aside, a form of Annie-insurance, was enough. She would find them if she took it into her head to turn the mattress, he supposed, but that was a chance he was prepared to take.
There had been no trouble between them since the blow-up over the typewriter paper. His medication came regularly, and he took it. He wondered if she knew he was hooked on the stuff.
Hey, come on now, Paul, that’s a bit of a dramatization, isn’t it?
No, it wasn’t. Three nights ago, when he was sure she was upstairs, he had sneaked one of the sample boxes out and had read everything on the label, although he supposed he had read everything he needed when he saw what Novril’s principal ingredient was. Maybe you spelled relief R-O-L-A-I-D-S, but you spelled Novril C-O-D-E-I-N-E.
The fact is, you’re healing up, Paul. Below the knees your legs look like a four-year-old’s stick-drawing, but you are healing up. You could get by on aspirin or Empirin now. It’s not you that needs the Novril; you’re feeding it to the monkey.
He would have to cut down, have to duck some of the caps. Until he could do that, she would have him on a chain as well as in a wheelchair—a chain of Novril capsules.
Okay, I’ll duck one of the two capsules she gives me every other time she brings them. I’ll put it under my tongue when I swallow the other one, then stick it under my mattress with the other pills when she takes the drinking glass out. Only not today. I don’t feel ready to start today. I’ll start tomorrow.
Now in his mind he heard the voice of the Red Queen lecturing Alice: Down here we got our act clean yesterday, and we plan to start getting our act clean tomorrow, but we never clean up our act today.
Ho-ho, Paulie, you’re a real riot, the typewriter said in the tough gunsel’s voice he had made up for it.
“Us dirty birdies are never all that funny, but we never stop trying—you have to give us that,” he muttered.
Well, you better start thinking about all the dope you are taking Paul. You better start thinking about it very seriously.
He decided suddenly, on the spur of the moment, that he would start dodging some of the medication as soon as he got a first chapter that Annie liked on paper—a chapter which Annie decided wasn’t a cheat.
Part of him—the part that listened to even the best, fairest editorial suggestions with ill-grace—protested that the woman was crazy, that there was no way to tell what she might or might not accept; that anything he tried would be only a crapshoot.
But another part—a far more sensible part—disagreed. He would know the real stuff when he found it. The real stuff would make the crap he had given Annie to read last night, the crap it had taken him three days and false starts without number to write, look like a dog turd sitting next to a silver dollar. Hadn’t he known it was all wrong? It wasn’t like him to labor so painfully, nor to half-fill a wastebasket with random jottings or half-pages which ended with lines like “Misery turned to him, eyes shining, lips murmuring the magic words Oh you numb shithead THIS ISN’T WORKING AT ALL!!!” He had chalked it off to the pain and to being in a situation where he was not just writing for his supper but for his life. Those ideas had been nothing but plausible lies. The fact was, things had gone dry. The work had gone badly because he was cheating and he had known it himself.
Well, she saw through you, shit-for-brains, the typewriter said in its nasty, insolent voice. Didn’t she? So what are you going to do now?
He didn’t know, but he supposed he would have to do something, and in a hurry. He hadn’t cared for her mood this morning. He supposed he should count himself lucky that she hadn’t re-broken his legs with a baseball bat or given him a battery-acid manicure or something similar to indicate her displeasure with the way he had begun her book—such critical responses were always possible, given Annie’s unique view of the world. If he got out of this alive, he thought he might drop Christopher Hale a note. Hale reviewed books for the New York Times. The note would say: “Whenever my editor called me up and told me you were planning to review one of my books