Doctor Sleep (6 page)

The bathroom was directly across a short stub of hall. The door was open, the toilet seat up. Dan lunged, fell on his knees, and spewed a great flood of brownish-yellow stuff on top of a floating turd. He looked away, groped for the flush, found it, pushed it. Water cascaded, but there was no accompanying sound of draining water. He looked back and saw something alarming: the turd, probably his own, rising toward the pee-splashed rim of the toilet bowl on a sea of half-digested bar-snacks. Just before the toilet could overspill, making this morning's banal horrors complete, something cleared its throat in the pipe and the whole mess flushed away. Dan threw up again, then sat on his heels with his back against the bathroom wall and his throbbing head lowered, waiting for the tank to refill so he could flush a second time.

No more. I swear it. No more booze, no more bars, no more fights
. Promising himself this for the hundredth time. Or the thousandth.

One thing was certain: he had to get out of this town or he might be in trouble.
Serious
trouble was not out of the question.

Johnny, what have we got for today's grand prize winner? Bob, it's TWO YEARS IN STATE FOR ASSAULT AND BATTERY!

And . . . the studio audience goes wild.

The toilet tank had quieted its noisy refill. He reached for the handle to flush away The Morning After, Part Two, then paused, regarding the black hole of his short-term memory. Did he know his name? Yes! Daniel Anthony Torrance. Did he know the name of the chick snoring on the mattress in the other room? Yes! Deenie. He didn't recall her last name, but it was likely she had never told him. Did he know the current president's name?

To Dan's horror, he didn't, not at first. The guy had a funky Elvis haircut and played the sax—quite badly. But the name . . . ?

Do you even know where you are?

Cleveland? Charleston? It was one or the other.

As he flushed the toilet, the president's name arrived in his head with splendid clarity. And Dan wasn't in either Cleveland
or
Charleston. He was in Wilmington, North Carolina. He worked as an orderly at Grace of Mary Hospital. Or had. It was time to move on. If he got to some other place, some
good
place, he might be able to quit the drinking and start over.

He got up and looked in the mirror. The damage wasn't as bad as he'd feared. Nose swelled but not actually broken—at least he didn't think so. Crusts of dried blood above his puffy upper lip. There was a bruise on his right cheekbone (the Case cowboy must have been a lefty) with the bloody imprint of a ring sitting in the middle of it. Another bruise, a big one, was spreading in the cup of his left shoulder. That, he seemed to remember, had been from a pool cue.

He looked in the medicine cabinet. Amid tubes of makeup and cluttered bottles of over-the-counter medicine, he found three prescription bottles. The first was Diflucan, commonly prescribed for yeast infections. It made him glad he was circumcised. The second was Darvon Comp 65. He opened it, saw half a dozen capsules, and put three in his pocket for later reference. The last scrip was for Fioricet, and the bottle—thankfully—was almost full. He swallowed three with cold water. Bending over the basin made his headache worse than ever, but he thought he would soon get relief. Fioricet, intended for migraine and tension headaches, was a guaranteed hangover killer. Well . . . almost guaranteed.

He started to close the cabinet, then took another look. He moved some of the crap around. No birth control ring. Maybe it was in her purse. He hoped so, because he hadn't been carrying a rubber. If he'd fucked her—and although he couldn't remember for sure, he probably had—he'd ridden in bareback.

He put on his underwear and shuffled back to the bedroom, standing in the doorway for a moment and looking at the woman who had brought him home last night. Arms and legs splayed, everything showing. Last night she had looked like the goddess of the Western world in her thigh-high leather skirt and cork sandals, her cropped top and hoop earrings. This morning he saw the sagging white dough of a growing boozegut, and the second chin starting to appear under the first.

He saw something worse: she wasn't a woman, after all. Probably not jailbait (please God not jailbait), but surely no more than twenty and maybe still in her late teens. On one wall, chillingly childish, was a poster of KISS with Gene Simmons spewing fire. On another was a cute kitten with startled eyes, dangling from a tree branch. HANG IN THERE, BABY, this poster advised.

