The Eighty-eighth Key Ch. 01-02

Part one

chapter one

Thunder in the distance, thunder that arrives like a broken promise. Thunder and rain, the strained promise of rain, rain in the air, rain -- like conditional release. As memory arrives on cooling winds, distant patterns both old and new emerge, like the wind sifting through old pines -- and new -- outside a dusty window. The disquieting pops of the first raindrops on dusty glass carry the boy back into the present, to thoughts of his mother downstairs, a solitary soul who also happens to be waiting in the dark. Nervously waiting, he knows, waiting inside the promise of rain, and for the release that comes from the music within the gathering storm.

Then he heard her playing as he watched the pines sway, dancing in the expectation of her uncertain renewal -- her song at once familiar yet punishingly strange. Without knowing the how or the why of his feelings, he too felt that soft, waiting renewal, not knowing the hidden currents of such things. Almost...he could almost feel a stirring in his gut...close now -- but not touching. Never touching. Like such music the wind played was forbidden fruit, the language of the notes and chords she formed in this latest release still a mystery.

Yet he could hear her song so clearly in the gathering storm. Even as deep thunder and her inevitable renewal came to the night once again.

Even this night, even before he truly understood that she would be forever lost to him.

+++++

"Another rough night, Callahan?"

"No? Why?" Harry Callahan said as he sat up on his bunk and rubbed his eyes.

"Crying in your sleep again," his dorm-mate said, stifling a first yawn.

"Bullshit," Callahan snarled through a yawn. "Why do you keep making this shit up?"

"Something about thunder -- and maybe a song, I think?" Al Bressler added through his own suddenly erupting yawn.

Harry Callahan sat up on the edge of his bunk and rubbed his eyes, tried to squeeze the memory out of consciousness...yet he still heard the wind in the trees...still heard her lingering music as he slid out of bed onto the cold tile floor. He slipped into worn rubber flip-flops and walked down the hall to the bathroom, stood at the urinal draining the night away before he returned to their room. Bressler was making his bed, getting ready for morning inspection, and apparently done with small talk...

"You ready?" Bressler said as he checked the shine on his shoes, the worry in his voice clear to anyone who knew what their common uncertainty really meant.

They'd been up 'til two in the morning working their way through the California Penal Code one last time, memorizing statute numbers for all the major crimes -- and the relevant mental states for each -- yet now the acid-drenched day stretched ahead in all its agonizing uncertainty. This was it. The last day of academy, and Callahan knew his own mental state was perilous.

If only because so much was riding on this day.

Bomb these last two tests and that was it, the end of the road. Anyone failing even one test would be shown the door and six months of life would be wiped from the ledger. A low passing score would get you into a shitty precinct with a burnt-out FTO, which was almost as bad as washing out -- if not more dangerous. A high score, on the other hand, would see you in to your choice of precincts and your future in the hands of an experienced, even a talented Field Training Officer, so to say this was a momentous day in the life was an understatement.

But why had the dream come again? Was she trying to tell him something? Even now?

"You better comb your hair again, Harry. You look like a toilet brush."

"Yeah? Well, you smell like one, Meathead."

They both tried to laugh as they finished up their room, then Bressler ran for the toilet. He didn't make it.

+++++

Walking to the dining hall after the written exam, Callahan was sure he'd bombed the test and thought he should feel despondent. Bressler, his hands habitually in his pockets, walked alongside scowling at the clear blue sky, whistling a show-tune while doing his best to hide his anxiety.

"How'd you do?" Bressler finally asked as they walked into the dining hall.

Callahan shrugged. "Who knows? You still worried about this afternoon?"

The second part of the final exam was one last physical agility test, and it promised to be a bear -- the mother-fucker of all mother-fuckers.

Hoist a hundred and eighty-pound dummy onto your shoulder and sprint twenty yards -- then drop it, take-off and get over three progressively higher fences, sprint a half-mile through hills and trees around the academy grounds before going up and down an exposed four-story metal stairway, then finish the course, after a last brief sprint, by swimming one lap in the training pool -- while towing a flailing academy instructor to the finish. All in uniform, and all in under eight minutes. In practice sessions earlier that week almost half the class had failed, and tensions were running high.

"Oh, I think I'll manage," Bressler sighed unconvincingly.

