Gerald’s Game

It was just one of those small plastic sample jars they send through the mail, Jessie. It must have slid off onto the floor.

It hadn’t, though. When Jessie had turned her head as far to the left as it would go without popping her neck out of joint, she was able to see a dark blue blob at the farthest edge of her vision.

It’s not really there, the hateful, doom-mongering part of her whispered. You think it’s there, perfectly understandable, but it’s really not. It’s just a hallucination, Jessie, just you seeing what most of your mind wants you to see, orders you to see. Not me, though; I’m a realist.

She looked again, straining a tiny bit farther to the left in spite of the pain. Instead of disappearing, the blue blob grew momentarily clearer. It was the sample jar, all right. There was a reading-lamp on Jessie’s side of the bed, and this hadn’t slid off onto the floor when she tilted the shelf because the base was fastened to the wood. A paperback copy of The Valley of Horses which had been lying on the shelf since mid-July had slid against the base of the lamp, and the jar of Nivea cream had slid against the book. Jessie realized it was possible that her life was going to be saved by a reading-lamp and a bunch of fictional cave-people with names like Ayla and Oda and Uba and Thonolan. It was more than amazing; it was surreal.

Even if it’s there, you’ll never he able to reach it, the doom-monger told her, but Jessie barely heard it. The thing was, she thought she could reach the jar. She was almost sure of it.

She turned her left hand within its restraint and reached slowly up to the shelf, moving with infinite care. It would not do to make a mistake now, to nudge the jar of Nivea cream out of reach along the shelf, or knock it backward against the wall. For all she knew, there might now be a gap between the shelf and the wall, a gap a small sample-sized jar could easily drop through. And if that happened, she was quite sure her mind would break. Yes. She would hear the jar hit the floor down there, landing among the mouse-turds and dust bunnies, and then her mind would just… well, break. So she had to be careful. And if she was, everything might yet be all right. Because…

Because maybe there is a God, she thought, and He doesn’t want me to die here on this bed like an animal in a leg-hold trap. It makes sense, when you stop to think about it. I picked that jar up off the shelf when the dog started chewing on Gerald, and then I saw it was too small and too light to do any damage even if I managed to bit the dog with it. Under those circumstances-revolted, confused, and scared out of my mind-the most natural thing in the world would have been to drop it before feeling around on the shelf for something heavier, Instead of doing that, I put it back on the shelf. Why would I or anyone else do such an illogical thing? God, that’s why. That’s the only answer I can think of, the only one that fits. God saved it for me because He knew Id need it.

She whispered her cuffed hand gently along the wood, trying to turn her splayed fingers into a radar dish. There must be no slip-ups. She understood that, questions of God or fate or providence aside, this was almost certainly going to be both her best chance and her last one. And as her fingers touched the smooth, curved surface of the jar, a snatch of talking blues occurred to her, a little dustbowl ditty probably composed by Woody Guthrie. She had first heard it sung by Tom Rush, back in her college days:

If you want to go to heaven

Let me tell you how to do it,

You gotta grease your feet

With a little mutton suet.

You just slide out of the devil’s hand

And ooze on over to the Promised Land,,

Take it easy,

Go greasy.

She slipped her fingers around the jar, ignoring the rusty pull of her shoulder muscles, moving with a slow, caressing care, and hooked the jar gently toward her. Now she knew how safecrackers felt when they were using nitro. Take it easy, she thought, go greasy. Had truer words ever been spoken in the whole history of the world?

“I don’t theeenk so, my deah,” she said in her snottiest Elizabeth Taylor Cat on a Hot Tin Roof voice. She did not hear herself do this, did not even realize she had spoken.

Already she could feel the blessed balm of relief stealing over her; it was as sweet as that first drink of fresh, cool water was going to be when she poured it over the rusty razorwire embedded in her throat. She was going to slide out of the devil’s hand and ooze on over to the Promised Land; absolutely no doubt about it. As long as she oozed carefully, that was. She had been tested; she had been tempered in the fire; now she would reap her reward. She had been a fool to ever doubt.

I think you better stop thinking that way, the Goodwife said in a worried tone. It will make you careless, and I have an idea that very few careless people ever manage to slide out of the devil’s hand.

Probably true, but she hadn’t the slightest intention of being careless. She had spent the last twenty-one hours in hell, and no one knew any better than she did how much was riding on this one. No one could know, not ever.

“I’ll be careful,” Jessie crooned. “I’ll think out every step. I promise I will. And then I… I’ll…”

She would what?

Why, she would go greasy, of course. Not just until she got out of the handcuffs, but from now on. Jessie suddenly heard herself talking to God again, and this time she did it with an easy fluency.

I want to make You a promise, she told God. I promise to go right on oozing. I’m going to start by having a big spring cleaning inside my head and throwing out all the broken stuff and the toys I outgrew a long time ago-all the stuff that isn’t doing anything hut taking up space and contributing to the fire-hazard, in other words. I might call Nora Callighan and ask her if she wants to help. I think I might call Carol Symonds, too… Carol Rittenhouse these days, of course. If there’s anyone in our old bunch who still knows where Ruth Neary is, it’ll be Carol. Listen to me, Lord-I don’t know if anyone ever gets to the Promised Land or not, but I promise to stay greasy and keep trying. Okay?

