Autopsy Room Four (6)

I hear that sound in my head again—WHOCK!—only this time it
is followed by another, far less pleasant sound: the rustle of underbrush as I sweep it with the head of my driver. It would have to be fourteen, where there is reputedly poison ivy. Poison ivy and . . .
Rusty is still peering down at me, stupid and avid. It’s not death that interests him; it’s my resemblance to Michael Bolton. Oh yes, I know about it, have not been above using it with certain female clients. Otherwise, it gets old in a hurry. And in these circumstances . . . God.

“Attending physician?” the lady doc asks. “Was it Kazalian?”
“No,” Mike says, and for just a moment he looks down at me.
Older than Rusty by at least ten years. Black hair with flecks of gray
in it. Spectacles. How come none of these people can see that I am not dead? “There was a doc in the foursome that found him, actually. That’s his signature on page one . . . see?”

Riffle of paper, then: “Christ, Jennings. I know him. He gave Noah his physical after the ark grounded on Mount Ararat.” Rusty doesn’t look as if he gets the joke, but he brays laughter into my face anyway. I can smell onions on his breath, a little leftover lunchstink, and if I can smell onions, I must be breathing. I must be, right? If only—

Before I can finish this thought, Rusty leans even closer and I feel
a blast of hope. He’s seen something! He’s seen something and
means to give me mouth-to-mouth. God bless you, Rusty! God bless
you and your onion breath!

But the stupid grin doesn’t change, and instead of putting his mouth on mine, his hand slips around my jaw. Now he’s grasping one side with his thumb and the other side with his fingers. “He’s alive!” Rusty cries. “He’s alive, and he’s gonna sing for the Room Four Michael Bolton Fan Club!”

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

Autopsy Room Four (5)

The tie, tickling across my forehead like a feather.
Help me! I scream up at the Baywatch beefcake, who is probably an
intern or maybe just a med-school brat. Help me, please!

My lips don’t even quiver.
The face moves back, the tie stops tickling, and all that white light
streams through my helpless-to-look-away eyes and into my brain. It’s a hellish feeling, a kind of rape. I’ll go blind if I have to stare into it for long, I think, and blindness will be a relief.

WHOCK! The sound of the driver hitting the ball, but a little flat
this time, and the feeling in the hands is bad. The ball’s up . . . but
veering . . . veering off . . . veering toward . . .
Shit.
I’m in the rough.

Now another face bends into my field of vision. A white tunic
instead of a green one below it, a great untidy mop of orange hair
above it. Distress-sale IQ is my first impression. It can only be Rusty.
He’s wearing a big dumb grin that I think of as a high-school grin, the
grin of a kid who should have a tattoo reading BORN TO SNAP BRASTRAPS on one wasted bicep.

“Michael!” Rusty exclaims. “Jeez, ya lookin gooood! This’z an honor!
Sing for us, big boy! Sing your dead ass off!”
From somewhere behind me comes the doc’s voice, cool, no longer
even pretending to be amused by these antics. “Quit it, Rusty.”
Then, in a slightly new direction: “What’s the story, Mike?”

Mike’s voice is the first voice—Rusty’s partner. He sounds slightly
embarrassed to be working with a guy who wants to be Andrew Dice
Clay when he grows up. “Found him on the fourteenth hole at
Derry Muni. Off the course, actually, in the rough. If he hadn’t just
played through the foursome behind him, and if they hadn’t seen one
of his legs stickin out of the puckerbrush, he’d be an ant-farm by
now.”

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

Autopsy Room Four (4)

Rusty: “What are you doing next Saturday night, doc?”
But if I’m dead, how can I feel? How can I smell the bag I’m in? How
can I hear these voices, the doc now saying that next Saturday night she’s going to be shampooing her dog which is named Rusty, what a coincidence, and all of them laughing? If I’m dead, why aren’t I either gone or in the white light they’re always talking about on Oprah?

