Which Lie Did I Tell? Read Online Free Page B

very, very serious. Everything suggests an operation of major import.
    CUT TO:
    Long shot that takes in all the people, the nurses, the anesthetists, the doctors. Everyone is seen but the patient.
    A drum begins.
    Slowly, with an awesome steadiness, the camera starts to move in closer to the operating table.
    The drum beats louder.
    A nurse scurries around the table.
    Louder on the drum; louder, but no faster.
    DR. STRAUSS is perspiring heavily and again a gloved hand dabs at his skin.
    Relentlessly, the camera moves on, wedging in between the shoulders of two nurses.
    We still do not see the patient.
    Slowly the camera tilts up, up toward the great circular light high above the operating table. For a moment, the light is almost blinding.
    The drum stops.
    The camera swoops down to the table, revealing that the patient is ALGERNON.
    ALGERNON is a white mouse.
    A VERY FAST FADE-OUT .
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The Princess Bride
[1987]
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    Here is how the novel The Princess Bride happened.
    I loved telling stories to my daughters. When they were small, I would go into their room and stories would just be there. Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t think much of what I do is very terrific, but, my God, I was wonderful those early evenings. Stuff just came. I knew that because the girls would sneak out and tell their mother and she would say to me, “Write it down, write it down,” and I told her I didn’t need to, I was on such a hot streak I knew I’d remember.
    All gone, of course, and of all the stuff I’ve done over almost forty-five years of storytelling, more than anything I wish I had those moments back. Doesn’t matter, really. Woulda shoulda coulda … At any rate, I was on my way to Magic Town around 1970, and I said to them both, to Jenny, then seven, and Susanna, then four, “I’ll write you a story, what do you most want it to be about?” And one of them said “princesses” and the other one said “brides.”
    “Then that will be the title,” I told them. And so it has remained.
    The first snippets are gone. A couple of pages maybe, maybe a little more, sent from the Beverly Hills Hotel to home. Since it was to be a kid’s saga, the early names were silly names: Buttercup, Humperdinck. I’m sure those pages weren’t much. I have never been able to write in Southern California. (My fault, of course. I find it just too, well, wun derful. There was a time, before the recent madness, when people actually thought of L.A. as being that, wun derful.
    Wandering now, I suppose nothing surprises me more than Los Angeles’s becoming a place people leave. For the first half-century of my life, it was, he says in as cornball a way as he can muster, the American dream. Walls closing in? Just drive to the western ocean, you’ll be fine. For me, abrasiveness helps, so I have always written in New York.
    Anyway, the early pages disappeared. As did the notion of writing something for my ladies. At least consciously. (I don’t understand thecreative process. Actually, I make more than a concerted effort not to understand it. I don’t know what it is or how it works but I am terrified that one green morning it will decide to not work anymore, so I have always given it as wide a bypass as possible.)
    There is a story of Olivier after a particularly remarkable performance of Othello. Maggie Smith, his Desdemona, knocked on his dressing room door as she was on her way out of the theater and saw him staring at the wall, holding a tumbler of whiskey. She told him his work that night was magic. And he said, in, I suspect, tears and despair, “I know it was … and I don’t know how I did it.”
    This relates to me in but one way: The Princess Bride is the only novel of mine I really like. And I don’t know how I did it.
    I remember doing the first chapter about how Buttercup became the most beautiful woman in the world. And the second chapter, which is a rather unflattering intro of Prince Humperdinck, the animal