dust of the chase

Turn and turn again. Roland knows his first face. Roland knows his final fate.

He might ask: “Do you remember me?” And Roland might say aye, I do, moving atop him. He has breached the stronghold of his body in a most familiar way indeed. But he never does — among all men in all worlds the man in black is alone.

Most wonderfully and terribly alone. He opens his mouth to suck the fingers of Roland’s man-murdering hand. Roland’s skin tastes of leather and niter, deep salt-ocean tastes. He could tell him such secrets, if they left off long enough. Better not to speak.

They lie together in the dust, Flagg receives him with obscene relish. The way Roland’s cold colorless eyes rake over him is exquisitely familiar. This is his old enemy, who sees their conjunction as a grim duty and not something they might have done a dozen times in strange repetitions, a hundred times.

He kisses him on the mouth, cruel and biting kisses that extort a groan out of Roland’s throat and shut his eyes in momentary pleasure — he’s come to him like a spirit in the wilderness, to rob him of his life. Is this the first time, or the fifth, or the hundredth — he’s been down this path too many times to count, tracking footsteps across some corner, across the baddest badlands, running his filthy fingers through Roland’s bedtime stories. Shuffle the cards as many times as you like, there will never be any more in the deck. He has read the cards for Roland and seen his own fate, he has shown him what there is to be shown.

Roland is eaten up by scars, in every world, and Flagg finds them with his fingers. He can number them and know them from world to world, tally them up in his head, count them to nineteen (that’s the number, mark you, nineteen, give in to curiosity and fold, nineteen) and higher still, suture-digs and welts and grazes The track of a knife across his bicep — Flagg grips there tightly and grins with long teeth, watching the skin lose its color under his fingers. Only the mark is left behind.

Roland fills him and completes him. His hips come up in a rolling motion — don’t Roland’s joints pain him, Flagg wonders, but of course they don’t do that yet, not here, not yet, not now. There are charms for that, and potions — the man Flagg mixed up potions once that brought back an old man’s stamina but that was not this Roland, was it? Not Roland, weathered and raw but hard and hungry and utterly ignorant of his enemy and his intentions.

The weight of him is real and true. Flagg slashes his tongue against the sandy line of his stubble. All of Gabrielle’s softness is a pale shadow, like milk in water. Bent like a willow, yes — Roland is bent against him like the hammer of a gun, taut to strike.

He goads him to the edge, even as the hard plunge of him has sent him nearly insensible, breathing hard ragged sounds that are not words — Roland turns him away and presses his face into the ground, leaving the taste of red dust in his mouth. It’s a denial of sight but not of touch.

He’ll hold this in his fondest memories — having Roland as a pair of men might have each other and not like a couple of warring metaphors. He’ll dream of this, as he sleeps under the earth. He’ll dream of the hammering of Roland’s blood, the slickness of his seed, the fathomless distance of his eyes.

Afterward, Roland lies beside him stubbornly vigilant, his body rigid with wakefulness. It’s not very flattering, but it’s reasonable — Roland’s known spirits in the wastes that would drain the moisture from a man and leave him mummified, spirits that join with a man and cut out his heart for a delicacy after. The man in black is not one of these. The last crusader lies beside him, and he is afraid of him. Wisely so.

He sits up, shockingly naked in the cold air, and reaches to scratch an epitaph in the dust. The campfire is losing its shape, crumbling into ash. Without a covering his own marklessness is obscene — no scars and no siguls, only the hard lines of his legs and the gully cut of his spine.

“Tell me, will you dream?”

“I often do.” Roland’s long arm is braced behind his head, his killing arm, and the man in black can feel him shifting uneasily as he speaks, the hard vibration of his voice as real as anything. His wariness is as tangible as the pass of a hand.

“That’s a shame. Self-knowledge is a heavy load to carry indeed. Now sleep, gunslinger,” he says, making a sigul with his fingers behind his back, and turns Roland out like a light. A sudden drop into lightless, dreamless dark. He’ll give him that by way of trade.

This is madness, real frothing-at-the-mouth insanity — when he’s been here before, here is always the Mohaine Desert, Gilead is always gone by. If he wants to see Roland this is where he must be — there are other worlds than these, and yet the pair of them run this same race. What would become of him if he broke away? They’re like two men shackled together. Roland will follow him to the end of all worlds, as far as he’ll go, as far as the Tower.

*

This time around ka’s wheel, a cataclysm falls on Gilead — Roland outlives his mother and father both, as he always does, he roams the halls with a red cotton cloth bound across his face to keep out the stench of the fallen. There’s no chance, of course, that Roland will not survive this — that he will not reach the Tower.

