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Big Pink 1 страница






DUMA KEY

By

Stephen King

 

Copyright © 2008 by Stephen King

 

For Barbara Ann and Jimmy

 


Memory… is an internal rumor.

— GEORGE SANTAYANA

 

Life is more than love and pleasure,
I came here to dig for treasure.
If you want to play you gotta pay
You know it’s always been that way,
We all came to dig for treasure.

— SHARK PUPPY

 


 

 

How to Draw a Picture (I)

 

Start with a blank surface. It doesn’t have to be paper or canvas, but I feel it should be white. We call it white because we need a word, but its true name is nothing. Black is the absence of light, but white is the absence of memory, the color of can’t remember.

How do we remember to remember? That’s a question I’ve asked myself often since my time on Duma Key, often in the small hours of the morning, looking up into the absence of light, remembering absent friends. Sometimes in those little hours I think about the horizon. You have to establish the horizon. You have to mark the white. A simple enough act, you might say, but any act that re-makes the world is heroic. Or so I’ve come to believe.

Imagine a little girl, hardly more than a baby. She fell from a carriage almost ninety years ago, struck her head on a stone, and forgot everything. Not just her name; everything! And then one day she recalled just enough to pick up a pencil and make that first hesitant mark across the white. A horizon-line, sure. But also a slot for blackness to pour through.

Still, imagine that small hand lifting the pencil… hesitating… and then marking the white. Imagine the courage of that first effort to re-establish the world by picturing it. I will always love that little girl, in spite of all she has cost me. I must. I have no choice.

Pictures are magic, as you know.

 

My Other Life

I

 

My name is Edgar Freemantle. I used to be a big deal in the building and contracting business. This was in Minnesota, in my other life. I learned that my-other-life thing from Wireman. I want to tell you about Wireman, but first let’s get through the Minnesota part.

Gotta say it: I was a genuine American-boy success there. Worked my way up in the company where I started, and when I couldn’t work my way any higher there, I went out and started my own. The boss of the company I left laughed at me, said I’d be broke in a year. I think that’s what most bosses say when some hot young pocket-rocket goes off on his own.

For me, everything worked out. When Minneapolis–St. Paul boomed, The Freemantle Company boomed. When things tightened up, I never tried to play big. But I did play my hunches, and most played out well. By the time I was fifty, Pam and I were worth forty million dollars. And we were still tight. We had two girls, and at the end of our particular Golden Age, Ilse was at Brown and Melinda was teaching in France, as part of a foreign exchange program. At the time things went wrong, my wife and I were planning to go and visit her.

I had an accident at a job site. It was pretty simple; when a pickup truck, even a Dodge Ram with all the bells and whistles, argues with a twelve-story crane, the pickup is going to lose every time. The right side of my skull only cracked. The left side was slammed so hard against the Ram’s doorpost that it fractured in three places. Or maybe it was five. My memory is better than it used to be, but it’s still a long way from what it once was.

The doctors called what happened to my head a contracoup injury, and that kind of thing often does more damage than the original hit. My ribs were broken. My right hip was shattered. And although I retained seventy per cent of the sight in my right eye (more, on a good day), I lost my right arm.

I was supposed to lose my life, but didn’t. I was supposed to be mentally impaired thanks to the contracoup thing, and at first I was, but it passed. Sort of. By the time it did, my wife had gone, and not just sort of. We were married for twenty-five years, but you know what they say: shit happens. I guess it doesn’t matter; gone is gone. And over is over. Sometimes that’s a good thing.

When I say I was mentally impaired, I mean that at first I didn’t know who people were — even my wife — or what had happened. I couldn’t understand why I was in such pain. I can’t remember the quality of that pain now, four years later. I know that I suffered it, and that it was excruciating, but it’s all pretty academic. It wasn’t academic at the time. At the time it was like being in hell and not knowing why you were there.

At first you were afraid you’d die, then you were afraid you wouldn’t. That’s what Wireman says, and he would have known; he had his own season in hell.

