The Eighty-eighth Key Ch. 48

It was almost dark by the time they decided to walk up the street to Cathy's house, but already Callahan was growing hungry.

"You know, I can't remember the last time I had something to eat."

"It was on the airplane," Fujiko said.

"Yes, but we ate on the first flight we took, not the one we just got off of. So, the food we ate..."

"Probably does not exist, at least not as far as our bodies are concerned."

"Now I'm confused," Callahan sighed. "If we ate food, it should still be there. Shouldn't it?"

"So, you understand the dilemma better?"

He nodded. "Yeah, but I'm still hungry."

"Of course you are. You are a man, after all -- so you think with your stomach."

"Look, I'm not the one who ate three cheeseburgers -- in under an hour."

"Oh, yes. I forgot..."

"Yup. Thought you might...women have a way of forgetting inconvenient facts like that."

"We do not!"

"Of course you don't."

"What?"

"Never mind."

Frank seemed lost inside a stoic's funk. He looked at Cathy from time to time like she was some kind of spectral apparition -- not the flesh and bones Cathy he had known almost all his adult life. She walked around the house, putzed around in the kitchen none the wiser, too, because he was simply terrified to bring it up. When the doorbell rang and he saw it was Harry and Fujiko he let them in and hugged Fujiko before he turned to Harry...

"You hug me, Frank, and we're gonna have a serious talk out back."

"Man, Harry, I need a serious talk out back."

"Yeah, I know. How's Cathy?"

"She's...Cathy. No differences, period. Memories intact, too."

Callahan shook his head. "This is fucked up, Frank."

"Granted, but she's alive."

"And Evelyn is in custody. Have you checked on Elizabeth?"

"Big turd in her diaper. In other words, situation normal."

"You have an interesting conception of normal," Fujiko said as she walked off to the kitchen.

"It's amazing what you can get used to," he replied to her departing backsides.

"Something's been bothering me," Callahan said, his voice not quite a whisper. "When the Old Man found out that Cathy was dead, he said something like 'This isn't the way it's supposed to be."

"Yeah, so?"

"Well, if her death was, let's just call it incorrect, doesn't that imply there is a correct chain of events?"

Frank looked away, and Harry could tell he was lost in thought. "Yeah, and it also implies time has been tampered with..."

"Which also implies that the Old Man knows how things are supposed to turn out, right?"

"That follows, yeah."

"But the only way he can know one way or another is if he has access to knowledge that's...well...beyond anything we could understand..."

Frank scowled. "Every time we've seen him he appears to be about the same age, no?"

Harry thought for a moment: "Yeah, now that you mention it, I think you're right."

"So, while our lives have played out, and even your mother's life as well, he might have been intervening over the course of just one night -- one night wherever he's from, I mean."

Then Callahan looked at Frank. "I think you mean whenever he's from, Frank."

"Huh? What do you mean?"

"The only way he could know most of these things..."

"Yeah, okay, I see where you're going with this. And...that's the only way he could know whether or not something is -- wrong."

Callahan nodded. "The only thing we don't know is why."

"Ya know, Harry...I don't think I want to know why. We've been opening doors we have no business going through with that piano trick you do, but so far we haven't been able to do anything like what the Old Man just did."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, we've been observing things that have already happened, right? Yet we're gaining access to knowledge that we couldn't otherwise have. Now here's the tricky part: we're manipulating outcomes, changing the future in some way..."

Callahan sighed. "But that's exactly what the Old Man is doing too."

"Assuming we're in -- 'his' -- past, yes, that's true," Frank added. "But...wait...that means..."

"Exactly! If Cathy's death was wrong that means someone else is playing this game, too...!"

"Someone who wants to change outcomes..." Frank said, suddenly lost inside a thought. "So, someone in the future who is or might be related to someone now, in the present?"

"Or a chain of events that leads to...I don't know, a certain outcome."

"Or," Frank whispered, "a certain link in the chain. Why Cathy? Could it be because of Elizabeth? Is Elizabeth the link? Is she the key?"

