by Stephen King
"Wail later," he said huskily. "Call the doctor now."
"I'll do it," Rogan said, and ran back to his own house.
"Lydia," Morris said. He wet his lips.
"What? What, Morris?" She bent over him and a tear splashed on his cheek. It was touching, he supposed, but it had made him flinch, and the flinch had made the pain worse.
"Lydia, I also have one of my migraines."
"Oh, poor darling! Poor Morrist But I told you--"
"I've got the headache because that potzer Rogan's dog barked all night and kept me awake. Today the dog chases my cat and knocks over my ladder and I think my back is broken."
Lydia shrieked. The sound made Morris's head vibrate.
"Lydia," he said, and wet his lips again.
"What, darling?"
"I have suspected something for many years. Now I am sure."
"My poor Morris! What?"
"There is no God," Morris said, and fainted.
They took him to Santo Donato and his doctor told him, at about the same time that he would have ordinarily been sitting down to one of Lydia's wretched suppers, that he would never walk again. By then they had put him in a bodycast. Blood and urine samples had been taken. Dr. Kemmelman had peered into his eyes and tapped his knees with a little rubber hammer--but no reflexive twitch of the leg answered the taps. And at every turn there was Lydia, the tears streaming from her eyes, as she used up one handkerchief after another. Lydia, a woman who would have been at home married to Job, went everywhere well-supplied with little lace snotrags, just in case reason for an extended crying spell should occur. She had called her mother, and her mother would be here soon ("That's nice, Lydia"--although if there was anyone on earth Morris honestly loathed, it was Lydia's mother). She had called the rabbi, he would be here soon, too ("That's nice, Lydia"--although he hadn't set foot inside the synagogue in five years and wasn't sure what the rabbi's name was). She had called his boss, and while he wouldn't be here soon, he sent his greatest sympathies and condolences ("That's nice, Lydia"--although if there was anyone in a class with Lydia's mother, it was that cigar-chewing putz Frank Haskell). At last they gave Morris a Valium and took Lydia away. Shortly afterward, Morris just drifted away--no worries, no migraines, no nothing. If they kept giving him little blue pills like that, went his last thought, he would go on up that stepladder and break his back again.
When he woke up--or regained consciousness, that was more like it--dawn was just breaking and the hospital was as quiet as Morris supposed it ever got. He felt very calm... almost serene. He had no pain; his body felt swaddled and weightless. His bed had been surrounded by some sort of contraption like a squirrel cage--a thing of stainless steel bars, guy wires, and pulleys. His legs were being held up by cables attached to this gadget. His back seemed to be bowed by something beneath, but it was hard to tell--he had only the angle of his vision to judge by.
Others have it worse, he thought. All over the world, others have it worse. In Israel, the Palestinians kill busloads of farmers who were committing the political crime of going into town to see a movie. The Israelis cope with this injustice by dropping bombs on the Palestinians and killing children along with whatever terrorists may be there. Others have it worse than me ... which is not to say this is good, don't get that idea, but others have it worse.
He lifted one hand with some effort--there was pain somewhere in his body, but it was very faint--and made a weak fist in front of his eyes. There. Nothing wrong with his hands. Nothing wrong with his arms, either. So he couldn't feel anything below the waist, so what? There were people all over the world paralyzed from the neck down. There were people with leprosy. There were people dying of syphilis. Somewhere in the world right now, there might be people walking down the jetway and onto a plane that was going to crash. No, this wasn't good, but there were worse things in the world.
And there had been, once upon a time, much worse things in the world.
He raised his left arm. It seemed to float, disembodied, before his eyes--a scrawny old man's arm with the muscles deteriorating. He was in a hospital johnny but it had short sleeves and he could still read the numbers on the forearm, tattooed there in faded blue ink. P499965214. Worse things, yes, worse things than falling off a suburban stepladder and breaking your back and being taken to a clean and sterile metropolitan hospital and being given a Valium that was guaranteed to bubble your troubles away.