Everything hurt all the time. I had a constant ringing headache; behind my forehead it was always midnight in the world’s biggest clock-shop. Because my right eye was fucked up, I was seeing the world through a film of blood, and I hardly knew what the world was. Nothing had a name. I remember one day when Pam was in the room — I was still in the hospital — and she was standing by my bed. I was extremely pissed that she should be standing when there was a thing to sit on right over in the cornhole.

“Bring the friend, ” I said. “Sit in the friend.”

“What do you mean, Edgar? ” she asked.

“The friend, the buddy! ” I shouted. “Bring over the fucking pal, you dump bitch! ” My head was killing me and she was starting to cry. I hated her for that. She had no business crying, because she wasn’t the one in the cage, looking at everything through a red blur. She wasn’t the monkey in the cage. And then it came to me. “Bring over the chum and sick down! ” It was the closest my rattled, fucked-up brain could come to chair.

I was angry all the time. There were two older nurses that I called Dry Fuck One and Dry Fuck Two, as if they were characters in a dirty Dr. Seuss story. There was a candystriper I called Pilch Lozenge — I have no idea why, but that nickname also had some sort of sexual connotation. To me, at least. When I grew stronger, I tried to hit people. Twice I tried to stab Pam, and on one of those two occasions I succeeded, although only with a plastic knife. She still needed a couple of stitches in her forearm. There were times when I had to be tied down.

Here is what I remember most clearly about that part of my other life: a hot afternoon toward the end of my month-long stay in an expensive convalescent home, the expensive air conditioning broken, tied down in my bed, a soap opera on the television, a thousand midnight bells ringing in my head, pain burning and stiffening my right side like a poker, my missing right arm itching, my missing right fingers twitching, no more Oxycontin due for awhile (I don’t know how long, because telling time is beyond me), and a nurse swims out of the red, a creature coming to look at the monkey in the cage, and the nurse says: “Are you ready to visit with your wife? ” And I say: “Only if she brought a gun to shoot me with.”

You don’t think that kind of pain will pass, but it does. Then they ship you home and replace it with the agony of physical rehabilitation. The red began to drain from my vision. A psychologist who specialized in hypnotherapy showed me some neat tricks for managing the phantom aches and itches in my missing arm. That was Kamen. It was Kamen who brought me Reba: one of the few things I took with me when I limped out of my other life and into the one I lived on Duma Key.

“This is not approved psychological therapy for anger management, ” Dr. Kamen said, although I suppose he might have been lying about that to make Reba more attractive. He told me I had to give her a hateful name, and so, although she looked like Lucy Ricardo, I named her after an aunt who used to pinch my fingers when I was small if I didn’t eat all my carrots. Then, less than two days after getting her, I forgot her name. I could only think of boy names, each one making me angrier: Randall, Russell, Rudolph, River-fucking-Phoenix.

I was home by then. Pam came in with my morning snack and must have seen the look on my face, because I could see her steeling herself for an outburst. But even though I’d forgotten the name of the fluffy red rage-doll the psychologist had given me, I remembered how I was supposed to use it in this situation.

“Pam, ” I said, “I need five minutes to get myself under control. I can do this.”

“Are you sure—”

“Yes, now just get that hamhock out of here and stick it up your face-powder. I can do this.”

I didn’t know if I really could, but that was what I was supposed to say. I couldn’t remember the fucking doll’s name, but I could remember I can do this. That’s clear about the end of my other life, how I kept saying I can do this even when I knew I couldn’t, even when I knew I was fucked, I was double-fucked, I was dead-ass-fucked in the pouring rain.

“I can do this, ” I said, and God knows how I looked because she backed out without a word, the tray still in her hands and the cup chattering against the plate.

When she was gone, I held the doll up in front of my face, staring into its stupid blue eyes as my thumbs disappeared into its stupid yielding body. “What’s your name, you bat-faced bitch? ” I shouted at it. It never once occurred to me that Pam was listening on the kitchen intercom, she and the day-nurse both. Tell you what, if the intercom had been broken they could have heard me through the door. I was in good voice that day.

I began to shake the doll back and forth. Its head flopped and its synthetic I Love Lucy hair flew. Its big blue cartoon eyes seemed to be saying Oouuu, you nasty man! like Betty Boop in one of those old cartoons you can still see sometimes on the cable.

