The Collective (53 page)

'Feel like I'm drowning,' I whisper.

Somebody checks something, and someone else says, 'His lung has collapsed.'

There's a rattle of paper as something is unwrapped, and then the someone else speaks into my ear, loudly so as to be heard over the rotors. 'We're going to put a chest tube in you, Stephen. You'll feel some pain, a little pinch. Hold on.'

It's like being thumped very high up on the right side of the chest by someone holding a short sharp object. Then there's an alarming whistle in my chest, as if I've sprung a leak. In fact, I suppose I have. A moment later, the soft in-out of normal respiration, which I've listened to my whole life (mostly without being aware of it, thank God), has been replaced by an unpleasant shloop-shloop-shloop sound. The air I'm taking in is very cold, but it's air, at least, air, and I keep breathing it. I don't want to die. I love my wife, my kids, my afternoon walks by the lake. I also love to write. I don't want to die, and as I lie in the helicopter looking out at the bright blue summer sky, I realise that I am actually lying in death's doorway. Someone is going to pull me one way or the other pretty soon; it's mostly out of my hands. All I can do is lie there, look at the sky, and listen to my thin, leaky breathing: shloop-shloop-shloop.

Ten minutes later, we set down on the concrete landing pad at CMMC. To me, it seems to be at the bottom of a concrete well. The blue sky is blotted out and the whap-whap-whap of the helicopter rotors becomes magnified and echoey, like the clapping of giant hands.

Still breathing in great leaky gulps, I am lifted out of the helicopter. Someone bumps the stretcher and I scream. 'Sorry, sorry, you're okay, Stephen,' someone says - when you're badly hurt, everyone calls you by your first name, everyone is your pal.

'Tell Tabby I love her very much,' I say as I am first lifted and then wheeled, very fast, down some sort of descending concrete walkway. All at once I feel like crying.

'You can tell her that yourself,' the someone says. We go through a door; there is air-conditioning and lights flowing past overhead. Speakers issue pages. It occurs to me, in a muddled sort of way, that an hour before I was taking a walk and planning to pick some berries in a field that overlooks Lake Kezar. I wouldn't pick for long, though; I'd have to be home by 5.30 because we were all going to the movies. The General's Daughter , starring John Travolta. Travolta was in the movie made out of Carrie , my first novel. He played the bad guy. That was a long time ago.

'When?' I ask. 'When can I tell her?'

'Soon,' the voice says, and then I pass out again. This time it's no splice but a great big whack taken out of the memory-film; there are a few flashes, confused glimpses of faces and operating rooms and looming X-ray machinery; there are delusions and hallucinations fed by the morphine and Dilaudid being dripped into me; there are echoing voices and hands that reach down to paint my dry lips with swabs that taste of peppermint. Mostly, though, there is darkness.

Bryan Smith's estimate of my injuries turned out to be conservative. My lower leg was broken in at least nine places - the orthopaedic surgeon who put me together again, the formidable David Brown, said that the region below my right knee had been reduced to 'so many marbles in a sock.' The extent of those lower-leg injuries necessitated two deep incisions -they're called medial and lateral fasciatomies - to release the pressure caused by the exploded tibia and also to allow blood to flow back into the lower leg. Without the fasciatomies (or if the fasciatomies had been delayed), it probably would have been necessary to amputate the leg. My right knee itself was split almost directly down the middle; the technical term for the injury is 'comminuted intra-articular tibial fracture'. I also suffered an acetabular cup fracture of the right hip - a serious derailment, in other words - and an open femoral intertrochanteric fracture in the same area. My spine was chipped in

eight places. Four ribs were broken. My right collarbone held, but the flesh above it was stripped raw. The laceration in my scalp took 20 or 30 stitches. Yeah, on the whole, I'd say Bryan Smith was a tad conservative.

