Misery

Chapter 5

36

That evening she brought him his Keflex pill - his urinary infection was improving, but very slowly - and a bucket of ice. She laid a neatly folded towel beside it and left without saying a word.

Paul put his pencil aside - he had to use the fingers of his left hand to unbend the fingers of his right - and slipped his hand into the ice. He left it there until it was almost completely numb. When he took it out, the swelling seemed to have gone down a little. He wrapped the towel around it and sat, looking out into the darkness, until it began to tingle. He put the towel aside, flexed the hand for awhile (the first few times made him grimace with pain, but then the hand began to limber up), and started to write again.

At dawn he rolled slowly over to his bed, lurched in, and was asleep at once. He dreamed he was lost in a snowstorm, only it wasn't snow; it was flying pages which filled the world, destroying direction, and each page was covered with typing, and all the n's and t's and e's were missing, and he understood that if he was still alive when the blizzard ended, he would have to fill them all in himself, by hand, deciphering words that were barely there.

37

He woke up around eleven, and almost as soon as Annie heard him stirring about, she came in with orange juice, his pills, and a bowl of hot chicken soup. She was glowing with excitement. "It's a very special day, Paul, isn't it?"

"Yes." He tried to pick up the spoon with his right hand and could not. It was puffy and red, so swollen the skin was shiny. When he tried to bend it into a fist, it felt as though long rods of metal had been pushed through it at random. The last few days, he thought, had been like some nightmare autographing session that just never ended.

"Oh, your poor hand!" she cried. "I'll get you another pill! I'll do it right now!"

"No. This is the push. I want my head clear for it."

"But you can't write with your hand like that!"

"No," he agreed. "My hand's shot. I'm going to finish this baby the way I started - with that Royal. Eight or ten pages should see it through. I guess I can fight my way through that many n's, t's, and e's."

"I should have gotten you another machine," she said. She looked honestly sorry; tears stood in her eyes. Paul thought that the occasional moments like this were the most ghastly of all, because in them he saw the woman she might have been if her upbringing had been right or the drugs squirted out by all the funny little glands inside her had been less wrong. Or both. "I goofed. It's hard for me to admit that, but it's true. It was because I didn't want to admit that Dartmonger woman got the better of me. I'm sorry, Paul. Your poor hand." She raised it, gentle as Niobe at the pool, and kissed it.

"That's all right," he said. "We'll manage, Ducky Daddles and I. I hate him, but I've got a feeling he hates me as well, so I guess we're even."

"Who are you talking about?"

"The Royal. I've nicknamed it after a cartoon character."

"Oh..." She trailed away. Turned off. Came unplugged. He waited patiently for her to return, eating his soup as he did so, holding the spoon awkwardly between the first and second fingers of his left hand.

At last she did come back and looked at him, smiling radiantly like a woman just awakening and realizing it was going to be a beautiful day. "Soup almost gone? I've got something very special, if it is." He showed her the bowl, empty except for a few noodles stuck to the bottom. "See what a Do-Bee I am, Annie?" he said without even a trace of a smile.

"You're the most goodest Do-Bee there ever was, Paul and you get a whole row of gold stars! In fact... wait! Wait till you see this!" She left, leaving Paul to look first at the calendar and then at the Arc de Triomphe. He looked up at the ceiling and saw the intertinked W's waltzing drunkenly across the plaster. Last of all he looked across at the typewriter and the vast, untidy pile of manuscript. Goodbye to all that, he thought randomly, and then Annie was bustling back in with another tray.

On it were four dishes: wedges of lemon on one, grated egg on a second, toast points on a third. In the middle was a larger plate, and on this one was a vast (oogy) gooey pile of caviar.

"I don't know if you like this stuff or not," she said shyly. I don't even know if I like it. I never had it." Paul began to laugh. It hurt his middle and it hurt his legs and it even hurt his hand; soon he would probably hurt even more, because Annie was paranoid enough to think that if someone was laughing it must be at her. But still he couldn't stop. He laughed until he was choking and coughing, his cheeks red, tears spurting from the corners of his eyes. The woman had cut off his foot with an axe and his thumb with an electric knife, and here she was with a pile of caviar big enough to choke a warthog. And for a wonder, that black look of crevasse did not dawn on her face. She began to laugh with him, instead.

