4

   He walked for three hours. He fell twice, and the second time he did not believe he would be able to get up again. Then a wave came toward him, close enough to make him remember his guns, and he was up before he knew it, standing on legs that quivered like stilts.
   He thought he had managed about four miles in those three hours. Now the sun was growing hot, but not hot enough to explain the way his head pounded or the sweat pouring down his face; nor was the breeze from the sea strong enough to explain the sudden fits of shuddering which sometimes gripped him, making his body lump into gooseflesh and his teeth chatter.
   Fever, gunslinger, the man in black tittered. What's left inside you has been touched afire.
   The red lines of infection were more pronounced now; they had marched upward from his right wrist halfway to his elbow.
   He made another mile and drained his waterbag dry. He tied it around his waist with the other. The landscape was monotonous and unpleasing. The sea to his right, the mountains to his left, the gray, shell-littered sand under the feet of his cut-down boots. The waves came and went. He looked for the lobstrosities and saw none. He walked out of nowhere toward nowhere, a man from another time who, it seemed, had reached a point of pointless ending.
   Shortly before noon he fell again and knew he could not get up. This was the place, then. Here. This was the end, after all.
   On his hands and knees, he raised his head like a groggy fighter … and some distance ahead, perhaps a mile, perhaps three (it was difficult to judge distances along the unchanging reach of the strand with the fever working inside him, making his eyeballs pulse in and out), he saw something new. Something which stood upright on the beach.
   What was it?
   (three)
   Didn't matter.
   (three is the number of your fate)
   The gunslinger managed to get to his feet again. He croaked something, some plea which only the circling sea-birds heard (and how happy they would be to gobble my eyes from my head, he thought, how happy to have such a tasty bit!), and walked on, weaving more seriously now, leaving tracks behind him that were weird loops and swoops.
   He kept his eyes on whatever it was that stood on the strand ahead. When his hair fell in his eyes he brushed it aside. It seemed to grow no closer. The sun reached the roof of the sky, where it seemed to remain far too long. Roland imagined he was in the desert again, somewhere between the last out-lander's hut
   (the musical fruit the more you eat the more you toot)
   and the way-station where the boy
   (your Isaac)
   had awaited his coming.
   His knees buckled, straightened, buckled, straightened again. When his hair fell in his eyes once more he did not bother to push it back; did not have the strength to push it back. He looked at the object, which now cast a narrow shadow back toward the upland, and kept walking.
   He could make it out now, fever or no fever.
   It was a door.
   Less than a quarter of a mile from it, Roland's knees buckled again and this time he could not stiffen their hinges. He fell, his right hand dragged across gritty sand and shells, the stumps of his fingers screamed as fresh scabs were scored away. The stumps began to bleed again.
   So he crawled. Crawled with the steady rush, roar, and retreat of the Western Sea in his ears. He used his elbows and his knees, digging grooves in the sand above the twist of dirty green kelp which marked the high-tide line. He supposed the wind was still blowing―it must be, for the chills continued to whip through his body―but the only wind he could hear was the harsh gale which gusted in and out of his own lungs.
   The door grew closer.
   Closer.
   At last, around three o'clock of that long delirious day, with his shadow beginning to grow long on his left, he reached it. He sat back on his haunches and regarded it wearily.
   It stood six and a half feet high and appeared to be made of solid ironwood, although the nearest ironwood tree must grow seven hundred miles or more from here. The doorknob looked as if it were made of gold, and it was filigreed with a design which the gunslinger finally recognized: it was the grinning face of the baboon.
   There was no keyhole in the knob, above it, or below it.
   The door had hinges, but they were fastened to nothing―or so it seems, the gunslinger thought. This is a mystery, a most marvellous mystery, but does it really matter? You are dying. Your own mystery—the only one that really matters to any man or woman in the end―approaches.
   All the same, it did seem to matter.
   This door. This door where no door should be. It simply stood there on the gray strand twenty feet above the high tide line, seemingly as eternal as the sea itself, now casting the slanted shadow of its thickness toward the east as the sun westered.
   Written upon it in black letters two-thirds of the way up, written in the high speech, were two words:
   THE PRISONER
   A demon has infested him. The name of the demon is HEROIN.
   The gunslinger could hear a low droning noise. At first he thought it must be the wind or a sound in his own feverish head, but he became more and more convinced that the sound was the sound of motors … and that it was coming from behind the door.
   Open it then. It's not locked. You know it's not locked.
   Instead he tottered gracelessly to his feet and walked above the door and around to the other side.
   There was no other side.
   Only the dark gray strand, stretching back and back. Only the waves, the shells, the high-tide line, the marks of his own approach―bootprints and holes that had been made by his elbows. He looked again and his eyes widened a little. The door wasn't here, but its shadow was.
   He started to put out his right hand―oh, it was so slow learning its new place in what was left of his life―dropped it, and raised his left instead. He groped, feeling for hard resistance.
   If I feel it I'll knock on nothing, the gunslinger thought. That would be an interesting thing to do before dying!
   His hand encountered thin air far past the place where the door―even if invisible―should have been.
   Nothing to knock on.
   And the sound of motors―if that's what it really had been―was gone. Now there was just the wind, the waves, and the sick buzzing inside his head.
   The gunslinger walked slowly back to the other side of what wasn't there, already thinking it had been a hallucination to start with, a―
   He stopped.
   At one moment he had been looking west at an uninterrupted view of a gray, rolling wave, and then his view was interrupted by the thickness of the door. He could see its keyplate, which also looked like gold, with the latch protruding from it like a stubby metal tongue. Roland moved his head an inch to the north and the door was gone. Moved it back to where it had been and it was there again. It did not appear; it was just there.
   He walked all the way around and faced the door, swaying.
   He could walk around on the sea side, but he was convinced that the same thing would happen, only this time he would fall down.
   I wonder if I could go through it from the nothing side?
   Oh, there were all sorts of things to wonder about, but the truth was simple: here stood this door alone on an endless stretch of beach, and it was for only one of two things: opening or leaving closed.
   The gunslinger realized with dim humor that maybe he wasn't dying quite as fast as he thought. If he had been, would he feel this scared?
   He reached out and grasped the doorknob with his left hand. Neither the deadly cold of the metal or the thin, fiery heat of the runes engraved upon it surprised him.
   He turned the knob. The door opened toward him when he pulled.
   Of all the things he might have expected, this was not any of them.
   The gunslinger looked, froze, uttered the first scream of terror in his adult life, and slammed the door. There was nothing for it to bang shut on, but it banged shut just the same, sending seabirds screeching up from the rocks on which they had perched to watch him.