Mr Smith's driving behaviour in this case was eventually examined by a grand jury, who indicted him on two counts: driving to endanger (pretty serious) and aggravated assault (very serious, the kind of thing that means jail time). After due consideration, the District Attorney responsible for prosecuting such cases in my little corner of the world allowed Smith to plead out to the lesser charge of driving to endanger. He received six months of county jail time (sentence suspended) and a year's suspension of his privilege to drive. He was also put on probation for a year with restrictions on other motor vehicles, such as snowmobiles and ATVs. It is conceivable that Bryan Smith could be legally back on the road in the fall or winter of 2001.

David Brown put my leg back together in five marathon surgical procedures that left me thin, weak and nearly at the end of my endurance. They also left me with at least a fighting chance to walk again. A large steel and carbon-fibre apparatus called an external fixator was clamped to my leg. Eight large steel pegs called Schanz pins run through the fixator and into the bones above and below my knee. Five smaller steel rods radiate out from the knee. These look sort of like a child's drawing of sunrays. The knee itself was locked in place. I entered the hospital on 19 June. Around the 25th, I got up for the first time, staggering three steps to a commode, where I sat with my hospital johnny in my lap and my head down, trying not to weep and failing. You try to tell yourself that you've been lucky, most incredibly lucky, and usually that works because it's true. Sometimes it doesn't work, that's all. Then you cry.

A day or two after those initial steps, I started physical therapy. During my first session, I managed 10 steps in a downstairs corridor, lurching along with the help of a walker. One other patient was learning to walk again at the same time, a wispy 80-year-old woman named Alice who was recovering from a stroke. We cheered each other on when we had enough breath to do

so. On our third day in the downstairs hall, I told Alice that her slip was showing.

'Your ass is showing, sonnyboy,' she wheezed, and kept going. I came home to Bangor on 9 July, after a hospital stay of three weeks. I began a daily rehab program which includes stretching, bending, and crutch-walking. I tried to keep my courage and my spirits up. On 4 August, I went back to CMMC for another operation. When I woke up this time, the Schanz pins in my upper thigh were gone. I could bend my knee again. Dr Brown pronounced my recovery 'on course' and sent me home for more rehab and physical therapy. And in the midst of all this, something else happened. On 24 July, five weeks after Bryan Smith hit me with his Dodge van, I began to write again.

Stephen King

The Observer
Extracted from
On Writing
September 17, 2000

My wife made a crucial difference during those two years I spent teaching at Hampden. If she had suggested that the time I spent writing stories was wasted time, I think a lot of the heart would have gone out of me.

Two unrelated ideas, adolescent cruelty and telekinesis, came together, and I had an idea. The story remained on the back burner for a while, and I had started my teaching career before I sat down one night to give it a shot.

I did three single-spaced pages of a first draft, then crumpled them up in disgust and threw them away.

The next night, when I came home from school, Tabby had the pages. She'd spied them while emptying my waste-basket, had shaken the cigarette ashes off the crumpled balls of paper, smoothed them out, and sat down to read them. She wanted me to go on with it, she said. She wanted to know the rest of the story. I told her I didn't know jack-shit about high school girls. She said she'd help me with that part. She was smiling in that severely cute way of hers. 'You've got something here,' she said. 'I really think you do.'

The manuscript of Carrie went off to Doubleday, where I had made a friend named William Thompson. I pretty much forgot about it and moved on with my life - teaching school, raising kids, loving my wife, getting drunk on Friday afternoons, and writing stories. My free period that semester was five, right after lunch. I usually spent it in the teachers' room, grading papers and wishing I could stretch out on the couch and take a nap. The intercom came on. I had a phone call. My wife, sounding out of breath, but deliriously happy, read me a telegram. Bill Thompson (who would later go on to discover a Mississippi scribbler named John Grisham) had sent it after trying to call and discovering the Kings no longer had a

phone. 'Congratulations,' it read. 'Carrie officially a Doubleday book. Is $2,500 advance OK? The future lies ahead. Love, Bill.'

We spent the advance on a new car and I signed a teaching contract for the 1973-4 academic year. Carrie had fallen off my radar screen almost completely. Then one Sunday, I got a call from Bill Thompson at Doubleday.

