The Road to The Dark Tower (43 page)

When he tells Feemalo and Fimalo that he must press on to fulfill a promise he made to himself, they say he is as crazy as the Crimson King, who thinks he can survive the Tower’s destruction. His obsession is contagious. He knows that any of his ka-tet would carry on in his place if he fell. “I may have been a failure at my life’s greatest work, but when it comes to making martyrs, I have always done well.” [DT5] He wonders what he’s done to deserve such enthusiastic protectors. “What, besides tear them out of their known and ordinary lives as ruthlessly as a man might tear weeds out of his garden?”

As he emerges from his self-absorbed state, like Walter o’Dim he fears being called to account.
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“My score grows ever longer, and the day when it will all have to be totted up, like a long-time drunkard’s bill in an alehouse, draws ever nearer. How will I ever pay?” He denies being a good man. “All my life I’ve had the fastest hands, but at being good I was always a little too slow.”

He thinks followers of the traditional God learn that love and murder are inextricably bound and that in the end God always drinks blood. At times he is compelled to confess his actions, but he never seeks absolution. His one great fear is not that God is dead, but that He has become feebleminded and malicious. He still prays, but “it’s when folks get the idea that the gods are answering that the trouble starts.” He shuns the title Childe, a formal, ancient term that describes a gunslinger on a quest. “We never used it among ourselves, for it means holy, chosen by ka. We never liked to think of ourselves in such terms.”

As a gunslinger, he serves as a peace officer, messenger, accountant, diplomat, envoy, mediator, teacher, spy and executioner.
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He is a soldier of the White, a divine combination of training, observation and hair-trigger intuition, which is his version of the touch. His talents include reloading his weapons without pausing, hypnosis, counting a true minute, speaking five languages and running in the darkness. He can see much farther than any of his companions.

Eddie once mused that he had never seen the bottom of Roland’s purse, which was an endless source of needed items. Susannah thinks that after all their time together, she hasn’t come close to seeing the bottom of
Roland. She’s seen him laughing and crying, sleeping, going to the bathroom, killing and dancing the Rice Song with skill and flair. She never slept with him, but thinks she’s seen him in every other circumstance, and he still has depths she’s never seen.

Things he cannot do: blend in to New York City culture, read English or pronounce words like “tuna” or “aspirin” and see television. His way of listening to stories his ka-tet tell of Keystone Earth bugs them. He listens like an anthropologist trying to figure out some strange culture by their myths and legends.

Both Cuthbert and Vannay warned Roland that failing to change and failing to learn from the past would be his damnation. He once believed that nothing in the universe could cause him to renounce the Tower. At the beginning of his career he was friendless, childless and heartless. Though he had once loved, he learns to love again. He loves his surrogate son, Jake, more than all the others, including Susan Delgado. When Jake dies, Roland is afraid that he has lost the ability to weep, but the tears finally come. He prays over Jake’s body, not because he thinks Jake needs a prayer to send him on his way, but to keep his mind occupied, to keep it from breaking.

Susannah, the only member of his ka-tet to leave without dying, believes that Roland even feels pity for Mordred. Whether he does or not, he kills his demon child after it kills Oy, putting an end to the line of Eld, mutated though it might have been. Roland has had three progeny—two real and one surrogate, and all are now gone, one before it was born.

When the time comes for Susannah to leave, he is suddenly afraid to be alone again and falls to his knees to beg her to stay. However, he must let her go—he owes her that much. His selfish desire to keep her with him is unworthy of his training and unworthy of how much he loves and respects her.

Roland suffers his final injury within sight of the Tower when he severs one of the remaining fingers on his right hand while plucking a rose. The hand goes numb to the wrist, and Roland suspects he will never feel it again.

Before he takes the last few steps toward the Tower, he sends Patrick back the way they came. Patrick is the surrogate for all those who have died during his millennium-long quest; the gunslinger won’t abandon him here at the end of End-World. He tells the boy they may meet again
at the clearing at the end of the path, but he knows there will be no clearing for him. His path ends at the Dark Tower.

