Stephen King - Duma Key

“You could hear the refrigerator,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said without surprise. “I could hear the fridge — both the hum of the motor and the clunk of the ice-maker. I reached out and I picked an apple.”

“Did you cheat?”

Wireman smiled. “A fair question. If you mean did I peek, the answer is no. If you mean did I memorize the geography of the fruit in the bowl…” He shrugged. “ Quién sabe? In any case, I picked an apple: in Adam’s fall, sinned we all. I didn’t have to bite it or smell it; I could tell what it was by the skin. So without opening my eyes — or giving myself any chance to think — I picked up the gun and put it to my temple.” He mimed this with the hand I no longer had, cocking the thumb and placing the first finger against the small circular scar that his long, graying hair usually hid. “My last thought was, ‘At least I won’t have to listen to that refrigerator anymore, or eat one more gourmet shepherd’s pie out of it.’ I don’t remember any bang. Nevertheless, the whole world went white, and that was the end of Wireman’s other life. Now… would you like the hallucinogenic shit?”

“Yes, please.”

“You want to see if it matches yours, don’t you?”

“Yes.” And a question occurred to me. One of some import, maybe. “Wireman, did you have any of these telepathic bursts… weird receptions… whatever you want to call them… before you came to Duma Key?” I was thinking of Monica Goldstein’s dog, Gandalf, and how I seemed to have choked him with an arm I no longer had.

“Yes, two or three,” he said. “I may tell you about them in time, Edgar, but I don’t want to stick Jack with Miss Eastlake for too long. All other considerations aside, she’s apt to be worried about me. She’s a dear thing.”

I could have said that Jack — also sort of a dear thing — would probably be worried, too, but instead I only told him to go on.

“You often have a redness about you, muchacho, ” Wireman said. “I don’t think it’s an aura, exactly, and it’s not exactly a thought… except when it is. I’ve gotten it from you as a word as well as a color on three or four occasions. And yes, once when I was off Duma Key. When we were at the Scoto.”

“When I was stuck for a word.”

“Were you? I don’t remember.”

“Neither do I, but I’m sure that was it. Red ’s a mnemonic for me. A trigger. From a Reba McEntyre song, of all things. I found it almost by accident. And there’s something else, I guess. When I forget stuff I tend to get… you know…”

“A little pissed off?”

I thought of how I’d taken Pam by the throat. How I’d tried to choke her.

“Yeah,” I said. “You could say that.”

“Ah.”

“Anyway, I guess that red must have gotten out and stained my… my mental suit of clothes? Is that what it’s like?”

“Close. And every time I sense that around you, in you, I think of waking up after putting a bullet in my temple and seeing the whole world was dark red. I thought I was in hell, that that was what hell was going to be like, an eternity of deepest scarlet.” He paused. “Then I realized it was just the apple. It was lying right in front of me, maybe an inch from my eyes. It was on the floor and I was on the floor.”

“I’ll be damned,” I said.

“Yes, that’s what I thought, but it wasn’t damnation, only an apple. ‘In Adam’s fall, sinned we all.’ I said that out loud. Then I said, ‘Fruit-bowl.’ I remember everything that happened and everything that was said over the next ninety-six hours with perfect clarity. Every detail.” He laughed. “Of course I know some of the things I remember aren’t true, but I remember them with exquisite precision, all the same. No cross-examination could trip me up to this very day, not even concerning the pus-covered roaches I saw crawling out of old Jack Fineham’s eyes, mouth, and nostrils.

“I had a hell of a headache, but once I got over the shock of the apple close-up, I felt pretty much okay otherwise. It was four in the morning. Six hours had gone by. I was lying in a puddle of congealed blood. It was caked on my right cheek like jelly. I remember sitting up and saying, ‘I’m a dandy in aspic’ and trying to remember if aspic was some kind of jelly. I said, ‘No jelly in the fruit-bowl.’ And saying that seemed so rational it was like passing a sanity test. I began to doubt that I’d shot myself. It seemed more likely that I’d gone to sleep at the dining room table only thinking of shooting myself, fallen off my chair, and hit my head. That’s where the blood came from. In fact, it seemed almost certain, given the fact that I was moving around and talking. I told myself to say something else. To say my mother’s name. Instead I said, ‘Cash crop in the groun, lan’lord soon be roun.’”

I nodded, excited. I had had similar experiences, not once but countless times, after coming out of my coma. Sit in the buddy, sit in the chum .

“Were you angry?”

“No, serene! Relieved! I could accept a little disorientation from a knock on the head. Only then I saw the gun on the floor. I picked it up and smelled the muzzle. There’s no mistaking the smell of a recently fired gun. It’s acrid, a smell with claws. Still, I held onto the falling-asleep-and-hitting-my-head idea until I got into the bathroom and saw the hole in my temple. Little round hole with a corona of singe-marks around it.” He laughed again, as people do when remembering some crazy boner they’ve pulled — forgetting to open the garage door, for instance, and then backing into it.

“That’s when I heard the last number clicking into place, Edgar — the Powerball Number! And I knew I was going to Disney World, after all.”

“Or a reasonable facsimile,” I said. “Christ, Wireman.”

“I tried to wash the powder-burns off, but bearing down with a facecloth hurt too much. It was like biting down on a bad tooth.”

Suddenly I understood why they’d X-rayed him instead of sticking him in the MRI machine. The bullet was still in his head.

“Wireman, can I ask you something?”

“All right.”

“Are a person’s optic nerves… I don’t know… bass-ackwards?”

“Indeed they are.”

“So that’s why your left eye is fucked up. It’s like…” For a moment the word wouldn’t come, and I clenched my fists. Then it was there. “It’s like contracoup.”

“I guess so, yeah. I shot myself in the right side of my stupid head, but it’s my left eye that’s fucked up. I put a Band-Aid over the hole. And took some aspirin.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Wireman smiled and nodded.

“Then I went to bed and tried to sleep. I might as well have tried sleeping in the middle of a brass band. I didn’t sleep for four days. I felt I would never sleep again. My mind was going four thousand miles an hour. This made cocaine seem like Xanax. I couldn’t even lie still for long. I managed twenty minutes, then leaped up and put on a mariachi record. It was five-thirty in the morning. I spent thirty minutes on the exercise bike — first time I’d been on it since Julia and Ez died — showered, and went in to work.

“For the next three days I was a bird, I was a plane, I was Super Lawyer. My colleagues progressed from being worried about me to being scared for me to being scared for themselves — the non sequiturs were getting worse, and so was my tendency to lapse into both pidgin Spanish and a kind of Pepé Le Pew French — but there can be no doubt that I moved a mountain of paper during those days, and very little of it ever came back on the firm. I checked. The partners in the corner offices and the lawyers in the trenches were united in the belief that I was having a nervous breakdown, and in a sense they were right. It was an organic nervous breakdown. Several people tried to get me to go home, with no success. Dion Knightly, one of my good friends there, all but begged me to let him take me to see a doctor. Know what I told him?”