by Vincent, Bev
Eddie knows what will happen to Roland’s body when he goes through the doorway, and threatens to kill the gunslinger if he doesn’t promise to take Eddie with him once his business with the Lady of Shadows is done. Like anyone in the grip of addiction, he knows how to dissemble. All he wants is something to eat other than lobstrosity, he claims. Fried chicken and doughnuts. That’s all.
Roland knows better than to trust a junkie. “Until after the Tower, at least, that part of your life is done. After that I don’t care. After that you’re free to go to hell in your own way. Until then I need you.” He tries to appeal to Eddie’s good, strong side. The quest that lies ahead of them is a chance for Eddie to redeem his honor. “You could be a gunslinger. I needn’t be the last after all. It’s in you, Eddie. I see it. I feel it.”
Eddie, who isn’t so sure he’s going to have a life after they reach the Tower, continues threatening to kill Roland as the gunslinger passes through the doorway. He can’t follow without Roland’s cooperation, but even with a gun and a knife to wield over the gunslinger’s limp body, he doesn’t have the power to coerce someone willing to yield his life to fate.
The second doorway reveals a world that Roland recognizes as Eddie’s. Eddie—watching from the beach—knows that the setting is decades before his era. As they watch, the woman, who Eddie thinks is “one rude bitch,” steals some cheap cosmetic jewelry from a store display.
“The Lady of Shadows” is Odetta Holmes, a young, affluent, disabled woman—she thinks of herself as Negro and is offended when Eddie refers to her as black—living in 1964. Her tarot card showed a woman who seemed to be “smiling craftily and sobbing at the same time.” Walter called her a “veritable Janus,” referring to the Roman god of gates and doorways, often depicted with two faces looking in opposite directions. It’s an appropriate symbol for a woman who suffers from multiple personality disorder.5
Because she lost her legs from the knees down when she was pushed in front of a train, Odetta is wheelchair bound. This accounts for the strange, gliding view Eddie observes through the doorway, which reminds him of a Steadicam shot from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The accident also causes her second personality, Detta Walker, who first appeared after a head injury when Odetta was five, to manifest more strongly and frequently.
Odetta’s history is revealed through a series of flashbacks, a different approach to how King disclosed Eddie’s history. Roland learned about Eddie by sharing his memories and from Eddie himself as they walked along the beach. For Odetta, King switches perspective and tells who she is in narrative that Roland isn’t privy to. The paragraph in which King describes Detta’s existence runs three pages, most of it a single sentence, a rant that reveals something of her mental process.
Odetta is in one of her Detta phases, on a shoplifting spree at Macy’s. Stealing is one way she expresses her rage. She never takes anything of value, and discards whatever she takes shortly after. The items are cheap, like she believes herself to be. The act of stealing is what is important to her.
Roland entered Eddie without being noticed, but Detta detects Roland’s presence immediately and without apparent surprise. She’s outraged because he’s white, and tries to fight him off. Detta also briefly senses her other personality, “not the way one would look at her reflection in a mirror, but as separate people; the window became a windowpane and for a moment Odetta had seen Detta and Detta had seen Odetta and had been equally horror-struck.” Eddie, looking through Detta’s eyes, sees himself briefly in a disjointed, out-of-body manner.
Roland takes control and drives her into a changing room and through the doorway. By the time they reach the other side, Odetta has reasserted control.
Eddie is kneeling on the ground next to the gunslinger, knife in hand. The last thing Odetta remembers is being at home watching the news on television. A flood of questions flies from her. She asks, “Who am I?” before she even inquires who Roland and Eddie are. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, Dorothy,” Eddie said. “You ain’t in Kansas anymore,” foreshadowing—or perhaps inspiring—events to come in Wizard and Glass.
Odetta reacts to her new situation with deliberate disbelief. She thinks she’s either gone insane or suffered another head injury. Eddie tells her of his own experience, but she refuses to accept the reality of her situation and retreats into denial. She doesn’t wear jewelry, she claims, and the fact that she has on cheap rings, and other contradictions, only makes her head hurt.
