had spent most of his adult life thinking the word writer was the most important definition of himself—made her seem utterly monstrous, something he must escape. She really was an idol, and if she didn’t kill him, she might kill what was in him.
Now he heard the eager squeal of the pig—she had thought he would mind, but he thought Misery was a wonderful name for a pig. He remembered how she had imitated it, the way her upper lip had wrinkled toward her nose, how her cheeks had seemed to flatten, how she had actually looked like a pig for a moment: Whoink! WHOINKK!
From the barn, her voice: “Sooo-ey pig-pig-pig!”
He lay back, put his arm over his eyes, and tried to hold onto the anger, because the anger made him feel brave. A brave man could think. A coward couldn’t.
Here was a woman who had been a nurse—he was sure of that. Was she still a nurse? No, because she did not go to work. Why did she no longer practice her trade? That seemed obvious. Not all her gear was stowed right; lots of it was rolling around in the holds. If it was obvious to him even through the haze of pain he had been living in, it would surely have been obvious to her colleagues.
And he had a little extra information on which to judge just how much of her gear wasn’t stowed right, didn’t he? She had dragged him from the wreck of his car and instead of calling the police or an ambulance she had installed him in her guest-room, put IV drips in his arms and a shitload of dope in his body. Enough so he had gone into what she called respiratory depression at least once. She had told no one he was here, and if she hadn’t by now, that meant she didn’t mean to.
Would she have behaved in this same fashion if it had been Joe Blow from Kokomo she had hauled out of the wreck? No. No, he didn’t think so. She had kept him because he was Paul Sheldon, and she—
“She’s my number-one fan,” Paul muttered, and put an arm over his eyes.
An awful memory bloomed there in the dark: his mother had taken him to the Boston Zoo, and he had been looking at a great big bird. It had the most beautiful feathers—red and purple and royal blue—that he had ever seen ... and the saddest eyes. He had asked his mother where the bird came from and when she said Africa he had understood it was doomed to die in the cage where it lived, far away from wherever God had meant it to be, and he cried and his mother bought him an ice-cream cone and for awhile he had stopped crying and then he remembered and started again and so she had taken him home, telling him as they rode the trolley back to Lynn that he was a bawl-baby and a sissy.
Its feathers. Its eyes.
The throbbing in his legs began to cycle up.
No. No, no.
He pressed the crook of his elbow more tightly against his eyes. From the barn he could hear spaced thudding noises. Impossible to tell what they were, of course, but in his imagination
(your MIND your CREATIVITY that is all I meant)
he could see her pushing bales of hay out of the loft with the heel of her boot, could see them tumbling to the barn floor.
Africa. That bird came from Africa. From—
Then, cutting cleanly through this like a sharp knife, came her agitated, almost screaming voice: Do you think that when they put me up there on the stand in Den—
Up on the stand. When they put me up on the stand in Denver.
Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?
(“I don’t know where he gets it.”)
I do.
(“He’s ALWAYS writing things like this down.”)
State your name.
(“Nobody on MY side of the family had an imagination like his.”)
Annie Wilkes.
(“So vivid!”)
My name is Annie Wilkes.
He willed her to say more; she would not.
“Come on,” he muttered, his arm over his eyes—this was the way he thought best, the way he imagined best. His mother liked to tell Mrs. Mulvaney on the other side of the fence what a marvellous imagination he had, so vivid, and what wonderful little stories he was always writing down (except, of course, when she was calling him a sissy and a bawl-baby). “Come on,