There was other stuff to think about, too. Like how you could hypnotize a talented guy, or drug him, or maybe even expose him to other 257
STEPHEN KING
talented guys in order to keep him from asking any of the wrong questions or doing any of the wrong things. Like how you could make sure such a talented guy couldn’t run away even if he happened to wake up to the truth. You’d do that by setting him up in what was, essentially, a cashless existence . . . a life where rule number one was no ratholing any extra dough, not even pocket-change. What sort of talented guy would fall for something like that? A naive one, with few friends and next to no self-image. A guy who would sell you his talented soul for a few groceries and seventy bucks a week, because he believes that’s about what it’s worth.
I didn’t want to think about any of that. I tried to concentrate on Rutger Hauer, doing all that amusing blind karate shit (Pug would have laughed his ass off if he’d been there, believe me), so I wouldn’t have to think about any of that.
Two hundred, for instance. There was a number I didn’t want to think about. 200. 10 x 20, 40 x 5. CC, to the old Romans. At least two hundred times I’d pushed the button that brought the message DINKYMAIL SENT up on my screen.
It occurred to me—for the first time, as if I was finally waking up—that I was a murderer. A mass murderer.
Yes indeed. That’s what it comes down to.
Good of mankind? Bad of mankind? Indifferent of mankind?
Who makes those judgements? Mr. Sharpton? His bosses? Their bosses? And does it matter?
I decided it didn’t matter a fuck in a rabbit-hutch. I further decided I really couldn’t spend too much time moaning (even to myself) how I had been drugged, hypnotized, or exposed to some kind of mind-control. The truth was, I’d been doing what I was doing because I loved the feeling I got when I was composing the special letters, the feeling that there was a river of fire running through the center of my head.
Mostly, I’d been doing it because I could.
“That’s not true,” I said . . . but not real loud. I whispered it under my breath. They probably don’t have any bugs planted here, I’m sure they don’t, but it’s best to be safe.
258
EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL
I started writing this . . . what is it? A report, maybe. I started writing this report later that night . . . as soon as the Rutger Hauer movie was over, in fact. I write in a notebook, though, not on my computer, and I write in plain old English. No sankofites, no bews, no smims.
There’s a loose floor-tile under the Ping-Pong table down in the basement. That’s where I keep my report. I just now looked back at how I started. I’ve got a good job now, I wrote, and no reason to feel glum. Idi-otic. But of course, any fool who can pucker is apt to whistle past the graveyard.
When I went to bed that night, I dreamed I was in the parking lot of the Supr Savr. Pug was there, wearing his red duster and a hat on his head like the one Mickey Mouse wore in Fantasia— that’s the movie where Mickey played the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Halfway across the parking lot, shopping carts were lined up in a row. Pug would raise his hand, then lower it. Each time he did this, a cart would start rolling by itself, gathering speed, rushing across the lot until it crashed into the brick side of the supermarket. They were piling up there, a glittering junkheap of metal and wheels. For once in his life, Pug wasn’t smiling. I wanted to ask him what he was doing and what it meant, but of course I knew.
“He’s been good to me,” I told Pug in this dream. It was Mr. Sharpton I meant, of course. “He’s been really, really eventual.”
Pug turned fully to me then, and I saw it wasn’t Pug at all. It was Skipper, and his head had been smashed in all the way down to the eyebrows. Shattered hunks of skull stuck up in a circle, making him look like he was wearing a bone crown.