by Stephen King
“But she turned around. The girl on your background did a complete three-sixty.”
“A simple trick of motion picture projection.” But he glanced away as he said it. Then he looked back at me. “Do you want to get better, Jamie?”
“I am better. Must have been one of those twenty-four-hour things.”
“It’s not a twenty-four-hour thing, it’s the flu, and if you try leaving here for the bus station, it’ll be back full blast by noon. Stay here and yes, I think you’ll probably be better in a few days. But it’s not the flu I’m talking about.”
“I’m okay,” I said, but now it was my turn to look away. What brought my eyes back front and center was the little brown bottle. He was holding it by the spoon and swinging it on its little silver chain like a hypnotist’s amulet. I reached for it. He held it away.
“How long have you been using?”
“Heroin? About three years.” It had been six. “I had a motorcycle accident. Smashed the hell out of my hip and leg. They gave me morphine—”
“Of course they did.”
“—and then stepped me down to codeine. That sucked, so I started chugging cough syrup to go with the pills. Terpin hydrate. Ever heard of it?”
“Are you kidding? On the circuit they call it GI Gin.”
“My leg healed, but it never healed right. Then—I was in a band called the Andersonville Rockers, or maybe they’d changed the name to the Georgia Giants by then—this guy introduced me to Tussionex. That was a big step in the right direction, as far as pain control went. Listen, do you really want to hear this?”
“Absolutely.”
I shrugged as if it didn’t matter much to me one way or the other, but it was a relief to spill it out. Before that day in Jacobs’s Bounder, I never had. In the bands I played with, everyone just shrugged and looked the other way. As long as you kept showing up, that was, and remembered the chords to “In the Midnight Hour”—which, believe me, ain’t rocket science.
“It’s another cough syrup. More powerful than terpin hydrate, but only if you knew how to get at the good stuff. To do that, you tied a string around the neck of the bottle and twirled it like a mad bastard. The centrifugal force separated the syrup into three levels. The good stuff—the hydrocodone—was in the middle. You used a straw to suck it up.”
“Fascinating.”
Not very, I thought. “After awhile, when I was still having pain, I started scoring morphine again. Then I discovered heroin worked as well, and at half the price.” I smiled. “There’s a kind of drug stock market, you know. When everybody started using rock cocaine, horse took a nosedive.”
“Your leg looks fine to me,” he said mildly. “There’s a bad scar, and there’s obviously been some muscle loss, but not that much. Some doctor did a fine job on you.”
“I can walk, yeah. But you try standing on a leg that’s full of metal clips and screws for three hours a night, under hot lights and with a nine-pound guitar strapped on. Lecture all you want, you picked me up when I was down and I guess I owe you that, but don’t tell me about pain. Nobody knows unless they’re on the inside.”
He nodded. “As someone who’s suffered . . . losses . . . I can relate to that. But here’s something I bet you already know, deep down. It’s your brain that’s hurting, and blaming it on your leg. Brains are crafty that way.”
He put the bottle back in his pocket (I watched it go with deep regret) and leaned forward, his eyes locked on mine. “But I believe I can take care of you with an electrical treatment. No guarantees, and the treatment might not cure your mental craving forever, but I believe I can give you what the football players call running room.”
“Cure me the way you did Connie, I suppose. When that kid clotheslined him with a ski pole.”
He looked surprised, then laughed. “You remember that.”
“Of course! How could I forget it?” I also remembered how Con had refused to go with me to see Jacobs after the Terrible Sermon. It wasn’t exactly like Peter denying Jesus, but it was in the same ballpark.
“A dubious cure at best, Jamie. More likely the placebo effect. I’m offering you an actual cure, one that will—or so I believe—short-circuit the painful withdrawal process.”
“Well of course you’d say that, wouldn’t you?”
“You’re judging me by my carny persona. But that’s all it is, Jamie—a persona. When I’m not wearing my show suit and making a living, I try to tell the truth. In fact, I mostly tell the truth when I’m working. That picture will amaze Miss Cathy Morse’s friends.”
