“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.