These things were important, but he began to realize that something else was more important: the tide was going out again. He began to wait for the sound of her alarm clock upstairs. It would not go off for some long while yet, but it was time for him to start waiting for it to be time.
She was crazy but he needed her.
Oh I am in so much trouble he thought, and stared blindly up at the ceiling as the droplets of sweat began to gather on his forehead again.
9
The next morning she brought him more soup and told him she had read forty pages of what she called his “manuscript-book”. She told him she didn't think it was as good as his others.
“It's hard to follow. It keeps jumping back and forth in time.”
“Technique,” he said. He was somewhere between hurting and not hurting, and so was able to think a little better about what she was saying. “Technique, that's all it is. The subject… the subject dictates the form.” In some vague way he supposed that such tricks of the trade might interest, even fascinate her. God knew they had fascinated the attendees of the writers” workshops to whom he had sometimes lectured when he was younger. “The boy's mind, you see, is confused, and so - “
“Yes! He's very confused, and that makes him less interesting. Not uninteresting - I'm sure you couldn't create an uninteresting character - but less interesting. And the profanity! Every other word is that effword! It has - “ She ruminated, feeding him the soup automatically, wiping his mouth when he dribbled almost without looking, the way an experienced typist rarely looks at the keys; so he came to understand, effortlessly, that she had been a nurse. Not a doctor, oh no; doctors would not know when the dribble would come, or be able to forecast the course of each with such a nice exactitude.
If the forecaster in charge of that storm had been half as good at his job as Annie Wilkes is at hers, I would not be in this fucking jam, he thought bitterly.