“What’s your name, bitch? What’s your name, you cunt? What’s your name, you cheap rag-filled whore? Tell me your name! Tell me your name! Tell me your name or I’ll cut out your eyes and chop off your nose and rip out your —”

My mind cross-connected then, a thing that still happens now, four years later, down here in the town of Tamazunchale, state of San Luis Potosí, country of Mexico, site of Edgar Freemantle’s third life. For a moment I was in my pickup truck, clipboard rattling against my old steel lunchbucket in the passenger footwell (I doubt if I was the only working millionaire in America to carry a lunchbucket, but you probably could have counted us in the dozens), my PowerBook beside me on the seat. And from the radio a woman’s voice cried “ It was RED! ” with evangelical fervor. Only three words, but three was enough. It was the song about the poor woman who turns out her pretty daughter as a prostitute. It was “Fancy, ” by Reba McEntire.

“Reba, ” I whispered, and hugged the doll against me. “You’re Reba. Reba-Reba-Reba. I’ll never forget again.” I did — the following week — but I didn’t get angry that time. No. I held her against me like a little love, closed my eyes, and visualized the pickup truck that had been demolished in the accident. I visualized my steel lunchbucket rattling against the steel clip on my clipboard, and the woman’s voice came from the radio once more, exulting with that same evangelical fervor: “ It was RED!

Dr. Kamen called it a breakthrough. He was excited. My wife seemed a good deal less excited, and the kiss she put on my cheek was of the dutiful variety. I think it was two months later that she told me she wanted a divorce.

 

Ii

 

By then the pain had either lessened or my mind had made certain crucial adjustments when it came to dealing with it. The headaches still came, but less often and rarely with the same violence; it was no longer always midnight in the world’s biggest clock-shop between my ears. I was always more than ready for Vicodin at five and Oxycontin at eight — could hardly hobble on my bright red Canadian crutch until I’d swallowed those magic pills — but my rebuilt hip was starting to mend.

Kathi Green the Rehab Queen came to Casa Freemantle in Mendota Heights on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I was allowed an extra Vicodin before our sessions, and still my screams filled the house by the time we finished up. Our basement rec room had been converted into a therapy suite, complete with a handicap-accessible hot tub. After two months of torture, I was able to make it down there on my own in the evenings to double up on my leg exercises and begin some abdominal work. Kathi said doing that stuff a couple of hours before bed would release endorphins and I’d sleep better.

It was during one of these evening workouts — Edgar in search of those elusive endorphins — when my wife of a quarter-century came downstairs and told me she wanted a divorce.

I stopped what I was doing — crunches — and looked at her. I was sitting on a floor-pad. She was standing at the foot of the stairs, prudently across the room. I could have asked her if she was serious, but the light down there was very good — those racked fluorescents — and I didn’t have to. I don’t think it’s the sort of thing women joke about six months after their husbands have almost died in accidents, anyway. I could have asked her why, but I knew. I could see the small white scar on her arm where I had stabbed her with the plastic knife from my hospital supper tray, and that was really the least of it. I thought of telling her, not so long ago, to get that hamhock out of here and stick it up her face-powder. I considered asking her to at least think about it, but the anger came back. In those days what Dr. Kamen called inappropriate anger was my ugly friend. And hey, what I was feeling right then did not seem inappropriate at all.

My shirt was off. My right arm ended three and a half inches below the shoulder. I twitched it at her — a twitch was the best I could do with the muscle that was left. “This is me, ” I said, “giving you the finger. Get out of here if that’s how you feel. Get out, you quitting birch.”

The first tears had started rolling down her face, but she tried to smile. It was a pretty ghastly effort. “Bitch, Edgar, ” she said. “The word is bitch. ”

“The word is what I say it is, ” I said, and began to do crunches again. It’s harder than hell to do them with an arm gone; your body wants to pull and corkscrew to that side. “I wouldn’t have left you, that’s the point. I wouldn’t have left you. I would have gone on through the mud and the blood and the piss and the spilled beer.”

“It’s different, ” she said. She made no effort to wipe her face. “It’s different and you know it. I couldn’t break you in two if I got into a rage.”