Men and women lie dead in their beds, dead in the training hall, dead in the kitchens, dead in the streets. Gabrielle goes mad before she dies, she tears her hair from its braid and drinks the blood of men. Cort is dead. Cuthbert is dead. Alain is dead. All of Roland’s jolly little would-be gunslinger pals are dead as Hax, choking on a sickness that has no name they will ever understand. His true-love will die when the pestilence reaches her insulated traitor-town, even Hambry’s choicest beauties will roast in their skin, choking on phlegm, the town simpleton will die quietly, the old maid and the witch will die with curses on their lips. The whole cast of characters will be swept away. The two of them have never been more alone than they are now.

Roland passes through the corridors of the dead. Like the Sleeping Beauty’s prince creeping through the palace in silence. He finds Marten Broadcloak in the hall of the grandfathers, with his feet up in front of a bonfire. Fire is the liveliest thing around; it eats and eats and is never satisfied.

“This is your doing,” Young Roland cries out in his boy’s voice, and his gun is drawn — did he scavenge these guns, did he steal them? Was he granted them in Steven Deschain’s dying moments? The red cloth lies carelessly around his neck.

“Sit down, and you’ll see that isn’t the case. Have your breakfast before you slay me.”

Oats and milk and honey — the boy makes a face as he eats, put off by the sweetness. Marten shows him in the cookfire what the future holds — there is no barony that can stand untouched by this pestilence, Farson’s men dug too deep and found something they never thought to find under the earth, some weapon of the Old Ones. My own poison, the man in black finds himself thinking, mine, and he doesn’t know why. He’s been here before.

Marten teaches him the names for this pestilence, all the names he knows from other wheres and other whens. Roland the boy listens keenly, his colorless eyes fixed on Marten’s hands as he tells the story. His jaw is set — already squaring off, already repulsively familiar. His eyes are the same.

“There are other ways to die than plague. Choose your next steps carefully.”

Young Roland looks at him with recognition: Gunslinger eyes, now blue and now dark, all-color and no-color. For him this is only a fearful dream. “What happens next?”

He doesn’t know. He’s never made it this far before. The repetitions are growing strange. “Take horses from the stables and roam the wilderness together, lone wolf and cub. Follow the rails. Would that be agreeable to you?”

The tug of perversity is too strong not to make the offer — this is Roland the boy, not Roland the man, he should know better than to take the company of a hated stranger and yet he may not — but it turns his stomach as soon as the words have left his mouth. The thought of wandering and watching his own nemesis grow to manhood before his eyes after what they’ve been and done together is too near the bone, too strange. Roland-the-boy and his father’s hated magician, roaming the wastes together, picking through the bones of ancient cities. It would be a different kind of story altogether.

This is wrong. This is not where their story picks up every time, this is not how it begins for them.

For want of another option, Roland accepts. They will walk together, man and boy, through the wastelands — piercing into End-World like a bullet. They proceed together.

*

Roland the man is hunched by the sacrificial fire, with his guns resting in his lap and his eyes which are all colors and no color at all resting on the man in black’s face. The fire, the bones, the cards, the stars. All the elements are there, all the stations of Roland’s passage.

The man in black shows him Marten’s face — the face that seduces mothers and ruins maids — and then his own, the face he’s worn in one shape or another since he was a farmboy in Delain. The difference must be disappointing. Was he ever a farmboy in Delain? Was Roland ever a dinh’s son? Walter Padick’s father couldn’t have been dinh of anything; he’s not a miller’s son, he’s Walter O’Dim, Walter in the dark, Walter with no father and no mother. Walter on the road.

There are other arcane tricks to show him — necromancer’s toys and riddles, making dry bones speak, making blood cry out from the earth. He thrusts his hand in the folds of his cloak and withdraws it blasted to the bone with disease — leprous and white as snow. That one’s an oldie but a goodie. He stretches the ruined hand out toward Roland, who startles, most ungunslingerlike. It is most amusing.

The man in black speaks. “Do you remember the killing plague? It burned through Gilead, but left you untouched. It killed your mother before you had the chance.”

But that was a fluke, a glitch, an error — some backwards jolt of the wheel, some repetition that cannot be. That was before — before the Mohaine, before the world had moved on. Half the time, Roland can’t even make the conclusion that Walter is Marten, and that Marten might be Flagg, without the gentlest kind of prompting. He is almost endearingly simple. A simple process, like combustion or erosion. What did Roland look like then, before age had left its stamp on him? The man in black cannot remember.

There’s no comprehension in Roland’s face, only sensible unimaginative suspicion. He does not remember it — any of it. The man in black laughs, but his laugh is a cry of despair.

