Brad Wesley’s pants are a mess. Look at those wrinkled-ass trousers. Like an elephant’s trunk, twice, in khaki. This is his apotheosis right here, his truest moment of pure power, the point at which instead of blowing up buildings in the middle of the night with no one looking he feels able to order his man to run over a Ford dealership in a monster truck in broad daylight with a crowd of like two hundred witnesses watching. Dalton’s there, the owner of the Ford dealership is there, Wade Garrett is there, his own ex-wife Elizabeth is there, and guess what, the man don’t give a fuck, this is his town, don’t you forget it, but apparently the dry cleaners is not included. Those pants are the visual equivalent of him crowing about having the raw kingmaking power to open a JC Penney. What the hell was Ben Gazzara doing to wrinkle his pants up like that? Did no one from wardrobe intervene? Did they think it made for a nice feet-of-clay visual shorthand and just let it slide? Jimmy, couldn’t Jimmy have said something? Ketchum, a man who looks like he was born starched, what about him? Will no one tell Brad Wesley his pants are embarrassingly wrinkled? Is this what it feels like to be truly alone, even with the world at your feet? Standing in front of your great triumph over your enemies and looking like a goddamned fool and you have no friends to say so? What? Is up? With the pants?

The Stand is Stephen King’s best book, I decided about three decades into my career of reading and re-reading Stephen King books. One of the many reasons I think this involves a fellow name of Starkey. Starkey’s a military guy, brass, way up on the totem pole but it’s a totem pole they keep hidden in the dark at all times. He was in charge of the bioweapons project that had a little hiccup and started to destroy the human race, and so he’s in charge trying to halt that destruction. He’s also in charge of trying to cover it up, first under the pretext that it will buy them a few extra days to find a vaccine or a cure before panic sets in, and then mostly out of sheer force of American military habit.

The thing about Starkey is that as time goes by and it becomes increasingly clear he won’t be earning any medals for this one, to say the least, he grows fixated on the security monitors that show him the inside of the facility where Captain Trips emerged and started drowning everyone in their own snot while their brains boiled. At first this happened much faster than it does later, for reasons that I don’t think the book ever quite makes clear, and even if it did the idea of a flu virus that kills in under a minute the same way a regular flu virus would kill over the course of several days is science-fictional even for The Stand.

Be that as it may. The important thing for Starkey, less important than other things really but increasingly important to him as the bodies pile up outside that’s for sure, is that one of the people in that facility died in the cafeteria, just dropped dead at his seat, and when he did his face fell right into his bowl of soup. The soup starts congealing and getting really disgusting, which is the case with everything else that used to be warm and made of organic material down there, but the soup and the face in the soup are what start to bother Starkey, and bother him bad.

It’s the indignity of it, you see. This fellow in the lab, for all anyone knows his face will remain in that bowl of awful soup for…well, for as long as it takes for the site to be deemed sterile enough to enter at first, and then, when it becomes clear no one will be left alive to enter it, for all eternity. Starkey just stares and stares at this guy with his face in the soup. Did I mention Starkey also gave the order to have secret agents in Russia and China open vials of the flu without ever telling them what they were doing, just to make sure that when America dies she takes the rest of the world with her? Yeah, but anyway the soup. It’s just not right, a man dying like that, like a slob, like a joke. Something must be done.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about Brad Wesley’s pants. They’re wrinkled, is the problem. See? See? See?