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Roland Deschain saves you from being harassed and mugged while you're visiting the Big Apple and couldn't get a cab after drinking with your girlfriends. With one hand missing half its features and the brutal butt of his antique looking pistol, he pummels the men to within an inch of their respective lives.

In 2011 in a movie theater, the homophobic ringleader of the men who hounded you, whose name is Geoff, goes to see Drive in theaters with his daughter and his daughters friend. They both think the lead actor is cute. That meticulous calm, that dread and serendipitous violence hidden behind the wistful eyes of the lead as portrayed by Ryan Gosling, stirs something in him. Geoff breaks down into tears remembering the girl he and his friends would've... he cast an askance glance at his daughter, reaching out to him, and the girl she brought, No, he realizes, they're in love, how did couldn't I see that?

Geoff's old shuddering limp returns, a reminder lain dormant all these years that the butt of the gun that shattered his L2 vertebra hadn't just broken him for the rest of his youth. (Psychosomatic the doctor said. Bullshit, Geoff said. My ass still hurts.) It hadn't just taken years of physical therapy. It hadn't just wiped away the group of friends (shitheels, he realizes). That mad diseased looking cowboy motherfucker had saved his soul. He had given Geoff time to become someone else.

In your present, the whirling madness continued and by the end of it, you weren't sure this interloper had even been in your life longer than that black-sounding-white guy song you heard in the bar. How did it go? Baby can you--? (But he's a righteous man!) Baby can you dig-- (Righteous man!)

He crushes hands, he kicks a knee in. You see the ringleader, whose hate you could see shining right through his eyes, collapse into a broken heap on the sidewalk pavement, unable to move. But you know he is not dead because the ungodly wail that comes ripping through him makes you almost wish this had never happened. Wished you were a worm that had died in a rotten hole in the Big Apple.

"You," the satanic cowpoke offers raggedly, "have received my aide and now I must ask of yours. I am dying and there's a quest needs doing. Many things hang in the balance, worlds upon worlds." Though he didn't seemed strained during the fighting you realize now he was deathly sick to begin with.

The longer he talks, the more words he says, the more the hellish dream land he describes as his home country reminds you of where you came from. Even when there is nothing in parallel you ken his heartbreak and his resolve and he kens yours. You are enveloped in a grand quest to find some Dark Tower. He merits that there may be "iron in you yet" and you may even have "the makings of a Gunslinger they would have sent west in shame". Your training begins as he leans on you more and more to hunt food and fend off wildlife.

As hard as it all is to bear, as alien and terrible as this world is, as cruel as he is, he is one of the only people who truly ever saw you.

He saw you very well.

Another of the Unfound Doors that let the savage dying cowpoke into your world approaches on the horizon like the black silhouette of an army marching in single file. Roland's only chance of survival may be the antibiotics found in any American pharmacy on the other side. If there is someone like you, or utterly unlike you, you pontificate, it is by the Way of the Gun and in the name of Arthur Eld and the White that you must be there for them. Like he was for you.

And will you be there with him when he blows his horn at the foot of the Tower, when your Tet has lain waste to all that opposed you and your worn through moccasins grace the roses at Can'-Ka No Rey, the red fields you've begun to dream about? A sick feeling in your gut tells you that although he has come to love you and you him, father and daughter after a fashion, you are just one more cartridge to be sent into Ka's wind. And that feels so sickeningly right.

You know that when he speaks the dozens, perhaps hundreds of names he's sworn to speak before the threshold of the Dark Tower itself, your true name, the one you gave yourself all those years ago, will be among them. The word that means you will shake the foundations of existence itself.