Duma Key - Stephen King

He was starting to scare me. "Wireman-"

He whirled around and now his eyes were blazing, the left one seemingly through a net of blood. "Promise, Edgar! We need a plan! If we don't have one, they'll cart her away and put her in a home and she'll be dead in a month! In a week! I know it! So promise!"

I thought he might be right. And I thought that if I wasn't able to take some of the pressure off his boiler, he was apt to have another seizure right in front of me. So I promised. Then I said, "You may end up living a lot longer than you think, Wireman."

"Sure. But I'll write everything down anyway. Just in case."

iii

He once more offered me the Palacio golf cart for the return trip to Big Pink. I told him I'd be fine walking, but I wouldn't mind having a glass of juice before setting out.

Now I enjoy fresh-squeezed Florida oj as much as anyone, but I confess to having an ulterior motive that particular morning. He left me in the little receiving room at the beach end of El Palacio' s glassed-in center hall. He used this room as an office, although how a man who couldn't read for more than five minutes at a stretch could deal with correspondence was beyond me. I guessed - and this touched me - that Elizabeth might have helped him, and quite a lot, before her own condition began to worsen.

Coming in for breakfast, I had glanced into this room and spied a certain gray folder lying on the closed lid of a laptop for which Wireman probably had little use these days. I flipped it open now and took one of the three X-rays.

"Big glass or little glass?" Wireman called from the kitchen, startling me so badly that I almost dropped the sheet in my hand.

"Medium's fine!" I called back. I tucked the X-ray film into my collection pouch and flipped the folder closed again. Five minutes later I was trudging back up the beach.

iv

I didn't like the idea of stealing from a friend - not even a single X-ray photograph. Nor did I like keeping silent about what I was sure I'd done to Candy Brown. I could have told him; after the Tom Riley business, he would have believed me. Even without that little twinkle of ESP, he would have believed me. That was the trouble, actually. Wireman wasn't stupid. If I could send Candy Brown to the Sarasota County Morgue with a paintbrush, then maybe I could do for a certain brain-damaged ex-lawyer what the doctors could not. But what if I couldn't? Better not to raise false hopes... at least outside of my own heart, where they were outrageously high.

By the time I got back to Big Pink, my hip was yelling. I slung my duffle coat into the closet, took a couple of Oxycontins, and saw the message-light on my answering machine was blinking.

It was Nannuzzi. He was delighted to hear from me. Yes indeed, he said, if the rest of my work was on a par with what he'd seen, the Scoto would be pleased and proud to sponsor an exhibition of my work, and before Easter, when the winter people went home. Would it be possible for him and one or more of his partners to come out, visit me in my studio, and look at some of my other completed work? They would be happy to bring a sample contract for me to look at.

It was good news - exciting news - but in a way it seemed to be happening on some other planet, to some other Edgar Freemantle. I saved the message, started to go upstairs with the pilfered X-ray, then stopped. Little Pink wasn't right because the easel wasn't right. Canvas and oil paints weren't right, either. Not for this.

I limped back down to my big living room. There was a stack of Artisan pads and several boxes of colored pencils on the coffee table, but they weren't right, either. There was a low, vague itching in my missing right arm, and for the first time I thought that I might really be able to do this... if I could find the right medium for the message, that was.

It occurred to me that a medium was also a person who took dictation from the Great Beyond, and that made me laugh. A little nervously, it's true.

I went into the bedroom, at first not sure what I was after. Then I looked at the closet and knew. The week before, I'd had Jack take me shopping - not at the Crossroads Mall but at one of the men's shops on St. Armand's Circle - and I'd bought half a dozen shirts, the kind that button up the front. When she was a little kid, Ilse used to call them Big People Shirts. They were still in their cellophane bags. I tore the bags off, pulled out the pins, and tossed the shirts back into the closet, where they landed in a heap. I didn't want the shirts. What I wanted were the cardboard inserts.

Those bright white rectangles of cardboard.

I found a Sharpie in a pocket of my PowerBook carrying case. In my old life I'd hated Sharpies for both the smell of the ink and their tendency to smear. In this one I'd come to love the fat boldness of the lines they created, lines that seem to insist on their own absolute reality. I took the cardboard inserts, the Sharpie, and the X-ray of Wireman's brain out to the Florida room, where the light was bright and declamatory.

The itch in my missing arm deepened. By now it felt almost like a friend.

