Misery (30 page)

  'Not until I finish,' he said, trying to enunciate each word carefully. This was difficult, because he felt as if someone had shot his mouth full of Novocain. He had seen her low before, but he'd seen
nothing
like this; he wondered if she'd ever
had
a low as low as this before. This was how depressives got just before shooting all the members of their families, themselves last; it was the psychotic despair of the woman who dresses her children in their best, takes them out for icecream, walks them down to the nearest bridge, lifts one into the crook of each arm, and jumps over the side. Depressives kill themselves. Psychotics, rocked in the poison cradles of their own egos, want to do everyone handy a favor and take them along.

  
I'm closer to death than I've ever been in my life,
he thought,
because she means it. The bitch
means it.

  'Misery?' she asked, almost as if she had never heard the word before — but there had been a momentary fugitive sparkle in her eyes, hadn't there? He thought so.

  'Misery, yes.' He thought desperately about how he should go on. Every possible approach seemed mined. 'I agree that the world is a pretty crappy place most of the time,' he said, and then added inanely: 'Especially when it rains.'

  
Oh, you idiot, stop babbling!

  'I mean, I've been in a lot of pain these last few weeks, and — '

  'Pain?' She looked at him with sallow, sunken contempt. 'You don't know what pain is. You don't have the slightest
idea,
Paul.'

  'No . . . I suppose not. Not compared to you.'

  'That's right.'

  'But — I want to finish this book. I want to see how it all turns out.' He paused. 'And I'd like you to stick around and see, too. A person might as well not write a book at all, if there's no one around to read it. Do you get me?'

  He lay there looking at that terrible stone face, heart thumping.

  'Annie? Do you get me?'

  'Yes . . . ' She sighed. 'I
do
want to know how it comes out. That's the only thing left in the world that I still want, I suppose.' Slowly, apparently unaware of what she was doing, she began to suck the rat's blood from her fingers. Paul jammed his teeth together and grimly told himself he' would
not
vomit, would
not
, would
not.
'It's like waiting for the end of one of those chapter-plays.'

She looked around suddenly, the blood on her mouth like lipstick.

    'Let me offer again, Paul. I can get my gun. I can end all of this for both of us. You are not a stupid man. You know I can never let you leave here. You've known that for some time, haven't you?'

  
Don't let your eyes waver. If she sees your eyes waver, she'll; kill you right now.

  'Yes. But it always ends, doesn't it, Annie? In the end we all swing.'

  A ghost of a smile at the corners of her mouth; she touched his face briefly, with some affection.

   'I suppose you think of escape. So does a rat in a trap, I'm sure, in its way. But you're not going to, Paul. You might if this was one of your stories, but it's not. I can't let you leave here . . . but I could go with you.'

  And suddenly, for just a moment, he thought of saying:
All right, Annie — go ahead. Let's just
call it off.
Then his need and will to live — and there was still quite a lot of each in him — rose up and clamored the momentary weakness away. Weakness was what it was. Weakness and cowardice. Fortunately or unfortunately, he did not have the crutch of mental illness to fall back on.

  'Thank you,' he said, 'but I want to finish what I've started.'

    She sighed and stood up. 'All right. I suppose I must have known you would, because I see I brought you some pills, although I don't remember doing it.' She laughed — a small crazy titter which seemed to come from that slack face as if by ventriloquism. 'I'll have to go away for awhile. If I don't, what you or I want won't matter. Because I do things. I have a place I go when I feel like this. A place in the hills. Did you ever read the Uncle Remus stories, Paul?'

  He nodded.

  'Do you remember Brer Rabbit telling Brer Fox about his Laughing Place?'

  'Yes.'

   'That's what I call my place upcountry. My Laughing Place. Remember how I said I was coming back from Sidewinder when I found you?'

He nodded.

    'Well, that was a fib. I fibbed because I didn't know you well then. I was really coming back from my Laughing Place. It has a sign over the door that says that. ANNIE'S LAUGHING PLACE, it says. Sometimes I
do
laugh when I go there.