There were the showers, they were worse. His first wife, Ruth, had died in one of their filthy showers. There were the trenches that became graves--he could close his eyes and still see the men lined up along the open maw of the trenches, could still hear the volley of rifle-fire, could still remember the way they flopped backwards into the earth like badly made puppets. There were the crematoriums, they were worse, too, the crematoriums that filled the air with the steady sweet smell of Jews burning like torches no one could see. The horror-struck faces of old friends and relatives... faces that melted away like guttering candles, faces that seemed to melt away before your very eyes--thin, thinner, thinnest. Then one day they were gone. Where? Where does a torch-flame go when the cold wind has blown it out? Heaven. Hell? Lights in the darkness, candles in the wind. When Job finally broke down and questioned, God asked him: Where were you when I made the world? If Morris Heisel had been Job, he would have responded: Where were You when my Ruth was dying, You potzer, You? Watching the Yankees and the Senators? If You can't pay attention to Your business better than this, get out of my face.
Yes, there were worse things than breaking your back, he had no doubt of it. But what sort of God would have allowed him to break his back and become paralyzed for life after watching his wife die, and his daughters, and his friends?
No God at all, that was Who.
A tear trickled from the comer of his eye and ran slowly down the side of his head to his ear. Outside the hospital room, a bell rang softly. A nurse squeaked by on white crepe-soled shoes. His door was ajar, and on the far wall of the corridor outside he could read the letters NSIVE CA and guessed that the whole sign must read INTENSIVE CARE.
There was movement in the room--a rustle of bedclothes.
Moving very carefully, Morris turned his head to the right, away from the door. He saw a night-table next to him with a pitcher of water on it. There were two call-buttons on the table. Beyond it was another bed, and in the bed was a man who looked even older and sicker than Morris felt. He was not hooked into a giant exercise-wheel for gerbils like Morris was, but an IV feed stood beside his bed and some sort of monitoring console stood at its foot. The man's skin was sunken and yellow. Lines around his mouth and eyes had driven deep. His hair was yellowish-white, dry and lifeless. His thin eyelids had a bruised and shiny look, and in his big nose Morris saw the burst capillaries of the life-long drinker.
Morris looked away ... and then looked back. As the dawnlight grew stronger and the hospital began to wake up, he began to have the strangest feeling that he knew his roommate. Could that be? The man looked to be somewhere between seventy-five and eighty, and Morris didn't believe he knew anyone quite that old--except for Lydia's mother, a horror Morris sometimes believed to be older than the Sphinx, whom the woman closely resembled.
Maybe the guy was someone he had known in the past, maybe even before he, Morris, came to America. Maybe. Maybe not. And why all of a sudden did it seem to matter? For that matter, why had all his memories of the camp, of Patin, come flooding back tonight, when he always tried to--and most times succeeded in--keeping those things buried?
He broke out in a sudden rash of gooseflesh, as if he had stepped into some mental haunted house where old bodies were unquiet and old ghosts walked. Could that be, even here and now in this clean hospital, thirty years after those dark times had ended?
He looked away from the old man in the other bed, and soon he had begun to feel sleepy again.
It's a trick of your mind that this other man seems familiar. Only your mind, amusing you in the best
way it can, amusing you the way it used to try to amuse you in--
But he would not think of that. He would not allow himself to think of that.
Drifting into sleep, he thought of a boast he had made to Ruth (but never to Lydia; it didn't pay to boast to Lydia; she was not like Ruth, who would always smile sweetly at his harmless puffing and crowing): I never forget a face. Here was his chance to find out if that was still so. If he had really known the man in the other bed at some time or other, perhaps he could remember when... and where.
Very close to sleep, drifting back and forth across its threshold, Morris thought: Perhaps I knew him in the camp.
That would be ironic indeed--what they called a "jest of God."
What God? Morris Heisel asked himself again, and slept.
19
Todd graduated salutatorian of his class, just possibly because of his poor grade on the trig final he had been studying for the night Dussander had his heart attack. It dragged his final grade in the course down to 89, one point below an A-minus average.