There’s a harsh ripping sound and all at once I am in white light; it is blinding, like the sun breaking through a scrim of clouds on a winter day. I try to squint my eyes shut against it, but nothing happens.
My eyelids are like blinds on broken rollers.

A face bends over me, blocking off part of the glare, which comes
not from some dazzling astral plane but from a bank of overhead fluorescents. The face belongs to a young, conventionally handsome man of about twenty-five; he looks like one of those beach beefcakes on Baywatch or Melrose Place. Marginally smarter, though. He’s got a lot of dark black hair under a carelessly worn surgical-greens cap. He’s wearing the tunic, too. His eyes are cobalt blue, the sort of eyes girls reputedly die for. There are dusty arcs of freckles high up on his cheekbones.

“Hey, gosh,” he says. It’s the third voice. “This guy does look like
Michael Bolton! A little long in the old tootharoo; maybe . . .” He
leans closer. One of the flat tie-ribbons at the neck of his greens tunic tickles against my forehead. “. . . but yeah. I see it. Hey, Michael, sing something.”

Help me! is what I’m trying to sing, but I can only look up into his
dark blue eyes with my frozen dead man’s stare; I can only wonder if
I am a dead man, if this is how it happens, if this is what everyone goes through after the pump quits. If I’m still alive, how come he hasn’t seen my pupils contract when the light hit them? But I know the answer to that . . . or I think I do. They didn’t contract. That’s why the glare from the fluorescents is so painful.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

Autopsy Room Four (3)

There’s laughter at that, the female voice joining in (a little doubtfully), and as I am set down on what feels like a padded table, Rusty starts some new crack—he’s got a whole standup routine, it seems. I lose this bit of hilarity in a burst of sudden horror. I won’t be able to breathe if my tongue blocks my windpipe, that’s the thought which has just gone through my mind, but what if I’m not breathing now? What if I’m dead? What if this is what death is like?

It fits. It fits everything with a horrid prophylactic snugness. The
dark. The rubbery smell. Nowadays I am Howard the Conqueror,
stock broker extraordinaire, terror of Derry Municipal Country Club,
frequent habitué of what is known at golf courses all over the world as The Nineteenth Hole, but in ’71 I was part of a Medical Assistance
Team in the Mekong Delta, a scared kid who sometimes woke up weteyed from dreams of the family dog, and all at once I know this feel, this smell.

Dear God, I’m in a bodybag.
First voice: “Want to sign this, doc? Remember to bear down hard—it’s three copies.”
Sound of a pen, scraping away on paper. I imagine the owner of
the first voice holding out a clipboard to the woman doctor.
Oh dear Jesus let me not be dead! I try to scream, and nothing comes out. I’m breathing though . . . aren’t I? I mean, I can’t feel myself doing it, but my lungs seem okay, they’re not throbbing or yelling for air the way they do when you’ve swum too far underwater, so I must be okay, right?

Except if you’re dead, the deep voice murmurs, they wouldn’t be crying out for air, would they? No—because dead lungs don’t need to breathe. Dead lungs can just kind of . . . take it easy.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

Autopsy Room Four (2)

A third voice: “Over here, boys.”
My rolling bed is pushed in a new direction, and the question
drumming in my head is What kind of a mess have I gotten myself into?

Doesn’t that depend on who you are? I ask myself, but that’s one thing, at least, I find I do know. I’m Howard Cottrell. I’m a stock broker known to some of my colleagues as Howard the Conqueror.

Second voice (from just above my head): “You’re looking very
pretty today, doc.”

Fourth voice (female, and cool): “It’s always nice to be validated by
you, Rusty. Could you hurry up a little? The babysitter expects me
back by seven. She’s committed to dinner with her parents.”

Back by seven, back by seven. It’s still the afternoon, maybe, or
early evening, but black in here, black as your hat, black as a woodchuck’s asshole, black as midnight in Persia, and what’s going on? Where have I been? What have I been doing? Why haven’t I been manning the phones?

