The Dark Tower

“Anyway, I struck up a conversation withhim one day. On Main Street, this was, outside the Gem. Star Wars wasback for its umpty-umpth revival. If there’s any movie the Breakers never getenough of, it’s Star Wars.

“I asked him if he knew where his name camefrom. He said yes, of course, from his clan-fam. Each can-toi is given a humename by his clan-fam at some point in his development; it’s a kind of maturity-marker.Dinky says they get that name the first time they successfully whack off, butthat’s just Dinky being Dinky. The fact is we don’t know and it doesn’t matter,but some of the names are pretty hilarious. There’s one fellow who looks likeRondo Hatton, a film actor from the thirties who suffered from acromegaly andgot work playing monsters and psychopaths, but his name is Thomas Carlyle.There’s another one named Beowulf and a fellow named Van Gogh Baez.”

Susa

“Anyway, I told him that Trampas was acharacter from a famous Western novel called The Virginian. Only secondbanana to the actual hero, true, but Trampas has got the one line from the bookeveryone remembers: ‘Smile when you say that!’ It tickled our Trampas,and I ended up telling him the whole plot of the book over cups of drug-storecoffee.

“We became friends. I’d tell him what wasgoing on in our little community of Breakers, and he’d tell me all sorts ofinteresting but i

“Holy shit,” Eddie said, and took anothergraham cracker. He wished mightily for milk to dip them in; graham crackerswithout milk were almost like Oreos without the white stuff in the middle.

“Imagine turning a radio or a TV onfull-blast,” Ted said in his rusty, failing voice, “and then turning it offagain… justasquick.” He purposely ran this together, and they allsmiled—even Roland. “That’ll give you the idea. Now I’ll tell you what Ilearned. I suspect you know it already, but I just can’t take the risk that youdon’t. It’s too important.

“There is a Tower, lady and gentlemen, asyou must know. At one time six beams crisscrossed there, both takingpower from it—it’s some kind of unimaginable power-source—andlending support, the way guy-wires support a radio tower. Four of these Beamsare now gone, the fourth very recently. The only two remaining are the Beam ofthe Bear, Way of the Turtle—Shardik’s Beam—and the Beam of theElephant, Way of the Wolf—some call that one Gan’s Beam.

“I wonder if you can imagine my horror atdiscovering what I’d actually been doing in The Study. When I’d been scratchingthat i

“And there was something worse, something Ihadn’t suspected, something that applied only to me. I’d known that Iwas different in some ways; for one thing, I seemed to be the only Breaker withan ounce of compassion in my makeup. When they’ve got the mean reds, I am, as Itold you, the one they come to. Pimli Prentiss, the Master, married Tanya andJoey Rastosovich—insisted on it, wouldn’t hear a word against the idea,kept saying that it was his privilege and his responsibility, he was just likethe captain on an old cruise-ship—and of course they let him do it. Butafterward, they came to my rooms and Tanya said, ‘You marry us, Ted.Then we’ll really be married.’

“And sometimes I ask myself, ‘Did you thinkthat was all it was? Before you started visiting with Trampas, and listeningevery time he lifted up his cap to scratch, did you truly think that having alittle pity and a little love in your soul were the only things that set youapart from the others? Or were you fooling yourself about that, too?’

“I don’t know for sure, but maybe I can findmyself i

“Listening to Trampas’s head, I came to seethat they considered me the catch of the century, maybe of all time, the onetruly indispensable Breaker. I’d already helped them to snap one Beam and I wascutting centuries off their work on Shardik’s Beam. And when Shardik’sBeam snaps, lady and gentlemen, Gan’s can only last a little while. And whenGan’s Beam also snaps, the Dark Tower will fall, creation will end, and thevery Eye of Existence will turn blind.

“How I ever kept Trampas from seeing mydistress I don’t know. And I’ve reason to believe that I didn’t keep ascomplete a poker face as I thought at the time.

“I knew I had to get out. And that was whenSheemie came to me the first time. I think he’d been reading me allalong, but even now I don’t know for sure, and neither does Dinky. All I knowis that one night he came to my room and thought to me, ‘I’ll make a hole foryou, sai, if you want, and you can go boogie-bye-bye.’ I asked him what hemeant, and he just looked at me. It’s fu

Roland grunted agreement. His brillianteyes were fixed on the turning reels of the tape recorder.

“I did ask him where the hole wouldcome out. He said he didn’t know—I’d be taking luck of the draw. All thesame, I didn’t think it over for long. I was afraid that if I did, I’d findreasons to stay. I said, ‘Go ahead, Sheemie—send me boogie-bye-bye.’

“He closed his eyes and concentrated, andall at once the corner of my room was gone. I could see cars going by. Theywere distorted, but they were actual American cars. I didn’t argue or questionany more, I just went for it. I wasn’t completely sure I could go through intothat other world, but I’d reached a point where I hardly even cared. I thoughtdying might be the best thing I could do. It would slow them down, at least.

“And just before I took the plunge, Sheemiethought to me, ‘Look for my friend Will Dearborn. His real name is Roland. Hisfriends are dead, but I know he’s not, because I can hear him. He’s agunslinger, and he has new friends. Bring them here and they’ll make the badfolks stop hurting the Beam, the way he made Jonas and his friends stop whenthey were going to kill me.’ For Sheemie, this was a sermon.

“I closed my eyes and went through. Therewas a brief sensation of being turned on my head, but that was all. No chimes,no nausea. Really quite pleasant, at least compared to the Santa Mira doorway.I came out on my hands and knees beside a busy highway. There was a piece ofnewspaper blowing around in the weeds. I picked it up and saw I’d landed inApril of 1960, almost five years after Armitage and his friends herded usthrough the door in Santa Mira, on the other side of the country. I was lookingat a piece of the Hartford Courant, you see. And the road turned out tobe the Merritt Parkway.”