slip shut again. The tide was in. The pilings were covered. The tide had finally come in and the next time it went out it might go out forever and so he was going to ride the waves while there were waves left to ride, he could think about sitting up later....
“Eat!” she said again, and this was followed by a recurrence of pain. It buzzed against the left side of his head, making him whine and try to pull away.
“Eat, Paul! You’ve got to come out of it enough to eat or . . .”
Zzzzzing! His earlobe. She was pinching it.
“‘Kay,” he muttered. “’Kay! Don’t yank it off, for God’s sake.”
He forced his eyes open. Each lid felt as if it had a cement block dangling from it. Immediately the spoon was in his mouth, dumping hot soup down his throat. He swallowed to keep from drowning.
Suddenly, out of nowhere—the most amazing come-back this announcer has ever seen, ladies and gentlemen!—I Got the Hungries came bursting into view. It was as if that first spoonful of soup had awakened his gut from a hypnotic trance. He took the rest as fast as she could spoon it into his mouth, seeming to grow more rather than less hungry as he slurped and swallowed.
He had a vague memory of her wheeling out the sinister, smoking barbecue and then wheeling in something which, in his drugged and fading state, he had thought might be a shopping cart. The idea had caused him to feel neither surprise nor wonder; he was visiting with Annie Wilkes, after all. Barbecues, shopping carts; maybe tomorrow a parking meter or a nuclear warhead. When you lived in the funhouse, the laff riot just never stopped.
He had drifted off, but now he realized that the shopping cart had been a folded-up wheelchair. He was sitting in it, his splinted legs stuck stiffly out in front of him, his pelvic area feeling uncomfortably swollen and not very happy with the new position.
She put me in it while I was conked out, he thought. Lifted me. Dead weight. Christ she must be strong.
“Finished!” she said. “I’m pleased to see how well you took that soup, Paul. I believe you are going to mend. We will not say ‘Good as new’—alas, no—but if we don’t have any more of these ... these contretemps ... I believe you’ll mend just fine. Now I’m going to change your nasty old bed, and when that’s done I’m going to change nasty old you, and then, if you’re not having too much pain and still feel hungry, I am going to let you have some toast.”
“Thank you, Annie,” he said humbly, and thought: Your throat. If I can, I’ll give you a chance to lick your lips and say ‘Goodness!’ But only once, Annie.
Only once.
21
Four hours later he was back in bed and he would have burned all his books for even a single Novril. Sitting hadn’t bothered him a bit while he was doing it—not with enough shit in his bloodstream to have put half the Prussian Army to sleep—but now it felt as if a swarm of bees had been loosed in the lower half of his body.
He screamed very loudly—the food must have done something for him, because he could not remember being able to scream so loudly since he had emerged from the dark cloud.
He sensed her standing just outside the bedroom door in the hallway for a long time before she actually came in, immobile, turned off, unplugged, gazing blankly at no more than the doorknob or perhaps the pattern of lines on her own hands.
“Here.” She gave him his medication—two capsules this time.
He swallowed them, holding her wrist to steady the glass.
“I bought you two presents in town,” she said, getting up.
“Did you?” he croaked.
She pointed at the wheelchair which brooded in the corner with its steel leg-rests stuck stiffly out.
“I’ll show you the other one tomorrow. Now get some sleep, Paul.”
22
But for a long time no sleep came. He floated on the dope and thought about the situation he was in. It seemed a little easier now. It was easier to think about than the book which he had created and then uncreated.
Things ... isolated things like pieces of cloth which may be pieced together to make a quilt.
They were miles from the neighbors who, Annie said, didn’t like her. What was the name? Boynton. No, Roydman. That was it. Roydman. And how far from town? Not too