The Dark Tower (Page 53)

"Jesus," Susannah said. "Jesus, that poor man."

"So long ago," Jake said, and shook his head as if to clear it.

To him, the years between his when and Mr. Brautigan’s seemed an unbridgeable chasm.

Eddie picked up the third box and displayed the tape inside, raising his eyebrows at Roland. The gunslinger twirled a finger 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, as the saying went. The tired voice began again, speaking from the Gingerbread House Dinky Earnshaw had made for Sheemie, a real place created from nothing more than imagination. A balcony on the side of the Dark Tower, Brautigan had called it.

He’d killed the man (by accident, they all would have agreed; they had come to live by the gun and knew the difference between by accident and on purpose without needing to discuss the matter) around seven in the evening. By nine that night, Brautigan was on a westbound train. Three days later he was scanning the Accountants Wanted ads in the Des Moines newspaper. He knew something about himself by then, knew how careful he would have to be. He could no longer allow himself the luxury of anger even when anger was justified. Ordinarily he was just your garden-variety telepath-could tell you what you had for lunch, could tell you which card was the queen of hearts because the streetcorner sharpie running the monte-con knew-but when angry he had access to this spear, this terrible spear…

"And just by the way, that’s not true," said the voice from the tape recorder. "The part about being just a garden-variety telepath, I mean, and I understood that even when I was a wetbehind-the-ears kid trying to get into the Army. I just didn’t know the word for what I was."

The word, it turned out, was facilitator. And he later became sure that certain folks-certain talent scouts-were watching him even then, sizing him up, knowing he was different even in the subset of telepaths but not how different. For one thing, telepaths who did not come from die Keystone Earth (it was their phrase) were rare. For another, Ted had come to realize by the mid-nineteen-thirties that what he had was actually catching.

If he touched a person while in a state of high emotion, that person for a short time became a telepath. What he hadn’t known tfien 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 rode the rods in a passenger car and wearing a suit instead of in a boxcar wearing Oshkosh biballs, never staying in one place long enough to put down roots. And in retrospect, he supposed he knew that even then he was being watched. It was an intuitive thing, or like oddities one sometimes glimpsed from the corner of one’s eye. He became aware of a certain kind of people, for instance.

A few were women, most were men, and all had a taste for loud clothes, rare steak, and fast cars painted in colors as garish as their clouiing. Their faces were oddly heavy and strangely inexpressive.

It was a look he much later came to associate with dumbbells who’d gotten plastic surgery from quack doctors.

During that same twenty-year period-but once again not consciously, only in the corner of his mind’s eye-he became aware that no matter what city he was in, those childishly simple symbols had a way of turning up on fences and 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 not always. Later on, he said, it all fit together in a crazy sort of way, but not back 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 what was right in front of him, because it was… disturbing.

And then, right around the time Korea was winding down, he saw The Ad. It promised THE JOB OF A LIFETIME and said that if yon were THE MAN WITH THE RIGHT QUALIFICATIONS, there would be ABSOLUTELY NO QUESTIONS ASKED. A number of required skills were enumerated, accountancy being one of them. Brautigan was sure the ad ran in newspapers all over the country; he happened to read it in the Sacramento Bee.

"Holy crap!" Jake cried. "That’s the same paper Pere Callahan was reading when he found out his friend George Magruder-"

"Hush," Roland said. "Listen."

They listened.

The tests are administered by humes (a term Ted Brautigan won’t know for another few weeks-not until he steps out of the year 1955 and into the no-time of the Algal). The interviewer he eventually meets in San Francisco is also a hume. Ted will learn (among a great many other things) that the disguises the low men wear, most particularly the masks they loear, are not good, not when you ‘re up close and personal.

Up close and personal you can see the truth: they are hume/taheen hybrids who take the matter of their becoming with a religious fervor.

