How close had he himself come to sinking on the night of the axe? He didn't know, but the fact that he had felt almost no pain during the week following the amputation was a pretty clear indicator of just how close, perhaps. That, and the panic in her voice.
He had lain in a semi-coma, barely breathing because of the respiratory-depressant side-effects of the medication, the glucose drips back in his arms again. And what brought him out of it was the beat of drums and the drone of bees.
Bourka drums.
Bourka bees.
Bourka
dreams.
Color bleeding slowly and relentlessly into a land and a tribe that never were beyond the margins of the paper on which he wrote.
A dream of the goddess, the
face
of the goddess, looming black over the jungle green, brooding and eroded. Dark goddess, dark continent, a stone head full of bees. Overlying even all this was a picture, which grew clearer and clearer (as if a giant slide had been projected against the cloud in which he lay) as time passed. It was a picture of a clearing in which one old eucalyptus tree stood. Hanging from the lowest branch of this tree was an old-fashioned pair of blued steel handcuffs. Bees were crawling over them. The cuffs were empty. They were empty because Misery had —
— escaped? She had, hadn't she? Wasn't that how the story was supposed to go?
It
had
been — but now he wasn't so sure. Was that what those empty handcuffs meant? Or had she been taken away? Taken into the idol? Taken to the queen bee, the Big Babe of the Bourkas?
You were also Scheherazade to yourself.
Who are you telling this story for, Paul? Who are you telling
it
to? To Annie?
Of course not. He did not look through that hole in the paper to see Annie, or please Annie . . . he looked through it to get
away
from Annie.
The pain had started. And the itch. The cloud began to lighten again, and rift apart. He began to glimpse the room, which was bad, and Annie, which was even worse. Still, he had decided to live. Some part of him that was as addicted to the chapter-plays as Annie had been as a child had decided he could not die until he saw how it all came out.
Had
she escaped, with the help of Ian and Geoffrey? Or had she been taken into the head of the goddess. It was ridiculous, but these stupid questions actually seemed to need answering.
7
She didn't want to let him go back to work — not at first. He could see in her skittery eyes how frightened she had been and still was. How close he had come. She was taking extravagant care of him, changing the bandages on his weeping stump every eight hours (and at first, she had informed him with the air of one who knows she will never get a medal for what she has done — although she deserves one — she had done it every four hours), giving him sponge baths and alcohol rubs — as if to deny what she had done. Work, she said, would hurt him.
It would put you
back, Paul. I wouldn't say it if it weren't so — believe me. At least you know what's ahead — I'm
dying to find out what happens next.
It turned out she had read everything he had written — all his pre-surgery work, you might say — while he lingered near death . . . better than three hundred manuscript pages. He hadn't filled in the n's in the last forty or so; Annie had done that. She showed him these with an uneasily defiant sort of pride. Her n's were textbook neat, a striking comparison with his own, which had degenerated into a humpbacked scrawl.
Although Annie never said so, he believed she had filled in the n's either as another evidence of her solicitude —
How can you say I was cruel to you, Paul, when you see all the n's I have filled
in?
— or as an act of atonement, or possibly even as a quasi-superstitious rite: enough bandagechanges, enough sponge baths, enough n's filled in, and Paul would live.
Bourka bee-woman work
powful mojo-magic, Bwana, fill in all dese hoodaddy n's an' all be well again.
That was how she had begun . . . but then
the gotta
set in. Paul knew all the symptoms. When she said she was dying to find out what happened next, she wasn't kidding.
Because you went on
living
to find out what happened next, isn't that what you're really saying?
Crazy as it was — shameful, even, in its absurdity — he thought it was.
The gotta.
It was something he had been irritated to find he could generate in the
Misery
books almost at will but in his mainstream fiction erratically or not at all. You didn't know exactly where to find
the gotta,
but you always knew when you did. It made the needle of some internal Geiger counter swing all the way over to the end of the dial. Even sitting in front of the typewriter slightly hungover, drinking cups of black coffee and crunching a Rolaid or two every couple of hours (knowing he should give up the fucking cigarettes, at least in the morning, but unable to bring himself to the sticking point), months from finishing and light-years from publication, you knew
the gotta
when you got it. Having it always made him feel slightly ashamed — manipulative. But it also made him feel vindicated in his labor. Christ, days went by and the hole in the paper was small, the light was dim, the overheard conversations witless. You pushed on because that was all you could do. Confucius say if man want to grow one row of corn, first must shovel one ton of shit. And then one day the hole widened to VistaVision width and the light shone through like a sunray in a Cecil B. De Mille epic and you knew you had
the gotta,
alive and kicking.
The gotta,
as in: 'I think I'll stay up another fifteen-twenty minutes, honey, I gotta see how this chapter comes out.' Even though the guy who says it spent the day at work thinking about getting laid and knows the odds are good his wife is going to be asleep when he finally gets up to the bedroom.
The gotta,
as in: 'I know I should be starting supper now — he'll be mad if it's TV dinners again — but I gotta see how this ends.'
I gotta know will she live.
I gotta know will he catch the shitheel who killed his father.
I gotta know if she finds out her best friend's screwing her husband.
The gotta.
Nasty as a hand-job in a sleazy bar, fine as a fuck from the world's most talented callgirl. Oh boy it was bad and oh boy it was good and oh boy in the end it didn't matter how rude it was or how crude it was because in the end it was just like the Jacksons said on that record — don't stop til you get enough.
8
You were also Scheherazade to yourself.
That was not an idea he was able to articulate or even understand, not then; he had been in too much pain. But he had known just the same, hadn't he?
Not you, The guys in the sweatshop.
They knew.