Because it’s Saturday, a voice from far down murmurs. You were . . .
were . . .
A sound: WHOCK! A sound I love. A sound I more or less live for.
The sound of . . . what? The head of a golf-club, of course. Hitting a
ball off the tee. I stand, watching it fly off into the blue . . .

I’m grabbed, shoulders and calves, and lifted. It startles me terribly,
and I try to scream. No sound comes out . . . or perhaps one does, a tiny squeak, much tinier than the one produced by the wheel below me. Probably not even that. Probably it’s just my imagination.

I’m swung through the air in an envelope of blackness—Hey, don’t
drop me, I’ve got a bad back! I try to say, and again there’s no movement
of the lips or teeth; my tongue goes on lying on the floor of my mouth, the mole maybe not just stunned but dead, and now I have a
terrible thought, one which spikes fright a degree closer to panic:
what if they put me down the wrong way and my tongue slides backward and blocks my windpipe? I won’t be able to breathe! That’s
what people mean when they say someone “swallowed his tongue,”
isn’t it?

Second voice (Rusty): “You’ll like this one, doc, he looks like
Michael Bolton.”
Female doc: “Who’s that?” Third voice—sounds like a young man, not much more than a teenager: “He’s this white lounge-singer who wants to be black. I don’t think this is him.”

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

Autopsy Room Four (1)

It’s so dark that for awhile—just how long I don’t know—I think I’m
still unconscious. Then, slowly, it comes to me that unconscious
people don’t have a sensation of movement through the dark, accompanied by a faint, rhythmic sound that can only be a squeaky wheel. And I can feel contact, from the top of my head to the balls of my heels. I can smell something that might be rubber or vinyl. This is not unconsciousness, and there is something too . . . too what? Too rational about these sensations for it to be a dream.

Then what is it?
Who am I?
And what’s happening to me?
The squeaky wheel quits its stupid rhythm and I stop moving.

There is a crackle around me from the rubber-smelling stuff.
A voice: “Which one did they say?”
A pause.
Second voice: “Four, I think. Yeah, four.”
We start to move again, but more slowly. I can hear the faint scuff
of feet now, probably in soft-soled shoes, maybe sneakers. The owners of the voices are the owners of the shoes. They stop me again. There’s a thump followed by a faint whoosh. It is, I think, the sound of a door with a pneumatic hinge being opened.

What’s going on here? I yell, but the yell is only in my head. My lips
don’t move. I can feel them—and my tongue, lying on the floor of
my mouth like a stunned mole—but I can’t move them.

The thing I’m on starts rolling again. A moving bed? Yes. A gurney,
in other words. I’ve had some experience with them, a long time ago, in Lyndon Johnson’s shitty little Asian adventure. It comes to me that I’m in a hospital, that something bad has happened to me, something like the explosion that almost neutered me twenty-three years before, and that I’m going to be operated on. There are a lot of
answers in that idea, sensible ones, for the most part, but I don’t hurt anywhere. Except for the minor matter of being scared out of my wits, I feel fine. And if these are orderlies wheeling me into an operating room, why can’t I see? Why can’t I talk?

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

Introduction: Practicing the (Almost) Lost Art (6)

This book will probably end up on the best-seller lists for awhile; I’ve
been very lucky that way. But if you see it there, you might ask yourself how many other books of short stories end up on the bestseller lists in the course of any given year, and how long publishers can be expected to publish books of a type that doesn’t interest readers very much. Yet for me, there are few pleasures so excellent as sitting in my favorite chair on a cold night with a hot cup of tea, listening to the wind outside and reading a good story which I can complete in a single sitting.

Writing them is not so pleasurable. I can only think of two in the
current collection—the title story and “L.T.’s Theory of Pets”—
which were written without an amount of effort far greater than the
relatively slight result. And yet I think I have succeeded in keeping
my craft new, at least to myself, mostly because I refuse to let a year go by without writing at least one or two of them. Not for money, not even precisely for love, but as a kind of dues-paying. Because if you want to write short stories, you have to do more than think about writing short stories. It is not like riding a bicycle but more like working out in the gym: your choice is use it or lose it.