I didn't have the sort of light-box doctors stick X-rays and MRI scans on when they want to study them, but the Florida room's glass wall made a very acceptable substitute. I didn't even need Scotch tape. I was able to snap the X-ray into the crack between the glass and the chrome facing, and there it was, a thing many claimed did not exist: the brain of a lawyer. It floated against the Gulf. I stared at it for awhile, I don't know how long - two minutes? four? - fascinated by the way the blue water looked when viewed through the gray crenellations, how those folds changed the water to fog.

The slug was a black chip, slightly fragmented. It looked a little like a small ship. Like a rowboat floating on the caldo.

I began to draw. I had meant only to draw his brain intact - no slug - but it ended up being more than that. I went on and added the water, you see, because the picture seemed to demand it. Or my missing arm. Or maybe they were the same. It was just a suggestion of the Gulf, but it was there, and it was enough to be successful, because I really was a talented sonofabitch. It only took twenty minutes, and when I was done I had drawn a human brain floating on the Gulf of Mexico. It was, in a way, way cool.

It was also horrifying. It isn't a word I want to use about my own work, but it's unavoidable. As I took the X-ray down and compared it to my picture - slug in the science, no slug in the art - I realized something I perhaps should have seen much earlier. Certainly after I started the Girl and Ship series. What I was doing didn't work just because it played on the nerve-endings; it worked because people knew - on some level they really did know - that what they were looking at had come from a place beyond talent. The feeling those Duma pictures conveyed was horror, barely held in check. Horror waiting to happen. Inbound on rotted sails.

v

I was hungry again. I made myself a sandwich and ate it in front of my computer. I was catching up with The Hummingbirds - they had become quite the little obsession with me - when the phone rang. It was Wireman.

"My headache's gone," he said.

"Do you always say hello like that?" I asked. "Can I maybe expect your next call to begin 'I just evacuated my bowels'?"

"Don't make light of this. My head has ached ever since I woke up on the dining room floor after shooting myself. Sometimes it's just background noise and sometimes it rings like New Year's Eve in hell, but it always aches. And then, half an hour ago, it just quit. I was making myself a cup of coffee and it quit. I couldn't believe it. At first I thought I was dead. I've been walking around on eggshells, waiting for it to come back and really wallop me with Maxwell's Silver Hammer, and it hasn't."

"Lennon- McCartney," I said. "1968. And don't tell me I'm wrong on that one."

He didn't tell me anything. Not for a long time. But I could hear him breathing. Then, at last, he said: "Did you do something, Edgar? Tell Wireman. Tell your Daddy."

I thought about telling him I hadn't done a damn thing. Then I considered him checking his X-ray folder and finding one was gone. I also considered my sandwich, wounded but far from dead. "What about your vision? Any change there?"

"Nope, the left lamp is still out. And according to Principe, it ain't coming back. Not in this life."

Shit. But hadn't part of me known the job wasn't done? This morning's diddling with Sharpie and Cardboard had been nothing like the previous night's full-blown orgasm. I was tired. I didn't want to do anything more today but sit and stare at the Gulf. Watch the sun go down in the caldo largo without painting the fucking thing. Only this was Wireman. Wireman, goddammit.

"You still there, muchacho?"

"Yes," I said. "Can you get Annmarie Whistler for a few hours later today?"

"Why? What for?"

"So you can sit for your portrait," I said. "If your eye's still out, I guess I need the actual Wireman."

"You did do something." His voice was low. "Did you paint me already? From memory?"

"Check the folder with your X-rays in it," I said. "Be here around four. I want to take a nap first. And bring something to eat. Painting makes me hungry." I thought of amending that to a certain kind of painting, and didn't. I thought I'd said enough.

vi

I wasn't sure I'd be able to nap, but I did. The alarm roused me at three o'clock. I went up to Little Pink and considered my store of blank canvases. The biggest was five feet long by three wide, and this was the one I chose. I pulled my easel's support-strut to full extension and set up the blank canvas longways. That blank shape, like a white coffin on end, touched off a little flutter of excitement in my stomach and down my right arm. I flexed those fingers. I couldn't see them, but I could feel them opening and closing. I could feel the nails digging into the palm. They were long, those nails. They had grown since the accident and there was no way to cut them.

vii

I was cleaning my brushes when Wireman came striding up the beach in his shambling, bearlike gait, the peeps fleeing before him. He was wearing jeans and a sweater, no coat. The temperatures had begun to moderate.

