Gerald’s Game

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Jessie awoke in the mild, milky light of dawn with the perplexing and ominous memory of the woman still filling her mind-the woman with her dark hair pulled back in that tight countrywoman’s bun, the woman who had been kneeling in the blackberry tangles with her slip puddled beside her, the woman who had been looking down through broken boards and smelling that awful bland smell. Jessie hadn’t thought of that woman in years, and now, fresh from her dream of 1963 that hadn’t been a dream but a recollection, it seemed to her that she had been granted some sort of supernatural vision on that day, a vision that had perhaps been caused by stress and then lost again for the same reason.

But it didn’t matter-not that, not what had happened with her father out on the deck, not what had happened later, when she had turned around to see him standing in the bedroom door. All that had happened a long time ago, and as for what was happening right now-

I’m in trouble. I think I’m in very serious trouble.

She lay back against the pillows and looked up at her suspended arms. She felt as dazed and helpless as a poisoned insect in a spider’s web, wanting no more than to be asleep again-dreamlessly this time, if possible-with her dead arms and dry throat in another universe.

No such luck.

There was a slow, somnolent buzzing sound somewhere close by. Her first thought was alarm clock. Her second, after two or three minutes of dozing with her eyes open, was smoke detector. That idea caused a brief, groundless burst of hope which brought her a little closer to real waking. She realized that what she was hearing didn’t really sound very much like a smoke detector at all. It sounded like… well… like…

It’s flies, toots, okay? The no-bullshit voice now sounded tired and wan. You’ve heard about the Boys of Summer, haven’t you? Well, these are the Flies of Autumn, and their version of the World Series is currently being played on Gerald Burlingame, the noted attorney and handcuff-fetishist.

“Jesus, I gotta get up,” she said in a croaking, husky voice she barely recognized as her own.

What the hell does that mean? she thought, and it was the answer-Not a goddam thing, thanks very much-that finished the job of bringing her back to full wakefulness. She didn’t want to be awake, but she had an idea that she had better accept the fact that she was and do as much with it as she could, while she could.

And you probably better start by waking up your hands and arms. If they will wake up, that is.

She looked at her right arm, then turned her head on the rusty armature of her neck (which was only partially asleep) and looked at her left. Jessie realized with sudden shock that she was looking at them in a completely new way-looking at them as she might have looked at pieces of fiirniture in a showroom window. They seemed to have no business with Jessie Burlingame at all, and she supposed there was nothing so odd about that, not really; they were, after all, utterly without feeling. Sensation only started a little below her armpits.

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.