The Dark Tower

When you see a book in this day and age, any thoughts that had been in your head are melted away. Like finding a flower tucked between the cracks of a city street, so out of place that you can't help but pick it. It's amazing enough to spot a parchment of paper in any city, but to see a book, filled with hundreds of pieces bound together inside a hard cover made of cardboard and leather, is a rarity some never get to experience in an entire lifetime.

But I saw one. That kills me—there are people on the west coast who could dedicate forty hours a week to the sole task of finding a book in old homes, attics, dumps, you name it—and here's little old me, Paul Cole, twenty-nine years old with a shit municipal job and no prospects, standing in front of a glass display case one day while walking down fifth avenue and staring down at probably one of the most beautiful sights left in this shit world.

Menomonie Pawn and Loan, that's what the store's called. Only to be clever, the bastards put it like this: “Me-No-Monie,” like it's some real task to come up with a play on words. Normally, that type of thing is exactly what sets me off and sends me walking. Little stuff like that, like those stores that have sales people always standing around trying to sell you their stupid credit cards when all you're trying to do is buy a damned pair of jeans and get the hell back home in time for the evening news. Like those radio stations that dedicate at least twenty minutes every hour to advertising their station on their own damned station , as if we're not already listening to it.

But this was a book we're talking about. A book . And it was such a magnificent rarity that I couldn't let the shop's lame slogan deter me. So I walked inside and I played it as cool as I possibly could, even though I found myself looking back toward the book in the display case every five or so seconds to make sure no one else had taken it. Who would, really? In retrospect, it was probably pretty stupid of me to think anyone else in this God-forsaken city would want to spend a week's paycheck for a stack of bound paper. Shit, there's gotta be at least a hundred movies that come out of Hollywood every year. Every year! Not to mention all the shit you can find online now. That's enough to keep everyone busy, and Lord knows it's a lot easier to watch a bunch of shit go down on a screen than to read a bunch of words and try to form all those pesky images yourself.

But I like forming those images. I don't like a bunch of dumbass producers telling me “this is how this scene happened and that's the end of it, and this is exactly how the characters look.” When you read something, you get to let your imagination take over and draw the story on your own terms, a level of freedom we don't get too often anymore in this day and age.

I finally meandered back to the display window, pretending I'm not too interested just in case I can finagle some sort of deal outta the cashier. I casually picked up the book and took a look at it. My hands were clammy and shaking a little bit because I was so damned excited, but I couldn't help it at the time. The damned thing even had its original dust jacket in pretty good condition, and when I held it up in the sunlight I could see why: someone had slipped a plastic cover over the dust jacket. It was a smart thing to do, given the way the atmosphere had been going to shit during the 21 st century.

I'm not gonna lie to you and say it was perfect—the pages had some wear and tear. This was no mint condition book, like the fake props you sometimes see in the movies when the scientists or whoever are looking through all their old documents to figure out clues for the deadly mystery disease. Someone had dog-eared a lot of the pages in the upper right-hand corner, and there were light black smudges along the margins from sweaty thumbs. If anything, it kinda made the book feel a little more special because it was proof that a lot of people had read through it. It had been popular at some point in time, at least.

“You looking to actually buy that?” the stuffy-looking guy behind the counter asks. I took a look at him and gave a little nod, one of those maybe-if-you're-not-too-much-of-an-asshole nods, and he seemed to get the picture. He hobbled over to me and I fought the urge to back away in stride to keep some distance between us. He had greasy slicked-back hair that reminded me too much of some old Russian bad guy from the movies who's always stalking around in the shadows with too much eye makeup on. When he got a little closer, I began to get the feeling that the weird musky smell inside the store was actually coming from him and not the old clothes hanging from the racks next to the gun case. I gave up on keeping my distance, letting the guy get in close enough to examine the book with me.

“Where'd you get it, if you don't mind my asking?” I asked, kinda just out of friendliness so maybe he'd consider cutting me a deal. I could afford the book and probably wouldn't have regretted it—paper could be sold in the underground market for a pretty coin—but bargaining had become a part of my life ever since I took my middle income job.

The man put his fat hands on his chubby waist and pretended to think, as if he ran by a lot of books and was trying to sort out the “from who's” in his memory. Boy, that really ticked me off. Who was he trying to impress, honestly? Just give me the damned anecdote you already have stored away, don't throw in any so-called clever plays-on-words or puns and I'll be right enough satisfied. That's what I wanted to say, swear to God, and I almost said it.

“My guess is the guy who brought it in stole it from someone else,” the owner finally said.

I looked up from my examination of the book, because that really came outta left field and I had to read the guy's face to see if it was just a “Me-No-Monie” joke, but sure enough the guy looked totally serious.

“Really?” I asked.

The guy shrugged. “He didn't look like the type of fella who would own a book, I'll tell ya that much.”

“And you just bought it anyway?” I asked. “Even though you thought it was stolen?”

The guy's feathers got a little ruffled for a moment (which meant his fat skin folded between his eyebrows), but he gave another shrug and then didn't seem so pissed off anymore. Maybe he knew I was about to spend a ton of money in his store and knew well enough to keep his temper down.

