Misery

The pain wasn’t tidal. That was the lesson of the dream which was really a memory. The pain only appeared to come and go. The pain was like the piling, sometimes covered and sometimes visible, but always there. When the pain wasn’t harrying him through the deep stone grayness of his cloud, he was dumbly grateful, but he was no longer fooled—it was still there, waiting to return.

It was while he ate the soup that she told him what had happened, and he remembered it all as she told him, and he supposed it was good to know how you happened to end up with your legs shattered, but the manner by which he was coming to this knowledge was disquieting—it was as if he was a character in a story or a play, a character whose history is not recounted like history but created like fiction.

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.

He had dreamed that Annie Wilkes was Scheherazade, her solid body clad in diaphanous robes […] But of course it wasn’t Annie that was Scheherazade. He was. And if what he wrote was good enough, if she could not bear to kill him until she discovered how it all came out no matter how much or how loudly her animal instincts yelled for her to do it, that she must do it…

Might he not have a chance?

He looked past her and saw she had turned the typewriter around before waking him; it grinned resplendently at him with its missing tooth, telling him it was all right to hope and noble to strive, but in the end it was doom alone which would count.

“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.”

He looked around quickly, chin down on his breastbone, eyes crafty and frightened. Although he knew it was too soon to be feeling any relief, he did feel it—having the pills, it seemed, was even more important than taking the pills. It was as if he had been given control of the moon and the tides—or had just reached up and taken it. It was a huge thought, awesome…and yet also frightening, with undertones of guilt and blasphemy.

“When he found that parachute under the seat, it was fair. Maybe not all that realistic, but fair.”

He thought about this, startled—her occasional sharp insights never failed to startle him—and decided it was true. Fair and realistic might be synonyms in the best of all possible worlds, but if so, this was not that world.

She suddenly leaped at him with that limber ferocity, and although he felt certain she meant to hurt him as she had before, possibly because she couldn’t get at the dirty birdie of a scriptwriter who had cheated Rocket Man out of the Hudson before it went over the cliff, he did not move at all—he could see the seeds of her current instability in the window of the past she had just opened for him, but he was also awed by it—the injustice she felt was, in spite of its childishness, completely, inarguably real.

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.

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.

“How its heart beats! How it struggles to get away! As we do, Paul. As we do. We think we know so much, but we really don’t know any more than a rat in a trap—a rat with a broken back that thinks it still wants to live.”

[…]

“I’ll get my gun, Paul, shall I? Maybe the next world is better. For rats and people both—not that there’s much difference between the two.”

Annie had killed them because—

“Because they were rats in a trap,” he whispered.

Poor things. Poor poor things.

Sure. That was it. In Annie’s view all the people in the world were divided into three groups: brats, poor poor things…and Annie.

“Sometimes, the native workers stole diamonds. […] And do you know what the British did to them if they got caught before they could get over Oranjerivier and into Boer country?”

“Killed them, I suppose,” he said, eyes still closed.

“Oh, no! That would have been like junking an expensive car just because of a broken spring. If they caught them they made sure that they could go on working…but they also made sure they would never run again. The operation was called hobbling, Paul, and that is what I’m going to do to you. For my own safety…and yours as well. Believe me, you need to be protected from yourself.”

Of course he would ask Annie for nothing, much less demand. Once there had been a man who would at least have asked. A man who had been in a great deal more pain, a man who had nothing to hold onto, not even this shitty book. That man would have asked. Hurt or not, that man had had the guts to at least try to stand up to Annie Wilkes.

He had been that man, and he supposed he ought to be ashamed, but that man had two big advantages over this one: that man had had two feet…and two thumbs.

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.

She did it because I told her no and she had to accept that. It was an act of rage. The rage was the result of realization. What realization? Why, that she didn’t hold all the cards after all—that I had a certain passive hold over her. The power of the gotta. I turned out to be a pretty passable Scheherazade after all.

It was crazy. It was funny. It was also real. Millions might scoff, but only because they failed to realize how pervasive the influence of art—even of such a degenerate sort as popular fiction—could become.

There, within plain sight, was salvation: all he had to do was break the window and the dog-lock the bitch had put on his tongue and scream Help me, help me, save me from Annie! Save me from the goddess!

At the same time another voice was screaming: I’ll be good, Annie! I won’t scream! I’ll be good for goddess’ sake! I promise not to scream, just don’t chop off any more of me!

Paul was dismayed by the depth of this slyness. He suddenly realized that Annie was doing exactly what he could not: she was playing Can You? in real life. Maybe, he thought, that’s why she doesn’t write books. She doesn’t have to.

Was he going to keep his mouth shut because there were two chances in ten that she would off these two as well if he opened it?

The guilt stabbed quickly again and was gone. The answer to that was also no. It would be nice to credit himself with such selfless motives, but it wasn’t the truth. The fact was simple: he wanted to take care of Annie Wilkes himself. They could only put you in jail, bitch, he thought. I know how to hurt you.

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.

In a book, all would have gone according to plan…but life was so fucking untidy—what could you say for an existence where some of the most crucial conversations of your life took place when you needed to take a shit, or something? An existence where there weren’t even any chapters?

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.