"Not if you eat a big lunch," Lou Valenti added, joining them in the food line.

"Fuck that," Bressler said. "I'm going to drink about ten glasses of water."

"A gallon is about eight pounds," Valenti added, grinning. "Sure you want to carry the extra weight?"

"Fuck."

"Well, at least they're going to post the written scores first," Valenti said, scowling. "I guess if you don't cut it you can just slip away without adding insult to injury."

"I passed," Bressler said -- a little too defensively.

"Yeah? Harry, how'd you do?"

And once again Callahan shrugged, turning the question away unanswered. "I think," he managed to say as he stared at Bressler's pooling uncertainty, "that I really don't give a shit anymore."

"That's our Harry," Valenti said to Bressler, smirking as he cast a sidelong glance at Callahan. "Always got to play it cool, don't you, Callahan?"

+++++

Test results were posted, as promised, on the bulletin board just inside the academy gym doors promptly at 1330 hours, and the 35 members of class 421 stood in academy blues pouring over the list of names, looking for their futures. Callahan's name was, perhaps not unexpectedly, at the top of the list; Bressler's score was fifth best, Valenti's in the top ten. Seven cadets looked over the list and crashed, their journeys over for now, and this glum little group trudged off to the admin building.

Callahan noted a gaggle of the academy's drill instructors lurking in the shadows by the locker room doors, more than one smiling a little too sadistically, and then he saw the Academy Director walk in through the main doorway and head over to their sea of smiling faces.

"Everyone ready for this?" the Old Man asked as he came up to Callahan.

Everyone, apparently, was. The butterflies in Callahan's gut were churning.

"Okay," the Old Man said, "let's get this over with."

The group walked through the locker room and out to the oval track, and almost everyone's eyes seemed to drift nervously between the drill instructors and the course they were about to run as they approached the starting area.

But not Harry Callahan's.

He'd been a runner all his life, had grown up playing baseball or running track and so was no stranger to hard work and the lonely road. Any softness had been drilled out of his body by the United States Army's basic training -- and two subsequent years stationed in Germany -- so Callahan had breezed through all the Department's various physical training programs without breaking a sweat. Still, a sprained ankle could ruin your day out here, so this was no time for complacency. He turned and stared at the Old Man again, his eyes steely gray flints.

One of the DIs explained the course -- one more time -- and pointed out that instructors would be posted at key points along the route to call out times, then each cadet was asked to verify their understanding of the route -- one last time. All the cadets were stretching now; a few were already about to puke. Valenti paced in circles, Bressler bent to touch his toes and let slip a resounding fart; the Old Man's eyes rolled as he walked away.

"We'll run alphabetically, two at a time," the DI manning the start called out. "Adams and Baker! On the line...and get ready..."

Carol Adams and Stanton Baker walked over to the starting line on the track, both taking deep breaths while they looked at the DI...

...who then yelled "GO!" before they had a chance to think about their anxieties for another second...

Carol Adams leaped ahead of the much heavier Stan Baker, and she was at the huge, canvas dummy well ahead of him; she struggled, lost time heaving the weight onto her shoulders before she took off running, with Baker a second or so behind. She stumbled once, lost a step, but was still ahead as she cast off the dummy and made for the first fence -- a four-foot-high wooden picket fence with pointed slats. She and Baker leapt over in unison, making for the second obstacle -- a six-foot-tall chain-link fence -- and this one required coordination and dexterity to tackle without injury. Baker took the lead when he came down, and he sprinted for the next obstacle...a very slippery, painted eight-foot-tall concrete-block wall.

Timing was everything on this last wall. You had to time your jump on the short approach in order to leap high enough to get both hands on top of the ledge; then you had to pull yourself up and make the jump over the top and down, all without killing yourself -- or breaking a leg -- in the process.

And Baker missed his jump, slid down the wall and had to backtrack, make the leap a second time, and Adams passed him then, made her jump up and over in one fluidly ragged motion, her legs flying high as she cleared the top. Someone called out her time but she was too stoked now to hear the words.

By the time Baker made it over, Adams was twenty yards ahead and well into her half-mile run through the trees. The marked path ran between trees and over short, steep hills, much of the track here a slippery matrix of coarse, rocky scree. Even so, Carol Adams seemed to pull ahead even more, and she was bounding up the third course of stairs before Stan Baker made it to the first. She passed him on the way down and saw the panicked look in his eyes; she tried not to smile as she made her way down the last set of stairs and to the final hundred-yard sprint to the Olympic sized pool.

