Misery(6)

"You're good, she said gently. "I knew you would be. Just reading your books, I knew you would be. A man who could think of Misery Chastain, first think of her and then breathe life into her, could be nothing else." Her fingers were in his mouth suddenly, shockingly intimate, dirtily welcome. He sucked the capsules from between them and swallowed even before he could fumble the spilling glass of water to his mouth.

"Just like a baby," she said, but he couldn't see her because his eyes were still closed and now he felt the sting of tears. "But good. There is so much I want to ask you... so much I want to know." The springs creaked as she got up.

"We are going to be very happy here," she said, and although a bolt of horror ripped into his heart, Paul still did not open his eyes.

8

He drifted. The tide came in and he drifted. The TV played in the other room for awhile and then didn't. Sometimes the clock chimed and he tried to count the chimes but he kept getting lost between. IV. Through tubes. That's what those marks on your arms are.

He got up on one elbow and pawed for the lamp and finally got it turned on. He looked at his arms and in the folds of his elbows he saw fading, overlapped shades of purple and ocher, a hole filled with black blood at the center of each bruise.

He lay back, looking at the ceiling, listening to the wind. He was near the top of the Great Divide in the heart of winter, he was with a woman who was not right in her head, a woman who had fed him with IV drips when he was unconscious, a woman who had an apparently never-ending supply of dope, a woman who had told no one he was here.

These things were important, but he began to realize that something else was more important: the tide was going out again. He began to wait for the sound of her alarm clock upstairs. It would not go off for some long while yet, but it was time for him to start waiting for it to be time.

She was crazy but he needed her.

Oh I am in so much trouble he thought, and stared blindly up at the ceiling as the droplets of sweat began to gather on his forehead again.

9

The next morning she brought him more soup and told him she had read forty pages of what she called his "manuscript-book". She told him she didn't think it was as good as his others.

"It's hard to follow. It keeps jumping back and forth in time."

"Technique," he said. He was somewhere between hurting and not hurting, and so was able to think a little better about what she was saying. "Technique, that's all it is. The subject... the subject dictates the form." In some vague way he supposed that such tricks of the trade might interest, even fascinate her. God knew they had fascinated the attendees of the writers" workshops to whom he had sometimes lectured when he was younger. "The boy's mind, you see, is confused, and so - "

"Yes! He's very confused, and that makes him less interesting. Not uninteresting - I'm sure you couldn't create an uninteresting character - but less interesting. And the profanity! Every other word is that effword! It has - " She ruminated, feeding him the soup automatically, wiping his mouth when he dribbled almost without looking, the way an experienced typist rarely looks at the keys; so he came to understand, effortlessly, that she had been a nurse. Not a doctor, oh no; doctors would not know when the dribble would come, or be able to forecast the course of each with such a nice exactitude.

If the forecaster in charge of that storm had been half as good at his job as Annie Wilkes is at hers, I would not be in this f**king jam, he thought bitterly.

"It has no nobility!" she cried suddenly, jumping and almost spilling beef-barley soup on his white, upturned face.

"Yes," he said patiently. "I understand what you mean, Annie. It's true that Tony Bonasaro has no nobility. He's a slum kid trying to get out of a bad environment, you see, and those words... everybody uses those words in - "

"They do not!" she said, giving him a forbidding look "What do you think I do when I go to the feed store in town? What do you think I say? "Now Tony, give me a bag of that effing pigfeed and a bag of that bitchly cow-corn and some of that Christing ear-mite medicine"? And what do you think he says to me? "You're effing right, Annie, comin right the eff up"?" She looked at him, her face now like a sky which might spawn tornadoes at any instant. He lay back, frightened. The soup-bowl was tilting in her hands. One, then two drops fell on the coverlet.

"And then do I go down the street to the bank and say to Mrs Bollinger, "Here's one big bastard of a check and you better give me fifty effing dollars just as effing quick as you can"? Do you think that when they put me up there on the stand in Den - " A stream of muddy-colored beef soup fell on the coverlet. She looked at it, then at him, and her face twisted. "There! Look what you made me do!"

"I'm sorry."

"Sure! You! Are!" she screamed, and threw the bowl into the corner, where it shattered. Soup splashed up the wall. He gasped.

She turned off then. She just sat there for what might have been thirty seconds. During that time Paul Sheldon's heart did not seem to beat at all.

She roused a little at a time, and suddenly she tittered.

"I have such a temper," she said.

"I'm sorry," he said out of a dry throat.

"You should be." Her face went slack again and she looked moodily at the wall. He thought she was going to blank out again, but instead she fetched a sigh and lifted her bulk from the bed.