To see them collected here like this is a great pleasure for me. I hope
it will be for you, as well. You can let me know at www.stephenking.com, and you can do something else for me (and yourself), as well: if these stories work for you, buy another collection. Sam the Cat by Matthew Klam, for instance, or The Hotel Eden by Ron Carlson, These are only two of the good writers doing good work out there, and although it’s now officially the twenty-first century, they’re doing it in the same old way, one word at a time. The format in which they eventually appear doesn’t change that. If you care, support them. The best method of support really hasn’t changed much: read their stories.

I’d like to thank a few of the people who’ve read mine: Bill Buford, at The New Yorker; Susan Moldow, at Scribner; Chuck Verrill, who has
edited so much of my work across such a span of years; Ralph Vicinanza, Arthur Greene, Gordon Van Gelder, and Ed Ferman at The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; Nye Willden at Cavalier; and the late Robert A. W. Lowndes, who bought that first short story back in ’68. Also—most important—my wife, Tabitha, who remains my favorite Constant Reader. These are all people who have worked and are still working to keep the short story from becoming a lost art. So am I. And, by what you buy (and thus choose to subsidize) and by what you read, so are you. You most of all, Constant Reader. Always you. Stephen King Bangor, Maine December 11, 2001

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

Introduction: Practicing the (Almost) Lost Art (5)

After “Bullet” was published as an e-book (cover, Scribner
colophon, and all), that changed. I was mobbed in the airport lounges. I was even mobbed in the Boston Amtrak lounge. I was buttonholed on the street. For a little while there, I was turning down the chance to appear on a giddy three talk-shows a day (I was holding out for Springer, but Jerry never called). I even got on the cover of Time, and The New York Times pontificated at some length over the perceived success of “Riding the Bullet” and the perceived failure of its cybersuccessor, The Plant. Dear God, I was on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. I had inadvertently become a mogul.

And what was driving me crazy? What made it all seem so pointless?
Why, that nobody cared about the story. Hell, nobody even asked
about the story, and do you know what? It’s a pretty good story, if I do say so myself. Simple but fun. Gets the job done. If it got you to turn off the TV, as far as I’m concerned, it (or any of the stories in the collection which follows) is a total success.

But in the wake of “Bullet,” all the guys in ties wanted to know was, “How’s it doing? How’s it selling?” How to tell them I didn’t give a flying fuck how it was doing in the marketplace, that what I cared about was how it was doing in the reader’s heart? Was it succeeding
there? Failing? Getting through to the nerve-endings? Causing that little frisson which is the spooky story’s raison d’être? I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction.
There is something weirdly decadent about appearing on the cover of a major magazine simply because you used an alternate route into the marketplace. There is something weirder about realizing that all those readers might have been a lot more interested in the novelty
of the electronic package than they were in what was inside the package. Do I want to know how many of the readers who downloaded “Riding the Bullet” actually read “Riding the Bullet”? I do not. I think I might be extremely disappointed.

E-publishing may or may not be the wave of the future; about that I care not a fiddler’s fart, believe me. For me, going that route was simply another way of trying to keep myself fully involved in the process of writing stories. And then getting them to as many people as possible.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

Introduction: Practicing the (Almost) Lost Art (4)

I’m speaking here of “Riding the Bullet,” which has surely been my
oddest experience of selling my wares in the marketplace, and a story
which illustrates the main points I’m trying to make: that what’s lost
cannot be easily retrieved, that once things go past a certain point,
extinction is probably inevitable, but that a fresh perspective on one
aspect of creative writing—the commercial aspect—can sometimes
refresh the whole.

“Bullet” was composed after On Writing, and while I was still
recuperating from an accident which left me in a state of nearly constant physical misery. Writing took me away from the worst of that pain; it was (and continues to be) the best pain-killer in my limited arsenal. The story I wanted to tell was simplicity itself; little more than a campfire ghost-story, really. It was The Hitchhiker Who Got Picked Up By A Dead Man.