“I’d have a hell of a job breaking you in two with only one amp, ” I said, doing crunches faster.

“You stuck me with a knife.” As if that were the point. It wasn’t, and we both knew it.

“A plastic rudder knife is what it was, I was half out of my mind, and it’ll be your last words on your fucking beth-dead, ‘Eddie staffed me with a plastic fife, goodbye cruel world.’”

“You choked me, ” she said in a voice I could barely hear.

I stopped doing crunches and gaped at her. The clock-shop started up in my head; bang-a-gong, get it on. “What are you saying, I choked you? I never choked you! ”

“I know you don’t remember, but you did. And you’re not the same.”

“Oh, quit it. Save the New Age bullshit for the… for the guy… your… ” I knew the word and I could see the man it stood for, but it wouldn’t come. “For that bald fuck you see in his office.”

“My therapist, ” she said, and of course that made me angrier: she had the word and I didn’t. Because her brain hadn’t been shaken like Jell-O.

“You want a divorce, you can have a divorce. Throw it all away, why not? Only go do the alligator somewhere else. Get out of here.”

She went up the stairs and closed the door without looking back. And it wasn’t until she was gone that I realized I’d meant to say crocodile tears. Go cry your crocodile tears somewhere else.

Oh, well. Close enough for rock and roll. That’s what Wireman says.

And I was the one who ended up getting out.

 

Iii

 

Except for Pam, I never had a partner in my other life. Edgar Freemantle’s Four Rules for Success (feel free to take notes) were: never borrow more than your IQ times a hundred, never borrow from a man who calls you by your first name on first acquaintance, never take a drink while the sun’s still up, and never take a partner you wouldn’t be willing to embrace naked on a waterbed.

I did have an accountant I trusted, however, and it was Tom Riley who helped me move the few things I needed from Mendota Heights to our smaller place on Lake Phalen. Tom, a sad two-time loser in the marriage game, worried at me all the way out. “You don’t give up the house in a situation like this, ” he said. “Not unless the judge kicks you out. It’s like giving up home field advantage in a playoff game.”

I didn’t care about home field advantage; I only wanted him to watch his driving. I winced every time a car coming the other way looked a little too close to the centerline. Sometimes I stiffened and pumped the invisible passenger brake. As for getting behind the wheel again myself, I thought never sounded about right. Of course, God loves surprises. That’s what Wireman says.

Kathi Green the Rehab Queen had only been divorced once, but she and Tom were on the same wavelength. I remember her sitting cross-legged in her leotard, holding my feet and looking at me with grim outrage.

“Here you are, just out of Death’s Motel and short an arm, and she wants to call it off. Because you poked her with a plastic hospital knife when you could barely remember your own name? Fuck me til I cry! Doesn’t she understand that mood-swings and short-term memory loss following accident trauma are common? ”

“She understands that she’s scared of me, ” I said.

“Yeah? Well, listen to your Mama, Sunny Jim: if you’ve got a good lawyer, you can make her pay for being such a wimp.” Some hair had escaped from her Rehab Gestapo ponytail and she blew it back from her forehead. “She ought to pay for it. Read my lips: None of this is your fault. ”

“She says I tried to choke her.”

“And if so, being choked by a one-armed invalid must have been a pants-wetting experience. Come on, Eddie, make her pay. I’m sure I’m stepping way out of my place, but I don’t care. She should not be doing what she’s doing.”

“I think there’s more to it than the choking thing and the butter-knife thing.”

“What? ”

“I can’t remember.”

“What does she say? ”

“She doesn’t.” But Pam and I had been together a long time, and even if love had run out into a delta of passive acceptance, I thought I still knew her well enough to know that yes — there had been something else, there was still something else, and that was what she wanted to get away from.

