The Drawing of the Three

'As for myself, I arrived back from Oxford , was met by Andrew, my driver, and brought back to my building. I bathed and I wanted sleep?I was getting a very bad headache, and sleep is the only medicine that's any good for the really bad ones. But it was close on midnight , and I thought I would watch the news first. Some of us had been released, but a good many more were still in the jug when we left. I wanted to find out if their cases had been resolved.

'I dried off and put on my robe and went into the living room. I turned on the TV news. The newscaster started talking about a speech Krushchev had just made about the American advisors in Viet Nam . He said, 'We have a film report from?' and then he was gone and I was rolling down this beach. You say you saw me in some sort of magic doorway which is now gone, and that I was in Macy's, and that I was stealing. All of this is preposterous enough, but even if it was so, I could find something better to steal than costume jewelry. I don't wear jewelry.'

'You better look at your hands again, Odetta,' Eddie said quietly.

For a very long time she looked from the 'diamond' on her left pinky, too large and vulgar to be anything but paste, to the large opal on the third finger of her right hand, which was too large and vulgar to be anything but real.

'None of this is happening,' she repeated firmly.

'You sound like a broken record!' He was genuinely angry for the first time. 'Every time someone pokes a hole in your neat little story, you just retreat to that 'none of this is happening' shit. You have to wise up, 'Detta.'

'Don't call me that! I hate that!' she burst out so shrilly that Eddie recoiled.

'Sorry. Jesus! I didn't know.'

'I went from night to day, from undressed to dressed, from my living room to this deserted beach. And what really happened was that some big-bellied redneck deputy hit me upside the head with a club and that is all!'

'But your memories don't stop in Oxford ,' he said softly.

'W-What?' Uncertain again. Or maybe seeing and not wanting to. Like with the rings.

'If you got whacked in Oxford , how come your memories don't stop there?'

'There isn't always a lot of logic to things like this.' She was rubbing her temples again. 'And now, if it's all the same to you, Eddie, I'd just as soon end the conversation. My headache is back. It's quite bad.'

'I guess whether or not logic figures in all depends on what you want to believe. I saw you in Macy's, Odetta. I saw you stealing. You say you don't do things like that, but you also told me you don't wear jewelry. You told me that even though you'd looked down at your hands several times while we were talking. Those rings were there then, but it was as if you couldn't see them until I called your attention to them and made you see them.'

'I don't want to talk about it!' she shouted. 'My head hurts!'

'All right. But you know where you lost track of time, and it wasn't in Oxford .'

'Leave me alone,' she said dully.

Eddie saw the gunslinger toiling his way back with two full water-skins, one tied around his waist and the other slung over his shoulders. He looked very tired.

'I wish I could help you,' Eddie said, 'but to do that, I guess I'd have to be real.'

He stood by her for a moment, but her head was bowed, the tips of her fingers steadily massaging her temples.

Eddie went to meet Roland.

8

'Sit down.' Eddie took the bags. 'You look all in.'

'I am. I'm getting sick again.'

Eddie looked at the gunslinger's flushed cheeks and brow, his cracked lips, and nodded. 'I hoped it wouldn't happen, but I'm not that surprised, man. You didn't bat for the cycle. Balazar didn't have enough Keflex.'

'I don't understand you.'

'If you don't take a penicillin drug long enough, you don't kill the infection. You just drive it underground. A few days go by and it comes back. We'll need more, but at least there's a door to go to. In the meantime you'll just have to take it easy.' But Eddie was thinking unhappily of Odetta's missing legs and the longer and longer treks it took to find water. He wondered if Roland could have picked a worse time to have a relapse. He supposed it was possible; he just didn't see how.

'I have to tell you something about Odetta.'

'That's her name?'

'Uh-huh.'

'It's very lovely,' the gunslinger said.

'Yeah. I thought so, too. What isn't so lovely is the way she feels about this place. She doesn't think she's here.'

'I know. And she doesn't like me much, does she?'

No, Eddie thought, but that doesn't keep her from think-ing you're one booger of a hallucination. He didn't say it, only nodded.

'The reasons are almost the same,' the gunslinger said. 'She's not the woman I brought through, you see. Not at all.''

Eddie stared, then suddenly nodded, excited. That blurred glimpse in the mirror … that snarling face … the man was right. Jesus Christ, of course he was! That hadn't been Odetta at all.

Then he remembered the hands which had gone pawing carelessly through the scarves and had just as carelessly gone about the business of stuffing the junk jewelry into her big purse?almost, it had seemed, as if she wanted to be caught.

The rings had been there.

Same rings.

But that doesn't necessarily mean the same hands, he thought wildly, but that would only hold for a second. He had studied her hands. They were the same, long- fingered and delicate.

'No,' the gunslinger continued. 'She is not.' His blue eyes studied Eddie carefully.

'Her hands?'

'Listen,' the gunslinger said, 'and listen carefully. Our lives may depend on it?mine because I'm getting sick again, and yours because you have fallen in love with her.'

Eddie said nothing.

'She is two women in the same body. She was one woman when I entered her, and another when I returned here.'

Now Eddie could say nothing.

'There was something else, something strange, but either I didn't understand it or I did and it's slipped away. It seemed important.'

Roland looked past Eddie, looked to the beached wheel-chair, standing alone at the end of its short track from nowhere. Then he looked back at Eddie.

'I understand very little of this, or how such a thing can be, but you must be on your guard. Do you understand that?'

'Yes.' Eddie's lungs felt as if they had very little wind in them. He understood?or had, at least, a