Misery

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.

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.
Although Annie never said so, he believed she had filled in the n’s either as another evidence of her solicitude — How can you say I was cruel to you, Paul, when you see all the n’s I have filled in? — or as an act of atonement, or possibly even as a quasi-superstitious rite: enough bandage-changes, enough sponge baths, enough n’s filled in, and Paul would live. Bourka bee-woman work powful mojo-magic, Bwana, fill in all dese hoodaddy n’s an” all be well again.
That was how she had begun… but then the gotta set in. Paul knew all the symptoms. When she said she was dying to find out what happened next, she wasn’t kidding.
Because you went on living to find out what happened next, isn’t that what you’re really saying?
Crazy as it was — shameful, even, in its absurdity — he thought it was.
The gotta.
It was something he had been irritated to find he could generate in the Misery books almost at will but in his mainstream fiction erratically or not at all. You didn’t know exactly where to find the gotta, but you always knew when you did. It made the needle of some internal Geiger counter swing all the way over to the end of the dial. Even sitting in front of the typewriter slightly hung-over, drinking cups of black coffee and crunching a Rolaid or two every couple of hours (knowing he should give up the fucking cigarettes, at least in the morning, but unable to bring himself to the sticking point), months from finishing and light-years from publication, you knew the gotta when you got it. Having it always made him