While Roland doesn’t see how Odetta can possibly be of any use to him on his quest, he understands that she will be good for Eddie. She is vulnerable and afraid. Eddie has someone to look after, to replace his brother. Roland tries to warn Eddie about her other personality, as dangerous as the lobstrosities, but Eddie is smitten. He hears with his ears, but not with his heart. Roland, who has coexisted with Detta Walker, knows what she may be capable of. He also knows that Eddie will only truly believe how dangerous Detta can be by experience, so he loads his guns with spent casings and waits for Detta to prove herself.6 “A child doesn’t understand a hammer until he’s mashed his finger at a nail,” Cort once said.
After hearing Eddie’s story about Detta’s and Odetta’s brief awareness of each other, Roland realizes that somehow he will have to make her two personalities face each other and unite. The person he needs at his side on the road to the Dark Tower must have Detta’s “fight until you drop” stamina tempered by Odetta’s calm humanity.
Odetta fills the gaps in her memory that are caused when Detta is in control with pleasant fabrications. Detta fills hers with false memories of being brutalized by white people. When she reemerges that night, she is convinced Eddie slapped her, fed her monster meat and taunted her with slowly roasted beef after tying her to her wheelchair. She steals Roland’s specially prepared gun and pulls the trigger with the barrel pointed at Eddie’s temple.
Roland’s lessons are rarely gentle. He lets Detta pull the trigger several times to make sure Eddie knows what she tried to do. He doesn’t intervene when she batters him with the gun butt. “If Eddie hadn’t learned his lesson by now, he never would.” Eddie doesn’t argue when Roland suggests they tie up her hands and strap her into her wheelchair.
They continue north along the beach but, now that they have to push Detta’s wheelchair, their progress slows to a crawl. Roland has another problem. The antibiotic regimen was insufficient to defeat the infection and it returns with a vengeance, meaning that Eddie has to do most of the work. After years as a junkie, he jokes that he has turned into a pusher. This pun anticipates Jack Mort, whose door will be labeled THE PUSHER, bringing to mind drug dealers rather than Mort’s unique type of pushing.
Purely out of perversity, Detta does everything possible to thwart their progress. She uses her weight to make it harder to free the heavy wheelchair from the frequent sand traps they encounter. When Eddie finds a patch of solid ground and can move at a reasonable clip, she engages the chair’s brake to topple herself over. At night, exhausted from their day’s journey, Detta screams them awake. Roland appeals to the Odetta within to take control if possible.
Everything is working against them. Roland’s illness is advancing rapidly. They are down to relying on the questionable ammunition. Even Eddie is getting sick from vitamin deficiency caused by a steady diet of lobstrosity. Detta’s persistence is tiring him to the point of fatigue.
After several days of slow, plodding progress, Odetta reasserts control of her body. Roland has been holding himself together out of necessity, knowing he has to watch out for Eddie with Detta. Once Odetta is back, he collapses. Now he is the one holding up their progress. He sends Eddie and Odetta on alone, warning Eddie to be alert. If Detta returns, he tells Eddie to “brain” her. If he kills her, Roland’s quest is probably doomed, but if she kills Eddie, Roland will die, either at her hands or from his illness.
Without Detta working against him, Eddie feels like they’re flying up the beach. After their first day of travel with
out finding the third doorway, Eddie and Odetta make love on the beach under alien stars. The next afternoon, they reach the door.
Odetta knows the gunslinger doesn’t want her to have his gun, but Eddie can’t bring himself to leave her alone for two days with only a few stones to protect herself against the wildcats they hear screaming in the mountains. Roland knows that Detta armed would be a formidable creature, but the moment Eddie returns, Roland knows he has gone against orders.
When they reach the door, Odetta is gone, but Roland is sure she isn’t dead, or the doorway would be gone, too. Roland’s quest would die with her. Eddie won’t abandon his search for her, and Roland is too weak to trick him through the doorway, where he would be safer. He leaves Eddie with his remaining gun and crosses the threshold to New York. Regardless of the doorway’s label, Roland knows that it somehow means death.