He hollered a hello at the front door and I yelled for him to come on upstairs. He got most of the way and saw the big canvas on the easel. "Holy shit, amigo, when you said portrait, I got the idea we were talking about a headshot."

"That's sort of what I'm planning," I said, "but I'm afraid it's not going to be that realistic. I've already done a little advance work. Take a look."

The pilfered X-ray and Sharpie sketch were on the bottom shelf of my workbench. I handed them to Wireman, then sat down again in front of my easel. The canvas waiting there was no longer completely blank and white. Three-quarters of the way up was a faintly drawn rectangle. I had made it by holding the shirt-cardboard against the canvas and running a No. 2 pencil around the edge.

Wireman said nothing for almost two minutes. He kept looking back and forth between the X-ray and the picture I had drawn from it. Then, in a voice almost too low to hear: "What are we talking about here, muchacho? What are we saying?"

"We're not," I said. "Not yet. Hand me the shirt-cardboard."

"Is that what this is?"

"Yes, and be careful. I need it. We need it. The X-ray doesn't matter anymore."

He passed me the shirt-cardboard picture with a hand that wasn't quite steady.

"Now go over to the wall where the finished pictures are. Look at the one on the far left. In the corner."

He went over, looked, and recoiled. "Holy shit! When did you do this?"

"Last night."

He picked it up and turned it toward the light streaming through the big window. He looked at Tina, who was looking up at the mouthless, noseless Candy Brown.

"No mouth, no nose, Brown dies, case closed," Wireman said. His voice was no more than a whisper. "Jesus Christ, I'd hate to be the maric n de playa who kicked sand in your face." He set the picture back down and stepped away from it... carefully, like it might explode if it were joggled. "What got into you? What possessed you?"

"Goddam good question," I said. "I almost didn't show you. But... considering what we're up to here..."

"What are we up to here?"

"Wireman, you know."

He staggered a little bit, as if he were the one with the bad leg. And he had come over sweaty. His face shone with it. His left eye was still red, but maybe not as red. Of course that might only have been the Department of Wishful Thinking. "Can you do it?"

"I can try," I said. "If you want me to."

He nodded, then stripped off his sweater. "Go for it."

"I need you by the window, so the light falls on your face nice and strong as the sun starts going down. There's a stool in the kitchen you can sit on. How long have you got Annmarie for?"

"She said she could stay until eight, and she'll give Miss Eastlake dinner. I brought us lasagna. I'll put it in your oven at five-thirty."

"Good." By the time the lasagna was ready, the light would be gone, anyway. I could take some digital photos of Wireman, clip them to the easel, and work from those. I was a fast worker, but I already knew this was going to be a longer process - days, at least.

When Wireman came back upstairs with the stool, he stopped dead. "What are you doing?"

"What does it look like I'm doing?"

"Cutting a hole in a perfectly good canvas."

"Go to the head of the class." I laid aside the cut rectangle, then picked up the cardboard insert with the floating brain on it. I went behind the easel. "Help me glue this in place."

"When did you figure all this out, vato?"

"I didn't," I said.

"You didn't?" He was looking at me through the canvas, like a thousand lookie-loos I'd seen peering through a thousand peepholes at construction sites in my other life.

"Nope. Something's kind of telling me as I go along. Come around to this side."

With Wireman's help, the rest of the prep only took a couple of minutes. He blocked the rectangle with the shirt-cardboard. I fished a little tube of Elmer's Glue from my breast pocket, and began fixing it in place. When I came back around, it was perfect. Looked that way to me, anyway.

I pointed at Wireman's forehead. "This is your brain," I said. Then I pointed at my easel. "This is your brain on canvas."

He looked blank.

"It's a joke, Wireman."

"I don't get it," he said.

viii

We ate like football players that night. I asked Wireman if he was seeing any better and he shook his head regretfully. "Things are still mighty black on the left side of my world, Edgar. Wish I could tell you different, but I can't."

I played him Nannuzzi's message. Wireman laughed and pumped his fist. It was hard not to be touched by his pleasure, which bordered on glee. "You're on your way, muchacho - this is your other life for sure. Can't wait to see you on the cover of Time." He held his hands up, as if framing a cover.

"There's only one thing about it that worries me," I said... and then had to laugh. Actually a lot of things about it worried me, including the fact that I had not the slightest idea what I was letting myself in for. "My daughter may want to come. The one who visited me down here."

"What's wrong with that? Most men would be delighted to have their daughters watch them turn pro. You going to eat that last piece of lasagna?"