Hearts in Atlantis

by Stephen King

Bright light streamed from every window and the street was lined with cars on both sides for three blocks, but Bobby saw no crazy DeSotos or other cars that felt like thinly disguised living creatures.

“That’s what they do, those guys, go into places and ask questions. Always leave one of their big cars runnin at the curb. You’d think it’d be crazy to do that down here, leave a car runnin at the curb, but who’d steal one of those goddam things?”

“He sayin their shoes wasn’ touchin the ground,”

The smell of beer was much stronger and much fresher, and the room with the pinball machines in it banged and jangled with lights and noise. Where before only Dee had been playing pinball, there now seemed to be at least two dozen guys, all of them smoking, all of them wearing strap-style undershirts and Frank Sinatra hello-young-lovers hats, all of them with bottles of Bud parked on the glass tops of the Gottlieb machines.

Bobby looked around. The low men stood shoulder to shoulder, surrounding them, penning them in their smell of sweat and maggoty meat, blocking off any sight of the street with their yellow coats. They were dark-skinned, deep-eyed, red-lipped (as if they had been eating cherries) . . . but they weren’t what they looked like. They weren’t what they looked like at all. Their faces wouldn’t stay in their faces, for one thing; their cheeks and chins and hair kept trying to spread outside the lines (it was the only way Bobby could interpret what he was seeing). Beneath their dark skins were skins as white as their pointed reet-petite shoes. But their lips are still red, Bobby thought, their lips are always red. As their eyes were always black, not really eyes at all but caves. And they are so tall, he realized. So tall and so thin. There are no thoughts like our thoughts in their brains, no feelings like our feelings in their hearts.

More hands settled on Bobby, and something like a living branch caressed the nape of his neck. It set off that buzzing again, something that was both an alarm and a sickness. It rose into his head and hummed there like a hive. Within that lunatic hum he heard first one bell, tolling rapidly, then many. A world of bells in some terrible black night of hot hurricane winds. He supposed he was sensing wherever the low men had come from, an alien place trillions of miles from Connecticut and his mother. Villages were burning under unknown constellations, people were screaming, and that touch on his neck . . . that awful touch . . .

“He wants to be with you,” an unspeakable voice crooned. “I think we’ll bring him, Ted. He has no natural ability as a Breaker, but still . . . all things serve the King, you know.” The unspeakable fingers caressed again. “All things serve the Beam,” Ted said in a dry, correcting voice. His teacher’s voice. “Not for much longer,” the low man said, and laughed. The sound of it loosened Bobby’s bowels. “Bring him,” said another voice. It held a note of command. They did all sound sort of alike, but this was the one he had spoken to on the phone; Bobby was sure. “No!” Ted said. His hands tightened on Bobby’s back. “He stays here!” “Who are you to give us orders?” the low man in charge asked. “How proud you have grown during your little time of freedom, Ted! How haughty! Yet soon you’ll be back in the same room where you have spent so many years, with the others, and if I say the boy comes, then the boy comes.” “If you bring him, you’ll have to go on taking what you need from me,” Ted said. His voice was very quiet but very strong. Bobby hugged him as tight as he could and shut his eyes. He didn’t want to look at the low men, not ever again. The worst thing about them was that their touch was like Ted’s, in a way: it opened a window. But who would want to look through such a window? Who would want to see the tall, red-lipped scissor-shapes as they really were? Who would want to see the owner of that red Eye? “You’re a Breaker, Ted. You were made for it, born to it. And if we t...

You’re his te-ka. Aren’t you?

He now repented coming here with all his heart—would have stayed home hiding under his bed if he had known the truth of the low men—but yes, he supposed Ted was his te-ka.

Surely you’ll come with this wheezy old ka-mai, won’t you?

“You’ve learned how to be a coward, Bobby . . . haven’t you?”

Ted turned, smiled, started to wave. Then the one called Cam leaped forward, seized him, whirled him, and thrust him into the car. As Cam swung the De-Soto’s back door shut Bobby saw, for just an instant, an incredibly tall, incredibly scrawny being standing inside a long yellow coat, a thing with flesh as white as new snow and lips as red as fresh blood. Deep in its eyesockets were savage points of light and dancing flecks of darkness in pupils which swelled and contracted as Ted’s had done. The red lips peeled back, revealing needly teeth that put the alleycat’s to shame. A black tongue lolled out from between those teeth and wagged an obscene goodbye. Then the creature in the yellow coat sprinted around the hood of the purple DeSoto, thin legs gnashing, thin knees pumping, and plunged in behind the wheel. Across the street the Olds started up, its engine sounding like the roar of an awakening dragon. Perhaps it was a dragon. From its place skewed halfway across the sidewalk, the Cadillac’s engine did the same. Living headlights flooded this part of Narragansett Avenue in a pulsing glare. The DeSoto skidded in a U-turn, one fenderskirt scraping up a brief train of sparks from the street, and for a moment Bobby saw Ted’s face in the DeSoto’s back window. Bobby raised his hand and waved. He thought Ted raised his own in return but could not be sure. Once more his head filled with a sound like hoofbeats.

