The Dark Tower

What Uncle Tim doesn’t know is that before going to Harvard, Ted tries to enlist in what will soon be known as the American Expeditionary Force. “Son,” the doctor tells him, “you’ve got one hell of a loud heart murmur, and your hearing is substandard. Now are you going to tell me that you came here not knowing those things would get you a red stamp? Because, pardon me if I’m out of line, here, you look too smart for that.”

And then Ted Brautigan does something he’s never done before, has sworn he never will do. He asks the Army doc to pick a number, not just between one and ten but between one and a thousand. To humor him (it’s rainy in Hartford, and that means things are slow in the enlistment office), the doctor thinks of the number 748. Ted gives it back to him. Plus 419 . . . 89 . . . and 997. When Ted invites him to think of a famous person, living or dead, and when Ted tells him Andrew Johnson, not Jackson but Johnson, the doc is finally amazed. He calls over another doc, a friend, and Ted goes through the same rigmarole again . . . with one exception. He asks the second doctor to pick a number between one and a million, then tells the doctor he was thinking of eighty-seven thousand, four hundred and sixteen. The second doctor looks momentarily surprised—stunned, in fact—then covers with a big shitlicking smile. “Sorry, son,” he says, “you were only off by a hundred and thirty thousand or so.” Ted looks at him, not smiling, not responding to the shitlicking smile in any way at all of which he is aware, but he’s eighteen, and still young enough to be flabbergasted by such utter and seemingly pointless mendacity. Meanwhile, Doc Number Two’s shitlicking smile has begun to fade on its own. Doc Number Two turns to Doc Number One and says “Look at his eyes, Sam—look at what’s happening to his eyes.”

The first doctor tries to shine an ophthalmoscope in Ted’s eyes and Ted brushes it impatiently aside. He has access to mirrors and has seen the way his pupils sometimes expand and contract, is aware when it’s happening even when there’s no mirror handy by a kind of shuttering, stuttering effect in his vision, and it doesn’t interest him, especially not now. What interests him now is that Doc Number Two is fucking with him and he doesn’t know why. “Write the number down this time,” he invites. “Write it down so you can’t cheat.”