by Stephen King
Three days after the incident involving Weizak’s snapshot of his mother, a slim and dark-haired reporter from the Bangor Daily News named David Bright showed up at the door of Johnny’s room and asked if he could have a short interview.
“Have you asked the doctors?” Johnny asked.
Bright grinned. “Actually, no.”
“All right,” Johnny said. “In that case, I’d be happy to talk to you.”
“You’re a man after my own heart,” Bright said. He came in and sat down.
His first questions were about the accident and about Johnny’s thoughts and feelings upon slipping out of a coma and discovering he had misplaced nearly half a decade. Johnny answered these questions honestly and straightforwardly. Then Bright told him that he had heard from “a source” that Johnny had gained some sort of sixth sense as a result of the accident.
“Are you asking me if I’m psychic?”
Bright smiled and shrugged. “That’ll do for a start.”
Johnny had thought carefully about the things Weizak had said. The more he thought, the more it seemed to him that Weizak had done exactly the right thing when he hung up the phone without saying anything. Johnny had begun to associate it in his mind with that W. W. Jacobs story, “The Monkey’s Paw.” The paw was for wishing, but the price you paid for each of your three wishes was a black one. The old couple had wished for one hundred pounds and had lost their son in a mill accident—the mill’s compensation had come to exactly one hundred pounds. Then the old woman had wished for her son back and he had come—but before she could open the door and see what a horror she had summoned out of its grave, the old man had used the last wish to send it back. As Weizak had said, maybe some things were better lost than found.
“No,” he said. “I’m no more psychic than you are.”
“According to my source, you ...”
“No, it isn’t true.”
Bright smiled a trifle cynically, seemed to debate pressing the matter further, then turned to a fresh page in his notebook. He began to ask about Johnny’s prospects for the future, his feelings about the road back, and Johnny also answered these questions as honestly as he could.
“So what are you going to do when you get out of here?” Bright asked, closing his notebook.
“I haven’t really thought about that. I’m still trying to adjust to the idea that Gerald Ford is the president.”
Bright laughed. “You’re not alone in that, my friend.”
“I suppose I’ll go back to teaching. It’s all I know. But right now that’s too far ahead to think about.”
Bright thanked him for the interview and left. The article appeared in the paper two days later, the day before his leg surgery. It was on the bottom of the front page, and the headline read: JOHN SMITH, MODERN RIP VAN WINKLE, FACES LONG ROAD BACK. There were three pictures, one of them Johnny’s picture for the Cleaves Mills High School yearbook (it had been taken barely a week before the accident), a picture of Johnny in his hospital bed, looking thin and twisted with his arms and legs in their bent positions. Between these two was a picture of the almost totally demolished taxi, lying on its side like a dead dog. There was no mention in Bright’s article of sixth senses, precognitive powers, or wild talents.
“How did you turn him off the ESP angle?” Weizak asked him that evening.
Johnny shrugged. “He seemed like a nice guy. Maybe he didn’t want to stick me with it.”
“Maybe not,” Weizak said. “But he won’t forget it. Not if he’s a good reporter, and I understand that he is.”
“You understand?”
“I asked around.”
“Looking out for my best interests?”
“We all do what we can, nuh? Are you nervous about tomorrow, Johnny?”
“Not nervous, no. Scared is a more accurate word.”
“Yes, of course you are. I would be.”
“Will you be there?”
“Yes, in the observation section of the operating theater. Above. You won’t be able to tell me from the others in my greens, but I will be there.”
“Wear something,” Johnny said. “Wear something so I’ll know it’s you.”
Weizak looked at him, and smiled. “All right. I’ll pin my watch to my tunic.”
“Good,” Johnny said. “What about Dr. Brown? Will he be there?”
“Dr. Brown is in Washington. Tomorrow he will present you to the American Society of Neurologists. I have read his paper. It is quite good. Perhaps overstated.”
“You weren’t invited?”
Weizak shrugged. “I don’t like to fly. That is something that scares me.”
“And maybe you wanted to stay here?”
Weizak smiled crookedly, spread his hands, and said nothing.
“He doesn’t like me much, does he?” Johnny asked. “Dr. Brown?”
“No, not much,” Weizak said. “He thinks you are having us on. Making things up for some reason of your own. Seeking attention, perhaps. Don’t judge him solely on that, John. His cast of mind makes it impossible for him to think otherwise. If you feel anything for Jim, feel a little pity. He is a brilliant man, and he will go far. Already he has offers, and someday soon he will fly from these cold north woods and Bangor will see him no more. He will go to Houston or Hawaii or possibly even to Paris. But he is curiously limited. He is a mechanic of the brain. He has cut it to pieces with his scalpel and found no soul. Therefore there is none. Like the Russian astronauts who circled the earth and did not see God. It is the empiricism of the mechanic, and a mechanic is only a child with superior motor control. You must never tell him I said that.”
“No.”
“And now you must rest. Tomorrow you have a long day.”
2
All Johnny saw of the world-famous Dr. Ruopp during the operation was a pair of thick horn-rimmed glasses and a large wen at the extreme left side of the man’s forehead. The rest of him was capped, gowned, and gloved.