There is a Tower, he thought. It holds everything together. There are Beams that protect it somehow. There is a Crimson King, and Breakers working to destroy the Beams . . . not because the Breakers want to but because it wants them to. The Crimson King.

Liz prospered in her new career as a real-estate agent. Bobby did well enough in English (he got an A-plus on a paper in which he compared Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men to Golding’s Lord of the Flies) and did poorly in the rest of his classes. He began to smoke cigarettes.

When I came to the University of Maine in 1966, there was still a Goldwater sticker, tattered and faded but perfectly readable (AuH2O-4-USA), on the old station wagon I inherited from my brother.

When I try to talk about the sixties—when I even try to think about them—I am overcome by horror and hilarity.

Most of us don’t say much about those years now, not because we don’t remember them but because the language which we spoke back then has been lost. When I try to talk about the sixties—when I even try to think about them—I am overcome by horror and hilarity. I see bell-bottom pants and Earth Shoes. I smell pot and patchouli, incense and peppermints.

The older I get, the harder it is to let go of that song’s stupidity and hold onto its sweetness.

And I hear Donovan Leitch singing his sweet and stupid song about the continent of Atlantis, lyrics that still seem profound to me in the watches of the night, when I can’t sleep. The older I get, the harder it is to let go of that song’s stupidity and hold onto its sweetness. I have to remind myself that we were smaller then, small enough to live our brightly hued lives under the mushrooms, all the time believing them to be trees, shelter from the sheltering sky. I know that doesn’t make any real sense, but it’s the best I can do: hail Atlantis.

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.

Both the girl and the dog were sporting identical grins. It was fucking surreal.

He had three Mitch Miller records (Sing Along with Mitch, More Sing Along with Mitch, Mitch and the Gang Sing John Henry and Other American Folk Favorites), Meet Trini Lopez, a Dean Martin LP (Dino Swings Vegas!), a Gerry and the Pacemakers LP, the first Dave Clark Five album—perhaps the noisiest bad rock record ever made—and many others of the same ilk.

“I bet you’re the only college student in America that brought Diane Renay Sings Navy Blue to school with him,” Skip said. “It’s wrong, Nate. This belongs back in your attic, along with the wiener pants I bet you wore to all the high-school pep rallies and church socials.”

I think credibility died of shame around 1986, just as all those sixties war protesters and fearless battlers for racial equality were discovering junk bonds, Martha Stewart Living, and the StairMaster.

It was Atlantis, that’s all I know for sure, way down below the ocean.

By 1969 he had a better idea of who and what he was. That was the year he constructed a papier-mâché Vietnamese family tableau that was set on fire at the end of a peace rally in front of the Fogler Library while The Youngbloods played “Get Together” from a borrowed set of amps and part-time hippies worked out to the beat like tribal warriors after a hunt. You see how jumbled it all is in my mind? It was Atlantis, that’s all I know for sure, way down below the ocean. The paper family burned, the hippie protesters chanted “Napalm! Napalm! Scum from the skies!” as they danced, and after awhile the jocks and the frat boys began to throw stuff. Eggs at first. Then stones.

At the U.N., Secretary General U Thant was pleading with American representative Arthur Goldberg to stop, at least temporarily, the bombing of North Vietnam. Arthur Goldberg got in touch with the Great White Father in Hawaii to relay Thant’s request. The Great White Father, perhaps still wearing his lei, said no way, we’d stop when the Viet Cong stopped, but in the meantime they were going to cry 96 tears. At least 96. (Johnson did a brief, clumsy shimmy with the hula-hula girls; I remember watching that on The Huntley-Brinkley Report and thinking he danced like every other white guy I knew . . . which was, incidentally, all the guys I knew.) In Greenwich Village a peace march was broken up by the police. The marchers had no permit, the police said. In San Francisco war protesters carrying plastic skulls on sticks and wearing whiteface like a troupe of mimes were dispersed by teargas. In Denver police tore down thousands of posters advertising an antiwar rally at Chautauqua Park in Boulder. The police had discovered a statute forbidding the posting of such bills. The statute did not, the Denver Chief said, forbid posted bills which advertised movies, old clothes drives, VFW dances, or rewards for information leading to the recovery of lost pets. Those posters, the chief explained, were not political. On our own little patch, there was a sit-in at East Annex, where Coleman Chemicals was holding job interviews. Coleman, like Dow, made napalm. Coleman also made Agent Orange, ...

