Lady Slings the Booze Page 18

  No one who’s had medically administered morphine—or any of its derivatives or substitutes—can ever again truly despise junkies. Or marvel quite as much at the incredible prodigies of creativity junk can sometimes induce in a Ray Charles or a James Taylor. Someone, that is, who was already that talented before they ever got high. The average human in the best of circumstances spends a hell of a lot of attention and energy on monitoring the body’s thousand and one aches and pains and twinges and other sudden small alarms. At least as much energy and time goes into constantly combing the environment for immediate dangers or enemies. And as much again is spent on worry about impending or chronic problems, the struggle to stay afloat, the need to be loved, and the underlying awareness of mortality.

  A man on a morphine high has none of these worries. All he has to do is grin, and bask, and think. If he happens to be predisposed to thinking, he can do a hell of a lot of it, very well, very fast, with better concentration than a Zen archer.

  (I’m not recommending this, understand. For one thing, you’d waste at least half your thinking on the question where will I get my next fix? For another, you’d probably die young. I’m very glad both the celebrity ex-junkies I mentioned have opted to spread their sharp observation and creative insights over a long and healthy life. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.)

  Under normal conditions, logical deductions appear on my mental computer screen in largish chunks, paragraphs at a time. But shoot me full of enough dope to submerge the memory of recent abdominal surgery, and I can grasp pages at a time, skip ahead whole chapters with a sureness that may be intuitive or may just be hyperrational. If there’s a difference. It’s fun to experience.

  Thank God there’s just enough masochist in me that all four times I’ve been on morphine, or one of its analogs like Demerol or Percodan, I got to missing pain and aggravation, just about the time the doctors wanted to wean me off the drug. I guess that retired sewer worker Murph told me about would say life has “gotten good to me.” Or maybe I’m just too square to enjoy life unless I pay for it as I go. I understand junkies better now—but I don’t think I’ll ever become one voluntarily.

  Having had it forced on me temporarily again, I took advantage.

  ONE other thing junk does, it plays tricks with time…the exact opposite of the kind Raffalli had enjoyed. Hours sprinted by like greyhounds, too fast to leave tracks.

  The next time I saw Lady Sally come in, resplendent in lime-colored evening dress and pearl necklace, I was feeling so mellow that I chose to break her chops in a friendly rather than a wounded tone. “Liable to give a fellow a complex,” I said, keeping my voice down so we wouldn’t wake Arethusa, who was sleeping. (Both of her, breathing in unison.) It wasn’t really necessary. I had learned that Arethusa slept like she did everything else: wholeheartedly. But I kept my voice low anyway.

  “I beg your pardon?” Lady Sally said, matching her volume to mine. She came from darkness into the small pool of soft light that spilled around my upper body, and sat by my bedside, on my right.

  “Kate tells me I’ve been out of surgery three days now. About time you came by for a visit.”

  She stared at me—and got that funny strained expression you get when you’re trying not to crack up. She got it under control before I could begin to resent it. “Joe, now you know why they call it dope.”

  “Huh?”

  “I have been here every day. For hours at a time.”

  “Huh?”

  “At least two hours each day. As many as four. In between keeping this Bedlam running, or more accurately, lurching.”

  I really hate saying “Huh?” “Where was I?”

  “Right there. Wide awake. Large as life and twice as natural. Witty, charming, and personable. We have had scintillating conversations on several topics. You narrated the plots of each of Donald Westlake’s Dortmunder novels—brilliantly, in some cases. Your comparison of the book and film versions of THE HOT ROCK was particularly trenchant, although I’m not certain you’ve entirely persuaded me that Goldman was right to cut the train-to-the-nuthouse sequence from the screenplay.”

  “He had no choice,” I insisted automatically. “Well, this is really something else. I wonder where I was while all this was going on. I wonder who that was minding the store for me. I wonder where he is now.”

  “Oh, he was you,” Lady Sally said positively. “Ask Arethusa when she wakes up if you don’t believe me: she’d know you from your own twin brother.”