5

   What he had seen was the earth from some high, impossible distance in the sky―miles up, it seemed. He had seen the shadows of clouds lying upon that earth, floating across it like dreams. He had seen what an eagle might see if one could fly thrice as high as any eagle could.
   To step through such a door would be to fall, screaming, for what might be minutes, and to end by driving one's self deep into the earth.
   No, you saw more.
   He considered it as he sat stupidly on the sand in front of the closed door with his wounded hand in his lap. The first faint traceries had appeared above his elbow now. The infection would reach his heart soon enough, no doubt about that.
   It was the voice of Cort in his head.
   Listen to me, maggots. Listen for your lives, for that's what it could mean some day. You never see all that you see. One of the things they send you to me for is to show you what you don't see in what you see―what you don't see when you're scared, or fighting, or running, or fucking. No man sees all that he sees, but before you're gunslingers―those of you who don't go west, that is―you'll see more in one single glance than some men see in a lifetime. And some of what you don't see in that glance you'll see afterwards, in the eye of your memory―if you live long enough to remember, that is. Because the difference between seeing and not seeing can be the difference between living and dying.
   He had seen the earth from this huge height (and it had somehow been more dizzying and distorting than the vision of growth which had come upon him shortly before the end of his time with the man in black, because what he had seen through the door had been no vision), and what little remained of his attention had registered the fact that the land he was seeing was neither desert nor sea but some green place of incredible lushness with interstices of water that made him think it was a swamp, but―
   What little remained of your attention, the voice of Cort mimicked savagely. You saw more!
   Yes.
   He had seen white.
   White edges.
   Bravo, Roland! Cort cried in his mind, and Roland seemed to feel the swat of that hard, callused hand. He winced.
   He had been looking through a window.
   The gunslinger stood with an effort, reached forward, felt cold and burning lines of thin heat against his palm. He opened the door again.

