The Road to The Dark Tower (32 page)

Ted tells of how he came to Blue Heaven and how he once escaped through a hole Sheemie made for him. From reading the thoughts of one of Blue Heaven’s guards
¹³
Ted knows that King, the incarnation of Gan in Keystone Earth, isn’t writing anymore, leaving him vulnerable. The ka of 19 and the ka of 99 will get together (1999) to bring about his end.

Susannah finally remembers to tell the others about her dream. All the 19s they’ve been seeing point to a date, probably June 19. They know King is still alive because they wouldn’t still exist if he died. Roland’s aches mirror the injuries King will suffer, and only living things feel pain, which tells him King won’t be killed instantly. Roland is angry because one of the two simultaneous crises confronting them is due to the writer’s laziness. Saving him by changing ka will cost them dearly. He looks forward to kicking “the lazy tale-spinner’s yellow ass.”

They have to decide which emergency to handle first. Sheemie tells them of a dream he had the previous night about a small boy who asks why they are hurting him when he loves them so. The members of the ka-tet realize that each one of them had this dream. The boy represents the
Beam, which is analogous to love. “When love leaves the world, all hearts are still.” The answer is clear: They must first free the Breakers.

Roland sends a Roderick with a few sneetches to start fires that will create confusion and panic. Fire is the most feared thing in Blue Heaven, much of which is constructed of wood. Susannah sets up her ATV on the north side of town with enough firepower to make it seem like she’s a small army. They plan the attack for shift change, when the prison is most vulnerable.

When the fire alarms go off, Dinky mentally guides the Breakers out of the building and tells them to put their hands up so the gunslingers can distinguish prisoners from guards. Roland waits for Prentiss and Finli to appear before opening fire; cut off the head of the snake and it dies. He shoots Prentiss, then gives the order to the others to fire. What follows is the pandemonium of a vast and multifronted battle. King describes the confusion in discrete vignettes. “The historians can later assemble it into a comprehensive narrative,” he writes. Susannah drives the battle from the north with her guns and laser beams. By the time she reaches Main Street, the shooting is over and Pleasantville’s gutters run with the blood of Blue Heaven’s personnel.

From the moment the ka-tet reached Thunderclap, King started establishing the vector leading to the first major death in the series, Father Callahan notwithstanding. When Ted tells the history of Algul Siento, King draws attention to the gun used by Prentiss’s predecessor to execute a low man who raped a Breaker, warning that it will play a grim part in future events. This is the gun passed to Prentiss when he took charge of the prison camp. On the morning of the battle, he tucks the weapon into his belt without giving it much thought. He didn’t normally arm himself, but he was nervous—perhaps influenced by the same sense of déjà vu known to the ka-tet.

The ka-tet gathers for their last group hug. Prentiss isn’t dead, only mortally wounded. He can’t change the outcome of the battle, but its one-sided nature angers him. Eddie’s reflexes aren’t quick enough to avoid Prentiss’s bullet, which enters above his right eye and exits from the back of his head. Gran-Pere Jaffords would have said it was the only end that a gunslinger such as him could expect. Prentiss is struggling to get off a second shot when Roland kills him.

Roland and Jake take care of the remaining guards while Ted and
Dinky help Susannah comfort Eddie. Roland kills only those who shoot at them. The others he disarms and frees, giving them until sundown to get out of Dodge. “You’ve done bad work here, hell’s work, but hell’s shut, and I mean to see it will never open these doors again.” This is a far different gunslinger from the one who obliterated every living soul in Tull and offered no quarter to those who chased Jake from the Dixie Pig.

To Jake, Eddie’s lingering death is pointless and endless. He didn’t want to remember his wisecracking friend looking frail, old and stupid. He’s afraid that even kissing Eddie might be enough to kill him. Roland tells him they attend Eddie for Susannah’s sake because “later on she’ll remember who was there, and be grateful.” Jake wonders how grateful she’ll be to Roland, without whom Eddie wouldn’t be dying. On the other hand, Susannah would never have met Eddie without him. No one says “better to have loved and lost,” but this is what Jake thinks.

