"-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
BILL DENBROUGH BEATS THE DEVIL-II
"I knew the bride when she used to do the Pony,
I knew the bride when she used to do the Stroll.
I knew the bride when she used to wanna party,
I knew the bride when she used to rock and roll."
-Nick Lowe
"You can't be careful on a skateboard man"
-some kid
1
Noon of a summer day.
Bill stood naked in Mike Hanlon's bedroom, looking at his lean body in the mirror on the door. His bald head gleamed in the light which fell through the window and cast his shadow along the floor and up the wall. His chest was hairless, his thighs and shanks skinny but overlaid with ropes of muscle. Still, he thought, it's an adult's body we got here, no question about that. There's the pot belly that comes with a few too many good steaks, a few too many bottles of Kirin beer, a few too many poolside lunches where you had the Reuben or the French dip instead of the diet plate. Your seat's dropped, too, Bill old buddy. You can still serve an ace if you're not too hung over and if your eye's in, but you can't hustle after the old Dunlop the way you could when you were seventeen. You got love handles and your balls are starting to get that middle-aged dangly look. There's lines on your face that weren't there when you were seventeen... Hell, they weren't there on your first author photo, the one where you tried so hard to look as if you knew something... anything. You're too old for what you've got in mind, Billy-boy. You'll kill both of you.
He put on his underpants.
If we'd believed that, we never could have... have done whatever it was we did.
Because he didn't really remember what it was they had done, or what had happened to turn Audra into a catatonic wreck. He only knew what he was supposed to do now, and he knew that if he didn't do it now, he would forget that, too. Audra was sitting downstairs in Mike's easy chair, her hair hanging lankly to her shoulders, staring with rapt attention at the TV, which was currently showing Dialing for Dollars. She didn't speak and would only move if you led her.
This is different. You're just too old, man. Believe it.
I won't.
Then die here in Derry. Big fucking deal.
He put on athletic socks, the one pair of jeans he had brought, the tank top he'd bought at the Shirt Shack in Bangor the day before. The tank was bright orange. Across the front it said WHERE THE HELL IS DERRY, MAINE? He sat down on Mike's bed-the one he had shared for the last week of nights with his warm but corpse-like wife-and put on his sneakers... a pair of Keds, which he had also bought yesterday in Bangor.
He stood up and looked at himself in the mirror again. He saw a man pressing middle age dressed up in a kid's clothes.
You look ludicrous.
What kid doesn't?
You're no kid. Give this up!
"Fuck, let's rock and roll a little," Bill said softly, and left the room.
2
In the dreams he will have in later years, he is always leaving Derry alone, at sunset. The town is deserted; everyone has left. The Theological Seminary and the Victorian houses on West Broadway brood black against a lurid sky, every summer sunset you ever saw rolled up into one.
He can hear his footfalls echoing back as they rap along the concrete. The only other sound is water rushing hollowly through the stormdrains
3
He rolled Silver out into the driveway, put him on the kickstand, and checked the tires again. The front one was okay but the back one felt a little mushy. He got the bike pump that Mike had bought and firmed it up. When he put the pump back, he checked the playing cards and the clothespins. The bike's wheels still made those exciting machine-gun sounds Bill remembered from his boyhood. Good deal.
You've gone crazy.
Maybe. We'll see.
He went back into Mike's garage again, got the 3-in-l, and oiled the chain and sprocket. Then he stood up, looked at Silver, and gave the bulb of the oogah-horn a light, experimental squeeze. It sounded good. He nodded and went into the house.
4
and he sees all those places again, intact, as they were then: the hulking brick fort of Derry Elementary, the Kissing Bridge with its complex intaglio of initials, high-school sweethearts ready to crack the world open with their passion who had grown up to become insurance agents and car salesmen and waitresses and beauticians; he sees the statue of Paul Bunyan against that bleeding sunset sky and the leaning white fence which ran along the Kansas Street sidewalk at the edge of the Barrens. He sees them as they were, as they always will be in some part of his mind... and his heart breaks with love and honor.
Leaving, leaving Derry, he thinks. We are leaving Derry, and if this was a story it would be the last half-dozen pages or so; get ready to put this one up on the shelf and forget it. The sun's going down and there's no sound but my footfalls and the water in the drains. This is the time of
5
Dialing for Dollars had given way to Wheel of Fortune. Audra sat passively
in front of it, her eyes never leaving the set. Her demeanor did not change
when Bill snapped the TV off.
"Audra," he said, going to her and taking her hand. "Come on."
She didn't move. Her hand lay in his, warm wax. Bill took her other hand from the arm of Mike's chair and pulled her to her feet. He had dressed her that morning much as he had dressed himself-she was wearing Levis and a blue shell top. She would have looked quite lovely if not for her wide-eyed vacant stare.
"Cuh-come on," he said again, and led her through the door, into Mike's kitchen and, eventually, outside. She came willingly enough... although she would have plunged off the back porch stoop and gone sprawling in the dirt if Bill had not put an arm around her waist and guided her down the steps.
He led her over to where Silver stood heeled over on his kick-stand in the bright summer noonlight. Audra stood beside the bike, looking serenely at the side of Mike's garage.
"Get on, Audra."
She didn't move. Patiently, Bill worked at getting her to swing one of her long legs over the carrier mounted on Silver's back fender. At last she stood there with the package carrier between her legs, not quite touching her crotch. Bill pressed his hand lightly to the top of her head and Audra sat down.
He swung onto Silver's saddle and put up the kickstand with his heel. He prepared to reach behind him for Audra's hands and draw them around his middle, but before he could do it they crept around him of their own accord, like small dazed mice.