“Yeah,” I said. “For two years, anyway. Give or take.”
“Stop dodging and answer my question. Do you want to get better?”
What came to mind was the PS of the note Kelly Van Dorn had slid under my door. In prison a year from now if I didn’t clean up my act, he’d written. And that was if I struck lucky.
“I got straight three years ago.” Sort of true, although I had been on the Marijuana Maintenance Program. “Did it righteous, went through the shakes and sweats and the Hershey squirts. My leg was so bad I could barely hobble. It’s some kind of nerve damage.”
“I believe I can take care of that, too.”
“What are you, some kind of miracle worker? Is that what you want me to believe?”
He had been sitting on the carpet beside the bed. Now he got up. “That’s enough for now. You need to sleep. You’re still quite a long way from well.”
“Then give me something that will help me.”
He did so without argument, and it helped me. It just didn’t help enough. By 1992, real help came in the needle. There was nothing else. You don’t just wave a magic wand over that shit and make it gone.
Or so I believed.
• • •
I stayed in his Bounder for the best part of a week, living on soup, sandwiches, and nasally administered doses of heroin that were just enough to keep the worst of the shakes at bay. He brought my guitar and duffel. I kept a spare set of works in the duffel, but when I looked (it was the second night, and he was working the crowds at his Portraits in Lightning shy), the kit was gone. I begged him to give it back, along with enough heroin so I could cook and shoot up.
“No,” he said. “If you want to mainline—”
“I’ve only been skin-popping!”
He gave me an Oh, please look. “If you want that, you’ll have to find the proper equipment yourself. If you’re not well enough to do it tonight, you will be by tomorrow, and around this place I’m sure it wouldn’t take you long. Just don’t come back here.”
“When do I get this so-called miracle cure?”
“When you’re well enough to withstand a small application of electricity to your frontal lobe.”
I felt cold at that. I swung my legs out of his bed (he was sleeping on the pullout couch) and watched him take off his show clothes, hanging them up carefully and replacing them with a pair of plain white pajamas that looked like something inmate extras might wear in a horror movie set in an insane asylum. Sometimes I wondered if he might not belong in an asylum, and not because he was running what was essentially a carny wonder-show. Sometimes—especially when he talked about the curative powers of electricity—he got a look in his eyes that didn’t seem sane. It was not unlike the way he’d looked when he preached himself out of a job in Harlow.
“Charlie . . .” This was what I called him now. “Are you talking about shock treatment?”
He looked at me soberly, buttoning the top of his white inmate pajamas. “Yes and no. Certainly not in the conventional sense, because I don’t intend to treat you with conventional electricity. My spiel sounds unbelievable, because it’s what the customers want. They don’t come here for reality, Jamie, they come for fantasy. But there really is a secret electricity, and its uses are manifold. I just haven’t discovered all of them
yet, and that includes the one that interests me most.”
“Want to share?”
“No. I gave several exhausting performances, and I need sleep. I hope you’ll still be here in the morning, but if you’re not, that’s your choice.”
“Once upon a time you would have said there are no real choices, only God’s will.”
“That was a different man. A young fellow with naïve beliefs. Will you wish me goodnight?”
I did, then lay in the bed he had given up so I could use it. He was no longer a preacher, but still of the Good Samaritan stripe in so many ways. I hadn’t been naked, like the man who had been set upon by robbers on his way to Jericho, but heroin had robbed me of plenty for sure. He had fed me, and given me shelter, and propped me up with just enough horse to keep me from going out of my fucking mind. The question now was whether or not I wanted to give him a chance to blast my brainwaves flat. Or outright kill me by shooting megavolts of “special electricity” into my head.