The drill here was to dive into the deep end, take your "drowning victim" in tow by the approved method, then get them to the far end without drowning the victim. Because most "victims" would -- out in the real world -- be panicking, the academy's instructor/victims would be flailing and kicking and screaming like any other freaked-out drowning victim. Bloody noses were not uncommon, and some DIs seemed to enjoy this part of their job a little too much.

Adams dove in and approached her flailing victim, who promptly tried to climb on top of her; she ducked under and swam away, surfaced out of sight, then balled her right fist and slammed it into her victim/instructor's nose. With enough force to give the former marine a bloody nose. She then towed her now very quiet "victim" to the shallow end of the pool -- and to the hypothetical finish line.

She heard a fragmented, disjointed voice call out "Seven minutes twenty-three seconds..." as she stumbled out of the pool. Then the flood of lactic acid hit her gut and she went to her knees, coughing-up pool water as she fell.

"Baker, you got thirty seconds left! Move your ass!"

Yet Adams stood and started cheering her classmate on -- "Come on, Stan! You can do it!" -- and her classmates joined her...from a quarter-mile away. All but Harry Callahan, that is. He and Bressler had just moved to the starting line, and the wait was becoming almost unendurable.

Callahan heard a cheer from the pool, assumed Baker had just crossed the line in the allowed time, then he heard a loud "GO!" and looked at his dummy.

He was surprised how dry his mouth was, how anxious he suddenly felt, and then -- in a flash -- it dawned on him: he really did care. Passing these last tests mattered. Becoming a cop mattered. But being the best mattered most of all. In that instant he felt a strong adrenaline rush -- as he watched Bressler get a jump on him. Yet by the time he scaled the third fence, the eight-footer, he had found his stride and soon pulled steadily ahead...

...and then he felt the distant peeling rip of deep thunder somewhere out over the Pacific...

...and he saw his mother's hands once again -- working towards the eighty-eighth key...

+++++

She had appeared to most people -- when she first arrived in San Francisco, California -- as a stern woman, perhaps an unforgiving soul. And so, if indeed eyes are windows to the soul, what most people saw when they looked into Imogen Callahan's eyes disturbed them; indeed, the sight left many profoundly unsettled.

Her eyes were the deepest cobalt, her close-cropped hair a brilliant blond that bordered on white, but she was disconcertingly tall. Some people took the expression on her face, and in her eyes, as a sort of upwelling -- of anger, perhaps -- or maybe containing hints of profound despair -- yet nothing was further from the truth of these eyes -- when they were new. When they were the eyes of a child. She was a serious woman, true enough, a musician and a teacher, yet most people adduced she was a woman of uncertain passions.

Yet, she was a woman dedicated to the truth of the world, and finding this truth was indeed a passion.

When Lloyd Callahan first laid eyes on Imogen Schwarzwald in early Spring, 1945, when he first visited her passion, his unyielding impression was that he had gazed upon a passing ghost. Except this ghost was playing a piano...a battered, old concert grand...and she was playing a Nocturne inside a barren cafe-like area located in the far corner of a hastily cobbled together passenger terminal inside a run-down seaside wharf along Copenhagen's waterfront.

And inside that crystalline moment, Callahan had been caught like a fly in amber, mesmerized, unable to move as the ghost's fingers danced across unimaginable chords, working into the deeper registers, an impossible, soaring sadness echoing off the tattered building's barren walls. Unaware he was walking through scattered, bombed-out rubble, he made his way to the piano, to her side, and he studied her tear-streaked face, the long, almost skeletal fingers working at the ends of her emaciated arms...and he had wondered how such stark beauty survived the ravages of prolonged war.

Her skin was impossibly white; whiter still -- perhaps -- because of the ground in dirt that rimmed her neck and shoulders. Her closely shaven head, remnants of hair so blond it had almost completely disappeared, startled his sensibilities, yet he realized even then he had never known anyone that looked even remotely like her. Nor had he ever known such an accomplished pianist. He soon learned she had been, and from a very tender age, an accomplished pianist; some implied she had been a composer of some import as well, so he was surprised to learn she had never been a professional musician.