The third mind Roland enters belongs to a sociopath. King is uncharacteristically unsubtle by naming this dealer of death Jack Mort. Mort has absolutely no awareness of Roland. He’s too intent on his current task: preparing to push Jake Chambers in front of a car.
At first, Roland thinks he will be forced to witness Jake’s fatal accident, a fitting punishment for sacrificing the boy beneath the mountains. His own hands, in a way, would be responsible. However, “the rejection of brutish destiny had been the gunslinger’s work all his life,” so Roland steps forward, distracting Mort long enough for him to miss his chance. Jake isn’t crushed beneath the wheels of Balazar’s 1976 Cadillac Sedan de Ville.7
It occurs to Roland that if Jack Mort had meant to kill the boy, he might have to stand aside and let it happen, but he can’t allow himself to be responsible for Jake’s death a second time. Through this instinctual act, Roland has performed selflessly for the first time. His extended contact with Eddie makes him consider the human implications of his decisions.
He doesn’t stop to think about the paradox he has just created or whether he may have jeopardized his mission. Jake reached the way station not through a doorway but by being reborn into Roland’s world after dying in his own. By apparently saving the boy’s life, the gunslinger nullified Jake’s part in Roland’s past. Though he later realizes that this wasn’t the day Jake died, because the boy told him Mort had been dressed like a priest, Roland’s pending destruction of Mort makes the point moot.
Through the doorway, he sees that Detta has Eddie tied up at the mercy of the lobstrosities. He recognizes it as a trick to get him to come back to the beach. She could kill Roland by shooting his helpless body, but she wants more than that.
With intuition that defies logic, Roland knows what he needs to do. Jack Mort, who caused both of Odetta’s life-altering injuries, isn’t meant to join his ka-tet, much to Roland’s relief. Mort represents death, not for Roland but for the individual entities that call themselves Odetta Holmes and Detta Walker. His plan is risky, and he needs Mort’s cooperation to pull it off.
Once Mort realizes he has been possessed by another entity, his conscious mind faints, which is a great relief to Roland, who is repulsed by the man’s worm pit of a mind.8 Roland has complete control over Mort’s body and memories, and uses him as a reference book for the information he needs to replenish his supply of ammunition and get his much-needed medication.
His first destination is a gun shop, where he finds more bullets than he could ever have imagined. Because he doesn’t have a gun permit, Roland is forced to orchestrate an elegant scam involving a couple of police officers9 and the shop owner. He can’t imagine needing the two hundred bullets he can afford with Mort’s money, but he can’t deny the temptation to have them. He also takes the cops’ guns, intending them for Eddie and Odetta, when and if she is ever ready to bear arms. He enjoys the sensation of being able to hold a weapon in a whole right hand again.
Next, Roland commits what the pharmacist believes to be the first penicillin robbery in history. Though he has to use his guns to control the situation, it’s not really a robbery. After getting two hundred doses of Keflex, Roland leaves behind Mort’s Rolex watch in payment. He even exhibits concern for the general safety of bystanders, something he didn’t do in Tull.
His material tasks completed, Roland has one more job in Jack Mort’s body. He hijacks a cop car and lets Mort drive to the Greenwich Village station where he pushed Odetta Holmes.10 The police officers who follow Mort are more worthy of Roland’s admiration than the ones at the gun shop. One cop almost takes down Mort, but the bullet is stopped by his cigarette lighter—perhaps placed there by ka—which he carried to curry favor with his superiors at work. Lighter fluid catches fire in Mort’s pocket. Roland guides the burning man toward the coming subway train, not knowing for sure if it was the same train that struck Odetta, but knowing all the same because this is the way of ka.
Everything must come together in a split second. Roland projects a message to his Lady of Shadows, calling her by both her names. When she turns to look, Roland jumps Mort’s body onto the tracks, where the train cuts him in half at the waist a split second after Roland crosses back to Mid-World with his boxes of bullets and antibiotics but without the cops’ guns.
