Stephen King: The Dark Tower

What if he doesn’t recognize her?

What if when he turns he sees nothing but a homeless black lady in an electric cart whose battery will soon be as flat as a sat-on hat, a black lady with no money, no clothes, no address (not in this where and when, say thankee sai) and no legs? A homeless black lady with no connection to him? Or what if he does know her, somewhere far back in his mind, yet still denies her as completely as Peter denied Jesus, because remembering is just too hurtful?

Worse still, what if he turns to her and she sees the burned-out, fucked-up, empty-eyed stare of the longtime junkie? What if, what if, and here comes the snow that will soon turn the whole world white.

Stop thy grizzling and go to him, Roland tells her. You didn’t face Blaine and the taheen of Blue Heaven and the thing under Castle Discordia just to turn tail and run now, did you? Surely you’ve got a moit more guts than that.

But she isn’t sure she really does until she sees her hand rise to the throttle. Before she can twist it, however, the gunslinger’s voice speaks to her again, this time sounding wearily amused.

Perhaps there’s something you want to get rid of first, Susannah?

She looks down and sees Roland’s weapon stuck through her crossbelt, like a Mexican bandido ’s pistola, or a pirate’s cutlass. She pulls it free, amazed at how good it feels in her hand…how brutally right. Parting from this, she thinks, will be like parting from a lover. And she doesn’t have to, does she? The question is, what does she love more? The man or the gun? All other choices will flow from this one.

On impulse she rolls the cylinder and sees that the rounds inside look old, their casings dull.

These’ll never fire, she thinks…and, without knowing why, or precisely what it means: These are wets.

She sights up the barrel and is queerly saddened — but not surprised — to find that the barrel lets through no light. It’s plugged. Has been for decades, from the look of it. This gun will never fire again. There is no choice to be made, after all. This gun is over.

Susannah, still holding the revolver with the sandalwood grips in one hand, twists the throttle with the other. The little electric cart — the one she named Ho Fat III, although that is already fading in her mind — rolls soundlessly forward. It passes a green trash barrel with KEEP LITTER IN ITS PLACE!stenciled on the side. She tosses Roland’s revolver into this litter barrel. Doing it hurts her heart, but she never hesitates. It’s heavy, and sinks into the crumpled fast-food wrappers, advertising circulars, and discarded newspapers like a stone into water. She is still enough of a gunslinger to bitterly regret throwing away such a storied weapon (even if the final trip between worlds has spoiled it), but she’s already become enough of the woman who’s waiting for her up ahead not to pause or look back once the job is done.

Before she can reach the man with the paper cup, he turns. He is indeed wearing a sweatshirt that says I DRINK NOZZ-A-LA! but she barely registers that. It’s him: that’s what she registers. It’s Edward Cantor Dean. And then even that becomes secondary, because what she sees in his eyes is all she has feared. It’s total puzzlement. He doesn’t know her.

Then, tentatively, he smiles, and it is the smile she remembers, the one she always loved. Also he’s clean, she knows it at once. She sees it in his face. Mostly in his eyes. The carolers from Harlem sing, and he holds out the cup of hot chocolate.

“Thank God,” he says. “I’d just about decided I’d have to drink this myself. That the voices were wrong and I was going crazy after all. That…well…” He trails off, looking more than puzzled. He looks afraid. “Listen, you are here for me, aren’t you? Please tell me I’m not making an utter ass of myself. Because, lady, right now I feel as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs.”

“You’re not,” she says. “Making an ass of yourself, I mean.” She’s remembering Jake’s story about the voices he heard arguing in his mind, one yelling that he was dead, the other that he was alive. Both of them utterly convinced. She has at least some idea of how terrible that must be, because she knows a little about other voices. Strange voices.

“Thank God,” he says. “Your name is Susannah?”

“Yes,” she says. “My name is Susannah.”

Her throat is terribly dry, but the words come out, at least. She takes the cup from him and sips the hot chocolate through the cream. It is sweet and good, a taste of this world. The sound of the honking cabs, their drivers hurrying to make their day before the snow shuts them down, is equally good. Grinning, he reaches out and wipes a tiny dab of the cream from the tip of her nose. His touch is electric, and she sees that he feels it, too. It occurs to her that he is going to kiss her again for the first time, and sleep with her again for the first time, and fall in love with her again for the first time. He may know those things because voices have told him, but she knows them for a far better reason: because those things have already happened. Ka is a wheel, Roland said, and now she knows it’s true. Her memories of ( Mid-World ) the gunslinger’s where and when are growing hazy, but she thinks she will remember just enough to know it’s all happened before, and there is something incredibly sad about this.

But at the same time, it’s good.

It’s a damn miracle, is what it is.

“Are you cold?” he asks.

“No, I’m okay. Why?”

“You shivered.”

“It’s the sweetness of the cream.” Then, looking at him as she does it, she pokes her tongue out and licks a bit of the nutmeg-dusted foam.

“If you aren’t cold now, you will be,” he says. “WRKO says the temperature’s gonna drop twenty degrees tonight. So I bought you something.” From his back pocket he takes a knitted cap, the kind you can pull down over your ears. She looks at the front of it and sees the words there printed in red: MERRY CHRISTMAS.

“Bought it in Brendio’s, on Fifth Avenue,” he says.

Susannah has never heard of Brendio’s. Brentano’s, maybe — the bookstore — but not Brendio’s. But of course in the America where she grew up, she never heard of Nozz-A-La or Takuro Spirit automobiles, either. “Did your voices tell you to buy it?” Teasing him a little now.

He blushes. “Actually, you know, they sort of did. Try it on.”

It’s a perfect fit.

“Tell me something,” she says. “Who’s the President? You’re not going to tell me it’s Ronald Reagan, are you?”

He looks at her incredulously for a moment, and then smiles. “What? That old actor who used to host Death Valley Days on TV? You’re kidding, right?”

“Nope. I always thought you were the one who was kidding about Ronnie Reagan, Eddie.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“That’s okay, just tell me who the President is.”

“Gary Hart,” he says, as if speaking to a child. “From Colorado. He almost dropped out of the race in 1980—as I’m sure you know — over that Monkey Business business. Then he said ‘Fuck em if they can’t take a joke’ and hung on in there. Ended up winning in a landslide.”

His smile fades a little as he studies her.

“You’re not kidding me, are you?”

“Are you kidding me about the voices? The ones you hear in our head? The ones that wake you up at two in the morning?”

Eddie looks almost shocked. “How can you know that ?”

“It’s a long story. Maybe someday I’ll tell you.” If I can still remember, she thinks.