"I may have gone insane," she said.
7
The first words which came into Eddie's mind were If you think you've gone insane, Odetta, you're nuts.
Brief consideration, however, made this seem an unprofitable line of argument to take.
Instead he remained silent for a time, sitting by her wheelchair, his knees drawn up, his hands holding his wrists.
"Were you really a heroin addict?"
"Am," he said. "It's like being an alcoholic, or 'basing. It's not a thing you ever get over. I used to hear that and go 'Yeah, yeah, right, right,' in my head, you know, but now I understand. I still want it, and I guess part of me will always want it, but the physical part has passed."
"What's 'basing?" she asked.
"Something that hasn't been invented yet in your when. It's something you do with cocaine, only it's like turning TNT into an A-bomb."
"You did it?"
"Christ, no. Heroin was my thing. I told you."
"You don't seem like an addict," she said.
Eddie actually was fairly spiffy . . . if, that was, one ignored the gamy smell arising from his body and clothes (he could rinse himself and did, could rinse his clothes and did, but lacking soap, he could not really wash either). His hair had been short when Roland stepped into his life (the better to sail through customs, my dear, and what a great big joke that had turned out to be), and was still a respectable length. He shaved every morning, using the keen edge of Roland's knife, gingerly at first, but with increasing confidence. He'd been too young for shaving to be part of his life when Henry left for 'Nam, and it hadn't been any big deal to Henry back then, either; he never grew a beard, but sometimes went three or four days before Mom nagged him into "mowing the stubble." When he came back, however, Henry was a maniac on the subject (as he was on a few others--foot-powder after showering; teeth to be brushed three or four times a day and followed by a chaser of mouthwash; clothes always hung up) and he turned Eddie into a fanatic as well. The stubble was mowed every morning and every evening. Now this habit was deep in his grain, like the others Henry had taught him. Including, of course, the one you took care of with a needle.
"Too clean-cut?" he asked her, grinning.
"Too white," she said shortly, and then was quiet for a moment, looking sternly out at the sea. Eddie was quiet, too. If there was a comeback to something like that, he didn't know what it was.
"I'm sorry," she said. "That was very unkind, very unfair, and very unlike me."
"It's all right."
"It's not. It's like a white person saying something like 'Jeez, I never would have guessed you were a nigger' to someone with a very light skin."
"You like to think of yourself as more fair-minded," Eddie said.
"What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common, I should think, but yes--I like to think of myself as more fair-minded. So please accept my apology, Eddie."
"On one condition."
"What's that?" she was smiling a little again. That was good. He liked it when he was able to make her smile.
"Give this a fair chance. That's the condition."
"Give what a fair chance?" She sounded slightly amused. Eddie might have bristled at that tone in someone else's voice, might have felt he was getting boned, but with her it was different. With her it was all right. He supposed with her just about anything would have been.
"That there's a third alternative. That this really is happening. I mean . . ." Eddie cleared his throat. "I'm not very good at this philosophical shit, or, you know, metamorphosis or whatever the hell you call it--"
"Do you mean metaphysics?"
"Maybe. I don't know. I think so. But I know you can't go around disbelieving what your senses tell you. Why, if your idea about this all being a dream is right--"
"I didn't say a dream--"
"Whatever you said, that's what it comes down to, isn't it? A false reality?"
If there had been something faintly condescending in her voice a moment ago, it was gone now. "Philosophy and metaphysics may not be your bag, Eddie, but you must have been a hell of a debater in school."
"I was never in debate. That was for gays and hags and wimps. Like chess club. What do you mean, my bag? What's a bag?"
"Just something you like. What do you mean, gays? What are gays?"
He looked at her for a moment, then shrugged. "Homos. Fags. Never mind. We could swap slang all day. It's not getting us anyplace. What I'm trying to say is that if it's all a dream, it could be mine, not yours. You could be a figment of my imagination."
Her smile faltered. "You . . . nobody bopped you."
"Nobody bopped you, either."
Now her smile was entirely gone. "No one that I remember," she corrected with some sharpness.
"Me either!" he said. "You told me they're rough in Oxford. Well, those Customs guys weren't exactly cheery joy when they couldn't find the dope they were after. One of them could have head-bopped me with the butt of his gun. I could be lying in a Bellevue ward right now, dreaming you and Roland while they write their reports, explaining how, while they were interrogating me, I became violent and had to be subdued."
"It's not the same."
"Why? Because you're this intelligent socially active black lady with no legs and I'm just a hype from Co-Op City?" He said it with a grin, meaning it as an amiable jape, but she flared at him.