  “How is Arethusa?” I asked suddenly, trying to glance to both sides at once. “I must have been told, but I can’t remember.”

  “Calm yourself, Joe—she’s perfectly all right. Doctor Kate discharged her this morning: she’s still sleeping here in Recovery only because you are. Her second body came out of coma shortly after the first one left overdrive, just as she’d hoped. As a matter of fact, knocking herself unconscious against Raffalli’s skull actually helped: from force of habit her consciousness jumped bodies again. Her worst problem was total exhaustion, and she’s recovered most of her strength now.”

  “No matter how loopy I was the last few days, I should have heard that,” I said, angry at myself.

  “You did. But there were no capstans turning up in your Snoop Room. You were making memories, you simply weren’t saving any. Like a RAM disk in a computer: every time you cut power by going to sleep, all the data vanished.”

  “I never heard a better reason to get off narcotics,” I said. “Memories are the only real treasures a man has.”

  “Do you know the story about Steve Wosniak’s plane crash?” she asked.

  “The guy that invented the Apple computer?”

  “And the disk drive. The Great Woz was practicing touch-and-go landings in his plane. He and his passenger walked away from the wreckage, so it wasn’t a bad landing, but it shook him up a good deal. When he got a phone call from Apple, asking when he would be returning to work, he said, in essence, ‘For God’s sake, I just crashed my damn plane yesterday, give me a break, will you?’ After a pause, they told him the crash had occurred nearly a month before. Like you, he had somehow severed the link between short-term and long-term memory. Armed with this information, the Woz rebuilt the link, in a matter of days, from the inside. He was quoted as saying that he ‘consciously thought my brain from the zero to the one state.’ If you like, I could call him and ask if he has any further technical advice.”

  “I’d be honored to speak with him. But I’d never understand his advice. I think ‘cut back on the narcotics’ is a good basic strategy to start with. If that doesn’t work, we’ll see.”

  “Sound,” she agreed.

  “Is Mary recording what we say?”

  She shook her head. “This room’s bugs are switched off—since I couldn’t be sure what you might say while drugged. You can speak freely.”

  (A shame, that was: if Mary had heard that conversation, she’d have been spared a lot of heartache down the line. But that’s another story…one I didn’t learn myself for months.)1

  “Uh, while I was off with the fairies, did we…” I cleared my throat. “Did we discuss Topic A? Why you’re here? Or rather, why you’re now?”

  “Not at all,” she said. “I tried to introduce it into the conversation from time to time, but you kept wanting to analyze John Dortmunder’s fatalism in the face of disaster in terms of Buddhist acceptance of suffering, instead.”

  “I don’t know anything about Buddhism!” I said.

  “I know,” she said drily. “You did, however, raise some interesting points concerning Christian imagery in GOOD BEHAVIOR.”

  “Christian imagery in what?”

  “GOOD BEHAVIOR. The new Dortmunder novel.”

  “I haven’t read it.”

  She pointed silently. On the bedside table was the new Donald Westlake hardcover. I’d never seen it before in my life, hadn’t known there was a new Westlake out, let alone a Dortmunder. I picked it up. There was a bookmark. I o
pened to page 181, read the first sentence of Chapter 35. “Wilbur Howey came out of the men’s room with Scandinavian Marriage Secrets under his arm and deep gray circles under his eyes.” I knew who Wilbur Howey was, and why it was funny that he was carrying the magazine Scandinavian Marriage Secrets, and every detail of the complicated caper in which he and Dortmunder and Kelp and Murch and Tiny Bulcher were trying to rob an entire building, and the whole goofy subplot about Dortmunder being forced to steal a nun.

  I was quite sure I’d never read a word of this book. I just knew things about it, as if I’d always known them.

  “Holy shit,” I breathed.

  “Not a bad alternate title,” she agreed. “But somewhat impractical from a sales point of view.”

