Duma Key - Stephen King

That winter I also made the Internet in general and Google in particular my close personal friends, pecking away one-handed. When it came to Duma Key, I found little more than a map. I could have dug deeper and harder, but something told me to leave that alone for the time being. What I was really interested in were peculiar events following the loss of limbs, and I found a mother-lode.

I should tell you that while I took all the stories Google led me to with a grain of salt, I didn't reject even the wildest completely, because I never doubted that my own strange experiences were related to the injuries I'd suffered - the insult to Broca's area, my missing arm, or both. I could look at my sketch of Carson Jones in his Torii Hunter tee-shirt anytime I wanted to, and I was sure Mr. Jones had purchased Ilse's engagement ring at Zales. Less concrete, but just as persuasive to me, were my increasingly surreal drawings. The phone-pad doodles of my previous life gave no hint of the haunted sunsets I was now doing.

I wasn't the first person to lose a body-part only to gain something else. In Fredonia, New York, a logger cut off his own hand in the woods and then saved his life by cauterizing the spouting stump of his wrist. The hand he took home, put in a jar of alcohol, and stored in the cellar. Three years later the hand that was no longer south of his wrist nevertheless began to feel freezing cold. He went downstairs and discovered a cellar window had broken and the winter wind was blowing in on the jar with his preserved hand floating inside. When the ex-logger moved the jar next to the furnace, that sense of freezing cold disappeared.

A Russian peasant from Tura, deep in Siberia, lost his left arm up to the elbow in a piece of farming equipment and spent the rest of his life as a dowser. When he stood over a spot where there was water, his left hand and arm, although no longer there, would grow cool, with an accompanying sensation of wetness. According to the articles I read (there were three), his skills never failed.

There was a guy in Nebraska who could predict tornadoes by the corns on his missing foot. A legless sailor in England who was used by his mates as a kind of human fish-finder. A Japanese double amputee who became a respected poet - not a bad trick for a fellow who'd been illiterate at the time of the train accident in which he lost his arms.

Of all the stories, maybe the strangest was that of Kearney Jaffords of New Jersey, a child born without arms. Shortly after his thirteenth birthday, this formerly well-adjusted handicapped child became hysterical, insisting to his parents that his arms were "hurting and buried on a farm." He said he could show them where. They drove two days, finishing up on a dirt road in Iowa, somewhere between Nowhere and Nowhere in Particular. The kid led them into a cornfield, took a sighting on a nearby barn with a MAIL POUCH advertisement on the roof, and insisted that they dig. The parents did, not because they expected to find anything but because they hoped to set the child's mind and body at rest again. Three feet down they found two skeletons. One was a female child between twelve and fifteen. The other was a man, age undetermined. The Adair County Coroner estimated these bodies had been in the ground approximately twelve years... but of course it could have been thirteen, which was the span of Kearney Jaffords's life. Neither body was ever identified. The arms of the female child's skeleton had been removed. Those bones were mixed with the bones of the unidentified man.

Fascinating as this story was, there were two others that interested me even more, especially when I thought of how I'd gone rooting through my daughter's purse.

I found them in an article called "They See with What's Missing," from The North American Journal of Parapsychology. It chronicled the histories of two psychics, one a woman from Phoenix, the other a man from R o Gallegos, Argentina. The woman was missing her right hand; the man was missing his entire right arm. Both had had several successes in helping the police find missing persons (perhaps failures as well, but these were not set out in the piece).

According to the article, both amputee psychics used the same technique. They would be provided with a piece of the missing person's clothes, or a sample of his handwriting. They would shut their eyes and visualize touching the item with the missing hand (there was a huggermugger footnote here about something called the Hand of Glory, aka the Mojo Hand). The Phoenix woman would then "get an image," which she would relay to her interlocutors. The Argentinian, however, followed up his communings with brief, furious spates of automatic writing with his remaining hand, a process I saw as analogous to my paintings.

And, as I say, I might have doubted a few of the wilder anecdotes I ran across during my Internet explorations, but I never doubted something was happening to me. Even without the picture of Carson Jones, I think I would have believed it. Because of the quiet, mostly. Except when Jack dropped by, or when Wireman - ever closer - waved and called " Buenos d as, muchacho! " I saw no one and spoke to no one but myself. The extraneous dropped away almost entirely, and when that happens, you begin to hear yourself clearly. And clear communication between selves - the surface self and the deep self is what I mean - is the enemy of self-doubt. It slays confusion.