6

   The view he had expected―that view of the earth from some horrendous, unimaginable height―was gone. He was looking at words he didn't understand. He almost understood them; it was as if the Great Letters had been twisted.…
   Above the words was a picture of a horseless vehicle, a motor-car of the sort which had supposedly filled the world before it moved on. Suddenly he thought of the things Jake had said when, at the way station, the gunslinger had hypnotized him.
   This horseless vehicle with a woman wearing a fur stole laughing beside it, could be whatever had run Jake over in that strange other world.
   This is that other world, the gunslinger thought.
   Suddenly the view …
   It did not change; it moved. The gunslinger wavered on his feet, feeling vertigo and a touch of nausea. The words and the picture descended and now he saw an aisle with a double row of seats on the far side. A few were empty, but there were men in most of them, men in strange dress. He supposed they were suits, but he had never seen any like them before. The things around their necks could likewise be ties or cravats, but he had seen none like these, either. And, so far as he could tell, not one of them was armed―he saw no dagger nor sword, let alone a gun. What kind of trusting sheep were these? Some read papers covered with tiny words—words broken here and there with pictures―while others wrote on papers with pens of a sort the gunslinger had never seen. But the pens mattered little to him. It was the paper. He lived in a world where paper and gold were valued in rough equivalency. He had never seen so much paper in his life. Even now one of the men tore a sheet from the yellow pad which lay upon his lap and crumpled it into a ball, although he had only written on the top half of one side and not at all on the other. The gunslinger was not too sick to feel a twinge of horror and outrage at such unnatural profligacy.
   Beyond the men was a curved white wall and a row of windows. A few of these were covered by some sort of shutters, but he could see blue sky beyond others.
   Now a woman approached the doorway, a woman wearing what looked like a uniform, but of no sort Roland had ever seen. It was bright red, and part of it was pants. He could see the place where her legs became her crotch. This was nothing he had ever seen on a woman who was not undressed.
   She came so close to the door that Roland thought she would walk through, and he blundered back a step, lucky not to fall. She looked at him with the practiced solicitude of a woman who is at once a servant and no one's mistress but her own. This did not interest the gunslinger. What interested him was that her expression never changed. It was not the way you expected a woman―anybody, for that matter―to look at a dirty, swaying, exhausted man with revolvers crisscrossed on his hips, a blood-soaked rag wrapped around his right hand, and jeans which looked as if they'd been worked on with some kind of buzzsaw.
   "Would you like …" the woman in red asked. There was more, but the gunslinger didn't understand exactly what it meant. Food or drink, he thought. That red cloth―it was not cotton. Silk? It looked a little like silk, but―
   "Gin," a voice answered, and the gunslinger understood that. Suddenly he understood much more:
   It wasn't a door.
   It was eyes.
   Insane as it might seem, he was looking at part of a carriage that flew through the sky. He was looking through someone's eyes.
   Whose?
   But he knew. He was looking through the eyes of the prisoner.