Five times, maybe ten or a dozen, I thought I would get up and drag the midway until I found somebody who’d sell me what I needed. That need was like a drillbit in my head, boring in deeper and deeper. Nasally administered sips of H didn’t cut it. I needed a big blast direct to the central nervous system. Once I actually swung my legs out of bed and reached for my shirt, determined to do it and get it done, but then I lay back down again, shaking and sweating and twitching.
Finally I began to drift off. I let myself go, thinking Tomorrow. I’ll leave tomorrow. But I stayed. And on my fifth morning—I think it was the fifth—Jacobs slipped behind the wheel of his Bounder, keyed the engine, and said, “Let’s take a ride.”
I had no choice about it, unless I wanted to open the door and jump out, because we were already rolling.
VI
The Electrical Treatment. A Nighttime Excursion. One Pissed-Off Okie. A Ticket on the Mountain Express.
Jacobs’s electrical workshop was in West Tulsa. I don’t know what that part of town is like now, but in 1992 it was a forlorn industrial zone where a lot of the industries seemed to be dead or dying. He pulled into the parking lot of an all-but-destitute strip mall on Olympia Avenue and parked in front of Wilson Auto Body.
“It was standing empty for a long time, that’s what the Realtor told me,” Jacobs said. He was dressed in faded jeans and a blue golf shirt, his hair washed and combed, his eyes sparkling with excitement. Just looking at him made me nervous. “I had to take a year’s lease, but it was still dirt cheap. Come on in.”
“You ought to take down the sign and put up your own,” I said. I framed it with hands that were only shaking a little. “‘Portraits in Lightning, C. D. Jacobs, Proprietor.’ It would look good.”
“I won’t be in Tulsa that long,” he said, “and the portraits are really just a way of supporting myself while I conduct my experiments. I’ve come a long way since my pastoral days, but I’ve still got a long way to go. You have no idea. Come in, Jamie. Come in.”
He unlocked a door and led me through an office that was empty of furniture, although I could still see square clean patches on the grimy linoleum, where the legs of a desk had once stood. On the wall was a curling calendar with April 1989 showing.
The garage had a corrugated metal roof and I expected it to be baking under the September sun, but it was wonderfully cool. I could hear the whisper of air conditioners. When he flicked a bank of switches—recently modified, judging from the makeshift way the wires stuck out of the uncovered holes where the plates had been—a dozen brilliant lights came on. If not for the oil-darkened concrete and the rectangular caverns where two lifts had once been, you would have thought it was an operating theater.
“It must cost a fortune to air-condition this place,” I said. “Especially when you’ve got all those lights blazing.”
“Dirt cheap. The air conditioners are my own design. They draw very little power, and most of that I generate myself. I could generate all of it, but I wouldn’t want Tulsa Power and Light down here, snooping around to find out if I was volt-jacking, somehow. As for the lights . . . you could wrap a hand around one of the bulbs without burning yourself. Or even heating your skin, for that matter.”
Our footfalls echoed in all that empty space. So did our voices. It was like being in the company of phantoms. It just feels that way because I’m strung out, I told myself.
“Listen, Charlie—you’re not messing with anything radioactive, are you?”
He grimaced and shook his head. “Nuclear’s the last thing I’m interested in. It’s energy for idiots. A dead end.”
“So how do you generate the juice?”
“Electricity breeds electricity, if you know what you’re doing. Leave it at that. Step over here, Jamie.”
There were three or four long tables at the end of the room with electrical stuff on them. I recognized an oscilloscope, a spectrometer, and a couple of things that resembled Marshall amps but could have been batteries of some kind. There was a control board that looked mostly torn apart, and several stacked consoles with darkened dials. Thick electrical cords snaked every whichway. Some disappeared into closed metal containers that could have been Craftsman tool chests; others just looped back to the dark equipment.
This could all be a fantasy, I thought. Equipment that only comes alive in his imagination. But the Portraits in Lightning weren’t make-believe. I had no idea how he was making those, his explanation had been vague at best, but he was making them. And although I was standing directly beneath one of those brilliant lights, it really did not seem to be throwing any heat.
