by Stephen King
Someone screamed piercingly—the stout woman who had asked about the Democrats. Johnny saw Dussault pitch forward to his knees, grope at the sleeve of the stout woman’s print blouse and then slide tiredly forward onto the tile near the doorway he had been trying to reach. The St. Christopher medal was still in one hand.
“Fainted,” someone said. “Fainted dead away. I’ll be damned.”
“My fault,” Johnny said to Sam Weizak. His throat felt close and tight with shame, with tears. “All my fault.”
“No,” Sam said. “No, John.”
But it was. He shook loose of Weizak’s hands and went to where Dussault lay, coming around now, eyes blinking dazedly at the ceiling. Two of the doctors had come over to where he lay.
“Is he all right?” Johnny asked. He turned toward the woman reporter in the slacksuit and she shrank away from him. A cramp of fear passed over her face.
Johnny turned the other way, toward the TV reporter who had asked him if he’d had any flashes before his accident. It suddenly seemed very important that he explain to someone. “I didn’t mean to hurt him,” he said. “Honest to God, I never meant to hurt him. I didn’t know ...”
The TV reporter backed up a step. “No,” he said. “Of course you didn’t. He was asking for it, anybody could see that. Just ... don’t touch me, huh?”
Johnny looked at him dumbly, lips quivering. He was still in shock but beginning to understand. Oh yes. He was beginning to understand. The TV reporter tried to smile and could only produce a death’s-head rictus.
“Just don’t touch me, Johnny. Please.”
“It’s not like that,” Johnny said—or tried to. Later, he was never sure if any sound had come out.
“Don’t touch me, Johnny, okay?”
The reporter backed up to where his cameraman was packing his gear. Johnny stood and watched him. He began to shake all over.
3
“It’s for your own good, John,” Weizak said. The nurse stood behind him, a white ghost, a sorcerer’s apprentice with her hands hovering above the small, wheeled medication table, a junkie’s paradise of sweet dreams.
“No,” Johnny said. He was still shaking, and now there was cold sweat as well. “No more shots. I’ve had it up to here with shots.”
“A pill, then.”
“No more pills, either.”
“To help you sleep.”
“Will he be able to sleep? That man Dussault?”
“He asked for it,” the nurse murmured, and then flinched as Weizak turned toward her. But Weizak smiled crookedly.
“She is right, nuh?” he said. “The man asked for it. He thought you were selling empty bottles, John. A good night’s sleep and you’ll be able to put this in perspective.”
“I’ll sleep on my own.”
“Johnny, please.”
It was quarter past eleven. The TV across the room had just gone off. Johnny and Sam had watched the filmed story together; it had been second-lined right after the bills Ford had vetoed. My own story made better theater, Johnny thought with morbid amusement. Film footage of a bald-headed Republican mouthing platitudes about the national budget just didn’t compare with the film clip that WABI cameraman had gotten here earlier this evening. The clip had ended with Dussault plunging across the floor with his sister’s medal clutched in his hand and then crashing down in a faint, clutching at the woman reporter the way a drowning man might clutch at a straw.
When the TV anchorman went on to the police dog and the four hundred pounds of pot, Weizak had left briefly and had come back with the news that the hospital switchboard had jammed up with calls for him even before the report was over. The nurse with the medication had shown up a few minutes later, leading Johnny to believe that Sam had gone down to the nurse’s station to do more than check on incoming calls.
At that instant, the telephone rang.
Weizak swore softly under his breath. “I told them to hold them all. Don’t answer it, John, I’ll ...”
But Johnny already had it. He listened for a moment, then nodded. “Yes, that was right.” He put a hand over the receiver. “It’s my dad,” he said. He uncovered the receiver. “Hi, Dad. I guess you ...” He listened. The small smile on his lips faded and was replaced by an expression of dawning horror. His lips moved silently.
“John, what is it?” Weizak asked sharply.
“All right, Daddy,” Johnny said, almost in a whisper. “Yes. Cumberland General. I know where it is. Just above Jerusalem’s Lot. Okay. All right. Daddy ...”
His voice broke. His eyes were tearless but glistening.
