Sheldon said, “and if you ever get excited while you’re making out at the drive-in, take a second between excited enough to want to and too excited to care and slip that on. Too many bastards in the world already, and I don’t want to see you going in the Army at sixteen.”
Now Paul went on: “I guess he told me to keep my eye on my wallet so many times that it’s stuck inside for good. If I offended you, I’m truly sorry.”
She relaxed. Smiled. The crevasse closed. Summer flowers nodded cheerfully once again. He thought of pushing his hand through that smile and encountering nothing but flexible darkness. “No offense taken. It’s in a safe place. Wait—I’ve got something for you.”
She left and returned with a steaming bowl of soup. There were vegetables floating in it. He was not able to eat much, but he ate more than he thought at first he could. She seemed pleased. It was while he ate the soup that she told him what had happened, and he remembered it all as she told him, and he supposed it was good to know how you happened to end up with your legs shattered, but the manner by which he was coming to this knowledge was disquieting—it was as if he was a character in a story or a play, a character whose history is not recounted like history but created like fiction.
She had gone into Sidewinder in the four-wheel drive to get feed for the livestock and a few groceries ... also to check out the paperbacks at Wilson’s Drug Center—that had been the Wednesday that was almost two weeks ago now, and the new paperbacks always came in on Tuesday.
“I was actually thinking of you,” she said, spooning soup into his mouth and then professionally wiping away a dribble from the corner with a napkin. “That’s what makes it such a remarkable coincidence, don’t you see? I was hoping Miser’s Child would finally be out in paperback, but no such luck.”
A storm had been on the way, she said, but until noon that day the weather forecasters had been confidently claiming it would veer south, toward New Mexico and the Sangre de Cristos.
“Yes,” he said, remembering as he said it: “They said it would turn. That’s why I went in the first place.” He tried to shift his legs. The result was an awful bolt of pain, and he groaned.
“Don’t do that,” she said. “If you get those legs of yours talking, Paul, they won’t shut up ... and I can’t give you any more pills for two hours. I’m giving you too much as it is.”
Why aren’t I in the hospital? This was clearly the question that wanted asking, but he wasn’t sure it was a question either of them wanted asked. Not yet, anyway.
“When I got to the feed store, Tony Roberts told me I better step on it if I was going to get back here before the storm hit, and I said—”
“How far are we from this town?” he asked.
“A ways,” she said vaguely, looking off toward the window. There was a queer interval of silence, and Paul was frightened by what he saw on her face, because what he saw was nothing; the black nothing of a crevasse folded into an alpine meadow, a blackness where no flowers grew and into which the drop might be long. It was the face of a woman who has come momentarily untethered from all of the vital positions and landmarks of her life, a woman who has forgotten not only the memory she was in the process of recounting but memory itself. He had once toured a mental asylum—this was years ago, when he had been researching Misery, the first of the four books which had been his main source of income over the last eight years—and he had seen this look ... or, more precisely, this unlook. The word which defined it was catatonia, but what frightened him had no such precise word—it was, rather, a vague comparison: in that moment he thought that her thoughts had become much as he had imagined her physical self: solid, fibrous, unchannelled, with no places of hiatus.
Then, slowly, her face cleared. Thoughts seemed to flow back into it. Then he realized flowing was just a tiny bit wrong. She wasn’t filling up, like a pond or a tidal pool; she was warming up. Yes ... she is warming up, like some small