CHAPTER 2
EDDIE DEAN

1

   As if to confirm this idea, mad as it was, what the gunslinger was looking at through the doorway suddenly rose and slid sidewards. The view turned (that feeling of vertigo again, a feeling of standing still on a plate with wheels under it, a plate which hands he could not see moved this way and that), and then the aisle was flowing past the edges of the doorway. He passed a place where several women, all dressed in the same red uniforms, stood. This was a place of steel things, and he would have liked to make the moving view stop in spite of his pain and exhaustion so he could see what the steel things were―machines of some sort. One looked a bit like an oven. The army woman he had already seen was pouring the gin which the voice had requested. The bottle she poured from was very small. It was glass. The vessel she was pouring it into looked like glass but the gunslinger didn't think it actually was.
   What the doorway showed had moved along before he could see more. There was another of those dizzying turns and he was looking at a metal door. There was a lighted sign in a small oblong. This word the gunslinger could read. VACANT, it said.
   The view slid down a little. A hand entered it from the right of the door the gunslinger was looking through and grasped the knob of the door the gunslinger was looking at. He saw the cuff of a blue shirt, slightly pulled back to reveal crisp curls of black hair. Long fingers. A ring on one of them, with a jewel set into it that might have been a ruby or a firedim or a piece of trumpery trash. The gunslinger rather thought it this last―it was too big and vulgar to be real.
   The metal door swung open and the gunslinger was looking into the strangest privy he had ever seen. It was all metal.
   The edges of the metal door flowed past the edges of the door on the beach. The gunslinger heard the sound of it being closed and latched. He was spared another of those giddy spins, so he supposed the man through whose eyes he was watching must have reached behind himself to lock himself in.
   Then the view did turn―not all the way around but half―and he was looking into a mirror, seeing a face he had seen once before … on a Tarot card. The same dark eyes and spill of dark hair. The face was calm but pale, and in the eyes―eyes through which he saw now reflected back at him―Roland saw some of the dread and horror of that baboon-ridden creature on the Tarot card.
   The man was shaking.
   He's sick, too.
   Then he remembered Nort, the weed-eater in Tull.
   He thought of the Oracle.
   A demon has infested him.
   The gunslinger suddenly thought he might know what HEROIN was after all: something like the devil-grass.
   A trifle upsetting, isn't he?
   Without thought, with the simple resolve that had made him the last of them all, the last to continue marching on and on long after Cuthbert and the others had died or given up, committed suicide or treachery or simply recanted the whole idea of the Tower; with the single-minded and incurious resolve that had driven him across the desert and all the years before the desert in the wake of the man in black, the gunslinger stepped through the doorway.

