The plant - By Stephen King Page 0,27

answer is, I don't know. But I know this: I awoke from a terrible dream last night, a dream in which I had just thrown battery acid into her face. That was what really scared me, scared me so badly I had to sleep the rest of the night with the light on.

Not his.

Hers.

Ruth's face.

"No," I said again, and then poured the rest of my drink over the dryness I heard in my voice. "No, I think that would be very unwise."

"Then you could stay on."

"Yes, but I couldn't work." I looked at him with some exasperation. My head was starting to buzz. It wasn't a very cheerful buzz, but all the same I signaled the waiter, who had been lurking nearby, for another. "Right now I'm having trouble remembering how to tie my own shoelaces." No. Wrong. That was hip and it sounded good, but it wasn't the truth-my shoelaces had nothing to do with it. "Roger, I'm depressed."

"Bereaved people shouldn't sell the house after the funeral," Roger said, and in my state of buzziness that seemed extremely witty-worthy of H. L. Mencken, in fact. I laughed. Roger smiled, but I could tell he was serious. "It's true," he said. "One of the few interesting courses I ever took in college was called the Psychology of Human Stress-one of these nifty little blocks they give you to fill up the final eight weeks of your senior year after you're done student teaching - "

"You were going to be a teacher?" I asked startled. I couldn't see Roger teaching-and then, all of a sudden I could.

"I did teach for six years," Roger said. "Four in high school and two in elementary. But that's beside the point. This course took up human stress situations like marriage, divorce, imprisonment, and bereavement. The course wasn't really a Signposts for Better Living sort of deal, but if you kept your eyes open you couldn't help but notice a few. One was this thing about living out at least the first six months of a really deep bereavement in the house where you and your loved one were living when the death occurred."

"Roger, this is not the same thing." I sipped my new drink, which tasted just like my old drink. It occurred to me that I was getting fried. It also occurred to me that I didn't care in the slightest.

"But it is," He said, leaning solemnly toward me. "In a queer way Ruth is dead to you now. You may see her from time to time over the years, but if the break is as final and complete as that letter sounds, the Ruth we could call your Lover-Ruth is dead to you. And you are grieving."

I opened my mouth to tell him he was full of shit, and then I closed it again because he was at least partly right. That's what carrying a torch really means, isn't it? You're grieving for the lover who died-the lover who is dead to you, anyway.

"People tend to think of 'grief' and 'depression' as interchangeable terms," Roger said. His tone was a good deal more pedantic than usual, and his eyes were rimmed with red. It occurred to me that Roger was getting fried, too. "They're really not. There's an element of depression in grief, of course, but there are a whole slew of other feelings as well, ranging from guilt and sadness to anger and relief. A person who runs from the scene of those feelings is a person in retreat from the inevitable. He arrives in a new place and discovers he feels exactly the same mixture of emotions we call grief-except now he feels homesickness as well, and a feeling of having lost the essential linkage which eventually turn grief into remembrance."

"You remember all of that from an eight-week psychology block course you took eighteen years ago?" Roger sipped modestly at his drink. "Sure," he said. "I got an A."

"Bullshit you do."

"I also banged the grad student who taught the course. What a piece of ass she was."

"It's not my apartment I was planning to leave," I said, although I had no idea if I intended to leave it or not... and I know that wasn't his point anyway.

"It wouldn't matter whether you left that two-room cockroach condo or not," he said. "You know what I'm talking about here. Your job is your house."

"Yeah? Well the roof is sure leaking," I said, and even that seemed sort of witty to me. I