The Dark Tower

“Have I told you that the taheen don’t need the thinking-caps? They speak perfectly good English, and I’ve sensed from time to time that some have limited progging abilities of their own, can send and receive—at least a little—but if you dip into them, you get these mind-numbing blasts of what sounds like mental static—white noise. I assumed it was some sort of protective device; Dinky believes it’s the way they actually think. Either way, it makes it easier for them. They don’t have to remember to put on hats in the morning when they go out!

“Trampas was one of the can-toi rovers. You might see him one day strolling along Main Street in Pleasantville, or sitting on a bench in the middle of the Mall, usually with some self-help book like Seven Steps to Positive Thinking. Then, the next day, there he is leaning against the side of Heartbreak House, taking in the sun. Same with the other can-toi floaters. If there’s a pattern, I’ve never been able to anticipate it, or Dinky either. We don’t think there is one.

“What’s always made Trampas different is a complete lack of that sense of jealousy. He’s actually friendly—or was; in some ways he hardly seemed to be a low man at all. Not many of his can-toi colleagues seem to like him a whole hell of a lot. Which is ironic, you know, because if there really is such a thing as becoming, then Trampas is one of the few who actually seem to be getting somewhere with it. Simple laughter, for instance. When most low men laugh, it sounds like a basket of rocks rolling down a tin coal-chute: makes you fair shiver, as Tanya says. When Trampas laughs, he sounds a little high-pitched but otherwise normal. Because he is laughing, I think. Genuinely laughing. The others are just forcing it.

“Anyway, I struck up a conversation with him one day. On Main Street, this was, outside the Gem. Star Wars was back for its umpty-umpth revival. If there’s any movie the Breakers never get enough of, it’s Star Wars.

“I asked him if he knew where his name came from. He said yes, of course, from his clan-fam. Each can-toi is given a hume name by his clan-fam at some point in his development; it’s a kind of maturity-marker. Dinky says they get that name the first time they successfully whack off, but that’s just Dinky being Dinky. The fact is we don’t know and it doesn’t matter, but some of the names are pretty hilarious. There’s one fellow who looks like Rondo Hatton, a film actor from the thirties who suffered from acromegaly and got work playing monsters and psychopaths, but his name is Thomas Carlyle. There’s another one named Beowulf and a fellow named Van Gogh Baez.”

Susannah, a Bleecker Street folkie from way back, put her face in her hands to stifle a gust of giggles.

“Anyway, I told him that Trampas was a character from a famous Western novel called The Virginian. Only second banana to the actual hero, true, but Trampas has got the one line from the book everyone remembers: ‘Smile when you say that!’ It tickled our Trampas, and I ended up telling him the whole plot of the book over cups of drug-store coffee.

“We became friends. I’d tell him what was going on in our little community of Breakers, and he’d tell me all sorts of interesting but innocent things about what was going on over on his side of the fence. He also complained about his eczema, which made his head itch terribly. He kept lifting his hat—this little beanie-type of thing, almost like a yarmulke, only made of denim—to scratch underneath. He claimed that was the worst place of all, even worse than down there on your makieman. And little by little, I realized that every time he lifted his beanie to scratch, I could read his thoughts. Not just the ones on top but all of them. If I was fast—and I learned to be—I could pick and choose, exactly the way you’d pick and choose articles in an encyclopedia by turning the pages. Only it wasn’t really like that; it was more like someone turning a radio on and off during a news broadcast.”

“Holy shit,” Eddie said, and took another graham cracker. He wished mightily for milk to dip them in; graham crackers without milk were almost like Oreos without the white stuff in the middle.

“Imagine turning a radio or a TV on full-blast,” Ted said in his rusty, failing voice, “and then turning it off again . . . justasquick.” He purposely ran this together, and they all smiled—even Roland. “That’ll give you the idea. Now I’ll tell you what I learned. I suspect you know it already, but I just can’t take the risk that you don’t. It’s too important.