Something big has already happened. 

Only, it didn’t cry murder, nor did it cry at death’s guttural sounds. I’m stuck on the name; yet Stephen King has such a funny way of doing this every single time. He drifts through doors and takes all the space left on those empty bookshelves, stories struggling to settle themselves down—the very shelves I swore in many lost and unfinished diaries to fill with different words written with different ink-bruised hands by the end of the year. Yet, promise after promise, he is gifted to me every birthday. He’s plastered in the early credits of movies. He’s the first image to appear when the mind drifts to a door’s death by axe. And he’s quite the contemporary Shakespeare, I once murmured across a cubicle to another who stared at my second head caught whispering such things into my impressionable ear. 

I’m quite the devoted listener, eagerly asking questions of my own. How so? How can we compare these two to each other at all? We shouldn’t, so we don’t. However, we haven’t mistaken a grass spider weaving its web in the moon’s illusory light for a recluse yet—so, what if? What if Stephen King speaks commonly among all; what if Shakespeare spoke the same? What if Stephen King writes hypocritical lines on a motel mirror and leaves the rest to the audience; what if Shakespeare has projected very similar lines across a theatre to reach those who stand just outside the doors to listen? Further, what if the connection between these two expands beyond language and delves into asking a deeper set of questions: What did they want us to see? And how did they want us to misunderstand it?

 When I think about this deliberate trick of perception, Stephen King’s The Green Mile comes to mind. The novel follows Paul Edgecomb as he guides prisoners down to the execution room where Old Sparky, the humming electric chair, awaits. Then John Coffey arrives in the dim, flickering lights behind iron bars, cutting across his tall silhouette—but make no mistake: he has only cast a shadow that swallows the room in a sudden eclipse. We imagine Coffey’s back sinking into a thin mattress as the rusted springs press along his spine like teeth clenching to neutralize him. His feet hang off the edge as the cold crawls beneath his skin. And yet—what surprises us—is how John Coffey still quails in his burly body. His eyes dart from left to right in search of light’s last shred. His sheepish smile tilts as his first question to Paul is whether a light is left on during the prison’s bedtime. A little darkness flooding a room is never a big deal—except, we don’t feel fear’s heftiness until it bursts from an open, pleading mouth—John Coffey begged: “Don’t put me in the dark… I’s ‘fraid of the dark.”¹ So he is; so we all are. 

And yet, as I write this now, all I can answer with is an unlit candle stuck in a rusty candlestick’s pricket. For a candle, to be left in the dark is to be safe from itself—from others. Otherwise, once the candle burns, it slowly dwindles and becomes nothing more than a waxy nub stuck to some rusty metal that’s wondering, when will the damned thing be scraped off? And I imagine in similar and devastating ways, John Coffey has burned. After all, how was I supposed to know the difference between shadows twisting into something inhuman and a kind man simply being left behind as the flame is carried elsewhere by another's hand? Appearance becomes very convoluted to me; our judgements become mean—partly because it’s hard to miss someone as gigantic as him, and mostly because it’s easy to pin individual malice onto someone who fits so perfectly into cold iron. Stephen King gives every reason to see John Coffey as an intimidating giant, only to reveal later that the monster we thought we saw was never really there. And so, I make my return to that rusty candlestick’s pricket, except it’s taken a much larger and more sinister shape: Old Sparky. Old Sparky has become more than a time of death; it represents an institution that has already decided Coffey’s character—a body written off and settled in its unwavering indistinctiveness—before anyone has ever bothered to ask, ‘What are you, and why?’ Coffey is constructed by the descriptions others give of him, the assumptions they make about him, and the system that has already decided what must be done to him. Again and again, I wander in nautical twilight for hours, lost in my own indecision: Can I save myself from another’s fiery eyes? Can I withstand the way a man-made flame is destined to burn into a soul, only to leave it hollow? 

Oh, how I wish to count the various ways to scrutinise a person in the warm candlelight after others infiltrate the imagination with such rigorous misdirection. Although as light shifts alongside deliberate movement, truth will always look mangled whether it burns a hole into me or it burns out before me—how it twists up like smoke to be choked on. In many loud and defeating ways, Gloucester chokes—not because he cannot see with certainty, but rather that he certainly cannot recognise what he sees. In this circumstance, I imagine blindness is similar to smoke, memorising where one comes from, whom one meets, and how one returns. In Shakespeare’s King Lear, Gloucester’s sight relies on known points in the mapping of his external world, for example, knowing how someone appears, but never how they truly act. And while Edmund basks in the court’s sunlight, the other, Edgar, becomes a castaway for a deceptive letter he had never written. It is only after Gloucester’s eyes, gouged out by the very people who reward him with selfish insight, that he finally regains moral insight, despite now walking in total darkness. In total darkness, he stumbles onto Dover Cliff’s rocky, yet solid ground. In total darkness, he came to know the way wind snuffs out candlelight. In total darkness, he felt the smoke as it traveled down his throat like an infection: ‘Don’t you know it now?’ And, in total darkness, Gloucester found a beggar before he saw Edgar: a display of how he could find another person, and still fail to see them. So, what is there left to do—what is there left to see? 

My second head once answered me with this: if Stephen King must lead us through the dark to finally realise the truth, then why must Shakespeare blind us by light and expect us to survive choking on our own hypocrisy? As I follow down this winding thought path, I think about that mortal candlelight once more and how it beams inversely into the final moments of these characters: Shakespeare punishes his characters for eternally living in darkness, and Stephen King rewards other characters for bearing witness to a dying light. Shakespeare’s lonely Gloucester needs to plunge into total darkness before he can clearly see others’ true natures. His world is forcibly cloaked in darkness, and he dies with his heart caught aflame—burning him from the inside out—the joy in final recognitions overwhelms him to an inevitable end. Meanwhile, Stephen King’s gentle John Coffey needs to sit in such burdensome darkness and allow it to swallow him whole before others embrace him. Yet, in his final moments, he refuses the hands tying the execution bag, immersing him in darkness. John Coffey asks—he desperately pleads to die without it, and in the flickering lights, his fear of the dark reminds only Paul and a little mouse of his humanity and personhood. As a twisted reward for all but Coffey, as he dies sitting in humanity's brightest artificial light, Old Sparky—finally, ending as a rusty candlestick stuck with a futile waxy nub in its pricket. One man is hollowed out beneath a man-made light—a spectacle for an audience of two—while the other reconciles with a light he discovers only in total darkness. 

I had wished for so long to be seen clearly by someone, and how I had believed for so long that healing comes from someone finally choosing to see me certainly. But perhaps that is the cruelest paradox King has carried forward from Shakespeare: being seen does not necessarily mean being saved. And so, as that unnamed big thing has already happened, tragedy is still that same terrible distance between seeing the truth and having no time left to change what that truth means. And perhaps, my second head, that is what makes Stephen King quite the contemporary Shakespeare. Not that he writes like him, or is seen through multimedia influence, but instead that he understands recognition’s late arrival and exactly when recognition can no longer change the way things appear.