Misery

They wanted Misery, Misery, Misery, Misery. Each time he had taken a year or two off to write one of the other novels—what he thought of as his “serious” work with what was at first certainty and then hope and then 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.”

“But characters in stories DO NOT just slip away! God takes us when He thinks it’s time and a writer is God to the people in a story, he made them up just like God made us up and no one can get hold of God to make him explain, all right, okay, but as far as Misery goes, I’ll tell you one thing you dirty bird, I’ll tell you that God just happens to have a couple of broken legs and God just happens to be in MY house eating MY food…and…”

She went blank then.

“The mother feels badly when her child says she’s mean or if he cries for what’s been taken away, as you are crying now. But she knows she’s right, and so she does her duty. As I am doing mine.”

Three quick dull thumps as Annie dropped her knuckles on the manuscript—190,000 words and five lives that a well and pain-free Paul Sheldon had cared deeply about, 190,000 words and five lives that he was finding more dispensable as each moment passed.

The pills. The pills. He had to have the goddam pills. The lives were shadows, the pills were not. They were real.

The door closed behind her. He did not want to look at the typewriter and for awhile resisted, but at last his eyes rolled helplessly toward it. It sat on the bureau, grinning. Looking at it was a little like looking at an instrument of torture—boot, rack, strappado—which is standing inactive, but only for the moment.

“So you just sit there,” she said, lips pulled back in that grinning rictus, “and you think about who is in charge here, and all the things I can do to hurt you if you behave badly or try to trick me. You sit there and you scream if you want to, because no one can hear you. No one stops here because they all know Annie Wilkes is crazy, they all know what she did, even if they did find me innocent.”

Paul had no idea she was there—had no idea, in fact, that he was. He had finally escaped. He was in Little Dunthorpe’s churchyard, breathing damp night air, smelling moss and earth and mist; he heard the clock in the tower of the Presbyterian church strike two and dumped it into the story without missing a beat. When it was very good, he could see through the paper. He could see through it now.

Misery, of course. That was the thread that ran through everything, but, true thread or false, it was so goddam silly.

As a common noun it meant pain, usually lengthy and often pointless; as a proper one it meant a character and a plot, the latter most assuredly lengthy and pointless, but one which would nonetheless end very soon. Misery ran through the last four (or maybe it was five) months of his life, all right, plenty of Misery, Misery day in and Misery day out, but surely that was too simple, surely—

Oh no, Paul. Nothing is simple about Misery. Except that you owe her your life, such as that may be…because you turned out to be Scheherazade after all, didn’t you?

[…]

What you keep overlooking, because it’s so obvious, is that you were—are—also Scheherazade to yourself.

But his ideas about God—like his ideas about so many things, had changed. They had changed in Africa. In Africa, he had discovered that there was not just one God but many, and some were more than cruel—they were insane, and that changed all. Cruelty, after all, was understandable. With insanity, however, there was no arguing.

If his Misery were truly dead, as he had come to fear, he intended to go up on the foredeck and throw himself over the rail. He had always known and accepted the fact that the gods were hard; he had no desire, however, to live in a world where the gods were insane.

That was all in the past, though. Annie Wilkes was in her grave. But, like Misery Chastain, she rested there uneasily. In his dreams and waking fantasies, he dug her up again and again. You couldn’t kill the goddess. Temporarily dope her with bourbon, maybe, but that was all.