38

Caviar was supposed to be one of those things you either loved or hated, but Paul had never felt either way. If he was flying first class and a stewardess stuck a plate of it in front of him, he ate it and then forgot there was such a thing as caviar until the next time a stewardess stuck a plate of it in front of him. But now he ate it hungrily, with all the trimmings, as if discovering the great principle of food for the first time in his life.

Annie didn't care for it at all. She nibbled at the one dainty teaspoonful she'd put on a toast point, wrinkled her face in disgust, and put it aside. Paul, however, plowed ahead with undimmed enthusiasm. In a space of fifteen minutes he had eaten half of Mount Beluga. He belched, covered his mouth, and looked guiltily at Annie, who went off into another g*y gust of laughter.

I think I'm going to kill you, Annie, he thought, and smiled warmly at her. I really do. I may go with you - probably will, in fact - but I am going to go with a by-God bellyful of caviar. Things could be worse.

"That was great, but I can't eat any more," he said.

"You'd probably throw up if you did," she said. "That stuff is very rich." She smiled back. "There's another surprise. I have a bottle of champagne. For later... when you finish the book. It's called Dom Perignon. It cost seventy-five dollars! For one bottle! But Chuckie Yoder down at liquor store says it's the best there is."

"Chuckie Yoder is right," Paul said, thinking that it was partly Dom's fault that he'd gotten himself into this hell in the first place. He paused a moment and then said: "There's something else I'd like, as well. For when I finish."

"Oh? What's that?"

"You said once you had all of my things."

"I do."

"Well... there was a carton of cigarettes in my suitcase. I'd like to have a smoke when I finish." Her smile had faded slowly. "You know those things are no good for you, Paul. They cause cancer."

"Annie, would you say that cancer is something I have to worry about just now?" She didn't answer.

"I just want that one single cigarette. I've always leaned back and smoked one when I finished. It's the one that always tastes the best, believe me - even better than the one you have after a really fine meal. At least that's how it used to be. I suppose this time it'll make me feel dizzy and like puking, but I'd like that little link with the past. What do you say, Annie? Be a sport. I have been."

"All right... but before the champagne. I'm not drinking a seventy-five-dollar bottle of fizzy beer in the same room where you've been blowing that poison around."

"That's fine. If you bring it to me around noon, I'll put it on the windowsill where I can look at it once in awhile. I'll finish, and then I'll fill in the letters, and then I'll smoke it until I feel like I'm going to fall down unconscious, and then I'll butt it. Then I'll call you."

"All right," she said. "But I'm still not happy about it. Even if you don't get lung cancer from just one, I'm still not happy about it. And do you know why, Paul?"

"No." Because only Don't-Bees smoke," she said, and began to gather up the dishes.

39

"Mistuh Boss Ian, is she -?"

"Shhhhh!" Ian hissed fiercely, and Hezekiah subsided. Geoffrey felt a pulse beating with wild rapidity in his throat. From outside came the steady soft creak of lines and rigging, the slow flap of the sails in the first faint breezes of the freshening trade winds, the occasional cry of a bird. Dimly, from the afterdeck, Geoffrey could hear a gang of men singing a shanty in bellowing, off-key voices. But in here all was silence as the three men, two white and one black, waited to see if Misery would live... or - Ian groaned hoarsely, and Hezekiah gripped his arm. Geoffrey merely tightened his already hysterically tight hold on himself. After all of this, could God really be cruel enough to let her die? Once he would have denied such a possibility confidently, and with humor rather than indignation. The, idea that God could be cruel would in those days have struck him as absurd.

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.

These wretched musings were interrupted by a harsh, half-superstitious gasp from Hezekiah.

"Mist" Boss Ian! Mist" Boss Geoffrey! Look! She eyes Look she eyes!" Misery's eyes, that gorgeously delicate shade of cornflower blue, had fluttered open. They passed from Ian to Geoffrey and then back to Ian again. For a moment Geoffrey saw only puzzlement in those eyes... and then recognition dawned in them, and he felt gladness roar through his soul.

"Where am I?" she asked, yawning and stretching. "Ian - Geoffrey - are we at sea? Why am I so hungry?" Laughing, crying, Ian bent and hugged her, speaking her name over and over again.

Bewildered but pleased, she hugged him back - and because he knew she was all right, Geoffrey found he could abide their love, now and forever. He would live alone, could live alone, in perfect peace.