  I found that I was dying to know how the Westlake came out. Dortmunder had just stumbled into a meeting of bloodthirsty mercenaries, and they were becoming suspicious of him. But I forced it from my mind. “Obviously Kate has reduced my dosage of Demerol or whatever. I can tell because my side hurts. So there’s a good chance I’ll remember this conversation in half an hour. Would you be willing to discuss Topic A now, on that assumption? Or would you rather wait until tomorrow and be sure you’re not wasting your time?”

  She handed me a hat. I recognized it as my own fedora. “Hit the floor with that,” she directed.

  I did so. Successfully.

  “Glib as you’ve been the last few days,” she said, “that would have given you trouble, I think. You resembled in manner and coordination a man with ten stiff drinks in him. Now, on the other hand, you look like a man who could use ten stiff drinks. You have proven you can hit the floor with your hat. I therefore pronounce you competent to manage your affairs, subject to outbreaks of Spoonerism. Do you wish to take on or discharge fluids before I tell you why I’m here/now?”

  I made myself as comfortable as I could, moving slowly and carefully. Did you know that every single muscle, tendon, and ligament in your body is directly connected to your left side? “No, and no, and since I’ve had a little time to think, why don’t I tell you why you’re here/now?”

  She raised her eyebrows slightly and then smiled. “You know, I wish I knew someone foolish enough to bet me that you can’t. All right, Joe: why am I here?”

  “To save the world.”

  “Right in one,” she said, immensely pleased.

  “MAY I ask how you figured it out?” she went on.

  “You’re ethical, and you’re a time traveler,” I said. “So there’s no other possibility. I’m no sci-fi fan, but I’ve seen enough movies to know how dangerous it is to monkey with history: only that motive could justify the risk of making the universe collapse and disappear.”

  “Correct again. And thank you. Keep going. What am I trying to save the world from?”

  “This part is just a hunch. But it’s a strong one.”

  “A hunch is often a conclusion based on data you don’t know you possess,” she said, seeming to be quoting someone. “Go on.”

  “I think you’re trying to prevent the Last World War.”

  Her eyes were sparkling. “Joe Quigley, with a head full of Demerol you are the equal of Holmes himself. Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s smarter brother. Have you considered that intuition like yours might actually be a genuine paranormal ability, on a par with Arethusa’s telepathy or Amos Garrett’s guitar solos? Never mind; can I ask what led you to that hunch?”

  “Well, I’ve noticed a high percentage of foreigners in your parlor and even on your staff. And it occurs to me that out of all the planet, you chose to locate about as close as you can get to the United Nations headquarters without actually having to be in Manhattan. It’s just across the Bridge. Damned if I can think of any other reason you’d pick Brooklyn.”

  “Providence has surely sent you to me, Joe,” she said. “Because until you joined my team, you were probably the most significant threat to me alive.” Suddenly she looked troubled. “I’m compelled to wonder if there are any more of you out there.”

  “Me too.”

  “You present me with a problem. I had intended to exact from you, as the price of revealing my mission, something like a formal oath of loyalty and obedience. Now I cannot do that. According to doctrine, I should perform major memory deletion on you at once, for security’s sake.” Could that be where my memories of the last three days had gone? No, as she went on to explain: “But deletion sufficient to prevent you from simply reaching the same conclusions a second time would have the side effect of using you up. You’re far too potentially valuable to me. A waste is a terrible thing to mind, and vice versa. Will you take me off the hook by giving me such an oath voluntarily?”

  “No,” I said at once. Before I could chicken out and say yes. “I give my loyalty and obedience to one person—me! And I made that oath a long time ago, irrevocably—the day I got out of the service. I have no reason to suppose that your interests and mine will always coincide.” I waited to see if she would kill me, or mindwipe me, almost wishing I had the kind of faith (or is it courage?) it takes to surrender command to another. It’s so much simpler to just be one of the grunts. But look how that had turned out the last time…

  “Understood,” she said reluctantly. “You make it as hard as possible for me to accept you into my army, Joe.”

  “I can’t help that.”

