Misery

“When I was a girl,” she said, “they used to have chapter-plays at the movies. An episode a week. The Masked Avenger, and Flash Gordon, even one about Frank Buck, the man who went to Africa to catch wild animals and who could subdue lions and tigers just by staring at them. Do you remember the chapter-plays?”
“I remember them, but you can’t be that old, Annie — you must have seen them on TV, or had an older brother or sister who told you about them.” At the corners of her mouth dimples appeared briefly in the solidity of flesh and then disappeared. “Go on with you, you fooler! I did have an older brother, though, and we used to go to the movies every Saturday afternoon. This was in Bakersfield, California, where I grew up. And while I always used to enjoy the newsreel and the color cartoons and the feature, what I really looked forward to was the next installment of the chapter-play. I’d find myself thinking about it at odd moments all week long. If a class was boring, or if I had to babysit Mrs Krenmitz’s four brats downstairs. I used to hate those little brats.” Annie lapsed into a moody silence, staring into the corner. She had become unplugged. It was the first time this had happened in some days, and he wondered uneasily if it meant she was slipping into the lower part of her cycle. If so, he had better batten down his hatches.
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