Johnny had been given two preop injections, one of demerol and one of atropine, and when he was wheeled in he was as high as a kite. The anesthetist approached with the biggest novocaine needle Johnny had ever seen in his life. He expected that the injection would hurt, and he was not wrong. He was injected between L4 and L5, the fourth and fifth lumbar vertebrae, high enough up to avoid the cauda equina, that bundle of nerves at the base of the spine that vaguely resembles a horse’s tail.
Johnny lay on his stomach and bit his arm to keep from screaming.
After an endless time, the pain began to fade to a dull sensation of pressure. Otherwise, the lower half of his body was totally gone.
Ruopp’s face loomed over him. The green bandit, Johnny thought. Jesse James in horn-rims. Your money or your life.
“Are you comfortable, Mr. Smith?” Ruopp asked.
“Yes. But I’d just as soon not go through that again.”
“You may read magazines, if you like. Or you may watch in the mirror, if you feel it will not upset you.”
“All right.”
“Nurse, give me a blood pressure, please.”
“One-twenty over seventy-six, Doctor.”
“That’s lovely. Well, group, shall we begin?”
“Save me a drumstick,” Johnny said weakly, and was surprised by the hearty laughter. Ruopp patted his sheet-covered shoulder with one thinly gloved hand.
He watched Ruopp select a scalpel and disappear behind the green drapes hung over the metal hoop that curved above Johnny. The mirror was convex, and Johnny had a fairly good if slightly distorted view of everything.
“Oh yes,” Ruopp said. “Oh yes, dee-de-dee ... here’s what we want ... hum-de-dum ... okay ... clamp, please, Nurse, come on, wake up for Christ’s sake ... yes sir ... now I believe I’d like one of those ... no, hold it ... don’t give me what I ask for, give me what I need ... yes, okay. Strap, please.”
With forceps, the nurse handed Ruopp something that looked like a bundle of thin wires twisted together. Ruopp pick
ed them delicately out of the air with tweezers.
Like an Italian dinner, Johnny thought, and look at all that spaghetti sauce. That was what made him feel ill, and he looked away. Above him, in the gallery, the rest of the bandit gang looked down at him. Their eyes looked pale and merciless and frightening. Then he spotted Weizak, third from the right, his watch pinned neatly to the front of his gown.
Johnny nodded.
Weizak nodded back.
That made it a little better.
3
Ruopp finished the connections between his knees and calves, and Johnny was turned over. Things continued. The anesthesiologist asked him if he felt all right. Johnny told her he thought he felt as well as possible under the circumstances. She asked him if he would like to listen to a tape and he said that would be very nice. A few moments later the clear, sweet voice of Joan Baez filled the operating room. Ruopp did his thing. Johnny grew sleepy and dozed off. When he woke up the operation was still going on. Weizak was still there. Johnny raised one hand, acknowledging his presence, and Weizak nodded again.
4
An hour later it was done. He was wheeled into a recovery room where a nurse kept asking him if he could tell her how many of his toes she was touching. After a while, Johnny could.
Ruopp came in, his bandit’s mask hanging off to one side.
“All right?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“It went very well,” Ruopp said. “I’m optimistic.”
“Good.”
“You’ll have some pain,” Ruopp said. “Quite a lot of it, perhaps. The therapy itself will give you a lot of pain at first. Stick with it.”
“Stick with it,” Johnny muttered.
“Good afternoon,” Ruopp said, and left. Probably, Johnny thought, to play a quick nine on the local golf course before it got too dark.
5
Quite a lot of pain.
By nine P.M. the last of the local had worn off, and Johnny was in agony. He was forbidden to move his legs without the help of two nurses. It felt as if nail-studded belts had been looped around his knees and then cinched cruelly tight. Time slowed to an inchworm’s crawl. He would glance at his watch, sure that an hour had passed since the last time he had looked at it, and would see instead that it had only been four minutes. He became sure he couldn’t stand the pain for another minute, then the minute would pass, and he would become sure he couldn’t stand it for another minute.
He thought of all the minutes stacked up ahead, like coins in a slot five miles high, and the blackest depression he had ever known swept over him in a smooth solid wave and carried him down. They were going to torture him to death. Operations on his elbows, thighs, his neck. Therapy. Walkers, wheelchairs, canes.
You’re going to have pain... stick with it.
No, you stick with it, Johnny thought. Just leave me alone. Don’t come near me again with your butchers’ knives. If this is your idea of helping, I want no part of it.
Steady throbbing pain, digging into the meat of him.
Warmth on his belly, trickling.
He had wet himself.
Johnny Smith turned his face toward the wall and cried.
6
Ten days after that first operation and two weeks before the next one was scheduled, Johnny looked up from the book he was reading—Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men—and saw Sarah standing in the doorway, looking at him hesitantly.
“Sarah,” he said. “It is you, isn’t it?”
She let out her breath shakily. “Yes. It’s me, Johnny.”
