Misery

“I see.” She set it back down. The bed rocked a little. Paul guessed the typewriter might weigh as much as fifty pounds. It had come from a time when there were no alloys, no plastics… also no six-figure book advances, no movie tie-in editions, no USA Today, no Entertainment Tonight, no celebrities doing ads for credit cards or vodka.
The Royal grinned at him, promising trouble.
“She wanted forty-five dollars but gave me five Because of the missing n.” She offered him a crafty smile. No fool she, it said.
He smiled back. The tide was in. That made both smiling and lying easy. “Gave it to you? You mean you didn’t dicker?” Annie preened a little. “I told her n was an important letter,” she allowed.
“Well good for you! Damn!” Here was a new discovery. Sycophancy was easy once you got the hang of it.
Her smile grew sly, inviting him to share a delicious secret.
“I told her n was one of the letters in my favorite writer’s name.”
“It’s two of the letters in my favorite nurse’s name.” Her smile became a glow. Incredibly, a blush rose in her solid cheeks. That’s what it would look like, he thought, if you built a furnace inside the mouth of one of those idols in the H. Rider Haggard stories. That is what it would look like at night.
“You fooler!” she simpered.
“I’m not!” he said. “Not at all.”
“Well!” She looked off for a moment, not blank but just pleased, a little flustered, taking a moment to gather her thoughts. Paul could have taken some pleasure in the way this was going if not for the weight of the typewriter, as solid as the woman and also damaged; it sat there grinning with its missing tooth, promising trouble.
“The wheelchair was much more expensive,” she said. “Ostomy supplies have gone right out of sight since I -” She broke off, frowned, cleared her throat. Then she looked back at him, smiling. “But it’s time you began sitting up, and I don’t begrudge the cost one tiny bit. And of course you can’t type lying down, can you?”
“No… “
“I’ve got a board… I cut it to size… and paper… wait!” She dashed from the room like a girl, leaving Paul and the typewriter to regard each other. His grin disappeared the moment her back was turned. The Royal’s never varied. He supposed later that he had pretty well known what all this was about, just as he supposed he had known what the typewriter would sound like, how it would clack through its grin like that old comic-strip character Ducky Daddles.
She came back with a package of Corrasable Bond in shrink-wrap and a board about three feet wide by four feet long.
“Look!” She put the board on the arms of the wheelchair that stood by his bed like some solemn skeletal visitor. Already he could see the ghost of himself behind that board, pent in like a prisoner.
She put the typewriter on the board, facing the ghost, and put the package of Corrasable Bond — the paper he hated most in all the world because of the way the type blurred when the pages were shuffled together — beside it. She had now created a kind of cripple’s study.
“What do you think?”
“It looks good,” he said, uttering the biggest lie of his life with perfect ease, and then asked the question to which he already knew the answer. “What will I write there, do you think?”
“Oh, but Paul” she said, turning to him, her eyes dancing animatedly in her flushed face. “I don’t think, I know! You’re going to use this typewriter to write a new novel! Your best novel! Misery’s Retum!”

Misery’s Return. He felt nothing at all. He supposed a man who had just cut his hand off in a power saw might feel this same species of nothing as he stood regarding his spouting wrist with dull surprise.
“Yes!” Her face shone like a searchlight. Her powerful hands were clasped between her breasts. “It will be a book just for me, Paul! My payment for nursing you back to health! The one and only copy of the newest Misery book! I’ll have something no one else in the world has, no matter how much they might want it! Think of it!”
“Annie, Misery is dead.” But already, incredibly, he was thinking, I could bring her back. The thought filled him with tired revulsion but no real surprise. After all, a man who could drink from a floor-bucket should be capable of a little directed writing.
“No she’s not,” Annie replied dreamily. “Even when I was… when I was so mad at you, I knew she wasn’t really dead. I knew you couldn’t really kill her. Because you’re good.”
“Am I?” he said, and looked at the typewriter. It grinned at him. We’re going to find out just how good you are, old buddy, it whispered.
“Yes!”
“Annie, I don’t know if I can sit in that wheelchair. Last time