The easiest way to find yourself wrapped in a low-man bearhug loith a set of murderous low-man teeth searching for your carotid artery is to aver that the only two things they are becoming is older and uglier. The red marks on their foreheads-the Eye of the King-usually disappear when they are America-side (or dry up, like temporarily dormant pimples), and the masks take on a weird organic quality, except for behind the ears, where the hairy, tooth-scabbed underflesh shows, and inside the nostrils, where one can see dozens of little moving cilia. But who is so impolite as to look up a fellow’s snot-gutters?

Whatever they think, up close and personal there’s something definitely wrong with them even when they ‘re America-side, and no one wants to scare the new fish before the net’s properly in place. So it’s humes

(an abbreviation the can-toi won’t even use; they find it demeaning, like "nigger" or "vamp") at the exams, humes in the interview rooms, nothing but humes until later, when they go through one of the working America-side doorways and come out in Thunderclap.

Ted is tested, along with a hundred or so 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 mats have been considerately laid down to keep the desks’ old-fashioned round iron bases from scratching the varnished hardwood), but after the first round of testing-a ninety-minute diagnostic full of math, English, and vocabulary questions-half of them are empty. After the second round, it’s three quarters. Round Two consists of some mighty iveird questions, highly subjective questions, and in several cases Ted gives an answer in which he does not believe, because he thinks-maybe knows-that the people giving the test want a different answer from the one he (and most people) would ordinarily give. For instance, there’s this little honey:

23. You come to a stop near an over-turned car on a littletraveled road. Trapped in the car is a Young Man crying for rescue. You ask, "Are you hurt, Young Man?" to which he responds, "I don’t think so!" In the field nearby is a Satchel filled with Money. You: a. Rescue the Young Man and give him back his Money b. Rescue the Young Man but insist that the Money be taken to the local Police c. Take the Money and go on your way, knowing that although the road may be little traveled, someone will be along eventually to free the Young Man d. None of the above Had this been a test for the Sacramento PD, Ted would have circled "b" in a heartbeat. He may be little more than a hobo on the road, but his mama didn’t raise no fools, thank you oh so very much. That choice would be the correct one in most circumstances, too-the play-it-safe choice, the can’t-go-wrong choice. And, as a fall-back position, the one that says "I don’t have a frigging clue what this is about but at least I’m honest enough to say so,"there’s "d."

Ted circles "c, "but not because that is necessarily what he’d do in that situation. On the whole he tends to think that he’d go for "a, "presuming he could at least ask the "Young Man "a few questions about where the loot came from. And if outright torture wasn’t involved (and he would know, wouldn’t he, no matter what the "Young Man" might have to say on the subject), sure, here’s your money, Vaya con Dios. And why? Because Ted Brautigan happens to believe that the owner of the defunct candystore had a point: THEIR KILLING THE LITTLE MAN.

But he circles "c", and five days later he finds himself in the anteroom of an out-of-business dance studio in San Francisco (his train-fare from Sacramento prepaid), along with three other men and a sullenlooking teenage girl (the girl’s the former Tanya Leeds of Bryce, Colorado, as it turns out). Better than four hundred people showed up for the test in the gym, lured by the honeypot ad. Goats, for the most part.

Here, however, are four sheep. One per cent. And even this, as Brautigan will discover in the full course of time, is an amazing catch.

Eventually he is shown into an office marked PBRKTE. It is mostly filled with dusty ballet stuff. A broad-shouldered, hard-faced man in a brown suit sits in a folding chair, incongruously surrounded by filmy pink tutus. Ted thinks, A real toad in an imaginary garden.

The man sits forward, arms on his elephantine thighs. "Mr.

Brautigan, "he says, "I may or may not be a toad, but I can offer you the job of a lifetime. I can also send you out of here with a handshake and a much-obliged. It depends on the answer to one question. A question about a question, in fact."

The man, whose name turns out to be Frank Armitage, hands Ted a sheet of paper. On it, blown up, is Question 23, the one about the Young Man and the Satchel of Money.