He put the book down and looked at her. She was smartly dressed in a light-green linen dress, and she held a small, brown clutch bag in front of her like a shield. She had put a streak in her hair and it looked good. It also made him feel a sharp and twisting stab of jealousy—had it been her idea, or that of the man she lived and slept with? She was beautiful.
“Come in,” he said. “Come in and sit down.”
She crossed the room and suddenly he saw himself as she must see him—too thin, his body slumped a little to one side in the chair by the window, his legs stuck out straight on the hassock, dressed in a Johnny and a cheap hospital bathrobe.
“As you can see, I put on my tux,” he said.
“You look fine.” She kissed his cheek and a hundred memories shuffled brightly through his mind like a doubled pack of cards. She sat in the other chair, crossed her legs, and tugged at the hem of her dress.
They looked at each other without saying anything. He saw that she was very nervous. If someone were to touch her on the shoulder, she would probably spring right out of her seat.
“I didn’t know if I should come,” she said, “but I really wanted to.”
“I’m glad you did.”
Like strangers on a bus, he thought dismally. It’s got to be more than this, doesn’t it?”
“So how’re you doing?” she asked.
He smiled. “I’ve been in the war. Want to see my battle scars?” He raised his gown over his knees, showing the S-shaped incisions that were now beginning to heal. They were still red and hashmarked with stitches.
“Oh, my Lord, what are they doing to you?”
“They’re trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again,” Johnny said. “All the king’s horses, all the king’s men, and all the king’s doctors. So I guess ...” And then he stopped, because she was crying.
“Don’t say it like that, Johnny,” she said. “Please don’t say it like that.”
“I’m sorry. It was just ... I was trying to joke about it.” Was that it? Had he been trying to laugh it off or had it been a way of saying, Thanks for coming to see me, they’re cutting me to pieces?
“Can you? Can you joke about it?” She had gotten a Kleenex from the clutch bag and was wiping her eyes with it.
“Not very often. I guess seeing you again ... the defenses go up, Sarah.”
“Are they going to let you out of here?”
“Eventually. It’s like running the gauntlet in the old days, did you ever read about that? If I’m still alive after every Indian in the tribe has had a swing at me with his tomahawk, I get to go free.”
“This summer?”
“No, I ... I don’t think so.”
“I’m so sorry it happened,” she said, so low he could barely hear her. “I try to figure out why ... or how things could have been changed ... and it just robs me of sleep. If I hadn’t eaten that bad hot dog ... if you had stayed instead of going back ...” She shook her head and looked at him, her eyes red. “It seems sometimes there’s no percentage.”
Johnny smiled. “Double zero. House spin. Hey, you remember that? I clobbered that Wheel, Sarah.”
“Yes. You won over five hundred dollars.”
He looked at her, still smiling, but now the smile was puzzled, wounded almost. “You want to know something funny? My doctors think maybe the reason I lived was because I had some sort of head injury when I was young. But I couldn’t remember any, and neither could my mom and dad. But it seems like every time I think of it, I flash on that Wheel of Fortune ... and a smell like burning rubber.”
“Maybe you were in a car accident ...” she began doubtfully.
“No, I don’t think that’s it. But it’s like the Wheel was my warning ... and I ignored it.”
She shifted a little and said uneasily, “Don’t, Johnny.”
He shrugged. “Or maybe it was just that I used up four years of luck in one evening. But look at this, Sarah.” Carefully, painfully, he took one leg off the hassock, bent it to a ninety-degree angle, then stretched it out on the hassock again. “Maybe they can put Humpty back together again. When I woke up, I couldn’t do that, and I couldn’t get my legs to straighten out as much as they are now, either.”
“And you can think, Johnny,” she said. “You can talk. We all thought that ... you know.”
“Yeah, Johnny the turnip.” A silence fell between them again, awkward and heavy. Johnny broke
it by saying with forced brightness, “So how’s by you?”
“Well ... I’m married. I guess you knew that.”
“Dad told me.”
“He’s such a fine man,” Sarah said. And then, in a burst, “I couldn’t wait, Johnny. I’m sorry about that, too. The doctors said you’d never come out of it, and you’d get lower and lower until you just ... just slipped away. And even if I had known ...” She looked up at him with an uneasy expression of defense on her face. “Even if I’d known, Johnny, I don’t think I could have waited. Four-and-a-half years is a long time.”
“Yeah, it is,” he said. “That’s a hell of a long time. You want to hear something morbid? I got them to bring me four years worth of news magazines just so I could see who died. Truman. Janis Joplin. Jimi Hendrix—Jesus, I thought of him doing “Purple Haze” and I could hardly believe it. Dan Blocker. And you and me. We just slipped away.”
“I feel so bad about it,” she said, nearly whispering. “So damn guilty. But I love the guy, Johnny. I love him a lot.”
“Okay, that’s what matters.”
“His name is Walt Hazlett, and he’s a ...”
“I think I’d rather hear about your kid,” Johnny said. “No offense, huh?”
“He’s a peach,” she said, smiling. “He’s seven months old now. His name is Dennis but we call him Denny. He’s named after his paternal grandfather.”
“Bring him in sometime. I’d like to see him.”