The Dark Tower

“Was it Emily Dickinson who called hope the thing with feathers? I can’t remember. There are a great many things I can’t remember any longer, but it seems I still remember how to fight. Maybe that’s a good thing. I hope it’s a good thing.

“Has it crossed your mind to wonder where I’m recording this, lady and gentlemen?”

It hadn’t. They simply sat, mesmerized by the slightly dusty sound of Brautigan’s voice, passing a bottle of Perrier and a tin filled with graham crackers back and forth.

“I’ll tell you,” Brautigan went on, “partly because the three of you from America will surely find it amusing, but mostly because you may find it useful in formulating a plan to destroy what’s going on in Algul Siento.

“As I speak, I’m sitting on a chair made of slab chocolate. The seat is a big blue marshmallow, and I doubt if the air mattresses we’re planning to leave you could be any more comfortable. You’d think such a seat would be sticky, but it’s not. The walls of this room — and the kitchen I can see if I look through the gumdrop arch to my left — are made of green, yellow, and red candy. Lick the green one and you taste lime. Lick the red one and you taste raspberry. Although taste (in any sense of that slippery word) had very little to do with Sheemie’s choices, or so I believe; I think he simply has a child’s love of bright primary colors.”

Roland was nodding and smiling a little.

“Although I must tell you,” the voice from the tape recorder said dryly, “I’d be happy to have at least one room with a slightly more reserved décor. Something in blue, perhaps. Earth-tones would be even better.

“Speaking of earth tones, the stairs are also chocolate. The banister’s a candy-cane. One cannot, however, say ‘the stairs going up to the second floor,’ because there is no second floor. Through the window you can see cars that look suspiciously like bonbons going by, and the street itself looks like licorice. But if you open the door and take more than a single step toward Twizzler Avenue, you find yourself back where you started. In what we may as well call ‘the real world,’ for want of a better term.

“Gingerbread House — which is what we call it because that’s what you always smell in here, warm gingerbread, just out of the oven — is as much Dinky’s creation as it is Sheemie’s. Dink wound up in the Corbett House dorm with Sheemie, and heard Sheemie crying himself to sleep one night. A lot of people would have passed by on the other side in a case like that, and I realize that no one in the world looks less like the Good Samaritan than Dinky Earnshaw, but instead of passing by he knocked on the door of Sheemie’s suite and asked if he could come in.

“Ask him about it now and Dinky will tell you it was no big deal. ‘I was new in the place, I was lonely, I wanted to make some friends,’ he’ll say. ‘Hearing a guy bawling like that, it hit me that he might want a friend, too.’ As though it were the most natural thing in the world. In a lot of places that might be true, but not in Algul Siento. And you need to understand that above all else, I think, if you’re going to understand us. So forgive me if I seem to dwell on the point.

“Some of the hume guards call us morks, after a space alien in some television comedy. And morks are the most selfish people on Earth. Antisocial? Not exactly. Some are extremely social, but only insofar as it will get them what they currently want or need. Very few morks are sociopaths, but most sociopaths are morks, if you understand what I’m saying. The most famous, and thank God the low men never brought him over here, was a mass murderer named Ted Bundy.

“If you have an extra cigarette or two, no one can be more sympathetic — or admiring — than a mork in need of a smoke. Once he’s got it, though, he’s gone.

“Most morks — I’m talking ninety-eight or — nine out of a hundred — would have heard crying behind that closed door and never so much as slowed down on their way to wherever. Dinky knocked and asked if he could come in, even though he was new in the place and justifiably confused (he also thought he was going to be punished for murdering his previous boss, but that’s a story for another day).

“And we should look at Sheemie’s side of it. Once again, I’d say ninety-eight or even ninety-nine morks out of a hundred would have responded to a question like that by shouting ‘Get lost!’ or even ‘Fuck off!’ Why? Because we are exquisitely aware that we’re different from most people, and that it’s a difference most people don’t like. Any more than the Neanderthals liked the first Cro-Magnons in the neighborhood, I would imagine. Morks don’t like to be caught off-guard.”

A pause. The reels spun. All four of them could sense Brautigan thinking hard.