While I was writing away at my story in the unreal world of my
imagination, a dot-com bubble was growing in the equally unreal
world of e-commerce. One aspect of this was the so-called electronic
book, which, according to some, would spell the end of books as we’d always known them, objects of glue and binding, pages you
turned by hand (and which sometimes fell out, if the glue was weak
or the binding old). In early 2000, there was great interest in an essay by Arthur C. Clarke, which had been published only in cyberspace.

It was extremely short, though (like kissing your sister is what I
thought when I first read it). My story, when it was done, was quite
long. Susan Moldow, my editor at Scribner (as an X-Files fan, I call
her Agent Moldow . . . you work it out), called one day prompted by
Ralph Vicinanza and asked if I had anything I’d like to try in the
electronic marketplace. I sent her “Bullet,” and the three of us—
Susan, Scribner, and I—made a little bit of publishing history. Several
hundred thousand people downloaded the story, and I ended up
making an embarrassing amount of money. (Except that’s a fucking
lie, I wasn’t embarrassed a bit.) Even the audio rights went for over
a hundred thousand dollars, a comically huge price.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual

Introduction: Practicing the (Almost) Lost Art (3)

Poetry is not a lost art. Poetry is better than ever. Of course you’ve
got the usual gang of idiots (as the Mad magazine staff writers used
to call themselves) hiding in the thickets, folks who have gotten pretension and genius all confused, but there are also many brilliant practitioners of the art out there. Check the literary magazines at your local bookstore, if you don’t believe me. For every six crappy poems you read, you’ll actually find one or two good ones. And that, believe me, is a very acceptable ratio of trash to treasure.

The short story is also not a lost art, but I would argue it is a good
deal closer than poetry to the lip of the drop into extinction’s pit.
When I sold my first short story in the delightfully antique year of
1968, I was already bemoaning the steady attrition of markets: the
pulps were gone, the digests were going, the weeklies (such as The
Saturday Evening Post) were dying. In the years since, I have seen the markets for short stories continue to shrink. God bless the little magazines, where young writers can still publish their stories for contributors’ copies, and God bless the editors who still read the contents of their slush piles (especially in the wake of 2001’s anthrax scare), and God bless the publishers who still greenlight the occasional anthology of original stories, but God won’t have to spend His whole day—or even His coffee break—blessing those people. Ten or fifteen minutes would do the trick. Their number is small, and every year there are one or two fewer. Story magazine, a lodestar for young writers (including myself, although I never actually published there), is now gone. Amazing Stories is gone, despite repeated efforts to revive it. Interesting science-fiction magazines such as Vertex are gone, and, of course, the horror mags like Creepy and Eerie. Those wonderful periodicals are long gone. Every now and then someone will try to revive one of these magazines; as I write this, Weird Tales is staggering through such a revival. Mostly, they fail. It’s like those plays in blank verse, the ones that open and then close in what seems to be no more than the wink of an eye. When it’s gone, you can’t bring it back. What’s lost has a way of staying lost.

I’ve continued to write short stories over the years, partly because
the ideas still come from time to time—beautifully compressed ideas
that cry out for three thousand words, maybe nine thousand, fifteen
thousand at the very most—and partly because it’s the way I affirm,
at least to myself, the fact that I haven’t sold out, no matter what the more unkind critics may think. Short stories are still piecework, the equivalent of those one-of-a-kind items you can buy in an artisan’s shop. If, that is, you are willing to be patient and wait while it’s made by hand in the back room.

But there’s no reason for stories to be marketed by the same old justlike- Father-did-it methods, simply because the stories themselves are created that way, nor is there any reason to assume (as so many stodgies in the critical press seem to have done) that the way in which a apiece of fiction is sold must in some way contaminate or cheapen the product itself.

Taken From:Stephen king everything’s eventual