Perhaps the gods were not insane after all... at least, not all of them.

He touched Hezekiah on the shoulder. "I think we should leave them alone, old man, don" you?"

"I guess that be right, Mist" Boos Geoffrey," Hezekiah said. He grinned widely, flashing all seven of his gold teeth.

Geoffrey stole one last look at her, and for just a moment those cornflower eyes flashed his way, warming him, filling him. Fulfilling him.

I love you, my darling, he thought. Do you hear me?

Perhaps the answer which came back was only the wistful call of his own mind, but he thought not - it was too clear, too much her own voice.

I hear... and I love you, too.

Geoffrey closed the door and went up to the afterdeck. Instead of throwing himself over the rail, as he might have done, he lit his pipe and smoked a bowl of tobacco slowly, watching the sun go down behind that distant, disappearing cloud on horizon - that cloud which was the coast of Africa.

And then, because he could not stand to do otherwise, Paul Sheldon rolled the last page out of the typewriter and scrawled the most loved and hated phrase in the writer's vocabulary with a pen:

THE END



40

His swollen right hand had not wanted to fill in the missing letters, but he had forced it through the work nonetheless. If he wasn't able to work at least some of the stiffness out of it, he was not going to be able to carry through with this.

When it was done, he put the pen aside. He regarded his work for a moment. He felt as he always did when he finished a book - queerly empty, let down, aware that for each little success he had paid a toll of absurdity.

It was always the same, always the same - like toiling uphill through jungle and breaking out to a clearing at the top after months of hell only to discover nothing more rewarding than a view of a freeway - with a few gas stations and bowling alleys thrown in for good behavior, or something.

Still, it was good to be done - always good to be done. Good to have produced, to have caused a thing to be. In a numb sort of way he understood and appreciated the bravery of the act, of making little lives that weren't, creating the appearance of motion and the illusion of warmth. He understood - now, finally - that he was a bit of a dullard at doing this trick, but it was the only one he knew, and if he always ended up doing it ineptly, he at least never failed to do it with love. He touched the pile of manuscript and smiled a little bit.

His hand left the big pile of paper and stole to the single Marlboro she had put on the windowsill for him. Beside it was a ceramic ashtray with a paddlewheel excursion boat printed on the bottom encircled by the words, SOUVENIR OF HANNIBAL, MISSOURI - HOME OF AMERICA'S STORY TELLER!

In the ashtray was a book of matches, but there was only one match in it - all she had allowed him. One, however, should be enough.

He could hear her moving around upstairs. That was good. He would have plenty of time to make his few little preparations, plenty of warning if she decided to come down before he was quite ready for her.

Here comes the real trick, Annie. Lees see if I can do it. Let's see - can I?

He bent over, ignoring the pain in his legs, and began to work the loose section of baseboard out with his fingers.

41

He called for her five minutes later, and listened to her heavy, somehow toneless tread on the stairs. He had expected to feel terrified when things got to this point, and was relieved to find he felt quite calm. The room was filled with the reek of lighter fluid. It dripped steadily from one side of the board which lay across the arms of the wheelchair.

"Paul, are you really done? she called down the length of hallway.

Paul looked at the pile of paper sitting on the board beside the hateful Royal typewriter. Lighter fluid soaked the stack. "Well," he called back, "I did the best I could, Annie."

"Wow! Oh, great! Gee, I can hardly believe it! After all this time! Just a minute! I'll get the champagne!"

"Fine!" He heard her cross the kitchen linoleum, knowing where each squeak was going to come the instant before it did come. I am hearing all these sounds for the last time, he thought, and that brought a sense of wonder, and wonder broke the calm open like an egg. The fear was inside... but there was something else in there as well. He supposed it was the receding coast of Africa.

The refrigerator door was opened, then banged shut. Here she came across the kitchen again; here she came.

He had not smoked the cigarette, of course; it still lay on the windowsill. It had been the match he wanted. That one single match.

What if it doesn't light when you strike it?

But it was far too late for such considerations.

He reached over to the ashtray and picked up the matchbook. He tore out the single match. She was coming down the hallway now. Paul struck the match and, sure enough, it didn't light.

Easy! Easy does it!

He struck it again. Nothing.

Easy... easy...

He scratched it along the rough dark-brown strip on the back of the book a third time and a pale-yellow flame bloomed at the end of the paper stick.