  'But mostly I just scream.'

  'How long will you be gone, Annie?'

   She was drifting dreamily toward the door now. 'I can't tell. I've brought you pills. You'll be all right. Take two every six hours. Or six every four hours. Or all of them at once.'

  
But what will I eat?
he wanted to ask her, and didn't. He didn't want her attention to return to him — not at all. He wanted her gone. Being here with her was like being with the Angel of Death.

    He lay stiffly in his bed for a long time, listening to her, movements, first upstairs, then on the stairs, then in the' kitchen, fully expecting her to change her mind and come back with the gun after all. He did not even relax when he heard the side door slam and lock, followed by splashing steps outside. The gun could just as easily be in the Cherokee.

    Old Bessie's motor whirred and caught. Annie gunned it fiercely. A fan of headlights came on, illuminating a shining silver curtain of rain. The lights began to retreat down the driveway. They swung around, dimming, and then Annie was gone. This time she was not heading downhill, toward Sidewinder, but up into the high country.

    'Going to her Laughing Place,' Paul croaked, and began to laugh himself. She had hers; he was already in his. The wild gales of mirth ended when he looked at the mangled body of the rat in the corner.

  A thought struck him.

  'Who
said
she didn't leave me anything to eat' he asked the room, and laughed even harder. In the empty house' Paul Sheldon's Laughing Place sounded like the padded cell of a madman.

Two hours later, Paul jimmied the bedroom's lock again and for the second time forced the wheelchair through the doorway that was almost too small. For the last time, he hoped. He had a pair of blankets in his lap. All the pills he had cached under the mattress were wrapped in a Kleenex tucked into his underwear. He meant to get out if he could rain or no rain; this was his chance and this time he meant to take it. Sidewinder was downhill and the road would be slippery in the rain and it was darker than a mineshaft; he meant to try it all the same. He hadn't lived the life of a hero or a saint, but he did not intend to die like an exotic bird in a zoo.

  He vaguely remembered an evening he'd spent drinking Scotch with a gloomy playwright named Bernstein at the Lion's Head, down in the Village (and if he lived to see the Village again he would get down on whatever remained of his knees and kiss the grimy sidewalk of Christopher Street). At some point the conversation had turned to the Jews living in Germany during the uneasy four or five years before the
Wehrmacht
rolled into Poland and the festivities began in earnest. Paul remembered telling Bernstein, who had lost an aunt and a grandfather in the Holocaust, that he didn't understand why the Jews in Germany — hell, all over Europe but
especially
in Germany — hadn't gotten out while there was still time. They were not, by and large, stupid people, and many had had first-hand experience of such persecution. Surely they had seen what was coming. So why had they stayed?

  Bernstein's answer had struck him as frivolous and cruel and incomprehensible:
Most of them
had pianos. We Jews are very partial to the piano. When you own a piano, it's harder to think
about moving.

  Now he understood. Yes. At first it was his broken legs, and crushed pelvis. Then, God help him, the book had taken off. In a crazy way he was even having fun with it. It would be easy — too easy — to blame everything on his broken bones, or the dope, when in fact so much of it had been the
book
. That and the droning passage of days with their simple convalescent pattern. Those things — but mostly the stupid goddam
book
— had been his piano. What would she do if he was gone when she came back from her Laughing Place? Burn the manuscript?

    'I don't give a fuck,' he said, and this was almost the truth. If he lived, he could write another book — re-create this one, even, if he wanted to. But a dead man couldn't write a book any more than he could buy a new piano.

