Duma Key

by Stephen King

He looked at me inscrutably. His large face was made for such an expression; etched on King Tut’s tomb, I believe it might have made even Howard Carter consider.

As that light skied upward, orange faded to a breathless Maxfield Parrish blue-green that I had never seen before with my own eyes… and yet I had a sense of déjà vu, as if maybe I had seen it, in my dreams. Maybe we all see skies like that in our dreams, and our waking minds can never quite translate them into colors that have names.

It was hard to imagine this water whipped into a destructive hurricane frenzy. Impossible, actually. Later, Wireman would tell me God always punishes us for what we can’t imagine. That was one of his better ones.

“Do you mind it?” Jack looked honestly curious. “All the quiet? Because it’d get on my nerves a little, to tell you the God’s honest.” “No,” I said. “Not at all.” And that was the truth. Healing is a kind of revolt, and as I think I’ve said, all successful revolts begin in secret.

If you want to translate the world, you need to use your appetites.

He snickered. “Did you see the table trying to escape? The fucking table?” I also snickered. My hip hurt and my stomach-muscles ached, but I felt pretty good for a man who had almost laughed himself unconscious. “ ‘Alabama Getaway,’ ” I said. He nodded, still wiping sand from his face. “Grateful Dead. Nineteen seventy-nine. Or thereabouts.” He giggled, the giggle broadened into a chuckle, and the chuckle became another bellow of full-throated laughter.

Now it wasn’t Emily Dickinson I thought of, but some old folk-song: Don’t the sun look good, Mama, shinin through the trees.

There was a bottle of single-malt in the living room liquor cabinet. I wanted a shot and didn’t take it. I wanted to wait, maybe eat one of my egg salad sandwiches and plan out what I was going to say to her, and I didn’t do that, either. Sometimes the only way to do it is to do it.

At last he came back. Stood in front of me. Confronted me, almost. “Look. The world has knocked you around a lot in the last year or so, and I know that takes a lot of gas out of the old self-image airbag. But don’t tell me you don’t at least feel how good they are.”

He nodded. “It’s the simplest fact of art—good art almost always feels good to the artist.

I discovered an interesting thing: when the Gulf got a little crazy and those waves really poured in, the shells shut up. The waves lifted them too high for conversation.

“Not much need to ask,” Jack said, and of course he was right. I had signed each of the oils in the lower left corner, just as neatly as I had signed all invoices, work orders, and contracts in my other life: Edgar Freemantle.

“Mary reviews every new show she can get to, which is most of them, and believe me, not all her reviews are raves.” “But most are?” Wireman said. “Sure, because most of the shows are good. She’d tell you very little of the stuff she sees is great, because that isn’t what tourist-track areas as a rule produce, but good? Yes. Stuff anyone can hang, then point to and say ‘I bought that’ without a quaver of embarrassment.” I thought Nannuzzi had just given a perfect definition of mediocrity—I had seen the principle at work in hundreds of architectural drawings—but again I kept silent.

“Throw out your mean words, Mr. Freemantle. Art should be a place of hope, not doubt. And your doubts rise from inexperience, which is not a dishonorable thing. Listen to me. Will you listen?”

“I don’t want to think too much about art, you see. I don’t want to criticize it. I don’t want to attend symposia, listen to papers, or discuss it at cocktail parties—although sometimes in my line of work I’m forced to do all those things. What I want to do is clutch my heart and fall down when I see it.”

I’m enjoying one of my clear patches. I love and treasure them, but they make me sad, as well. It’s like being in a glider and rising on a gust of wind above a low-lying groundmist. For a little while one can see everything so clearly… and at the same time one knows the wind will die and one’s glider will sink back into the mist again. Do you see?”

Don’t be afraid to experiment; find your muse and let her lead you. As her talent grew stronger, Elizabeth’s muse became Noveen, the marvelous talking doll. Or so she thought. And by the time she discovered her mistake—by the time Noveen’s voice changed—it was too late. But at first it must have been wonderful. Finding one’s muse always is.

She felt the wind begin to rise and blow out of simple charcoal strokes as black as death. The size of the actual storm when it arrived—the pelting rain, the freight-train shriek of the gale—frightened her badly, as if she had whistled for a dog and gotten a wolf.

“Wireman, that’s bizarre.” “Is it? Think of your own situation.” I thought of my situation. I was a man who had choked his own wife and then forgot about it. A man who now slept with a doll in the other half of the bed. I decided to keep my opinions to myself.

Standing in the wings, suffering through that purgatory only frightened main speakers experience as their introducers wind their slow and peristaltic courses, I hardly noticed.

but a tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I’ll take A Midsummer Night’s Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh.” He brooded a moment.

She was doing what I’ve been doing, I thought, and my skin began to creep again. Trying to re-invent the ordinary, make it new by turning it into a dream.

“Sorry,” he said. “I don’t usually lose someone I love and poke a candlestick in a vampire’s face in the same week. Usually it’s one or the other.” He shrugged his shoulders in an effort at insouciance. It was unsuccessful, but I had to give him points for trying.

“Jesus,” Jack said, “if I’m as cynical as you two when I get old, I think I’ll turn in my badge.”

And the empty, pupil-less pearls that were her eyes.

Jack spoke very softly. “Where would a thing like that have come from to begin with, Edgar?” A phrase rose to my lips, from where I don’t know, only that it wasn’t my own: There were elder gods in those days; kings and queens they were. I didn’t say it. I didn’t want to hear it, not even in that well-lighted room, so I only shook my head.

she was out of control and getting out-of-controller all the time,

Now that I wasn’t thinking about it, the numbers came with no problem whatsoever; that marvelous muscle memory thing took over completely. It occurred to me that human beings might be better off if that was the only kind of memory they had.

If I kept saying it; if I kept reaching out. My accident really taught me just one thing: the only way to go on is to go on. To say I can do this even when you know you can’t.

Crossing it about thirty yards up was a line of five frogs the size of Cocker Spaniel puppies. The first three were a brilliant solid green that rarely if ever occurs in nature; the fourth was blue; the fifth was a faded orange that might once have been red. They were smiling, but there was something fixed and weary about those smiles. They were hopping slowly, as if their hoppers were almost busted. Like the bobcat, they reached the underbrush and disappeared into it. “What the blue fuck were those?” Jack asked.

“And where the twins drowned,” Wireman added. “That’s the path they walked to get there. Only…” He fell silent. The breeze tugged at our hair. We looked at the path, still visible after all these years. Little feet going down to swim hadn’t done that.

but we had come this far and we had to do something. Ilse insisted on that, from my bones and heart. “Yes,” I said. “On we go.”

As we stood looking at Charley the Lawn Jockey in light that was now taking on a definite purple cast, a nonsense couplet from an old Dave Van Ronk blues occurred to me: “Mama bought a chicken, thought it was a duck; Sat it on the table with the legs stickin up.”

I thought there would be time, but we always think stuff like that, don’t we? We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.