Really no different than programming a computer’s hard disk, and no more sinister.”
“But you don’t know for sure?”
“No—as I say, training and testing are not my purview. But I’ll make some calls, and Dr. Wentworth will talk to you. It may even be that an apology is due. If that’s the case, Dink, you may be sure that it will be tendered. Our trannies are too rare and too valuable to be upset needlessly. Now, is there anything else?”
I thought about it, then said no. I thanked him and hung up. It had been on the tip of my tongue to tell him I thought I’d been drugged, as well . . . given some sort of mood-elevator to help me through the worst of my homesickness, but in the end I decided not to bother him.
It was three in the morning, after all, and if they had been giving me anything, it was probably for my own good.
XII
Dr. Wentworth came to see me the next day—he was the Big Kahuna—and he did apologize. He was perfectly nice about it, but he had a look, I don’t know, like maybe Mr. Sharpton had called him about two minutes after I hung up and gave him a hot reaming.
Dr. Wentworth took me for a walk on the back lawn—green and rolling and damned near perfect there at the end of spring—and said he was sorry for not keeping me “up to speed.” The epilepsy test really was an epilepsy test, he said (and a CAT-scan, too), but since it induced a hypnotic state in most subjects, they usually took advan-tage of it to give certain “baseline instructions.” In my case, they were instructions about the computer programs I’d be using in Columbia City. Dr. Wentworth asked me if I had any other questions. I lied and said no.
241
STEPHEN KING
You probably think that’s weird, but it’s not. I mean, I had a long and sucky school career which ended three months short of gradua-tion. I had teachers I liked as well as teachers I hated, but never one I entirely trusted. I was the kind of kid who always sat in the back of the room if the teacher’s seating-chart wasn’t alphabetical, and never took part in class discussions. I mostly said “Huh?” when I was called on, and wild horses wouldn’t have dragged a question out of me. Mr. Sharpton was the only guy I ever met who was able to get into where I lived, and ole Doc Wentworth with his bald head and sharp eyes behind his little rimless glasses was no Mr. Sharpton. I could imagine pigs flying south for the winter before I could imagine opening up to that dude, let alone crying on his shoulder.
And fuck, I didn’t know what else to ask, anyway. A lot of the time I liked it in Peoria, and I was excited by the prospects ahead—new job, new house, new town. People were great to me in Peoria. Even the food was great—meatloaf, fried chicken, milkshakes, everything I liked. Okay, I didn’t like the diagnostic tests, those boogersnots you have to do with an IBM pencil, and sometimes I’d feel dopey, as if someone had put something in my mashed potatoes (or hyper, sometimes I’d feel that way, too), and there were other times—at least two—when I was pretty sure I’d been hypnotized again. But so what?
I mean, was any of it a big deal after you’d been chased around a supermarket parking lot by a maniac who was laughing and making race-car noises and trying to run you over with a shopping cart?
XIII
I had one more talk on the phone with Mr. Sharpton that I suppose I should mention. That was just a day before my second airplane ride, the one that took me to Columbia City, where a guy was waiting with the keys to my new house. By then I knew about the cleaners, and the basic money-rule—start every week broke, end every week broke—
and I knew who to call locally if I had a problem. (Any big problem and I call Mr. Sharpton, who is technically my “control.”) I had 242