But to be sure, I settled on what I told myself was an experiment.

iv

EFree19 to Pamorama667

9:15 AM

January 24

Dear Pam: I have an unusual bequest for you. I've been painting, and the subjects are odd but kind of fun (at least I think so). Easier to show you what I mean than describe, so I will attach a couple of jpegs to this e-mail. I have been thinking about those gardening gloves you used to have, the ones that said HANDS on one glove and OFF on the other. I would love to put those on a sunset. Do NOT ask me why, these ideas just come to me. Do you still have them? And if you do, would you send them to me? I will happily send them back if you want.

I'd just as soon you didn't share the pix with any of the "old crowd." Bozie in particular would probably laugh like a look if he saw THESE things.

Eddie

PS: If you don't feel good about sending the gloves, perfectly O.K. It's just a wind.

This response came that evening, from a Pam who was by then back home in St. Paul:

Pamorama667 to EFree19

January 24

Hello Edgar: Ilse told me about yr pictures of course.

They certainly are different. Hopefully this hobby will last longer than yr car restoration thing. If not for eBay that old Mustang would still be behind the house I think. Yr right about it being an odd request but after looking at yr pix I can sort of see what yr up-to (putting different things together so people will look at them in new ways, right) and I'm ready for a new pr anyway so "knock yrself out." I'll send them UPS only ask that you send me a jpg of the

"Finnish Product" PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=emoticon"

if there ever is one.

Ilse sd she had a terrific time. I hope she sent a Thank-You card and not just an e-mail, but I know her.

One more thing to tell you, Eddie, altho I don't know how much you will like it. I sent a copy of yr e-mail and jpg pictures to Zander Kamen, you remember him I'm sure. I thought he would like to see the pix, but mostly I wanted him to see the e-mail and find out if it was cause for concern, because you are doing in yr writing what you used to do in yr speaking: "bequest" for "request," "laugh like a look" for "laugh like a loon." At the bottom you wrote "It's just a wind" and I don't know what that means but Dr. Kamen says maybe "whim."

I'm just thinking of you.

Pam

PS: My father is a little better, came through the operation well (the doctors say they might have "got all of it" but I bet they always say that). He seems to be handling the chemo well and is at home. Walking already.

Thanks for yr concern.

Her PS zinger was a perfect example of my ex-wife's unlovelier side: lie back... lie back... lie back... then bite and "make yrself scarce." She was right, though. I should have told her to pass on best wishes from the Commiecrat when she spoke to her old man on the phone. That ass-cancer's a bitch.

The whole e-mail was a symphony of irritation, from the mention of the Mustang that I'd never had time to finish to her concerns about my mistaken word-choices. Said concerns delivered by a woman who thought Xander came with a Z.

And with that petty spleen out of my system (spoken to the empty house, and in loud tones, if you must know), I did review the e-mail I'd sent her, and yes, I was worried. A little, anyway.

On the other hand, maybe it was just the wind.

v

The second striped beach chair had become a fixture at the heavyset guy's table, and as I drew closer to it, we sometimes shouted a little conversation back and forth. It was a strange way to strike up an acquaintance, but pleasant. The day after Pam's e-mail, with its surface concerns and buried subtext ( You could be as sick as my father, Eddie, maybe even sicker ), the fellow down the beach yelled: "How long before you get here, do you think?"

"Four days!" I yelled back. "Maybe three!"

"You that set on making a round trip?"

"I am!" I said. "What's your name?"

His deeply tanned face, although growing fleshy, was still handsome. Now white teeth flashed there, and his incipient jowls disappeared when he grinned. "Tell you when you get here! What's yours?"

"It's on the mailbox!" I called.

"The day I stoop to reading mailboxes is the day I start getting my news from talk radio!"

I gave him a wave, he gave me one in turn, called "Hasta ma ana!" and turned to look at the water and the cruising birds once more.

When I got back to Big Pink, the flag of my computer mailbox was sticking up, and I found this:

KamenDoc to EFree19

2:49 PM

January 25

Edgar: Pam sent me copies of your latest e-mail and your pictures. Let me say first and foremost that I am STUNNED by the rapidity of your growth as an artist. I can see you shying away from the word with that patented sidelong frown of yours, but there is no other word. YOU MUST NOT STOP. Concerning her worries: there's probably nothing to them. Still, an MRI would be a good idea. Do you have a doctor down there? You're due for a physical - soup to nuts, my friend.

Kamen

EFree19 to KamenDoc

January 25

Kamen: Good to hear from you. If you want to call me an artist (or even an "artiste"), who am I to argue? I currently have no Florida sawbones. Can you refer me to one or would you rather I went through Todd Jamieson, the doc with his fingers most recently in my brain?

