The Waste Lands (17 page)

Susannah lay down, laced her hands behind her head, and looked up at the stars wheeling slowly across the black sky.

At the edge of the campsite, Roland stood beyond the glow of the fire and listened as the voices of madness rose once more in his aching, confused mind.

Wasn
’
t.

He closed his eyes, cupped his aching forehead in one cold hand, and wondered how long it would be until he simply snapped like an overwound bowstring.

Oh Jake,
he thought.
Where are you? Where are you?

And above the three of them, Old Star and Old Mother rose into their appointed places and stared at each other across the starry ruins of their ancient broken marriage.

FOR THREE WEEKS JOHN “Jake” Chambers fought bravely against the madness rising inside him. During that time he felt like the last man aboard a foundering ocean liner, working the bilge-pumps for dear life, trying to keep the ship afloat until the storm ended, the skies cleared, and help could arrive . . . help from somewhere. Help from
anywhere.
On May 31st, 1977, four days before school ended for the summer, he finally faced up to the fact that no help was going to come. It was time to give up; time to let the storm carry him away. The straw that broke the camel’s back was his Final Essay in English Comp.

John Chambers, who was Jake to the three or four boys who were almost his friends (if his father had known this little factoid, he undoubtedly would have hit the roof), was finishing his first year at The Piper School. Although he was eleven and in the sixth grade, he was small for his age, and people meeting him for the first time often thought he was much younger. In fact, he had sometimes been mistaken for a girl until a year or so ago, when he had made such a fuss about having his hair cut short that his mother had finally relented and allowed it. With his father, of course, there had been no problem about the haircut. His father had just grinned his hard, stainless steel grin and said,
The kid wants to look like a Marine, Laurie. Good for him.

To his father, he was never Jake and rarely John. To his father, he was usually just “the kid.”

The Piper School, his father had explained to him the summer before (the Bicentennial Summer, that had been—all bunting and flags and New York Harbor filled with Tall Ships), was, quite simply, The Best Damned School In The Country For A Boy Your Age. The fact that Jake had been accepted there had nothing to do with money, Elmer Chambers explained . . . almost
insisted.
He had been savagely proud of this fact, although, even at ten, Jake had suspected it might not be a
true
fact, that it might really be a bunch of bullshit his father had turned
into
a fact so he could casually drop it into the conversation at lunch or over cocktails:
My kid? Oh, he’s going to Piper. Best Damned School In The Country For A Boy His Age. Money won’t buy you into that school, you know; for Piper, it’s brains or nothing.

Jake was perfectly aware that in the fierce furnace of Elmer Chambers’s mind, the gross carbon of wish and opinion was often blasted into the hard diamonds which he called facts . . . or, in more informal circumstances, “factoids.” His favorite phrase, spoken often and with reverence, was
The fact is
, and he used it every chance he got.

The fact is, money doesn’t get anyone into The Piper School
, his father had told him during that Bicentennial Summer, the summer of blue skies and bunting and Tall Ships, a summer which seemed golden in Jake’s memory because he had not yet begun to lose his mind and all he had to worry about was whether or not he could cut the mustard at The Piper School, which sounded like a nest for newly hatched geniuses. The only thing that gets you into
a
place like Piper is what
you’ve got
up here. Elmer Chambers had reached over his desk and tapped the center of his son’s forehead with a hard, nicotine-stained finger. Get me,
kid?

Jake had nodded. It wasn’t necessary to talk to his father, because is father treated everyone—including his wife—the way he treated his underlings at the TV network where he was in charge of programming and an acknowledged master of The Kill. All you had to do was listen, nod in the right places, and after a while he let you go.

Good,
his father said, lighting one of the eighty Camel cigarettes he smoked each and every day.
We understand each other, then. You’re going to have to work your buttsky off, but you can cut it. They never would have sent us this if you couldn’t.
He picked up the letter of acceptance from The Piper School and rattled it. There was a kind of savage triumph in the gesture, as if the letter was an animal he had killed in the jungle, an animal he would now skin and eat.
So work hard. Make your grades. Make your mother and me proud of you. If you end the year with an A average in your courses, there’s a trip to Disney World in it for you. That’s something to shoot for, right, kiddo?

Jake had made his grades—A’s in everything (until the last three weeks, that was). He had, presumably, made his mother and father proud of him, although they were around so little that it was hard to tell. Usually there was
nobody
around when he came home from school except for Greta Shaw—the housekeeper—and so he ended up showing his A papers to her. After that, they migrated to a dark corner of his room. Sometimes Jake looked through them and wondered if they meant anything. He
wanted
them to, but he had serious doubts.

Jake didn’t think he would be going to Disney World this summer, A average or no A average.

He thought the nuthouse was a much better possibility.

As he walked in through the double doors of The Piper School at 8:45 on the morning of May 31st, a terrible vision came to him. He saw his father in his office at 70 Rockefeller Plaza, leaning over his desk with a Camel jutting from the corner of his mouth, talking to one of his underlings as blue smoke wreathed his head. All of New York was spread out behind and below his father, its thump and hustle silenced by two layers of Thermopane glass.

