Trouble was, he was going cool turkey. Cool, not cold. More words of wisdom from that great sage and eminent junkie Henry Dean.
They had been sitting on the penthouse balcony of the Regency Tower, not quite on the nod but edging toward it, the sun warm on their faces, done up so good … back in the good old days, when Eddie had just started to snort the stuff and Henry himself had yet to pick up his first needle.
Everybody talks about going cold turkey, Henry had said, but before you get there, you gotta go cool turkey.
And Eddie, stoned out of his mind, had cackled madly, because he knew exactly what Henry was talking about. Henry, however, had not so much as cracked a smile.
In some ways cool turkey's worse than cold turkey, Henry said. At least when you make it to cold turkey, you KNOW you're gonna puke, you KNOW you're going to shake, you KNOW you're gonna sweat until it feels like you're drowning in it. Cool turkey is, like, the curse of expectation.
Eddie remembered asking Henry what you called it when a needle-freak (which, in those dim dead days which must have been all of sixteen months ago, they had both solemnly assured themselves they would never become) got a hot shot.
You call that baked turkey, Henry had replied promptly, and then had looked surprised, the way a person does when he's said something that turned out to be a lot funnier than he actually thought it would be, and they looked at each other, and then they were both howling with laughter and clutching each other. Baked turkey, pretty funny, not so funny now.
Eddie walked up the aisle past the galley to the head, checked the sign―VACANT―and opened the door.
Hey Henry, o great sage if eminent junkie big brother, while we're on the subject of our feathered friends, you want to hear my definition of cooked goose? That's when the Customs guy at Kennedy decides there's something a little funny about the way you look, or it's one of the days when they got the dogs with the PhD noses out there instead of at Port Authority and they all start to bark and pee all over the floor and it's you they're all just about strangling themselves on their choke-chains trying to get to, and after the Customs guys toss all your luggage they take you into the little room and ask you if you'd mind taking off your shirt and you say yeah I sure would I'd mind like hell, I picked up a little cold down in the Bahamas and the air-conditioning in here is real high and I'm afraid it might turn into pneumonia and they say oh is that so, do you always sweat like that when the air-conditioning's too high, Mr. Dean, you do, well, excuse us all to hell, now do it, and you do it, and they say maybe you better take off the t-shirt too, because you look like maybe you got some kind of a medical problem, buddy, those bulges under your pits look like maybe they could be some kind of lymphatic tumors or something, and you don't even bother to say anything else, it's like a center-fielder who doesn't even bother to chase the ball when it's hit a certain way, he just turns around and watches it go into the upper deck, because when it's gone it's gone, so you take off the t-shirt and hey, looky here, you're some lucky kid, those aren't tumors, unless they're what you might call tumors on the corpus of society, yuk-yuk-yuk, those things look more like a couple of baggies held there with Scotch strapping tape, and by the way, don't worry about that smell, son, that's just goose. It's cooked.
He reached behind him and pulled the locking knob. The lights in the head brightened. The sound of the motors was a soft drone. He turned toward the mirror, wanting to see how bad he looked, and suddenly a terrible, pervasive feeling swept over him: a feeling of being watched.
Hey, come on, quit it, he thought uneasily. You're supposed to be the most unparanoid guy in the world. That's why they sent you. That's why―
But it suddenly seemed those were not his own eyes in the mirror, not Eddie Dean's hazel, almost-green eyes that had melted so many hearts and allowed him to part so many pretty sets of legs during the last third of his twenty-one years, not his eyes but those of a stranger. Not hazel but a blue the color of fading Levis . Eyes that were chilly, precise, unexpected marvels of calibration. Bombardier's eyes.
Reflected in them he saw―clearly saw―a seagull swooping down over a breaking wave and snatching something from it.
He had time to think What in God's name is this shit? and then he knew it wasn't going to pass; he was going to throw up after all.
In the half-second before he did, in the half-second he went on looking into the mirror, he saw those blue eyes disappear … but before that happened there was suddenly the feeling of being two people … of being possessed, like the little girl in The Exorcist.
Clearly he felt a new mind inside his own mind, and heard a thought not as his own thought but more like a voice from a radio: I've come through. I'm in the sky-carriage.
There was something else, but Eddie didn't hear it. He was too busy throwing up into the basin as quietly as he could.
When he was done, before he had even wiped his mouth, something happened which had never happened to him before. For one frightening moment there was nothing―only a blank interval. As if a single line in a column of newsprint had been neatly and completely inked out.
What is this? Eddie thought helplessly. What the hell is this shit?
Then he had to throw up again, and maybe that was just as well; whatever you might say against it, regurgitation had at least this much in its favor: as long as you were doing it, you couldn't think of anything else.
3
I've come through. I'm in the sky-carriage, the gunslinger thought. And, a second later: He sees me in the mirror !
Roland pulled back―did not leave but pulled back, like a child retreating to the furthest corner of a very long room. He was inside the sky-carriage; he was also inside a man who was not himself. Inside The Prisoner. In that first moment, when he had been close to the front (it was the only way he could describe it), he had been more than inside; he had almost been the man. He felt the man's illness, whatever it was, and sensed that the man was about to retch. Roland understood that if he needed to, he could take control of this man's body. He would suffer his pains, would be ridden by whatever demon-ape rode him, but if he needed to he could.
Or he could stay back here, unnoticed.
When the prisoner's fit of vomiting had passed, the gunslinger leaped forward—this time all the way to the front. He understood very little about this strange situation, and to act in a situation one does not understand is to invite the most terrible consequences, but there were two things he needed to know―and he needed to know them so desperately that the needing outweighed any consequences which might arise.
Was the door he had come through from his own world still there?
And if it was, was his physical self still there, collapsed, untenanted, perhaps dying or already dead without his self's self to go on unthinkingly running lungs and heart and nerves? Even if his body still lived, it might only continue to do so until night fell. Then the lobstrosities would come out to ask their questions and look for shore dinners.
He snapped the head which was for a moment his head around in a fast backward glance.
The door was still there, still behind him. It stood open on his own world, its hinges buried in the steel of this peculiar privy. And, yes, there he lay, Roland, the last gunslinger, lying on his side, his bound right hand on his stomach.
I'm breathing, Roland thought. I’llhave to go back and move me. But there are things to do first. Things …