Song of Susannah

When you finally get the thing you need
It makes you feel so fine.

RESPONSE: Commala-come-nine !
It makes ya feel fine!
But if you’d have the thing you need
You have to walk the line.

10th STANZA SUSANNAH-MIO, DIVIDED GIRL OF MINE

ONE

“John Fitzgerald Kennedy died this afternoon at Parkland Memorial Hospital.”

This voice, this grieving voice: Walter Cronkite’s voice, in a dream.

“America’s last gunslinger is dead. O Discordia!”

TWO

As Mia left room 1919 of the New York Plaza-Park (soon to be the Regal U.N. Plaza, a Sombra/North Central project, O Discordia), Susannah fell into a swoon. From a swoon she passed into a savage dream filled with savage news.

THREE

 

The next voice is that of Chet Huntley, co-anchor of The Huntley-Brinkley Report. It’s also-in some way she cannot understand-the voice of Andrew, her chauffeur.

“Diem and Nhu are dead,” says that voice. “Now do slip the dogs of war, the tale of woe begins; from here the way to Jericho Hill is paved with blood and sin. Ah, Discordia! Charyou tree! Come, reap!”

Where am I?

She looks around and sees a concrete wall packed with a jostling intaglio of names, slogans, and obscene drawings. In the middle, where anyone sitting on the bunk must see it, is this greeting: hello nigger welcome to oxford don’t let THE SUN SET ON YOU HERE!

The crotch of her slacks is damp. The underwear beneath is downright soaked, and she remembers why: although the bail bondsman was notified well in advance, the cops held onto them as long as possible, cheerfully ignoring the increasing chorus of pleas for a bathroom break. No toilets in the cells; no sinks; not even a tin bucket. You didn’t need to be a quiz-kid on Twenty-one to figure it out; they were supposed to piss in their pants, supposed to get in touch with their essential animal natures, and eventually she had, she, Odetta Holmes-

No, she thinks, I am Susannah. Susannah Dean. I’ve been taken prisoner again, jailed again, but I am still I.

She hears voices from beyond this wing of jail cells, voices which for her sum up the present. She’s supposed to think they’re coming from a TV out in the jail’s office, she assumes, but it’s got to be a trick. Or some ghoul’s idea of a joke. Why else would Frank McGee be saying President Kennedy’s brother, Bobby, is dead? Why would Dave Garroway from the Today show be saying that the President’s little boy is dead, that John-John has been killed in a plane crash? What sort of awful lie is that to hear as you sit in a stinking southern jail with your wet underpants clinging to your crotch? Why is “Buffalo” Bob Smith of the Howdy Doody show yelling “Cowabunga, kids, Martin Luther King is dead'? And the kids all screaming back, “Commala-come-Yay! We love the things ya say! Only good nigger’s a dead nigger, so kill a coon today!

The bail bondsman will be here soon. That’s what she needs to hold onto, that.

She goes to the bars and grips them. Yes, this is Oxford Town, all right, Oxford all over again, two men dead by the light of the moon, somebody better investigate soon. But she’s going to get out, and she’ll fly away, fly away, fly away home, and not long after that there will be an entirely new world to explore, with a new person to love and a new person to be. Commala-come-come, the journey’s just begun.

Oh, but that’s a lie. The journey is almost over. Her heart knows this.

Down the hall a door opens and footsteps come clicking toward her. She looks in that direction-eagerly, hoping for the bondsman, or a deputy with a ring of keys-but instead it’s a black woman in a pair of stolen shoes. It’s her old self. It’s Odetta Holmes. Didn’t go to Morehouse, but did go to Columbia. And to all those coffee houses down in the Village. And to the Castle on the Abyss, that house, too.

“Listen to me,” Odetta says. “No one can get you out of this but yourself, girl.”

“You want to enjoy those legs while you got em, honey!” The voice she hears coming out of her mouth is rough and confrontational on top, scared underneath. The voice of Detta Walker. ’You goan lose em fore long! They goan be cut off by the A train! That fabled A train! Man named Jack Mort goan push you off the platform in the Christopher Street station!”

Odetta looks at her calmly and says, “The A train doesn’t stop there. It’s never stopped there.”

“What the fuck you talkin about, bitch?”

Odetta is not fooled by the angry voice or the profanity. She knows who she’s talking to. And she knows what she’s talking about. The column of truth has a hole in it. These are not the voices of the gramophone but those of our dead friends. There are ghosts in the rooms of ruin. “Go back to the Dogan, Susannah. And remember what I say: only you can save yourself. Only you can lift yourself out of Discordia.”

FOUR

Now it’s the voice of David Brinkley, saying that someone named Stephen King was struck and killed by a Dodge minivan while walking near his home. King was fifty-two, he says, the author of many novels, most notably The Stand, The Shining, and ’salem’s Lot. Ah Discordia, Brinkley says, the world grows darker.

FIVE

Odetta Holmes, the woman Susannah once was, points through the bars of the cell and past her. She says it again: “Only you can save yourself. But the way of the gun is the way of damnation as well as salvation; in the end there is no difference.”

Susannah turns to look where the finger is pointing, and is filled with horror at what she sees: The blood! Dear God, the blood! There is a bowl filled with blood, and in it some monstrous dead thing, a dead baby that’s not human, and has she killed it herself?

“No!” she screams. “No, I will never! I will NEVER!”

“Then the gunslinger will die and the Dark Tower will fall,” says the terrible woman standing in the corridor, the terrible woman who is wearing Trudy Damascus’s shoes. “Discordia indeed.”

Susannah closes her eyes. Can she make herself swoon? Can she swoon herself right out of this cell, this terrible world?

She does. She falls forward into the darkness and the soft beeping of machinery and the last voice she hears is that of Walter Cronkite, telling her that Diem and Nhu are dead, astronaut Alan Shepard is dead, Lyndon Johnson is dead, Richard Nixon is dead, Elvis Presley is dead, Rock Hudson is dead, Roland of Gilead is dead, Eddie of New York is dead, Jake of New York is dead, the world is dead, the worlds, the Tower is falling, a trillion universes are merging, and all is Discordia, all is ruin, all is ended.