And she saw (almost as though it were an approving answer to her prayer) exactly how it was supposed to go. Getting the top off the jar would be the toughest part; it would require patience and great care, but she would be helped by its unusually small size. Plant the jar’s base on the palm of her left hand; brace the top with her fingers; use her thumb to do the actual unscrewing. It would help if the cap was loose, but she was pretty sure she would be able to get it off in any case.

You’re damn right I’ll get it off, toots, Jessie thought grimly.

The most dangerous moment would probably come when the cap actually started to turn. If it happened all at once and she wasn’t ready for it, the jar might shoot right out of her hand. Jessie voiced a croaky little laugh. “Fat chance,” she told the empty room. “Fat fucking chance, my deah.”

Jessie held the jar up, looking at it fixedly. It was hard to see through the translucent blue plastic, but the container appeared to be at least half full, maybe a little more. Once the cap was off, she would simply turn the jar over in her hand and let the goo run out onto her palm. When she’d gotten as much as she could, she would tilt her hand up to the vertical, letting the cream run down to her wrist. Most of it would pool between her flesh and the cuff. She would spread it by rotating her hands back and forth. She already knew where the vital spot was, anyway: the area just below the thumb. And when she was as greasy as she could get, she’d give one last pull, hard and steady. She would block out all pain and keep pulling until her hand slid through the cuff and she was free at last, free at last, Great God Almighty, free at last. She could do it. She knew she could.

“But carefully,” she murmured, letting the base of the jar settle onto her palm and spacing the pads of her fingers and her thumb at intervals around the cap. And-

“It’s loose!” she cried in a hoarse, trembling voice. “Oh my and pumpkin pie, it really is!”

She could hardly believe it-and the doom-monger buried somewhere deep inside refused to-but it was true. She could feel the cap rock a little on its spiral groove when she pressed the tips of her fingers gently up and down against it.

Carefully, Jess-oh so carefully. Just the way you saw it.

Yes. In her mind she now saw something else-saw herself, sitting at her desk in Portland, wearing her best black dress, the fashionably short one she had bought herself last spring as a present for sticking to her diet and losing ten pounds. Her hair, freshly washed and smelling of some sweet herbal shampoo instead of old sour sweat, was held in a simple gold clip. The top of the desk was flooded with friendly afternoon sunshine from the bow windows. She saw herself writing to The Nivea Corporation of America, or whoever it was that made Nivea face cream. Dear Sirs, she would write, I just had to let you know what a lifesaver your product really is…

When she applied pressure to the jar’s cap with her thumb, it began to turn smoothly, without a single jerk. All according to plan. Like a dream, she thought. Thank You, God. Thank You. Thank You so very, very, very m-

Sudden movement snagged the corner of her eye and her first thought was not that someone had found her and she was saved but that the space cowboy had come back to take her for itself before she could get away. Jessie voiced a shrill, startled cry. Her gaze leaped up from its intent focus-point on the jar. Her fingers clutched it in an involuntary spasm of fright and surprise.

It was the dog. The dog had returned for a late-morning snack and was standing in the doorway, checking out the bedroom before coming in. At the same instant Jessie realized this, she also realized that she had squeezed the small blue jar much too hard. It was squirting through her fingers like a freshly peeled grape.

“No!”

She clutched for it and almost reinstated her grip. Then it tumbled out of her hand, struck her hip, and bounced off the bed. There was a mild and stupid clacking sound as the “at struck the wooden floor. This was the very sound which she had believed, less than three minutes ago, would drive her mad. It did not, and now she discovered a newer, deeper terror: in spite of everything which had happened to her, she was still a very long way from insanity. It seemed to her that, no matter what horrors might lie ahead for her now that this last door to escape had been barred, she must face them sane.

“Why do you have to come in now, you bastard?” she asked the former Prince, and something in her grating, deadly voice made it pause and look at her with a caution all her screams and threats had not been able to inspire. “Why now, God damn you? Why now?”

The stray decided the bitchmaster was probably still harmless in spite of the sharp edges which now glinted in her voice, but it still kept a wary eye on her as it trotted over to its supply of meat. It was better to be safe. It had suffered greatly in the course of learning that simple lesson, and it wasn’t one it would forget easily, or soon-it was always better to be safe.

It gave her one final look with its bright and desperate eyes before dipping its head, seizing one of Gerald’s love-handles, and tearing a large portion of it away. Seeing this was bad, but for Jessie it was not the worst. The worst was the cloud of flies which rose from their feeding- and nesting-ground when the stray locked its teeth and yanked. Their somnolent buzz finished the “ob of demolishing some vital, survival-oriented part of her, some part that had to do with both hope and heart.

The dog stepped back as delicately as a dancer in a movie musical, its good ear cocked, the meat dangling from its jaws. Then it turned and trotted quickly from the room. The flies were beginning resettlement operations even before it was out of sight. Jessie leaned her head back against the mahogany crossboards and closed her eyes. She began praying again, but this time it was not escape she prayed for. This time she prayed that God would take her quickly and mercifully, before the sun went down and the white-faced stranger came back.