Though standing so close to the Tower makes him feel like he’s in a dream, he realizes that nothing significant has changed. He’s still human, but he feels oddly relieved not to have his heavy guns hanging at his hips any longer. The killing has come to an end, but he is forced to remember all those he left behind as he climbs to the top of the Tower. Eventually, it becomes too painful to take in, and he sets his sights on the room at the top, but there’s nothing for him there except the punishment for having failed to change enough.

His existence is near perpetual reincarnation. Each time he is returned to the point in his journey where he is closing in on the man in black. Too late, he thinks, to make the important changes. Ka gives him credit, though, for the progress he has made, and Eld’s horn is his reward. If he can hold on to it through another iteration, maybe everything will be different next time and he will learn what the top of the Tower really holds for him.

Will he drop Jake again when torn between rescue and catching the man in black?

“I bear watching, as you well know.” [DT4]

“Go then. There are other worlds than these.” [DT1]

Jake Chambers holds the record for the number of times someone dies in the
Dark Tower
series: three. Roland first encounters him at a way station for the coach line while crossing the desert in pursuit of Walter. Jack Mort, probably under Walter’s influence, pushed the boy in front of Enrico Balazar’s car, and he ended up in Mid-World after he was killed.

His tarot card is the Sailor, drowning, with no one to cast him a line.

Though Roland estimates his age to be about nine,
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he is actually eleven. He’s small for his age, with sun-bleached blond hair and blue eyes. People don’t only underestimate his age; until he cut his hair, he was often mistaken for a girl. Calvin Tower tells him he looks like an only child, which he is. He is clean and well mannered, comely, sensitive. He has a hard time making friends his own age. He doesn’t shy away from the girls
who notice him; he talks to them with unknowing professionalism and puzzles them away. People bewilder him.

Jake’s upbringing—like Roland’s—was left to a court of cooks, nannies, tutors and teachers. His parents don’t hate him, but they seem to have overlooked him. His father, Elmer R. Chambers,
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is a ruthless and successful TV network executive, the master of “The Kill,” the fine art of putting strong programming against a rival’s weaker schedule. He’s a gunslinger of sorts, a Big Coffin Hunter in TV land.

The private school Jake attends in New York City is, according to his father, the best in the country for a boy his age. Jake won admission based on his academic record and intelligence, not because of his father’s money and influence.

His mother, who is scrawny in a sexy way, drinks prodigiously and cheats on her husband, as did Gabrielle Deschain. She leaves taxi fare for Jake to go to school each day, but he pockets the money and walks if it isn’t raining.

The family cook, Greta Shaw, is the strongest parental figure he has in New York. She makes his lunch and nicknames him ’Bama, from a Crimson Tide chant. While his parents go off on their respective adventures, she stays with him. By the age of four, Jake has already fantasized that Greta would become his mother if his parents died in a plane crash.

His bedroom is decorated like that of any young boy living in 1977. He has posters of Stevie Wonder and the Jackson Five on his walls, and a microscope. He likes geography, and bowls in the afternoon. He subconsciously resents professional people, and avoids bowling alleys that use equipment manufactured by companies in which his father owns stock. His career aspirations include bowling on the pro tour.

He’s prone to claustrophobia. Eddie jokes that if he had stayed in New York, he would probably have had his own child psychiatrist, working on his unresolved conflicts and his parent issues and perhaps being prescribed a drug like Ritalin.

His sensitivity in New York translates into a special awareness in Mid-World that Roland calls the touch. His talent is stronger than that of Roland’s old friend and fellow gunslinger Alain Johns. After he sees the rose in the vacant lot, his talent increases. He can lift thoughts from the top of Roland’s mind without trying hard, and could defeat the gunslinger in a battle of the minds, even with Roland trying his hardest to defend
himself. The strength of his touch might have made him a fine Breaker. Jake is scrupulous about his talent, though. He believes that reading people’s minds is as wrong as watching them undress through binoculars.