2

   Eddie ordered a gin and tonic―maybe not such a good idea to be going into New York Customs drunk, and he knew once he got started he would just keep on going―but he had to have something.
   When you got to get down and you can't find the elevator, Henry had told him once, you got to do it any way you can. Even if it's only with a shovel.
   Then, after he'd given his order and the stewardess had left, he started to feel like he was maybe going to vomit. Not for sure going to vomit, only maybe, but it was better to be safe. Going through Customs with a pound of pure cocaine under each armpit with gin on your breath was not so good; going through Customs that way with puke drying on your pants would be disaster. So better to be safe. The feeling would probably pass, it usually did, but better to be safe.
   Trouble was, he was going cool turkey. Cool, not cold. More words of wisdom from that great sage and eminent junkie Henry Dean.
   They had been sitting on the penthouse balcony of the Regency Tower, not quite on the nod but edging toward it, the sun warm on their faces, done up so good … back in the good old days, when Eddie had just started to snort the stuff and Henry himself had yet to pick up his first needle.
   Everybody talks about going cold turkey, Henry had said, but before you get there, you gotta go cool turkey.
   And Eddie, stoned out of his mind, had cackled madly, because he knew exactly what Henry was talking about. Henry, however, had not so much as cracked a smile.
   In some ways cool turkey's worse than cold turkey, Henry said. At least when you make it to cold turkey, you KNOW you're gonna puke, you KNOW you're going to shake, you KNOW you're gonna sweat until it feels like you're drowning in it. Cool turkey is, like, the curse of expectation.
   Eddie remembered asking Henry what you called it when a needle-freak (which, in those dim dead days which must have been all of sixteen months ago, they had both solemnly assured themselves they would never become) got a hot shot.
   You call that baked turkey, Henry had replied promptly, and then had looked surprised, the way a person does when he's said something that turned out to be a lot funnier than he actually thought it would be, and they looked at each other, and then they were both howling with laughter and clutching each other. Baked turkey, pretty funny, not so funny now.
   Eddie walked up the aisle past the galley to the head, checked the sign―VACANT―and opened the door.
   Hey Henry, o great sage if eminent junkie big brother, while we're on the subject of our feathered friends, you want to hear my definition of cooked goose? That's when the Customs guy at Kennedy decides there's something a little funny about the way you look, or it's one of the days when they got the dogs with the PhD noses out there instead of at Port Authority and they all start to bark and pee all over the floor and it's you they're all just about strangling themselves on their choke-chains trying to get to, and after the Customs guys toss all your luggage they take you into the little room and ask you if you'd mind taking off your shirt and you say yeah I sure would I'd mind like hell, I picked up a little cold down in the Bahamas and the air-conditioning in here is real high and I'm afraid it might turn into pneumonia and they say oh is that so, do you always sweat like that when the air-conditioning's too high, Mr. Dean, you do, well, excuse us all to hell, now do it, and you do it, and they say maybe you better take off the t-shirt too, because you look like maybe you got some kind of a medical problem, buddy, those bulges under your pits look like maybe they could be some kind of lymphatic tumors or something, and you don't even bother to say anything else, it's like a center-fielder who doesn't even bother to chase the ball when it's hit a certain way, he just turns around and watches it go into the upper deck, because when it's gone it's gone, so you take off the t-shirt and hey, looky here, you're some lucky kid, those aren't tumors, unless they're what you might call tumors on the corpus of society, yuk-yuk-yuk, those things look more like a couple of baggies held there with Scotch strapping tape, and by the way, don't worry about that smell, son, that's just goose. It's cooked.
   He reached behind him and pulled the locking knob. The lights in the head brightened. The sound of the motors was a soft drone. He turned toward the mirror, wanting to see how bad he looked, and suddenly a terrible, pervasive feeling swept over him: a feeling of being watched.
   Hey, come on, quit it, he thought uneasily. You're supposed to be the most unparanoid guy in the world. That's why they sent you. That's why―
   But it suddenly seemed those were not his own eyes in the mirror, not Eddie Dean's hazel, almost-green eyes that had melted so many hearts and allowed him to part so many pretty sets of legs during the last third of his twenty-one years, not his eyes but those of a stranger. Not hazel but a blue the color of fading Levis . Eyes that were chilly, precise, unexpected marvels of calibration. Bombardier's eyes.
   Reflected in them he saw―clearly saw―a seagull swooping down over a breaking wave and snatching something from it.
   He had time to think What in God's name is this shit? and then he knew it wasn't going to pass; he was going to throw up after all.
   In the half-second before he did, in the half-second he went on looking into the mirror, he saw those blue eyes disappear … but before that happened there was suddenly the feeling of being two people … of being possessed, like the little girl in The Exorcist.
   Clearly he felt a new mind inside his own mind, and heard a thought not as his own thought but more like a voice from a radio: I've come through. I'm in the sky-carriage.
   There was something else, but Eddie didn't hear it. He was too busy throwing up into the basin as quietly as he could.
   When he was done, before he had even wiped his mouth, something happened which had never happened to him before. For one frightening moment there was nothing―only a blank interval. As if a single line in a column of newsprint had been neatly and completely inked out.
   What is this? Eddie thought helplessly. What the hell is this shit?
   Then he had to throw up again, and maybe that was just as well; whatever you might say against it, regurgitation had at least this much in its favor: as long as you were doing it, you couldn't think of anything else.

