Stephen King – The Dark Tower

He has no doubt that some would feel the word is too harsh, but he will be the judge of that

in this particular case, thank you oh so very much, and he thinks the word is apt. It’s Akron and it’s a blue summer dusk and kids are playing kick-the-can at one end of Stossy Avenue

and stickball at the other and Brautigan stands on the corner in a summerweight suit, stands

by the pole with the white stripe painted on it, the white stripe that means the bus stops here.

Behind him is a deserted candystore with a blueNRA eagle in one window and a

whitewashed message in the other that saysTHEIR KILLING THE LITTLE MAN . Ted is

just standing there with his scuffed cordovan briefcase and a brown sack—a pork chop for

his supper, he got it at Mr. Dale’s Fancy Butcher Shop—when all at once somebody runs

into him from behind and he’s driven into the telephone pole with the white stripe on it. He

connects nose-first. His nose breaks. It sprays blood. Then his mouth connects, and he feels

his teeth cut into the soft lining of his lips, and all at once his mouth is filled with a salty taste like hot tomato juice. There’s a thud in the small of his back and a ripping sound. His trousers are pulled halfway down over his ass by the force of the hit, hanging crooked and

twisted, like the pants of a clown, and all at once a guy in a tee-shirt and gabardine slacks with a shiny seat is running off down Stossy Avenue toward the stickball game and that

thing flapping in his right hand, flapping like a brown leather tongue, why, that thing is Ted Brautigan’s wallet. He has just been mugged out of his wallet, by God!

The purple dusk of that summer night deepens suddenly to full dark, then lightens up again,

then deepens once more. It’s his eyes, doing the trick that so amazed the second doctor

almost twenty years before, but Ted hardly notices. His attention is fixed on the fleeing

man, the son of a bitch who just mugged him out of his wallet and spoiled his face in the

process. He’s never been so angry in his life, never, and although the thought he sends at

the fleeing man is innocuous, almost gentle

(say buddy I would’ve given you a dollar if you’d asked maybe even two)

it has the deadly weight of a thrown spear. And itwasa spear. It takes him some time to

fully accept that, but when the time comes he realizes that he’s a murderer and if there’s a

God, Ted Brautigan will someday have to stand at His throne and answer for what he’s just

done. The fleeing man looks like he stumbles over something, but there’s nothing there,

onlyHARRY LOVES BELINDA printed on the cracked sidewalk in fading chalk. The

sentiment is surrounded with childish doodles—stars, a comet, a crescent moon—which he

will later come to fear. Ted feels like he just took a spear in the middle of the back himself, but he, at least, is still standing. And he didn’t mean it. There’s that. He knows in his heart that he didn’t mean it. He was just…surprised into anger.

He picks up his wallet and sees the stickball kids staring at him, their mouths open. He

points his wallet at them like some kind of gun with a floppy barrel, and the boy holding the sawed-off broomhandle flinches. It’s the flinch even more than the falling body that will

haunt Ted’s dreams for the next year or so, and then off and on for the rest of his life.

Because helikeskids, would never scare one on purpose. And he knows what they are

seeing: a man with his pants mostly pulled down so his boxer shorts show (for all he knows

his dingus could be hanging out of the fly front, and wouldn’t that just be the final magical touch), a wallet in his hand and a loony look on his bloody kisser.

“You didn’t see anything!” he shouts at them. “You hear me, now! You hear me! You

didn’t see anything!”

Then he hitches up his pants. Then he goes back to his briefcase and picks it up, but not the pork chop in the brown paper sack, fuck the pork chop, he lost his appetite along with one

of his incisors. Then he takes another look at the body on the sidewalk, and the frightened

kids. Then he runs.

Which turns into a career.

Five

The end of the second tape pulled free of the hub and made a softfwip-fwip-fwip sound as

it turned.

“Jesus,” Susannah said. “Jesus, that poor man.”

“So long ago,” Jake said, and shook his head as if to clear it. To him, the years between his when and Mr. Brautigan’s seemed an unbridgeable chasm.

Eddie picked up the third box and displayed the tape inside, raising his eyebrows at

Roland. The gunslinger twirled a finger in his old gesture, the one that said go on, go on.

Eddie threaded the tape through the heads. He’d never done this before, but you didn’t

have to be a rocket scientist, as the saying went. The tired voice began again, speaking

from the Gingerbread House Dinky Earnshaw had made for Sheemie, a real place created

from nothing more than imagination. A balcony on the side of the Dark Tower, Brautigan

had called it.

He’d killed the man (by accident, they all would have agreed; they had come to live by the

gun and knew the difference betweenby accident andon purpose without needing to discuss

the matter) around seven in the evening. By nine that night, Brautigan was on a westbound

train. Three days later he was scanning the Accountants Wanted ads in the Des Moines

newspaper. He knew something about himself by then, knew how careful he would have to

be. He could no longer allow himself the luxury of anger even when anger was justified.

Ordinarily he was just your garden-variety telepath—could tell you what you had for lunch,

could tell you which card was the queen of hearts because the streetcorner sharpie running

the monte-con knew—but when angry he had access to this spear, this terrible spear…

“And just by the way, that’s not true,” said the voice from the tape recorder. “The part

about being just a garden-variety telepath, I mean, and I understood that even when I was a

wet-behind-the-ears kid trying to get into the Army. I just didn’t know the word for what I

was.”

The word, it turned out, wasfacilitator. And he later became sure that certain

folks—certaintalent scouts —were watching him even then, sizing him up, knowing he

was different even in the subset of telepaths but nothow different. For one thing, telepaths

who did not come from the Keystone Earth (it was their phrase) were rare. For another, Ted

had come to realize by the mid-nineteen-thirties that what he had was actuallycatching : if

he touched a person while in a state of high emotion, that person for a short time became a

telepath. What he hadn’t known then was that people who werealready telepaths became

stronger.

Exponentially stronger.

“But that’s ahead of my story,” he said.

He moved from town to town, a hobo who rode the rods in a passenger car and wearing a suit instead of in a boxcar wearing Oshkosh biballs, never staying in one place long enough

to put down roots. And in retrospect, he supposed he knew that even then he was being

watched. It was an intuitive thing, or like oddities one sometimes glimpsed from the corner

of one’s eye. He became aware of a certainkind of people, for instance. A few were women,

most were men, and all had a taste for loud clothes, rare steak, and fast cars painted in

colors as garish as their clothing. Their faces were oddly heavy and strangely inexpressive.

It was a look he much later came to associate with dumbbells who’d gotten plastic surgery

from quack doctors. During that same twenty-year period—but once again not consciously,

only in the corner of his mind’s eye—he became aware that no matter what city he was in,

those childishly simple symbols had a way of turning up on fences and stoops and

sidewalks. Stars and comets, ringed planets and crescent moons. Sometimes a red eye.

There was often a hopscotch grid in the same area, but not always. Later on, he said, it all

fit together in a crazy sort of way, but not back in the thirties and forties and early fifties, when he was drifting. No, back then he’d been a little bit like Docs One and Two, not

wanting to see what was right in front of him, because it was…disturbing.

And then, right around the time Korea was winding down, he saw The Ad. It

promisedTHE JOB OF A LIFETIME and said that if you wereTHE MAN WITH THE