“Not until I finish,” he said, trying to enunciate each word carefully. This was difficult, because he felt as if someone had shot his mouth full of Novocain. He had seen her low before, but he'd seen nothing like this; he wondered if she'd ever had a low as low as this before. This was how depressives got just before shooting all the members of their families, themselves last; it was the psychotic despair of the woman who dresses her children in their best, takes them out for ice-cream, walks them down to the nearest bridge, lifts one into the crook of each arm, and jumps over the side. Depressives kill themselves. Psychotics, rocked in the poison cradles of their own egos, want to do everyone handy a favor and take them along.
I'm closer to death than I've ever been in my life, he thought, because she means it. The bitch means it.
“Misery?” she asked, almost as if she had never heard the word before - but there had been a momentary fugitive sparkle in her eyes, hadn't there? He thought so.
“Misery, yes.” He thought desperately about how he should go on. Every possible approach seemed mined. “I agree that the world is a pretty crappy place most of the time,” he said, and then added inanely: “Especially when it rains.” Oh, you idiot, stop babbling!
“I mean, I've been in a lot of pain these last few weeks, and - “
“Pain?” She looked at him with sallow, sunken contempt. “You don't know what pain is. You don't have the slightest idea, Paul.”
“No… I suppose not. Not compared to you.”
“That's right.”
“But - I want to finish this book. I want to see how it all turns out.” He paused. “And I'd like you to stick around and see, too. A person might as well not write a book at all, if there's no one around to read it. Do you get me?” He lay there looking at that terrible stone face, heart thumping.
“Annie? Do you get me?”
“Yes… “ She sighed. “I do want to know how it comes out. That's the only thing left in the world that I still want, I suppose.” Slowly, apparently unaware of what she was doing, she began to suck the rat's blood from her fingers. Paul jammed his teeth together and grimly told himself he” would not vomit, would not, would not. “It's like waiting for the end of one of those chapter-plays.” She looked around suddenly, the blood on her mouth like lipstick.
“Let me offer again, Paul. I can get my gun. I can end all of this for both of us. You are not a stupid man. You know I can never let you leave here. You've known that for some time, haven't you?” Don't let your eyes waver. If she sees your eyes waver, she'll; kill you right now.
“Yes. But it always ends, doesn't it, Annie? In the end we all swing.” A ghost of a smile at the corners of her mouth; she touched his face briefly, with some affection.
“I suppose you think of escape. So does a rat in a trap, I'm sure, in its way. But you're not going to, Paul. You might if this was one of your stories, but it's not. I can't let you leave here… but I could go with you.” And suddenly, for just a moment, he thought of saying: All right, Annie - go ahead. Let's just call it off. Then his need and will to live - and there was still quite a lot of each in him - rose up and clamored the momentary weakness away. Weakness was what it was. Weakness and cowardice. Fortunately or unfortunately, he did not have the crutch of mental illness to fall back on.
“Thank you,” he said, “but I want to finish what I've started.” She sighed and stood up. “All right. I suppose I must have known you would, because I see I brought you some pills, although I don't remember doing it.” She laughed - a small crazy titter which seemed to come from that slack face as if by ventriloquism. “I'll have to go away for awhile. If I don't, what you or I want won't matter. Because I do things. I have a place I go when I feel like this. A place in the hills. Did you ever read the Uncle Remus stories, Paul?” He nodded.
“Do you remember Brer Rabbit telling Brer Fox about his Laughing Place?”
“Yes.”
“That's what I call my place upcountry. My Laughing Place. Remember how I said I was coming back from Sidewinder when I found you?” He nodded.
“Well, that was a fib. I fibbed because I didn't know you well then. I was really coming back from my Laughing Place. It has a sign over the door that says that. ANNIE'S LAUGHING PLACE, it says. Sometimes I do laugh when I go there.
“But mostly I just scream.”
“How long will you be gone, Annie?” She was drifting dreamily toward the door now. “I can't tell. I've brought you pills. You'll be all right. Take two every six hours. Or six every four hours. Or all of them at once.” But what will I eat? he wanted to ask her, and didn't. He didn't want her attention to return to him - not at all. He wanted her gone. Being here with her was like being with the Angel of Death.
He lay stiffly in his bed for a long time, listening to her, movements, first upstairs, then on the stairs, then in the” kitchen, fully expecting her to change her mind and come back with the gun after all. He did not even relax when he heard the side door slam and lock, followed by splashing steps outside. The gun could just as easily be in the Cherokee.
Old Bessie's motor whirred and caught. Annie gunned it fiercely. A fan of headlights came on, illuminating a shining silver curtain of rain. The lights began to retreat down the driveway. They swung around, dimming, and then Annie was gone. This time she was not heading downhill, toward Sidewinder, but up into the high country.
“Going to her Laughing Place,” Paul croaked, and began to laugh himself. She had hers; he was already in his. The wild gales of mirth ended when he looked at the mangled body of the rat in the corner.
A thought struck him.
“Who said she didn't leave me anything to eat” he asked the room, and laughed even harder. In the empty house” Paul Sheldon's Laughing Place sounded like the padded cell of a madman.
16
Two hours later, Paul jimmied the bedroom's lock again and for the second time forced the wheelchair through the doorway that was almost too small. For the last time, he hoped. He had a pair of blankets in his lap. All the pills he had cached under the mattress were wrapped in a Kleenex tucked into his underwear. He meant to get out if he could rain or no rain; this was his chance and this time he meant to take it. Sidewinder was downhill and the road would be slippery in the rain and it was darker than a mineshaft; he meant to try it all the same. He hadn't lived the life of a hero or a saint, but he did not intend to die like an exotic bird in a zoo.
He vaguely remembered an evening he'd spent drinking Scotch with a gloomy playwright named Bernstein at the Lion's Head, down in the Village (and if he lived to see the Village again he would get down on whatever remained of his knees and kiss the grimy sidewalk of Christopher Street). At some point the conversation had turned to the Jews living in Germany during the uneasy four or five years before the Wehrmacht rolled into Poland and the festivities began in earnest. Paul remembered telling Bernstein, who had lost an aunt and a grandfather in the Holocaust, that he didn't understand why the Jews in Germany - hell, all over Europe but especially in Germany - hadn't gotten out while there was still time. They were not, by and large, stupid people, and many had had first-hand experience of such persecution. Surely they had seen what was coming. So why had they stayed?
Bernstein's answer had struck him as frivolous and cruel and incomprehensible: Most of them had pianos. We Jews are very partial to the piano. When you own a piano, it's harder to think about moving.
Now he understood. Yes. At first it was his broken legs, and crushed pelvis. Then, God help him, the book had taken off. In a crazy way he was even having fun with it. It would be easy - too easy - to blame everything on his broken bones, or the dope, when in fact so much of it had been the book. That and the droning passage of days with their simple convalescent pattern. Those things - but mostly the stupid goddam book - had been his piano. What would she do if he was gone when she came back from her Laughing Place? Burn the manuscript?