For it was in those first days of their time together Lloyd Callahan learned that this wispy veil of a woman had been a physicist. She had, in fact, graduated from the University of Copenhagen, had from her undergraduate days on worked with Niels Bohr and his team at the Institute of Physics as they worked to uncover the inner workings of atomic nuclei. She met with Werner Heisenberg in 1939, and became aware of German plans to develop atomic weapons before she knew who a house painter named Hitler was. And even after the war began, she remained at the Institute, working on problems related to extracting pure uranium isotopes from raw ore, even as Denmark's Jews began disappearing to camps in the east. Which was all the more surprising as she too was a Jew. And when, in 1943, after Bohr fled to Sweden and thence on to Great Britain, Heisenberg had Imogen removed from Denmark, where he intended to have her work on the German atomic effort -- or so he said, anyway.

Heisenberg had his doubts about atomic weaponry, however, and he had ever stronger misgivings about this man Hitler. Although it would not be discovered until well after the war ended, Heisenberg worked quietly, and secretly, to impede progress towards a Nazi weapon. And Imogen worked with Heisenberg on this subterfuge. In time, however, internal security discovered this effort and all blame landed squarely on Imogen's frail shoulders; in the immediate aftermath she disappeared into the camps. The men who caged her kept her on a very tight leash indeed, and used her talents as a pianist and the naked charms of her body as entertainment. And when for some odd reason this very nearly ruined human soul latched onto Lloyd Callahan he suddenly felt an exhilarating -- and solemn -- obligation to take care of her, and even though she wore the trauma of her recent existence like a wound covered in deep shadow, even during the near-catatonic spells she endured almost daily, she fell into the solidity of this big man's sheltering eyes. In time she fell into the brighter sunlight of his very existence.

He was one of many deck officers on a hospital ship, a very minor part of the British Expeditionary Force looking into claims of terrifying abuses at recently uncovered camps such as Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt. Yet what this force soon learned about the killing camps in Poland was beyond horrific, and all this destitute horror only served to wrap Imogen Schwarzwald deeper into Lloyd Callahan's deeply protective embrace.

As the European war drifted away into the reaches of time he took Imogen Schwarzwald first to Vancouver, Canada, and then to California, where he had enrolled in the state's Merchant Marine Academy. He bought a small house in the Potrero Hill neighborhood on the south side of San Francisco, a property with a large back yard, and with just enough room to plant a small stand of lemon trees between the pines. When he wasn't tied-up with his maritime studies Lloyd helped Imogen with her English, to help her advance her own academic work but soon enough to simply keep her sane.

With his wartime experience at sea Lloyd quickly graduated, and he soon began working for a passenger line carrying tourists and cargo between California and Hawaii. He was, unfortunately, away for long stretches of time, though he was home for even longer periods. And after one very long time away he bought Imogen a piano, and music returned to their lives.

And with music came a son: Harold Lloyd Callahan.

Life took on a sudden, fresher intensity after Harry's arrival, and music seemed to be the focal point of all the family's time together. Harry started to play almost as soon as he could walk, and by the time he finished kindergarten he was considered something of a prodigy -- but then he fell in love with baseball and all thoughts of a career in music seemingly fell away beyond the lights. Not long after Imogen began to fall away from music, too.

She grew restive and depressed when she was not at her teaching job in Berkeley, and soon took to composing dark, ominous pieces that seemed to Lloyd like the distant echoes of her time in the Theresienstadt ghetto. There were times in high school when Harry came home after school and found his mother frozen at the keyboard, lost in unheard memories that left him as dazed and confused.

And yet, what pulled her from these minor-key fugues was Harry's playing. He'd somehow fallen back in love with the piano during high school, only now he played Gershwin tunes, punctuated by intense ragtime rants that poured out of the little house like sun-streams through dark clouds -- and these new forms enthralled Imogen almost as much as she loved watching her son play again. Their last Spring together was, therefore, a magical time for her, but then -- out of the blue -- he joined the Army and was soon on his way to flight school, and a year later he was flying helicopters in Germany over the Fulda Gap. Yet soon enough she found Harry in her dreams, only the uniform he wore wasn't American. She dreamt in blacks and silvers, his red armbands dripping with mercurial zephyrs that colored these interludes as shivering cold passages of fear.