A week after graduation, the Bowdens went to visit Mr. Denker at Santo Donato General. Todd fidgeted through fifteen minutes of banalities and thank-yous and how-do-you-feels and was grateful for the break when the man in the other bed asked him if he could come over for a minute.
"You'll pardon me," the other man said apologetically. He was in a huge bodycast and was for some reason attached to an overhead system of pulleys and wires. "My name is Morris Heisel. I broke my back."
"That's too bad," Todd said gravely.
"Oy, too bad, he says! This boy has the gift of understatement!"
Todd started to apologize, but Heisel raised his hand, smiling a little. His face was pale and tired, the face of any old man in the hospital facing a life full of sweeping changes just ahead--and surely few of them for the better. In that way, Todd thought, he and Dussander were alike.
"No need," Morris said. "No need to answer a rude comment. You are a stranger. Does a stranger need to be inflicted with my problems?"
"'No man is an island, entire of itself--' " Todd began, and Morris laughed.
"Donne, he quotes at me! A smart kid! Your friend there, is he very bad off?"
"Well, the doctors say he's doing fine, considering his age. He's eighty."
"That old!" Morris exclaimed. "He doesn't talk to me much, you know. But from what he does say, I'd guess he's naturalized. Like me. I'm Polish, you know. Originally, I mean. From Radom."
"Oh?" Todd said politely.
"Yes. You know what they call an orange manhole cover in Radom?"
"No," Todd said, smiling.
"Howard Johnson's," Morris said, and laughed. Todd laughed, too. Dussander glanced over at them, startled by the sound and frowning a little. Then Monica said something and he looked back at her again.
"Is your friend naturalized?"
"Oh, yes," Todd said. "He's from Germany. Essen. Do you know that town?"
"No," Morris said, "but I was only in Germany once. I wonder if he was in the war."
"I really couldn't say." Todd's eyes had gone distant.
"No? Well, it doesn't matter. That was a long time ago, the war. In another three years there will be people in this country constitutionally eligible to become President--President!--who weren't even born until after the war was over. To them it must seem there is no difference between the Miracle of Dunkirk and Hannibal taking his elephants over the Alps"
"Were you in the war?" Todd asked.
"I suppose I was, in a manner of speaking. You're a good boy to visit such an old man ... two old men, counting me."
Todd smiled modestly.
"I'm tired now," Morris said. "Perhaps I'll sleep."
"I hope you'll feel better very soon," Todd said.
Morris nodded, smiled, and closed his eyes. Todd went back to Dussander's bed, where his parents were just getting ready to leave--his dad kept glancing at his watch and exclaiming with bluff heartiness at how late it was getting.
Two days later, Todd came back to the hospital alone. This time, Morris Heisel, immured in his bodycast, was deeply asleep in the other bed.
"You did well," Dussander said quietly. "Did you go back to the house later?"
"Yes. I burned the damned letter. I don't think anyone was too interested in that letter, and I was afraid ... I don't know." He shrugged, unable to tell Dussander he'd been almost superstitiously afraid about the letter--afraid that maybe someone would wander into the house who could read German, someone who would notice references in the letter that were ten, perhaps twenty years out of date.
"Next time you come, smuggle me in something to drink," Dussander said. "I find I don't miss the cigarettes, but--"
"I won't be back again," Todd said flatly. "Not ever. It's the end. We're quits."
"Quits." Dussander folded his hands on his chest and smiled. It was not a gentle smile ... but it was perhaps as close as Dussander could come to such a thing. "I thought that was in the cards. They are going to let me out of this graveyard next week ... or so they promise. The doctor says I may have a few years left in my skin yet. I ask him how many, and he just laughs. I suspect that means no more than three, and probably no more than two. Still, I may give him a surprise."
Todd said nothing.
"But between you and me, boy, I have almost given up my hopes of seeing the century turn."
"I want to ask you about something," Todd said, looking at Dussander steadily. "That's why I came in today. I want to ask you about something you said once."
