There was a reason. There was a purpose. There was life and love. He heard it all in the song of the rose, and he too began to cry. Mostly with relief. Getting here had been a hard journey. Many had died. Yet here they lived; here they sang with the rose. His life had not all been a dry dream after all.
They joined hands and stumbled forward, helping each other to avoid the nail-studded boards and the holes into which an ankle could plunge and twist and perhaps break. Roland didn’t know if one could break a bone while in the todash state, but he had no urge to find out.
“This is worth everything,” he said hoarsely.
Eddie nodded. “I’ll never stop now. Might not stop even if I die.”
Jake gave him a thumb-and-forefinger circle at that, and laughed. The sound was sweet in Roland’s ears. It was darker in here than it had been on the street, but the orange streetlights on Second and Forty-sixth were strong enough to provide at least some illumination. Jake pointed at a sign lying in a pile of boards. “See that? It’s the deli sign. I pulled it out of th weeds. That’s why it is where it is.” He looked around, dien pointed in anodier direction. “And look!”
This sign was still standing. Roland and Eddie turned to read it. Although neither of them had seen it before, they both felt a strong sense of deja vu, nonetheless.
MILLS CONSTRUCTION AND SOMBRA REAL ESTATE ASSOCIATES ARE CONTINUING TO
REMAKE THE FACE OF MANHATTAN!
COMING SOON TO THIS LOCATION:
TURTLE BAY LUXURY CONDOMINIUMS!
CALL 661-6712 FOR INFORMATION!
YOU WILL BE SO GLAD YOU DID!
As Jake had told them, the sign looked old, in need of either refreshment or outright replacement. Jake had remembered the graffito which had been sprayed across the sign, and Eddie remembered it from Jake’s story, not because it meant anything to him but simply because it was odd. And there it was, just as reported: bango skank. Some long-gone tagger’s calling card.
“I think the telephone number on the sign’s different,” Jake said.
“Yeah?” Eddie asked. “What was the old one?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Then how can you be sure this one’s different?”
In another place and at another time, Jake might have been irritated by these questions. Now, soothed by the proximity of the rose, he smiled, instead. “I don’t know. I guess I can’t. But it sure seems different. Like the sign in the bookstore window.”
Roland barely heard. He was walking forward over the piles of bricks and boards and smashed glass in his old cowboy boots, his eyes brilliant even in the shadows. He had seen the rose. There was something lying beside it, in the spot where Jake had found his version of the key, but Roland paid this no heed. He only saw the rose, growing from a clump of grass that had been stained purple with spilled paint. He dropped to his knees before it. A moment later Eddie joined him on his left, Jake on his right.
The rose was tightly furled against the night. Then, as they knelt there, the petals began to open, as if in greeting. The hum rose all around them, like a song of angels.
THIRTEEN
At first Susannah was all right. She held on despite the fact that she had lost over a foot and a half of herself
—the self that had arrived here, anyway—and was now forced into her old familiar (and hatefully subservient) posture, half-kneeling and half-sitting on the filthy sidewalk. Her back was propped against the fence surrounding the vacant lot. A sardonic thought crossed her mind— All I need’s a cardboard sign and a tin cup.
She held on even after seeing the dead woman cross Forty-sixth Street. The singing helped—what she understood to be the voice of the rose. Oy helped, too, crowding his warmth close to her. She stroked his silky fur, using the reality of him as a steadying-point. She told herself again and again that she was not insane. All right, she’d lost seven minutes. Maybe. Or maybe the guts inside that newfangled clock down there had just hiccupped. All right, she’d seen a dead woman crossing the street. Maybe. Or maybe she’d just seen some strung-out junkie, God knew there was no shortage of them in New York—
A junkie with a little green worm crawling out of her mouth ?
“I could have imagined that part,” she said to the bumbler. “Right?”
