Gerald’s Game

coming back from a student effort entitled “The Son of Noah’s Parrot'. I mean, it doesn’t always happen, but it usually does-I think that’s really what student- written-and-produced plays are for-so guys and girls can take off their clothesand make out in public.

She hadn’t thought of Ruth in years and now Ruth was inside her head, handing out little nuggets of wisdom just as she had in days of yore. Well, why not? Who was more qualified to advise the mentally confused and emotionally disturbed than Ruth Neary, who had gone on from the University of New Hampshire to three marriages, two suicide attempts, and four drug-and-alcohol rehabs? Good old Ruth, just another shining example of how well the erstwhile Love Generation was making the transition to middle age.

“Jesus, just what I need, Dear Abby from hell,” she said, and the thick, slurry quality of her voice frightened her more than the lack of feeling in her hands and lower arms.

She tried to yank herself back up to the mostly-sitting position she had managed just before Gerald’s little diving exhibition (Had that horrible egg-cracking sound been part of her dream? She prayed that it had been), and thoughts of Ruth were swallowed by a sudden burst of panic when she did not move at all. Those tingling spirals of sensation spun through her muscles again, but nothing else happened. Her arms just went on hanging above and slightly behind her, as moveless and feelingless as stovelengths of rock maple. The muzzy feeling in her head disappeared-panic beat the hell out of smelling salts, she was discovering-and her heart kicked into a higher gear, but that was all. A vivid image culled from some long-ago history text flickered behind her eyes for a moment: a circle of laughing, pointing people standing around a young woman with her head and hands in stocks. The woman was bent over like a hag in a fairy-tale and her hair hung in her face like a penitent’s shroud.

Her name is Goodwife Burlingame and she’s being punished for hurtingher husband, she thought. They’re punishing the Goodwife because theycan’t get hold of the one who’s really responsible for hurting him… theone who sounds like my old college roommate.

But was hurting the right word? Was it not likely that she was now sharing this bedroom with a dead man? Was it not also likely that, dog or no dog, the Notch Bay end of the lake was entirely deserted? That if she started to scream, she would be answered only by the loon? Only that and nothing more?

It was mostly that thought, with its strange echo of Poe’s “The Raven,” that brought her to a sudden realization of just what was going on here, what she had gotten herself into, and full-fledged, mindless terror suddenly fell on her. For twenty seconds or so (if asked how long that panic-attack lasted, she would have guessed at least three minutes and probably closer to five) she was totally in its grip. A thin rod of rational consciousness remained deep inside her, but it was helpless-only a dismayed spectator watching the woman writhe on the bed with her hair flying as she whipped her head from side to side in a gesture of negation, hearing her hoarse, frightened screams.

A deep, glassy pain at the base of her neck, just above the place where her left shoulder started, put a stop to it. It was a muscle-cramp, a bad one, what the jocks called a Charley horse. Moaning, Jessie let her head fall back against the separated mahogany slats which formed the head-board of the bed. The muscle she had strained was frozen in a strenuous flexed position, and it felt as hard as a rock. The fact that her exertion had forced pins and needles of feeling all the way down the forearms to the palms of her hands meant little next to that terrible pain, and she found that leaning back against the headboard was only putting more pressure on the over-strained muscle.

Moving instinctively, without any thought at all, Jessie planted her heels against the coverlet, raised her buttocks, and shoved with her feet. Her elbows bent and the pressure on her shoulders and upper arms eased. A moment later the Charley horse in her deltoid muscle began to let go. She let out her breath in a long, harsh sigh of relief.

The wind-it had progressed quite a bit beyond the breeze stage, she noticed-gusted outside, sighing through the pines on the slope between the house and the take. just off the kitchen (which was in another universe as far as Jessie was concerned), the door she and Gerald had neglected to pull shut banged against the swollen jamb; one time, two time, three time, four. These were the only sounds; only these and nothing more. The dog had quit barking, at least for the time being, and the chainsaw had quit roaring. Even the loon seemed to be on its coffee-break.

The image of a lake-loon taking a coffee-break, maybe floating in the water-cooler and chatting up a few of the lady loons, caused a dusty croaking sound in her throat. Under less unpleasant circumstances, that sound might have been termed a chuckle. It dissolved the last of her panic, leaving her still afraid but at least in charge of her thoughts and actions once more. It also left her with an unpleasant metallic taste on her tongue.

That’s adrenaline, toots, or whatever glandular secretion your bodydumps when you sprout claws and start climbing the walls, If anyoneever asks you what panic is, now you can tell them: an emotional blankspot that leaves you feeling as if you’ve been sucking on a mouthful ofpennies.

Her forearms were buzzing, and the tingles of sensation had at last spread into her fingers as well. Jessie rolled her hands open and closed several times, wincing as she did so. She could hear the faint sound of the handcuff chains rattling against the bedposts and took a moment to wonder if she and Gerald had been mad it certainly seemed so now, although she had no doubt that thousands of people all over the world played similar games each and every day. She had read that there were even sexual free spirits who hanged themselves in their closets and then beat off as the blood-supply to their brains slowly decreased to nothing. Such news only served to increase her belief that men were not so much gifted with penises as cursed with them.

But if it had been only a game (only that and nothing more), why had Gerald felt it necessary to buy real handcuffs? That was sort of an interesting question, wasn’t it?