*

A dozen times and places, a hundred, an unknown multitude bearing down at once. The furnishings and fixtures of the world change, but only the man in black still stands — perhaps he is the Tower, the true Tower into which Roland can never pierce, the fixed point on which all worlds wheel like the room spins around a drunken man. He and Roland are fixed poles on which all things turn — and every moment more slips and scatters away from their grasp.

The Hand of God has set their places in this game, the veritable material Hand of God. The Crimson King is pale and feeble in comparison to the forces that bind him and Roland together.

Or the real dark tower was the friendships they made along the way. This time around he dies by Roland’s hand and he is so grateful he could weep — so struck by the perversity of it that he could laugh, but he makes no sound save the wet burst of blood when a bullet pierces his throat. He can’t be killed, and yet he dies — if anything can kill him, Roland could.

There will be no misfire. Roland Deschain kills the things he loves. He killed his own mother, and he ruined his own first love, and his questing kills everyone whoever looked on him in love, it strips them away like chaff. It’s a better fate than many. Now if the man in black could pick one fate and stick with it — that would be heaven. What’s it they say? No rest for the wicked.

Ding dong, the witch is dead. Eddie will die, and Jake will die, and Susannah will die with the multitude she contains, the priest and his lover are dead — will die, the writer will die, the fat old booksellers will die too — and death is better, death is a plunge into the void that will quench all their sufferings forever, but death is not for men like him, even the pits of Na’ar will vomit him back up. He will begin again. Dead is better. The man in black will begin again.

He is dying in Topeka. Go figure.

*

Roland’s a junkie and his fix is the Tower — the Tower is the magnet toward which he is inexorably pulled every time, like iron filings cast over a piece of paper. The man in black is not integral to that in the way he would like to be. Call it ka or luck or obsession or piss-poor writing — but he remembers everything. The man in black extinguishes his campfires and scuffs out his bootprints, he flees away along the path of the Beam, he has learned every secret of concealment by hard experience.

He chases him across the Mohaine, like he always does. Has he ever doubled back?

*

Follow the Beam, follow it to the end of the line. They are on a pendulum’s arc, a collision course. He’s with him in a dream, passing through the Waste Lands — Roland lies in the midst of his ka-tet and the man in black is alone,

Without Roland, what is he? A tyrant — a wanderer — nothing at all. He was written this way. The landscape of this place is pure Sergio Leone, limestone and gypsum, red stone. The climate is purely imaginary.

A wheel can turn either way. Do you remember me? he asks in the heat-shiver of a dream, for a moment Flagg and for a moment Broadcloak and from another certain angle no one but Walter O’Dim — and Roland beneath him, even in his own dreams he’s steely in the face of pain — Flagg twists his fingers inside him, searching to elicit a rise, and Roland swipes out a broad hardened hand to yank his hair. They do it one way and then another.

The man in black tries to martial his impressions into a single image and to hold Roland in his mind, but there’s too much, like water spilling from a cup. Roland in Gilead, Roland in the Mohaine, Roland in New York, Roland dragged back to the place of his resumption by the veritable Hand of God. Loving, hating, or indifferent — Roland might be dark or fair, smooth or ragged, full of youth or old as the stars, but he is always himself. Their fucking is like a delirium, endlessly slow and too-hot and tangled. Roland is his in climax. They fuck to exhaustion, and beyond that, into insensibility. The man in black breathes it into his ear when they are entwined, like distilling poison, like the words of a spell:

“You let the boy die. You’ll let him die again. Remember your Isaac. You kill him every time, and I never have to lift a finger. You’ve killed your Eddie before. Can you remember it? His woman wept. Call it a mercy killing. You killed him before the very Tower, like a blood sacrifice. He was dead in your arms, dead as Kennedy with his brains in your lap. Try to remember it.”

It’s a lie. It’s a lie. It’s a lie. Nothing is a lie when he tells it any more, he can recall these things to himself with such clarity that it’s anybody’s guess what has happened and what will happen and what has never happened, never in all his days. The poor bastard is haunted by the spirit of a jawbone. The man in black who once was Flagg is haunted by an unending repetition. Try to remember.

*

This will be the last resumption, and their last reunion. Roland carries the Horn of Eld, the face of his father, his mother’s forgiveness, all that happy horseshit.

Somewhere there is a gunslinger, piercing into the West. The man in black precedes him. Seldom or never does he make it all the way to the Tower. Roland must walk among the roses alone, and the man in black will never do more than goad him faster to his destination. What lies at the top of it? Try to remember. Another thing altogether — a reckoning. All of a man’s lives will be brought to bear on him and they will crush him. Fearful and terrible, great and powerful.

All may yet be well. The man in black commences to turn again.