Oy was dividing his nervous attention between Susannah and the rushing headlights, which might have looked to him like large, predatory animals with shining eyes. He whined nervously.
“Besides, the boys’ll be back soon.”
“Oys,” the bumbler agreed, sounding hopeful.
Why didn’t I just go in with em ? Eddie would have carried me on his back, God knows he’s done it before, both with the harness and without it.
“I couldn’t,” she whispered. “I just couldn’t.”
Because some part of her was frightened of the rose. Of getting too close to it. Had that part been in control during the missing seven minutes? Susannah was afraid it had been. If so, it was gone now. Had taken back its legs and just walked off on them into New York, circa 1977. Not good. But it had taken her fear of the rose with it, and that was good. She didn’t want to be afraid of something that felt so strong and so wonderful.
Another personality ? Are you thinking the lady who brought the legs was another personality ?
Another version of Detta Walker, in other words?
The idea made her feel like screaming. She thought she now understood how a woman would feel if, five
years or so after an apparently successful cancer operation, the doctor told her a routine X-ray had picked up a shadow on her lung.
“Not again,” she murmured in a low, frantic voice as a fresh group of pedestrians schooled past. They all moved away from the board fence a little, although it reduced the space between them considerably. “No, not again. It can’t be. I’m whole. I’m… I’m fixed.”
How long had her friends been gone?
She looked downstreet at the flashing clock. It said 8:42, but she wasn’t sure she could trust it. It felt longer than that. Much longer. Maybe she should call to them. Just give a halloo. How y’all doin in there?
No. No such thing. You’re a gunslinger, girl. At least that’s what he says. What he thinks. And you’re not going to change what he thinks by hollering like a schoolgirl just seen a garter snake under a bush. You’re just going to sit here and wait. You can do it. You’ve got Oy for company and you—
Then she saw the man standing on the other side of the street. Just standing there beside a newsstand. He was naked. A ragged Y-cut, sewn up with large black industrial stitches, began at his groin, rose, and branched at his sternum. His empty eyes gazed at her. Through her. Through the world.
Any possibility that this might only have been a hallucination ended when Oy began to bark. He was staring directly across at the naked dead man.
Susannah gave up her silence and began to scream for Eddie.
FOURTEEN
When the rose opened, disclosing the scarlet furnace within its petals and the yellow sun burning at the center, Eddie saw everything that mattered.
“Oh my Lord,” Jake sighed from beside him, but he might have been a thousand miles away.
Eddie saw great things and near misses. Albert Einstein as a child, not quite struck by a runaway milk-wagon as he crossed a street. A teenage boy named Albert Schweitzer getting out of a bathtub and not quite stepping on the cake of soap lying beside the pulled plug. A Nazi Oberleutnant burning a piece of paper with the date and place of the D-Day invasion written on it. He saw a man who intended to poison the entire water supply of Denver die of a heart attack in a roadside rest stop on 1-80 in Iowa with a bag of McDonald’s french fries on his lap. He saw a terrorist wired up with explosives suddenly turn away from a crowded restaurant in a city that might have been Jerusalem. The terrorist had been transfixed by nothing more than the sky, and the thought that it arced above the just and unjust alike. He saw four men rescue a little boy from a monster whose entire head seemed to consist of a single eye.
But more important than any of these was the vast, accretive weight of small things, from planes which hadn’t crashed to men and women who had come to the correct place at the perfect time and thus founded generations. He saw kisses exchanged in doorways and wallets returned and men who had come to a splitting of the way and chosen the right fork. He saw a thousand random meetings that weren’t random, ten thousand right decisions, a hundred thousand right answers, a million acts of unacknowledged kindness. He saw the old people of River Crossing and Roland kneeling in the dust for Aunt Talitha’s blessing; again heard her giving it freely and gladly. Heard her telling him to lay the cross she had given him at the foot of the Dark Tower and speak the name of Talitha Unwin at the far end of the earth. He saw the Tower itself in the burning