Barry Margeaux and Brad Witherspoon both got the Derry News delivered to their rooms, and the two copies had usually made the rounds of the third floor by the end of the day—we’d find the remnants in the lounge when we took our seats for the evening session of Hearts, the pages torn and out of order, the crossword filled in by three or four different hands.

When college kids showed up in the Derry News (except on the sports page, of course) it was always because they were in trouble.

POLICE BREAK UP DRAFT PROTEST, the photo caption read. No names were given. According to the accompanying story, a dozen or so protesters from the University of Maine had gathered in front of the Federal Building in downtown Derry. They had carried signs and marched around the entrance to the Selective Service office for about an hour, singing songs and “chanting slogans, some obscene.” Police had been called and had at first only stood by, intending to allow the demonstration to run its course, but then an opposing group of demonstrators had turned up—mostly construction workers on their lunch break. They had begun chanting their own slogans, and although the News didn’t mention if they were obscene or not, I could guess there had been invitations to go back to Russia, suggestions as to where the demonstrators could store their signs while not in use, and directions to the nearest barber shop.

When the protesters began to shout back at the construction workers and the construction workers began firing pieces of fruit from their dinner-buckets at the protesters, the police had stepped in. Citing the protesters’ lack of a permit (the Derry cops had apparently never heard about the right of Americans to assemble peaceably), they rounded up the kids and took them to the police substation on Witcham Street. There they were simply released. “We only wanted to get them out of a bad atmosphere,” one cop was quoted as saying. “If they go back down there, they’re even dumber than they look.”

I thought of Nate saying he was afraid his mother would see a picture of him getting arrested. Mommy’s good little pre-dent pinched down in Derry for parading in front of the Federal Building without a permit. Ah, the shame, the shame. And Carol’s dad? Not quite the same deal, but close. Carol’s dad was a steady boy who said ship ahoy and joined the Nay-yay-vee, after all.

He had a wide-eyed Danger High Voltage look that I later came to associate with heavy cocaine users. And that’s what the game really was; a kind of drug. Not the kind that mellowed you out, either.

The picture showed three kids of eleven or twelve, a girl and two boys.

The picture showed three kids of eleven or twelve, a girl and two boys. They were all wearing blue tee-shirts with the words STERLING HOUSE on them in red block letters. They were standing in a parking lot somewhere and had their arms around each other—an easy pals-forever pose that was sort of beautiful. The girl was in the middle. The girl was Carol, of course.

“Nice baseball glove.” Carol still with the smile. I could see the tears that had come into her eyes as we sat looking down at the snapshot, but still with the smile. In the white light of the fluorescents from the dining hall, her tears looked silver—the tears of a princess in a fairy-tale. “That was Bobby’s favorite thing. There’s a baseball player named Alvin Dark, right?” “There was.” “That’s what kind of a glove Bobby had. An Alvin Dark model.” “Mine was a Ted Williams. I think my mom rummage-saled it a couple of years ago.” “Bobby’s got stolen,” Carol said. I’m not sure she knew I was there anymore. She kept touching that narrow, slightly frowning face with her fingertip. It was as if she had regressed into her own past. I’ve heard that hypnotists can do that with good subjects. “Willie took it.” “Willie?” “Willie Shearman. I saw him playing ball with it a year later, down at Sterling House. I was so mad. My mom and dad were always fighting then, working up to the divorce, I guess, and I was mad all the time. Mad at them, mad at my math teacher, mad at the whole world. I was still scared of Willie, but mostly I was mad at him . . . and besides, I wasn’t by myself, not that day. So I marched right up to him and said I knew that was Bobby’s glove and he ought to give it to me. I said I had Bobby’s address in Massachusetts and I’d send it to him. Willie said I was crazy, it was his glove, and he showed me his name on the side. He’d erased Bobby’s—best as he could, anywa...

“I’m not following this,” I said. “Why should you? It’s all jumbled up in my mind and I was there. My mother told me once that happens to people who are in accidents or fights. I remember some of it pretty well—mostly the parts with Bobby in them—but almost everything else comes from what people told me later on. “I was in the park down the street from my house, and these three boys came along—Harry Doolin, Willie Shearman, and another one. I can’t remember the other one’s name. It doesn’t matter, anyway. They beat me up. I was only eleven but that didn’t stop them. Harry Doolin hit me with a baseball bat. Willie and the other one held me so I couldn’t run away.” “A baseball bat? Are you shitting me?” She shook her head. “At first they were joking, I think, and then . . . they weren’t. My arm got dislocated. I screamed and I guess they ran away. I sat there, holding my arm, too hurt and too . . . too shocked I guess . . . to know what to do. Or maybe I tried to get up and get help for myself and couldn’t. Then Bobby came along. He walked me out of the park and then he picked me up and carried me back to his apartment. All the way up Broad Street Hill on one of the hottest days of the year. He carried me in his arms.”

