Even before she had asked who they were, she had asked who she was.
3
Eddie looked from the lovely young/old face of the black woman in the wheelchair to
Roland’s face.
“How come she doesn’t know?”
“I can’t say. Shock, I suppose.”
“Shock took her all the way back to her living room, before she left for Macy’s? You
telling me the last thing she remembers is sitting in her bathrobe and listening to some
blow-dried dude talk about how they found that gonzo down in the Florida Keys with
Christa McAuliff’s left hand mounted on his den wall next to his prize marlin?”
Roland didn’t answer.
More dazed than ever, the Lady said, “Who is Christa McAuliff? Is she one of the missing
Freedom Riders?”
Now it was Eddie’s turn not to answer. Freedom Riders? What the hell were they”?
The gunslinger glanced at him and Eddie was able to read his eyes easily enough: Can’t you see she’s in shock?
I know what you mean, Roland old buddy, but it only washes up to a point. I felt a little
shock myself when you came busting into my head like Walter Payton on crack, but it didn’t
wipe out my memory banks.
Speaking of shock, he’d gotten another pretty good jolt when she came through. He had
been kneeling over Roland’s inert body, the knife just above the vulnerable skin of the
throat. . .but the truth was Eddie couldn’t have used the knife anyway—not then, anyway.
He was staring into the doorway, hypnotized, as an aisle of Macy’s rushed forward—he
was reminded again of The Shining, where you saw what the little boy was seeing as he
rode his trike through the hallways of that haunted hotel. He remembered the little boy had
seen this creepy pair of dead twins in one of those hallways. The end of this aisle was much
more mundane: a white door. The words ONLY TWO GARMENTS AT ONE TIME,
PLEASE were printed on it in discreet lettering. Yeah, it was Macy’s, all right. Macy’s for
sure.
One black hand flew out and slammed the door open while the male voice (a cop voice if
Eddie had ever heard one, and he had heard many in his time) behind yelled for her to quit
it, that was no way out, she was only making things a helluva lot worse for herself, and
Eddie caught a bare glimpse of the black woman in the wheelchair in the mirror to the left,
and he remembered thinking Jesus, he’s got her, all right, but she sure don’t look happy
about it.
Then the view pivoted and Eddie was looking at himself. The view rushed toward the
viewer and he wanted to put up the hand holding the knife to shield his eyes because all at
once the sensation of looking through two sets of eyes was too much, too crazy, it was
going to drive him crazy if he didn’t shut it out, but it all happened too fast for him to have time.
The wheelchair came through the door. It was a tight fit; Eddie heard its hubs squeal on the
sides. At the same moment he heard another sound: a thick tearing sound that made him
think of some word
(placental)
that he couldn’t quite think of because he didn’t know he knew it. Then the woman was
rolling toward him on the hard-packed sand, and she no longer looked mad as hell— hardly
looked like the woman Eddie had glimpsed in the mirror at all, for that matter, but he
supposed that wasn’t surprising; when you all at once went from a changing-room at Macy’s
to the seashore of a godforsaken world where some of the lobsters were the size of small
Collie dogs, it left you feeling a little winded. That was a subject on which Eddie Dean felt
he could personally give testimony.
She rolled about four feet before stopping, and only went that far because of the slope and
the gritty pack of the sand. Her hands were no longer pumping the wheels, as they must have been doing (when you wake up with sore shoulders tomorrow you can blame them on
Sir Roland, lady, Eddie thought sourly). Instead they went to the arms of the chair and
gripped them as she regarded the two men.
Behind her, the doorway had already disappeared. Disap- peared? That was not quite right.
It seemed to fold in on itself, like a piece of film run backward. This began to happen just as the store dick came slamming through the other, more mun- dane door—the one between
the store and the dressing room. He was coming hard, expecting the shoplifter would have
locked the door, and Eddie thought he was going to take one hell of a splat against the far
wall, but Eddie was never going to see it happen or not happen. Before the shrinking space
where the door between that world and this disappeared entirely, Eddie saw everything on
that side freeze solid.
The movie had become a still photograph.
All that remained now were the dual tracks of the wheel-chair, starting in sandy nowhere
and running four feet to where it and its occupant now sat.
“Won’t somebody please explain where I am and how I got here?” the woman in the
wheelchair asked—almost pleaded.
“Well, I’ll tell you one thing, Dorothy,” Eddie said. “You ain’t in Kansas anymore.”
The woman’s eyes brimmed with tears. Eddie could see her trying to hold them in but it
was no good. She began to sob.
Furious (and disgusted with himself as well), Eddie turned on the gunslinger, who had
staggered to his feet. Roland moved, but not toward the weeping Lady. Instead he went to
pick up his knife.
“Tell her!” Eddie shouted. “You brought her, so go on and tell her, man!” And after a moment he added in a lower tone, “And then tell me how come she doesn’t remember
herself.”
4
Roland did not respond. Not at once. He bent, pinched the hilt of the knife between the two
remaining fingers of his right hand, transferred it carefully to his left, and slipped it into the scabbard at the side of one gunbelt. He was still trying to grapple with what he had sensed
in the Lady’s mind. Unlike Eddie, she had fought him, fought him like a cat, from the
moment he came forward until they rolled through the door. The fight had begun the
moment she sensed him. There had been no lapse, because there had been no surprise. He had experienced it but didn’t in the least understand it. No surprise at the invading stranger
in her mind, only the instant rage, terror, and the commencement of a battle to shake him
free. She hadn’t come close to winning that battle—could not, he suspected—but that
hadn’t kept her from trying like hell. He had felt a woman insane with fear and anger and
hate.
He had sensed only darkness in her—this was a mind entombed in a cave-in.
Except—
Except that in the moment they burst through the door- way and separated, he had
wished—wished desperately— that he could tarry a moment longer. One moment would
have told so much. Because the woman before them now wasn’t the woman in whose mind
he had been. Being in Eddie’s mind had been like being in a room with jittery, sweating
walls. Being in the Lady’s had been like lying naked in the dark while venomous snakes
crawled all over you.
Until the end.
She had changed at the end.
And there had been something else, something he believed was vitally important, but he
either could not understand it or remember it. Something like
(a glance)
the doorway itself, only in her mind. Something about
(you broke theforspecial it was you)
some sudden burst of understanding. As at studies, when you finally saw—
“Oh, fuck you,” Eddie said disgustedly. “You’re nothing but a goddam machine.”
He strode past Roland, went to the woman, knelt beside her, and when she put her arms
around him, panic-tight, like the arms of a drowning swimmer, he did not draw away but
put his own arms around her and hugged her back.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I mean, it’s not great, but it’s okay.”
“Where are we?”she wept. ” Iwas sitting home watching TV so I could hear if my friends got out of Oxford alive and now I’m here and I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHERE HERE IS!”
“Well, neither do I,” Eddie said, holding her tighter, beginning to rock her a little, “but I guess we’re in it together. I’m from where you’re from, little old New York City, and I’ve
been through the same thing—well, a little different, but same principle—and you’re gonna be just fine.” As an afterthought he added: “As long as you like lobster.”
She hugged him and wept and Eddie held her and rocked her and Roland thought, Eddie