Though they’ve saved the Beams and prevented the fall of the Tower, Roland and Jake can take no pleasure in their victory. Their fourteen-hour bedside vigil puts the pressure on. King will meet his own destiny in less than a day, but Roland won’t leave until Eddie dies. On his deathbed, Eddie promises Susannah he will await her in the clearing at the end of the path. His message to Jake is more cryptic, telling him his job (and Oy’s) is to protect his dinh from Mordred and Dandelo. He calls Roland Father and, with his final words, thanks Roland for the better life he has had since the gunslinger drew him from New York.

“The rest of the tale will be short compared to all that’s gone before. Because when ka-tet breaks, the end comes quickly.”

Roland had planned to destroy Devar-Toi, but he leaves it for the Breakers who wish to stay. There’s enough food to last them a lifetime. He tells them how to get to the Callas, where the people will likely forgive them. He urges them to go that way if only to find absolution for what they’ve done. “If you prefer purgatory to redemption, then stay here.”

Susannah stays with Ted to bury Eddie, while Sheemie sends Jake, Oy and Roland to Maine to save King. Teleporting is dangerous business for Sheemie. Ted estimates he can only do it one or two more times before it kills him. They don’t know that he’s already dying from an infected foot wound he suffered during the battle.

Roland arranges to meet Susannah in Fedic in two days. She agrees to
rejoin them because Eddie wanted her to, but Jake thinks she still wants to see the Tower as much as he and Roland do. The ka-tet might be broken, but ka remains.

Roland and Jake arrive outside the general store twenty-two years after Andolini’s ambush. Roland has no time for pleasantries. He pulls his gun and demands the store owner’s truck keys, but they also need a driver; Jake can’t drive, and Roland’s hip aches too much. For the second time, Roland finds a useful person in the general store. Irene Tassenbaum agrees to take them where they need to go. She’s afraid, but she also enjoys being at the center of something important.

King is on one of the country-road walks his wife nags him about. He reaches a crucial point, a crossroads. If he takes the shorter route back home, he will start working on the next
Dark Tower
book. By choosing the longer road, he announces his intention to procrastinate. Ka decides he’s outlived his usefulness.

His fate lies in the hands of Bryan Smith, a local in a blue minivan who is on his way into town to satisfy his drug-induced munchies. Jake can sense Smith and tries to use his touch to slow him down. The minivan driver is distracted from the road by his rottweillers, Bullet and Pistol, who are digging in a cooler of meat behind his seat. He doesn’t see King on the roadside ahead, or the truck approaching from the opposite direction.

To save one life, the ka-tet will have to exchange another. Roland has already sacrificed Jake—the boy he now thinks of as his son—once on his quest for the Tower; he will not do so again. If anyone dies this day, Roland is determined it will be him.

When it comes to ka, Roland doesn’t always get his way. Ironically, pain from the very injury he intends to prevent causes his bad leg to betray him when he leaps from the truck. Without a second’s hesitation, Jake steps on and over Roland and seizes King, shielding him.

King doesn’t escape completely. The impact throws him off the road, and the van hits him again and stops on top of him, breaking his hip. Roland rushes to Jake, but the boy pushes him away. Roland needs to make sure King will live. He tries to convince himself that Jake’s injuries are slight, but Jake knows otherwise. He has died twice already.

The van did Roland’s job of kicking the lazy tale-spinner’s yellow ass. King looks worse than Jake, but Roland is sure he’ll survive. King
recognizes Roland, greeting him by saying, “You again,” before asking where Eddie is. He hasn’t written about Eddie’s death yet and tries to tell Roland he lost the Beam, but Roland forces him to sit up in spite of his injuries, and points to the sky, where it is perfectly clear. “You didn’t lose it, you turned your coward’s eye away.”

The Accident

Most readers will be aware that the incident depicted here bears some resemblance to the accident King suffered in the summer of 1999. In the endnotes, the author calls it a “funhouse mirror” version of the real event. How close are truth and fiction?