“There doesn’t seem to be much here,” I said doubtfully. “I expected more.”
“Flashing lights! Chrome-plated knife-switches sticking out of science fiction control panels! Star Trek telescreens! Possibly a teleportation chamber, or a hologram of Noah’s Ark in a cloud chamber!” He laughed cheerily.
“Nothing like that,” I said, although he had pretty much hit the nail on the head. “It just seems kind of . . . sparse.”
“It is. I’ve gone about as far as I can for the time being. I’ve sold some of my equipment. Other stuff—more controversial stuff—I’ve dismantled and put in storage. I’ve done good work in Tulsa, especially considering how little spare time I have. Keeping body and soul together is an annoying business, as I suppose you know.”
I certainly did.
“But yes, I made some progress toward my ultimate goal. Now I need to think, and I don’t believe I can do that when I’m turning half a dozen tips a night.”
“Your ultimate goal being what?”
He ignored the question this time, too. “Step over here, Jamie. Would you like a small pick-me-up before we begin?”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to begin, but I wanted a pick-me-up, all right. Not for the first time, I considered just snatching the little brown bottle and running. Only he’d probably catch me and wrest it away. I was younger, and almost over the flu, but he was still in better shape. He hadn’t suffered a shattered hip and leg in a motorcycle accident, for one thing.
He grabbed a paint-spattered wooden chair and set it in front of one of the black boxes that looked like a Marshall amp. “Sit here.”
But I didn’t, not right away. There was a picture on one of the tables, the kind with a little wedge on the back to prop it up. He saw me reach for it and made a move as if to stop me. Then he just stood there.
A song on the radio can bring back the past with fierce (if mercifully transitory) immediacy: a first kiss, a good time with your buddies, or an unhappy life-passage. I can never hear Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way” without thinking of my mother’s last painful weeks; that spring it seemed to be on the radio every time I turned it on. A picture can have the same effect. I looked at this one and all at once I was eight again. My sister was helping Morrie set up dominos in Toy Corner while Patsy Jacobs playe
d “Bringing in the Sheaves,” swaying on the piano bench, her smooth blond hair shifting from side to side.
It was a studio portrait. Patsy was wearing the sort of billowy, shin-length dress that went out of fashion years ago, but it looked good on her. The kid was on her lap, wearing short pants and a sweater vest. A cowlick I remembered well stuck up at the back of his head.
“We used to call him Tag-Along-Morrie,” I said, running my fingers lightly over the glass.
“Did you?”
I didn’t look up. His unsteady voice made me afraid of what I might see in his eyes. “Yeah. And all of us boys were in love with your wife. Claire was, too. I think Mrs. Jacobs was what she wanted to be.”
At the thought of my sister, my own eyes began to fill up. I could tell you it was just because I was physically low and full of craving, and it would be the truth, but not the whole truth.
I swiped an arm across my face and set the picture down. When I looked up, he was fiddling with a voltage regulator that didn’t look like it needed fiddling with. “You never remarried?”
“No,” he said. “Never even close. Patsy and Morrie were all I wanted. Needed. There’s not a day when I don’t think of them, not a month when I don’t have a dream that they’re okay. It was the accident that was the dream, I think. Then I wake up. Tell me something, Jamie. Your mother and your sister. Do you ever wonder where they are? If they are?”
“No.” Any scraps of belief that survived the Terrible Sermon had withered away in high school and college.
“Ah. I see.” He dropped the regulator and turned on the thing that looked like a Marshall amp—the kind of amp the bands I played with could rarely afford. It hummed, but not like a Marshall. This sound was lower, and almost musical. “Well, let’s get on with it, shall we?”
I looked at the chair, but didn’t sit on it. “You were going to give me a little hit first.”
“So I was.” He produced the brown bottle, considered it, then handed it to me. “Since we can hope this will be your last, why don’t you do the honors?”