The Road to The Dark Tower (13 page)

“That part of your life is over, Eddie . . . your need will pass.” With these words, Roland closes the door. Both of them forget about the cocaine that is still hidden on the beach, but it’s unlikely this drug would have done much to satisfy Eddie’s need for heroin, anyway.

Roland’s life is in Eddie’s hands in the following days. Time means little to either of them as Roland fights his infection and Eddie suffers intense heroin withdrawal. They can smell each other’s illnesses. Both have the same choice, which echoes Red’s sentiments in “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption”: “Get busy living, or get busy dying.” [DS]

Ironically, all Eddie can find for them to eat are the lobstrosities that poisoned and mutilated Roland. Eddie hates the gunslinger for kidnapping him to a place where he has no hope of finding drugs to cure his craving. Even so, he builds a travois and drags Roland north, the direction Roland intuitively knows they must go. Roland is tempted to ridicule the crude carrier, but he realizes Cort would probably have grudgingly approved of Eddie’s resourcefulness.

Eddie contemplates suicide in the dreary nighttime hours. The only thing that keeps him going is the knowledge that without him, Roland will die, too. “After you’re really on your feet again, I may, like, re-examine my options.”

During their rest periods, Eddie talks about the life he left behind. Roland understands that his unbalanced relationship with his brother—eight years his senior—and their mother robbed him of his self-esteem. Eddie had been hooked on the drug of trust that Henry knew how to use and push so well. By the end Henry had been so badly hooked on drugs that their roles reversed. “Now Eddie held Henry’s hand crossing streets.”

Having told his story—to Roland, but also to himself for the first time—Eddie awaits Roland’s response, but Roland has no use for philosophy. If the gunslinger were prone to introspection and questioning the cosmos, he would have asked himself why he had been blessed with a companion who “seems to promise weakness or strangeness or even outright doom.” The question, however, never forms in Roland’s mind. Eddie’s past is irrelevant. All he knows—all he cares to know—is that Eddie is here with him now. “[W]hat’s past is past, and what’s ahead is ahead. The second is ka, and takes care of itself,” a sentiment
Eddie
will grow to despise.

The antibiotics combat Roland’s infection enough so that Eddie no longer has to drag him along the beach. Long before Eddie can see it, Roland detects the next doorway almost a full day’s walk away.

For Roland, the portal labeled
THE LADY OF SHADOWS
represents his next companion. Eddie sees it as a way back to his own world and to the heroin he still craves. Roland knows what Eddie has in mind, and for the first time in his life Roland lets someone strip him of one of his weapons.
⁴
When it comes to his ka-tet, Roland always allows the other person to make his or her own decisions. He knew that Eddie might be weak, but he isn’t stupid. Entrusting ka to set them on the right path, Roland places his life entirely in fate’s hands.

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 without 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.