Yes. That had the ring of the right.
The sound of the riding mower swelled louder. Annie came into view for a moment. She looked at him, saw him looking back, and raised a hand to him. He raised one of his own — the one with the thumb still on it — in return. She passed from sight again. Good deal.
He was finally able to convince her that returning to work would put him forward, not back . . . He was haunted by the specificity of those images which had lured him out of the cloud, and
haunted
was exactly the right word: until the3 were written down they were shades which would remain unlaid.
And while she hadn't believed him — not then — she had allowed him to go back to work just the same. Not because he had convinced her but because of
the gotta.
At first he had been able to work only in painfully short bursts — fifteen minutes, maybe half an hour if the story really demanded it of him. Even short bursts were agony. A shift in position caused the stump to come brightly alive, the way a smouldering brand will burst into flame when fanned by a breeze. It hurt furiously while he wrote, but that was not the worst — the worst was the hour or two afterward, when the healing stump would madden him with a droney itch, like swarming, sleepy bees.
He had been right, not her. He never became really well — probably could not do in such a situation — but his health did improve and some of his strength came back. He was aware that the horizons of his interest had shrunk, but he accepted this as the price of survival. It was a genuine wonder he had survived at all.
Sitting here in front of this typewriter with its increasingly bad teeth, looking back over a period which had consisted of work rather than events, Paul nodded. Yes, he supposed he had been his own Scheherazade, just as he was his own dream-woman when he grabbed hold of himself and jacked off to the feverish beat of his fantasies. He didn't need a psychiatrist to point out that writing had its autoerotic side — you beat a typewriter instead of your meat, but both acts depended largely on quick wits, fast hands and a heartfelt commitment to the art of the farfetched.
But hadn't there also been some sort of fuck, even if of the driest variety? Because once he started again . . . well she wouldn't interrupt him while he was working, but she' would take each day's output as soon as he was done, ostensibly to fill in the missing letters, but actually — he knew this by now, just as sexually acute men know which dates will put out at the end of the evening and which ones will not — to get her fix. To get her
gotta.
The chapter-plays. Yes. Back to that. Only for the last few months she's been going every day
instead of just on Saturday afternoons, and the Paul who takes her is her pet writer instead of her
older brother.
His stints at the typewriter grew gradually longer as the pain slowly receded and some of his endurance returned . . . but ultimately he wasn't able to write fast enough to satisfy her demands.
The gotta
which had kept them both alive — and it had, for without it she surely would have murdered both him and herself long since — was also what had caused the loss of his thumb. It was horrible, but also sort of funny.
Have a little irony, Paul — it's good for your blood.
And think how much worse it could have been.
It could have been his penis, for instance.
'And I only have one of those,' he said, and began to laugh wildly in the empty room in front of the hateful Royal with its gap-toothed grin. He laughed until his gut and stump both ached. Laughed until his mind ached. At some point the laughter turned to horrible dry sobs that awoke pain even in what remained of his left thumb, and when that happened he was finally able to stop. He wondered in a dull sort of way how close he was to going insane.
Not that it really mattered, he supposed.
9
One day not long before the thumbectomy — perhaps even less than a week — Annie had come in with two giant dishes of vanilla ice-cream, a can of Hershey's chocolate syrup, a pressure can of Reddi-Whip, and a jar in which maraschino cherries red as heart's blood floated like biology specimens.
'I thought I'd make us sundaes, Paul,' Annie said. Her tone was spuriously jolly. Paul didn't like it. Not her tone of voice, nor the uneasy look in her eyes.
I'm being a naughty girl
, that look said. It made him wary, put his wind up. It was too easy for him to imagine her looking exactly the same way when she put a heap of clothes on one set of stairs, a dead cat on another.
'Why, thank you, Annie.' he said, and watched as she poured the syrup and puffed two cumulus clouds of whipped cream out of the pressure can. She performed these chores with the practiced, heavy hand of the long-time sugar junkie.
'No need for thanks. You deserve it. You've been working so hard.'
She gave him his sundae. The sweetness became cloying after the third bite, but he kept on. It was wiser. One of the key rules to survival here on the scenic Western Slope was, to wit,
When
Annie's treatin, you best be eatin.
There was silence for awhile, and then Annie put her spoon down, wiped a mixture of chocolate syrup and melting ice-cream off her chin with the back of her hand, and said pleasantly: 'Tell me the rest.'
Paul put his own spoon down. 'I beg your pardon?'
'Tell me the rest of the story. I can't wait. I just can't.'
And hadn't he known this was coming? Yes. If someone had delivered all twenty reels of the new Rocket Man chapter-play to Annie's house, would she have waited, parcelling out only one a week, or even one a day?
He looked at the half-demolished avalanche of her sundae, one cherry almost buried in whipped cream, another floating in chocolate syrup. He remembered the way the living room had looked, with sugar-glazed dishes everywhere.
No. Annie was not the waiting type. Annie would have watched all twenty episodes in one night, even if they gave her eyestrain and a splitting headache.
Because Annie loved sweet things.
'I can't do that,' he said.
Her face had darkened at once, but hadn't there been a shadowy relief there, as well? 'Oh? Why not?'
Because you wouldn't respect me in the morning
, he thought of saying, and clamped down on that. Clamped down hard.
'Because I'm a rotten story-teller,' he answered instead.
She slurped up the remainder of her sundae
in five huge spoonfuls that would have left Paul's throat gray with frostbite. Then she set her dish down and looked at him angrily, not as if he were the great Paul Sheldon but as if he were someone who had presumed to
criticize
the great Paul Sheldon.
'If you're such a rotten story-teller, how come you have best-sellers and millions of people love the books you write?'