DERRY: THE LAST INTERLUDE

 

“The ocean, in these times, is a perfect fleet of ships, and we can hardly fail to encounter many, in running over. It is merely crossing,” said Mr Micawber trifling with his eyeglass, “merely crossing. The distance is quite imaginary.”

-Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

June 4th, 1985

Bill came in about twenty minutes ago and brought me this book-Carole found it on one of the tables in the library and gave it to him when he asked for it. I thought Chief Rademacher might have taken it, but apparently he didn’t want anything to do with it.

Bill’s stutter is disappearing again, but the poor man has aged four years in the last four days. He told me he expects Audra to be discharged from Derry Home Hospital (where I myself yet tarry) tomorrow, only to take a private ambulance north to the Bangor Mental Health Institute. Physically she’s fine-minor cuts and bruises that are already healing. Mentally…

’You raise her hand and it stays up,” Bill said. He was sitting by the window, twiddling a can of diet soda between his hands. “It just floats there until someone puts it down again. Her reflexes are there, but very slow. The EEG they did shows a severely repressed alpha wave. She’s c-c-catatonic, Mike.”

I said, “I’ve got an idea. Maybe not such a good one. If you don’t like it, just say so.”

“What?”

“I’m going to be in here another week,” I said. “Instead of sending Audra up to Bangor, why don’t you take her to my place, Bill? Spend the week with her. Talk to her, even if she doesn’t talk back. Is she… is she continent?”

“No,” Bill said bleakly.

“Can you-I mean, would you-”

“Would I change her?” He smiled, and it was such a painful smile that I had to look away for a moment. It was the way my father smiled the time he told me about Butch Bowers and the chickens. “Yes. I think I could do that much.”

“I won’t tell you to take it easy on yourself when you’re obviously not prepared to do that,” I said, “but please remember that you yourself agreed that much or all of what’s happened was almost certainly ordained. That may include Audra’s part in this.”

“I sh-should have kept my mouth shut about where I was g-going.”

Sometimes it’s better to say nothing-so that’s what I did.

“All right,” he said at last. “If you really mean it-”

“I mean it. They’ve got my housekeys down at the Patient Services Desk. There’s a couple of Delmonico steaks in the freezer. Maybe that was ordained, too.”

“She’s eating mostly soft foods and, uh, luh-liquids.”

“Well,” I said, holding onto my smile, “maybe there’ll be cause for a celebration. There’s a pretty good bottle of wine on the top shelf in the pantry, too. Mondavi. Domestic, but good.”

He came over and gripped my hand. “Thank you, Mike.”

“Any time, Big Bill.”

He let go of my hand. “Richie flew back to California this morning.”

I nodded. “Think you’ll stay in touch?”

“M-Maybe,” he said. “For awhile, anyway. But… “He looked at me levelly. “It’s going to happen again, I think.”

“The forgetting?”

“Yes. In fact, I think it’s already started. Just little things so far. Details. But I think it’s going to spread.”

“Maybe that’s best.”

“Maybe.” He looked out the window, still twiddling his can of diet soda, almost surely thinking about his wife, so wide-eyed and silent and beautiful and plastic. Catatonic. The sound of a door slamming shut and locked. He sighed. “Maybe it is.”

“Ben? Beverly?”

He looked back at me and smiled a little. “Ben’s invited her to come back to Nebraska with him, and she’s agreed to go, at least for awhile. You know about her friend in Chicago?”

I nodded. Beverly told Ben and Ben told me yesterday. If I may understate the case (grotesquely understate the case), Beverly’s later description of her wonderful fantastic husband, Tom, was much truer than her original one. Wonderful fantastic Tom kept Bev in emotional, spiritual, and sometimes physical bondage for the last four years or so. Wonderful fantastic Tom got here by beating the information out of Bev’s only close woman friend.

“She told me she’s going to fly back to Chicago the week after next and file a missing-persons report on him. Tom, I mean.”

“Smart enough,” I said. “No one’s ever going to find him down there.” Or Eddie either, I thought but did not say.

“No, I suppose not,” Bill said. “And when she goes back, I’m betting Ben will go with her. And you know something else? Something really crazy?”

“What?”

“I don’t think she really remembers what happened to Tom.”

I just stared at him.

