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.
