At last she came out of it, as always with an expression of faint surprise, as if she had not really expected the world to still be here.
"Rocket Man was my favorite. There he would be at the end of Chapter 6, Death in the Sky, unconscious while his plane went into a power dive. Or at the end of Chapter 9, Fiery Doom, he'd be tied to a chair in a burning warehouse. Sometimes it was a car with no brakes, sometimes poison gas, sometimes electricity." Annie spoke of these things with an affection which was bizarre in its unmistakable genuineness.
"Cliff-hangers, they called them," he ventured.
She frowned at him. "I know that, Mister Smart Guy. Gosh, sometimes I think you must believe I'm awful stupid!"
"I don't, Annie, really." She waved a hand at him impatiently, and he understood it would be better - today, at least - not to interrupt her. "It was fun to try and think how he would get out of it. Sometimes I could, sometimes I couldn't. I didn't really care, as long as they played fair. The people who made the story." She looked at him sharply to make sure he was taking the point. Paul thought he could hardly have missed it.
"Like when he was unconscious in the airplane. He woke up, and there was a parachute under his seat. He put it on and jumped out of the plane and that was fair enough." Thousands of English-comp teachers would disagree with you; my dear, Paul thought. What you're talking about is called a deus ex machina, the God from the machine, first used in Greek amphitheaters. When the playwright got his hero into an impossible jam, this chair decked with flowers came down from overhead. The hero sat down in it and was drawn up and out of harm's way. Even the stupidest swain could grasp the symbolism - the hero had been saved by God. But the deus ex machina - sometimes known in the technical jargon as "the old parachute-under-the-airplane-seat trick", finally went out of vogue around the year 1700. Except, of course, for such arcana as the Rocket Man serials and the Nancy Drew books. I guess you missed the news, Annie.
For one gruesome, never-to-be-forgotten moment, Paul thought he was going to have a laughing fit. Given her mood this morning, that would almost surely have resulted in some unpleasant and painful punishment. He raised a hand quickly to his mouth, pasting it over the smile trying to be born there, and manufactured a coughing fit.
She thumped him on the back hard enough to hurt.
"Better?"
"Yes, thanks."
"Can I go on now, Paul, or were you planning to have a sneezing fit? Should I get the bucket? Do you feel as if you might have to vomit a few times?"
"No, Annie. Please go on. What you're saying is fascinating." She looked a little mollified - not much, but a little. "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.
"But you take another episode," she said, "and this is exactly what's wrong with what you wrote yesterday, Paul, so listen to me."
"I'm all ears." She looked at him sharply to see if he was joking. His face, however, was pale and serious - very much the face of a conscientious student. The urge to laugh had dissipated when he realized that Annie might know everything about the deus ex machina except the name.
"All right," she said. "This was a no-brakes chapter. The bad guys put Rocket Man - only it was Rocket Man in his secret identity - into a car that didn't have any brakes, and then they welded all the doors shut, and then they started the car rolling down this twisty-turny mountain road. I was
on the edge of my seat that day, I can tell you." She was sitting on the edge of his bed - Paul was sitting across the room in the wheelchair. It had been five days since his expedition into the bathroom and the parlor, and he had recuperated from that experience faster than he would ever have believed. Just not being caught, it seemed, was a marvellous restorative.
She looked vaguely at the calendar, where the smiling boy rode his sled through an endless February.
"So there was poor old Rocket Man, stuck in that car without his rocket pack or even his special helmet with the one-way eyes, trying to steer and stop the car and open the side door, all at the same time. He was busier than a one-armed paperhanger, I can tell you!" Yes, Paul could suddenly see it - and in an instinctive way he understood exactly how such a scene, absurdly melodramatic as it might be, could be milked for suspense. The scenery, all of it canted at an alarming downhill angle, rushing by. Cut to the brake-pedal, which sinks bonelessly to the mat when the man's foot (he saw the foot clearly, clad in a 1940s-style airtip shoe) stomps on it. Cut to his shoulder, hitting the door. Cut to the outside reverse, showing us an irregular bead of solder where the door has been sealed shut Stupid, sure - not a bit literary - but you could do thing, with it. You could speed up pulses with it. No Chivas Regal here; this was the fictional equivalent of backwoods popskull.
"So then you saw that the road just ended at this cliff," she said, "and everyone in the theater knew that if Rocket Main didn't get out of that old Hudson before it got to the cliff he was a gone goose. Oh boy! And here came the car, with Rocket Man still trying to put on the brakes or bash the door open, and then... over it went! It flew out into space and then it went down. It hit the side of the cliff about halfway down and burst into flames, and then it went into the ocean, and then this ending message came up on the screen that said NEXT WEEK CHAPTER II, THE DRAGON FLIES." She sat on the edge of his bed, hands tightly clasped together, her large bosom rising and falling rapidly.