Stephen King - 11/22/63: A Novel

For Zelda

Hey, honey, welcome to the party.

I have never been what youd call a crying man.

My ex-wife said that my nonexistent emotional gradient was the main reason she was leaving me (as if the guy she met in her AA meetings was beside the point). Christy said she supposed she could forgive me not crying at her fathers funeral; I had only known him for six years and couldnt understand what a wonderful, giving man he had been (a Mustang convertible as a high school graduation present, for instance). But then, when I didnt cry at my own parents funerals they died just two years apart, Dad of stomach cancer and Mom of a thunderclap heart attack while walking on a Florida beach she began to understand the nonexistent gradient thing. I was unable to feel my feelings, in AA-speak.

I have never seen you shed tears, she said, speaking in the flat tones people use when they are expressing the absolute final deal-breaker in a relationship. Even when you told me I had to go to rehab or you were leaving. This conversation happened about six weeks before she packed her things, drove them across town, and moved in with Mel Thompson. Boy meets girl on the AA campusthats another saying they have in those meetings.

I didnt cry when I saw her off. I didnt cry when I went back inside the little house with the great big mortgage, either. The house where no baby had come, or now ever would. I just lay down on the bed that now belonged to me alone, and put my arm over my eyes, and mourned.

Tearlessly.

But Im not emotionally blocked. Christy was wrong about that. One day when I was nine, my mother met me at the door when I came home from school. She told me my collie, Rags, had been struck and killed by a truck that hadnt even bothered to stop. I didnt cry when we buried him, although my dad told me nobody would think less of me if I did, but I cried when she told me. Partly because it was my first experience of death; mostly because it had been my responsibility to make sure he was safely penned up in our backyard.

And I cried when Moms doctor called me and told me what had happened that day on the beach. Im sorry, but there was no chance, he said. Sometimes its very sudden, and doctors tend to see that as a blessing.

Christy wasnt there she had to stay late at school that day and meet with a mother who had questions about her sons last report card but I cried, all right. I went into our little laundry room and took a dirty sheet out of the basket and cried into that. Not for long, but the tears came. I could have told her about them later, but I didnt see the point, partly because she would have thought I was pity-fishing (thats not an AA term, but maybe it should be), and partly because I dont think the ability to bust out bawling pretty much on cue should be a requirement for successful marriage.

I never saw my dad cry at all, now that I think about it; at his most emotional, he might fetch a heavy sigh or grunt out a few reluctant chuckles no breast-beating or belly-laughs for William Epping. He was the strong silent type, and for the most part, my mother was the same. So maybe the not-crying-easily thing is genetic. But blocked? Unable to feel my feelings? No, I have never been those things.

Other than when I got the news about Mom, I can only remember one other time when I cried as an adult, and that was when I read the story of the janitors father. I was sitting alone in the teachers room at Lisbon High School, working my way through a stack of themes that my Adult English class had written. Down the hall I could hear the thud of basketballs, the blare of the time-out horn, and the shouts of the crowd as the sports-beasts fought: Lisbon Greyhounds versus Jay Tigers.

Who can know when life hangs in the balance, or why?

The subject Id assigned was The Day That Changed My Life. Most of the responses were heartfelt but awful: sentimental tales of a kindly aunt whod taken in a pregnant teenager, an Army buddy who had demonstrated the true meaning of bravery, a chance meeting with a celebrity (Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek, I think it was, but maybe it was Karl Malden). The teachers among you who have picked up an extra three or four thousand a year by taking on a class of adults studying for their General Equivalency Diploma will know what a dispiriting job reading such themes can be. The grading process hardly figures into it, or at least it didnt for me; I passed everybody, because I never had an adult student who did less than try his or her ass off. If you turned in a paper with writing on it, you were guaranteed a hook from Jake Epping of the LHS English Department, and if the writing was organized into actual paragraphs, you got at least a B-minus.

What made the job hard was that the red pen became my primary teaching tool instead of my mouth, and I practically wore it out. What made the job dispiriting was that you knew that very little of that red-pen teaching was apt to stick; if you reach the age of twenty-five or thirty without knowing how to spell (totally, not todilly), or capitalize in the proper places (White House, not white-house), or write a sentence containing both a noun and a verb, youre probably never going to know. Yet we soldier on, gamely circling the misused word in sentences like My husband was to quick to judge me or crossing out swum and replacing it with swam in the sentence I swum out to the float often after that.

It was such hopeless, trudging work I was doing that night, while not far away another high school basketball game wound down toward another final buzzer, world without end, amen. It was not long after Christy got out of rehab, and I suppose if I was thinking anything, it was to hope that Id come home and find her sober (which I did; shes held onto her sobriety better than she held onto her husband). I remember I had a little headache and was rubbing my temples the way you do when youre trying to keep a little nagger from turning into a big thumper. I remember thinking, Three more of these, just three, and I can get out of here. I can go home, fix myself a big cup of instant cocoa, and dive into the new John Irving novel without these sincere but poorly made things hanging over my head.

There were no violins or warning bells when I pulled the janitors theme off the top of the stack and set it before me, no sense that my little life was about to change. But we never know, do we? Life turns on a dime.

He had written in cheap ballpoint ink that had blotted the five pages in many places. His handwriting was a looping but legible scrawl, and he must have been bearing down hard, because the words were actually engraved into the cheap notebook pages; if Id closed my eyes and run my fingertips over the backs of those torn-out sheets, it would have been like reading Braille. There was a little squiggle, like a flourish, at the end of every lower-case y. I remember that with particular clarity.