'I'm all set,' he said...

'Annie, please — '
'And you won't make me mad anymore?'
'No. I won't make you mad anymore.'
'Because when I get mad I'm not really myself.' Her eyes dropped. She was looking down to where his hands were cupped tightly together over the sample boxes of Novril. She looked for a very long time.
'Paul?' she asked softly. 'Paul, why are you holding your hands like that?'
He began to cry. It was guilt he cried from, and he hated that most of all: in addition to everything else that this monstrous woman had done to him, she had made him feel guilty as well.
So he cried from guilt . . . but also from simple childish weariness.
He looked up at her, tears flowing down his cheeks, and played the absolute last card in his hand.
'I want my pills,' he said, 'and I want the urinal. I held it all the time you were gone, Annie, but I can't hold it much longer, and I don't want to wet myself again.'
She smiled softly, radiantly, and pushed his tumbled hair off his brow. 'You poor dear. Annie has put you through a lot, hasn't she? Too much! Mean old Annie! I'll get it right away.'


36

He wouldn't have dared put the pills under the rug even if he thought he had time to do so before she came back — the packages were small, but the bulges would still be all too obvious. As he heard her go into the downstairs bathroom, he took them, reached painfully around his body, and stuffed them into the back of his underpants. Sharp cardboard corners poked into the cleft of his buttocks.
She came back with the urinal, an old-fashioned tin device that looked absurdly like a blow-dryer, in one hand. She had two Novril capsules and a glass of water in the other.
Two more of those on top of the ones you took half an hour ago may drop you into a coma and then kill you, he thought, and a second voice answered at once: Fine with me.
He took the pills and swallowed them with water.
She held out the urinal. 'Do you need help?'
'I can do it,' he said.
She turned considerately away while he fumbled his penis into the cold tube and urinated. He happened to he looking at her when the hollow splashing sounds commenced, and he saw that she was smiling.
'All done?' she asked a few moments later.
'Yes.' He actually had needed to urinate quite badly — in all the excitement he hadn't had time to think of such things.
She took the urinal away from him and set it carefully on the floor. 'Now let's get you back in bed,' she said. 'You must be exhausted . . . and your legs must be singing grand opera.'
He nodded, although the truth was that he could not feel anything — this medication on top of what he'd already given himself was rolling him toward unconsciousness at an alarming rate, and he was beginning to see the room through gauzy layers of gray. He held onto one thought — she was going to lift him into bed, and when she did that she would have to be blind as well as numb not to notice that the back of his underwear happened to be stuffed with little boxes.
She got him over to the side of the bed.
'Just a minute longer, Paul, and you can take a snooze.'
'Annie, could you wait five minutes?' he managed. She looked at him, gaze narrowing slightly.
'I thought you were in a lot of pain, buster.'
'I am,' he said. 'It hurts . . . too much. My knee, mostly. Where you . . . uh, where you lost your temper. I'm not ready to be picked up. Could I have five minutes to . . . to . . . '
He knew what he wanted to say but it was drifting away from him. Drifting away and into the gray. He looked at her helplessly, knowing he was going to be caught after all.
'To let the medication work?' she asked, and he nodded gratefully.
'Of course. I'll just put a few things away and come right back.'
As soon as she was out of the room he was reaching behind him, bringing out the boxes and stuffing them under the mattress one by one. The layers of gauze kept thickening, moving steadily from gray toward black.
Get them as far under as you can, he thought blindly. Make sure you do that so if she changes the bed she won't pull them out with the ground sheet. Get them as far under as you . . . you . . .
He shoved the last under the mattress, then leaned back and looked up at the ceiling, where the W's danced drunkenly across the plaster.
Africa, he thought.
Now I must rinse, he thought.
Oh, I am in so much trouble here, he thought. Tracks, he thought. Did I leave tracks? Did I —
Paul Sheldon fell unconscious. When he woke up, fourteen hours had gone by and outside it wa snowing again.
Part II

Misery

Writing does not cause misery, it is born of misery.

— Montaigne
1

MISERY’S RETURN

By Paul Sheldon


For Annie Wilkes


CHAPTER 1 Although Ian Carmichael would not have moved from Little Dunthorpe for all the