Gerald’s Game

He raised his eyebrows.

“There’s still an excellent chance that I can find out for sure. And you’re going to help me, Brandon.”

He was starting to smile that less-than-pleasant smile again, the one I bet he doesn’t even know is in his repertoire, the one that says you can’t live with “em and you can’t shoot “em. “Oh? And how am I going to do that?”

“By taking me to see Joubert,” I said,

“Oh, no,” he said. “That’s the one thing I absolutely will not-can not-do, Jessie.”

I’ll spare you the hour of round-and-round which followed, a conversation that degenerated at one point to such intellectually profound statements as “You’re crazy, Jess” and “Quit trying to run my life, Brandon.” I thought of waving the cudgel of the press in front of him-it was the one thing I was almost sure would make him cave in-but in the end, I didn’t have to. All I had to do was cry. In a way it makes me feel unbelievably sleazy to write that, but in another way it does not; in another way I recognize it as just another symptom of what’s wrong between the fellers and the girls in this particular square-dance. He didn’t entirely believe I was serious until I started to cry, you see.

To make a long story at least a little shorter, he got on the telephone, made four or five quick calls, and then came back with the news that Joubert was going to be arraigned the following day in Cumberland County District Court on a number of subsidiary charges-mostly theft. He said that if I was really serious-and if I had a hat with a veil-he’d take me. I agreed at once, and although Brandon’s face said he believed he was making one of the biggest mistakes of his life, he stuck by his word.

Jessie paused again, and when she began to type once more she did so slowly, looking through the screen to yesterday, when last night’s six inches of snow had still been just a smooth white threat in the sky. She saw blue flashers on the road ahead, felt Brandon’s blue Beamer slowing down.

We got to the hearing late because there was an overturned trailer truck on I-295-that’s the city bypass. Brandon didn’t say so, but I know he was hoping we’d get there too late, that Joubert would already have been taken back to his cell at the end of the County Jail’s maximum-security wing, but the guard at the courthouse door said the hearing was still going on, although finishing up. As Brandon opened the door for me, he leaned close to my ear and murmured: “Put the veil down, Jessie, and keep it down.” I lowered it and Brandon put a hand on my waist and led me inside. The courtroom…

Jessie stopped, looking out the window into the darkening afternoon with eyes that were wide and gray and blank.

Remembering.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

The courtroom is illuminated by the sort of hanging glass globes Jessie associates with the five-and-dime stores of her youth, and it is as sleepy as a grammar school classroom at the end of a winter day. As she walks forward down the aisle, she is aware of two sensations-Brandon’s hand, still on the incurve of her waist, and the veil tickling against her cheeks like cobwebs. These two sensations combine to make her feel strangely bridal.

Two lawyers stand before the judge’s bench. The judge is leaning forward, looking down into their upturned faces, the three of them lost in some murmuring, technical conversation. To Jessie they look like a real-life re-creation of a Boz sketch from some Charles Dickens novel. The bailiff stands to the left, next to the American flag. Near him, the court stenographer is waiting for the current legal discussion, from which she has apparently been excluded, to be over. And, sitting at a long table on the far side of the rail which divides the room between the area set aside for the spectators and that which belongs to the combatants, is a skinny, impossibly tall figure clad in a bright-orange jailhouse overall. Next to him is a man in a suit, surely another lawyer. The man in the orange jumpsuit is hunched over a yellow legal pad, apparently writing something.

From a million miles away, Jessie feels Brandon Milheron’s hand press more insistently against her waist. “This is close enough,” he murmurs.

She moves away from him. He’s wrong; it’s not close enough. Brandon doesn’t have the slightest idea of what she’s thinking or feeling, but that’s okay, she knows. For the time being, all her voices have become one voice; she is basking in unexpected unanimity, and what she knows is this: if she doesn’t get closer to him now, if she doesn’t get just as close as she can, he will never be far enough away. He will always be in the closet, or just outside the window, or hiding under the bed at midnight, grinning his pallid, wrinkled grin-the one that shows the glimmers of gold far back in his mouth.

She steps quickly up the aisle toward the rail divider with the gauzy stuff of the veil touching her cheeks like tiny, concerned fingers. She can hear Brandon grumbling unhappily, but the sound is coming from at least ten light-years away. Closer (but still on the next continent), one of the lawyers standing before the bench is muttering, “… feel the State has been intransigent in this matter, your honor, and if you’ll just look at our citations most notably Castonguay vs. Hollis…”

Closer still, and now the bailiff glances up at her, suspicious for a moment, then relaxing as Jessie raises her veil and smiles at him. Still holding her eye with his own, the bailiff jerks his thumb toward Joubert and gives his head a minute shake, a gesture which she can, in her heightened emotional and perceptual state, read as easily as a tabloid headline: Stay away from the tiger, ma'am.Don’t get within reach of his claws. Then he relaxes even more as he sees Brandon catch up with her, a parfit gentle knight if ever there was one, but he clearly does not hear Brandon’s low growl: “Put the veil down, Jessie, or I will, goddammit!”