3

   I've come through. I'm in the sky-carriage, the gunslinger thought. And, a second later: He sees me in the mirror !
   Roland pulled back―did not leave but pulled back, like a child retreating to the furthest corner of a very long room. He was inside the sky-carriage; he was also inside a man who was not himself. Inside The Prisoner. In that first moment, when he had been close to the front (it was the only way he could describe it), he had been more than inside; he had almost been the man. He felt the man's illness, whatever it was, and sensed that the man was about to retch. Roland understood that if he needed to, he could take control of this man's body. He would suffer his pains, would be ridden by whatever demon-ape rode him, but if he needed to he could.
   Or he could stay back here, unnoticed.
   When the prisoner's fit of vomiting had passed, the gunslinger leaped forward—this time all the way to the front. He understood very little about this strange situation, and to act in a situation one does not understand is to invite the most terrible consequences, but there were two things he needed to know―and he needed to know them so desperately that the needing outweighed any consequences which might arise.
   Was the door he had come through from his own world still there?
   And if it was, was his physical self still there, collapsed, untenanted, perhaps dying or already dead without his self's self to go on unthinkingly running lungs and heart and nerves? Even if his body still lived, it might only continue to do so until night fell. Then the lobstrosities would come out to ask their questions and look for shore dinners.
   He snapped the head which was for a moment his head around in a fast backward glance.
   The door was still there, still behind him. It stood open on his own world, its hinges buried in the steel of this peculiar privy. And, yes, there he lay, Roland, the last gunslinger, lying on his side, his bound right hand on his stomach.
   I'm breathing, Roland thought. I’llhave to go back and move me. But there are things to do first. Things …
   He let go of the prisoner's mind and retreated, watching, waiting to see if the prisoner knew he was there or not.

4

   After the vomiting stopped, Eddie remained bent over the basin, eyes tightly closed.
   Blanked there for a second. Don't know what it was. Did I look around?
   He groped for the faucet and ran cool water. Eyes still closed, he splashed it over his cheeks and brow.
   When it could be avoided no longer, he looked up into the mirror again.
   His own eyes looked back at him.
   There were no alien voices in his head.
   No feeling of being watched.
   You had a momentary fugue, Eddie, the great sage and eminent junkie advised him. A not uncommon phenomenon in one who is going cool turkey.
   Eddie glanced at his watch. An hour and a half to New York . The plane was scheduled to land at 4:05 EDT , but it was really going to be high noon. Showdown time.
   He went back to his seat. His drink was on the divider. He took two sips and the stew came back to ask him if she could do any thing else for him. He opened his mouth to say no … and then there was another of those odd blank moments.

5

   "I'd like something to eat, please," the gunslinger said through Eddie Dean's mouth.
   "We'll be serving a hot snack in―"
   "I'm really starving, though," the gunslinger said with perfect truthfulness. "Anything at all, even a popkin―"
   "Popkin?" the army woman frowned at him, and the gunslinger suddenly looked into the prisoner's mind. Sandwich … the word was as distant as the murmur in a conch shell.
   "A sandwich, even," the gunslinger said.
   The army woman looked doubtful. "Well … I have some tuna fish …"
   "That would be fine," the gunslinger said, although he had never heard of tooter fish in his life. Beggars could not be choosers.
   "You do look a little pale," the army woman said. "I thought maybe it was air-sickness."
   "Pure hunger."
   She gave him a professional smile. "I'll see what I can rustle up."
   Russel? the gunslinger thought dazedly. In his own world to russel was a slang verb meaning to take a woman by force. Never mind. Food would come. He had no idea if he could carry it back through the doorway to the body which needed it so badly, but one thing at a time, one thing at a time.
   Russel, he thought, and Eddie Dean's head shook, as if in disbelief.
   Then the gunslinger retreated again.

