taking off your shirt and you say yeah I sure would I’d mind like hell, I picked up a little
cold down in the Bahamas and the air-conditioning in here is real high and I’m afraid it
might turn into pneumonia and they say oh is that so, do you always sweat like that when
the air-conditioning’s too high, Mr. Dean, you do, well, excuse us all to hell, now do it, and
you do it, and they say maybe you better take off the t-shirt too, because you look like
maybe you got some kind of a medical problem, buddy, those bulges under your pits look
like maybe they could be some kind of lymphatic tumors or something, and you don’t even
bother to say anything else, it’s like a center-fielder who doesn’t even bother to chase the
ball when it’s hit a certain way, he just turns around and watches it go into the upper deck,
because when it’s gone it’s gone, so you take off the t-shirt and hey, looky here, you’re some
lucky kid, those aren’t tumors, unless they’re what you might call tumors on thecorpus of
society, yuk-yuk-yuk, those things look more like a couple of baggies held there with Scotch
strapping tape, and by the way, don’t worry about that smell, son, that’s just goose. It’s
cooked.
He reached behind him and pulled the locking knob. The lights in the head brightened. The
sound of the motors was a soft drone. He turned toward the mirror, wanting to see how bad
he looked, and suddenly a terrible, pervasive feeling swept over him: a feeling of being
watched.
Hey, come on, quit it,he thought uneasily. You’re supposed to be the most unparanoid guy
in the world. That’s why they sent you. That’s why—
But it suddenly seemed those were not his own eyes in the mirror, not Eddie Dean’s hazel,
almost-green eyes that had melted so many hearts and allowed him to part so many pretty
sets of legs during the last third of his twenty-one years, not his eyes but those of a stranger.
Not hazel but a blue the color of fading Levis. Eyes that were chilly, precise, unexpected
mar- vels of calibration. Bombardier’s eyes.
Reflected in them he saw—clearly saw—a seagull swoop- ing down over a breaking wave
and snatching something from it.
He had time to think What in God’s name is this shit? and then he knew it wasn’t going to pass; he was going to throw up after all.
In the half-second before he did, in the half-second he went on looking into the mirror, he
saw those blue eyes disap- pear . . . but before that happened there was suddenly the feeling
of being two people … of being possessed, like the little girl in The Exorcist.
Clearly he felt a new mind inside his own mind, and heard a thought not as his own
thought but more like a voice from a radio: I’ve come through. I’m in the sky-carriage.
There was something else, but Eddie didn’t hear it. He was too busy throwing up into the
basin as quietly as he could.
When he was done, before he had even wiped his mouth, something happened which had
never happened to him before. For one frightening moment there was nothing—only a
blank interval. As if a single line in a column of newsprint had been neatly and completely
inked out.
What is this?Eddie thought helplessly. What the hell is this shit?
Then he had to throw up again, and maybe that was just as well; whatever you might say
against it, regurgitation had at least this much in its favor: as long as you were doing it, you
couldn’t think of anything else.
3
I’ve come through. I’m in the sky-carriage,the gunslingerthought. And, a second later: He
sees me in the mirror !
Roland pulled back—did not leave but pulled back, like a child retreating to the furthest
corner of a very long room. He was inside the sky-carriage; he was also inside a man who
was not himself. Inside The Prisoner. In that first moment, when he had been close to the
front (it was the only way he could describe it), he had been more than inside; he had
almost been the man. He felt the man’s illness, whatever it was, and sensed that the man was about to retch. Roland understood that if he needed to, he could take control of this man’s
body. He would suffer his pains, would be ridden by whatever demon-ape rode him, but if
he needed to he could.
Or he could stay back here, unnoticed.
When the prisoner’s fit of vomiting had passed, the gun-slinger leaped forward—this time
all the way to the front. He understood very little about this strange situation, and to act in a situation one does not understand is to invite the most terrible consequences, but there were
two things he needed to know—and he needed to know them so desperately that the
needing outweighed any consequences which might arise.
Was the door he had come through from his own world still there?
And if it was, was his physical self still there, collapsed, untenanted, perhaps dying or
already dead without his self’s self to go on unthinkingly running lungs and heart and
nerves? Even if his body still lived, it might only continue to do so until night fell. Then the
lobstrosities would come out to ask their questions and look for shore dinners.
He snapped the head which was for a moment his head around in a fast backward glance.
The door was still there, still behind him. It stood open on his own world, its hinges buried
in the steel of this peculiar privy. And, yes, there he lay, Roland, the last gunslinger, lying
on his side, his bound right hand on his stomach.
I’m breathing,Roland thought. I’llhave to go back and move me. But there are things to do
first. Things . . .
He let go of the prisoner’s mind and retreated, watching, waiting to see if the prisoner
knew he was there or not.
4
After the vomiting stopped, Eddie remained bent over the basin, eyes tightly closed.
Blanked there for a second. Don’t know what it was. Did I look around?
He groped for the faucet and ran cool water. Eyes still closed, he splashed it over his
cheeks and brow.
When it could be avoided no longer, he looked up into the mirror again.
His own eyes looked back at him.
There were no alien voices in his head.
No feeling of being watched.
You had a momentary fugue, Eddie,the great sage and eminent junkie advised him. A not
uncommon phenomenon in one who is going cool turkey.
Eddie glanced at his watch. An hour and a half to New York. The plane was scheduled to
land at 4:05 EDT, but it was really going to be high noon. Showdown time.
He went back to his seat. His drink was on the divider. He took two sips and the stew came
back to ask him if she could do any thing else for him. He opened his mouth to say
no. . .and then there was another of those odd blank moments.
5
“I’d like something to eat, please,” the gunslinger said through Eddie Dean’s mouth.
“We’ll be serving a hot snack in—”
“I’m really starving, though,” the gunslinger said with perfect truthfulness. “Anything at all, even a popkin—”
“Popkin?” the army woman frowned at him, and the gunslinger suddenly looked into the
prisoner’s mind. Sand- wich . . . the word was as distant as the murmur in a conch shell.
“A sandwich, even,” the gunslinger said.
The army woman looked doubtful. “Well… I have some tuna fish …”
“That would be fine,” the gunslinger said, although he had never heard of tooter fish in his life. Beggars could not be choosers.
“You do look a little pale,” the army woman said. “I thought maybe it was air-sickness.”
“Pure hunger.”
She gave him a professional smile. “I’ll see what I can rustle up.”
Russel?the gunslinger thought dazedly. In his own world to russel was a slang verb
meaning to take a woman by force. Never mind. Food would come. He had no idea if he
could carry it back through the doorway to the body which needed it so badly, but one thing
at a time, one thing at a time.
Russel,he thought, and Eddie Dean’s head shook, as if in disbelief.
Then the gunslinger retreated again.
6
Nerves,the great oracle and eminent junkie assured him. Just nerves. All part of the cool
turkey experience, little brother.
But if nerves was what it was, how come he felt this odd sleepiness stealing over
him—odd because he should have been itchy, ditsy, feeling that urge to squirm and scratch
that came before the actual shakes; even if he had not been in Henry’s “cool turkey” state, there was the fact that he was about to attempt bringing two pounds of coke through U.S.