“I know that, Daddy. I love you too. I’m sorry.”
Listened.
“Yes. Yes it was,” Johnny said. “I’ll see you, Daddy. Yes. Good-bye.”
He hung up the phone, put the heels of his hands to his eyes, and pressed.
“Johnny?” Sam leaned forward, took one of his hands away and held it gently. “Is it your mother?”
“Yeah. It’s my mother.”
“Heart attack?”
“Stroke,” Johnny said, and Sam Weizak made a small, pained hissing between his teeth. “They were watching the TV news ... neither of them had any idea ... and I came on ... and she had a stroke. Christ. She’s in the hospital. Now if something happens to my dad, we got a triple play.” He uttered a high scream of laughter. His eyes rolled wildly from Sam to the nurse and back to Sam again. “It’s a good talent,” he said. “Everybody should have it.” The laugh came again, so like a scream.
“How bad is she?” Sam asked.
“He doesn’t know.” Johnny swung his legs out of bed. He had changed back to a hospital gown and his feet were bare.
“What do you think you are doing?” Sam asked sharply.
“What does it look like?”
Johnny got up, and for a moment it seemed that Sam would push him back onto the bed. But he only watched Johnny limp over to the closet. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re not ready for this, John.”
Unmindful of the nurse—they had seen his bare tail enough times, God knew—Johnny let the gown drop around his feet. The thick, twisting scars stood out on the backs of his knees and dimpled into the scant swell of his calves. He began to rummage in the closet for clothes, and came up with the white shirt and jeans he had worn to the news conference.
“John, I absolutely forbid this. As your doctor and your friend. I tell you, it is madness.”
“Forbid all you want, I’m going,” Johnny said. He began to dress. His face wore that expression of distant preoccupation that Sam associated with his trances. The nurse gawped.
“Nurse, you might as well go back to your station,” Sam said.
She backed to the door, stood there for a moment, and then left. Reluctantly.
“Johnny,” Sam said. He got up, went to him, and put a hand on his shoulder. “You didn’t do it.”
Johnny shook the hand off. “I did it, all right,” he said. “She was watching me when it happened.” He began to button the shirt.
“You urged her to take her medicine and she stopped.”
Johnny looked at Weizak for a moment and then went back to buttoning his shirt.
“If it hadn’t happened tonight, it would have happened tomorrow, next week, next month ...”
“Or next year. Or in ten years.”
“No. It would not have been ten years, or even one. And you know it. Why are you so anxious to pin this tail on yourself? Because of that smug reporter? Is it maybe an inverted kind of self-pity? An urge to believe that you have been cursed?”
Johnny’s face twisted. “She was watching me when it happened. Don’t you get that? Are you so fucking soft you don’t get that?”
“She was planning a strenuous trip, all the way to California and back, you told me that yourself. A symposium of some kind. A highly emotional sort of thing, from what you have said. Yes? Yes. It would almost certainly have happened then. A stroke is not lightning from a blue sky, Johnny.”
/> Johnny buttoned the jeans and then sat down as if the act of dressing had tired him out too much to do more. His feet were still bare. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, you may be right.”
“Sense! He sees sense! Thank the Lord!”
“But I still have to go, Sam.”
Weizak threw up his hands. “And do what? She is in the hands of her doctors and her God. That is the situation. Better than anyone else, you must understand.”
“My dad will need me,” Johnny said softly. “I understand that, too.”
“How will you go? It’s nearly midnight.”
“By bus. I’ll grab a cab over to Peter’s Candlelighter. The Greyhounds still stop there, don’t they?”
“You don’t have to do that,” Sam said.
Johnny was groping under the chair for his shoes and not finding them. Sam got them from under the bed and handed them to him.
“I’ll drive you down.”
Johnny looked up at him. “You’d do that?”
“If you’ll take a mild tranquilizer, yes.”
“But your wife ...” He realized in a confused sort of way that the only concrete thing he knew about Weizak’s personal life was that his mother was living in California.
“I am divorced,” Weizak said. “A doctor has to be out all hours of the night ... unless he is a podiatrist or a dermatologist, nuh? My wife saw the bed as half-empty rather than half-full. So she filled it with a variety of men.”
