The End of the Whole Mess

Sorry, Bow-wow…

Let me preface this by saying I don’t read or write as much as I should. It may be because school turned me off to it or I grew lazy, but the point stands. For some, the journey back to consistency is diving into the cold water. I’m going to test the temperature first and take it from there.

This is a brief analysis and summary of a short story by Stephen King featured in the Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse book. King’s writing here is very conversational and blunt. It’s not too wordy and primarily dialog-driven by our two main characters, Howard and Bobby Fornoy. I am hesitant to call them protagonists because of how this story ends. We follow the Fornoy brother’s through their lives as Howard recalls memories of his younger brother, a naïve genius on a mission to save the world.

/ As a note – this article is going to go into detail on certain plot points, so if you want to avoid spoilers, stop here.

The structure of this short story is a recollection of memories by the lone, surviving Fornoy – Howard. What happened, you ask? Howard and Bobby are the boys of Richard and India Fornoy (we get the parent’s names once in the story and a brief description that has no effect on the overarching story – this is Bobby and Howard’s story). Howard acts as our conduit into their lives, a grounded point of view. He’s a writer, like many of King’s character’s, and is very supportive of his brother to a fault.

Bobby, 7 years younger than Howard, is a prodigy child who would get frustrated because his hands could not keep up with his fast mind. He’s described as a “bright if extremely naïve fifth-grader.” An important aspect of his character that’s described is his internal compass – it’s swinging aimlessly, looking for something to work on. The second it finds something interesting, it locks on. One of the memories described is him building a functional plane at the age of 8.

This memory plays out like a scene from a Spielberg movie. It’s wonderous – the sense of awe as Bobby is flying through the air in his makeshift aircraft and the very real horror Howard is feeling as his brother’s life is in danger. It’s a rosy memory with a dark vignette around it as we are taken back to the current day and Howard catches himself getting emotional.

As an aside – a fun quirk of Bobby’s plane is that it has forward-swept wings. In the story it says that they’d go on to be used by military – but that was not the case, at least at large scale. It ended up being a solution to a problem nobody was really interested in fixing and had many setbacks.

The story takes a leap forward to 2003 and Bobby is 16 years old. He’s had a chance to leave his bubble and see the world. Unfortunately the world is cruel and Bobby in his naivety had a lot of emotional development to do. He’s seen violence and acts of cruelty that made him question what we’re doing to fix it. It’s at this point in the story that King does a callback to earlier in the story: Bobby’s compass has found North and he’s laser focused on “fixing” the problem.

During the next few pages of the story, Bobby moves to Waco and back. On his excursion he found what can be described as a “cure” for violence and negativity. A small town by the name of La Plata has a water source that contains a protein that deactivates the aggressive switches in our brains. This is illustrated to us by Bobby using some of the water on wasps. After only 3 minutes, the hellish cretins are completely docile. Bobby mentions the people of the town will likely live their whole lives without violence, specifically mentioning their sheriff who appears to have Alzheimer’s.

It’s at this point that Bobby tells Howard his plans: he wants to fundraise some money and move around a million gallons of that water to Borneo and dump it on a volcano on the verge of eruption. The expectation here is that when it explodes, the ensuing rain will be laced with the miracle water and “cure” the Earth.

Like many reasonable people, Howard is very much concerned about potential side-effects. He brings up examples like the ’97 AIDS vaccination and sleeping pills that caused heart attacks, but Bobby’s pleading are too much. Howard is simply too supportive and gives in. This leads to the end of the world – as far as we know. The operation ended up costing over 4 million dollars and 8 months of their time. The cure seemed to be okay for a few years but then the side effects came in the form of a callback to the La Plata research – the sheriff and his Alzheimer’s.

The research Bobby conducted could be applied to Alzheimer’s cases. Interestingly, it showed an inverse relationship to crime rates. As crime decreased, Alzheimer’s cases increased, turning La Plata into what might as well be an elderly home. As a result, the rain was tainted and would lead to mind decay.

The last page or so is a heartbreaking descent into madness as Howard describes the measures he and Bobby took to preserve their minds but it was only delaying the inevitable. They tried to drink different water and wear rain jackets to protect themselves from the rain, but they would eventually lose their minds like their parents and the rest of the world. Bobby is dead after asking Howard to inject him with some of the “calmative” water. The story ends with a increasingly incoherent Howard telling Bobby he forgives him and loves him.

The story unfolds like a series of gut punches that culminates in a final blow – a clean right hook to the button. As Wade Wilson once said, it plays out like a series of train wrecks, interrupted only by brief commercial-like breaks of happiness. We go into the story knowing it’s all going to go south but can’t help but get sucked into the lives of these two boys. Bobby is naïve but ultimately you’d want his cure to work. It’s a universal good but was poorly researched and no one said no to him. We likely would have been okay without the cure – there would be struggles and death but life would go on. Like the forward-swept wings, it was an attempt at a solution to a problem the world wasn’t trying to fix.

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

Photo by Alejandro Piñero Amerio on Unsplash