I took the snapshot from her, held it in the light, and bent over it, looking at the boy with the crewcut. Looking at his thin stick arms, then looking at the girl. She was an inch or two taller than he was, and broader in the shoulders. I looked at the other boy, Sully. He of the tumbled black hair and the All-American grin. Stoke Jones’s hair; Skip Kirk’s grin. I could see Sully carrying her in his arms, yeah, but the other kid— “I know,” she said. “He doesn’t look big enough, does he? But he carried me. I started to faint and he c...

She nodded. “Bobby took me to his apartment. There was this old guy who lived in a room upstairs, Ted, who seemed to know a little bit about everything. He popped my arm back into its socket. I remember he gave me his belt to bite on when he did it. Or maybe it was Bobby’s belt. He said I could catch the pain, and I did. After that . . . after that, something bad happened.” “Worse than getting lumped up with a baseball bat?” “In a way. I don’t want to talk about it.” She wiped her tears away with one hand, first one side and then the other, st...

There was magic in her story. Not in the middle, but somewhere out around the edges. I felt it.

What she said made me unhappy—it was what the citizens of Atlantis referred to as a bummer—but it didn’t really surprise me.

“If we let them take South Vietnam, they’ll take Cambodia.” Dearie’s eyes moved from Skip to me to Ronnie . . . to all of us. “Then Laos. Then the Philippines. One after the other.”

“You want some information?”

“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.”

It was hard to sound as tough as Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner when you still felt like crying, but I did my best.

“I’ll do my best to share my college education.”

Jackie Wilson sang “Lonely Teardrops” and I went slow. Roy Orbison sang “Only the Lonely” and I went slow. Wanda Jackson sang “Let’s Have a Party” and I went slow. Mighty John did an ad for Brannigan’s, Derry’s hottest bottle club, and I went slow. Then she began to moan and it wasn’t her fingers on my neck but her nails digging into it, and when she began to move her hips up against me in short hard thrusts I couldn’t go slow and then The Platters were on the radio, The Platters were singing “Twilight Time” and she began to moan that she hadn’t known, hadn’t had a clue, oh gee, oh Pete, oh gee, oh Jesus, Jesus Christ, Pete, and her lips were all over my mouth and my chin and my jaw, she was frantic with kisses. I could hear the seat creaking, I could smell cigarette smoke and the pine air-freshener hanging from the rearview mirror, and by then I was moaning, too, I don’t know what, The Platters were singing “Each day I pray for evening just to be with you,” and then it started to happen. The pump turns on in ecstasy. I closed my eyes, I held her with my eyes closed and went into her that way, that way you do, shaking all over, hearing the heel of my shoe drumming against the driver’s-side door in a spastic tattoo, thinking that I could do this even if I was dying, even if I was dying, even if I was dying; thinking also that it was information. The pump turns on in ecstasy, the cards fall where they fall, the world never misses a beat, the queen hides, the queen is found, ...

I filled my own suitcase, thinking that I could take Carol to the bus depot in Derry and then just keep on going.

“Carol said she had to leave early. She took the Black Bear Shuttle to Derry. But she told me you’d be by and asked me to give you this.”

By Saturday of Thanksgiving break I’d done lots of soul-searching and understood I was mostly concerned about myself, mostly looking out for Number Six.

Yeah, Mom, the third-floor lounge is the problem, cards are the problem—just a few hands is what I tell myself every time, and when I look up at the clock it’s quarter of midnight and I’m too tired to study. Hell, too wired to study. Other than play Hearts, all I’ve really managed to do this fall is lose my virginity.

“They’re killing boys across the sea,” she said. “At first I thought there was a good reason for it, but your father says it’s crazy and I’m not so sure he isn’t right. You study hard. If you need a little extra for books—or a tutor—we’ll scrape it up.”

Boys who don’t work hard at their studies have been dying, my mother had said. And Carol telling me that this was a good time to be a girl, Lyndon Johnson had seen to that.

Quitting the game was the only sane solution to my problems, but even with the third-floor lounge a hundred and thirty miles north of where I was lying, it had a hold on me, one which had little to do with sanity or rationality.

I felt a little nutso, as if the combination of turkey and cramming had set off a minor earthquake in my head. And as if I might next fall asleep around, oh, say St. Patrick’s Day.