“Didn't see any reason not to.”

“I guess not,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. “You gotta pay your bills, after all.”

He seemed to like that comment, so he pointed to the hefty price tag sticking out from between the pages. It was on a bookmark, a plain red one, written in black marker on the tip so it stuck out of the book. “That's still a pretty good steal for such a big book, but I'm willing to negotiate if you're seriously interested.”

“Of course I'm interested,” I said. I pulled my hand enough away from the top of the book so I could read the author's name: Stephen King. I could remember running across his name on a few Web sites, a short story here and there that had been copied from an original book. Never a novel-length story, though. I mentioned that to the guy and he seemed to recognize the name, too.

“Wrote a lot of books,” he said. “But I've never looked online for any of them. I'd imagine there's a few out there somewhere … some people who find these rare books copy them and put them online for other people to read.”

“I can't read stuff on the computer,” I said. “It burns my eyes.” Then again, I'd never found anything too great online that was worth the suffering that accommodated it.

The guy tucked his hands into his pockets, seemingly ignoring me while his mind wandered somewhere else. “Hell, there's probably a few J.D. Salinger novels out there, too. Somewhere.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Salinger. The guy who wrote Catcher in the Rye . I got the chance to read an actual paper copy of it when I was a little kid. Back then, you could sometimes find those things in your grandma's attic.”

“Oh.” I envied him a little bit, mostly because my grandma's attic was pretty much full of useless shit. “What happened to the book.”

The guy pointed to the off-white pages of the book I was holding. “Just kinda disintegrated, like this one is doing already. They're not built to last forever, you know. Not with all the shit in the air now.”

“No, I guess not.” I opened the book to the center. The glue on the binding let out a few quiet cracking noises, but the pages stayed intact. It even had its own smell: rotten, dry, organic, beautiful. Books, you know? They're just so damned cool .

Only this guy didn't seem to think so. He cocked one eye then, and asked, “Are you really going to buy this?”

I nodded right away, and I mean right away . Really, my mind was trying to figure which to do away with for a month: health insurance or heat. Just so I could buy this book. The original price on the book was $24.95—God, to live during a time when these things were as cheap as a meal. Looking back at it, I could almost see my mouth salivating at the smell, the feel of the rough pages against the tips of my fingers … I would have pawned my television for that book.

The guy didn't seem to believe me. Or maybe he wanted the book for himself. That probably sounds a little too much like one of those Hollywood conspiracy theory movies, but the way the guy was looking at the book still made me a little uneasy. “You know, there's tons of books online. And they're only a couple of bucks. Hell, you might even be able to find a copy of this somewhere.”

I knew that was bullshit. “I'm sick of reading everything on a computer monitor,” I said. Because I really was. The light from the screen burns your eyes so you can only read in short periods. And maybe this sounds like a conspiracy theory, too, but what if that's what the higher-ups really want, you know? Maybe they don't want you to read too much because they're afraid you'll get too smart and then you'll see them for who they really are. If that's the case, then they're doing a bang-up job because I don't know a single person who reads anything on a regular basis. The closest they'll get to digesting any information is plopping their fat asses in front of the TV and turning on Fox News for a half hour before the prime-time lineup starts.

“Better than spending a ton of money,” the guy said, and it really was a pretty decent argument. Even if the book was precious and the price reasonable, it was a lot of money to waste in the eyes of a sensible middle-class American serf trying to get by in a feudalist society. But I couldn't stop staring at those printed words, almost hovering over the pages and hypnotizing me with their seductive, intricate black lines.

I went on and bought the book anyway. I used my credit card and murmured a little prayer that I had a large enough limit to cover the cost—I can never remember those types of things. The guy was nice enough to throw in an old leather carrying bag they used to recycle for shopping. I didn't thank him because it was the least he could have done, considering I came in and spent more on one thing than he saw in an entire week of business.

I only opened the bag once to look at the book while I took the subway back to the upper west side and I got to thinking that maybe a couple hundred years ago when the book was brand-new, someone like me probably would have been pretty pissed off right about now. I mean, maybe if I was more used to seeing books lying around like they were nothing special, I wouldn't have been so blind as to not notice the printing on the right side of the dust jacket that read, The Dark Tower, Volume Five. But it never even occurred to me at the time that a story could be long enough to warrant more than a sequel. There was no way in hell anyone would be able to read five volumes of something like this in front of their computer monitor. No way.

How could I understand it without reading the other ones? Truthfully, I was a little afraid of the prospect of five books to tell one story. I didn't think I could do it. I could try, maybe, but my brain just wasn't primed for that type of information overload.

Then again, there was probably close to no way in hell that another copy of the book even existed anymore, and that sent an honest-to-God chill right down my spine as I sat there on the hard train seat surrounded by a bunch of nine-to-fivers who all looked like they were ready for a warm shot of whiskey and a cold bullet. Stephen King was going to tell this story to just one person. I was the only person privileged enough to hear it. I was stupid enough to do coke once back in college and the feelings running through my body while I snuck a peek inside the book right then were almost completely identical. No, they were better because coke didn't last very long.

