Misery
Then he smiled a little. Would that really be so bad? The answer was a resounding HELL, NO! It would be good. The pilings would disappear forever. No more low tide. Forever.
With that thought in mind he found the pulse in his left thigh, and though he had never injected himself in his life, he did it efficiently now, even eagerly.
23
He did not die and he did not sleep. The pain went away and he drifted, feeling almost untethered from his body, a balloon of thought drifting at the end of a long string.
You were also Scheherazade to yourself, he thought, and looked at the barbecue pot. He thought of Martian deathrays, burning London in fire.
He thought suddenly of a song, a disco tune, something by a group called the Trammps: Burn, baby, burn, burn the mother down…
Something flickered.
Some idea.
Burn the mother down…
Paul Sheldon slept.
24
When he woke up the cellar was filled with the ashy light of dawn. A very large rat sat on the tray Annie had left him, nibbling cheese with its tail neatly curled around its body.
Paul screamed, jerked, then screamed again as pain flowed up his legs. The rat fled.
She had left him some capsules. He knew that the Novril wouldn’t take care of the pain, but it was better than nothing.
Besides, pain or no pain, it’s time for the old morning fix, right, Paul?
He washed two of the caps down with Pepsi and then leaned back, feeling the dull throb in his kidneys. He was growing something down there, all right. Great.
Martians, he thought. Martian death-machines He looked toward the barbecue pot, expecting it to look like a barbecue pot in the morning light: a barbecue pot and nothing else. He was surprised to find it still looked to him like one of Wells’s striding machines of destruction.
You had an idea – what was it?
The song came back, the one by the Trammps: Burn, baby, burn, burn the mother down!
Yeah? And just what mother is that? She wouldn’t even leave you a candle. You couldn’t light a fart.
Up came a message from the boys in the sweatshop.
You don’t need to burn anything now. Or here.
What the f**k are we talking about, guys? Could you let me in on – Then it came, it came at once, the way all the really ideas came, rounded and smooth and utterly persuasive in its baleful perfection.
Burn the mother down…
He looked at the barbecue pot, expecting the pain of what he had done – what she had made him do – to return. It did, but it was dull and faint; the pain in his kidneys was worse. What had she said yesterday? All I ever did was… talk you out of a bad book you’d written and into the best one you ever wrote…
Maybe there was a queer sort of truth in that. Maybe he had wildly overestimated just how good Fast Cars had been.
That’s just your mind trying to heal itself, part of him whispered. If you ever get out of this, you’ll work yourself around in much the same fashion to thinking you never needed your left foot anyway – hell, five less nails to clip. And they do wonders with prosthetics these days. No, Paul, one was a damned good book and the other was a damned good foot. Let’s not kid ourselves.
Yet a deeper part of him suspected that to think that way was kidding himself.
Not kidding yourself, Paul. Tell the goddam truth. Lying to yourself. A guy who makes up stories, a guy like that is lying to everyone, so that guy can’t ever lie to himself. It’s funny, but it’s also the truth. Once you start that shit, you might as well just cover up your typewriter and start studying for a broker’s license or something, because you’re down the toilet.
So what was the truth? The truth, should you insist, was that the increasing dismissal of his work in the critical press as that of a "popular writer" (which was, as he understood it, one step – a small one – above that of a "hack") had hurt him quite badly. It didn’t jibe with his self-image as a Serious Writer who was only churning out these shitty romances in order to subsidize his (flourish of trumpets, please!) REAL WORK! Had he hated Misery? Had he really? If so, why had it been so easy to slip back into her world? No, more than easy; blissful, like slipping into a warm bath with a good book by one hand and a cold beer by the other. Perhaps all he had hated was the fact that her face on the dust jackets had overshadowed his in his author photographs, not allowing the critics to see that they were dealing with a young Mailer or Cheever here – that they were dealing with a heavyweight here. As a result, hadn’t his "serious fiction" become steadily more self-conscious, a sort of scream? Look at me! Look how good this is! Hey, guys! This stuff has got a sliding perspective! This stuff has got stream-of-consciousness interludes! This is my REAL WORK, you ass**les! Don’t you DARE turn away from me! Don’t you DARE, you cockadoodie brats! Don’t you DARE turn away from my REAL WORK! Don’t you DARE, or I’ll – What? What would he do? Cut off their feet? Saw off their thumbs?
Paul was seized by a sudden fit of shivering. He had to urinate. He grabbed the bedpan and finally managed, although it hurt worse than before. He moaned while he was pissing, and continued moaning for a long while after it was done.
Finally, mercifully, the Novril began to kick in – a little and he drowsed.
He looked at the barbecue pot with heavy-lidded eyes.
How would you feel if she made you burn Misery’s Return? the interior voice whispered, and he jumped a little. Drifting away, he realized that it would hurt, yes, it would hurt terribly, it would make the pain he had felt when Fast Cars went up in smoke look like the pain of this kidney infection compared with what he had felt when she brought the axe down, cutting off his foot, exercising editorial authority over his body.
He also realized that wasn’t the real question.
The real question was how it would make Annie feel.