Gerald’s Game

guess I can live with the voices of Ruth and the Goodwife if I have to… even with the assorted UFOs who chip in their two cents” worth every once in awhile… but I draw the line at doing a live interview with Bryant Gumbel while dressed in nothing but a pair of pee-stained panties. Even in my imagination I draw the line at that.

Just tell me one thing, Jessie, another voice said. No UFO here; it was the voice of Nora Callighan. One thing and we’ll consider the subject closed, at least for now and probably forever, Okay?

Jessie was silent, waiting, wary.

When you finally lost your temper yesterday afternoon-when you finally kicked out-who were you kicking at? Was it Gerald?

“Of course it was Ger-” she began, and then broke off as a single image, perfectly clear, filled her mind. It was the white string of drool which had been hanging from Gerald’s chin, She saw it elongate, saw it fall to her midriff just above the navel. Only a little spit, that was all, no big deal after all the years and all the passionate kisses with their mouths open and their tongues duelling; she and Gerald had swapped a fair amount of lubrication, and the only price they’d ever paid was a few shared colds.

No big deal, that was, until yesterday, when he’d refused to let her go when she wanted, needed, to be let go. No big deal until she’d smelled that flat sad mineral smell, the one she associated with the well-water at Dark Score, and with the lake itself on hot summer days… days like July 20th, 1963, for instance.

She had seen spit; she had thought spunk.

No, that’s not true, she thought, but she didn’t need to summon Ruth to play devil’s advocate this time; she knew it was true. It’s his goddam spunk-that had been her exact thought, and after that she had ceased thinking altogether, at least for awhile. Instead of thinking she bad launched that reflexive countering movement, driving one foot into his stomach and the other into his balls. Not spit but spunk; not some new revulsion at Gerard’s game but that old stinking horror suddenly surfacing like a seamonster.

Jessie glanced at the huddled, mutilated body of her husband. Tears pricked her eyes for a moment, and then the sensation passed. She had an idea that the Survival Department had decided tears were a luxury she could not afford, at least for the time being. Still, she was sorry-sorry Gerald was dead, yes, of course, but even sorrier she was here, in this situation.

Her eyes shifted to thin air a little above Gerald, and Jessie produced a shabby, pained smile.

“I guess that’s all I’ve got to say right now, Bryant. Give my best to Willard and Katie, and by the way-would you mind unlocking these handcuffs before you go? I’d really appreciate it.”

Bryant didn’t answer. Jessie wasn’t all that surprised.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

If you’re going to live through this experience, Jess, I suggest you stop rehashing the past and start deciding what you’re going to do with the future… starting with the next ten minutes or so. I don’t think that dying of thirst on this bed would he very pleasant, do you?

No, not very pleasant… and she thought that thirst would be far from the worst of it. Crucifixion had been in the back of her mind almost since she’d awakened, floating up and down like some nasty drowned thing which is just a little too waterlogged to come all the way to the surface. She had read an article about this charming old method of torture and execution for a college history class, and had been surprised to learn that the old nails-through-the-hands-and-feet trick was only the beginning. Like magazine subscriptions and pocket calculators, crucifixion was the gift that kept on giving.

The real hardships began with cramps and muscle-spasms. Jessie reluctantly recognized that the pains she had suffered so far, even the paralyzing Charley horse which had put an end to her first panic-attack, were only tweaks compared to the ones which were waiting. They would rack her arms, diaphragm, and abdomen, growing steadily worse, more frequent, and more widespread as the day passed. Numbness would eventually begin to creep into her extremities no matter how hard she worked to keep the blood flowing, but numbness would bring no relief; by then she would almost certainly have begun suffering excruciating chest and stomach cramps. There were no nails in her hands and feet and she was lying down instead of hanging from a cross at the side of the road like one of the defeated gladiators in Spartacus, but those variations might only draw out her agony.

So what are you going to do right now, while you’re still pretty much free of pain and able to think?

“Whatever I can,” she croaked, “so why don’t you just shut up and let me think about it for a minute?”

Go ahead-be my guest.

She would start with the most obvious solution and work her way down from there… if she had to. And what was the most obvious solution? The keys, of course. They were still lying on top of the bureau, where he had left them. Two keys, but both exactly the same. Gerald, who could be almost endearingly corny, had often referred to them as the Primary and the Backup (Jessie had clearly heard those capital letters in her husband’s voice).

Suppose, just for the sake of argument, she could somehow slide the bed across the room to the bureau. Would she be able to actually get hold of one of those keys and put it to use? Jessie reluctantly realized that there were two questions there, not one. She supposed she might be able to pick up one of the keys in her teeth, but then what? She still wouldn’t be able to get it into the lock; her experience with the water-glass suggested there was going to be a gap no matter how much she stretched.

Okay; scratch the keys. Descend to the next rung on the ladder of probability. What might that be?

She thought about it for almost five minutes without success, turning it around and around in her mind like the sides of Rubik’s Cube, pumping her arms up and down as she did so. At some point during her ruminations, her eyes wandered to the phone sitting on the low table by the east window. She had dismissed it earlier as being in another universe, but perhaps she had been too hasty. The table, after all, was closer than the bureau, and the phone was a lot bigger than a handcuff key.

