The Waste Lands (Page 37)

“Yes, ma’am.”

“All right. Return as soon as possible.” “Yes, Ms. Avery.”

He closed the folder as he got up, took hold of it, then reluctantly let go again. No good. Ms. Avery would wonder why he was taking his Final Essay to the toilet with him. He should have removed the damning pages from the folder and stuffed them in his pocket before asking for permission to step out. Too late now.

Jake walked down the aisle toward the door, leaving his folder on the desk and his bookbag lying beneath it.

“Hope everything comes out all right, Chambers,” David Surrey whispered, and snickered into his hand.

“Still your restless lips, David,” Ms. Avery said, clearly exasperated now, and the whole class laughed.

Jake reached the door leading to the hall, and as he grasped the knob, that feeling of hope and surety rose in him again: This is it—really it. I’ll open the door and the desert sun will shine in. I’ll feel that dry wind on my face. I’ll step through and never see this classroom again. He opened the door and it was only the hallway on the other side, but he was right about one thing just the same: he never saw Ms. Avery’s classroom again.

HE WALKED SLOWLY DOWN the dim, wood-panelled corridor, sweating lightly. He walked past classroom doors he would have felt compelled to open if not for the clear glass windows set in each one. He looked into Mr. Bissette’s French II class and Mr. Knopf’s Introduction to Geometry class. In both rooms the pupils sat with pencils in hand and heads bowed over open blue-books. He looked into Mr. Harley’s Spoken Arts class and saw Stan Dorfman—one of those acquaintances who were not quite friends—beginning his Final Speech. Stan looked scared to death, but Jake could have told Stan he didn’t have the slightest idea what fear— real fear—was all about..

I died.

No. I didn’t.

Did too.

Did not.

Did.

Didn’t.

He came to a door marked GIRLS. He pushed it open, expecting to see a bright desert sky and a blue haze of mountains on the horizon. Instead he saw Belinda Stevens standing at one of the sinks, looking into the mirror above the basin and squeezing a pimple on her forehead.

“Jesus Christ, do you mind?” she asked.

“Sorry. Wrong door. I thought it was the desert.”

“What?”

But he had already let the door go and it was swinging shut on its pneumatic elbow. He passed the drinking fountain and opened the door marked BOYS. This was it, he knew it, was sure of it, this was the door which would take him back— Three urinals gleamed spotlessly under the fluorescent lights. A tap dripped solemnly into a sink. That was all.

Jake let the door close. He walked on down the hall, his heels making firm little clicks on the tiles. He glanced into the office before passing it and saw only Ms. Franks. She was talking on the telephone, swinging back and forth in her swivel chair and playing with a lock of her hair. The silver-plated bell stood on the desk beside her. Jake waited until she swivelled away from the door and then hurried past. Thirty seconds later he was emerging into the bright sunshine of a morning in late May.

I’ve gone truant, he thought. Even his distraction did not keep him from being amazed at this unexpected development. When I don’t come back from the bathroom in five minutes or so, Ms. Avery will send somebody to check . . . and then they’ll know. They’ll all know that I’ve left school, gone truant. He thought of the folder lying on his desk. They’ll read it and they’ll think I’m crazy. Fou. Sure they will. Of course. Because I am.

Then another voice spoke. It was, he thought, the voice of the man with the bombardier’s eyes, the man who wore the two big guns slung low on his hips. The voice was cold . . . but not without comfort. No, Jake, Roland said. You’re not crazy. You’re lost and scared, but you’re not crazy and need fear neither your shadow in the morning striding behind you nor your shadow at evening rising to meet you. Yow have to find your way back home, that’s all.

“But where do I go?” Jake whispered. He stood on the sidewalk of Fifty-sixth Street between Park and Madison, watching the traffic bolt past. A city bus snored by, laying a thin trail of acrid blue diesel smoke. “Where do I go? Where’s the f**king door?”

But the voice of the gunslinger had fallen silent. Jake turned left, in the direction of the East River, and began to walk blindly forward. He had no idea where he was going—no idea at all. He could only hope his feet would carry him to the right place . . . as they had carried him to the wrong one not long ago.

IT HAD HAPPENED THREE weeks earlier.

One could not say It all began three weeks earlier, because that gave the impression that there had been some sort of progression, and that wasn’t right. There had been a progression to the voices, to the violence with which each insisted on its own particular version of reality, but the rest of it had happened all at once.

He left home at eight o’clock to walk to school—he always walked when the weather was good, and the weather this May had been abso-lutely fine. His father had left for the Network, his mother was still in bed, and Mrs. Greta Shaw was in the kitchen, drinking coffee and reading her New York Post. “Goodbye, Greta,” he said. “I’m going to school now.” She raised a hand to him without looking up from the paper. “Have a good day, Johnny.”

All according to routine. Just another day in the life. And so it had been for the next fifteen hundred seconds. Then everything had changed forever.

He idled along, bookbag in one hand, lunch sack in the other, looking in the windows. Seven hundred and twenty seconds from the end of his life as he had always known it, he paused to look in the window of Brendio’s, where mannequins dressed in fur coats and Edwardian suits stood in stiff poses of conversation.