“She’s forgotten or forgetting,” Bill said. “And I can’t remember what the doorway looked like anymore. The d-doorway into Its place. I try to think of it and the craziest thing happens-I get this ih-image of g-g-goats walking over a bridge. From that story “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.” Crazy, huh?”

“They’ll trace Tom Rogan to Derry eventually,” I said. “He’ll have left a paper trail a mile wide. Rent-a-car, plane tickets.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” Bill said, lighting a cigarette. “I think he might have paid cash for his plane ticket and given a phony name. Maybe bought a cheap car here or stole one.”

“Why?”

“Oh, come on,” Bill said. “do you think he came all this way to give her a spanking?”

Our eyes met for a long moment and then he stood up. “Listen, Mike…”

“Too hip, gotta split,” I said. “I can dig it.”

He laughed at that, laughed hard, and when he had sobered he said: Thanks for the use of your place, Mikey.”

“I’m not going to swear to you it’ll make any difference. It has no therapeutic qualities that I’m aware of.”

“Well… I’ll see you.” He did an odd thing then, odd but rather lovely. He kissed my cheek. “God bless, Mike. I’ll be around.”

Things may be okay, Bill,” I said. “don’t give up hope. They may be okay.”

He smiled and nodded, but I think the same word was in both of our minds: Catatonic.

June 5th, 1985

Ben and Beverly came in today to say goodbye. They’re not flying-Ben’s rented a great big Cadillac from the Hertz people and they’re going to drive, not hurrying. There’s something in their eyes when they look at each other, and I’d bet my pension-plan that if they’re not making it now, they will be by the time they get to Nebraska.

Beverly hugged me, told me to get well quickly, and then cried.

Ben also hugged me, and asked for the third or fourth time if I would write. I told him I would indeed write, and so I will… for awhile, at least. Because this tune it’s happening to me, as well.

I’m forgetting things.

As Bill said, right now it’s only small things, details. But it feels like the sort of thing that’s going to spread. It could be that in a month or a year, this notebook will be all I’ll have to remind me of what happened here in Derry. I suppose the words themselves might begin to fade, eventually leaving this book as blank as when I first picked it up in the school-supplies department at Freese’s. That’s an awful thought and in the daytime it seems wildly paranoid… but, do you know, in the watches of the night it seems perfectly logical.

This forgetting… the prospect fills me with panic, but it also offers a sneaking sort of relief. It suggests to me more than anything else that this time they really did kill It; that there is no need of a watchman to stand and wait for the cycle to begin again.

Dull panic, sneaking relief. It’s the relief I’ll embrace, I think, sneaking or not.

Bill called to say he and Audra had moved in. There is no change in her.

“I’ll always remember you.” That’s what Beverly told me just before she and Ben left.

I think I saw a different truth in her eyes.

June 6th, 1985

Interesting piece in the Derry News today, on page one. The story was headed: STORM CAUSES HENLEY TO GIVE UP AUDITORIUM EXPANSION PLANS. The Henley in question is Tim Henley a multi-millionaire developer who came into Derry like a whirlwind in the late sixties-it was Henley and Zitner who organized the consortium responsible for building the Derry Mall (which, according to another piece on page one, is probably going to be declared a total loss). Tim Henley was determined to see Derry grow. There was a profit-motive, yes indeed, but there was more to it than that: Henley genuinely wanted to see it happen. His sudden abandonment of the auditorium expansion suggests several things to me. That Henley may have soured on Derry is only the most obvious. I think it’s also possible that he’s in the process of losing his shirt because of the destruction of the mall.

But the article also suggests that Henley is not alone; that other investors and potential investors in Derry’s future may be rethinking their options. Of course, Al Zitner won’t have to bother; God retired him when downtown collapsed. Of the others, those who thought like Henley are now facing a rather difficult problem-how do you rebuild an urban area which is now at least fifty percent underwater?

I think that, after a long and ghoulishly vital existence, Derry may be dying… like a nightshade whose time to bloom has come and gone.

Called Bill Denbrough late this afternoon. No change in Audra.

An hour ago I put through another call, this one to Richie Tozier in California. His answering machine fielded the call, with Creedence Clearwater Revival music playing in the background. Those machines always fuck up my timing somehow. I left my name and number, hesitated, and added that I hoped he was able to wear his contact lenses again. I was about to hang up when Richie himself picked up the phone and said, “Mikey! How you be?” His voice was pleased and warm… but there was an obvious bewilderment there as well. He was wearing the verbal expression of a man who has been caught utterly flat-footed.