6

   Nerves, the great oracle and eminent junkie assured him. Just nerves. All part of the cool turkey experience, little brother.
   But if nerves was what it was, how come he felt this odd sleepiness stealing over him―odd because he should have been itchy, ditsy, feeling that urge to squirm and scratch that came before the actual shakes; even if he had not been in Henry's "cool turkey" state, there was the fact that he was about to attempt bringing two pounds of coke through U.S. Customs, a felony punishable by not less than ten years in federal prison, and he seemed to suddenly be having blackouts as well.
   Still, that feeling of sleepiness.
   He sipped at his drink again, then let his eyes slip shut.
   Why'd you black out?
   I didn't, or she'd be running for all the emergency gear they carry.
   Blanked out, then. It's no good either way. You never blanked out like that before in your life. Nodded out, yeah, but never blanked out.
   Something odd about his right hand, too. It seemed to throb vaguely, as if he had pounded it with a hammer.
   He flexed it without opening his eyes. No ache. No throb. No blue bombardier's eyes. As for the blank-outs, they were just a combination of going cool turkey and a good case of what the great oracle and eminent et cetera would no doubt call the smuggler's blues.
   But I'm going to sleep, just the same, he thought. How 'bout that?
   Henry's face drifted by him like an untethered balloon. Don't worry, Henry was saying. You'll be all right, little brother. You fly down there toNassau, check in at the Aquinas, there'll be a man come by Friday night. One of the good guys. He'll fix you, leave you enough stuff to take you through the weekend. Sunday night he brings the coke and you give him the key to the safe deposit box. Monday morning you do the routine just like Balazar said. This guy will play; he knows how it's supposed to go. Monday noon you fly out, and with a face as honest as yours, you'll breeze through Customs and we'll be eating steak inSparksbefore the sun goes down. It's gonna be a breeze, little brother, nothing but a cool breeze.
   But it had been sort of a warm breeze after all.
   The trouble with him and Henry was they were like Charlie Brown and Lucy. The only difference was once in awhile Henry would hold onto the football so Eddie could kick it―not often, but once in awhile. Eddie had even thought, while in one of his heroin dazes, that he ought to write Charles Schultz a letter. Dear Mr. Schultz, he would say. You're missing a bet by ALWAYS having Lucy pull the football up at the last second. She ought to hold it down there once in awhile. Nothing Charlie Brown could ever predict, you understand. Sometimes she'd maybe hold it down for him to kick three, even four times in a row, then nothing for a month, then once, and then nothing for three or four days, and then, you know, you get the idea. That would REALLY fuck the kid up, wouldn't it?
   Eddie knew it would really fuck the kid up.
   From experience he knew it.
   One of the good guys, Henry had said, but the guy who showed up had been a sallow-skinned thing with a British accent, a hairline moustache that looked like something out of a 1940s filmnoire, and yellow teeth that all leaned inward, like the teeth of a very old animal trap.
   "You have the key, Senor?" he asked, except in that British public school accent it came out sounding like what you called your last year of high school.
   "The key's safe," Eddie said, "if that's what you mean."
   "Then give it to me."
   "That's not the way it goes. You're supposed to have something to take me through the weekend. Sunday night you're supposed to bring me something. I give you the key. Monday you go into town and use it to get something else. I don't know what, 'cause that's not my business."
   Suddenly there was a small flat blue automatic in the sallow-skinned thing's hand. "Why don't you just give it to me, Senor? I will save time and effort; you will save your life."


   There was deep steel in Eddie Dean, junkie or no junkie. Henry knew it; more important, Balazar knew it. That was why he had been sent. Most of them thought he had gone because he was hooked through the bag and back again. He knew it, Henry knew it, Balazar, too. But only he and Henry knew he would have gone even if he was as straight as a stake. For Henry. Balazar hadn't got quite that far in his figuring, but fuck Balazar.
   "Why don't you just put that thing away, you little scuzz?" Eddie asked. "Or do you maybe want Balazar to send someone down here and cut your eyes out of your head with a rusty knife?"
   The sallow thing smiled. The gun was gone like magic; in its place was a small envelope. He handed it to Eddie. "Just a little joke, you know."
   "If you say so."
   "I see you Sunday night."
   He turned toward the door.
   "I think you better wait."
   The sallow thing turned back, eyebrows raised. "You think I won't go if I want to go?"
   "I think if you go and this is bad shit, I'll be gone tomorrow. Then you'll be in deep shit."
   The sallow thing turned sulky. It sat in the room's single easy chair while Eddie opened the envelope and spilled out a small quantity of brown stuff. It looked evil. He looked at the sallow thing.
   "I know how it looks, it looks like shit, but that's just the cut," the sallow thing said. "It's fine."
   Eddie tore a sheet of paper from the notepad on the desk and separated a small amount of the brown powder from the pile. He fingered it and then rubbed it on the roof of his mouth. A second later he spat into the wastebasket.
   "You want to die? Is that it? You got a death-wish?"
   "That's all there is." The sallow thing looked more sulky than ever.
   "I have a reservation out tomorrow," Eddie said. This was a lie, but he didn't believe the sallow thing had the resources to check it. "TWA. I did it on my own, just in case the contact happened to be a fuck-up like you. I don't mind. It'll be a relief, actually. I wasn't cut out for this sort of work."
   The sallow thing sat and cogitated. Eddie sat and concentrated on not moving. He felt like moving; felt like slipping and sliding, hipping and bopping, shucking and jiving, scratching his scratches and cracking his crackers. He even felt his eyes wanting to slide back to the pile of brown powder, although he knew it was poison. He had fixed at ten that morning; the same number of hours had gone by since then. But if he did any of those things, the situation would change. The sallow thing was doing more than cogitating; it was watching him, trying to calculate the depth of him.
   "I might be able to find something," it said at last.
   "Why don't you try?" Eddie said. "But come eleven, I turn out the light and put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, and anybody that knocks after I do that, I call the desk and say someone's bothering me, send a security guy."
   "You are a fuck," the sallow thing said in its impeccable British accent.
   "No," Eddie said, "a fuck is what you expected. I came with my legs crossed. You want to be here before eleven with something that I can use―it doesn't have to be great, just something I can use―or you will be one dead scuzz."