 

Iv

 

Not long after I relocated to the place on Lake Phalen, the girls came to see me — the young women. They brought a picnic hamper. We sat on the piney-smelling lakeporch, looked out at the lake, and nibbled sandwiches. It was past Labor Day by then, most of the floating toys put away for another year. There was also a bottle of wine in the hamper, but I only drank a little. On top of the pain medication, alcohol hit me hard; a single beer could turn me into a slurring drunk. The girls — the young women — finished the rest between them, and it loosened them up. Melinda, back from France for the second time since my argument with the crane and not happy about it, asked me if all adults in their fifties had these unpleasant regressive interludes, did she have that to look forward to. Ilse, the younger, began to cry, leaned against me, and asked why it couldn’t be like it was, why couldn’t we — meaning her mother and me — be like we were. Lin told her this wasn’t the time for Illy’s patented Baby Act, and Illy gave her the finger. I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Then we all laughed.

Lin’s temper and Ilse’s tears weren’t pleasant, but they were honest, and as familiar to me as the mole on Ilse’s chin or the faint vertical frown-line, which in time would deepen into a groove, between Lin’s eyes.

Linnie wanted to know what I was going to do, and I told her I didn’t know. I’d come a long distance toward deciding to end my own life, but I knew that if I did it, it must absolutely look like an accident. I would not leave these two young women, just starting out in their lives, carrying the residual guilt of their father’s suicide. Nor would I leave a load of guilt behind for the woman with whom I had once shared a milkshake in bed, both of us naked and laughing and listening to the Plastic Ono Band on the stereo.

After they’d had a chance to vent — after a full and complete exchange of feelings, in Dr. Kamen–speak — my memory is that we had a pleasant afternoon, looking at old photo albums and reminiscing about the past. I think we even laughed some more, but not all memories of my other life are to be trusted. Wireman says when it comes to the past, we all stack the deck.

Ilse wanted us all to go out to dinner, but Lin had to meet someone at the Public Library before it closed, and I said I didn’t feel much like hobbling anywhere; I thought I’d read a few chapters of the latest John Sandford and then go to bed. They kissed me — all friends again — and then left.

Two minutes later, Ilse came back. “I told Linnie I forgot my keys, ” she said.

“I take it you didn’t, ” I said.

“No. Daddy, would you ever hurt Mom? I mean, now? On purpose? ”

I shook my head, but that wasn’t good enough for her. I could tell by the way she just stood there, looking me in the eye. “No, ” I said. “Never. I’d—”

“You’d what, Daddy? ”

“I was going to say I’d cut my own arm off first, but all at once that seemed like a really bad idea. I’d never do it, Illy. Leave it at that.”

“Then why is she still afraid of you? ”

“I think… because I’m maimed.”

She hurled herself into my arms so hard she almost knocked us both onto the sofa. “Oh, Daddy, I’m so sorry. All of this is just so sucky. ”

I stroked her hair a little. “I know, but remember this — it’s as bad as it’s going to get.” That wasn’t the truth, but if I was careful, Ilse would never know it had been an outright lie.

A horn honked from the driveway.

“Go on, ” I said, and kissed her wet cheek. “Your sister’s impatient.”

She wrinkled her nose. “So what else is new? You’re not overdoing the pain meds, are you? ”

“No.”

“Call if you need me, Daddy. I’ll catch the very next plane.”

She would, too. Which was why I wouldn’t.

“You bet.” I put a kiss on her other cheek. “Give that to your sister.”

She nodded and went out. I sat down on the couch and closed my eyes. Behind them, the clocks were striking and striking and striking.

 

V

 

My next visitor was Dr. Kamen, the psychologist who gave me Reba. I didn’t invite him. I had Kathi, my rehabilitation dominatrix, to thank for that.

Although surely no more than forty, Kamen walked like a much older man and wheezed even when he sat, peering at the world through enormous horn-rimmed spectacles and over an enormous pear of a belly. He was a very tall, very black black man, with features carved so large they seemed unreal. His great staring eyeballs, ship’s figurehead of a nose, and totemic lips were awe-inspiring. Xander Kamen looked like a minor god in a suit from Men’s Warehouse. He also looked like a prime candidate for a fatal heart attack or stroke before his fiftieth birthday.

He refused my offer of refreshment, said he couldn’t stay, then put his briefcase aside on the couch as if to contradict that. He sank full fathom five beside the couch’s armrest (and going deeper all the time — I feared for the thing’s springs), looking at me and wheezing benignly.

