Stephen King: 11/22/63: A Novel

“Come in,” he said. “I’ve got a lot to talk about, and I think you’re the only one who might listen. Will you listen?”

“Al,” I said. My voice was so low and strengthless I could hardly hear it myself. “What’s happened to you?”

“Will you listen?”

“Of course.”

“You’ll have questions, and I’ll answer as many as I can, but try to keep them to a minimum. I don’t have much voice left. Hell, I don’t have much strength left. Come on in here.”

I came in. The diner was dark and cool and empty. The counter was polished and crumbless; the chrome on the stools gleamed; the coffee urn was polished to a high gloss; the sign reading IF YOU DON’T LIKE OUR TOWN, LOOK FOR A TIMETABLE was in its accustomed place by the Sweda register. The only thing missing was the customers.

Well, and the cook-proprietor, of course. Al Templeton had been replaced by an elderly, ailing ghost. When he turned the door’s thumb-latch, locking us in, the sound was very loud.

“Lung cancer,” he said matter-of-factly, after leading us to a booth at the far end of the diner. He tapped the pocket of his shirt, and I saw it was empty. The ever-present pack of Camel straights was gone. “No big surprise. I started when I was eleven, and smoked right up to the day I got the diagnosis. Over fifty damn years. Three packs a day until the price went way up in ’07. Then I made a sacrifice and cut back to two a day.” He laughed wheezily.

I thought of telling him that his math had to be wrong, because I knew his actual age. When I’d come in one day in the late winter and asked him why he was working the grill with a kid’s birthday hat on, he’d said Because today I’m fifty-seven, buddy. Which makes me an official Heinz. But he’d asked me not to ask questions unless I absolutely had to, and I assumed the request included not butting in to make corrections.

“If I were you-and I wish I was, although I’d never wish being me on you, not in my current situation-I’d be thinking, ‘Something’s screwy here, nobody gets advanced lung cancer overnight.’ Is that about right?”

I nodded. That was exactly right.

“The answer is simple enough. It wasn’t overnight. I started coughing my brains out about seven months ago, back in May.”

This was news to me; if he’d been doing any coughing, it hadn’t been while I was around. Also, he was doing that bad-math thing again. “Al, hello? It’s June. Seven months ago it was December.”

He waved a hand at me-the fingers thin, his Marine Corps ring hanging on a digit that used to clasp it cozily-as if to say Pass that by for now, just pass it.

“At first I thought I just had a bad cold. But there was no fever, and instead of going away, the cough got worse. Then I started losing weight. Well, I ain’t stupid, buddy, and I always knew the big C might be in the cards for me… although my father and mother smoked like goddam chimneys and lived into their eighties. I guess we always find excuses to keep on with our bad habits, don’t we?”

He started coughing again, and pulled out the handkerchief. When the hacking subsided, he said: “I can’t get off on a sidetrack, but I’ve been doing it my whole life and it’s hard to stop. Harder than stopping with the cigarettes, actually. Next time I start wandering off-course, just kind of saw a finger across your throat, would you?”

“Okay,” I said, agreeably enough. It had occurred to me by then that I was dreaming all of this. If so, it was an extremely vivid dream, right down to the shadows thrown by the revolving ceiling fan, marching across the place mats reading OUR MOST VALUABLE ASSET IS YOU !

“Long story short, I went to a doctor and got an X-ray, and there they were, big as billy-be-damned. Two tumors. Advanced necrosis. Inoperable.”

An X-ray, I thought- did they still use those to diagnose cancer?

“I hung in for awhile, but in the end I had to come back.”

“From where? Lewiston? Central Maine General?”

“From my vacation.” His eyes looked fixedly at me from the dark hollows into which they were disappearing. “Except it was no vacation.”

“Al, none of this makes any sense to me. Yesterday you were here and you were fine. ”

“Take a good close look at my face. Start with my hair and work your way down. Try to ignore what the cancer’s doing to me-it plays hell with a person’s looks, no doubt about that-and then tell me I’m the same man you saw yesterday.”

“Well, you obviously washed the dye out-”

“Never used any. I won’t bother directing your attention to the teeth I lost while I was… away. I know you saw those. You think an X-ray machine did that? Or strontium-90 in the milk? I don’t even drink milk, except for a splash in my last cup of coffee of the day.”

“Strontium what?”

“Never mind. Get in touch with your, you know, feminine side. Look at me the way women look at other women when they’re judging age.”

I tried to do what he said, and while what I observed would never have stood up in court, it convinced me. There were webworks of lines spraying out from the corners of his eyes, and the lids had the tiny, delicately ruffled wrinkles you see on people who no longer have to flash their Senior Discount Cards when they step up to the multiplex box office. Skin-grooves that hadn’t been there yesterday evening now made sine-waves across Al’s brow. Two more lines-much deeper ones-bracketed his mouth. His chin was sharper, and the skin on his neck had grown loose. The sharp chin and wattled throat could have been caused by Al’s catastrophic weight loss, but those lines… and if he wasn’t lying about his hair…

He was smiling a little. It was a grim smile, but not without actual humor. Which somehow made it worse. “Remember my birthday last March? ‘Don’t worry, Al,’ you said, ‘if that stupid party hat catches on fire while you’re hanging over the grill, I’ll grab the fire extinguisher and put you out.’ Remember that?”

I did. “You said you were an official Heinz.”

“So I did. And now I’m sixty-two. I know the cancer makes me look even older, but these… and these…” He touched his forehead, then the corner of one eye. “These are authentic age-tattoos. Badges of honor, in a way.”

“Al… can I have a glass of water?”

“Of course. Shock, isn’t it?” He looked at me sympathetically. “You’re thinking, ‘Either I’m crazy, he’s crazy, or we both are.’ I know. I’ve been there.”

He levered himself out of the booth with an effort, his right hand going up beneath his left armpit, as if he were trying to hold himself together, somehow. Then he led me around the counter. As he did so, I put my finger on another element of this unreal encounter: except for the occasions when I shared a pew with him at St. Cyril’s (these were rare; although I was raised in the faith, I’m not much of a Catlick) or happened to meet him on the street, I’d never seen Al out of his cook’s apron.

He took a sparkling glass down and drew me a glass of water from a sparkling chrome-plated tap. I thanked him and turned to go back to the booth, but he tapped me on the shoulder. I wish he hadn’t done that. It was like being tapped by Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who stoppeth one of three.

“I want you to see something before we sit down again. It’ll be quicker that way. Only seeing isn’t the right word. I guess experiencing is a lot closer. Drink up, buddy.”

I drank half the water. It was cool and good, but I never took my eye off him. That craven part of me was expecting to be jumped, like the first unwitting victim in one of those maniac-on-the-loose movies that always seem to have numbers in their titles. But Al only stood there with one hand propped on the counter. The hand was wrinkled, the knuckles big. It didn’t look like the hand of a man in his fifties, even one with cancer, and-