Oh shit, why was he bothering? She had done it, and all the time between then and now had been pain and boredom and occasional bouts of work on his stupidly melodramatic book to escape the former two. The whole thing was meaningless.
Oh, but it's not - there is a theme here, Paul. It's the thread that runs through everything. The thread that runs so true. Can't you see it?
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 on 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?
Again he tried to turn aside from these thoughts, but found himself unable. The persistence of memory and all that. Hacks just want to have fun. Then an unexpected idea came, a new one which opened a whole new avenue of thought.
What you keep overlooking, because it's so obvious, is that you were - are - also Scheherazade to yourself.
He blinked, lowering his head and staring stupidly out into the summer he had never expected he would see. Annie's shadow passed and then disappeared again.
Was that true?
Scheherazade to myself he thought again. If so, then he was faced with an idiocy that was utterly colossal: he owed his survival to the fact that he wanted to finish the piece of shit Annie had coerced him into writing. He should have died... but couldn't. Not until he knew how it all came out.
Oh you're f**king crazy.
You sure?
No. He was no longer sure. Not about anything.
With one exception: his whole life had hinged and continued to hinge on Misery.
He let his mind drift.
The cloud, he thought. Begin with the cloud.
6
This time the cloud had been darker, denser, somehow smoother. There was a sensation not of floating but of sliding. Sometimes thoughts came, and sometimes there was pain, and sometimes, dimly, he heard Annie's voice, sounding the way it had when the burning manuscript in the barbecue had threatened to get out of control: "Drink this, Paul... you've got to!" Sliding?
No.
That was not quite the right verb. The right verb was sinking. He remembered a telephone call which had come at three in the morning - this was when he was in college. Sleepy fourth-floor dorm proctor hammering on his door, telling him to come on and answer the f**king phone. His mother. Come home as quick as you can, Paulie. Your father has had a bad stroke. He's sinking. And he had come as fast as he could, pushing his old Ford wagon to seventy in spite of the front-end shimmy that developed at speeds over fifty, but in the end it had all been for nothing. When he got there, his father was no longer sinking but sunk.
How close had he himself come to sinking on the night of the axe? He didn't know, but the fact that he had felt almost no pain during the week following the amputation was a pretty clear indicator of just how close, perhaps. That, and the panic in her voice.
He had lain in a semi-coma, barely breathing because of the respiratory-depressant side-effects of the medication, the glucose drips back in his arms again. And what brought him out of it was the beat of drums and the drone of bees.
Bourka drums.
Bourka bees.
Bourka dreams.
Color bleeding slowly and relentlessly into a land and a tribe that never were beyond the margins of the paper on which he wrote.
A dream of the goddess, the face of the goddess, looming black over the jungle green, brooding and eroded. Dark goddess, dark continent, a stone head full of bees. Overlying even all this was a picture, which grew clearer and clearer (as if a giant slide had been projected against the cloud in which he lay) as time passed. It was a picture of a clearing in which one old eucalyptus tree stood. Hanging from the lowest branch of this tree was an old-fashioned pair of blued steel handcuffs. Bees were crawling over them. The cuffs were empty. They were empty because Misery had - - escaped? She had, hadn't she? Wasn't that how the story was supposed to go?
It had been - but now he wasn't so sure. Was that what those empty handcuffs meant? Or had she been taken away? Taken into the idol? Taken to the queen bee, the Big Babe of the Bourkas?
You were also Scheherazade to yourself.
Who are you telling this story for, Paul? Who are you telling it to? To Annie?
Of course not. He did not look through that hole in the paper to see Annie, or please Annie... he looked through it to get away from Annie.
The pain had started. And the itch. The cloud began to lighten again, and rift apart. He began to glimpse the room, which was bad, and Annie, which was even worse. Still, he had decided to live. Some part of him that was as addicted to the chapter-plays as Annie had been as a child had decided he could not die until he saw how it all came out.
Had she escaped, with the help of Ian and Geoffrey? Or had she been taken into the head of the goddess. It was ridiculous, but these stupid questions actually seemed to need answering.
7
She didn't want to let him go back to work - not at first. He could see in her skittery eyes how frightened she had been and still was. How close he had come. She was taking extravagant care of him, changing the bandages on his weeping stump every eight hours (and at first, she had informed him with the air of one who knows she will never get a medal for what she has done - although she deserves one - she had done it every four hours), giving him sponge baths and alcohol rubs - as if to deny what she had done. Work, she said, would hurt him. It would put you back, Paul. I wouldn't say it if it weren't so - believe me. At least you know what's ahead - I'm dying to find out what happens next. It turned out she had read everything he had written - all his pre-surgery work, you might say - while he lingered near death... better than three hundred manuscript pages. He hadn't filled in the n's in the last forty or so; Annie had done that. She showed him these with an uneasily defiant sort of pride. Her n's were textbook neat, a striking comparison with his own, which had degenerated into a humpbacked scrawl.