At night he finds that what he thought he had learned was not a serviceable lesson, had been found lacking by his conscience and his heart, had, in blunt terms, been a placebo at best and a fucking lie at worst.
He thought, before this night, that he had learned. A painfully, horribly, difficult lesson, but he had put himself to it and he had learned. It had made its way into his bones whether he wanted it or not, whether he could handle it, kicking and screaming. But it was there, settled. It was there: the knowledge of experiencing grief. He had nursed it into something serviceable to him in those long, dusty years, alone in the desert, and he thought it was a serviceable thing to him still.
Then Eddie had died.
The lesson he thought he had been able to learn was nothing. Nothing, in the face of that, of Susannah’s screaming and Cuthbert watching his own death mirrored back at him, and Jake who had already been offered as sacrifice once and understood now the other kind of sacrifice that comes not with your own death, but the death of your heart. Or the beginning of it.
If he closes his eyes, he hears the gunshot and the yelling, and he hears Eddie’s last words to him calling him father and he sees nothing but darkness, the metal in his mouth the bitter taste he woke up to after Jericho, and if he goes even further back, allows for the bite to take full hold of him and the sweetness and the agony, he sees beaded braids, blue eyes in the shadows. A bitter loneliness he trained himself to call acceptance.
And at the centre of it, not a tower, but this: his son of eleven years old, with his limbs askew in ways no body should be, and his mouth full of blood, and Roland tears himself up from the pillow with a breath too sharp to be real.
Oy doesn’t sleep. In the blue-bitter light coming in from outside his motel room, the billy-bumbler’s chest moves slowly, regularly, exhausted by grief. He sees him stare at him, his snout resting on his paws, Jake in every slow blink, and next time Roland breathes the breath is sandpaper, the pain is throat, the grief is water, water, water, that never knew how to give him peace unless in Kingstown and now will never give him peace again, he never searched for it, he’ll never have it.
In the semidarkness: faces. Too many to count. He sees them start to congregate at the foot of the bed, by the bedside table, where the bathroom is.
Some he can barely name. Others he knows too well.
He opens the motel room door. It barely creaks, and even if it does, he knows how to weigh sounds so they don’t echo or reverberate, catch them in slow, tender hands, calloused hands, and nurse them into silence before anyone can hear. It is like turning the body into something else: perhaps a weapon. He never stopped to think about it long enough to realise it.
Oy stands up, and follows. He did not ask him to but perhaps like for him the room is crowded, crowded with faces, or scents, or thoughts. He does not know what billy-bumblers dream of, nor what their nightmares taste like, and figures Oy knows even less about Roland’s dreams, anyway. The only moment he had flown, brief as a heartbeat, was when Jake had switched them, put himself in Oy’s body and vice-versa, to escape the traps beneath the Dixie Pig. There Oy had known something closer to starlight and full thought, beyond the falling angel and the rising ape.
With the door closed the faces are gone, and it’s better, it keeps the rot inside him where he knows how to quell it. But he can’t. Not this pain, this final, ending pain that has changed, changed him and the quest and the tet, the tet most of all.
He hears the door to Arya’s room open, like the real world grating against his dream one where men more than six feet tall can open doors without a sound (this Where always unable to envelope him completely, unable to hold him like something part of it. Bodies may inhabit, but reality knows blood better than any eyes ever could), and he hears her footsteps. Not-Arya. Other-Arya.
He wonders if she understands. Bright in some dream, the notion of a second life like sweat on naked skin. It’s a thought that barely breaks the surface.
What ink-black darkness pain makes. What Black Thirteen. What uselessness of language and of thought.
“What’re you doing out here?”
He moves too slowly for comfort and wraps his own words around her question so softly. His blue eyes tear open the dream, spill out the pain like a broken vessel under the skin, like a bruise, yellow and purple on the brink of his heart. They fixate on her face. They ask her, despite himself, to bear witness. To his pain. To his emptiness. To the price, to the terrible price, like sugar in water to cover the cyanide flavour, that one must pay to the gun and the Tower and the singing red roses.
He seems to think a thousand miles away in the blink of an eye. Somewhere where time has no meaning anymore. Where a desert is a desert is eternity, is the sea in any other name. Where things overlap, and the only word with one meaning is death. Death, which cannot be taken back or bargained with. Death. Death, the only thing that flows forward.
He is dim, between one world and the next. Had she the Touch, she’d see him thin too thin to be real, stretched against the ribs of her reality like skin on a starving man’s skull. The stomach too small to hold any food anymore. Maybe water.
“I’m afraid to go to sleep. I’m afraid my dead friends will come to me, and that seeing them will kill me.”
The flicker of the lights: the parking-lot lights, the light like a ghost from her room, an ectoplasmic manifestation of technology, the small version of the human hubris that destroyed his world before it was his.
“Would it help if I sat down next to you?”
The question he answers with a nod. She sits gingerly like the air around them will break. Again, the brief bright thought: that some bodies simply understand, the knowledge intrinsic tied to the bones allows them to know they are a copy of a copy, that there is another version, another heart, the same eyes, the same bright thread beneath the skin. A prayer to a creature that perhaps created them, or that they simply thought had created them, as a way of comfort. It doesn’t matter: the reality is split anyway.
Roland swallows and blinks too hard when her palm touches his cheek. His wet cheek, he realises now, because his sons are dead, and he will have to look his husband and daughter-in-law in the eye, this family of five that now is three (and Oy) and the thought is a deadshroud, a death-shroud, a dead thing.
Chary-dinh.
Though he isn’t. Not anymore. That is why it hurts so much, the bitter realness of it, twisted inside him. A red dripping knife.
She smiles the tender wolf’s smile. Her thumb catches the tears without even wanting to, as Roland cries without sobbing but simply lets the grief, slow, drip past him, through him like a wave.