“What brings you out this way? ” I asked him.

“Oh, Kathi tells me you’re planning to bump yourself off, ” he said. It was the tone he might have used to say Kathi tells me you’re having a lawn party and there are fresh Krispy Kremes on offer. “Any truth to that rumor? ”

I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Once, when I was ten and growing up in Eau Claire, I took a comic book from a drugstore spin-around, put it down the front of my jeans, then dropped my tee-shirt over it. As I was strolling out the door, feeling jacked up and very clever, a clerk grabbed me by the arm. She lifted my shirt with her other hand and exposed my ill-gotten treasure. “How did that get there? ” she asked me. Not in the forty years since that day had I been so completely stuck for an answer to a simple question.

Finally — long after such a response could have any weight — I said, “That’s ridiculous. I don’t know where she could have gotten such an idea.”

“No? ”

“No. Sure you don’t want a Coke? ”

“Thanks, but I’ll pass.”

I got up and got a Coke from the kitchen fridge. I tucked the bottle firmly between my stump and my chest-wall — possible but painful, I don’t know what you may have seen in the movies, but broken ribs hurt for a long time — and spun off the cap with my left hand. I’m a southpaw. Caught a break there, muchacho, as Wireman says.

“I’m surprised you’d take her seriously in any case, ” I said as I came back in. “Kathi’s a hell of a physical therapist, but a headshrinker she’s not.” I paused before sitting down. “Neither are you, actually. In the technical sense.”

Kamen cupped an enormous hand behind an ear that looked roughly the size of a desk drawer. “Do I hear… a ratcheting noise? I believe I do! ”

“What are you talking about? ”

“It’s the charmingly medieval sound a person’s defenses make when they go up.” He tried an ironic wink, but the size of the man’s face made irony impossible; he could only manage burlesque. Still, I took the point. “As for Kathi Green, you’re right, what does she know? All she does is work with paraplegics, quadriplegics, accident-related amps like you, and people recovering from traumatic head injuries — again, like you. For fifteen years Kathi’s done this work, she’s had the opportunity to watch a thousand maimed patients reflect on how not even a single second of time can ever be called back, so how could she possibly recognize the signs of pre-suicidal depression? ”

I sat in the lumpy easy chair across from the couch and stared at him sullenly. Here was trouble. And Kathi Green was more.

He leaned forward… although, given his girth, a few inches was all he could manage. “You have to wait, ” he said.

I gaped at him.

He nodded. “You’re surprised. Yes. But I’m not a Christian, let alone a Catholic, and on the subject of suicide my mind is open. Yet I’m a believer in responsibilities, I know that you are, too, and I tell you this: if you kill yourself now… even six months from now… your wife and daughters will know. No matter how cleverly you do it, they’ll know.”

“I don’t—”

He raised his hand. “And the company that insures your life — for a very large sum, I’m sure — they’ll know, too. They may not be able to prove it… but they’ll try very hard. The rumors they start will hurt your girls, no matter how well-armored against such things you may think they are.”

Melinda was well-armored. Ilse, however, was a different story. When Melinda was mad at her, she called Illy a case of arrested development, but I didn’t think that was true. I thought Illy was just tender.

“And in the end, they may prove it.” Kamen shrugged his enormous shoulders. “How much of a death-duty that might entail I couldn’t guess, but I’m sure it would erase a great deal of your life’s treasure.”

I wasn’t thinking about the money. I was thinking about a team of insurance investigators sniffing around whatever I set up. And all at once I began to laugh.

Kamen sat with his huge dark brown hands on his doorstop knees, looking at me with his little I’ve-seen-everything smile. Except on his face nothing was little. He let my laughter run its course and then asked me what was so funny.

“You’re telling me I’m too rich to kill myself, ” I said.

“I’m telling you not now, Edgar, and that’s all I’m telling you. I’m also going to make a suggestion that goes against a good deal of my own practical experience. But I have a very strong intuition in your case — the same sort of intuition that caused me to give you the doll. I propose you try a geographical.”

“Beg pardon? ”

“It’s a form of recovery often attempted by late-stage alcoholics. They hope that a change of location will give them a fresh start. Turn things around.”






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