Hearts in Atlantis

by Stephen King

The world of the story had become so vivid to him that this real one now seemed false and drab.

It was the kiss by which all the others of his life would be judged and found wanting.

Yet he supposed a lot of finding out happened like this, completely by accident. You were just going along, minding your own business, and all at once the past sideswiped you.

He longed for the window in his mind to close, longed for the opacity that made love not just possible but necessary. The less you knew, the more you could believe.

Each letter was like one more labored breath from a loved one whose death now seems inevitable. One more breath.

We almost always see where our best interest lies, I think, but sometimes what we see means very little compared to what we feel. Tough but true.

Skip gave Dearie a shrug, eyebrows lifted, hands up to the sky. See what you get? it said. Act like an asshole and that’s how people treat you. Perfect eloquence is, I think, almost always mute.

Stoke Jones would no doubt have called it a waste of time, but I think in that case he would have been wrong. Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.

Quit doing what they say, quit doing what they want, quit playing their game. It’s an old game, and in this one The Bitch is hunting you.

He blew his nose long and hard. When he was finished he was under control again, but I could see the baffled unhappiness in his eyes. Part of me—a mean part—was glad to see it. Glad to know that you didn’t have to turn into a Hearts junkie to have problems. Human nature can be so shitty sometimes.

But Nate wasn’t thinking about Stoke; Nate was thinking about Nate. Brooding over his feet’s inexplicable refusal to carry his heart where it had clearly wanted to go.

“You want some information?” I asked her. My voice was trembling, thickening. “I’ll give you some whether you want it or not. Okay? You’re breaking my heart here. That’s the information. You’re breaking my goddam heart.”

“I’m not, though,” she said. “Hearts are tough, Pete. Most times they don’t break. Most times they only bend.”

This time I didn’t tell the truth, and looking back on it I realize how telling that lie was: some part of me, alien to my best interests but very powerful, still reserved the right to frog-march me to the cliff . . . and over the edge.

You lost your innocence when you grew up, all right, everyone knew that, but did you have to lose your hope, as well?

What good was it to kiss a girl on the Ferris wheel when you were eleven if you were to open the paper eleven years later and learn that she had burned to death in a slummy little house on a slummy little dead-end street? What good was it to remember her beautiful alarmed eyes or the way the sun had shone in her hair?

Perhaps what had happened to her in L.A. had burned a few holes in her memory. Bobby could see how a thing like that might happen. And it wouldn’t exactly make her unique, would it? A lot of people their age had worked very hard to forget who they had been and what they had believed during those years between the murder of John Kennedy in Dallas and the murder of John Lennon in New York City.