Gerald's Game

  The thought of the telephone distracted her for a moment, but only a moment. It sat on the low table in front of the east window, the one with its scenic view of the driveway and the Mercedes, and it might as well have been on another planet, for all the good it could do in her current situation. Her eyes returned to the underside of the shelf, first studying the plank itself and then scanning the L-shaped brackets again.

  When Gerald leaned on his end, her end had tilted. If she exerted enough pressure on her end to tilt his, the glass of water ...

  "It might slide down," she said in a hoarse, musing voice. "It might slide down to my end." Of course it might also go sliding gaily right past her to shatter on the floor, and it might bang into some unseen obstacle up there and overturn before it ever got to her, but it was worth trying, wasn't it?

  Sure, I guess so, she thought. I mean, I was planning to fly to New York in my Learjet--eat at Four Seasons, dance the night away at Birdland--but with Gerald dead I guess that would be a little tacky. And with all the good books currently out of reach--all the bad ones, too, as far as that goes--I guess I might as well try for the consolation prize.

  All right; how was she supposed to go about it?

  "Very carefully," she said. "That's how."

  She used the handcuffs to pull herself up again and studied the glass some more. Not being able to actually see the surface of the shelf now struck her as a drawback. She had a pretty good idea of what was on her end, but was less sure about Gerald's and the no-man's-land in the middle. Of course it wasn't surprising; who but someone with an eidetic memory could reel off a complete inventory of the items on a bedroom shelf? Who would have ever thought such things could matter?

  Well, they matter now. I'm living in a world where all the perspectives have changed.

  Yes indeed. In this world a stray dog could be scarier than Freddy Krueger, the phone was in the Twilight Zone, the sought-for desert oasis, goal of a thousand grizzled Foreign Legionnaires in a hundred desert romances, was a glass of water with a few last slivers of ice floating on top. In this new world order, the bedroom shelf had become a shipping lane as vital as the Panama Canal and an old paperback western or mystery in the wrong place could become a lethal roadblock.

  Don't you think you're exaggerating a little? she asked herself uneasily, but in truth she did not. This would be a long-odds operation under the best of circumstances, but if there was junk on the runway, forget it. A single skinny Hercule Poirot--or one of the Star Trek novels Gerald read and then dropped like used napkins--wouldn't show above the angle of the shelf, but it would be more than enough to stop or overturn the water-glass. No, she wasn't exaggerating. The perspectives of this world really had changed, and enough to make her think of that science fiction movie where the hero started to shrink and went on getting smaller until he was living in his daughter's dollhouse and going in fear of the family cat. She was going to learn the new rules in a hurry ... learn them and live by them.

  Don't lose your courage, Jessie, Ruth's voice whispered.

  "Don't worry," she said. "I'm going to try--I really am. But sometimes it's good to know what you're up against. I think sometimes that makes a difference."

  She rotated her right wrist outward from her body as far as it would go, then raised her arm. In this position she looked like a woman-shape in a line of Egyptian hieroglyphs. She began to patter her fingers on the shelf again, feeling for obstructions along the stretch where she hoped the glass would finish up.

  She touched a piece of fairly heavy-gauge paper and thumbed it for a moment, trying to think what it might be. Her first guess was a sheet from the note-pad that usually hid in the clutter on the telephone table, but it wasn't thin enough for that. Her eye happened on a magazine--either Time or Newsweek, Gerald had brought both along--lying face-down beside the phone. She remembered him thumbing rapidly through one of the magazines while he took off his socks and unbuttoned his shirt. The piece of paper on the shelf was probably one of those annoying blow-in subscription cards with which the newsstand copies of magazines are always loaded. Gerald often laid such cards aside for later use as bookmarks. It might be something else, but Jessie decided it didn't matter to her plans in any case. It wasn't solid enough to stop the glass or overturn it. There was nothing else up there, at least within reach of her stretching, wriggling fingers.

  "Okay," Jessie said. Her heart had started to pound hard. Some sadistic pirate broadcaster in her mind tried to transmit a picture of the glass tumbling off the shelf and she immediately blocked the image out. "Easy; easy does it. Slow and easy wins the race. I hope."

  Holding her right hand where it was, although bending it away from her body in that direction didn't work very well and hurt like the devil, Jessie raised her left hand (My ashtray-throwing hand, she thought with a grim glint of humor) and gripped the shelf with it well beyond the last supporting bracket on her side of the bed.

  Here we go, she thought, and began to exert downward pressure with her left hand. Nothing happened.

  I'm probably pulling too close to that last bracket to get enough leverage. The problem is the goddam handcuff chain. I don't have enough slack to get as far out on the shelf as I need to be.

  Probably true, but the insight didn't change the fact that she wasn't doing a thing to the shelf with her left hand where it was. She would have to spider her fingers out a little farther--if she could, that was--and hope it would be enough. It was funnybook physics, simple but deadly. The irony was that she could reach under the shelf and push it up any time she liked. There was one small problem with that, however--it would tip the glass the wrong way, off Gerald's end and onto the floor. When you considered it closely, you saw that the situation really did have its amusing side; it was like an America's Funniest Home Videos segment sent in from hell.

  Suddenly the wind dropped and the sounds from the entry seemed very loud. "Are you enjoying him, shithead?" Jessie screamed. Pain ripped at her throat, but she didn't--couldn't--stop. "I hope so, because the first thing I'm going to do when I get out of these cuffs is blow your head off!"

  Big talk, she thought. Very big talk for a woman who no longer even remembers if Gerald's old shotgun--the one that belonged to his dad--is here or in the attic of the Portland house.

  Nevertheless, there was a gratifying moment of silence from the shadowy world beyond the bedroom door. It was almost as if the dog were giving this threat its soberest, most thoughtful consideration.

  Then the smackings and chewings began again.

  Jessie's right wrist twanged warningly, threatening to cramp up, warning her that she had better get on with her business right away ... if she actually had any business to do, that was.

  She leaned to the left and stretched her hand as far as the chain would allow. Then she began to put the pressure on the shelf again. At first there was nothing. She pulled harder, eyes slitted almost shut, the corners of her mouth turned down. It was the face of a child who expects a dose of bad medicine. And, just before she reached the maximum downward pressure her aching arm muscles could exert, she felt a tiny shift in the board, a change in the uniform drag of gravity so minute that it was more intuited than actually sensed.

  Wishful thinking, Jess--that's all you felt. Only that and nothing more.

  No. It was the input of senses which had been jacked into the stratosphere by terror, perhaps, but it wasn't wishful thinking.

  She let go of the shelf and just lay there for a few moments, taking long slow breaths and letting her muscles recover. She didn't want them spasming or cramping up at the critical moment; she had quite enough problems without that, thanks. When she thought she felt as ready as she could feel, she curled her left fist loosely around the bedpost and slid it up and down until the sweat on her palm dried and the mahogany squeaked. Then she stretched out her arm and gripped the shelf again. It was time.

  Got to be careful, though. The shelf moved, no question about that, and it'll move more, but it's going to take
all my strength to get that glass in motion... if I can do it at all, that is. And when a person gets near the end of their strength, control gets spotty.

  That was true, but it wasn't the kicker. The kicker was this: she had no feel for the shelf's tip-point. Absolutely none at all.

  Jessie remembered seesawing with her sister Maddy on the playground behind Falmouth Grammar School --they had come back early from the lake one summer and it seemed to her she had spent that whole August going up and down on those paint-peeling teeterboards with Maddy as her partner--and how they had been able to balance perfectly whenever they felt like it. All it took was for Maddy, who weighed a little more, to move a butt's length in toward the middle. Long hot afternoons of practice, singing jump-rope songs to each other as they went up and down, had enabled them to find each seesaw's tip-point with an almost scientific exactitude; those half a dozen warped green boards standing in a row on the sizzling hot-top had seemed almost like living things to them. She felt none of that eager liveliness under her fingers now. She would simply have to try her best and hope it was good enough.

