Chapter Seven

I awoke at two AM that night in my own bed. The house was empty, my wife having not expected me home for the night, was taking the opportunity to spend the weekend with her girlfriend in the city. I realized where I was, considered for several moments the mystery of how I had gotten there, decided it was the least of the mysteries of the night, and promptly fell straight back to sleep.

It's three weeks later now, and despite some sleepless nights and the memories like fever dreams of that very bizarre trip, things seem pretty anticlimactically normal. To my rather tame surprise, the meeting in Hanford had evidently gone just fine. Nobody seems to remember much in particular that I said, but they seem to agree that it was a productive meeting. Apparently we had all decided Hanford was no good for the movie. "Too much like the real thing," I had evidently said during the meeting. They did remember that.

And so Constant Reader, here, like it or not, is where this strange and perhaps unsatisfying tale finally closes. I wish it all made more sense, for your sake and mine. Let me end by saying that, number one, I still haven't decided if I believe everything that seemed to happen in Hanford or not. The brain has a very pervasive habit of developing blind spots towards the inexplicable. I have written it all down exactly as I remember it, for whatever that's worth. And number two, I am still not certain about my future. The conduit is always open, always letting in the Story. I seem not to have much to say about whether or not that happens anymore. But yesterday morning, coffee in hand, I went to my office, turned on the stereo, sat down at my desk, and stared at my Mac without turning it on. It stared back at me with its one big, blank eye, and for no less than five minutes we just watched each other.

I've been thinking a lot about retirement lately. Thinking about putting away all my scratch-books and using the old computer for nothing more than the occasional email or to play some solitaire. I've been thinking about closing down the conduit. I stared at the blank screen of my Mac, remembering the first days, when it was all new, mysterious, frightening, like handling live current that could either run the dream-machine or kill you dead and didn't care which. Back then, it was the hard, unforgiving teeth of an old Underwood typewriter under my fingers rather than the effortless whisper of the computer keyboard, but the walk was still the same and the hands, my own version of the conduit, knew the way eerily well.

I could do it, I realized. I could shut it all down. I could get up and walk away from that blank eye without ever turning the damn thing on. Turn the stereo back off, go back downstairs, drink my coffee on the porch and...

And I realized, with no real surprise, that I didn't want to do that anymore. Not really.

Most of the time in life, I think people simply stumble into what they are, what they become. A high school kid gets his first job bagging groceries and fifty years later he's accepting a gold watch for his years of dedicated service as the district manager for six Piggly-Wiggly stores. The varsity quarterback gets handed a bottle on the day he loses the division playoffs and five decades later he's curled up in the bottom of that bottle like a dead mouse, rank, shriveled and defined only by his failures. A few of us try to steer the course ourselves, with varying degrees of success. And a very, very few, the luckiest and the unluckiest of us, find that one mother lode vein of pure potential that is the thing we were made to do, the thing we were hardwired for, the thing that once we've begun mining, we'd be crazy or stupid or suicidal not to keep mining. For some people, it's model trains. For some it's shooting three-pointers from downtown. For some it's putting numbers together like puzzle pieces until they connect and light up like the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Plaza. For me, it's bringing the stories through.

I could stop writing. I could retire.

I stared down at the Mac's keyboard like a gunslinger staring at his gun, lying cleaned on the table, glowing in its metal with that mellow, watery inner light. I could just let it lie there and never pick it up again. Of course I could.

But I still had a lot of bullets in my belt. A hell of a lot of them.

And Goddamn it, that gun did still feel so good in my hand. Still just like the very first time I picked it up, back when I barely knew how to load it and was just as sure to shoot my own ear off as nail my mark. It still feels just like my hand was made for it. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that there isn't much in life that's finer.

And maybe the gunslinger analogy is even more apt than it at first appeared to me. A gun is a conduit, too. For the holder as well as for who it's pointed at.

So I powered up the Mac. I started a new story. I don't know how it'll end. I never do. And that's just fine. That's just right as rain. The keys under my fingers felt eerily like the hard old choppers of my first Underwood, and in my mind I heard the clackety-clack on the platen, and the ding of the bell, and the ratchet-clunk of the return, and the shudder of the table as it socked home. I discovered I was grinning; a hard, spit-toothed grin that would have probably scared my wife a little if she'd seen. She wasn't going to see it, though, nobody was going to see it, so I left it there on my face. It felt right, too. Right as fuckin rain.

Because there is one more loose end that needs addressing.

This morning, after shaving, I leaned over and just stared at myself in the mirror over the sink. Same old face, thinner now than it used to be (the result of the cancer, but I'm not complaining), but still recognizable. Still me. No flexible bullet. But still.

He might still be out there, somewhere, on the other side of the world between the worlds. And if he was, I bet he was still writing. Writing and getting that same old giddy high off it and grinning like a homicidal loon as the keys clickety-clacked under his fingers.

I had tried to kill him off. It had been on the jacket of Desperation, supposedly his last book. In a short bio (accompanied by an old photo of me at the typewriter, ha-ha) I had included the little note about his tragic death. Struck and killed by a van during one of his regular walks along a local road near his home in Maine. I had even written up a short story about the van's driver and some mildly humorous hijinks with a Labrador and a cooler of meat in the backseat. It had all been pretty neat. I shook my head at myself in the mirror. Like I mentioned, writers, especially those who deal in my kind of grist, can be pretty superstitious lot. But maybe it had been a little too neat. A little too easy.

But I was still me. I was still on the throne, not some King. I stared into my eyes. Good old Rich Bachman, Richard to you, Constant Reader. Real as real. Solid as cedar.

Just one more little thing to tie up. For good luck, let's say. Better safe than sorry. Writing is a conduit, like carrying a gun, and just like with carrying a gun, every now and then you have to pull the trigger. Because there's always another gunslinger out there, and his sights may be set on you.

Next time I'll try harder. Next time I'll get it right. Next time I'll be thorough.

Next time, it'll be more than a van.

-

-

-

-

-

Want more? Visit the official Not he Who Tells website for more on the mystery, the myth, and the enigma of fiction, including the web's only interactive 3D environment in which you can explore the world of King/Bachman. Go to www dot mellowtiger dot com.