He needed to get out of here.

Their clothes were tangled together at the foot of the mattress. He separated his t-shirt from her panties, yanked it over his head, then stepped into his jeans. He froze with the zipper halfway up, realizing that his left front pocket was much flatter than it had been when he left the check-cashing joint the previous afternoon.

No. It can't be
.

His head, which had begun to feel the teeniest bit better, started to throb again as his heartbeat picked up speed, and when he shoved his hand into the pocket, it brought up nothing but a ten-dollar bill and two toothpicks, one of which poked under his index fingernail and into the sensitive meat beneath. He hardly noticed.

We didn't drink up five hundred dollars. No way we did. We'd be dead if we drank up that much.

His wallet was still at home in his hip pocket. He pulled it out, hoping against hope, but no joy. He must have transferred the ten
he usually kept there to his front pocket at some point. The front pocket made it tougher for barroom dips, which now seemed like quite the joke.

He looked at the snoring, splayed girl-woman on the mattress and started for her, meaning to shake her awake and ask her what she'd done with his fucking money.
Choke
her awake, if that was what it took. But if she'd stolen from him, why had she brought him home? And hadn't there been something else? Some other adventure after they left the Milky Way? Now that his head was clearing, he had a memory—hazy, but probably valid—of them taking a cab to the train station.

I know a guy who hangs out there, honey
.

Had she really said that, or was it only his imagination?

She said it, all right. I'm in Wilmington, Bill Clinton's the president, and we went to the train station. Where there was indeed a guy. The kind who likes to do his deals in the men's room, especially when the customer has a slightly rearranged face. When he asked who teed off on me, I told him—

“I told him he should mind his beeswax,” Dan muttered.

When the two of them went in, Dan had been meaning to buy a gram to keep his date happy, no more than that, and only if it wasn't half Manitol. Coke might be Deenie's thing but it wasn't his. Rich man's Anacin, he'd heard it called, and he was far from rich. But then someone had come out of one of the stalls. A business type with a briefcase banging his knee. And when Mr. Businessman went to wash his hands at one of the basins, Dan had seen flies crawling all over his face.

Deathflies. Mr. Businessman was a dead man walking and didn't know it.

So instead of going small, he was pretty sure he'd gone big. Maybe he'd changed his mind at the last moment, though. It was possible; he could remember so little.

I remember the flies, though.

Yes. He remembered those. Booze tamped down the shining, knocked it unconscious, but he wasn't sure the flies were even a part of the shining. They came when they would, drunk or sober.

He thought again:
I need to get out of here.

He thought again:
I wish I were dead
.

Deenie made a soft snorting sound and turned away from the merciless morning light. Except for the mattress on the floor, the room was devoid of furniture; there wasn't even a thrift-shop bureau. The closet stood open, and Dan could see the majority of Deenie's meager wardrobe heaped in two plastic laundry baskets. The few items on hangers looked like barhopping clothes. He could see a red t-shirt with SEXY GIRL printed in spangles on the front, and a denim skirt with a fashionably frayed hem. There were two pairs of sneakers, two pairs of flats, and one pair of strappy high-heel fuck-me shoes. No cork sandals, though. No sign of his own beat-up Reeboks, for that matter.

Dan couldn't remember them kicking off their shoes when they came in, but if they had, they'd be in the living room, which he
could
remember—vaguely. Her purse might be there, too. He might have given her whatever remained of his cash for safekeeping. It was unlikely but not impossible.

He walked his throbbing head down the short hall to what he assumed was the apartment's only other room. On the far side was a kitchenette, the amenities consisting of a hotplate and a bar refrigerator tucked under the counter. In the living area was a sofa hemorrhaging stuffing and propped up at one end with a couple of bricks. It faced a big TV with a crack running down the middle of the glass. The crack had been mended with a strip of packing tape that now dangled by one corner. A couple of flies were stuck to the tape, one still struggling feebly. Dan eyed it with morbid fascination, reflecting (not for the first time) that the hungover eye had a weird ability to find the ugliest things in any given landscape.

