The Life of Chuck

by Stephen King

Stories come when they will; you just have to be open to their arrival. One day on my morning walk, I was musing on an African proverb that says, “When an old man dies, a library burns down.”

I thought to myself, What if it isn’t a library that burns when a man dies? What if it’s a whole world? His world?

He said, “It’s interesting to me that the parents who did show up seemed more concerned about the Internet than the California quakes. I suppose because the state’s breadbasket regions are still there.”

“I’ll bet many of those folks think the multiple disasters we’re facing have a single cause rooted in what we have done to the earth’s environment. It’s not so. I would be the first to admit that we have treated our mother—yes, she’s the mother of us all—very badly, certainly molested her if not outright raped her, but we’re puny compared to the great clock of the universe. Puny. No, whatever is happening is much larger than environmental degradation.”

“Well fuck the mystery,” the boy says. “Mysteries should stay in storybooks, where they belong.”

“The human brain is finite—no more than a sponge of tissue inside a cage of bone—but the mind within the brain is infinite. Its storage capacity is colossal, its imaginative reach beyond our ability to comprehend. I think when a man or woman dies, a whole world falls to ruin—the world that person knew and believed in. Think of that, kiddo—billions of people on earth, and each one of those billions with a world inside. The earth their minds have conceived.”

His life is narrower than the one he once hoped for, but he’s made his peace with that. He understands that narrowing is the natural order of things. There comes a time when you realize you’re never going to be the President of the United States and settle for being president of the Jaycees instead.

Later he will lose the ability to walk, never mind dancing with little sister on Boylston Street. Later he will lose the ability to chew food, and his meals will come from a blender. Later he will lose his grip on the difference between waking and sleeping and enter a land of pain so great that he will wonder why God made the world. Later he will forget his wife’s name. What he will remember—occasionally—is how he stopped, and dropped his briefcase, and began to move his hips to the beat of the drums, and he will think that is why God made the world. Just that.

“Yes,” she said. “Everything you see. Everything you know. The world, Chucky. Planes in the sky, manhole covers in the street. Every year you live, that world inside your head will get bigger and brighter, more detailed and complex. Do you understand?”

When you lived with dread day in and day out, there had to be relief when the dreaded thing finally happened and was over. Didn’t there?

The universe is large, he thought. It contains multitudes. It also contains me, and in this moment I am wonderful. I have a right to be wonderful.

I will insist that he wasn’t, and I will live my life until my life runs out. I am wonderful, I deserve to be wonderful, and I contain multitudes.