Doctor Sleep: A Novel

of whiskey and cigarettes. His stomach was a ball of lead, full of all the wrong things. Morning-after junkbelly, some old drinking buddy or other had called that woeful sensation.
    Loud snoring from beside him. Dan turned his head that way, although his neck screamed in protest and another bolt of agony shot him through the temple. He opened his eyes again, but just a little; no more of that blazing sun, please. Not yet. He was lying on a bare mattress on a bare floor. A bare woman lay sprawled on her back beside him. Dan looked down and saw that he was also alfresco.
    Her name is . . . Dolores? No. Debbie? That’s closer, but not quite—
    Deenie. Her name was Deenie. He had met her in a bar called the Milky Way, and it had all been quite hilarious until . . .
    He couldn’t remember, and one look at his hands—both swollen, the knuckles of the right scuffed and scabbed—made him decide he didn’t want to remember. And what did it matter? The basic scenario never changed. He got drunk, someone said the wrong thing, chaos and bar-carnage followed. There was a dangerous dog inside his head. Sober, he could keep it on a leash. When he drank, the leash disappeared. Sooner or later I’ll kill someone . For all he knew, he had last night.
    Hey Deenie, squeeze my weenie .
    Had he actually said that? He was terribly afraid he had. Some of it was coming back to him now, and even some was too much. Playing eightball. Trying to put a little extra spin on the cue and scratching it right off the table, the little chalk-smudged sonofabitch bouncing and rolling all the way to the jukebox that was playing—what else?—country music. He seemed to remember Joe Diffie. Why had he scratched so outrageously? Because he was drunk, and because Deenie was standing behind him, Deenie had been squeezing his weenie just below the line of the table and he was showing off for her. All in good fun. But then the guy in the Case cap and the fancy silk cowboy shirt had laughed, and that was his mistake.
    Chaos and bar-carnage.
    Dan touched his mouth and felt plump sausages where normal lips had been when he left that check-cashing joint yesterday afternoon with a little over five hundred bucks in his front pants pocket.
    At least all my teeth seem to be—
    His stomach gave a liquid lurch. He burped up a mouthful of sour gunk that tasted of whiskey and swallowed it back. It burned going down. He rolled off the mattress onto his knees, staggered to his feet, then swayed as the room began to do a gentle tango. He was hungover, his head was bursting, his gut was filled with whatever cheap food he’d put in it last night to tamp down the booze . . . but he was also still drunk.
    He hooked his underpants off the floor and left the bedroom with them clutched in his hand, not quite limping but definitely favoring his left leg. He had a vague memory—one he hoped would never sharpen—of the Case cowboy throwing a chair. That was when he and Deenie-squeeze-my-weenie had left, not quite running but laughing like loons.
    Another lurch from his unhappy gut. This time it was accompanied by a clench that felt like a hand in a slick rubber glove. That released all the puke triggers: the vinegar smell of hardcooked eggs in a big glass jar, the taste of barbecue-flavored pork rinds, the sight of french fries drowning in a ketchup nosebleed. All the crap he’d crammed into his mouth last night between shots. He was going to spew, but the images just kept on coming, revolving on some nightmare gameshow prize wheel.
    What have we got for our next contestant, Johnny? Well, Bob, it’s a great big platter of GREASY SARDINES!
    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