“I’m sorry,” Johnny said, embarrassed.
“You spend far too much time being sorry, John.” Sam’s face was gentle, but his eyes were stern. “Put on your shoes.”
Chapter 12
1
Hospital to hospital, Johnny thought dreamily, flying gently along on the small blue pill he had taken just before he and Sam left the EMMC and climbed into Sam’s ’75 El Dorado. Hospital to hospital, person to person, station to station.
In a queer, secret way, he enjoyed the trip—it was his first time out of the hospital in almost five years. The night was clear, the Milky Way sprawled across the sky in an unwinding clockspring of light, a half-moon followed them over the dark tree line as they fled south through Palmyra, Newport, Pittsfield, Benton, Clinton. The car whispered along in near total silence. Low music, Haydn, issued from the four speakers of the stereo tape player.
Came to one hospital in the Cleaves Mills Rescue Squad ambulance, went to another in a Cadillac, he thought. He didn’t let it bother him. It was just enough to ride, to float along on the track, to let the problem of his mother, his new ability, and the people who wanted to pry into his soul (He asked for it ... just don’t touch me, huh?) rest in a temporary limbo. Weizak didn’t talk. Occasionally he hummed snatches of the music.
Johnny watched the stars. He watched the turnpike, nearly deserted this late. It unrolled ceaselessly in front of them. They went through the tollgate at Augusta and Weizak took a time-and-toll ticket. Then they went on again—Gardener, Sabbatus, Lewiston.
Nearly five years, longer than same convicted murderers spend in the slam.
He slept.
Dreamed.
“Johnny,” his mother said in his dream. “Johnny, make me better, make me well.” She was in a beggar’s rags. She was crawling toward him over cobblestones. Her face was white. Thin blood ran from her knees. White lice squirmed in her thin hair. She held shaking hands out to him. “It’s the power of God working in you,” she said. “It’s a great responsibility, Johnny. A great trust. You must be worthy.”
He took her hands, closed his own over them, and said, “Spirits, depart from this woman.”
She stood up. “Healed!” she cried in a voice that was filled with a strange and terrible triumph. “Healed! My son has healed me! His work is great upon the earth!”
He tried to protest, to tell her that he didn’t want to do great works, or heal, or speak in tongues, to divine the future, or find those things that had been lost. He tried to tell her, but his tongue wouldn’t obey the command of his brain. Then she was past him, striding off down the cobbled street, her posture cringing and servile but somehow arrogant at the same time; her voice belled like a clarion: “Saved! Savior! Saved! Savior!”
And to his horror he saw that there had been thousands of others behind her, maybe millions, all of them maimed or deformed or in terror. The stout lady reporter was there, needing to know who the Democrats would nominate for the presidency in 1976; there was a death-eyed farmer in biballs with a picture of his son, a smiling young man in Air Force blues, who had been reported MIA over Hanoi in 1972, he needed to know if his son was dead or alive; a young woman who looked like Sarah with tears on her smooth cheeks, holding up a baby with a hydrocephalic head on which blue veins were traced like runes of doom; an old man with his fingers turned into clubs by arthritis; others. They stretched for miles, they would wait patiently, they would kill him with their mute, bludgeoning need.
“Saved!” His mother’s voice carried back imperatively. “Savior! Saved! Saved!”
He tried to tell them that he could neither heal nor save, but before he could open his mouth to make the denial, the first had laid hands on him and was shaking him.
The shaking was real enough. It was Weizak’s hand on his arm. Bright orange light filled the car, turning the interior as bright as day—it was nightmare light, turning Sam’s kind face into the face of a hobgoblin. For a moment he thought the nightmare was still going on and then he saw the light was coming from parking-lot lamps. They had changed those, too, apparently, while he was in his coma. From hard white to a weird orange that lay on the skin like paint.
“Where are we?” he asked thickly.
“The hospital,” Sam said. “Cumberland General.”
“Oh. All right.”
He sat up. The dream seemed to slide off him in fragments, still littering the floor of his mind like something broken and not yet swept up.
“Are you ready to go in?”