She not only refuses to do what he says, she refuses to even glance his way. She knows his threat is empty-he will not cause a scene in these hallowed surroundings and will do almost anything to avoid being dragged into one-but it would not matter even if it weren’t. She likes Brandon, she honestly does, but her days of doing things simply because it’s a man doing the telling are over. She is only peripherally aware that Brandon is hissing at her, that the judge is still conferring with the defense lawyer and the County Prosecutor, that the bailiff has lapsed back into his semi-coma, his face dreamy and distant. Jessie’s own face is frozen in the pleasant smile which disarmed the bailiff, but her heart is pounding furiously in her chest. She has now come within two steps of the rail-two short steps-and sees she was wrong about what Joubert is doing. He is not writing, after all. He is drawing. His picture shows a man with an erect penis roughly the size of a baseball bat. The man in the picture has his head down, and he is fellating himself. She can see the picture perfectly well, but she can still see only a small pale slice of the artist’s cheek and the dank clots of hair which dangle against it.

Jessie, you can’t-” Brandon begins, grabbing at her arm.

She snatches it away without looking back; all her attention is now fixed on Joubert. “Hey!” she stage-whispers at him. “Hey, you!”

Nothing, at least not yet. She is swept by a feeling of unreality. Can it be she, doing this? Can it really? And for that matter, is she doing it? No one seems to be noticing her, no one at all.

“Hey! Asshole!” Louder now, angry-still a whisper, but only just barely. “Pssst! Pssst! Hey, I’m talking to you!”

Now the judge looks up, frowning, so she is getting through to somebody, it seems. Brandon makes a groaning, despairing sound and clamps a hand on her shoulder. She would have yanked away from him if he had tried to pull her backward down the aisle, even if it meant ripping off the top half of her dress in the process, and perhaps Brandon knows this, because he only forces her to sit down on the empty bench just behind the defense table (all the benches are empty; this is technically a closed hearing), and at that moment, Raymond Andrew Joubert finally turns around.

His grotesque asteroid of a face, with its swollen, poochy lips, its knife-blade of a nose, and its bulging bulb of a forehead, is totally vacant, totally incurious… but it ii the face, she knows it at once, and the powerful feeling which fills her is mostly not horror. Mostly it is relief.

Then, all at once, Joubert’s face lights up. Color stains his narrow cheeks like a rash, and the red-rimmed eyes take on a hideous sparkle she has seen before. They stare at her now as they stared at her in the house on Kashwakamak Lake, with the exalted raptness of the irredeemable lunatic, and she is held, hypnotized, by the awful rise of recognition she sees in his eyes.

“Mr Milheron?” the judge is asking sharply from some other universe. “Mr Milheron, can you tell me what you’re doing here and who this woman is?”

Raymond Andrew Joubert is gone; this is the space cowboy, the specter of love. Its oversized lips wrinkle back once more, revealing its teeth-the stained, unlovely, and completely serviceable teeth of a wild animal. She sees the glimmer of gold like feral eyes far back in a cave. And slowly, oh so slowly, the nightmare comes to life and begins to move; slowly the nightmare begins to raise its freakishly long orange arms.

“Mr Milheron, I would like you and your uninvited guest to approach the bench, and immediately!”

The bailiff, alerted by the whiplash in that tone, snaps out of his daze. The stenographer looks around. Jessie thinks Brandon takes her arm, meaning to make her comply with the judge’s order, but she cannot say for sure, and it doesn’t matter in any case, because she cannot move; she might as well be planted waist-deep in a plug of cement. It is the eclipse again, of course; the total, final eclipse. After all these years, the stars are once again shining in the daytime. They are shining inside her head.

She sits there and watches as the grinning creature in the orange overall raises its misshapen arms, still holding her with its muddy, red-rimmed gaze. It raises its arms until its long, narrow hands hang in the air about a foot from each of its pale ears. The mimicry is horribly effective: she can almost see the bedposts as the thing in the orange jumpsuit first revolves those splayed, long-fingered hands… and then shakes them back and forth, as if they are being held by restraints which only he and the woman in the turned-back veil can see. The voice that comes out of its grinning mouth is a bizarre contrast to the gross overdevelopment of the face from which it drifts; it is a reedy, whining voice, the voice of an insane child.

“I don’t think you’re anyone!” Raymond Andrew Joubert pipes up in that childish, wavering voice. It cuts through the stale, overheated air of the courtroom like a bright blade. “You’re only made of moonlight!”

And then it begins to laugh. It shakes its hideous hands back and forth within manacles only the two of them can see, and it laughs… laughs… laughs.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Jessie reached for her cigarettes, but succeeded only in knocking them all over the floor. She turned to the keyboard and the VDT again, without making any attempt to pick them up.

I felt myself going insane, Ruth-and I mean I really felt it happening. Then I heard some voice inside me, Punkin, I think; Punkin who showed me how to get out of the handcuffs in the first place and got me moving when Goody tried to interfere-Goody with her wistful, counterfeit logic, Punkin, God bless her.

“Don’t you give it the satisfaction, Jessie!” she said. “And don’t you let Brandon pull you away until you do what you have to do!”

He was trying, too. He had both hands on my shoulders and was pulling on me as if I were a tug-of-war rope, and the judge was hammering away with his gavel and the bailiff was running over and I knew I only had that one last second to do something that would matter, that would make a difference, that would show me that no eclipse lasts forever, so I…

CHAPTER FORTY