Unsolicited Writings

And what was on her breath He began to believe she was dead. Having a
novel end exactly the way you thought it would when you started out would be like
shooting a Titan missile halfway around the world and having the payload drop
through a basketball hoop. He was haunted by
the specificity of those images which had lured him out of the cloud, and haunted
was exactly the right word: until the3 were written down they were shades which
would remain unlaid. He kept seeing the trooper
coming back to life — some sort of life — out in the barn, sitting up, the loose hay
with which Annie had covered him falling to either side of him and into his lap, his
face plowed into bloody senselessness by the mower's blade. He saw her
slip the hypo into the pocket of her skirt and then she sat down on the bed.
Most seemed to feel that the Dragon Lady should be jabbed to death with
hot forks, and most indicated they would be very willing to serve as a jabber.So
spoke the opportunist, the survivor. Annie came in at eleven.
He grinned at her, his number-one Who loves ya, baby?
An engine cranked over and then started up. Eddie started
slowly toward it, feet gritting in the plaster dustHe could.

When this prickly knitting was padlocked across the driveway, she reached into her
breast pocket, and took out some red pieces of cloth. Cut to the
outside reverse, showing us an irregular bead of solder where the door has been
sealed shut Stupid, sure — not a bit literary — but you could do thing, with it.
"Whatever he thought of it, Mr Rancho Grande was not going to give Annie the
satisfaction of seeing it — that neutral expression dropped over his face again like
the visor on a suit of armor. The assumption was that Annie had
said things during her original interrogation which were extremely suggestive,
perhaps even damning; her attorney had managed to keep the transcript of that
interrogation out of the trial record. "Shut up, stupid,»she hissed, and then
his hands were pinned behind him, and just as he heard the click of the handcuffs,
he also heard a car turning into the driveway.
The side of the mower squalled along the side of the cruiser and took off some
paint. probably meant he was in for a really bad
night, because his»pelvis had gotten pretty quiet over the last two months.
He laid the top sheet over his penis, hoping to create a
crude filter, and urinated through it into his cupped and shaking hands. It
seemed possible that Kushner might have stumbled across the growing, distilling, or
stockpiling of one of these substances quite by accident during his search for signs
of the tenderfoot writer. There was a photo
of a balding, bespectacled man who looked to Paul like the type of fellow who might
eat boogers in secret. He had managed about four feet before
realizing he was going to do nothing more useful than roll the wheelchair past the
door and into the far comer unless he could turn it. They had bought a house
in March, and that was not step you took if you felt that your marriage was falling
apart. Paul suddenly remembered other examples of
this odd mania: the way people had mobbed the Baltimore docks each month when the
packet bearing the new installment of Mr Dickens's Little Dorrit or Oliver Twist was
due (some had drowned, but this did not discourage the others); the old woman of a
hundred and five who had declared she would five until Mr Galsworthy finished The
Forsyte Saga — and who had died less than an hour after having the final page of the
final volume read to her; the young mountain climber hospitalized with a supposedly
fatal case of hypothermia whose friends had read The Lord of the Rings to him
nonstop, around the clock, until he came out of his coma; hundred s of other such
incidents. This woman's feelings, obsessed
though they might have been, had never evolved into Annie's paranoid fixation, but
Paul understood now that the wellspring had been the same.
Sometimes thoughts came, and sometimes there was pain, and sometimes,
dimly, he heard Annie's voice, sounding the way it had when the burning manuscript
in the barbecue had threatened to get out of control: "Drink this, Paul.
Paul thought this was akin to proving that meteors never
struck the earth by showing five days when not a single one had hit Farmer John's
north field, but he could understand the weight he argument would have carried with
the jury just the same. Her phone was dead and he somehow doubted
if Annie would send him a telegram or Flowers by Wire. When it was just a
game (and even if they gave you money for it, a game was still all it was), you
could think up some pretty wild things and make them seem believable — the
connection between Misery Chastain and Miss Charlotte Evelyn-Hyde, for instance
(they had turned out to be half-sisters; Misery would later discover her father down
there in Africa hanging out with the Bourka Bee-People).
She had splinted them — of course he had known that, felt the rigid ungiving shapes,
but until now he had not known what she had done it with.
He had gone to sleep in the monster-woman's house and had awakened in the hospital.
He heard low squeaking sounds and thought of her saying: They come into the
cellar when it rains. This one was of Oliver Reed as the
mad but silkily persuasive scientist in David Cronenberg's movie, The Brood.