The Dark Tower

Doc Number Two blusters. Ted reiterateshis challenge. Doc Sam produces a piece of paper and a pen and the seconddoctor takes it. He is actually about to write a number when he reconsiders andtosses the pen on Sam’s desk and says: “This is some kind of cheap streetcornertrick, Sam. If you can’t see that, you’re blind.” And stalks away.

Ted invites Dr. Sam to think of arelative, any relative, and a moment later tells the doctor he’s thinking ofhis brother Guy, who died of appendicitis when Guy was fourteen; ever since,their mother has called Guy Sam’s guardian angel. This time Dr. Sam looks asthough he’s been slapped. At last he’s afraid. Whether it’s the odd in-and-outmovement of Ted’s pupils, or the matter-of-fact demonstration of telepathy withno dramatic forehead-rubbing, no “I’m getting a picture… wait…,” Dr. Sam isfinally afraid. He stamps REJECTED on Ted’s enlistment application withthe big red stamp and tries to get rid of him—next case, who wants to goto France and sniff the mustard gas?—but Ted takes his arm in a gripwhich is gentle but not in the least tentative.

“Listen to me,” says Ted StevensBrautigan. “I am a genuine telepath. I’ve suspected it since I was six or sevenyears old—old enough to know the word—and I’ve known it for suresince I was sixteen. I could be of great help in Army Intelligence, and mysubstandard hearing and heart murmur wouldn’t matter in such a post. As for thething with my eyes?” He reaches into his breast pocket, produces a pair ofsunglasses, and slips them on. “Ta-da!”

He gives Dr. Sam a tentative smile. Itdoes no good. There is a Sergeant-at-Arms standing at the door of the temporaryrecruitment office in East Hartford High’s physical education department, andthe medic summons him. “This fellow is 4-F and I’m tired of arguing with him.Perhaps you’d be good enough to escort him off the premises.”

Now it is Ted’s arm which is gripped,and none too gently.

“Wait a minute!” Ted says. “There’ssomething else! Something even more valuable! I don’t know if there’s a wordfor it, but…”

Before he can continue, theSergeant-at-Arms drags him out and hustles him rapidly down the hall, pastseveral gawking boys and girls almost exactly his own age. There is aword, and he’ll learn it years later, in Blue Heaven. The word isfacilitator, and as far as Paul “Pimli” Prentiss is concerned, it makes TedStevens Brautigan just about the most valuable hume in the universe.

Not on that day in 1916, though. On thatday in 1916, he is dragged briskly down the hallway and deposited on thegranite step outside the main doors and told by a man with a foot-thick accentthat “Y’all just want t’stay outta heah, boa.” After some consideration, Teddecides the Sergeant-at-Arms isn’t calling him a snake; boa in thiscontext is most likely Dixie for boy.

For a little while Ted just stands wherehe has been left. He’s thinking What does it take to convince you? andHow blind can you be? He can’t believe what just happened to him.

But he has to believe it, becausehere he is, on the outside. And at the end of a six-mile walk around Hartfordhe thinks he understands something else as well. They will never believe.None of them. Not ever. They’ll refuse to see that a fellow who could read thecollective mind of the German High Command might be mildly useful. A fellow whocould tell the Allied High Command where the next big German push wasgoing to come. A fellow who could do a thing like that a few times—maybeeven just once or twice!—might be able to end the war byChristmas. But he won’t have the chance because they won’t give it to him. Andwhy? It has something to do with the second doctor changing his number when Tedlanded on it, and then refusing to write another one down. Because somewheredown deep they want to fight, and a guy like him would spoil everything.

It’s something like that.

Fuck it, then. He’ll go to Harvard onhis uncle’s nickel.

And does. Harvard’s all Dinky told them,and more: Drama, Debate, Harvard Crimson, Mathematical Odd Fellows and,of course, the capper, Phi Beta Crapper. He even saves Unc a few bucks bygraduating early.

He is in the south of France, the warlong over, when a telegram reaches him: UNCLE DEAD STOP RETURN HOMESOONEST STOP.

The key word here seemed to be STOP.

God knows it was one of those watershedmoments. He went home, yes, and he gave comfort where comfort was due, yes. Butinstead of stepping into the furniture business, Ted decides to STOP his march toward financial success and START his march towardfinancial obscurity. In the course of the man’s long story, Roland’s ka-tetnever once hears Ted Brautigan blame his deliberate anonymity on hisoutré talent, or on his moment of epiphany: this is one valuable talentthat no one in the world wants.

And God, how he comes to understandthat! For one thing, his “wild talent” (as the pulp science-fiction magazinessometimes call it) is actually physically dangerous under the right circumstances.Or the wrong ones.

In 1935, in Ohio, it makes Ted Brautigana murderer.

He has no doubt that some would feel theword 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 ablue summer dusk and kids are playing kick-the-can at one end of Stossy Avenueand stickball at the other and Brautigan stands on the corner in a summerweightsuit, stands by the pole with the white stripe painted on it, the white stripe thatmeans the bus stops here. Behind him is a deserted candystore with a blue NRAeagle in one window and a whitewashed message in the other that says THEIRKILLING THE LITTLE MAN. Ted is just standing there with his scuffed cordovanbriefcase 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 frombehind and he’s driven into the telephone pole with the white stripe on it. Heco