waiting for you. Listen, we don't know each other... this is crazy... but do you have a place to stay? You don't, do you?"
She shakes her head. Doing a passable John Wayne (or maybe it's Blaine the train she's imitating), she says: "Ah'm a stranger here in Dodge, pilgrim."
Her heart is pounding slowly and heavily in her chest, but she feels a rising joy. This is going to be all right. She doesn't know how it can be, but yes, it's going to be just fine. This time ka is working in her favor, and the force of ka is enormous. This she knows from experience.
"If I asked how I know you... or where you come from..."
He pauses, looking at her levelly, and then says the rest of it.
"Or how I can possibly love you already...?"
She smiles. It feels good to smile, and it no longer hurts die side of her face, because whatever was there (some sort of scar, maybe-she can't quite remember) is gone. "Sugar," she tells him, "it's what I said: a long story. You'll get some of it in time, though... what I remember of it. And it could be that we still have some work to do. For an outfit called the Tet Corporation."
She looks around and then says, "What year is this?"
"1987," he says.
"And do you live in Brooklyn? Or maybe the Bronx?"
The young man whose dreams and squabbling voices have led him here-with a cup of hot chocolate in his hand and a MERRY CHRISTMAS hat in his back pocket-bursts out laughing. "God, no! I'm from White Plains! I came in on the train with my brother. He's right over there. He wanted a closer look at the polar bears."
The brother. Henry. The great sage and eminent junkie.
Her heart sinks.
"Let me introduce you," he says.
"No, really, I-"
"Hey, if we're gonna be friends, you gotta be friends with my kid brother. We're tight. Jake! Hey, Jake!"
She hasn't noticed the boy standing down by the railing which guards the sunken polar bears' environment from the rest of the park, but now he turns and her heart takes a great, giddy leap in her chest. Jake waves and ambles toward them.
"Jake's been dreaming about you, too," Eddie tells her. "It's the only reason I know I'm not going crazy. Any crazier than usual, at least."
She takes Eddie's hand-that familiar, well-loved hand.
And when the fingers close over hers, she thinks she will die of joy. She will have many questions-so will they-but for the time being she has only one that feels important. As the snow begins to fall more thickly around them, landing in his hair and in his lashes and on the shoulders of his sweatshirt, she asks it.
"You and Jake-what's your last name?"
"Toren," he says. "It's German."
Before either of them can say anything else, Jake joins them. And will I tell you that these three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there was happiness.
And they didlive.
Beneath the flowing and sometimes glimpsed glammer of the Beam that connects Shardik the Bear and Maturin the Turtle by way of the Dark Tower, they did live.
That's all.
That's enough.
Say thankya.
FOUND (CODA)
ONE
I've told my tale all the way to the end, and am satisfied. It was
(I set my watch and warrant on it) the kind only a good God would save for last, full of monsters and marvels and voyaging here and there. I can stop now, put my pen down, and rest my weary hand (although perhaps not forever; the hand that tells the tales has a mind of its own, and a way of growing restless).
I can close my eyes to Mid-World and all that lies beyond Mid-
World. Yet some of you who have provided the ears without which no tale can survive a single day are likely not so willing.
You are the grim, goal-oriented ones who will not believe that the joy is in the journey rather than the destination no matter how many times it has been proven to you. You are the unfortunate ones who still get the lovemaking all confused with the paltry squirt that comes to end the lovemaking (the orgasm is, after all, God's way of telling us we've finished, at least for the time being, and should go to sleep). You are the cruel ones who deny the Grey Havens, where tired characters go to rest. You say you want to know how it all comes out. You say you want to follow