“Hello, Richie,” I said. “I’m doing pretty well.”

“Good. How much pain you having?”

“Some. It’s going away. The itch is worse. I’ll be damn glad when they finally decide to unstrap my ribs. By the way, I liked the Creedence.”

Richie laughed. “shit, that ain’t Creedence, that’s “Rock and Roll Girls,” from Fogarty’s new album. Centerfield, it’s called. You haven’t heard any of it?”

“Huh-uh.”

“You got to get it, it’s great. It’s just like… ” He trailed off for a moment and then said, “It’s just like the old days.”

“I’ll pick it up,” I said, and I probably will. I always liked John Fogarty. “Green River” was my all-tune Creedence favorite, I guess. Get back home, he says. Just before the fade he says it.

“What about Bill?”

“He and Audra are keeping house for me while I’m in here.”

“Good. That’s good.” He paused for a moment. “You want to hear something fucking bizarre, ole Mikey?”

“Sure,” I said. I had a pretty good idea what he was going to say.

“Well… I was sitting here in my study, listening to some of the new Cashbox hot prospects, going over some ad copy, reading memos… there’s about two mountains of stuff backed up, and I’m looking at roughly a month of twenty-five-hour days. So I had the answering machine turned on, but with the volume turned up so I could intercept the calls I wanted and just let the dimwits talk to the tape. And the reason I let you talk to the tape as long as I did-”

“-was because at first you didn’t have the slightest idea who I was.”

“Jesus, that’s right! How did you know that?”

“Because we’re forgetting again. All of us this time.”

“Mikey, are you sure?”

“What was Stan’s last name?” I asked him.

There was silence on the other end of the line-a long silence. In it, faintly, I could hear a woman talking in Omaha… or maybe she was in Ruthven, Arizona, or Flint, Michigan. I heard her, as faint as a space-traveller leaving the solar system in the nosecone of a burned-out rocket, thank someone for the cookies.

Then Richie said, uncertainly: “I think it was Underwood, but that isn’t Jewish, it it?”

“It was Uris.”

“Uris!” Richie cried, sounding both relieved and shaken. “Jesus, I hate it when I get something right on the tip of my tongue and can’t quite pick it off. Someone brings out a Trivial Pursuit game, I say “Excuse me but I think the diarrhea’s coming back so maybe I’ll just go home, okay?” But you remember, anyhow, Mikey. Like before.”

“No. I looked it up in my address book.”

Another long silence. Then: “You didn’t remember?”

“Nope.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

“Then this tune it’s really over,” he said, and the relief in his voice was unmistakable.

“Yes, I think so.”

That long-distance silence fell again-all the miles between Maine and California. I believe we were both thinking the same thing: it was over, yes, and in six weeks or six months, we will have forgotten all about each other. It’s over, and all it’s cost us is our friendship and Stan and Eddie’s lives. I’ve almost forgotten them, you know it? Horrible as it may sound, I have almost forgotten Stan and Eddie. Was it asthma Eddie had, or chronic migraine? I’ll be damned if I can remember for sure, although I think it was migraine. I’ll ask Bill. He’ll know.

“Well, you say hi to Bill and that pretty wife of his,” Richie said with a cheeriness that sounded canned.

“I will, Richie,” I said, closing my eyes and rubbing my forehead. He remembered Bill’s wife was in Derry… but not her name, or what had happened to her.

“And if you’re ever in LA, you got the number. We’ll get together and mouth some chow.”

“Sure.” I felt hot tears behind my eyes. “And if you get back this way, the

same thing goes.”

“Mikey?”

“Right here.”

“I love you, man.”

“Same here.”

“Okay. Keep your thumb on it.”

“Beep-beep, Richie.”

He laughed. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stick it in your ear, Mike. Ah say, in yo ear, boy.”

He hung up and so did I. Then I lay back on my pillows with my eyes shut and didn’t open them for a long time.

June 7th, 1985

Police Chief Andrew Rademacher, who took over from Chief Borton in the late sixties, is dead. It was a bizarre accident, one I can’t help associating with what has been happening in Derry… what has just ended in Derry.