If she could move the bed over to the telephone table, might she not be able to lift the receiver off the cradle with her foot? And if she could do that, maybe she could use her big toe to push the Operator button at the bottom, between the keys marked * and #. It sounded like some crazy sort of vaudeville act, but-

Push the button, wait, then start screaming my head off.

Yes, and half an hour later either the big blue Medcu van from Norway or the big orange one marked Castle Country Rescue would turn up and trundle her off to safety. A crazy idea, all right, but so was turning a magazine subscription card into a straw. It could work, crazy or not-that was the point. It certainly had more potential than somehow pushing the bed all the way across the room and then trying to find a way to get one of the keys into one of the handcuff locks. There was one big problem with the idea, however: she would somehow have to find a way to move the bed to the right, and that was a heavy proposition. She guessed that, with its mahogany head- and footboards, it had to weigh at least three hundred pounds, and that estimate might be conservative.

But you can at least try it, babe, and you might get a big surprise the floor’s been waxed since Labor Day, remember. If a stray dog with its ribs sticking out can move your husband, maybe you can move this bed. You haven’t got anything to lose by trying, do you?

A good point.

Jessie worked her legs toward the left side of the bed, shifting her back and shoulders patiently to the right as she did so. When she got as far as she was going to using that method, she pivoted on her left hip. Her feet went over the side… and suddenly her legs and torso were not just moving to the left but sliding to the left, like an avalanche trying to happen. A horrible cramp jig-jagged up her left side as her body stretched in ways it hadn’t been meant to even under the best of conditions. It felt as if someone had given her a fast harsh scrape with a hot poker.

The short chain between the right-hand set of cuffs yanked taut, and for a moment the news from her left side was blotted out by fresh agony pulsing out of her right arm and shoulder. It felt as if someone were trying to twist that arm completely off. Now I know what a turkey drumstick feels like, she thought.

Her left heel thumped onto the floor; her right hung three inches above it. Her body was twisted unnaturally to the left with her right arm cast strenuously back behind her in a kind of frozen wave. The taut chain gleamed heartlessly above its rubber sleeve in the early-morning sun.

Jessie was suddenly sure she was going to die in this position, with her left side and right arm screaming. She would have to lie here, gradually growing numb as her flagging heart lost the battle to pump blood to all parts of her stretched and twisted body. Panic overtook her again and she howled for help, forgetting there was no one in the neighborhood but one raggedy-ass stray with a bellyful of lawyer. She flailed frantically for the bedpost with her right hand, but she had slid just a little too far; the dark-stained mahogany was half an inch beyond the tips of her straining fingers.

“Help! Please! Help! Help!”

No answer. The only sounds in this silent sunny bedroom were her sounds: hoarse, screaming voice, rasping breath, pounding heart. No one here but her, and unless she was able to get back onto the bed, she was going to die like a woman hung on a meat-hook. Nor was the situation done getting worse: her butt was still sliding toward the edge of the bed, pulling her right arm steadily backward at an angle which was becoming more and more extreme.

Without thinking about it or planning it (unless the body, goaded by pain, sometimes thinks for itself), Jessie braced her bare left heel on the floor and shoved backward with all her might. It was the only brace-point remaining to her painfully slued body, and the maneuver worked. Her lower body arched, the chain between the cuffs binding her right hand grew slack, and she seized the bedpost with the panicky zeal of a drowning woman seizing a life-ring. She used it to yank herself backward, ignoring the scream of her back and biceps. When her feet were up again, she paddled frantically back from the edge, as if she had dipped into a swimming pool filled with baby sharks and had noticed Just in time to save her toes.

At last she regained her former slumped sitting position against the crossboards, arms outstretched, the small of her back resting on the sweat-soaked pillow in its badly wrinkled cotton case. She let her head loll back against the mahogany slats, breathing rapidly, her bare breasts oiled with sweat she couldn’t afford to lose. She closed her eyes and laughed weakly.

Say, that was pretty exciting, wasn’t it, Jessie? I think it’s the fastest and hardest your heart has heat since 1985, when you came within a Christmas party kiss or so of going to bed with Tommy Delguidace. Nothing to lose by trying, isn’t that what you thought? Well, now you know better.

Yes. And she knew something else, as well.

Oh? And what’s that, toots?

“I know that fucking phone is out of reach,” she said.

Yes indeed. When she had pushed off with her left heel just now, she had shoved with all the enthusiasm of total, ass-freezing panic. The bed hadn’t moved an iota, and now that she had a chance to think about it, she was glad it hadn’t. If it had jigged to the right, she would still be hanging off it. And even if she had been able to push it all the way across to the telephone table that way, why…

“I’d’ve been hanging over the wrong fucking side,” she said, half-laughing and half-sobbing. “Jesus, somebody shoot me.”

Doesn’t look good, one of the UFO voices-one she definitely could have done without-told her. In fact, it sort of looks like the Jessie Burlingame Show just got its cancellation notice.

“Pick another choice,” she said huskily. “I don’t like that one.”