“Wow,” I said when I got home. I was talking to myself but I just didn't care. If I'd had a roommate or a girlfriend or something like that, I probably would have said it to one of them and then talked their ears off for at least an hour.

“Wow,” I said again, and again, and once more after I sat down on the couch and actually pulled the book out of the carrying bag. Just looking at the cover intrigued me, and I couldn't stop staring at the colors swirling across the dust jacket. I think, in retrospect, I was a little scared. Every page I would turn meant I was that much closer to finishing it, and I didn't want to ever be done with it.

“The Wolves of the Calla,” I read to myself. That's the title of the thing, can you believe that? The first thing I did when I finally managed to open the book was turn to the pictures, which is probably what anyone nowadays would do. We're just sort of trained to go after the simplest sensory stimulations first, I think. So I looked at the pictures and I got even more excited. Guys with guns, hot chicks without legs, robots and werewolves. I had seen probably a hundred movies with just about all of those elements in it, but I knew for a fact that none of them would compare to this book. Because when King wrote it, he didn't have to worry about going over the dreaded Ninety-Minute Mark or getting hassled by a murder of producers who wanted to change everything they couldn't understand.

I read the first few pages a couple of times, just to get an idea of what had happened in the previous books. King did a pretty good job telling the story—too good, almost, because he made me want to read all of them even more than before. I wanted to follow that gunslinger through the desert, catch up to the man in black, and kick his traitorous ass all over the place. I wanted to jump through doorways and help my friends defeat their demons. I wanted to visit the city of Lud and listen to the gunslinger tell his tale of lost love. And then I wanted to ride into the Calla Brinn Sturgis, guns blazing, plates flying, dancing with my kine and standing up to the Wolves.

I took the next day off from work, and the one after that, too, just so I could finish it in one sitting. I started off real slow-like, trying to savor every paragraph, but the moment the Wolves made their first appearance, I couldn't get to the next page fast enough. I finished it on my third night, and then I started it again. Whatever I was missing from the other books I simply let my imagination fill in the second time around and maybe old King turned over in his grave right there, but he could take pleasure in knowing the second time was even better than the first.

Then I read it again. I never got sick of it. And I kinda started to get depressed that no one else could enjoy it with me. The sick satisfaction of being King's audience-of-one had melted away and I would have given anything right then to have someone else read it so we could talk about it. So I got the crazy idea to try and share it. I would type it onto a word document and post it online. Everyone could read it. And maybe, just maybe, someone out there might have a copy of one of the other books in the series, and they could do the same and the entire Dark Tower series would be available for everyone to read.

Probably not, though. You know human nature, right?

“We like the easy way out of everything,” I told my friend Rob over lunch the next day, my third day off after I had read the book four times and begun transcribing it to my computer. We were standing in line in the campus cafeteria on break. “If people seriously wanted to put more books online, they would.”

Rob just shook his head, keeping his eyes glued to the menu over the cash registers. “Why don't you just go see a movie like a normal person, anyway?”

“This is better.”

Rob stepped in front of the register. “Gimme a number two,” he said before handing over his credit card and turning back to me. “There's probably a good reason why the book was never transcribed online, too.”

“Transcribed,” I repeated. “That's a pretty big word for you, Robby boy. Gimme a Diet Coke.”

“Vanilla or Citrus?” the woman behind the counter asked.

“You know what I mean,” Rob said.

“Just shut up a moment.” I turned back to the cashier. “What?”

“Vanilla or Citrus?”

“Diet.”

“We only have diet in Vanilla or Citrus flavors,” she said with no motion of apology.

“Then gimme a Diet Pepsi.”

“We don't carry Pepsi products here.”

“Nevermind,” I said, turning back to Rob. “You know what your problem is? You don't have more than a ninety-minute attention span. If you'd just read the book, you'd know why I'm doing this.”

“You're wasting your time,” Rob said with a tone authoritative enough to end discussion. “No one reads anymore.”

I continued transcribing in my free time, careful not to change a single word even if I thought I might have an idea for a better replacement. This was King's work, and it would remain his work, and I stuck with that through the good parts and the bad part. It wasn't until almost a month later that I received an email from another person. In the email was a file called The Dark Tower I and I immediately downloaded it. On the first page was a large, full-color picture of a man wearing a long dirty overcoat and worn hat, a raven sitting comfortably on his shoulder, both of them looking out over a barren wasteland. I couldn't believe me eyes, even when I started the next page.

I read the entire book on my computer that day. By the time I finished, my eyes were burning and I had to spend the entire evening in the darkness just to cool them off, letting my imagination recover from the images that had been fed into my brain.

The next day, I read it again, and I started writing to the woman who copied it to see if there were any more. There weren't, yet. But we'll see what happens. So far, I've tracked more than a thousand people who've downloaded my copy. I think it'll continue and someone will transcribe the others. You know why? Because I think everyone reaches a point in their life where they scan through the movie listings in their newspaper and come to the realization that there's nothing to see. And if we can save enough of these old books, maybe people will come around and appreciate the stories enough to suffer the burn.

- www.KenBrosky.com