As Mort’s body is divided, Odetta and Detta split into two physical entities and struggle with each other and the implications of what they witnessed through their own eyes and through Jack Mort’s. Odetta embraces Detta and says, “I love you,” at which the two become one again. This new person, whole for the first time since Jack Mort dropped a brick on her head, a woman of heart-stopping beauty, takes Roland’s guns down to the beach to save Eddie from the lobstrosities.
The woman formed from Odetta and Detta adopts their middle name, Susannah, and will soon take Eddie’s last name for her own. She’s exactly what Roland hoped for: someone who possesses the strengths of her antecedents. At times she will revert to Detta, especially when she wants to distance herself emotionally from something or requires the heart and mind of a killer when in battle. Roland is never convinced that he has completely cured Susannah, and readily accepts the appearance of Mia as a new personality. Walter said she had “at least” two faces. “You can burn away warts by painting them with silver metal . . . but in a person prone to warts, they’ll come back.” [DT5]
Roland believes that Susannah is the third person he was meant to draw from New York. Her very nature is three: “I who was; I who had no right to be but was; I am the woman who you have saved.” However, by killing Jack Mort, Roland has set up conditions for Jake, the real third person drawn to his ka-tet, to return to Mid-World.
After they reach the end of the beach, the trio travels through the hills, leaving the Western Sea behind. Roland dreams of the Tower again and hears its voices summoning him.
It stood on the horizon of a vast plain the color of blood in the violent setting of a dying sun. He couldn’t see the stairs which spiraled up and up and up within its brick shell, but he could see the windows which spiraled up along that staircase’s way, and saw the ghosts of all the people he had ever known pass through them. Up and up they marched, and an arid wind brought him the sound of voices calling his name.
Eddie knows that the gunslinger would sacrifice his new companions if his quest called for it, and tells Roland his brother taught him that if you kill what you love you’re damned. Roland thinks he may already be damned for having sacrificed Jake but he sees the possibility of redemption. He isn’t necessarily doomed by his inflexibility and narrow focus. He promises Eddie that he wouldn’t consider sacrificing them—would not have sacrificed Jake—if there was only this world to win. His mission is to save everything there is. “We are going to go, Eddie. We are going to fight. We are going to be hurt. And in the end we will stand.”
Roland and Eddie have a grudging respect for each other. They understand one another’s strengths, but they also know each other’s weaknesses. Though Eddie is destined to become a gunslinger as deadly as Roland—and he has already proven himself in battle—he hasn’t yet lost his heart to the Tow
er. He has discovered love and despises Roland’s callousness and single-mindedness.
In the weeks to come, Roland will instruct Eddie—and Susannah—in survival. Eddie will teach Roland about friendship and love. For his part, Roland has felt and seen the steel within Eddie, but his sarcastic humor and weak, insecure character annoy him. He’s predisposed toward this irritation because he’s been through it before with Cuthbert Allgood. Though they would be loath to admit it, the two men complete each other in much the same way Detta and Odetta complete Susannah. They counterbalance each other throughout the arduous journey ahead of them. Susannah is the wild card. Roland and Eddie know something of her constituent parts, but they still have to acquaint themselves with the composite person who has arisen from their ashes.
Critic Tony Magistrale says that Roland progresses toward a fuller realization of his heroic potential in this book. He’s still violent, but the level of violence is more appropriate to the behavior of a hero.11 The book is richer because it expands its scope beyond Roland by introducing two new major characters.
By the time he finished writing The Drawing of the Three, King had a rough idea of what would transpire in the next two volumes. “This work seems to be my own Tower, you know. These people haunt me, Roland most of all.” For the first time, he raises the possibility that Roland won’t reach the Tower, though someone from his group surely will.
In the afterword, King says that he still doesn’t know what the Tower is or what awaits Roland when he reaches it. Roland himself wonders if it represents damnation or salvation. All King knows is that the Tower, whatever it is, is closer.