Gerald’s Game

She tried to pull herself up and was dismayed to find the mutiny in her arms had gone further than she had suspected. Not only did they refuse to move her; they refused to move themselves. Her brain’s order was totally ignored. She looked up at them again, and they no longer looked like furniture to her. Now they looked like pallid cuts of meat hanging from butchers” hooks, and she let out a hoarse cry of fear and anger.

Never mind, though. The arms weren’t happening, at least for the time being, and being mad or afraid or both wasn’t going to change that a bit. How about the fingers? If she could curl them around the bedposts, then maybe…

… or maybe not. Her fingers seemed as useless as her arms. After nearly a full minute of effort, Jessie was rewarded only by a single numb twitch from her right thumb.

“Dear God,” she said in her grating dust-in-the-cracks voice. There was no anger in it now, only fear.

People died in accidents, of course-she supposed she had seen hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of “death-clips” on the TV news during her lifetime. Body-bags carried away from wrecked cars or winched out of the jungle in Medi-Vac slings, feet sticking out from beneath hastily spread blankets while buildings burned in the background, white-faced, stumble-voiced witnesses pointing to pools of sticky dark stuff in alleys or on barroom floors. She had seen the white-shrouded shape that had been John Belushi toted out of the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Los Angeles; she had seen aerialist Karl Wallenda lose his balance, fall heavily to the cable he had been trying to cross (it had been strung between two resort hotels, she seemed to remember), clutch it briefly, and then plunge to his death below. The news programs had played that one over and over as if obsessed with it. So she knew people died in accidents, of course she knew it, but until now she had somehow never realized there were people inside those people, people just like her, people who hadn’t had the slightest idea they would never eat another cheeseburger, watch another round of Final jeopardy (and please make sure your answer is in the form of a question), or call their best friends to say that penny poker on Thursday night or shopping on Saturday afternoon seemed like a great idea. No more beer, no more kisses, and your fantasy of making love in a hammock during a thunderstorm was never going to be fulfilled, because you were going to be too busy being dead. Any morning you rolled out of bed might be your last.

It’s a lot more than a case of might this morning, Jessie thought. I think now it’s a case of probably. The house-our nice quiet lakeside house-may very well be on the news Friday or Saturday night. It’ll he Doug Rowe wearing that white trenchcoat of his I hate so much and talking into his microphone and calling it “the house where prominent Portland lawyer Gerald Burlingame and his wife Jessie died.” Then he’ll send it back to the studio and Bill Green will do the sports, and that isn’t being morbid, Jessie, that isn’t the Goodwife moaning or Ruth ranting. It’s-

But Jessie knew. It was the truth. It was just a silly little accident, the kind of thing you shook your head over when you saw it reported in the paper at breakfast; you said, “Listen to this, honey,” and read the item to your husband while he ate his grapefruit. just a silly little accident, only this time it was happening to her. Her mind’s constant insistence that it was a mistake was understandable but irrelevant. There was no Complaint Department where she could explain that the handcuffs had been Gerald’s idea and so it was only fair that she should be let off. If the mistake was going to be rectified, she would have to be the one to do it.

Jessie cleared her throat, closed her eyes, and spoke to the ceiling. “God? Listen a minute, would You? I need some help here, I really do. I’m in a mess and I’m terrified. Please help me get out of this, okay? I… um… I pray in the name of Jesus Christ.” She struggled to amplify this prayer and could only come up with something Nora Callighan had taught her, a prayer which now seemed to be on the lips of every self-help huckster and dipshit guru in the world: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen.”

Nothing changed. She felt no serenity, no courage, most certainly no wisdom. She was still only a woman with dead arms and a dead husband, cuffed to the posts of this bed like a cur dog chained to a ringbolt and left to die unremarked and unlamented in a dusty back yard while his tosspot master serves thirty days in the country clink for driving without a license and under the influence.

“Oh please don’t let it hurt,” she said in a low, trembling voice. “if I’m going to die, God, please don’t let it hurt. I’m such a baby about pain.”

Thinking about dying at this point is probably a really had idea, toots. Ruth’s voice paused, then added: On second thought, strike the probably.

Okay, no argument-thinking about dying was a bad idea. So what did that leave?

Living. Ruth and Goodwife Burlingame said it at the same time.

All right, living. Which brought her around full circle to her arms again.

They’re asleep because I’ve been hanging on them all night. I’m still hanging on them. Getting the weight off is step one.

She tried to push herself backward and upward with her feet again, and felt a sudden weight of black panic when they at first also refused to move. She lost herself for a few moments then, and when she came back she was pistoning her legs rapidly up and down, pushing the coverlet, the sheets, and the mattress pad down to the foot of the bed. She was gasping for breath like a bicycleracer topping the last steep hill in a marathon race. Her butt, which had also gone to sleep, sang and zipped with wake-up needles.

Fear had gotten her fully awake, but it took the half-assed aerobics which accompanied her panic to kick her heart all the way up into passing gear. At last she began to feel tingles of sensation-bone-deep and as ominous as distant thunder-in her arms.

If nothing else works, toots, keep your mind on those last two or three sips of water. Keep re-minding yourself that you’re never going to get hold of that glass again unless your hands and arm are in good working order, let alone drink from it.

