his gills.
Everyone who saw him as we drove by assumed they were hallucinating him.
*
*
*
Doc Webster seemed stable for a couple more months.
Bouts of Spoonerisms came and went; he seemed to get tired a little more than usual, but not less merry; it became possible to tell a joke around him without being topped, but it was never a sure thing.
He and Mei-Ling did seem to work extra hard at savoring every golden moment, but then they always had.
Then with the coming of spring he went into decline.
He started losing weight rapidly, first.
then the Spoonerisms started to cluster and get a bit compulsive.
I heard him introduce three strangers he’d just met with, “Jim Thompson—excuse me, Tom Jimson—I’d like you to meet Tim Preacher, a prim teacher and a trim peacher; Treacher, this is either Will Johnson, John Wilson, Jill Wansen or Juan Jillson; Ginseng, say hello to Tim Johnson…”
They didn’t stay long.
A few days later it went beyond Spoonerisms; his unit of meaning began to shrink.
He went from funny jokes to funny sentences to funny words, and finally he began to get hung up on individual syllables.
I don’t mean he got dumb.
One night I was behind the bar, trying unsuccessfully to fix a jam in the conveyor belt of The Machine with orders backed up to Mars, when he came up and slammed his fist on the bar top until he had my and everyone else’s attention.
Then he held the fist in the air, and used it to count syllables, as he said, “Bet bat bit bot but bite bait boat boot bought beat.
Eleven.
Ah?”
I nodded cautiously.
“Mm hm.”
He zeroed his fist and started over.
“Met mat mitt mott mutt might mate moat moot mought meet—eleven?
Eleven.”
“Uh huh,” I said.
“Ah—but…” (this time he counted slower) “…cat kit cut cot kite Kate coat coot caught…
nine
.
No ‘keet’ or ‘ket,’ you see?”
Before I could respond he went on, “Set sat sit sot site sate suit sought seat…nine!
No ‘sut’ or ‘sote.’
But check
this
out: get gat git got gate gut goat…seven, only seven, no ‘gyte,’ ‘geet,’ ‘goot,’ or ‘gawt,’ isn’t that amazing?”
I felt my smile congealing, and tried to think of another noncommittal grunt besides “uh huh” and “mm hm”…and then all of a sudden light dawned.
“Oh, I get you, Doc.
You’re saying there are a whole fistful of basic one-syllable words, just as simple and memorable as they can be—”
“—
that aren’t being used at the moment,
right,” he agreed.
“There’s gotta be money in that, somewhere.”
You see what I mean?
His brain didn’t so much break down, exactly, as come adrift, or at least begin steering by a map nobody else could read.
And still it managed to find interesting places.
Here, for the record, is the last coherent joke I ever heard him tell:
“Researchers say they are baffled by a newly discovered discrepancy: while only forty-three percent of husbands say goodbye to their wives when they leave the house, over
ninety-nine
percent of men say goodbye to the house when they leave their wives…”
And here, from a little later in the same impromptu mock newscast, is the last pun I ever heard him make: “…asked how a student dressed entirely in black, wearing a mask, and brandishing a sword could have gained access to the building, school officials cited their new Zorro-tolerance policy.”
Several people got up and left his vicinity, crying out in disgust; he looked over at me, winked, closed his eyes and smiled.
One day Fast Eddie and I were trying to set up a live recording of some new music he’d composed, which I wanted to send as a present to some relatives back up on Long Island.
As we were making the final sound checks, Eddie nudged me, pointed over to where the Doc was sitting at poolside with his back to us watching his wife swim, and murmured, “His elevens is up.”
It’s an old British colonial expression, from the days of the Raj: what they meant was, when the tendons at the back of your neck stand out like a number eleven, you’re a goner.
With a stab of sorrow I saw that Eddie was right; Doc’s elevens were up.
Just then he suddenly stood, turned around and came shuffling up to me and Eddie, his eyes glowing with excitement.
“What’s up, Doc?” I said, partly because I just love saying that.
“Vamp,” he said to Fast Eddie, pointing at the piano, “Blues ballad,” and he hummed a few bars of “Try to remember/that kind of September…” to indicate meter and tempo.
“Fill,” he said to me, and pointed to my guitar.
