Bill Denbrough thinks: I'm damned near space-travelling; I might as well be inside a bullet shot from a gun.
This thought, although perfectly true, is not one he finds especially comfortable. In fact, for the first hour following the Concorde's takeoff (or perhaps liftoff would be a better way to put it) from Heathrow, he has been coping with a mild case of claustrophobia. The airplane is narrow-unsettlingly so. The meal is just short of exquisite, but the flight attendants who serve it must twist and bend and squat to get the job done; they look like a troupe of gymnasts. Watching this strenuous service takes some of the pleasure out of the food for Bill, although his seatmate doesn't seem particularly bothered.
The seatmate is another drawback. He's fat and not particularly clean, it may be Ted Lapidus cologne on top of his skin, but beneath it Bill detects the unmistakable odors of dirt and sweat. He's not being very particular about his left elbow, either; every now and then it strikes Bill with a soft thud.
His eyes are drawn again and again to the digital readout at the …show more content…
The first ride on his new bike ended with Bill dumping it on purpose to keep from running smack into the board fence at the end of Kossuth Lane (he had not been so afraid of running into the fence as he had been of bashing right through it and falling sixty feet into the Barrens). He came away from that one with a five-inch gash running between the wrist and elbow of his left arm. Not even a week later he had found himself unable to brake soon enough and had shot through the intersection of Witcham and Jackson at perhaps thirty-five miles an hour, a little kid on a dusty gray mastodon of a bike (Silver was silver only by the most energetic reach of a willing imagination), playing cards machine-gunning the spokes of the front and back wheels in a steady roar, and if a car had been coming he would have been dead meat. Just like