“Yes,” Johnny said.
They crossed the parking lot amid the soft creak of summer crickets in the woods. Fireflies stitched through the darkness. The image of his mother was very much on him—but not so much that he was unable to enjoy the soft and fragrant smell of the night and the feel of the faint breeze against his skin. There was time to enjoy the health of the night, and the feeling of health coming inside him. In the context of why he was here, the thought seemed almost obscene—but only almost. And it wouldn’t go away.
2
Herb came down the hallway to meet them, and Johnny saw that his father was wearing old pants, shoes with no socks, and his pajama shirt. It told Johnny a lot about the suddenness with which it had come. It told him more than he wanted to know.
“Son,” he said. He looked smaller, somehow. He tried to say more and couldn’t. Johnny hugged him and Herb burst into tears. He sobbed against Johnny’s shirt.
“Daddy,” he said. “That’s all right, Daddy, that’s all right.”
His father put his arms on Johnny’s shoulders and wept. Weizak turned away and began to inspect the pictures on the walls, indifferent water colors by local artists.
Herb began to recover himself. He swiped his arm across his eyes and said, “Look at me, still in my pj top. I had time to change before the ambulance came. I guess I never thought of it. Must be getting senile.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Well.” He shrugged. “Your doctor friend brought you down? That was nice of you, Dr. Weizak.”
Sam shrugged. “It was nothing.”
Johnny and his father walked toward the small waiting room and sat down. “Daddy, is she ...”
“She’s sinking,” Herb said. He seemed calmer now. “Conscious, but sinking. She’s been asking for you, Johnny. I think she’s been holding on for you.”
“My fault,” Johnny said. “All this is my f ...”
The pain in his ear startled him, and he stared at his father, astonished. Herb had seized his ear and twisted it fir
mly. So much for the role reversal of having his father cry in his arms. The old twist-the-ear trick had been a punishment Herb had reserved for the gravest of errors. Johnny couldn’t remember having his ear twisted since he was thirteen, and had gotten fooling around with their old Rambler. He had inadvertently pushed in the clutch and the old car had rumbled silently downhill to crash into their back shed.
“Don’t you ever say that,” Herb said.
“Jeez Dad!”
Herb let go, a little smile lurking just below the corners of his mouth. “Forgot all about the old twist-the-ear, huh? Probably thought I had, too. No such luck, Johnny.”
Johnny stared at his father, still dumbfounded.
“Don’t you ever blame yourself.”
“But she was watching that damned ...”
“News, yes. She was ecstatic, she was thrilled ... then she was on the floor, her poor old mouth opening and closing like she was a fish out of water.” Herb leaned closer to his son. “The doctor won’t come right out and tell me, but he asked me about ‘heroic measures.’ I told him none of that stuff. She committed her own kind of sin, Johnny. She presumed to know the mind of God. So don’t you ever blame yourself for her mistake.” Fresh tears glinted in his eyes. His voice roughened. “God knows I spent my life loving her and it got hard in the late going. Maybe this is just the best thing.”
“Can I see her?”
“Yes, she’s at the end of the hall, Room 35. They’re expecting you, and so is she. Just one thing, Johnny. Agree with anything and everything she might say. Don’t ... let her die thinking it was all for nothing.”
“No.” He paused. “Are you coming with me?”
“Not now. Maybe later.”
Johnny nodded and walked up the hall. The lights were turned down low for the nighttime. The brief moment in the soft, kind summer night seemed far away now, but his nightmare in the car seemed very close.
Room 35. VERA HELEN SMITH, the little card on the door read. Had he known her middle name was Helen? It seemed he must have, although he couldn’t remember. But he could remember other things: her bringing him an ice-cream bar wrapped in her handkerchief one bright summer day at Old Orchard Beach, smiling and gay. He and his mother and father playing rummy for matches—later, after the religion business began to deepen its hold on her, she wouldn’t have cards in the house, not even to play cribbage with. He remembered the day the bee had stung him and he ran to her, bawling his head off, and she had kissed the swelling and pulled out the stinger with tweezers and then had wrapped the wound in a strip of cloth that had been dipped in baking soda.