7

   The sallow thing was back long before eleven; he was back by nine-thirty. Eddie guessed the other stuff had been in his car all along.
   A little more powder this time. Not white, but at least a dull ivory color, which was mildly hopeful.
   Eddie tasted. It seemed all right. Actually better than all right. Pretty good. He rolled a bill and snorted.
   "Well, then, until Sunday," the sallow thing said briskly, getting to its feet.
   "Wait," Eddie said, as if he were the one with the gun. In a way he was. The gun was Balazar. Emilio Balazar was a high-caliber big shot in New York 's wonderful world of drugs.
   "Wait?" the sallow thing turned and looked at Eddie as if he believed Eddie must be insane. "For what?"
   "Well, I was actually thinking of you," Eddie said. "If I get really sick from what I just put into my body, it's off. If I die, of course it's off. I was just thinking that, if I only get a little sick, I might give you another chance. You know, like that story about how some kid rubs a lamp and gets three wishes."
   "It will not make you sick. That's China White."
   "If that's China White," Eddie said, "I'm Dwight Gooden."
   "Who?"
   "Never mind."
   The sallow thing sat down. Eddie sat by the motel room desk with the little pile of white powder nearby (the D-Con or whatever it had been had long since gone down the John). On TV the Braves were getting shellacked by the Mets, courtesy of WTBS and the big satellite dish on the Aquinas Hotel's roof. Eddie felt a faint sensation of calm which seemed to come from the back of his mind … except where it was really coming from, he knew from what he had read in the medical journals, was from the bunch of living wires at the base of his spine, that place where heroin addiction takes place by causing an unnatural thickening of the nerve stern.
   Want to take a quick cure? he had asked Henry once. Break your spine, Henry. Your legs stop working, and so does your cock, but you stop needing the needle right away.
   Henry hadn't thought it was funny.
   In truth, Eddie hadn't thought it was that funny either. When the only fast way you could get rid of the monkey on your back was to snap your spinal cord above that bunch of nerves, you were dealing with one heavy monkey. That was no capuchin, no cute little organ grinder's mascot; that was a big mean old baboon.
   Eddie began to sniffle.
   "Okay," he said at last. "It'll do. You can vacate the premises, scuzz."
   The sallow thing got up. "I have friends,'' he said. “They could come in here and do things to you. You'd beg to tell me where that key is."
   "Not me, champ," Eddie said. "Not this kid." And smiled. He didn't know how the smile looked, but it must not have looked all that cheery because the sallow thing vacated the premises, vacated them fast, vacated them without looking back.
   When Eddie Dean was sure he was gone, he cooked.
   Fixed.
   Slept.