The Dark Tower

Not on that day in 1916, though. On that day in 1916, he is dragged briskly down the hallway and deposited on the granite step outside the main doors and told by a man with a foot-thick accent that “Y’all just want t’stay outta heah, boa.” After some consideration, Ted decides the Sergeant-at-Arms isn’t calling him a snake; boa in this context is most likely Dixie for boy.

For a little while Ted just stands where he has been left. He’s thinking What does it take to convince you? and How blind can you be? He can’t believe what just happened to him.

But he has to believe it, because here he is, on the outside. And at the end of a six-mile walk around Hartford he thinks he understands something else as well. They will never believe. None of them. Not ever. They’ll refuse to see that a fellow who could read the collective mind of the German High Command might be mildly useful. A fellow who could tell the Allied High Command where the next big German push was going to come. A fellow who could do a thing like that a few times—maybe even just once or twice!—might be able to end the war by Christmas. But he won’t have the chance because they won’t give it to him. And why? It has something to do with the second doctor changing his number when Ted landed on it, and then refusing to write another one down. Because somewhere down deep they want to fight, and a guy like him would spoil everything.

It’s something like that.

Fuck it, then. He’ll go to Harvard on his uncle’s nickel.

And does. Harvard’s all Dinky told them, and more: Drama, Debate, Harvard Crimson, Mathematical Odd Fellows and, of course, the capper, Phi Beta Crapper. He even saves Unc a few bucks by graduating early.

He is in the south of France, the war long over, when a telegram reaches him: UNCLE DEAD STOP RETURN HOME SOONEST STOP.

The key word here seemed to beSTOP.

God knows it was one of those watershed moments. He went home, yes, and he gave comfort where comfort was due, yes. But instead of stepping into the furniture business, Ted decides toSTOPhis march toward financial success andSTARThis march toward financial obscurity. In the course of the man’s long story, Roland’s ka-tet never once hears Ted Brautigan blame his deliberate anonymity on his outré talent, or on his moment of epiphany: this is one valuable talent that no one in the world wants.

And God, how he comes to understand that! For one thing, his “wild talent” (as the pulp science-fiction magazines sometimes call it) is actually physically dangerous under the right circumstances. Or the wrong ones.