Misery (28 page)

  
(!breathe goddammit BREATHE!)

  blowing down his throat like a dirty wind from hell. His stomach clenched, but he smiled at her.

  'I love you, dear,' she said.

  'Would you put me in my chair before you go? I want to write.'

  'Of course.' She hugged him. 'Of course, my dear.'

Her tenderness did not extend to leaving the bedroom door unlocked, but this presented no problem. He was not half-mad with pain and withdrawal symptoms this time. He had collected four of her bobby-pins as assiduously as a squirrel collects nuts for the winter, and had secreted them under his mattress along with the pills.

   When he was sure she was really gone a not hanging around to see if he was going to 'get up to didoes' (another Wilkesism for his growing lexicon), he rolled the wheelchair over to the bed and got the pins, along with the pitcher of water and the box of Kleenex from the night-table. Rolling the wheelchair with the Royal perched on the board in front of him was not very difficult — his arms had gotten a lot stronger. Annie Wilkes might be surprised to know just
how
strong they were now — and he sincerely hoped that someday soon she would be.

   The Royal typewriter made a shitty writing machine, but as an exercise tool it was great. He had begun lifting it and setting it down whenever he was penned in the chair behind it and she was out of the room. Five lifts of six inches or so had been the best he could manage at first. Now he could do eighteen or twenty without a pause. Not bad when you considered the bastard weighed at least fifty pounds.

  He worked on the lock with one of the bobby-pins, holding two spares in his mouth like a seamstress hemming a dress. He thought that the piece of bobby-pin still somewhere inside the lock might screw him up, but it didn't. He caught the rocker almost at once and pushed it up, drawing the lock's tongue along with it. He had just a moment to wonder if she might not have put a bolt on the outside of the door as well — he had tried very hard to seem weaker and sicker than he now really felt, but the suspicions of the true paranoiac spread wide and ran deep. Then the door was open.

   He felt the same nervous guilt, the urge to do this
fast.
Ears attuned for the sound of Old Bessie returning — although she had only been gone for forty-five minutes — he pulled a bunch of the Kleenex, dipped the wad in the pitcher, and bent awkwardly over to one side with the soppy mass in his hand. Gritting his teeth and ignoring the pain, he began to rub at the mark on the right-hand side of the door.

  To his intense relief, it began to fade almost at once. The hubs of the wheelchair had not actually scored through the paint, as he had feared, but only scuffed it.

   He reversed away from the door, turned the chair, and backed up so he could work on the other mark. When he had done all he could, he reversed again and looked at the door, trying to see it through Annie's exquisitely suspicious eyes. The marks were there — but faint, almost unnoticeable. He thought he would be okay.

  He
hoped
he would be okay.

  'Tornado cellars,' he said, licked his lips, and laughed dryly. 'What the fuck, friends and neighbors.'

   He rolled back to the door and looked out at the corridor — but now that the marks were gone he felt no urge to go farther or dare more today. Another day, yes. He would know that day when it came around.

  What he wanted to do now was to write.

  He closed the door, and the click of the lock seemed very loud.

  
A.frica.

  That bird came from Africa.

  
But you mustn't cry for that bird, Paulie, because after awhile it forgot about how the veldt
smelled at noonday, and the sounds of the wildebeests at the waterhole, and the high acidic smell
of the
ieka-ieka
trees in the great clearing north of the Big Road. After awhile it forgot the cerise
color of the sun dying behind Kilimanjaro. After awhile it only knew the muddy, smogged-out
sunsets of Boston, that was all it remembered and all it
wanted
to remember. After awhile it didn't
want to go back anymore, and if someone took
it
back and set it free it would only crouch in one
place, afraid and hurting and homesick in two unknown and terribly ineluctable directions, until
something came along and killed it.
'Oh, Africa, oh, shit,' he said in a trembling voice.

  Crying a little, he rolled the wheelchair over to his wastebasket and buried the wet wads of Kleenex under the wastepaper. He repositioned the wheelchair by the window and rolled a piece of paper into the Royal.