Though it isn’t stated in the text, King’s fictional accident takes place around 4:20
P
.
M
. on Saturday, June 19, 1999, the same time as Father Callahan’s fatal appointment with Sombra Corporation fifteen and a half years earlier. The real accident happened at 4:30
P
.
M
.
¹⁴

In
The Dark Tower,
Jake attempted to slow down Smith by having him stop to urinate. In reality, it was King who stepped into the woods. He later said, “It was two months before I was able to take another leak standing up.” Two women observed Smith’s minivan weaving on the road, and one said that she hoped the van didn’t hit King, whom they had just passed. King has the women picking berries, but in reality they were driving.

King was struck as he walked along the shoulder of the road. He had earlier been reading a Bentley Little novel, but he stopped reading when he reached a stretch of road with poor sight lines due to blind curves and hills. He was thrown about fifteen feet off the road by the impact, landing in a grassy patch near a wall of rocks.

As in the fictionalized account, Bryan Smith—who was driving from his campsite into town for groceries (Mars bars)—was distracted from the road by his dog Bullet,
¹⁵
who was rummaging around in a cooler of meat behind him. Smith’s other rottweiler, Pistol, didn’t accompany him in the van in the real version of the accident.

Police reports indicated that King probably heard the van at the last minute because he turned slightly, which may have saved his life. He later said that he thinks he tried to leap out of the way. In the fictional version, of course, it was Jake Chambers who was responsible for deflecting the potentially fatal impact. King admits to a break in his memory here—the time during which a gunslinger from Mid-World hypnotized him?

In
The Dark Tower,
King is alone when struck, but in reality a pedestrian witnessed the accident and another driver arrived on the scene shortly after it happened. Smith, who never saw King and thought he’d struck a deer until he noticed the author’s bloody glasses inside the van beside him, was sent off to call the police while the resident stayed with King. As in the book, Smith reportedly told King he’d never even had a parking ticket before, which later proved to be patently untrue. King responded that he’d never been struck by a van before and, as in the book, asked for a cigarette.

King said, “It occurs to me that I have nearly been killed by a character out of one of my own novels.” [OW] How far apart are truth and fiction?

King promises to continue the story, no matter how it comes out, but
he chastises Roland for his anger. “Save your hate for those who deserve it. I didn’t make your ka any more than I made Gan or the world and we both know it.”

Roland is devastated that he has to leave Jake’s dying to Oy and Irene, a woman they met less than an hour earlier, to deal with two men he doesn’t like. While he’s making sure King won’t surrender if Death calls on the way to the hospital, Jake, whom he loved even more than Susan Delgado, answers that same call. In one of the series’ greatest ironies, Jake sacrificed his life to save Stephen King in 1999, thereby allowing King to finish writing the series in 2003, including the section depicting Jake’s death in 1999, which will happen again and again as Roland repeats the quest cycle until he gets it right. In the words of Andre Linoge from
Storm of the Century,
“Hell is repetition.”
¹⁶

Roland sends Irene away until the accident scene is cleared, trusting her to return because she is a companion of the Beam. In the woods, he digs a shallow grave for Jake and says a Manni prayer over him. He thinks Oy might decide to perish at Jake’s grave, but the bumbler rejoins Roland at the roadside before Irene returns in her own car.
¹⁷
Oy’s decision strengthens Roland’s resolve.

Jake asked Irene to drive Roland to New York, and she agrees to do so. On the first night, she watches the TV news long enough to learn that King survived his accident.
¹⁸
Later, she finds Roland sitting on the stoop in the dark. “I’m afraid to go to sleep,” he tells her. “I’m afraid my dead friends will come to me, and that seeing them will kill me.” This is a very different Roland from the man who was able to push thoughts of his upcoming sacrifice of Jake from his mind and sleep dreamlessly in the desert.

The second night, they make love in a motel in Harwich, Connecticut—the former home of Bobby Garfield and Ted Brautigan. King does not say whether Roland straightens any of the room’s pictures. Afterward, she dreams of the field of roses and the Tower and hears the voices of Roland’s lost friends. Roland has transferred some of his touch to her temporarily, like Ted Brautigan did with Bobby Garfield. Her part in the adventure is almost over, though, and soon she will return to her husband and her former life.