Stephen King - Duma Key

I looked over my left shoulder. Wireman wasn’t masturbating. Wireman wasn’t sleeping and having a vivid dream. Wireman was having a seizure. It was quiet, probably petit mal, but it was a seizure, all right; I’d employed an epileptic draftsman during the first ten years of The Freemantle Company’s existence, and I knew a seizure when I saw one. Wireman’s torso lifted and dropped four or five inches as his buttocks clenched and released. His hands jittered on his stomach. His lips were smacking as though he tasted something particularly good. And his eyes looked as they had outside the parking garage. By starlight that one-up, one-down look was weird beyond my ability to describe. Spittle ran from the left corner of his mouth; a tear from his welling left eye trickled into his shaggy sideburn.

It went on for perhaps twenty seconds, then ceased. He blinked, and his eyes went back where they belonged. He was completely quiet for a minute. Maybe two. He saw me looking at him and said, “I’d kill for another drink or a peanut butter cup, and I suppose a drink is out of the question, huh?”

“I guess it is if you want to make sure you hear her ring in the night,” I said, hoping I sounded casual.

“Bridge to Duma Key dead ahead,” Jack told us. “Almost home, guys.”

Wireman sat up and stretched. “It’s been a hell of a day, but I won’t be sorry to see my bed tonight, boys. I guess I’m getting old, huh?”

Although my leg was stiff, I got out of the van and stood next to him while he opened the door of the little iron box beside the gate to reveal a state-of-the-art security keypad.

“Thanks for coming with me, Wireman.”

“Sure,” he said. “But if you thank me again, muchacho, I’m going to have to punch you in the mouth. Sorry, but that’s just the way it’s gotta be.”

“Good to know,” I said. “Thanks for sharing.”

He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. “I like you, Edgar. You got style, you got class, you got the lips to kiss my ass.”

“Beautiful. I may cry. Listen, Wireman…”

I could have told him about what had just happened to him. I came close. In the end, I decided not to. I didn’t know if it was the right decision or the wrong one, but I did know he might have a long night with Elizabeth Eastlake ahead of him. Also, that headache was still sitting in the back of my skull. I settled for asking him again if he wouldn’t consider letting me turn my promised doctor’s appointment into a double date.

“I will consider it,” he said. “And I’ll let you know.”

“Well don’t wait too long, because—”

He raised a hand, stilling me, and for once his face was unsmiling. “Enough, Edgar. Enough for one night, okay?”

“Okay,” I said. I watched him go in, then went back to the van.

Jack had the volume up. It was “Renegade.” He went to turn it down and I said, “No, that’s okay. Crank it.”

“Really?” He turned around and headed back up the road. “Great band. You ever heard em before?”

“Jack,” I said, “that’s Styx. Dennis DeYoung? Tommy Shaw? Where have you been all your life? In a cave?”

Jack smiled guiltily. “I’m into country and even more into old standards,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I’m a Rat Pack kind of guy.”

The idea of Jack Cantori hanging with Dino and Frank made me wonder — and not for the first time that day — if any of this was really happening. I also wondered how I could remember that Dennis DeYoung and Tommy Shaw had been in Styx — that Shaw had in fact written the song currently blasting out of the van’s speakers — and sometimes not be able to remember my own ex-wife’s name.

Both lights on the answering machine next to the living room phone were blinking: the one indicating that I had messages and the one indicating that the tape for recording messages was full. But the number in the MESSAGES WAITING window was only 1. I considered this with foreboding while the weight with my headache inside it slid a little closer to the front of my skull. The only two people I could think of who might call and leave a message so long it would use up the whole tape were Pam and Ilse, and in neither case would hitting PLAY MESSAGES be apt to bring me good news. It doesn’t take five minutes of recording-time to say Everything’s fine, call when you get a chance.

Leave it until tomorrow, I thought, and a craven voice I hadn’t even known was in my mental repertoire (maybe it was new) was willing to go further. It suggested I simply delete the message without listening to it at all.

“That’s right, sure,” I said. “And when whichever one it is calls back, I can just tell her the dog ate my answering machine.”

I pushed PLAY. And as so often happens when we are sure we know what to expect, I drew a wild card. It wasn’t Pam and it wasn’t Ilse. The wheezy, slightly emphysematic voice coming from the answering machine belonged to Elizabeth Eastlake.

“Hello, Edgar,” she said. “One hopes you had a fruitful afternoon and are enjoying your evening out with Wireman as much as I am my evening in with Miss… well, I forget her name, but she’s very pleasant. And one hopes you’ll notice that I have remembered your name. I’m enjoying one of my clear patches. I love and treasure them, but they make me sad, as well. It’s like being in a glider and rising on a gust of wind above a low-lying groundmist. For a little while one can see everything so clearly… and at the same time one knows the wind will die and one’s glider will sink back into the mist again. Do you see?”

I saw, all right. Things were better for me now, but that was the world I’d woken up to, one where words clanged senselessly and memories were scattered like lawn furniture after a windstorm. It was a world where I had tried to communicate by hitting people and the only two emotions I really seemed capable of were fear and fury. One progresses beyond that state (as Elizabeth might say), but afterward one never quite loses the conviction that reality is gossamer. Behind its webwork? Chaos. Madness. The real truth, maybe, and the real truth is red.

“But enough of me, Edgar. I called to ask a question. Are you one who creates art for money, or do you believe in art for art’s sake? I’m sure I asked when I met you — I’m almost positive — but I can’t remember your answer. I believe it must be art for art’s sake, or Duma should not have called you. But if you stay here for long…”

Clear anxiety crept into her voice.

“Edgar, one is sure you’ll make a very nice neighbor, I have no doubts on that score, but you must take precautions. I think you have a daughter, and I believe she visited you. Didn’t she? I seem to remember her waving to me. A pretty thing with blond hair? I may be confusing her with my sister Hannah — I tend to do that, I know I do — but in this case, I think I’m right. If you mean to stay, Edgar, you mustn’t invite your daughter back. Under no circumstances. Duma Key isn’t a safe place for daughters.”

I stood looking down at the recorder. Not safe. Before she had said not lucky, or at least that was my recollection. Did those two things come to the same or not?

“And your art. There is the matter of your art.” She sounded apologetic and a little breathless. “One does not like to tell an artist what to do; really, one cannot tell an artist what to do, and yet… oh dear…” She broke out in the loose, rattlebox cough of the lifelong smoker. “One does not like to speak of these things directly… or even know how to speak of them directly… but might I give you a word of advice, Edgar? As one who only appreciates, to one who creates? Might I be allowed that?”