Maybe, but I don’t think it’s the really important question just now,Jessie, do you? Ruth Neary asked from inside her head. It was really quite amazing how many different tracks the human mind could work on at the same time. On one of these she now found herself wondering what had become of Ruth, whom she had last seen ten years ago. It had been at least three years since Jessie had heard from her. The last communication had been a postcard showing a young man in an ornate red velvet suit with a ruff at the neck. The young man’s mouth was open, and his long tongue had been protruding suggestively. some day my prince will tongue, the card had said. New Age wit, Jessie remembered thinking at the time. The Victorians had Anthony Trollope; the Lost Generation had H. L. Mencken; we got stuck with dirty greeting cards and bumper-sticker witticisms like as a matter of fact, i do own the road.

The card had borne a blurry Arizona postmark and the information that Ruth had joined a lesbian commune. Jessie hadn’t been terribly surprised at the news; had even mused that perhaps her old friend, who could be wildly irritating and surprisingly, wistfully sweet (sometimes in the same breath) had finally found the hole on the great gameboard of life which had been drilled to accept her own oddly shaped peg.

She had put Ruth’s card in the top left drawer of her desk, the one where she kept various odd lots of correspondence which would probably never be answered, and that had been the last time she’d thought about her old roomie until now-Ruth Neary, who lusted to own a Harley-Davidson barn-burner but who had never been able to master any standard transmission, even the one on Jessie’s tame old Ford Pinto; Ruth, who often got lost on the UNH campus even after three years there; Ruth, who always cried when she forgot she was cooking something on the hotplate and burned it to a crisp. She did that last so often it was really a miracle she had never set their room-or the whole dorm-on fire. How odd that the confident no-bullshit voice in her head should turn out to be Ruth’s.

The dog began to bark again. It sounded no closer, but it sounded no farther away, either. Its owner wasn’t hunting birds, that was for sure; no hunter would have anything to do with such a canine blabbermouth. And if dog and master were out for a simple afternoon walk, how come the barks had been coming from the same place for the last five minutes or so?

Because you were right before, her mind whispered. There is nomaster. This voice wasn’t Ruth’s or Goodwife Burlingame’s, and it certainly wasn’t what she thought of as her own voice (whatever that was); it was very young and very scared. And, like Ruth’s voice, it was strangely familiar. It’s just a stray, out here on its own.It won’t help you, Jessie. It won’t help us.

But that was maybe too gloomy an assessment. After all, she didn’t know the dog was a stray, did she? Not for sure. And until she did, she refused to believe it. “If you don’t like it, sue me,” she said in a low, hoarse voice.

Meanwhile, there was the question of Gerald. In her panic and subsequent pain, he had kind of slipped her mind.

“Gerald?” Her voice still sounded dusty, not really there. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Gerald!”

Nothing. Zilch. No response at all.

That doesn’t mean he’s dead, though, so keep your fur on, woman-don’t go off on another rip.

She was keeping her fur on, thank you very much, and she had no intention whatever of going off on another rip. All the same, she felt a deep, welling dismay in her vitals, a feeling that was like some awful homesickness. Gerald’s lack of response didn’t mean he was dead, that was true, but it did mean he was unconscious, at the very least.

And probably dead, Ruth Neary added. I don’t want to piss onyour parade, Jess-really-but you don’t hear him breathing, do you? I mean, you usually can bear unconscious people breathing; they take thesebig snory, blubbery snatches of air, don’t they?

“How the fuck would I know?” she said, but that was stupid. She knew because she had been an enthusiastic candystriper for most of her high school years, and it didn’t take long for you to get a pretty good fix on what dead sounded like; it sounded like nothing at all. Ruth had known all about the time she had spent in Portland City Hospital-what Jessie herself had sometimes called The Bedpan Years-but this voice would have known it even if Ruth hadn’t, because this voice wasn’t Ruth; this voice was her. She had to keep reminding herself of that, because this voice was so weirdly its own self.

Like the voices you heard before, the young voice murmured. Thevoices you heard after the dark day.

But she didn’t want to think about that. Never wanted to think about that. Didn’t she have enough problems already?

But Ruth’s voice was right: unconscious people-especially those who’d gotten unconscious as the result of a good hard rap on the noggin-usually did snore. Which meant…

“He’s probably dead,” she said in her dusty voice. “Okay, yeah.”

She leaned to the left, moving carefully, mindful of the muscle which had cramped so painfully at the base of her neck on that side. She had not quite reached the farthest extent of the chain binding her right wrist when she saw one pink, chubby arm and half of one hand-the last two fingers, actually. It was his right hand; she knew this because there was no wedding ring on his third finger. She could see the white crescents of his nails. Gerald had always been very vain about his hands and his nails. She had never realized just how vain until right now. It was funny how little you saw, sometimes. How little you saw even after you thought you’d seen it all.

I suppose, but I’ll tell you one thing, sweetie: right now you can pulldown the shades, because I don’t want to see any more. No, not one thing more. But refusing to see was a luxury in which she could not, at least for the time being, indulge.

Continuing to move with exaggerated care, babying her neck and shoulder, Jessie slid as far to the left as the chain would allow. It wasn’t much-another two or three inches, tops-but it fattened the angle enough for her to see part of Gerald’s upper arm, part of his right shoulder, and a tiny bit of his head. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she could also see tiny beads of blood at the edges of his thinning hair. She supposed it was at least technically possible that this last was just imagination. She hoped so.

“Gerald?” she whispered. “Gerald, can you hear me? Please say you can.”

No answer. No movement. She could feel that deep homesick dismay again, welling and welling, like an unstanched wound.

“Gerald?” she whispered again.

Why are you whispering? He’s dead. The man who once surprised youwith a weekend trip to Aruba-Aruba,