  
And by the way, Paulie, is the bumper of your car sticking out of the snow yet? Is it sticking out,
twinkling cheerily in the sun, just waiting for someone to come along and see it while you sit here
wasting what may be your last chance?

  He looked doubtfully at the blank sheet of paper in the typewriter.

  
I won't be able to write now anyway. That spoiled it.

   But nothing had ever spoiled it, somehow. It
could
be spoiled, he knew that but in spite of the reputed fragility of the creative act, it had always been the single toughest thing, the most abiding thing, in his life — nothing had ever been able to pollute that crazy well of dreams: no drink, no drug, no pain. He fled to that well now, like a thirsty animal finding a waterhole at dusk, and he drank from it; which is to say he found the hole in the paper and fell thankfully through it. By the time Annie got back home at quarter of six, he had done almost five pages.

During the next three weeks, Paul Sheldon felt surrounded by a queer electric peacefulness. His mouth was always dry. Sounds seemed too loud. There were days when he felt he could bend spoons simply by looking at them. Other days he felt like weeping hysterically.

   Outside this, separate of the atmosphere and apart from the deep, maddening itch of his healing legs, its own serene thing, the work continued. The stack of pages to the right of the Royal grew steadily taller. Before this strange experience, he had considered four pages a day to be his optimum output (on
Fast Cars
it had usually been three — and only two, on many days — before the final finishing sprint). But during this electric three—week period, which came to an end with the rainstorm of April 15th, Paul averaged
twelve pages a day
— seven in the morning, five more in an evening session. If anyone in his previous life (for so he had come to think of it, without even realizing it) had suggested he could work at such a pace, Paul would have laughed. When the rain began to fall, he had two hundred and sixty-seven pages of
Misery's Return
— first-draft stuff, sure, but he had scanned through it and thought it amazingly clean for a first.

  Part of the reason was that he was living an amazingly straight life. No long, muddled nights spent bar-hopping, followed by long, muddled days spent drinking coffee and orange juice and gobbling vitamin-B tablets (days when if his glance so much as happened upon his typewriter, he would turn away, shuddering). No more waking up next to a big blonde or redhead he had picked up somewhere the night before — a lass who usually looked like a queen at midnight and a goblin at ten the next morning. No more cigarettes. He had once asked for them in a timid and tentative voice, and she had given him a look of such utter darkness that he had told her at once to forget it. He was Mr Clean. No bad habits (except for his codeine jones, of course, still haven't done anything about that, have we, Paul?), no distractions.
Here I am,
he thought once,
the world's only
monastic druggie.
Up at seven. Down two Novril with juice. At eight o'clock breakfast came, served at
monsieur's
bedside. A single egg, poached or scrambled, three days a week. High-fiber cereal the other four days. Then into the wheelchair. Over to the window. Find the hole in the paper. Fall into the nineteenth century, when men were men and women wore bustles. Lunch. Afternoon nap. Up again, sometimes to edit, sometimes just to read. She had everything Somerset Maugham had ever written (once Paul found himself wondering dourly if she had John Fowles's first novel on her shelves and decided it might be better not to ask), and Paul began to work his way through the twenty-odd volumes that comprised Maugham's
oeuvre
, fascinated by the man's canny grasp of story values. Over the years Paul had grown more and more resigned to the fact that he could not read stories as he had when he was a kid; by becoming a writer of them himself, he had condemned himself to a life of dissection. But Maugham first seduced him and then made him a child again, and that was wonderful. At five o'clock she would serve him a light supper, and at seven she would roll in the black-and-white television and they would watch
M*A*S*H*
and
WKRP
in Cincinnati. When these were over, Paul would write. When he was done, he would roll the wheelchair slowly (he could have gone much faster, but it was just as well that Annie should not know that) over to the bed. She would hear come in, and help him back into bed. More medication. Boom. Out like a light. And the next day would be just the same. And the next. And the next.