"We have no way of knowing, Frank. None. And if I could ask him, I'd want to know why he was constantly intervening in my mother's life."

"That's just what I'm getting at, Harry. What if someone, or some other group -- in the future -- wanted to stop an outcome, and they've traced it back to a couple of people...in your case, a mother and her son. So they go back and break the chain of events, but they have to do it subtly, draw no attention to their actions."

"Frank? We can sit around and think about this shit until the cows come home, but we're just going to drive ourselves crazy. At this point, I say we just get on with what we were doing, forget about all this -- stuff."

Bullitt sighed. "Why? Because I can't get what happened to Cathy out of my mind, Harry. I think it's gonna be a real problem for you, too."

"Okay, so what do we do about it?"

Bullitt shook his head. "I'm not sure there is anything we can do Harry, because -- well, think about it. What we've lost is a sense of finality, that when something happens the result just 'is'. Now, if something happens to one of us, who's to say the Old Man won't somehow just come along and undo it?"

Harry heard something and turned -- and he saw Cathy and Fujiko staring at them. Then Frank followed Harry's gaze -- and he found Cathy's eyes locked on his.

© 2020 adrian leverkühn | abw | and as always, thanks for stopping by for a look around the memory warehouse...[and a last word or two on sources: I typically don't post all a story's acknowledgments until I've finished, if only because I'm not sure how many I'll need until work is finalized. Yet with current circumstances (i.e., Covid-19) waiting to list sources might not be the best way to proceed, and this listing will grow over time -- until the story is complete. To begin, the 'primary source' material in this case -- so far, at least -- derives from two seminal Hollywood 'cop' films: Dirty Harry and Bullitt. The first Harry film was penned by Harry Julian Fink, R.M. Fink, Dean Riesner, John Milius, Terrence Malick, and Jo Heims. Bullitt came primarily from the author of the screenplay for The Thomas Crown Affair, Alan R Trustman, with help from Harry Kleiner, as well Robert L Fish, whose short story Mute Witness formed the basis of Trustman's brilliant screenplay. Steve McQueen's grin was never trade-marked, though perhaps it should have been. John Milius (Red Dawn) penned Magnum Force, and the 'Briggs'/vigilante storyline derives from characters and plot elements originally found in that rich screenplay, as does the Captain McKay character. The Jennifer Spencer/Threlkis crime family storyline was first introduced in Sudden Impact, screenplay by Joseph Stinson, original story by Earl Smith and Charles Pierce. The Samantha Walker television reporter is found in The Dead Pool, screenplay by Steve Sharon, story by Steve Sharon, Durk Pearson, and Sandy Shaw. I have to credit the Jim Parish, M.D., character first seen in the Vietnam segments to John A. Parrish, M.D., author of the most fascinating account of an American physician's tour of duty in Vietnam -- and as found in his autobiographical 12, 20, and 5: A Doctor's Year in Vietnam, a book worth noting as one of the most stirring accounts of modern warfare I've ever read (think Richard Hooker's M*A*S*H, only featuring a blazing sense of irony conjoined within a searing non-fiction narrative). Denton Cooley, M.D. founded the Texas Heart Institute, as mentioned. Of course, James Clavell's Shōgun forms a principle backdrop in later chapters. The teahouse and hotel of spires in Ch. 42 is a product of the imagination; so-sorry. The UH-1Y image used from Pt VI on taken by Jodson Graves. Many of the other figures in this story derive from characters developed within the works cited above, but keep in mind that, as always, the rest of this story is in all other respects a work of fiction woven into a pre-existing cinematic-historical fabric. Using the established characters referenced above, as well as the few new characters I've managed to come up with here and there, I hoped to create something new -- perhaps a running commentary on the times we've shared with these fictional characters? And the standard disclaimer also here applies: the central characters in this tale should not be mistaken for persons living or dead. This was, in other words, just a little walk down a road more or less imagined, and nothing more than that should be inferred. I'd be remiss not to mention Clint Eastwood's Harry Callahan, and Steve McQueen's Frank Bullitt. Talk about the roles of a lifetime...and what a gift.]