Jake’s second death comes at the hands of the man who will become his surrogate father. The boy is sensitive enough even at that early stage of their relationship to know in advance that Roland will betray him for his quest. Several times he calls on Roland to turn aside or leave him behind, but he’s only a boy and has no one to watch out for him in Mid-World.

Ka wants him so badly that it found a way around death to put him back at Roland’s side. Roland kills Jack Mort, thereby preventing Jake’s first death. This sets up a mental conflict in both the gunslinger and the boy. They each remember both previous timelines, the one in which Jake dies and the one in which he doesn’t.

Once he returns to Mid-World, the mental echo vanishes and he grows to trust Roland and love him as a father. In Lud, when Gasher threatens the ka-tet with a hand grenade, Jake willingly goes with him to defuse the situation, trusting that Roland won’t let him down again. By the time they are reunited after searching for Susannah in 1999, Jake fully accepts Roland as his surrogate father, certainly more of a father than Elmer Chambers ever was.

From the moment he meets Oy, the billy-bumbler is his constant companion, and Jake’s touch connection with Oy increases during his time in Mid-World. At times he believes he can read the creature’s mind, and at one point the two actually switch minds temporarily.

In Mid-World, Jake shoulders adult responsibility when he’s younger than Roland was when the gunslinger took his test of manhood. Officially an apprentice, he’s as deadly a shot as the others. When he isn’t called on to be a gunslinger, though, he’s still only a child. He makes grown-up excuses to spend time with Benny Slightman in the Calla, seemingly ashamed to want to do boyish things. “This was the part that had been despoiled by the door-keeper in Dutch Hill, by Gasher, by the Tick-Tock Man and by Roland himself.”

At times, he is vaguely jealous of Mordred for being Roland’s blood offspring. He’s not beyond getting angry with Roland when he discovers that the gunslinger has been keeping secrets from the group. He understands, though, that to defy Roland would be more serious than adolescent rebellion. Roland is his dinh, and a serious act of defiance would mean he’d have to face Roland in a test of manhood that he would surely fail.

He’s resourceful enough to keep his own secrets when he trails Ben Slightman and Andy to the Dogan near the Calla. Realizing that he has to betray his friendship with Benny by telling what he’s seen, he understands a little better what Roland had to do in the mountains. “Jake had thought there could be no worse betrayal than that. Now he wasn’t so sure.”

Jake is enraged when the Wolves kill Benny, and he becomes a killing machine at the sight of his dead friend. “It should have been his fucking father,” Jake cries. He shoots Wolves in much the same way Roland shot down the population of Tull.

Jake’s touch is integral to helping the Manni reopen the
UNFOUND
doorway, giving the ka-tet access to Earth after Susannah and Mia vanish. He, Oy and Father Callahan arrive in the middle of a busy New York street, and he is nearly struck by a taxi. Angry at the near miss, Jake pulls his Ruger on the impressively tall taxi driver, displaying a temper that he certainly would have had to manage as an adult, given the chance. More counseling, on top of his parent issues.

He’s fully prepared to die trying to save Susannah. He takes Roland’s place as the leader of the team when he and Callahan prepare to invade the Dixie Pig, laying out the general plan of attack while leaving room for improvisation, should unforeseen circumstances arise.

He sometimes chides himself for having stolen his father’s gun and doesn’t always like the person he becomes when he wears it. Though he has “guts a yard,” Jake never loses the humanity gunslingers so often abandon. He is tempted to kill Jochabim, the washer boy in the Dixie Pig’s kitchen, but he pauses. He knows that Roland would not have hesitated and suspects Eddie and Susannah wouldn’t have, either. “I love them, but I hope I die before it gets me so bad it stops making any difference if the ones against me deserve [to die] or not.”

Jake is devastated when Eddie is shot during the liberation of Blue Heaven. The members of the ka-tet had sensed something was going to happen and the sensation—ka-shume—reminded Jake of how he felt before Roland let him fall beneath the mountains. During the hours that follow, Jake doesn’t know how to react since he’s never had to face the death of a loved one before.