(no subject)
SUSANNAH IN NEW YORK
(EPILOGUE)
00
The Epilogue was written by Stephen King, and appears at the end of the seventh and last book of the Dark Tower series.
Spoilers, obviously.
Many thanks to Aspen, who typed all this up for me.
No one takes alarm as the little electric cart slides out of nowhere an inch at a time until it’s wholly here in Central Park; no one sees it but us. Most of those here are looking skyward, as the first snowflakes of what will prove to be a great pre-Christmas snowstorm come skirling down from a white sky. The Blizzard of ’87, the newspapers will call it. Visitors to the park who aren’t watching the snowfall begin are watching the carolers, who are from public schools far uptown. They are wearing either dark red blazers (the boys) or dark red jumpers (the girls). This is the Harlem School Choir, sometimes called the Harlem Roses in the Post and its rival tabloid, the New York Sun. They sing an old hymn in gorgeous doo-wop harmony, snapping their fingers as they make their way through the staves, turning it into something that sounds almost like early Spurs, Coasters, or Dark Diamonds. They are standing not too far from the environment where the polar bears live their city lives, and the song they’re singing is “What Child is This.”
One of those looking up into the snow is a man Susannah knows well, and her heart leaps straight up to heaven at the sight of him. In his left hand he’s holding a large paper cup and she’s sure it contains hot chocolate, the good kind mit schlag.
For a moment she’s unable to touch the controls of the little cart, which came from another world. Thoughts of Roland and Patrick have left her mind. All she can think of is Eddie-Eddie in front of her right here and now, Eddie alive again. And if this is not the Keystone World, not quite, what of that? If Co-Op City is in Brooklyn (or even in Queens!) and Eddie drives a Takuro Spirit instead of a Buick Electra, what of those things? It doesn’t matter. Only one thing would, and it’s that which keeps her hand from rising to the throttle and trundling the cart toward him.
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 printed there 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.
“It’s not just the voices.”
“No?”
“No. I’ve been dreaming of you. For months now. I’ve been waiting for you. Listen, we don’t know each other… this is crazy… but do you have a place to stay? You don’t, do you?”
She shakes her head. Doing a passable John Wayne (or maybe it’s Blaine the train she’s imitating), she says: “Ah’m a stranger here in Dodge, pilgrim.” Her heart is pounding slowly and heavily in her chest, but she feels a rising joy. This is going to be all right. She doesn’t know how it can be, but yes, it’s going to be just fine. This time ka is working in her favor, and the force of ka is enormous. This she knows from experience.
“If I asked how I know you… or where you come from…” He pauses, looking at her levelly, and then says the rest of it. “Or how I can possibly love you already…?”
She smiles. It feels good to smile, and it no longer hurts the side of her face, because whatever was there (some sort of scar, maybe-she can’t quite remember) is gone. “Sugar,” she tells him, “it’s what I said: a long story. You’ll get some of it in time, though… what I remember of it. And it could be that we still have some work to do. For an outfit called the Tet Corporation.” She looks around and then says, “What year is this?”
“1987,” he says.
“And do you live in Brooklyn? Or maybe the Bronx?”
The young man whose dreams and squabbling voices have led him here-with a cup of hot chocolate in his hand and a MERRY CHRISTMAS hat in his back pocket-bursts out laughing. “God, no! I’m from White Plains! I came in on the train with my brother. He’s right over there. He wanted a closer look at the polar bears.”
The brother. Henry. The great sage and eminent junkie. Her heart sinks.
“Let me introduce you,” he says.
“No, really, I-“
“Hey, if we’re gonna be friends, you gotta be friends with my kid brother. We’re tight. Jake! Hey, Jake!”
She hasn’t noticed the boy standing down by the railing which guards the sunken polar bears’ environment from the rest of the park, but now he turns and her heart takes a great, giddy leap in her chest. Jake waves and ambles toward them.
“Jake’s been dreaming about you, too,” Eddie tells her. “It’s the only reason I know I’m not going crazy. Any crazier than usual, at least.”
She takes Eddie’s hand-that familiar, well-loved hand. And when the fingers close over hers, she thinks she will die of joy. She will have many questions-so will they-but for the time being she has only one that feels important. As the snow begins to fall more thickly around them, landing in his hair and in his lashes and on the shoulders of his sweatshirt, she asks it.
“You and Jake-what’s your last name?”
“Toren,” he says. “It’s German.”
Before either of them can say anything else, Jake joins them. And will I tell you that these three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there was happiness.
And they did live.
Beneath the flowing and sometimes glimpsed glammer of the Beam that connects Shardik the Bear and Maturin the Turtle by way of the Dark Tower, they did live.
That’s all.
