“What?” she asked me. “What is it, honey? What’s wrong? Is it Kennedy? Something about Kennedy?”
“He’s going to kill them all with a hammer!”I shouted at her.“On Halloween night! I have to stop him!”
“Who?” She took my waving hands, her face frightened. “Stop who?”
But I couldn’t remember, and I fell asleep. I slept a lot, and not just because of the slowly healing head injury. I was exhausted, little more than a ghost of my former self. On the day of the beating, I had weighed one hundred and eighty-five pounds. By the time I was released from the hospital and installed in Eden Fallows, I weighed a hundred and thirty-eight.
That was the outside life of Jake Epping, a man who had been beaten badly, then nearly died in the hospital. My inside life was blackness, voices, and flashes of understanding that were like lightning: they blinded me with their brilliance and were gone again before I could get more than glimpses of the landscape by their light. I was mostly lost, but every now and then I found myself.
Found myself hellishly hot, and a woman was feeding me ice chips that tasted heavenly cool. This was THE WOMAN WITH THE SCAR, who was sometimes Sadie.
Found myself on the commode in the corner of the room with no idea how I’d gotten there, unloosing what felt like gallons of watery burning shit, my side itching and throbbing, my knee bellowing. I remember wishing someone would kill me.
Found myself trying to get out of bed, because I had to do something terribly important. It seemed to me that the whole world was depending on me to do this thing. THE MAN WITH THE COWBOY HAT was there. He caught me and helped me back into bed before I fell on the floor. “Not yet, son,” he said. “You’re nowhere near strong enough.”
Found myself talking—or trying to talk—to a pair of uniformed policemen who had come to ask questions about the beating I’d taken. One of them had a name tag that said TIPPIT. I tried to tell him he was in danger. I tried to tell him to remember the fifth of November. It was the right month but the wrong day. I couldn’t remember the actual date and began to thump at mystupid head in frustration. The cops looked at each other, puzzled. NOT-TIPPIT called for a nurse. The nurse came with a doctor, the doctor gave me a shot, and I floated away.
Found myself listening to Sadie as she read to me, firstJude the Obscure,thenTess of the D’Urbervilles.I knew those stories, and listening to them again was comforting. At one point duringTess,I remembered something.
“I made Tessica Caltrop leave us alone.”
Sadie looked up. “Do you meanJessica? Jessica Caltrop? You did? How? Do you remember?”
But I didn’t. It was gone.
Found myself looking at Sadie as she stood at my little window, staring out at the rain and crying.
But mostly I was lost.
THE MAN WITH THE COWBOY HAT was Deke, but once I thought he was my grandfather, and that scared me very badly, because Grampy Epping was dead, and—
Epping,thatwas my name.Hold onto it,I told myself, but at first I couldn’t.
Several times AN ELDERLY WOMAN WITH RED LIPSTICK came to see me. Sometimes I thought her name was Miz Mimi; sometimes I thought it was Miz Ellie; once I was quite sure she was Irene Ryan, who played Granny Clampett onThe Beverly Hillbillies.I told her that I’d thrown my cell phone into a pond. “Now it sleeps with the fishes. I sure wish I had that sucker back.”
A YOUNG COUPLE came. Sadie said, “Look, it’s Mike and Bobbi Jill.”
I said, “Mike Coleslaw.”
THE YOUNG MAN said, “That’s close, Mr. A.” He smiled. A tear ran down his cheek when he did.
Later, when Sadie and Deke came to Eden Fallows, they would sit with me on the couch. Sadie would take my hand and ask, “What’s his name, Jake? You never told me hisname.How can we stop him if we don’t know who he is or where he is going to be?”
I said, “I’m going to flop him.” I tried very hard. It made the back of my head hurt, but I tried even harder. “Stop him.”
“You couldn’t stop a cinchbug without our help,” Deke said.
But Sadie was too dear and Deke was too old. She shouldn’t have told him in the first place. Maybe that was all right, though, because he didn’t really believe it.
“The Yellow Card Man will stop you if you get involved,” I said. “I’m the only one he can’t stop.”
“Who is the Yellow Card Man?” Sadie asked, leaning forward and taking my hands.
“I don’t remember, but he can’t stop me because I don’t belong here.”
Only hewasstopping me. Or something was. Dr. Perry said my amnesia was shallow and transient, and he was right… but only up to a point. If I tried too hard to remember the things that mattered most, my head ached fiercely, my limping walk became a stumble, and my vision blurred. Worst of all was the tendency to suddenly fall asleep. Sadie asked Dr. Perry if it was narcolepsy. He said probably not, but I thought he looked worried.
“Does he wake when you call him or shake him?”
