The Dark Tower

He picks up his wallet and sees the stickballkids staring at him, their mouths open. He points his wallet at them like somekind of gun with a floppy barrel, and the boy holding the sawed-off broomhandleflinches. It’s the flinch even more than the falling body that will haunt Ted’sdreams for the next year or so, and then off and on for the rest of his life.Because he likes kids, would never scare one on purpose. And he knowswhat they are seeing: a man with his pants mostly pulled down so his boxershorts show (for all he knows his dingus could be hanging out of the fly front,and wouldn’t that just be the final magical touch), a wallet in his hand and aloony look on his bloody kisser.

“You didn’t see anything!” he shouts atthem. “You hear me, now! You hear me! You didn’t see anything!”

Then he hitches up his pants. Then hegoes back to his briefcase and picks it up, but not the pork chop in the brownpaper sack, fuck the pork chop, he lost his appetite along with one of hisincisors. Then he takes another look at the body on the sidewalk, and thefrightened kids. Then he runs.

Which turns into a career.

Five

The end of the second tape pulled free ofthe hub and made a soft fwip-fwip-fwip sound as it turned.

“Jesus,” Susa

“So long ago,” Jake said, and shook hishead as if to clear it. To him, the years between his when and Mr. Brautigan’sseemed an unbridgeable chasm.

Eddie picked up the third box and displayedthe tape inside, raising his eyebrows at Roland. The gunslinger twirled afinger in his old gesture, the one that said go on, go on.

Eddie threaded the tape through the heads.He’d never done this before, but you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist, asthe saying went. The tired voice began again, speaking from the GingerbreadHouse Dinky Earnshaw had made for Sheemie, a real place created from nothingmore than imagination. A balcony on the side of the Dark Tower, Brautigan hadcalled it.

He’d killed the man (by accident, they allwould have agreed; they had come to live by the gun and knew the differencebetween by accident and on purpose without needing to discuss thematter) around seven in the evening. By nine that night, Brautigan was on awestbound train. Three days later he was sca

“And just by the way, that’s not true,”said the voice from the tape recorder. “The part about being just agarden-variety telepath, I mean, and I understood that even when I was awet-behind-the-ears kid trying to get into the Army. I just didn’t know theword for what I was.”

The word, it turned out, was facilitator.And he later became sure that certain folks—certain talent scouts—werewatching him even then, sizing him up, knowing he was different even in thesubset of telepaths but not how different. For one thing, telepaths whodid not come from the Keystone Earth (it was their phrase) were rare. Foranother, Ted had come to realize by the mid-nineteen-thirties that what he hadwas actually catching: if he touched a person while in a state of highemotion, that person for a short time became a telepath. What he hadn’t knownthen was that people who were already telepaths became stronger.

Exponentially stronger.

“But that’s ahead of my story,” he said.

He moved from town to town, a hobo who rodethe rods in a passenger car and wearing a suit instead of in a boxcar wearingOshkosh biballs, never staying in one place long enough to put down roots. Andin retrospect, he supposed he knew that even then he was being watched. It wasan intuitive thing, or like oddities one sometimes glimpsed from the corner ofone’s eye. He became aware of a certain kind of people, for instance. Afew were women, most were men, and all had a taste for loud clothes, raresteak, and fast cars painted in colors as garish as their clothing. Their faceswere oddly heavy and strangely inexpressive. It was a look he much later cameto associate with dumbbells who’d gotten plastic surgery from quack doctors.During that same twenty-year period—but once again not consciously, onlyin the corner of his mind’s eye—he became aware that no matter what cityhe was in, those childishly simple symbols had a way of turning up on fencesand stoops and sidewalks. Stars and comets, ringed planets and crescent moons.Sometimes a red eye. There was often a hopscotch grid in the same area, but notalways. Later on, he said, it all fit together in a crazy sort of way, but notback in the thirties and forties and early fifties, when he was drifting. No,back then he’d been a little bit like Docs One and Two, not wanting to see whatwas right in front of him, because it was… disturbing.

And then, right around the time Korea waswinding down, he saw The Ad. It promised THE JOB OF A LIFETIME and saidthat if you were THE MAN WITH THE RIGHT QUALIFICATIONS, there would be ABSOLUTELYNO QUESTIONS ASKED. A number of required skills were enumerated,accountancy being one of them. Brautigan was sure the ad ran in newspapers allover the country; he happened to read it in the Sacramento Bee.

“Holy crap!” Jake cried. “That’s the samepaper Pere Callahan was reading when he found out his friend George Magruder—”

“Hush,” Roland said. “Listen.”

They listened.

Six

The tests are administered by humes (aterm Ted Brautigan won’t know for another few weeks—not until he stepsout of the year 1955 and into the no-time of the Algul). The interviewer heeventually meets in San Francisco is also a hume. Ted will learn (among a greatmany other things) that the disguises the low men wear, most particularly themasks they wear, are not good, not when you’re up close and personal. Upclose and personal you can see the truth: they are hume/taheen hybrids who takethe matter of their becoming with a religious fervor. The easiest way tofind yourself wrapped in a low-man bearhug with a set of murderous low-manteeth searching for your carotid artery is to aver that the only two thingsthey are becoming is older and uglier. The red marks on theirforeheads—the Eye of the King—usually disappear when they areAmerica-side (or dry up, like temporarily dormant pimples), and the masks takeon a weird organic quality, except for behind the ears, where the hairy,tooth-scabbed underflesh shows, and inside the nostrils, where one can seedozens of little moving cilia. But who is so impolite as to look up a fellow’ssnot-gutters?

Whatever they think, up close andpersonal there’s something definitely wrong with them even when they’reAmerica-side, and no one wants to scare the new fish before the net’s properlyin place. So it’s humes (an abbreviation the can-toi won’t even use; they findit demeaning, like “nigger” or “vamp”) at the exams, humes in the interviewrooms, nothing but humes until later, when they go through one of the workingAmerica-side doorways and come out in Thunderclap.

Ted is tested, along with a hundred orso others, in a gymnasium that reminds him of the one back in East Hartford.This one has been filled with rows and rows of study-hall desks (wrestling matshave been considerately laid down to keep the desks’ old-fashioned round ironbases from scratching the varnished hardwood), but after the first round of testing—aninety-minute diagnostic full of math, English, and vocabularyquestions—half of them are empty. After the second round, it’s threequarters. Round Two consists of some mighty weird questions, highlysubjective questions, and in several cases Ted gives an answer in which hedoes not believe, because he thinks—maybe knows—that thepeople giving the test want a different answer from the one he (and mostpeople) would ordinarily give. For instance, there’s this little honey: