Gerald’s Game

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The next four hours were the worst of Jessie Burlingame’s life. The cramps in her muscles grew steadily more frequent and more intense, but it wasn’t intramuscular pain that made the hours between eleven and three so terrible; it was her mind’s stubborn, gruesome refusal to relinquish its hold on lucidity and go into the dark. She had read Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” in junior high school, but not until now had she grasped the real horror of its opening lines: Nervous! True, very nervous I am and have been, but why will you say I am mad?

Madness would be a relief, but madness would not come. Neither would sleep. Death might beat them both, and dark certainly would. She could only lie on the bed, existing in a dull olive-drab reality shot through with occasional gaudy blasts of pain as her muscles cramped up. The cramps mattered, and so did her horrible, tiresome sanity, but little else seemed to certainly the world outside this room had ceased to hold any real meaning for her. In fact, she came strongly to believe that there was no world outside this room, that all the people who had once filled it had gone back to some existential Central Casting office, and all the scenery had been packed away like stage-flats after one of Ruth’s beloved college drama society productions.

Time was a cold sea through which her consciousness forged like a waddling, graceless icebreaker. Voices came and went like phantoms. Most spoke inside her head, but for awhile Nora Callighan talked to her from the bathroom, and at another point Jessie had a conversation with her mother, who seemed to be lurking in the hall. Her mother had come to tell her that Jessie never would have gotten into a mess like this if she had been better about picking up her clothes. “If I had a nickel for every slip I ever fished out of the corner and turned rightside-out,” her mother said, “I could buy the Cleveland Gas Works.” This had been a favorite saying of her mother’s, and Jessie realized now that none of them had ever asked her why she would want the Cleveland Gas Works.

She continued to exercise weakly, pedaling with her feet and pumping her arms up and down as far as the handcuffs-and her own flagging strength-would allow. She no longer did this to keep her body ready for escape when the right option finally occurred to her, because she had finally come to understand, in her heart and in her head, that there were no options left. The jar of face cream had been the last. She was exercising now only because the movement seemed to alleviate the cramps a little.

In spite of the exercise, she could feel coldness creeping into her feet and hands, settling onto her skin like a skim of ice and then working its way in. This was nothing like the gone-to-sleep feeling with which she had awakened this morning; it was more like the frostbite she had suffered during a long afternoon of cross-country skiing as a teenager-sinister gray spots on the back of one hand and on the flesh of her calf where her legging hadn’t quite covered, dead spots that seemed impervious to even the baking heat of the fireplace. She supposed this numbness would finally overwhelm the cramps and that, in the end, her death might turn out to be quite merciful after all-like going to sleep in a snowbank-but it was moving much too slowly.

Time passed but it wasn’t time; it was just a relentless, unchanging flow of information passing from her sleepless senses to her eerily lucid mind. There was only the bedroom, the scenery outside (the last few stage-flats, yet to be packed away by the propmaster in charge of this shitty little production), the buzz of flies turning Gerald into a late-season incubator, and the slow movement of the shadows along the floor as the sun made its way across a painted autumn sky. Every now and then a cramp would stab into one of her armpits like an icepick or pound a thick steel nail into her right side. As the afternoon wore endlessly along, the first cramps began to strike into her belly, where all hunger pangs had now ceased, and into the overstressed tendons of her diaphragm. These latter were the worst, freezing the sheath of muscles in her chest and locking down her lungs. She stared up at the reflected water-ripples on the ceiling with agonized, bulging eyes as each one struck, arms and legs trembling with effort as she tried to continue breathing until the cramp eased. It was like being buried up to the neck in cold wet cement.

Hunger passed but thirst did not, and as that endless day turned about her, she came to realize that simple thirst (only that and nothing more) might accomplish what the increasing levels of pain and even the fact of her own oncoming death hadn’t been able to: it might drive her mad. It wasn’t just her throat and mouth now; every part of her body cried out for water. Even her eyeballs were thirsty, and the sight of the ripples dancing on the ceiling to the left of the skylight made her groan softly.

With these very real perils closing in on her, the terror she had felt of the space cowboy should have waned or disappeared entirely, but as the afternoon drew on, she found the white-faced stranger weighing more heavily on her mind rather than less. She saw its shape constantly, standing just beyond the small circle of light which enclosed her reduced consciousness, and although she could make out little more than its general shape (thin to the point of emaciation), she found she could see the sunken sickly grin that curved its mouth with greater and greater clarity as the sun dragged its harrow of hours into the west. In her ear she heard the dusty murmur of the bones and jewels as its hand stirred them in its old-fashioned case.

It would come for her. When it was dark it would come. The dead cowboy, the outsider, the specter of love.

You did see it, Jessie. It was Death, and you did see it, as people who die in the lonely places often do, Of course they do; it’s stamped on their twisted faces, and you can read it in their bulging eyes. It was Old Cowboy Death, and tonight when the sun goes down, he’ll be back for you.

Shortly after three, the wind, which had been calm all day, began to pick up. The back door began to bang restlessly against the jamb again. Not long after, the chainsaw quit and she could hear the faint sound of wind-driven wavelets slapping against the rocks along the shore. The loon did not raise its voice; perhaps it had decided the time had come to fly south, or at least relocate to a part of the lake where the screaming lady could not be heard.

It’s just me now. Until the other one gets here, at least.

She no longer made any effort to believe her dark visitor was only imagination; things had gone much too far for that.

A fresh cramp sank long, bitter teeth into her left armpit, and she pulled her cracked lips back in a grimace. It was like having your heart poked with the tines of a barbecue fork. Then the muscles just below her breasts tightened and the bundle of nerves in her solar plexus seemed to ignite like a pile of dry sticks. This pain was new, and it was enormous-far beyond anything she had experienced thus far. It bent her backward like a greenwood stick, torso twisting from side to side, knees snapping open and shut. Her hair flew in clots and clumps. She tried to scream and couldn’t. For a moment she was sure this was it, the end of the line. One final convulsion, as powerful as six sticks of dynamite planted in a granite ledge, and out you go, Jessie; cashier’s on your right.

But this one passed, too.

She relaxed slowly, panting, her head turned up toward the ceiling. For the moment, at least, the dancing reflections up there didn’t torment her; all her concentration was focused on that fiery bundle of nerves between and just below her breasts, waiting to see if the pain was really going to go away or if it would flare up again instead. It went… but grudgingly, with a promise to be back soon. Jessie closed her eyes, praying for sleep. Even a short release from the long and tiresome job of dying would be welcome at this point.

Sleep didn’t come, but Punkin, the girl from the stocks, did. She was free as a bird now, sexual enticement or no sexual enticement, walking barefooted across the town common of whatever Puritan village it was that she inhabited, and she was gloriously alone-there was no need to walk with her eyes decorously cast down so that some passing boy might not catch her gaze with a wink or a grin. The grass was a deep velvety green, and far away, on top of the next hill (this has to he the world’s biggest town common, Jessie thought), a flock of sheep was grazing. The bell Jessie had heard before was sending its flat, monotonous peals across the darkening day.

Punkin was wearing a blue flannel nightie with a big yellow exclamation point on the front-hardly Puritan dress, although it was certainly modest enough, covering her from neck to feet. Jessie knew the garment well, and was delighted to see it again. Between the ages of ten and twelve, when she had finally been persuaded to donate it to the rag-basket, she must have worn that silly thing to two dozen slumber parties.

Punkin’s hair, which had obscured her face completely while the neck-stock held her head down, was now tied back with a velvet bow of darkest midnight blue. The girl looked lovely and deeply happy, which didn’t surprise Jessie at all. The girl had, after all, escaped her bonds; she was free. Jessie felt no jealousy of her on this account, but she did have a strong desire-almost a need-to tell her that she must do more than simply enjoy her freedom; she must treasure it and guard it and use it.

I went to sleep after all. I must have, because this has got to he a dream.

Another cramp, this one not quite as terrible as the one which had set fire to her solar plexus, froze the muscles in her right thigh and set her right foot wagging foolishly in the air. She opened her eyes and saw the bedroom, where the light had once again grown long and slanting. It was not quite what the French call l'heure bleue, but that time was now fast approaching. She heard the banging door, smelled her sweat and urine and sour, exhausted breath. All was exactly as it had been. Time had moved forward, but it had not leaped forward, as it so often seems to have done when one awakens from an unplanned doze. Her arms were a little colder, she thought, but no more or less numb than they had been. She hadn’t been asleep and she hadn’t been dreaming… but she had been doing something.

I can do it again, too, she thought, and closed her eyes. She was back on the improbably huge town common the moment she did. The girl with the big yellow exclamation point sprouting UP between her small breasts was looking at her gravely and sweetly.

There’s one thing you haven’t tried, Jessie.

That’s not true, she told Punkin. I’ve tried everything, believe me. And you know what? I think that if I hadn’t dropped that damned jar of face cream when the dog scared me, I might have been able to squeak out of the left cuff, It was bad luck, that dog coming in when it did. Or had karma. Bad something, anyway.

The girl drifted closer, the grass whispering beneath her bare feet.

Not the left cuff, Jessie. It’s the right one you can squeak out of. It’s an outside shot, I’ll grant you that, hut it’s possible. The real question now, I think, is whether you really want to live.

Of course I want to live!

Closer still. Those eyes-a smoke color that tried to be blue and didn’t quite make it-now seemed to peer right through her skin and into the heart of her.

Do you? I wonder.

What are you, crazy? Do you think I want to still be here, handcuffed to this bed, when-

Jessie’s eyes-still trying to be blue after all these years and still not quite making it-slowly opened again. They gazed around the room with an expression of terrified solemnity. Saw her husband, now lying in an impossibly twisted position, glaring UP at the ceiling.

“I don’t want to still be handcuffed to this bed when it gets dark and the boogeyman comes back,” she told the empty room.

Close your eyes, Jessie.

She closed them. Punkin stood there in her old flannel nightie, gazing at her calmly, and Jessie could now see the other girl as well-the fat one with the pimply skin. The fat girl hadn’t been as lucky as Punkin; there had been no escape for her, unless death itself was an escape in certain cases-a hypothesis Jessie had become quite willing to accept. The fat girl had either choked to death or suffered some sort of seizure. Her face was the purpleblack color of summer thunderheads. One eye bulged from its socket; the other had burst like a squeezed grape. Her tongue, bloody where she had bitten it repeatedly in her last extremity, protruded between her lips.

Jessie turned back to Punkin with a shudder.

I don’t want to end up like that. Whatever else may be wrong with me, I don’t want to end up like that. How did you get out?

Slid out, Punkin replied promptly. Slid out of the devil’s hand; oozed on over to the Promised Land.

Jessie felt a throb of anger through her exhaustion.

Haven’t you heard a single word I’ve said? I dropped the goddam jar of Nivea! The dog came in and startled me and I dropped it! How can I-

Also, I remembered the eclipse. Punkin spoke abruptly, with the air of one who has become impatient with some complex but meaningless social formula; you curtsey, I bow, we all join hands. That’s how I really got out; I remembered the eclipse and what happened on the deck while the eclipse was going on, And you’ll have to remember, too. I think it’s the only chance you have to get free. You can’t run away anymore, Jessie. You have to turn and face the truth.

That again? Only that? Jessie felt a deep wave of exhaustion and disappointment. For a moment or two, hope had almost returned, but there was nothing here for her. Nothing at all.

You don’t understand, she told Punkin. We’ve been down this path before-all the way down. Yes, I suppose that what my father did to me then might have something to do with what’s happening to me now, I suppose that’s at least possible, but why go through all that pain again when there’s so much other pain to go through before God finally gets tired of torturing me and decides to pull down the blinds?

There was no answer. The little girl in the blue nightie, the little girl who had once been her, was gone. Now there was only darkness behind Jessie’s closed lids, like the darkness of a movie screen after the show has ended, so she opened her eyes again and took a long look around the room where she was going to die. She looked from the bathroom door to the framed batik butterfly to the bureau to her husband’s body, lying beneath its noxious throw-rug of sluggish autumn flies.

“Quit it, Jess. Go back to the eclipse.”

Her eyes widened. That actually did sound real-a real voice coming not from the bathroom or the hall or from inside her own head, but seeming to seep out of the very air itself.

“Punkin?” Her voice was only a croak now. She tried to sit up a little more, but another ferocious cramp threatened her midsection and she lay back against the headboard at once, waiting for it to pass. “Punkin, is that you? Is it, dear?”