Jessie continued to push with her feet as the morning brightened. Sweat plastered her hair against her temples and streamed down her cheeks. She was aware- vaguely-that she was deepening her water-debt every moment she persisted in this strenuous activity, but she saw no choice.

Because there is none, toots-none at all.

Toots this and toots that, she thought distractedly. Would you please put a sock in it, you mouthy bitch?

At last her bottom began to slide up toward the head of the bed. Each time it moved, Jessie tensed her stomach muscles and did a mini sit-up. The angle made by her upper and lower body slowly began to approach ninety degrees. Her elbows began to bend, and as the drag of her weight began to leave her arms and shoulders, the tingles racing through her flesh increased. She didn’t stop moving her legs when she was finally sitting up but continued to pedal, wanting to keep her heart-rate up.

A drop of stinging sweat ran into her left eye. She flicked it away with an impatient shake of her head and went on pedaling. The tingles continued to increase, darting upward and downward from her elbows, and about five minutes after she’d reached her current slumped position (she looked like a gawky teenager draped over a movie theater seat), the first cramp struck. It felt like a blow from the dull side of a meat-cleaver.

Jessie threw her head back, sending a fine mist of perspiration flying from her head and hair, and shrieked. As she was drawing breath to repeat the cry, the second cramp struck. This one was much worse. It felt as if someone had dropped a glass-encrusted noose of cable around her left shoulder and then yanked it tight. She howled, her hands snapping shut into fists with such sudden savagery that two of her fingernails splintered away from the quick and began to bleed. Her eyes, sunk into brown hollows of puffy flesh, were squeezed tightly shut, but tears escaped nevertheless and went trickling down her cheeks, mixing with the tunnels of sweat from her hairline.

Keep pedaling, toots-don’t stop now.

“Don’t you call me toots!” Jessie screamed.

The stray dog had crept back to the rear stoop just before first light, and at the sound of her voice, its head jerked up. There was an almost comical expression of surprise on its face.

“Don’t you call me that, you bitch! You hateful hi-”

Another cramp, this one as sharp and sudden as a thunderbolt coronary, punched through her left triceps all the way to the armpit, and her words dissolved into a long, wavering scream of agony. Yet she kept on pedaling.

Somehow she kept on pedaling.

CHAPTER TWENTY

When the worst of the cramps had passed-at least she hoped the worst of them had-she took a breather, leaning back against the slatted mahogany crossboards which formed the head of the bed, her eyes closed and her breath gradually slowing down-first to a lope, then a trot, and finally to a walk. Thirst or no thirst, she felt surprisingly good. She supposed part of the reason lay in that old joke, the one with the punchline that went “It feels so good when I stop.” But she had been an athletic girl and an athletic woman until five years ago (well, all right, maybe it was closer to ten), and she could still recognize an endorphin rush when she was having one. Absurd, given the circumstances, but also very nice.

Maybe not so absurd, Jess. Maybe useful. Those endorphins clear the mind, which is one reason why people work better after they’ve taken some exercise.

And her mind was clear. The worst of her panic had blown away like industrial smogs before a strong wind, and she felt more than rational; she felt wholly sane again. She never would have believed it possible, and she found this evidence of the mind’s tireless adaptability and almost insectile determination to survive a little spooky. All of this and I haven’t even had my morning coffee, she thought.

The image of coffee-black, and in her favorite cup with the blue flowers around its middle-made her lick her lips. It also made her think of the Today program. If her interior clock was right, Today would be coming on just about now. Men and women all over America-unhandcuffed, for the most part-were sitting at kitchen tables, drinking juice and coffee, eating bagels and scrambled eggs (or maybe one of those cereals that are supposed to simultaneously soothe your heart and excite your bowels). They were watching Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric yuck it up with Joe Garagiola. A little later they would watch Willard Scott wish a couple of centenarians a happy day. There would be guests one who would talk about something called the prime rate and something else called the Fed, one who would show viewers how they could keep their pet Chows from chewing up their slippers, and one who would plug his latest movie-and none of them would realize that over in western Maine there was an accident in progress; that one of their more-or-less-loyal viewers was unable to tune in this morning because she was handcuffed to a bed less than twenty feet from her naked, dogchewed, flyblown husband.

She turned her head to the right and looked up at the glass Gerald had set down carelessly on his side of the shelf shortly before the festivities had commenced. Five years ago, she reflected, that glass probably wouldn’t have been there, but as Gerald’s nightly Scotch consumption increased, so had his daily intake of all other liquids-mostly water, but he also drank tons of diet soda and iced tea. For Gerald, at least, the phrase “drinking problem” seemed to have been no euphemism but the literal truth.

Well, she thought drearily, if he did have a drinking problem, it’s certainly cured now, isn’t it?

The glass was exactly where she had left it, of course; if her visitor of the previous night had not been a dream (Don’t be silly, of course it was a dream, the Goodwife said nervously), it must not have been thirsty.

I’m going to get that glass, Jessie thought. I’m also going to be extremely careful, in case there are more muscle-cramps. Any questions?

There weren’t, and this time getting the glass turned out to be a cakewalk, because it was a lot easier to reach; there was no need for the balancing act. She