Edgar

I thought he'd refer, and I might even keep the appointment, but right then a few dropped words and linguistic oddities weren't a priority. Walking was a priority, and reaching the striped beach chair that had been set out for me was also sort of a priority, but my main ones as January waned were Internet searches and painting pictures. I had reached Sunset with Shell No. 16 only the night before.

On January twenty-seventh, after turning back only two hundred yards or so shy of the waiting beach chair, I arrived at Big Pink to find UPS had left a package. Inside were two gardening gloves, one with HANDS printed in faded red on the back and the other similarly printed with OFF. They were beat-up from many seasons in the garden but clean - she'd laundered them, as I had expected. As I had, in fact, hoped. It wasn't the Pam who had worn them during the years of our marriage that I was interested in, not even the Pam who might have worn them in the Mendota Heights garden the past fall, while I was out at Lake Phalen. That Pam was a known quantity. But... I'll tell you something else that's happening, my If-So-Girl had said, unaware of how eerily like her mother she had looked when she was saying it. She's seeing an awful lot of this guy down the street.

That was the Pam I was interested in - the one who had seen an awful lot of the guy down the street. The guy named Max. That Pam's hands had laundered these gloves, then picked them up and put them in the white box inside the UPS package.

That Pam was the experiment... or so I told myself, but we fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living. That's what Wireman says, and he's often right. Probably too often. Even now.

vi

I didn't wait for sunset, because at least I didn't fool myself that I was interested in painting a picture; I was interested in painting information. I took my wife's unnaturally clean gardening gloves (she must have really rammed the bleach to them) up to Little Pink and sat down in front of my easel. There was a fresh canvas there, waiting. To the left were two tables. One was for photos from my digital camera and various found objects. The other stood on a small green tarpaulin. It held about two dozen paint-pots, several jars partly filled with turpentine, and several bottles of the Zephyr Hills water I used as rinse. It was quite the messy, busy little work-station.

I held the gloves in my lap, closed my eyes, and pretended I was touching them with my right hand. There was nothing. No pain, no itching, no sense of phantom fingers caressing the rough, worn fabric. I sat there willing it to come - whatever it was - and got more nothing. I might as well have been commanding my body to shit when it didn't need to. After five long minutes, I opened my eyes again and looked down at the gloves on my lap: HANDS... OFF.

Useless things. Useless fucking things.

Don't get mad, get even, I thought. And then I thought, Too late. I am mad. At these gloves and the woman who wore them. As for getting even?

"Too late for that, too," I said, and looked at my stump. "I'll never be heaven again."

The wrong word. Always the wrong word, and it would go on like that for-fucking-ever. I felt like knocking everything off my stupid goddam play-tables and onto the floor.

"Even," I said, deliberately low and deliberately slow. "I'll never be eeee- ven again. I'm odd-arm-out." That wasn't very funny (or even very sensible), but the anger started seeping away just the same. Hearing myself say the right word helped. It usually did.

I turned my thoughts from my stump to my wife's gloves. HANDS OFF, indeed.

With a sigh - there might have been some relief in it, I don't remember for sure, but it's likely - I set them on the table where I put my model objects, took a brush out of a turp jar, cleaned it with a rag, rinsed it, and looked at the blank canvas. Did I mean to paint the gloves anyway? Why, for fuck's sake? Why?

All at once the idea that I had been painting at all seemed ridiculous. The idea that I didn't know how seemed a hell of a lot more plausible. If I dipped this brush in black and then put it on that forbidding white-space, surely the best I'd be able to do would be a series of marching stick figures: Ten little Indians went out to dine, One drowned her baby self, Then there were nine. Nine little Indians, Stayed up very late -

That was spooky. I got up from my chair, and fast. Suddenly I didn't want to be here, not in Little Pink, not in Big Pink, not on Duma Key, not in my stupid pointless limping retired retarded life. How many lies was I telling? That I was an artist? Ridiculous. Kamen could cry STUNNED and YOU MUST NOT STOP in his patented e-mail capitals, but Kamen specialized in tricking the victims of terrible accidents into believing the pallid imitations of life they were living were as good as the real thing. When it came to positive reinforcement, Kamen and Kathi Green the Rehab Queen were a tag-steam. They were FUCKING BRILLIANT, and most of their grateful patients cried YOU MUST NOT STOP. Was I telling myself I was psychic? Possessed of a phantom arm capable of seeing into the unknown? That wasn't ridiculous, it was pitiful and insane.