The fact is, money doesn’t get anyone into Sunnyvale Sanitarium,
his father was telling the underling in a tone of grim satisfaction. He reached out and tapped the underling’s forehead.
The only thing that gets you into a place like that is when something big-time goes wrong up here in the attic. That’s what happened to the kid. But he’s working his goddam buttsky off. Makes the best fucking baskets in the place, they tell me. And when they let him out—if they ever do—there
’
s a trip in it for him. A trip to—

“—the way station,” Jake muttered, then touched his forehead with a hand that wanted to tremble. The voices were coming back. The yelling, conflicting voices which were driving him mad.

“John?”

He looked around, badly startled. Mr. Bissette, his French teacher, was standing there, looking a little concerned. Behind him, the rest of the student body was streaming into the Common Room for the morning assembly. There was very little skylarking, and no yelling at all. Presumably these other students, like Jake himself, had been told by their parents how lucky they were to be attending Piper, where money didn’t matter (although tuition was $22,000 a year), only your brains. Presumably many of them had been promised trips this summer if their grades were good enough. Presumably the parents of the lucky trip-winners would even go along in some cases. Presumably—

“John, are you okay?” Mr. Bissette asked.

“Sure,” Jake said. “Fine. I overslept a little this morning. Not awake yet, I guess.”

Mr. Bissette’s face relaxed and he smiled. “Happens to the best of us.”

“Are you ready for your French final?” Mr. Bissette asked.
“Voulez-vous faire l’examen cet après-midi?”

“I think so,” Jake said. In truth he didn’t know if he was ready for the exam or not. He couldn’t even remember if he had
studied
for the French final or not. These days nothing seemed to matter much except for the voices in his head.

“I want to tell you again how much I enjoyed having you this year, John. I wanted to tell your folks, too, but they missed Parents’ Night—”

“They’re pretty busy,” Jake said.

Mr. Bissette nodded. “Well, I have enjoyed you. I just wanted to say so . . . and that I’m looking forward to having you back for French II next year.”

“Thanks,” Jake said, and wondered what Mr. Bissette would say if he added,
But I don’t think I’ll be taking French II next year, unless I can get a correspondence course delivered to my postal box at good old Sunnyvale.

Joanne Franks, the school secretary, appeared in the doorway of the Common Room with her small silver-plated bell in her hand. At The Piper School,
all
bells were rung by hand. Jake supposed that if you were a parent, that was one of its charms. Memories of the Little Red Schoolhouse and all that. He hated it himself. The sound of that bell seemed to go right through his head—

Mr. Bissette had caught sight of Ms. Franks. He turned away, then turned back again.
“Is
everything all right, John? You’ve seemed preoccupied these last few weeks. Troubled. Is something on your mind?”

Jake was almost undone by the kindness in Mr. Bissette’s voice, but then he imagined how Mr. Bissette would look if he said:
Yes. Something is on my mind. One hell of a nasty little factoid. I died, you see, and I went into another world. And then I died again. You’re going to say that stuff like that doesn’t happen, and of course you’re right, and part of my mind knows you’re right, but most of my mind knows that you’re wrong. It did happen. I did die.

If he said something like that, Mr. Bissette would be on the phone to Elmer Chambers at once, and Jake thought that Sunnyvale Sanitarium would probably look like a rest-cure after all the stuff his father would have to say on the subject of kids who started having crazy notions just before Finals Week. Kids who did things that couldn’t be discussed over lunch or cocktails. Kids Who Let Down The Side.

Jake forced himself to smile at Mr. Bissette. “I’m a little worried about exams, that’s all.”

Mr. Bissette winked. “You’ll do fine.”

Ms. Franks began to ring the Assembly Bell. Each peal stabbed into Jake’s ears and then seemed to flash across his brain like a small rocket.

“Come on,” Mr. Bissette said. “We’ll be late. Can’t be late on the first day of Finals Week, can we?”

They went in past Ms. Franks and her clashing bell. Mr. Bissette headed toward the row of seats called Faculty Choir. There were lots of cute names like that at Piper School; the auditorium was the Common Room, lunch-hour was Outs, seventh- and eighth-graders were Upper Boys and Girls, and, of course, the folding chairs over by the piano (which Ms. Franks would soon begin to pound as mercilessly as she rang her silver bell) was Faculty Choir. All part of the tradition, Jake supposed. If you were a parent who knew your kid had Outs in the Common Room at noon instead of just slopping up Tuna Surprise in the caff, you relaxed into the assurance that everything was A-OK in the education department.

He slipped into a seat at the rear of the room and let the morning’s announcements wash over him. The terror ran endlessly on in his mind, making him feel like a rat trapped on an exercise wheel. And when he tried to look ahead to some better, brighter time, he could see only darkness.

The ship was his sanity, and it was sinking.

Mr. Harley, the headmaster, approached the podium and imparted a brief exordium about the importance of Finals Week, and how the grades they received would constitute another step upon The Great Road of Life. He told them that the school was depending on them,
he
was depending on them, and their parents were depending on them. He did not tell them that the entire free world was depending on them, but he strongly implied that this might be so. He finished by telling them that bells would be suspended during Finals Week (the first and only piece of good news Jake had received that morning).

Ms. Franks, who had assumed her seat at the piano, struck an invocatory chord. The student body, seventy boys and fifty girls, each turned out in a neat and sober way that bespoke their parents’ taste and financial stability, rose as one and began to sing the school song. Jake mouthed the words and thought about the place where he had awakened after dying. At first he had believed himself to be in hell . . . and when the man in the black hooded robe came along, he had been sure of it.