tree! Come, reap!”
Where am I?
She looks around and sees a concrete wall packed with a jostling intaglio of names, slogans,
and obscene drawings. In the middle, where anyone sitting on the bunk must see it, is this
greeting: HELLO NIGGER WELCOME TO OXFORD DON’T LET THE SUN SET ON YOU
HERE!
The crotch of her slacks is damp. The underwear beneath is downright soaked, and she
remembers why: although the bail bondsman was notified well in advance, the cops held onto
them as long as possible, cheerfully ignoring the increasing chorus of pleas for a bathroom break.
No toilets in the cells; no sinks; not even a tin bucket. You didn’t need to be a quiz-kid on
Twenty-one to figure it out; they were supposed to piss in their pants, supposed to get in touch with their essential animal natures, and eventually she had, she, Odetta Holmes —
No, she thinks, I am Susannah. Susannah Dean. I’ve been taken prisoner again, jailed again, but I am still I.
She hears voices from beyond this wing of jail cells, voices which for her sum up the present.
She’s supposed to think they’re coming from a TV out in the jail’s office, she assumes, but it’s got to be a trick. Or some ghoul’s idea of a joke. Why else would Frank McGee be saying President
Kennedy’s brother, Bobby, is dead? Why would Dave Garroway from the Today show be saying that the President’s little boy is dead, that John-John has been killed in a plane crash? What sort of awful lie is that to hear as you sit in a stinking southern jail with your wet underpants clinging
to your crotch? Why is “Buffalo” Bob Smith of the Howdy Doody show yelling “Cowabunga, kids, Martin Luther King is dead”? And the kids all screaming back, “Commala-come- Yay! We love the things ya say! Only good nigger’s a dead nigger, so kill a coon today!
The bail bondsman will be here soon. That’s what she needs to hold onto, that.
She goes to the bars and grips them. Yes, this is Oxford Town, all right, Oxford all over again, two men dead by the light of the moon, somebody better investigate soon. But she’s going to get out, and she’ll fly away, fly away, fly away home, and not long after that there will be an entirely new world to explore, with a new person to love and a new person to be. Commala-come-come, the journey’s just begun.
Oh, but that’s a lie. The journey is almost over. Her heart knows this.
Down the hall a door opens and footsteps come clicking toward her. She looks in that
direction — eagerly, hoping for the bondsman, or a deputy with a ring of keys — but instead it’s a black woman in a pair of stolen shoes. It’s her old self. It’s Odetta Holmes. Didn’t go to
Morehouse, but did go to Columbia. And to all those coffee houses down in the Village. And to
the Castle on the Abyss, that house, too.
“Listen to me,” Odetta says. “No one can get you out of this but yourself, girl.”
“You want to enjoy those legs while you got em, honey!” The voice she hears coming out of her mouth is rough and confrontational on top, scared underneath. The voice of Detta Walker.
‘You goan lose em fore long! They goan be cut off by the A train! That fabled A train! Man
named Jack Mort goan push you off the platform in the Christopher Street station!”
Odetta looks at her calmly and says, “The A train doesn’t stop there. It’s never stopped there.”
“What the fuck you talkin about, bitch?”
Odetta is not fooled by the angry voice or the profanity. She knows who she’s talking to. And
she knows what she’s talking about. The column of truth has a hole in it. These are not the voices of the gramophone but those of our dead friends. There are ghosts in the rooms of ruin. “Go back to the Dogan, Susannah. And remember what I say: only you can save yourself. Only you can lift
yourself out of Discordia.”
FOUR
Now it’s the voice of David Brinkley, saying that someone named Stephen King was struck and
killed by a Dodge minivan while walking near his home. King was fifty-two, he says, the author
of many novels, most notably The Stand, The Shining, and ‘Salem’s Lot. Ah Discordia, Brinkley says, the world grows darker.
FIVE
Odetta Holmes, the woman Susannah once was, points through the bars of the cell and past her.
She says it again: “Only you can save yourself. But the way of the gun is the way of damnation as well as salvation; in the end there is no difference.”
Susannah turns to look where the finger is pointing, and is filled with horror at what she sees: The blood! Dear God, the blood! There is a bowl filled with blood, and in it some monstrous dead thing, a dead baby that’s not human, and has she killed it herself?
“No!” she screams. “No, I will never! I will NEVER! ”
“Then the gunslinger will die and the Dark Tower will fall,” says the terrible woman standing in the corridor, the terrible woman who is wearing Trudy Damascus’s shoes. “Discordia indeed.”
Susannah closes her eyes. Can she make herself swoon? Can she swoon herself right out of this cell, this terrible world?
She does. She falls forward into the darkness and the soft beeping of machinery and the last
voice she hears is that of Walter Cronkite, telling her that Diem and Nhu are dead, astronaut
Alan Shepard is dead, Lyndon Johnson is dead, Richard Nixon is dead, Elvis Presley is dead,
Rock Hudson is dead, Roland of Gilead is dead, Eddie of New York is dead, Jake of New York
is dead, the world is dead, the worlds, the Tower is falling, a trillion universes are merging, and all is Discordia, all is ruin, all is ended.
SIX
Susannah opened her eyes and looked around wildly, gasping for breath. She almost fell out of
the chair in which she was sitting. It was one of those capable of rolling back and forth along the instrument panels filled with knobs and switches and blinking lights. Overhead were the black-and-white TV screens. She was back in the Dogan. Oxford
(Diem and Nhu are dead)
had only been a dream. A dream within a dream, if you pleased. This was another, but
marginally better.
Most of the TV screens which had been showing pictures of Calla Bryn Sturgis the last time
she’d been here were now broadcasting either snow or test-patterns. On one, however, was the
nineteenth-floor corridor of the Plaza-Park Hotel. The camera rolled down it toward the
elevators, and Susannah realized that these were Mia’s eyes she was looking through.
My eyes, she thought. Her anger was thin, but she sensed it could be fed. Would have to be fed, if she was ever to regard the unspeakable thing she’d seen in her dream. The thing in the
corner of her Oxford jail cell. The thing in the bowl of blood..
They’re my eyes. She hijacked them, that’s all.
Another TV screen showed Mia arriving in the elevator lobby, examining the buttons, and
then pushing the one marked with the down arrow. We’re off to see the midwife, Susannah thought, looking grimly up at the screen, and then barked a short, humorless laugh. Oh, we’re off to see the midwife, the wonderful midwife of Oz. Because because because because be-CAUZZZ .
. . Because of the wonderful things she does!
Here were the dials she’d reset at some considerable inconvenience — hell, pain,
EMOTIONAL TEMP still at 72. The toggle-switch marked CHAP still turned to ASLEEP, and
in the monitor above it the chap thus still in black-and-white like everything else: no sign of those disquieting blue eyes. The absurd LABOR FORCE oven-dial was still at 2, but she saw
that most of the lights which had been amber the last time she’d been in this room had now
turned red. There were more cracks in the floor and the ancient dead soldier in the corner had
lost his head: the increasingly heavy vibration of the machinery had toppled the skull from the top of its spine, and it now laughed up at the fluorescent lights in the ceiling.
The needle on the SUSANNAH-MIO readout had reached the end of the yellow zone; as
Susannah watched, it edged into the red. Danger, danger, Diem and Nhu are dead. Papa Doc
Duvalier is dead. Jackie Kennedy is dead.
She tried the controls one after another, confirming what she already knew: they were locked
in place. Mia might not have been able to change the settings in the first place, but locking things up once those settings were to her liking? That much she had been able to do.
There was a crackle and squall from the overhead speakers, loud enough to make her jump.