Todd glanced over his shoulder at the man in the other bed and then drew his chair closer to Dussander's bed. He could smell Dussander's smell, as dry as the Egyptian room in the museum.
"So ask."
"That wino. You said something about me having experience. First-hand experience. What was that supposed to mean?"
Dussander's smile widened a bit. "I read the newspapers, boy. Old men always read the newspapers, but not in the same way younger people do. Buzzards are known to gather at the ends of certain airport runways in South America when the crosswinds are treacherous, did you know that? That is how an old man reads the newspaper. A month ago there was a story in the Sunday paper. Not a front-page story, no one cares enough about bums and alcoholics to put them on the front page, but it was the lead story in the feature section. is SOMEONE STALKING SANTO DONATO'S DOWN-AND-OUT?--that's what it was called. Crude. Yellow journalism. You Americans are famous for it."
Todd's hands were clenched into fists, hiding the butchered nails. He never read the Sunday papers, he had better things to do with his time. He had of course checked the papers every day for at least a week following each of his little adventures, and none of his stewbums had ever gotten beyond page three. The idea that someone had been making connections behind his back infuriated him.
"The story mentioned several murders, extremely brutal murders. Stabbings, bludgeonings. 'Subhuman brutality' was how the writer put it, but you know reporters. The writer of this lamentable piece admitted that there is a high death-rate among these unfortunates, and that Santo Donato has had more than its share of the indigent over the years. In any given year, not all of these men die naturally, or of their own bad habits. There are frequent murders. But in most cases the murderer is usually one of the deceased degenerate's compatriots, the motive no more than an argument over a penny-ante card-game or a bottle of muscatel. The killer is usually happy to confess. He is filled with remorse.
"But these recent killings have not been solved. Even more ominous, to this yellow journalist's mind--or whatever passes for his mind--is the high disappearance rate over the last few years. Of course, he admits again, these men are not much more than modern-day hoboes. They come and go. But some of these left without picking up welfare checks or day-labor checks from Spell O' Work, which only pays on Fridays. Could some of these have been victims of this yellow journalist's Wino Killer, he asks? Victims who haven't been found? Pah!"
D
ussander waved his hand in the air as if to dismiss such arrant irresponsibility.
"Only titillation, of course. Give people a comfortable little scare on Sunday morning. He calls up old bogies, threadbare but still useful--the Cleveland Torso Murderer, Zodiac, the mysterious Mr. X who killed the Black Dahlia, Springheel Jack. Such drivel. But it makes me think. What does an old man have to do but think when old friends don't come to visit anymore?"
Todd shrugged.
"I thought: 'If I wished to help this odious yellow-dog journalist, which I certainly do not, I could explain some of the disappearances. Not the corpses found stabbed or bludgeoned, not them, God rest their besotted souls, but some of the disappearances. Because at least some of the buns who disappeared are in my cellar.' "
"How many down there?" Todd asked in a low voice.
"Six," Dussander said calmly. "Counting the one you helped me dispose of, six."
"You're really nutso," Todd said. The skin below his eyes had gone white and shiny. "At some point you just blew all your fucking wheels."
" 'Blew my wheels.' What a charming idiom! Perhaps you're right! But then I said to myself: 'This newspaper jackal would love to pin the murders and the disappearances on the same somebody--his hypothetical Wino Killer. But I think maybe that's not what happened at all."
"Then I say to myself: 'Do I know anybody who might be doing such things? Somebody who has been under as much strain as I have during the last few years? Someone who has also been listening to old ghosts rattle their chains?' And the answer is yes. I know you, boy."
"I've never killed anyone."
The image that came was not of the winos; they weren't people, not really people at all. The image that came was of himself crouched behind the dead tree, peering through the telescopic sight of his .30-.30, the crosshairs fixed on the temple of the man with the scuzzy beard, the man driving the Brat pickup.
"Perhaps not," Dussander agreed, amicably enough. "Yet you took hold so well that night. Your surprise was mostly anger at having been put in such a dangerous position by an old man's infirmity, I think. Am I wrong?"