  “No, you can’t. And you are uniquely valuable to me. All right, I accept you formally into my conspiracy without requiring either loyalty or obedience. You’re a loose cannon—but a helluva cannon. Still, you must accept in turn that I might some day find it essential to kill you. Or worse.”

  “You’re welcome to try,” I said.

  “That seems fair enough,” she agreed. We both relaxed the barest trifle. “Onward. Do you have any questions before we get to the question of your specific work assignment?”

  “Yeah. What I can’t understand is, why do you need me? I can’t see that you need anybody at all. If you’re crazy enough to try and tamper with history, I don’t see what’s to stop you. Given time travel, and technology including laser pistols, you ought to be able to deal with just about any problem I can imagine. You weren’t even tempted to appropriate Raffalli’s watch for your own use. What could give you trouble?”

  “Ignorance,” she said. “And the cussedness of nature, human and otherwise. You see, Joe, we’re not trying to change history. We’re trying to make it have happened, just the way it did. And we don’t know quite how to do that.”

  I waited.

  She sighed. “This will take some background. If you notice any holes in the background, you may assume I left them there.”

  “Fire away,” I told her.

  “When I come from, Joe, it is possible to do something like a detailed systems analysis of history. James Burke does a primitive version of it today, if you have seen his TV series Connections. A simple example might be: if someone invents the plough, the invention of trade and thus of arithmetic must soon follow. The plough allows production of more food than the tribe can eat: it becomes necessary to dispose of the excess, and keep track of the resulting commerce.”

  “I follow,” I said.

  “The process is capable of nearly infinite refinement,” she went on, “given enough accurate data, sufficiently advanced mathematics of chaos and adequate computer power. The more modern the era one examines, the better the data, and the more accurately one can explain precisely why things turned out as they did. Of course, it makes weather prediction look easy. Many experts maintain this sort of analysis will never be useful for predicting future events, as some factors can only be identified as ‘significant’ in retrospect—and personally, I hope that’s true. Still, we try, in the hope of lessening human misery by our efforts.

  “We kept refining our techniques until we could retroactively ‘predict’ any portion of existing history from its preceding events—almost. But we kept finding anomalies, places where historical events had failed to come about as theory s
aid they should have. Not many, but fairly major disjunctions. It was like Einstein finding a single small village within which E equals mc. Attempts to revise the theory failed utterly. One day one of our greatest geniuses made the intuitive leap to the idea that something must be perturbing history at such cusps.

  “One classic example thereof is the mysterious failure of human civilization to end by thermonuclear suicide in the late twentieth century. All indications say it should have…yet it didn’t. The genius historian I spoke of hypothesized that some outside agency must have prevented it from happening. He then realized that said agency must necessarily turn out to have been either him, or else someone he trusted less than himself…there being no third category. So he assigned himself—and me—the job.”

  “Mike?” I said.

  “The same. The celebrated Mick of Time—me darlin’ spouse Michael Callahan.”

  “Sure an’ Gomorrah—the saints add preservatives to us! Do you seriously mean to tell me that the fate of the human race lies in the hands of a couple of historical micks?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But don’t worry: we Irish have been a lot easier to live with since we annexed Great Britain back in the early twenty-first century.”

  Huh. I should imagine so. “All right: so tell about why you two can’t just solve all your problems with a time machine and a brace of laser pistols.”

  She sighed. “Because we’re fighting with a blindfold on and one foot in a bucket. Whatever steps we’re supposed to take, the one thing we know for certain is that history didn’t…won’t…record them.”

  “Surely history offers clues. Hints. Your systems analysis—”

  “—says that nuclear war should occur, anytime now. In fact, without me and my husband it would have happened by now. As you surmised, I have for several decades been facilitating informal diplomacy between UN delegates and staff here, of a kind which by all the rules should not occur—and that has had a subtle but salutary effect. But according to our ‘systems analysis,’ it should not be enough to forestall holocaust indefinitely. There is something else that needs to be done if we are all to survive the Eighties. Urgently.”