For a moment she thought she heard something, that the voice said something else, but if it did, she was unable to make out the words. And then it was entirely gone.

Go back to the eclipse, Jessie.

“No answers there,” she muttered. “Nothing there but pain and stupidity and… “And what? What else?

The old Adam. The phrase rose naturally into her mind, lifted from some sermon she must have heard as a bored child sitting between her mother and father, kicking her feet in order to watch the light failing through the colored church windows shift and glimmer on her white patent-leather shoes. just some phrase that had caught on sticky flypaper in her subconscious and stayed with her. The old Adam-and maybe that was all it was, as simple as that. A father who had half-consciously arranged to be alone with his pretty, vivacious young daughter, thinking all the while There won’t be any harm in it, no harm, not a bit of harm. Then the eclipse had started, and she had sat on his lap in the sundress that was both too tight and too short-the sundress he himself had asked her to wear-and what had happened had happened. Just a brief, goatish interlude that had shamed and embarrassed them both. He had squirted his squirt-that was the long and short of it (and if there was some sort of pun buried in there, she didn’t give a shit about it); had shot it all over the back of her underwear, in fact-definitely not approved behavior for Daddies and definitely not a situation she had ever seen explored on The Brady Bunch, but…

But let’s face it, Jessie thought. I got off with barely a scratch compared to what could have happened… what does happen every day. It doesn’t just happen in places like Peyton Place and along Tobacco Road, either. My father wasn’t the first college-educated, upper-middle-class man to ever get a hard-on for his daughter, and I wasn’t the first daughter to ever find a wet spot on the back of her underpants. That’s not to say it was right, or even excusable; it’s just to say that it’s over, and it could have been a lot worse.

Yes. And right now forgetting all that seemed a much better idea than going through it yet again, no matter what Punkin had to say on the subject. Best to let it fade into the general darkness which came with any solar eclipse. She still had a lot of dying to do in this stinking, fly-filled bedroom.

She closed her eyes and immediately the scent of her father’s cologne seemed to drift into her nose. That, and the smell of his light, nervous sweat. The feel of the hard thing against her bottom. His little gasp as she squirmed on his lap, trying to get comfortable. Feeling his hand as it settled lightly on her breast. Wondering if he was all right. He had begun to breathe so fast. Marvin Gaye on the radio: “I love too hard, my friends sometimes say, but I believe I believe… that a woman should be loved that way…”

Do you love me, Punkin?

Yes, sure-

Then don’t worry about anything. I’d never hurt you. Now his other hand was moving up her bare leg, pushing the sundress ahead of it, bunching it in her lap. I want…

“'I want to be sweet to you,"” Jessie muttered, shifting a little against the headboard. Her face was sallow and drawn. “That’s what he said. Good Christ, he actually said that.”

“Everybody knows… especially you girls… that a love can be sad, well my love is twice as bad…”

I’m not sure I want to, Daddy… I’m afraid of burning my eyes.

You have another twenty seconds. At least that. So don’t worry. And don’t look around.

Then there had been the snap of elastic-not hers but his-as he set the old Adam free.

In defiance of her advancing dehydration, a single tear slipped from Jessie’s left eye and rolled slowly down her cheek. “I’m doing it,” she said in a hoarse, choked voice. “I’m remembering. I hope you’re happy.”

Yes, Punkin said, and although Jessie could no longer see it, she could feel that strange, sweet gaze on her. You’ve gone too far, though. Back up a little. Just a little.

An enormous sense of relief washed through Jessie as she realized the thing Punkin wanted to remember had not happened during or after her father’s sexual advances, but before them… although not long before.

Then why did I have to go through the rest of that awful old stuff?

The answer to that was pretty obvious, she supposed. It didn’t matter if you wanted one sardine or twenty, you still had to open the can and look at all of them; you had to smell that horrible fish-oil stink. And besides, a little ancient history wasn’t going to kill her. The handcuffs holding her to the bed might, but not these old memories, painful as they might be. It was time to quit bitching and moaning and get down to business. Time to find whatever it was Punkin said she was supposed to find.

Go back to just before he started to touch you that other way-the wrong way. Go back to the reason why the two of you were out there in the first place. Go back to the eclipse.

Jessie closed her eyes tighter and went back.