The Waste Lands (Page 40)

“Moses in the bullrushes!” she gasped, fluttering a hand rapidly against the front of her housedress. “You scared the bejabbers out of me, Johnny!” “I’m sorry,” he said. He really was, but he was also bitterly disap-pointed. It had only been the pantry, after all. He had been so sure— “What are you doing, creeping around here, anyway? This is your bowling day! I didn’t expect you for at least another hour! I haven’t even made your snack yet, so don’t be expecting it.”

“That’s okay. I’m not very hungry, anyway.” He bent down and picked up the can she had dropped.

“Wouldn’t know it from the way you came bustin in here,” she grumbled. “I thought I heard a mouse or something. I guess it was just you.” “I guess it was.” She descended the step-stool and took the can from him. “You look like you’re comin down with the flu or something, Johnny.” She pressed her hand against his forehead. “You don’t feel hot, but that doesn’t always mean much.”

“I think I’m just tired,” Jake said, and thought: If only that was all it was. “Maybe I’ll just have a soda and watch TV for a while.” She grunted. “You got any papers you want to show me? If you do, make it fast. I’m behind on supper.”

“Nothing today,” he said. He left the pantry, got a soda, then went into the living room. He turned on Hollywood Squares and watched vacantly as the voices argued and the new memories of that dusty other world continued to surface.

His MOTHER AND FATHER didn’t notice anything was wrong with him— his father didn’t even get in until 9:30—and that was fine by Jake. He went to bed at ten and lay awake in the darkness, listening to the city outside his window: brakes, horns, wailing sirens.

You died.

I didn’t, though. I’m right here, safe in my own bed. That doesn’t matter. You died, and you know it. The hell of it was, he knew both things. I don’t know which voice is true, but I know I can’t go on like this. So just quit it, both of you. Stop arguing and leave me alone. Okay? Please? But they wouldn’t. Couldn’t, apparently. And it came to Jake that he ought to get up—right now—and open the door to the bathroom. The other world would be there. The way station would be there and the rest of him would be there, too, huddled under an ancient blanket in the stable, trying to sleep and wondering what in hell had happened.

I can tell him, Jake thought excitedly. He threw back the covers, suddenly knowing that the door beside his bookcase no longer led into the bathroom but to a world that smelled of heat and purple sage and fear in a handful of dust, a world that now lay under the shadowing wing of night. I can tell him, but I won’t have to . . . because I’ll be IN him . . . I’ll BE him! He raced across his darkened room, almost laughing with relief, and shoved open the door. And—

And it was his bathroom. Just his bathroom, with the framed Marvin Gaye poster on the wall and the shapes of the Venetian blinds lying on the tiled floor in bars of light and shadow.

He stood there for a long time, trying to swallow his disappointment. It wouldn’t go. And it was bitter.

Bitter.

THE THREE WEEKS BETWEEN then and now stretched like a grim, blighted terrain in Jake’s memory—a nightmare wasteland where there had been no peace, no rest, no respite from pain. He had watched, like a helpless prisoner watching the sack of a city he had once ruled, as his mind buckled under the steadily increasing pressure of the phantom voices and memories. He had hoped the memories would stop when he reached the point in them where the man named Roland had allowed him to drop into the chasm under the mountains, but they didn’t. Instead they simply recycled and began to play themselves over again, like a tape set to repeat and repeat until it either breaks or someone comes along, and shuts it off.

His perceptions of his more-or-less real life as a boy in New York City grew increasingly spotty as this terrible schism grew deeper. He could remember going to school, and to the movies on the weekend, and out to Sunday brunch with his parents a week ago (or had it been two?), but he remembered these things the way a man who has suffered malaria may remember the deepest, darkest phase of his illness: people became shadows, voices seemed to echo and overlap each other, and even such a simple act as eating a sandwich or obtaining a Coke from the machine in the gymnasium became a struggle. Jake had pushed through those days in a fugue of yelling voices and doubled memories. His obsession with doors—all kinds of doors—deepened; his hope that the gunslinger’s world might lie behind one of them never quite died. Nor was that so strange, since it was the only hope he had.

But as of today the game was over. He’d never had a chance of winning anyway, not really. He had given up. He had gone truant. Jake walked blindly east along the gridwork of streets, head down, with no idea of where he was going or what he would do when he got there.

AFTER WALKING FOR A while, he began to come out of this unhappy daze and take some notice of his surroundings. He was standing on the corner of Lexington Avenue and. Fifty-fourth Street with no memory at all of how he had come to be there. He noticed for the first time that it was an absolutely gorgeous morning. May 9th, the day this madness had started, had been pretty, but today was ten times better—that day, perhaps, when spring looks around herself and sees summer standing nearby, strong and handsome and with a cocky grin on his tanned face. The sun shone brightly off the glass walls of the midtown buildings; the shadow of each pedestrian was black and crisp. The sky overhead was a clear and blameless blue, dotted here and there with plump foul-weather clouds.