    Being such a straight arrow was part of the reason for this amazing fecundity, but Annie herself was a bigger one. After all, it was her single hesitant suggestion about the bee-sting which had shaped the book and given it its urgency when Paul had firmly believed he could never feel urgent about Misery again.

   He'd been sure of one thing from the start: there really
was
no
Misery's Retum.
His attention had been focused only on finding a way to get the bitch out of her grave without cheating before Annie decided to inspire him by giving him an enema with a handful of Ginsu knives. Minor matters such as what the fucking book was supposed to be
about
would have to wait.

    During the two days following Annie's trip to town to pay her tax-bill, Paul tried to forget his failure to take advantage of what could have been a golden opportunity to escape and concentrated on getting Misery back to Mrs Ramage's cottage instead. Taking her to Geoffrey's home was no good. The servants — most notably Geoffrey's gossipy butler, Tyler — would see and talk. Also, he needed to establish the total amnesia which had been caused by the shock of being buried alive. Amnesia? Shit, the chick could barely talk. Sort of a relief, given Misery's usual burblings.

  So — what next? The bitch was out of her grave, now where was the fucking
story?
Should Geoffrey and Mrs Ramage tell Ian that Misery was still alive? Paul didn't think so but he wasn't sure —
not being sure of things,
he knew, was a charmless corner of purgatory reserved for writers who were driving fast with no idea at all where they were going.

  
Not Ian,
he thought, looking out at the barn.
Not Ian, not yet. The doctor first. That old asshole
with all the n's in his name, Shinebone.

    The thought of the doctor brought Annie's comment about bee—stings to mind, and not for the first time. It kept recurring at odd moments.
One person in every dozen
. . .

  But it just wouldn't play. Two unrelated women in neighboring townships, both allergic to stings in the same rare way?

    Three days following the Great Annie Wilkes Tax Bailout, Paul had been drowsing his way into his afternoon nap when the guys in the sweatshop weighed in, and weighed in heavy. This time it wasn't a flare; this time it was an H-bomb explosion.

  He sat bolt upright in bed, ignoring the flare of pain which shot up his legs.

  
'Annie!'
he bawled.
'Annie, come in here!'

   He heard her thump down the stairs two at a time and then run down the hallway. Her eyes were wide and scared when she came in.

'Paul! What's wrong? Are you cramping? Are you — '

   'No 'he said, but of course he was; his mind was cramping. 'No. Annie, I'm sorry if I scared you, but you gotta help me into the chair. Mighty fuck! I got it!' The dreaded effword was out before he could help it, but this time it didn't seem to matter — she was looking at him respectfully, and with not a little awe. Here was the secular version of the Pentecostal fire, burning before her very eyes.

'Of course, Paul.'

    She got him into the chair as quickly as she could. She began to roll him toward the window and Paul shook his head impatiently. 'This won't take long,' he said, 'but it's very important.'

  'Is it about the book?'

  'It
is
the book. Be quiet. Don't talk to me.'

   Ignoring the typewriter — he never used the typewriter to make notes — he seized one of the ballpoints and quickly covered a single sheet of paper with a scrawl that probably no one but himself could have read.

   And now he was struck by an idea of such intense loveliness — in terms of the plot at least — that he looked up, mouth open, eyes wide.

  'Paul?' Annie asked anxiously.

  'She
knew,'
Paul whispered. 'Of
course
she did. At least strongly suspected. But — '

  He bent to his notes again.

she — Mrs R. realizes at once that Mrs E-H has got to know M. is related to her daught. Same hair or something. Remember E-H's mom is starting to look like a maj. character. You'll need to work her up. Mrs R. starts to realize Mrs E-H MAY EVEN HAVE KNOWN MISERY WAS BURIED ALIVE!! SHIT ON A SHINGLE! LOVE IT! Suppose the ole lady guessed Misery was a leftover of her fuck-'em-and-leave-'em days and