There was a coffee table in front of the sofa. On it was an ashtray filled with butts, a baggie filled with white powder, and a
People
magazine with more blow scattered across it. Beside it, completing the picture, was a dollar bill, still partly rolled up. He didn't know how much they had snorted, but judging by how much still remained, he could kiss his five hundred dollars goodbye.

Fuck. I don't even
like
coke. And how did I snort it, anyway? I can hardly breathe
.

He hadn't.
She
had snorted it. He had rubbed it on his gums. It was all starting to come back to him. He would have preferred it stay away, but too late.

The deathflies in the restroom, crawling in and out of Mr. Businessman's mouth and over the wet surfaces of his eyes. Mr. Dealerman asking what Dan was looking at. Dan telling him it was nothing, it didn't matter, let's see what you've got. It turned out Mr. Dealerman had plenty. They usually did. Next came the ride back to her place in another taxi, Deenie already snorting from the back of her hand, too greedy—or too needy—to wait. The two of them trying to sing “Mr. Roboto.”

He spied her sandals and his Reeboks right inside the door, and here were more golden memories. She hadn't kicked the sandals off, only dropped them from her feet, because by then he'd had his hands planted firmly on her ass and she had her legs wrapped around his waist. Her neck smelled of perfume, her breath of barbecue-flavored pork rinds. They had been gobbling them by the handful before moving on to the pool table.

Dan put on his sneakers, then walked across to the kitchenette, thinking there might be instant coffee in the single cupboard. He didn't find coffee, but he did see her purse, lying on the floor. He thought he could remember her tossing it at the sofa and laughing when it missed. Half the crap had spilled out, including a red imitation leather wallet. He scooped everything back inside and took it over to the kitchenette. Although he knew damned well that his money was now living in the pocket of Mr. Dealerman's designer jeans, part of him insisted that there must be
some
left, if only because he needed some to be left. Ten dollars was enough for three drinks or two six-packs, but it was going to take more than that today.

He fished out her wallet and opened it. There were some pictures—a couple of Deenie with some guy who looked too much like her not to be a relative, a couple of Deenie holding a baby, one of Deenie in a prom dress next to a bucktoothed kid in a gruesome blue tux. The bill compartment was bulging. This gave him hope until he pulled it open and saw a swatch of food stamps. There was also some currency: two twenties and three tens.

That's my money
.
What's left of it, anyway
.

He knew better. He never would have given some shitfaced pickup his week's pay for safekeeping. It was hers.

Yes, but hadn't the coke been her idea? Wasn't she the reason he was broke as well as hungover this morning?

No. You're hungover because you're a drunk. You're broke because you saw the deathflies
.

It might be true, but if she hadn't insisted they go to the train station and score, he never would have
seen
the deathflies.

She might need that seventy bucks for groceries
.

Right. A jar of peanut butter and a jar of strawberry jam. Also a loaf of bread to spread it on. She had food stamps for the rest.

Or rent
.
She might need it for that.

If she needed rent money, she could peddle the TV. Maybe her dealer would take it, crack and all. Seventy dollars wouldn't go very far on a month's rent, anyway, he reasoned, even for a dump like this one.

That's not yours, doc
. It was his mother's voice, the last one he needed to hear when he was savagely hungover and in desperate need of a drink.

“Fuck you, Ma.” His voice was low but sincere. He took the money, stuffed it in his pocket, put the billfold back in the purse, and turned around.

A kid was standing there.

He looked about eighteen months old. He was wearing an Atlanta Braves t-shirt. It came down to his knees, but the diaper underneath showed anyway, because it was loaded and hanging just above his ankles. Dan's heart took an enormous leap in his chest
and his head gave a sudden terrific whammo, as if Thor had swung his hammer in there. For a moment he was absolutely sure he was going to stroke out, have a heart attack, or both.

Then he drew in a deep breath and exhaled. “Where did
you
come from, little hero?”