Stephen King - The Dark Tower

When he begins again, it’s to tell them he was born in Milford, Connecticut, in the year 1898. We have all heard similar introductory lines, enough to know that they signal — for better or worse — the onset of autobiography. Yet as they listen to that voice, the gunslingers are visited by another familiarity; this is true even of Oy. At first they’re not able to put their finger on it, but in time it comes to them. The story of Ted Brautigan, a Wandering Accountant instead of a Wandering Priest, is in many ways similar to that of Pere Donald Callahan. They could almost be twins. And the sixth listener — the one beyond the blanket-blocked cave entrance in the windy dark — hears with growing sympathy and understanding. Why not? Booze isn’t a major player in Brautigan’s story, as it was in the Pere’s, but it’s still a story of addiction and isolation, the story of an outsider.

At the age of eighteen, Theodore Brautigan is accepted into Harvard, where his Uncle Tim went, and Uncle Tim — childless himself — is more than willing to pay for Ted’s higher education. And so far as Timothy Atwood knows, what happens is perfectly straightforward: offer made, offer accepted, nephew shines in all the right areas, nephew graduates and prepares to enter uncle’s furniture business after six months spent touring post — World War I Europe.

What Uncle Tim doesn’t know is that before going to Harvard, Ted tries to enlist in what will soon be known as the American Expeditionary Force. “Son,” the doctor tells him, “you’ve got one hell of a loud heart murmur, and your hearing is substandard. Now are you going to tell me that you came here not knowing those things would get you a red stamp? Because, pardon me if I’m out of line, here, you look too smart for that.”

And then Ted Brautigan does something he’s never done before, has sworn he never will do. He asks the Army doc to pick a number, not just between one and ten but between one and a thousand. To humor him (it’s rainy in Hartford, and that means things are slow in the enlistment office), the doctor thinks of the number 748. Ted gives it back to him. Plus 419…89…and 997. When Ted invites him to think of a famous person, living or dead, and when Ted tells him Andrew Johnson, not Jackson but Johnson, the doc is finally amazed. He calls over another doc, a friend, and Ted goes through the same rigmarole again…with one exception. He asks the second doctor to pick a number between one and a million, then tells the doctor he was thinking of eighty-seven thousand, four hundred and sixteen. The second doctor looks momentarily surprised — stunned, in fact — then covers with a big shitlicking smile. “Sorry, son,” he says, “you were only off by a hundred and thirty thousand or so.” Ted looks at him, not smiling, not responding to the shitlicking smile in any way at all of which he is aware, but he’s eighteen, and still young enough to be flabbergasted by such utter and seemingly pointless mendacity. Meanwhile, Doc Number Two’s shitlicking smile has begun to fade on its own. Doc Number Two turns to Doc Number One and says “Look at his eyes, Sam — look at what’s happening to his eyes.”

The first doctor tries to shine an ophthalmoscope in Ted’s eyes and Ted brushes it impatiently aside. He has access to mirrors and has seen the way his pupils sometimes expand and contract, is aware when it’s happening even when there’s no mirror handy by a kind of shuttering, stuttering effect in his vision, and it doesn’t interest him, especially not now. What interests him now is that Doc Number Two is fucking with him and he doesn’t know why. “Write the number down this time,” he invites. “Write it down so you can’t cheat.”

Doc Number Two blusters. Ted reiterates his challenge. Doc Sam produces a piece of paper and a pen and the second doctor takes it. He is actually about to write a number when he reconsiders and tosses the pen on Sam’s desk and says: “This is some kind of cheap streetcorner trick, Sam. If you can’t see that, you’re blind.” And stalks away.

Ted invites Dr. Sam to think of a relative, any relative, and a moment later tells the doctor he’s thinking of his brother Guy, who died of appendicitis when Guy was fourteen; ever since, their mother has called Guy Sam’s guardian angel. This time Dr. Sam looks as though he’s been slapped. At last he’s afraid. Whether it’s the odd in-and-out movement of Ted’s pupils, or the matter-of-fact demonstration of telepathy with no dramatic forehead-rubbing, no “I’m getting a picture…wait…,” Dr. Sam is finally afraid. He stamps REJECTEDon Ted’s enlistment application with the big red stamp and tries to get rid of him — next case, who wants to go to France and sniff the mustard gas? — but Ted takes his arm in a grip which is gentle but not in the least tentative.

“Listen to me,” says Ted Stevens Brautigan. “I am a genuine telepath. I’ve suspected it since I was six or seven years old — old enough to know the word — and I’ve known it for sure since I was sixteen. I could be of great help in Army Intelligence, and my substandard hearing and heart murmur wouldn’t matter in such a post. As for the thing with my eyes?” He reaches into his breast pocket, produces a pair of sunglasses, and slips them on. “Ta-da!”

He gives Dr. Sam a tentative smile. It does no good. There is a Sergeant-at-Arms standing at the door of the temporary recruitment office in East Hartford High’s physical education department, and the medic summons him. “This fellow is 4-F and I’m tired of arguing with him. Perhaps you’d be good enough to escort him off the premises.”

Now it is Ted’s arm which is gripped, and none too gently.

“Wait a minute!” Ted says. “There’s something else! Something even more valuable! I don’t know if there’s a word for it, but…”

Before he can continue, the Sergeant-at-Arms drags him out and hustles him rapidly down the hall, past several gawking boys and girls almost exactly his own age. There is a word, and he’ll learn it years later, in Blue Heaven. The word is facilitator, and as far as Paul “Pimli” Prentiss is concerned, it makes Ted Stevens Brautigan just about the most valuable hume in the universe.

Not on that day in 1916, though. On that day in 1916, he is dragged briskly down the hallway and deposited on the granite step outside the main doors and told by a man with a foot-thick accent that “Y’all just want t’stay outta heah, boa.” After some consideration, Ted decides the Sergeant-at-Arms isn’t calling him a snake; boa in this context is most likely Dixie for boy.

For a little while Ted just stands where he has been left. He’s thinking What does it take to convince you? and How blind can you be? He can’t believe what just happened to him.

But he has to believe it, because here he is, on the outside. And at the end of a six-mile walk around Hartford he thinks he understands something else as well. They will never believe. None of them. Not ever. They’ll refuse to see that a fellow who could read the collective mind of the German High Command might be mildly useful. A fellow who could tell the Allied High Command where the next big German push was going to come. A fellow who could do a thing like that a few times — maybe even just once or twice! — might be able to end the war by Christmas. But he won’t have the chance because they won’t give it to him. And why? It has something to do with the second doctor changing his number when Ted landed on it, and then refusing to write another one down. Because somewhere down deep they want to fight, and a guy like him would spoil everything.