The combination police-station-courthouse stands on the edge of the area that fell into the Canal, and while it didn’t go, the upheaval-or the flood-must have caused structural damage of which no one was aware.

Rademacher was working late in his office last night, the story in the paper says, as he has every night since the storm and the flood. The Police Chiefs office has moved from the third to the fifth floor since the old days, to just below an attic where all sorts of records and useless city artifacts are stored. One of those artifacts was the tramp-chair I have described earlier in these pages. It was made of iron and weighed better than four hundred pounds. The building shipped a quantity of water during the downpour of May 31st, and that must have weakened the attic floor (or so the paper says). Whatever the reason, the tramp-chair fell from the attic directly onto Chief Rademacher as he sat at his desk, reading accident reports. He was killed instantly. Officer Bruce Andeen rushed in and found him lying on the ruins of his shattered desk, his pen still in one hand.

Talked to Bill on the phone again. Audra is taking some solid food, he says, but otherwise there is no change. I asked him if Eddie’s big problem had been asthma or migraine.

“Asthma,” he said promptly. “don’t you remember his aspirator?”

“Sure,” I said, and did. But only when Bill mentioned it.

“Mike?”

“Yeah?”

“What was his last name?”

I looked at my address book lying on the nighttable, but didn’t pick it up. “I don’t quite remember.”

“It was like Kerkorian,” Bill said, sounding distressed, “but that wasn’t quite it. You’ve got everything written down, though. Right?”

“Right,” I said.

“Thank God for that.”

“Have you had any ideas about Audra?”

“One,” he said, “but it’s so crazy I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“All right.”

“Mike, it’s scary, isn’t it? Forgetting like this?”

“Yes,” I said. And it is.

June 8th, 1985

Raytheon, which had been scheduled to break ground on its Derry plant in July, has decided at the last minute to build in Waterville instead. The editorial on page one of the News expresses dismay… and, if I read correctly between the lines, a little fright.

I think I know what Bill’s idea is. He’ll have to act quickly, before the last of the magic departs this place. If it hasn’t already.

I guess what I thought before wasn’t so paranoid after all. The names and addresses of the others in my little book are fading. The color and quality of the ink combine to make those entries look as if they were written fifty or seventy-five years before the others I’ve jotted in there. This has happened in the last four or five days. I’m convinced that by September their names will be utterly gone.

I suppose I could preserve them; I could just keep copying them. But I’m also convinced that each would fade in its turn, and that very soon it would become an exercise in futility-like writing I will not throw spit-balls in class five hundred times. I would be writing names that meant nothing for a reason I didn’t remember.

Let it go, let it go.

Bill, act quickly… but be careful!

June 9th, 1985

Woke up in the middle of the night from a terrible nightmare I couldn’t remember, got panicky, couldn’t breathe. Reached for the call-button and then couldn’t use it. Had a terrible vision of Mark Lamonica answering the bell with a hypo… or Henry Bowers with his switchblade.

I grabbed my address book and called Ben Hanscom in Nebraska… the address and number have faded still more, but they are still legible. No go, Joe. Got a recorded phone-company voice telling me service to that number has been cancelled.

Was Ben fat, or did he have something like a club foot?

Lay awake until dawn.

June 10th, 1985

They tell me I can go home tomorrow.

I called Bill and told him that-I suppose I wanted to warn him that his time is getting shorter all the time. Bill is the only one I remember clearly and I’m convinced that I’m the only one he remembers clearly. Because we are both still here in Derry, I suppose.

“All right,” he said. “By tomorrow we’ll be out of your hair.”

“You still got your idea?”

“Yeah. Looks like it’s time to try it.”

“Be careful.”

He laughed and said something I both do and don’t understand: “You can’t be c-c-careful on a skuh-hateboard, man.”

“How will I know how it turned out, Bill?”

“You’ll know,” he said, and hung up.

My heart’s with you, Bill, no matter how it turns out. My heart is with all of them, and I think that, even if we forget each other, we’ll remember in our dreams.

I’m almost done with this diary now-and I suppose a diary is all that it will ever be, and that the story of Derry’s old scandals and eccentricities has no place outside these pages. That’s fine with me; I think that, when they let me out of here tomorrow, it might finally be time to start thinking about some sort of new life… although just what that might be is unclear to me.

I loved you guys, you know.

I loved you so much.

 

EPILOGUE

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