  And whatever the Bible may say to the contrary, don't let your left hand forget what your right hand is supposed to be doing. Your left may be your ashtray-throwing hand, but your right had better be your glass-catching hand, Jessie. There's only a few inches of shelf where you'll have a chance to get hold of it. If it slides past that area, it won't matter if it stays up--it'll be as out of reach as it is right now.

  Jessie didn't think she could forget what her right hand was doing--it hurt too much. Whether or not it would be able to do what she needed it to do was another question entirely, though. She increased the pressure on the left side of the shelf as steadily and as gradually as she could. A stinging drop of sweat ran into the corner of one eye and she blinked it away. Somewhere the back door was banging again, but it had joined the telephone in that other universe. Here there was only the glass, the shelf, and Jessie. Part of her expected the shelf to come up all at once like a brutal Jack-in-the-box, catapulting everything off, and she tried to steel herself against the possible disappointment.

  Worry about that if it happens, toots. In the meantime, don't lose your concentration. I think something's happening.

  Something was. She could feel that minute shift again--that feel of the shelf starting to come unanchored at some point along Gerald's side. This time Jessie didn't let up her pressure but increased it, the muscles in her upper left arm standing out in hard little arcs that trembled with strain. She voiced a series of small explosive grunts. That sense of the shelf coming unanchored grew steadily stronger.

  And suddenly the flat circular surface of the water in Gerald's glass was a tilted plane and she heard the last slivers of ice chatter faintly as the right end of the board actually did come up. The glass itself did not move, however, and a horrible thought occurred to her: what if some of the water trickling down the sides of the glass had seeped beneath the cardboard coaster on which it sat? What if it had formed a seal, bonding it to the shelf?

  "No that can't happen." The words came out in a single whispered blurt, like a tired child's rote prayer. She pulled down harder on the left end of the shelf, using all her strength. Every last horse was now running in harness; the stable was empty. "Please don't let it happen. Please."

  Gerald's end of the shelf continued to rise, its end wavering wildly. A tube of Max Factor blush spilled off Jessie's end and landed on the floor near the place where Gerald's head had lain before the dog had come along and dragged him away from the bed. And now a new possibility--more of a probability, actually--occurred to her. If she increased the angle of the shelf much more, it would simply slide down the line of L-brackets, glass and all, like a toboggan going down a snowy hill. Thinking of the shelf as a seesaw could get her into trouble. It wasn't a seesaw; there was no central pivot-point to which it was attached.

  "Slide, you bastard!" she screamed at the glass in a high, breathy voice. She had forgotten Gerald; had forgotten she was thirsty; had forgotten everything but the glass, now tilted at an angle so acute that water was almost slopping over the rim and she couldn't understand why it didn't simply fall over. It didn't, though; it just went on standing where it had stood all along, as if it had been glued to the spot. "Slide!"

  Suddenly it did.

  Its movement ran so counter to her black imaginings that she was almost unable to understand what was happening. Later it would occur to her that the adventure of the sliding glass suggested something less than admirable about her own mindset: she had in some fashion or other been prepared for failure. It was success which left her shocked and gaping.

  The short, smooth journey of the glass down the shelf toward her right hand so stunned her that Jessie almost pulled harder with her left, a move that almost certainly would have overbalanced the precariously tilted shelf and sent it crashing to the floor. Then her fingers were actually touching the glass, and she screamed again. It was the wordless, delighted shriek of a woman who has just won the lottery.

  The shelf wavered, began to slip, then paused, as if it had a rudimentary mind of its own and was considering whether or not it really wanted to do this.

  Not much time, toots, Ruth warned. Grab the goddam thing while the grabbing's good.

  Jessie tried, but the pads of her fingers only slid along the slick wet surface of the glass. There was nothing to grab, it seemed, and she couldn't get quite enough finger-surface on the thrice-damned thing to grip. Water sloshed onto her hand, and now she sensed that even if the shelf held, the glass would soon tip over.

  Imagination, toots--just the old idea that a sad little Punkin like you can never do anything right.

