Song of Susannah - Stephen King [116]
“Do you feel left out?”
Eddie laughed, but in truth he did feel left out. A little, anyway. Maybe King hadn’t gotten to him yet. If that was the case, he wasn’t exactly safe, was he?
“This doesn’t feel like a breakdown,” King said, “but I suppose they never do.”
“You’re not having a breakdown, but I have some sympathy for how you feel, sai. That man—”
“Roland. Roland of…Gilead?”
“You say true.”
“I don’t know if I had the Gilead part or not,” King said. “I’d have to check the pages, if I could find them. But it’s good. As in ‘There is no balm in Gilead.’ ”
“I’m not following you.”
“That’s okay, neither am I.” King found cigarettes, Pall Malls, on the bureau and lit one. “Finish what you were going to say.”
“He dragged me through a door between this world and his world. I also felt like I was having a breakdown.” It hadn’t been this world from which Eddie had been dragged, close but no cigar, and he’d been jonesing for heroin at the time—jonesing bigtime—but the situation was complicated enough without adding that stuff. Still, there was one question he had to ask before they rejoined Roland and the real palaver began.
“Tell me something, sai King—do you know where Co-Op City is?”
King had been transferring his coins and keys from his wet jeans to the dry ones, right eye squinted shut against the smoke of the cigarette tucked in the corner of his mouth. Now he stopped and looked at Eddie with his eyebrows raised. “Is this a trick question?”
“No.”
“And you won’t shoot me with that gun you’re wearing if I get it wrong?”
Eddie smiled a little. King wasn’t an unlikable cuss, for a god. Then he reminded himself that God had killed his little sister, using a drunk driver as a tool, and his brother Henry as well. God had made Enrico Balazar and burned Susan Delgado at the stake. His smile faded. But he said, “No one’s getting shot here, sai.”
“In that case, I believe Co-Op City’s in Brooklyn. Where you come from, judging by your accent. So do I win the Fair-Day Goose?”
Eddie jerked like someone who’s been poked with a pin. “What?”
“Just a thing my mother used to say. When my brother Dave and I did all our chores and got em right the first time, she’d say ‘You boys win the Fair-Day Goose.’ It was a joke. So do I win the prize?”
“Yes,” Eddie said. “Sure.”
King nodded, then butted out his cigarette. “You’re an okay guy. It’s your pal I don’t much care for. And never did. I think that’s part of the reason I quit on the story.”
That startled Eddie again, and he got up from the bed to cover it. “Quit on it?”
“Yeah. The Dark Tower, it was called. It was gonna be my Lord of the Rings, my Gormenghast, my you-name-it. One thing about being twenty-two is that you’re never short of ambition. It didn’t take me long to see that it was just too big for my little brain. Too…I don’t know…outré? That’s as good a word as any, I guess. Also,” he added dryly, “I lost the outline.”
“You did what? ”
“Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But writing can be a crazy deal. Did you know that Ernest Hemingway once lost a whole book of short stories on a train?”
“Really?”
“Really. He had no back-up copies, no carbons. Just poof, gone. That’s sort of what happened to me. One fine drunk night—or maybe I was done up on mescaline, I can no longer remember—I did a complete outline for this five-or ten-thousand-page fantasy epic. It was a good outline, I think. Gave the thing some form. Some style. And then I lost it. Probably flew off the back of my motorcycle when I was coming back from some fucking bar. Nothing like that ever happened to me before. I’m usually careful about my work, if nothing else.”
“Uh-huh,” Eddie said, and thought of asking Did you happen to see any guys in loud clothes, the sort of guys who drive flashy cars, around the time you lost it? Low men, not to put too fine a point on it? Anyone with a red mark on his or her forehead? The sort of thing that looks a little like a circle