The Waste Lands (19 page)

He raised his hand.

“Yes, John, what is it?” Ms. Avery was looking at him with the expression of mild exasperation she reserved for students who interrupted her in mid-lecture.

“I’d like to step out for a moment, if I may,” Jake said.

This was another example of Piper-speak. Piper students did not ever have to “take a leak” or “tap a kidney” or, God forbid, “drop a load.” The unspoken assumption was that Piper students were too perfect to create waste byproducts in their tastefully silent glides through life. Once in a while someone requested permission to “step out for a moment,” and that was all.

Ms. Avery sighed. “Must you, John?”

“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.

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.”

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.

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. You 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 fucking
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 absolutely 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. He was thinking only of going bowling that afternoon after school. His average was 158, great for a kid who was only eleven. His ambition was to some day be a bowler on the pro tour (and if his father had known
this
little factoid, he
also
would have hit the roof).

Closing in now—closing in on the moment when his sanity would be suddenly eclipsed.

He crossed Thirty-ninth and there were four hundred seconds left. Had to wait for the WALK light at Forty-first and there were two hundred and seventy. Paused to look in the novelty shop on the corner of Fifth and Forty-second and there were a hundred and ninety. And now, with just over three minutes left in his ordinary life, Jake Chambers walked beneath the unseen umbrella of that force which Roland called
ka-tet.

An odd, uneasy feeling began to creep over him. At first he thought it was a feeling of being watched, and then he realized it wasn’t that at all . . . or not
precisely
that. He felt that he had been here before; that he was reliving a dream he had mostly forgotten. He waited for the feeling to pass, but it didn’t. It grew stronger, and now began to mix with a sensation he reluctantly recognized as terror.

Up ahead, on the near corner of Fifth and Forty-third, a black man in a Panama hat was setting up a pretzel-and-soda cart.

He’s the one that yells “Oh my God, he’s kilt!”
Jake thought.

Approaching the far corner was a fat lady with a Bloomingdale’s bag in her hand.

Behind the fat woman was a tall man in a gray nailhead worsted suit. He was carrying a briefcase.

Yet his feet carried him numbly forward toward the intersection, where people were crossing in a brisk, steady stream. Somewhere behind him, closing in, was a killer priest. He
knew
this, just as he knew that the priest’s hands would in a moment be outstretched to push . . . but he could not look around. It was like being locked in a nightmare where things simply had to take their course.

Fifty-three seconds left now. Ahead of him, the pretzel vendor was opening a hatch in the side of his cart.

The pretzel vendor brought out a bottle of Yoo-Hoo, shook it vigorously, and spun off the cap.

Forty seconds left.

White WALK went out. Red DONT WALK began to flash rapidly on and off. And somewhere, less than half a block away, a big blue Cadillac was now rolling toward the intersection of Fifth and Forty-third. Jake
knew
this, just as he knew the driver was a fat man wearing a hat almost the exact same blue shade as his car.

He wanted to scream this aloud to the people walking heedlessly all around him, but his jaws were locked shut. His feet swept him serenely onward toward the intersection. The DONT WALK sign stopped flashing and shone out its solid red warning. The pretzel vendor tossed his empty Yoo-Hoo bottle into the wire trash basket on the corner. The fat lady stood on the corner across the street from Jake, holding her shopping bag by the handles. The man in the nailhead suit was directly behind her. Now there were eighteen seconds left.

Time for the toy truck to go by,
Jake thought.

Ahead of him a van with a picture of a happy jumping-jack and the words TOOKER’S WHOLESALE TOYS printed on the side swept through the intersection, jolting up and down in the potholes. Behind him, Jake knew, the man in the black robe was beginning to move faster, closing the gap, now reaching out with his long hands. Yet he could not look around, as you couldn’t look around in dreams when something awful was gaining on you.

But he was powerless to stop it from happening. Ahead, on the edge of the curb, was a young woman in a white sweater and a black skirt. To her left was’ a young Chicano guy with a boombox. A Donna Summer disco tune was just ending. The next song, Jake knew, would be “Dr. Love,” by Kiss.

Even as the thought came, the woman moved a step to her right. The Chicano guy moved a step to his left, creating a gap between them. Jake’s traitor feet swept him into the gap. Nine seconds now.

Down the street, bright May sunshine twinkled on a Cadillac hood ornament. It was, Jake knew, a 1976 Sedan de Ville. Six seconds. The Caddy was speeding up. The light was getting ready to change and the man driving the de Ville, the fat man in the blue hat with the feather stuck jauntily in the brim, meant to scat through the intersection before it could. Three seconds. Behind Jake, the man in black was lunging forward. On the young man’s boombox, “Love to Love You, Baby” ended and “Dr. Love” began.

Two.

The Cadillac changed to the lane nearest Jake’s side of the street and charged down on the intersection, its killer grille snarling.

One.

Jake’s breath stopped in his throat.

None.

“Uh!” Jake cried as the hands struck him firmly in the back, pushing him, pushing him into the street, pushing him out of his life—

Except there
were
no hands.

He reeled forward nevertheless, hands flailing at the air, his mouth a dark O of dismay. The Chicano guy with the boombox reached out, grabbed Jake’s arm, and hauled him backward. “Look out, little hero,” he said. “That traffic turn you into bratwurst.”

The Cadillac floated by. Jake caught a glimpse of the fat man in the blue hat peering out through the windshield, and then it was gone.

That was when it happened; that was when he split down the middle and became two boys. One lay dying in the street. The other stood here on the corner, watching in dumb, stricken amazement as DONT WALK turned to WALK again and people began to cross around him just as if nothing had happened . . . as, indeed, nothing had.

I’m alive!
half of his mind rejoiced, screaming with relief.

Dead!
the other half screamed back.
Dead in the street! They’re all gathering around me, and the man in black who pushed me is saying “I am a priest. Let me through.”

Waves of faintness rushed through him and turned his thoughts to billowing parachute silk. He saw the fat lady approaching, and as she passed, Jake looked into her bag. He saw the bright blue eyes of a doll peeping above the edge of a red towel, just as he had known he would. Then she was gone. The pretzel vendor was not yelling
Oh my God, he’s kilt;
he was continuing to set up for the day’s business while he whistled the Donna Summer tune that had been playing on the Chicano guy’s radio.