Eddie and I exchanged a glance, shrugged, and went for our instruments, and thank God left the tape running as Doc Webster, off the top of his head, in a single take with no fluffs, tunelessly declaimed the following, his last twisted masterpiece:
PRUZY, THE NEWSIE WITH A CHARTREUSE UZI
Hugh’s an intrusion who sues cows for moos:
He will cruise avenues to woo slews of new stews,
So the cooze of the floozy he screws is a doozy;
The brews and the booze he abuses til woozy
Excuse what he chooses, confused, to refuse:
The queues in the pews, all the falses and trues…
So, amused by confusion, we use rendezvouses
To enthuse over news of shrews snoozing in flues
Who confuse their infusions with views of illusions
Whose Muse eschews dues through the tissues of clues
And the ruse that glues mews imbews yews with tattoos
While gnus in igloos contuse crews of yahoos…
Ghu’s baby Suze coos: she has Terrible Twos
She spews slews of grues, and strews shmoos that she shoos;
Youse ooze goos and muse, right through Lou’s don’t’s and do’s,
To the boos of two zoos, because two twos till Tues
day are clues to defusing the losers who bruise:
If you shmooze about boo-boos and fuse cootchy-coos
With the issues of thews for the Jews and the Druze
Syracuse would refuse, with fondues in your shoes,
Dr. Seuss can peruse any cashews he chews,
so you lose:
Louis,
you is
got the blues
And then as people were applauding and whistling his nose started to bleed, his eyes rolled up in his head and he went down.
At his insistent request we broke him out of the Stock Island Hospital the next day and brought him home.
He never left The Place again.
We set up a round the clock home care rotation system, and within a week it was clear it was a deathwatch.
With an almost eerie appropriateness, considering it’s Sam Webster we’re talking about, it turned out to be one of the very few silly deathwatches of all time.
I’ve asked around: at no time did any of us ever see him frightened, or depressed, or angry, or even particularly sad.
If anything he laughed more than usual, at less excuse, with each passing day.
Everything amused him.
His own deteriorating physical condition struck him as a riot, and I honestly believe his deteriorating mental condition escaped him.
I for one found it much easier to deal with in consequence, and I’m sure Mei-Ling did too, but I don’t think he was bravely faking it for that purpose.
Basically he just got a little goofier every day, until one day he got so goofy he neglected to take the next breath.
There was no deathbed scene.
He went in his sleep in the middle of the night.
I thought that a special mercy.
Then a few days later I was going through some of the oldest letters he’d sent me, so old the stamps had single digits, and I ran across one where, in discussing the recent passage of a friend, he’d written, “Me, I’d
hate
to go in my sleep.
Miss the whole thing!”
Well, there you go, Sam: one last joke on the funniest and kindest man I ever knew.
It’s been over a year now and I miss you every day.
We all do.
Mei-Ling is doing well, and misses you every second, and her new boyfriend has sense enough not to have a problem with that.
*
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*
Every few months, I pick up the phone and dial Mike Callahan’s number.
I never get an answer, a busy signal or a machine.
It always makes me feel a little like Manuel Garcia O’Kelly Davis did after
his
friend Mike stopped answering the phone.
My sole comfort is that so far at least I still get a ring, instead of a not-in-service recording.
I can’t seem to shake the notion that I have to tell Mike the news about Doc.
Which is silly—he’s from the far future and the ass end of the universe, he can zip around space and time better than my daughter, why does he need me to tell him about a matter of public record that, it seems to me, he probably had available to him the day he met Doc?
(I wonder what that must be like.
Partying with people whose date of death you can just look up.
I think I’m glad I’m not a time traveler…or an immortal.)
I waste an occasional idle moment wondering what the hell Mike and his family are up to, Out There, that’s so relentlessly pressing they can’t spare an hour to visit past friends on Earth.
But in the first place, Mike Callahan doesn’t owe me a God damned thing—it’s
way
the other way around: I owe him every single thing I care about—and even if he did, my best present understanding is that what he and Lady Sally and Mary and Finn and Tesla and their whole posse basically
do
for a living is keep the universe intact, crash-protect the cosmos, preserve this fragile reality in which I am privileged to watch and help my beautiful daughter enter puberty and my beautiful wife enter menopause and my presentable self approach the dotage I’ve trained for all my life.
If that has to take priority over taking phone calls from old combat buddies…so be it.
Perfect or not, it’s a universe worth preserving.
Spider Robinson
photo by Greg McKinnon
www.spectrumliteraryagency.com/robinson.htm
Spider Robinson was born in the Bronx, NY, in 1948, the year Robert A. Heinlein married Virginia Gerstenfeld—and in 2006 he became the only author ever to collaborate with Mr. Heinlein on a novel, VARIABLE STAR.
Since 1973 he has published over thirty-five books, and won three Hugos, a Nebula, the John W. Campbell Award, and numerous other international honours.
He moved to Canada in 1974, and became a Canadian citizen in 2004.
His Callahan’s Place stories inspired the creation of the long running Usenet newsgroup
alt.callahans
and other cybernetworks.
From 1995-2004 he published an op-ed column (“The Crazy Years,” later called “Future Tense”) in Canada’s national newspaper,
The Globe and Mail
.
In 2006 he became the first Writer In Residence at Vancouver’s H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, and in 2010 he was named sixth Writer In Residence at the Vancouver Public Library.
He has written songs with David Crosby and Todd Butler, and recorded original music with Amos Garrett and Michael Creber.
His award-winning podcast
Spider On The Web
has appeared regularly since 2007, and he has been Toastmaster at two World Science Fiction Conventions.