Misery(8)

"You won't make me mad again, will you?"

"No," he whispered. Anger the moon which brought the tide? What an idea! What a bad idea!

"I love you," she said, and kissed him on the cheek. She left, not looking back, carrying the floor-bucket the way a sturdy countrywoman might carry a milk-pail, slightly away from her body with no thought at all, so that none would spill.

He lay back, tasting grit and plaster in his mouth and throat. Tasting soap.

I won't throw up... won't throw up... won't throw up.

At last the urgency of this thought began to fade and he realized he was going to sleep. He had held everything down long enough for the medication to begin its work. He had won.

This time.

11

He dreamed he was being eaten by a bird. It was not a good dream. There was a bang and he thought, Yes, good, all right! Shoot it! Shoot the goddamned thing!

Then he was awake, knowing it was only Annie Wilkes, pulling the back door shut. She had gone out to do the chores. He heard the dim crunch of her footsteps in the snow. She went past his window, wearing a parka with the hood up. Her breath plumed out, then broke apart on her moving face. She didn't look in at him, intent on her chores in the barn, he supposed. Feeding the animals, cleaning the stalls, maybe casting a few runes - he wouldn't put it past her. The sky was darkening purple - sunset. Five-thirty, maybe six o'clock.

The tide was still in and he could have gone back to sleep - wanted to go back to sleep - but he had to think about this bizarre situation while he was still capable of something like rational thought.

The worst thing, he was discovering, was that he didn't want to think of it even while he could, even when he knew he could not bring the situation to an end without thinking about it. His mind kept trying to push it away, like a child pushing away his meal even though he has been told he cannot leave the table until he has eaten it.

He didn't want to think about it because just living it was hard enough. He didn't want to think about it because whenever he did unpleasant images intervened - the way she went blank, the way she made him think of idols and stones, and now the way the yellow plastic floor-bucket had sped toward his face like a crashing moon. Thinking of those things would not change his situation, was in fact worse than not thinking at all, but once he turned his mind to Annie Wilkes and his position here in her house, they thoughts that came, crowding out all others. His heart would start to beat too fast, mostly in fear, but partly in shame, too. He saw himself putting his lips to the rim of the yellow floor-bucket, saw the rinse-water with its film of soap aid the rag floating in it, saw these things but drank anyway, never hesitating a bit. He would never tell anyone about that, assuming he ever got out of this, and he supposed he might try to lie about it to himself, but he would never be able to do it.

Yet, miserable or not (and he was), he still wanted to live.

Think about it, goddammit! Jesus Christ, are you already so cowed you can't even try?

No - but almost that cowed.

Then an odd, angry thought occurred to him: She doesn't like the new book because she's too stupid to understand what it's up to.

The thought wasn't just odd; under the circumstances, how she felt about Fast Cars was totally immaterial. But thinking about the things she had said was at least a new avenue, and feeling angry at her was better than feeling scared of her, and so he went down it with some eagerness.

Too stupid? No. Too set. Not just unwilling to change, but antagonistic to the very idea of change.

Yes. And while she might be crazy, was she so different in her evaluation of his work from the hundreds of thousands of other people across the country - ninety percent of them women - who could barely wait for each new five-hundred, page episode in the turbulent life of the foundling who I risen to marry a peer of the realm? No, not at all. They wanted Misery, Misery, Misery. Each time he had taken a year or two off to write one of the other novels - what thought of as his "serious" work with what was at first certainty and then hope and finally a species of grim desperation - he had received a flood of protesting letters from these women, many of whom signed themselves "your number-one fan". The tone of these letters varied from bewilderment (that always hurt the most, somehow), to reproach, to outright anger, but the message was always the same: It wasn't what I expected, it wasn't what I wanted. Please go back to Misery. I want to know what Misery is doing. He could write a modern Under the Volcano, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Sound and the Fury; it wouldn't matter. They would still want Misery, Misery, Misery.

It's hard to follow... he's not interesting... and the profanity!

The anger sparked again. Anger at her obdurate density, anger that she could actually kidnap him - keep him prisoner here, force him into a choice between drinking dirty rinse-water from a floor-bucket or suffering the pain of his shattered legs - and then, on top of all that, find the nerve to criticize the best thing he had ever written.

"Bugger you and the effword you rode in on," he said, and he suddenly felt better again, felt himself again, even though he knew this rebellion was petty and pitiful and meaningless - she was in the barn where she couldn't hear him, and the tide was safely in over the splintered pilings. Still...

He remembered her coming in here, withholding the capsules, coercing permission to read the manuscript of Fast Cars. He felt a flush of shame and humiliation warming his face, but now they were mixed with real anger: it had bloomed from a spark into a tiny sunken flame. He had never shown anyone a manuscript before he had proof-read it and then retyped it. Never. Not even Bryce, his agent. Never. Why, he didn't even - For a moment his thoughts broke off cleanly. He could hear the dim sound of a cow mooing.