  That wasn't far from the mark--it was certainly too close for comfort--but it wasn't on the mark, not this time. The glass was getting ready to tip over, it really was, and she didn't have the slightest idea of what she could do to prevent that from happening. Why did she have to have such short, stubby, ugly fingers? Why? If only she could get them a little farther around the glass ...

  A nightmare image from some old TV commercial occurred to her: a smiling woman in a fifties hairdo with a pair of blue rubber gloves on her hands. So flexible you can pick up a dime! the woman was screaming through her smile. Too bad you don't have a pair, little Punkin or Goodwife or whoever the hell you are! Maybe you could get that fucking glass before everything on the goddam shelf takes the express elevator!

  Jessie suddenly realized the smiling, screaming woman in the Playtex rubber gloves was her mother, and a dry sob escaped her.

  Don't give up, Jessie! Ruth yelled. Not yet! You're close! I swear you are!

  She exerted the last tiny scrap of her strength on the left side of the shelf, praying incoherently that it wouldn't slide--not yet, Oh please God or whoever You are, please don't let it slide, not now, not yet.

  The board did slide ... but only a little. Then it held again, perhaps temporarily snagged on a splinter or balked by a warp in the wood. The glass slid a little farther into her hand, and now--crazier and crazier-- it seemed to be talking, too, the goddam glass. It sounded like one of those grizzled big-city cab-drivers who have a perpetual hard-on against the world: Jesus, lady, what else ya want me to do? Grow myself a goddam handle and turn into a fuckin pitcher forya? A fresh trickle of water fell on Jessie's straining right hand. Now the glass would fall; now it was inevitable. In her mind she could already feel the freeze as icewater doused the back of her neck.

  "No!"

  She twisted her right shoulder a little farther, opened her fingers a little wider, let the glass slide a tiny bit deeper into the straining pocket of her hand. The cuff was digging into the back of that hand, sending jabs of pain all the way up to her elbow, but Jessie ignored them. The muscles of her left arm were twanging wildly now, and the shakes were communicating themselves to the tilted, unstable shelf. Another tube of makeup tumbled to the floor. The last few slivers of ice chimed faintly. Above the shelf, she could see the
shadow of the glass on the wall. In the long sunset light it looked like a grain silo blown atilt by a strong prairie wind.

  More ... just a little bit more ...

  There is no more!

  There better be. There's got to be.

  She stretched her right hand to its absolute tendon-creaking limit and felt the glass slide a tiny bit farther down the shelf. Then she closed her fingers again, praying it would finally be enough, because now there really was no more--she had pushed her resources to their absolute limit. It almost wasn't; she could still feel the wet glass trying to squirm away. It had begun to seem like a live thing to her, a sentient being with a mean streak as wide as a turnpike passing lane. Its goal was to keep flirting toward her and then squirming away until her sanity broke and she lay here in the shadows of twilight, handcuffed and raving.

  Don't let it get away Jessie don't you dare DON'T YOU DARE LET THAT FUCKING GLASS GET AWAY--

  And although there was no more, not a single foot-pound of pressure, not a single quarter-inch of stretch, she managed a little more anyway, turning her right wrist one final bit in toward the board. And this time when she curved her fingers around the glass, it remained motionless.

  I think maybe I've got it. Not for sure, but maybe. Maybe.

  Or maybe it was just that she had finally gotten to the wishful-thinking part. She didn't care. Maybe this and maybe that and none of the maybes mattered anymore and that was actually a relief. The certainty was this--she couldn't hold the shelf any longer. She had only tilted it three or four inches anyway, five at the most, but it felt as if she had bent down and picked up the whole house by one corner. That was the certainty.

  She thought, Everything is perspective... and the voices that describe the world to you, I suppose. They matter. The voices inside your head.

  With an incoherent prayer that the glass would remain in her hand when the shelf was no longer there to support it, she let go with her left hand. The shelf banged back onto its brackets, only slightly askew and shifted only an inch or two down to the left. The glass did stay in her hand, and now she could see the coaster. It clung to the bottom of the glass like a flying saucer.