That’s enough.
Say thankya.
(EPILOGUE)
00
The Epilogue was written by Stephen King, and appears at the end of the seventh and last book of the Dark Tower series.
Spoilers, obviously.
Many thanks to Aspen, who typed all this up for me.
No one takes alarm as the little electric cart slides out of nowhere an inch at a time until it’s wholly here in Central Park; no one sees it but us. Most of those here are looking skyward, as the first snowflakes of what will prove to be a great pre-Christmas snowstorm come skirling down from a white sky. The Blizzard of ’87, the newspapers will call it. Visitors to the park who aren’t watching the snowfall begin are watching the carolers, who are from public schools far uptown. They are wearing either dark red blazers (the boys) or dark red jumpers (the girls). This is the Harlem School Choir, sometimes called the Harlem Roses in the Post and its rival tabloid, the New York Sun. They sing an old hymn in gorgeous doo-wop harmony, snapping their fingers as they make their way through the staves, turning it into something that sounds almost like early Spurs, Coasters, or Dark Diamonds. They are standing not too far from the environment where the polar bears live their city lives, and the song they’re singing is “What Child is This.”
One of those looking up into the snow is a man Susannah knows well, and her heart leaps straight up to heaven at the sight of him. In his left hand he’s holding a large paper cup and she’s sure it contains hot chocolate, the good kind mit schlag.
For a moment she’s unable to touch the controls of the little cart, which came from another world. Thoughts of Roland and Patrick have left her mind. All she can think of is Eddie-Eddie in front of her right here and now, Eddie alive again. And if this is not the Keystone World, not quite, what of that? If Co-Op City is in Brooklyn (or even in Queens!) and Eddie drives a Takuro Spirit instead of a Buick Electra, what of those things? It doesn’t matter. Only one thing would, and it’s that which keeps her hand from rising to the throttle and trundling the cart toward him.
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 printed there 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.
“It’s not just the voices.”
“No?”
“No. I’ve been dreaming of you. For months now. I’ve been waiting for you. Listen, we don’t know each other… this is crazy… but do you have a place to stay? You don’t, do you?”
She shakes her head. Doing a passable John Wayne (or maybe it’s Blaine the train she’s imitating), she says: “Ah’m a stranger here in Dodge, pilgrim.” Her heart is pounding slowly and heavily in her chest, but she feels a rising joy. This is going to be all right. She doesn’t know how it can be, but yes, it’s going to be just fine. This time ka is working in her favor, and the force of ka is enormous. This she knows from experience.
“If I asked how I know you… or where you come from…” He pauses, looking at her levelly, and then says the rest of it. “Or how I can possibly love you already…?”
She smiles. It feels good to smile, and it no longer hurts the side of her face, because whatever was there (some sort of scar, maybe-she can’t quite remember) is gone. “Sugar,” she tells him, “it’s what I said: a long story. You’ll get some of it in time, though… what I remember of it. And it could be that we still have some work to do. For an outfit called the Tet Corporation.” She looks around and then says, “What year is this?”
“1987,” he says.
“And do you live in Brooklyn? Or maybe the Bronx?”
The young man whose dreams and squabbling voices have led him here-with a cup of hot chocolate in his hand and a MERRY CHRISTMAS hat in his back pocket-bursts out laughing. “God, no! I’m from White Plains! I came in on the train with my brother. He’s right over there. He wanted a closer look at the polar bears.”
The brother. Henry. The great sage and eminent junkie. Her heart sinks.
“Let me introduce you,” he says.
“No, really, I-“
“Hey, if we’re gonna be friends, you gotta be friends with my kid brother. We’re tight. Jake! Hey, Jake!”
She hasn’t noticed the boy standing down by the railing which guards the sunken polar bears’ environment from the rest of the park, but now he turns and her heart takes a great, giddy leap in her chest. Jake waves and ambles toward them.
“Jake’s been dreaming about you, too,” Eddie tells her. “It’s the only reason I know I’m not going crazy. Any crazier than usual, at least.”
She takes Eddie’s hand-that familiar, well-loved hand. And when the fingers close over hers, she thinks she will die of joy. She will have many questions-so will they-but for the time being she has only one that feels important. As the snow begins to fall more thickly around them, landing in his hair and in his lashes and on the shoulders of his sweatshirt, she asks it.
“You and Jake-what’s your last name?”
“Toren,” he says. “It’s German.”
Before either of them can say anything else, Jake joins them. And will I tell you that these three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there was happiness.
And they did live.
Beneath the flowing and sometimes glimpsed glammer of the Beam that connects Shardik the Bear and Maturin the Turtle by way of the Dark Tower, they did live.
That’s all.
That’s enough.
Say thankya.