"I wish you would stop calling me black!"
He sighed. "Okay, but it's gonna take getting used to."
"You should have been on the debate club anyway."
"Fuck," he said, and the turn of her eyes made him realize again that the difference between them was much wider than color; they were speaking to each other from separate islands. The water between was time. Never mind. The word had gotten her attention. "I don't want to debate you. I want to wake you up to the fact that you are awake, that's all."
"I might be able to at least operate provisionally according to the dictates of your third alternative as long as this . . . this situation . . . continued to go on, except for one thing: There's a fundamental difference between what happened to you and what happened to me. So fundamental, so large, that you haven't seen it."
"Then show it to me."
"There is no discontinuity in your consciousness. There is a very large one in mine."
"I don't understand."
"I mean you can account for all of your time," Odetta said. "Your story follows from point to point: the airplane, the incursion by that . . . that . . . by him--"
She nodded toward the foothills with clear distaste.
"The stashing of the drugs, the officers who took you into custody, all the rest. It's a fantastic story, it has no missing links.
"As for myself, I arrived back from Oxford, was met by Andrew, my driver, and brought back to my building. I bathed and I wanted sleep--I was getting a very bad headache, and sleep is the only medicine that's any good for the really bad ones. But it was close on midnight, and I thought I would watch the news first. Some of us had been released, but a good many more were still in the jug when we left. I wanted to find out if their cases had been resolved.
"I dried off and put on my robe and went into the living room. I turned on the TV news. The newscaster started talking about a speech Krushchev had just made about the American advisors in Viet Nam. He said, 'We have a film report from--' and then he was gone and I was rolling down this beach. You say you saw me in some sort of magic doorway which is now gone, and that I was in Macy's, and that I was stealing. All of this is preposterous enough, but even if it was so, I could find something better to steal than costume jewelry. I don't wear jewelry."
"You better look at your hands again, Odetta," Eddie said quietly.
For a very long time she looked from the "diamond" on her left pinky, too large and vulgar to be anything but paste, to the large opal on the third finger of her right hand, which was too large and vulgar to be anything but real.
"None of this is happening," she repeated firmly.
"You sound like a broken record!" He was genuinely angry for the first time. "Every time someone pokes a hole in your neat little story, you just retreat to that 'none of this is happening' shit. You have to wise up, 'Detta."
"Don't call me that! I hate that!" she burst out so shrilly that Eddie recoiled.
"Sorry. Jesus! I didn't know."
"I went from night to day, from undressed to dressed, from my living room to this deserted beach. And what really happened was that some big-bellied redneck deputy hit me upside the head with a club and that is all!"
"But your memories don't stop in Oxford," he said softly.
"W-What?" Uncertain again. Or maybe seeing and not wanting to. Like with the rings.
"If you got whacked in Oxford, how come your memories don't stop there?"
"There isn't always a lot of logic to things like this." She was rubbing her temples again. "And now, if it's all the same to you, Eddie, I'd just as soon end the conversation. My headache is back. It's quite bad."
"I guess whether or not logic figures in all depends on what you want to believe. I saw you in Macy's, Odetta. I saw you stealing. You say you don't do things like that, but you also told me you don't wear jewelry. You told me that even though you'd looked down at your hands several times while we were talking. Those rings were there then, but it was as if you couldn't see them until I called your attention to them and made you see them."
"I don't want to talk about it!" she shouted. "My head hurts!"
"All right. But you know where you lost track of time, and it wasn't in Oxford."
"Leave me alone," she said dully.
Eddie saw the gunslinger toiling his way back with two full water-skins, one tied around his waist and the other slung over his shoulders. He looked very tired.
"I wish I could help you," Eddie said, "but to do that, I guess I'd have to be real."
He stood by her for a moment, but her head was bowed, the tips of her fingers steadily massaging her temples.
Eddie went to meet Roland.
8
"Sit down." Eddie took the bags. "You look all in."
"I am. I'm getting sick again."
Eddie looked at the gunslinger's flushed cheeks and brow, his cracked lips, and nodded. "I hoped it wouldn't happen, but I'm not that surprised, man. You didn't bat for the cycle. Balazar didn't have enough Keflex."
"I don't understand you."
"If you don't take a penicillin drug long enough, you don't kill the infection. You just drive it underground. A few days go by and it comes back. We'll need more, but at least there's a door to go. In the meantime you'll just have to take it easy." But Eddie was thinking unhappily of Odetta's missing legs and the longer and longer treks it took to find water. He wondered if Roland could have picked a worse time to have a relapse. He supposed it was possible; he just didn't see how.