    He went into the parlor. It had been tidy before, but now there were dirty dishes stacked on every available surface; it looked to Paul as if every one in the house must be here. Annie apparently not only pinched and slapped herself when she was feeling depressed. It looked like she really chowed down as well, and never mind cleaning up after. He half-remembered the stinking wind that had blown down his throat during his time in the cloud and felt his stomach, clench. Most of the remains were of sweet things. Ice—cream had dried or was drying in many of the bowls and soup dishes. There were crumbs of cake and smears of pie on the plates. A mound of lime Jell-O covered with a crack-glaze of dried whipped cream stood on top of the TV next to a two-liter plastic bottle of Pepsi and a gravy-boat. The Pepsi bottle looked almost as big as the nosecone of a Titan-II rocket. Its surface was dull and smeary, almost opaque. He guessed she had drunk directly from it, and that her fingers had been covered with gravy or ice-cream when she did it. He had not heard the clink of silverware and that was not surprising because there was none here. Dishes and: bowls and plate, but no cutlery. He saw drying drips and splashes — again, mostly of ice-cream — on the rug and couch.

  
That was what I saw on her housecoat. The stuff she was eating. And what was on her breath.
His image of Annie as Piltdown woman recurred. He saw her sitting in here and scooping icecream into her mouth, or maybe handfuls of half-congealed chicken gravy with a Pepsi chaser, simply eating and drinking in a deep depressed daze.

  The penguin sitting on his block of ice was still on the knickknack table, but she had thrown many of the other ceramic pieces into the comer, where their littered remains were scattered — sharp little hooks and shards.

   He kept seeing her fingers as they sank into the rat's body. The red smears of her fingers on the sheet. He kept seeing her licking the blood from her fingers, doing it as absently as she must have eaten the ice-cream and Jell-O and soft black jellyroll cake. These images were terrible, but they were a wonderful incentive to hurry.

  The spray of dried flowers on the coffee—table had overturned; beneath the table, barely visible, lay a dish of crusted custard pudding and a large book. MEMORY LANE, it said.
Trips
down Memory Lane when you're feeling depressed are never a very good idea, Annie — but I
suppose you know that by this point in your life.

    He rolled across the room. Straight ahead was the kitchen. On the right a wide, short hallway went down to Annie's front door. Beside this hallway a flight of stairs went up to the second floor. Giving the stairs only a brief glance (there were drips of ice-cream on some of the carpeted stair levels and glazey smears of it on the banister), Paul rolled down to the door. He thought that if there was going to be a way out for him, tied to this chair as he was, it would be by way of the kitchen door — the one Annie used when she went out to feed the animals, the one she galloped from when Mr Rancho Grande showed up — but he ought to check this one. He might get a surprise.

  He didn't.

  The porch stairs were every bit as steep as he had feared, but even if there had been a wheelchair ramp (a possibility he never would have accepted in a spirited game of Can You?, even if a friend had suggested it), he couldn't have used it. There were three locks on the door. The police-bar he could have coped with. The other two were Kreigs, the best locks in the whole world, according to his ex-cop friend Tom Twyford. And where were the keys? Umm ... let me see. On their way to Annie's Laughing Place, maybe?
Yes-siree Bob! Give that man a cigar and a
blowtorch to light it with!

    He reversed down the hall, fighting panic, reminding, himself he hadn't expected much from the front door anyway. He pivoted the chair once he was in the parlor and rolled into the kitchen. This was an old-fashioned room with bright linoleum on the floor and a pressed-tin ceiling. The refrigerator was old but quiet. There were three or four, magnets stuck to its door — not surprisingly, they all looked, like candy: a piece of bubble-gum, a Hershey Bar, a Tootsie Roll. One of the cabinet doors was open and he could see shelves neatly covered with oilcloth. There were big window over the sink and they would let in a lot of light even on cloudy days. It should have been a cheery kitchen but wasn't. The open garbage can overflowed onto the floor and emitted the warm reek of spoiling food, but that wasn't the only thing wrong, or the worst smell. There was another that seemed to exist mostly in his mind, but which was no less real for that. It was p
arfum de Wilkes;
a psychic odor of obsession.

  There were three doors in the room, two to the left and one straight ahead, between the refrigerator and the pantry alcove.

    He went to those on the left first. One was the kitchen closet — he knew that even before he saw the coats, hats, scarves, and boots. The brief, yapping squeak of the hinges was enough to tell him. The other was the one Annie used to go out. And here was another police-bar and two more Kreigs. Roydmans, stay out. Paul, stay in.