'Are you sitting down?' Bill asked.

'No,' I said. Our phone hung on the kitchen wall.'Do I need to?' 'You might,' he said. 'The paperback rights to Carrie went to Signet Books for $400,000.'

I was completely speechless.Bill asked if I was still there, kind of laughing as he said it. He knew I was.

When the conversation was over, I tried to call Tabby at her mother's. Her youngest sister, Marcella, said Tab had already left. I walked back and forth through the apartment, shaking all over. At last I pulled on my shoes and walked downtown. The only store that was open on Bangor's Main Street was the LaVerdiere's Drug. I suddenly felt that I had to buy Tabby a Mother's Day present, something wild and extravagant. I tried, but here's one of life's true facts: there's nothing really wild and extravagant for sale at LaVerdiere's. I did the best I could.

I got her a hairdryer.

When I got back home she was in the kitchen, unpacking the baby bags and singing along with the radio. I gave her the hairdryer. She looked at it as if she'd never seen one before. 'What's this for?' she asked.

I took her by the shoulders. I told her about the paperback sale. She didn't appear to understand. I told her again. Tabby looked over my shoulder at our shitty little four-room apartment, just as I had, and began to cry.

Stephen King

The Observer
Extracted from
On Writing
September 17, 2000

When I talk about writing, I usually offer my audiences an abbreviated version of the "On Writing" section which forms the second half of this book. That includes the Prime Rule, of course: Write a lot and read a lot. In the Q-and-A period which follows, someone invariably asks: "What do you read?"

I've never given a very satisfactory answer to that question, because it causes a kind of circuit overload in my brain. The easy answer-"Everything I can get my hands on"-is true enough, but not helpful. The list that follows provides a more specific answer to that question. These are the best books I've read over the last three or four years, the period during which I wrote The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Hearts in Atlantis, On Writing, and the as-yet-unpublished From a Buick Eight. In some way or other, I suspect each book in the list had an influence on the books I wrote.

As you scan this list, please remember that I'm not Oprah and this isn't my book club. These are the ones that worked for me, that's all. But you could do worse, and a good many of these might show you some new ways of doing your work. Even if they don't, they're apt to entertain you. They certainly entertained me.

Abrahams, Peter: A Perfect Crime Abrahams, Peter: Lights Out Abrahams, Peter: Pressure Drop Abrahams, Peter: Revolution #9 Agee, James: A Death in the Family Bakis, Kirsten: Lives of the Monster Dogs Barker, Pat: Regeneration Barker, Pat: The Eye in the Door Barker, Pat: The Ghost Road Bausch, Richard: In the Night Season Blauner, Peter: The Intruder Bowles, Paul: The Sheltering Sky Boyle, T. Coraghessan: The Tortilla Curtain Bryson, Bill: A Walk in the Woods

Buckley, Christopher: Thank You for Smoking

Carver, Raymond: Where I'm Calling From

Chabon, Michael: Werewolves in Their Youth

Chorlton, Windsor: Latitude Zero

Connelly, Michael: The Poet

Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness

Constantine, K. C.: Family Values

DeLillo, Don: Underworld

DeMille, Nelson: Cathedral

DeMille, Nelson: The Gold Coast

Dickens, Charles: Oliver Twist

Dobyns, Stephen: Common Carnage

Dobyns, Stephen: The Church of Dead Girls

Doyle, Roddy: The Woman Who Walked into Doors

Elkin, Stanley: The Dick Gibson Show

Faulkner, William: As I Lay Dying

Garland, Alex: The Beach

George, Elizabeth: Deception on His Mind

Gerritsen, Tess: Gravity

Golding, William: Lord of the Flies

Gray, Muriel: Furnace

Greene, Graham: A Gun for Sale (aka This Gun for Hire)

Greene, Graham: Our Man in Havana

Halberstam, David: The Fifties

Hamill, Pete: Why Sinatra Matters

Harris, Thomas: Hannibal