Bag of Bones

“Yes,” he said. “Have you started writing again?”

I went upstairs a few minutes later, checked Ki, brushed my teeth, checked Ki again, then climbed into bed. From where I lay I was able to look out the window at the pale moon shining on the snow. Have you started writing again? No. Other than a rather lengthy essay on how I spent my summer vacation which I may show to IZYRA in some later year, there’s been nothing. I know that Harold is nervous, and sooner or later I suppose I’ll have to call him and tell him what he already guesses: the machine which ran so sweet for so long has stopped. It isn’t broken—this memoir came out with nary a gasp or missed heartbeat—but the machine has stopped, just the same. There’s gas in the tank, the sparkplugs spark and the battery bats, but the wordygurdy stands there quiet in the middle of my head. I’ve put a tarp over it. It’s served me well, you see, and I don’t like to think of it getting dusty. Some of it has to do with the way Mattie died. It occurred to me at some point this fall that I had written similar deaths in at least two of my books, and popular fiction is heaped with other examples of the same thing. Have you set up a moral dilemma you don’t know how to solve? Is the protagonist sexually attracted to a woman who is much too young for him, shall we say? Need a quick fix? Easiest thing in the world. “When the story starts going sour, bring on the man with the gun.” Raymond Chandler said that, or something like it—close enough for government work, kemo sabe.

Murder is the worst kind of pornography, murder is let me do what I want taken to its final extreme. I believe that even make-believe murders should be taken seriously; maybe that’s another idea I got last summer.

Perhaps I got it while Mattie was struggling in my arms, gushing blood from her smashed head and dying blind, still crying out for her daughter as she left this earth. To think I might have written such a hellishly convenient death in a book, ever, sickens me.

Or maybe I just wish there’d been a little more time.

I remember telling Ki it’s best not to leave love letters around; what Ithought but didn’t say was that they can come back to haunt you. I am haunted anyway… but I will not willingly haunt myself, and when I closed my book of dreams I did so of my own free will. I think I could have poured lye over those dreams as well, but from that I stayed my hand.

I’ve seen things I never expected to see and felt things I never expected to feel—not the least of them what I felt and still feel for the child sleeping down the hall from me. She’s my little guy now, I’m her big guy, and that’s the important thing. Nothing else seems to matter half so much.

Thomas Hardy, who supposedly said that the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones, stopped writing novels himself after finishing Jude the Obscure and while he was at the height of his narrative genius. He went on writing poetry for another twenty years, and when someone asked him why he’d quit fiction he said he couldn’t understand why he had trucked with it so long in the first place. In retrospect it seemed silly to him, he said. Pointless. I know exactly what he meant. In the time between now and whenever the Outsider remembers me and decides to come back, there must be other things to do, things that mean more than those shadows. I think I could go back to clanking chains behind the Ghost House wall, but I have no interest in doing so.

I’ve lost my taste for spooks. I like to imagine Mattie would think of Bartleby in Melville’s story.

I’ve put down my scrivener’s pen. These days I prefer not to.

Center Lovell, Maine:

May 25th, 1997—February 6th, 1998

STEPHEN KING was born in 1947 and has lived most of his life in the state of Maine, attending the University of Maine at Orono, where he met his wife, the novelist Tabitha King. He began writing stories when he was nine years old, encouraged by an aunt who paid him a quarter each time he finished one. Mr. King was teaching high school English when his first novel, Carrie, was accepted for publication. He has since written and published more than thirty novels, including The Shining, The Stand, It, Desperation, and The Green Mile. His stories and novellas have been collected in four volumes, with a fifth to be published in 1999.

Numerous films have been based on his stories, including three— Carrie, Stand by Me, and Shawshank Redemption—that received Academy Award nominations. His most recent volume in the Dark Tower series, begun while he was in college, is l’zard and Glass, published in 1997. Among many honors for his work over the years, he received in 1996 the O.

Henry First Prize Award for his short story, “The Man in the Black Suit,” and in 1997 the Poets & Writers’ Writers for Writers Award for his support of writers, writing, and reading. Since 1991 he has played rhythm guitar and sung vocals for The Rock Bottom Remainders, a band of writers that performs now and then around the country to promote literacy. Year after year he roots (so far in vain) for the Red Sox to win the World Series.