Stephen King - The Tommyknockers

Hands grabbed him from behind.

He whirled, expecting that Arberg was over his impropriety attack and was back to have another go at giving him the bum's rush.

It wasn't Arberg. It was Ron. He still seemed calm-but there was something in his face, something dreadful. Was it compassion? Yes, Gardener saw, that was what it was.

Suddenly he didn't want the umbrella anymore. He threw it aside. The dining room was perfectly silent for a moment, except for Gardener's rapid breathing and Ted's harsh, sobbing gasps. The overturned buffet table lay in a puddle of linen, broken crockery, shattered crystal. The odor of spilled rum punch rose in an eye-watering fog.

“Patricia McCardle is on the telephone, talking to the cops,” Ron said, “and when it's Back Bay, they show up in a hurry. You want to bug out of here, Jim.”

Gardener looked around and saw knots of partygoers standing against the walls and in the doorways, looking at him with those wide, frightened eyes. By tomorrow they won't remember if it was about nuclear power or William Carlos Williams or how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, he thought. Half of them will tell the other half I made a pass at his wife. Just that good old fun-loving wifeshooting Jim Gardener, going crazy and beating the shit out of a guy with an umbrella. Also dumping about a pint of Chivas between the teeny tits of the woman who gave him a job when he had none. Nuclear power, what did that have to do with it?

“What a Christless mess,” he said hoarsely to Ron.

“Shit, they'll talk about it for years,” Ron said. “The best reading they ever heard followed by the best party blow-off they ever saw. Now get going. Get your ass up to Maine. I'll call.”

Ted the Power Man, eyes wide and teary, made a lunge for him. Two young men -one was the bartender-held him back.

“Goodbye,” Gardener said to the huddled knots of people. “Thank you for a lovely time.”

He went to the door, then turned back.

“And if you forget everything else, remember about the leukemia and the children. Remember-”

But what they'd remember was him whacking Ted with an umbrella. He saw it in their faces.

Gardener nodded and went down the hallway past Arberg, who was still standing with his hands clutched to his chest, lips flexing and closing. Gardener did not look back. He kicked aside the litter of umbrellas, opened the door, and stepped out into the night. He wanted a drink more than he ever had in his life, and he supposed he must have found one, because that was when he fell into the belly of the big fish and the blackout swallowed him.

Not long after dawn on the morning of July 4th, 1988, Gardener awoke-came to, anyway-near the end of the stone breakwater which extends out into the Atlantic not far from the Arcadia Funworld Amusement Park in Arcadia Beach, New Hampshire. Not that Gardener knew where he was then. He barely knew anything save for his own name, the fact that he was in what seemed to be total physical agony, and the somewhat less important fact that he had apparently almost drowned in the night.

He was lying on his side, his feet trailing in the water. He supposed that he had been high and dry when he had waltzed out here the night before but he had apparently rolled over in his sleep, slid a little way down the breakwater's sloped north side… and now the tide was coming in. If he had been half an hour later in waking up, he thought he very well might have simply floated off the rocks of the breakwater as a grounded ship may float off a sandbar.

One of his loafers was still on, but it was shrivelled and useless. Gardener kicked it off and watched apathetically as it floated down into greeny darkness. Something for the lobsters to shit in, he thought, and sat up.

The bolt of pain which went through his head was so immense he thought for a moment that he was having a stroke; that he had survived his night on the breakwater only to die of an embolism the morning after.

The pain receded a little and the world came back from the gray mist into which it had receded. He was able to appreciate just how miserable he was. It was what Bobbi Anderson would undoubtedly have called “the whole body trip,” as in Savor the whole body trip, Jim. What can be better than the way you feel after a night in the eye of the cyclone?

A night? One night?

No way, baby. This had been a genuine jag. The real fucking thing.

His stomach felt sour and bloated. His throat and sinuses were caked with elderly puke. He looked to his left and sure enough, there it was, a little above him in what must have been his original position, the drinker's signature-a great big splash of drying vomit.

Christ, his body ached all over.

Gardener wiped a shaking, dirty right hand under his nose and saw flakes of dried blood. He'd had a nosebleed. He'd had them off and on ever since the skiing accident at Sunday River when he was seventeen. He could almost count on the nosebleeds when he had been drinking.

At the end of all his previous binges-and this was the first time he had gone whole hog in almost three years-Gardener had felt what he was feeling now: a sickness that went deeper than the thudding head, the stomach curled up like a living sponge filled with acid, the aches, the quivering muscles. That deep sickness couldn't even be called depression-it was a feeling of utter doom.

This was the worst ever, even worse than the depression that had followed the Famous Thanksgiving Jag of 1980, the one that had ended his teaching career and his marriage. It had also come close to ending Nora's life. He had come to that time in Penobscot County Jail. A deputy was sitting outside his cell, reading a copy of Crazy magazine and picking his nose. Gardener learned later that all police departments are aware that jag-drinkers frequently come off their hinges deeply depressed. So if there happens to be a man available, he keeps an eye on you, just to make sure you don't highside it… at least not until you post bond and get off the county property.

“Where am IT Gardener had asked.

“Where do you think you are?” the deputy asked. He looked at the large green booger he had just scraped out of his nose and then wiped it slowly and with apparent enjoyment onto the sole of his shoe, squashing it down, smearing it along the dark dirt there. Gardener had been unable to take his eyes from this operation; a year later he would write a poem about it.

“What did I do?”

Save for occasional flashes, the previous two days had been totally black. The flashes were unrelated, like cloud-rifts which let through uncertain flickers of sunlight as a storm approaches. Bringing Nora a cup of tea and then starting to harangue her about the nukes. Oh yes, the nukes. Ave Nukea Eterna. When he died, his final word on the whole fucking mess wouldn't be Rosebud but Nukes. He could remember failing down in the driveway beside his house. Getting a pizza and being so drunk great big runny clots of cheese went down inside his shirt, burning his chest. He could remember calling Bobbi. Calling and babbling something to her, something awful, and had Nora been screaming? Screaming?

“What did I do?” he asked, more urgently.

The deputy looked at him for a moment with a perfect clear-eyed contempt. “Shot your wife. That's what you did. Good fucking deal, uh?”

The deputy had gone back to his Crazy magazine.

That had been bad; this was worse. That depthless feeling of self-contempt, the grisly certainty that you had done bad things you couldn't remember. Not a few too many glasses of champagne at the New Year's Eve party where you put a lampshade on your head and boogied around the room with it slipping down over your eyes, everybody in attendance (with the exception of your wife) thinking it was just the funniest thing they'd ever seen in their lives… Not knowing you did fun things like punching department heads. Or shooting your wife.