Stephen King - Gerald’s Game

Brandon was never loathsome, but he was a man with a mission: keep a lid on any bad publicity that might accrue to the firm. That meant keeping a lid on any bad publicity that might accrue to either Gerald or me, of course. This is the sort of job where the person doing it can wind up getting screwed by a single stroke of bad luck, but Brandon still took it like a shot… and to his further credit, he never once tried to tell me he took the job out of respect for Gerald’s memory. He took it because it was what Gerald himself used to call a career-maker-the kind of job that can open a quick shortcut to the next echelon, if it turns out well. It is turning out well for Brandon, and I’m glad. He treated me with a great deal of kindness and compassion, which is reason enough to be happy for him, I guess, but there are two other reasons, as well. He never got hysterical when I told him someone from the press had called or come around, and he never acted as if I were just a job-only that and nothing more. Do you want to know what I really think, Ruth? Although I am seven years older than the man I’m telling you about and I still look folded, stapled, and mutilated, I think Brandon Milheron may have fallen a little bit in love with me… or with the heroic Little Nell he sees in his mind’s eye when he looks at me. I don’t think it’s a sex thing with him (not yet, anyway; at a hundred and eight pounds, I still look quite a bit like a plucked chicken hanging in a butcher shop window), and that’s fine with me; if I never go to bed with another man, I will be absolutely delighted. Still, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like seeing that look in his eyes, the one that says I’m part of his agenda now-me, Jessie Angela Mahout Burlingame, as opposed to an inanimate lump his bosses probably think of as That Unfortunate Burlingame Business. I don’t know if I come above the firm on Brandon’s agenda, or below it, or right beside it, and I don’t care. It is enough to know that I’m on it, and that I’m something more than a

Jessie paused here, tapping her left forefinger against her teeth and thinking carefully. She took a deep drag on her current cigarette, then went on.

than a charitable side-effect.

Brandon was right beside me during all the police interviews, with his little tape-recorder going. He politely but relentlessly pointed out to everyone present at every interview-including stenographers and nurses-that anyone who leaked the admittedly sensational details of the case would face all the nasty reprisals a large New England law-firm with an exceedingly tight ass could think up. Brandon must have been as convincing to them as he was to me, because no one in the know ever talked to the press.

The worst of the questioning came during the three days I spent in “guarded conditional Northern Cumberland-mostly sucking up blood, water, and electrolytes through plastic tubes. The police reports that came out of those sessions were so strange they actually looked believable when they showed up in the papers, like those weird man-bites-dog stories they run from time to time. Only this one was actually a dog-bites-man story… and woman as well, in this version. Want to hear what’s going into the record books? Okay, here it is:

We decided to spend the day at our summer home in western Maine. Following a sexual interlude that was two parts tussle and one part sex, we showered together. Gerald left the shower while I was washing my hair. He was complaining of gas pains, probably from the sub sandwiches we ate on our way from Portland, and asked if there were any Rolaids or Turns in the house. I said I didn’t know, but they’d be on top of the bureau or on the bed-shelf it there were. Three or four minutes later, while I was rinsing my hair, I heard Gerald cry out. This cry apparently signalled the onset of a massive coronary. It was followed by a heavy thump-the sound of a body striking the floor. I jumped out of the shower, and when I ran into the bedroom, my feet went out from under me. I hit my head on the side of the bureau as I went down and knocked myself out.

According to this version, which was put together by Mr Milheron and Mrs Burlingame-and endorsed enthusiastically by the police, I might add-I returned to partial consciousness several times, but each time I did, I passed out again. When I came to the last time, the dog had gotten tired of Gerald and was noshing on me. I got up on the bed (according to our story, Gerald and I found it where it was-probably moved there by the guys who came in to wax the floor-and we were so hot to trot we didn’t bother to move it back where it belonged) and drove the dog off by throwing Gerald’s water-glass and fraternity ashtray at it. Then I passed out again and spent the next few hours unconscious and bleeding all over the bed. Later on I woke up again, got to the car, and finally drove to safety… after one final bout of unconsciousness, that is. That was when I ran into the tree beside the road.

I only asked once how Brandon got the police to go along with this piece of nonsense. He said, “It’s a State Police investigation now, Jessie, and we-by which I mean the firm-have lots of friends in the S.P. I’m calling in every favor I have to, but in truth I haven’t had to call in that many. Cops are human beings, too, you know. These guys had a pretty good idea of what really happened as soon as they saw the cuffs hanging from the bedposts. It’s not the first time they’ve seen handcuffs after someone popped his carburetor, believe me. There wasn’t a single one of those cops-state or local-who wanted to see you and your husband turned into a dirty joke as a result of something that was really no more than a grotesque accident.”

At first I didn’t say anything even to Brandon about the man I thought I saw, or the footprint, or the pearl earring, or anything else. I was waiting, you see looking for straws in the wind, I suppose.

Jessie looked at that last, shook her head, and began to type again.

No, that’s bullshit. I was waiting for some cop to come in with a little plastic evidence bag and hand it to me and ask me to identify the rings-finger-rings, not earrings-inside. “We’re pretty sure they must be yours,” he’d say, “because they have your initials and those of your husband engraved inside them, and also because we found them on the floor of your husband’s study.”

I kept waiting for that because when they showed me my rings, I’d know for sure that Little Nell’s Midnight Caller had just been a figment of Little Nell’s imagination. I waited and waited, but it didn’t happen. Finally, just before the first operation on my hand, I told Brandon about how I’d had the idea that I might not have been alone in the house, at least not all the time. I told him it could have just been my imagination, that was certainly a possibility, but it had seemed very real at the time. I didn’t say anything about my own missing rings, but I talked a lot about the footprint and the pearl earring. About the earring I think it would be fair to say I babbled, and I think I know why: it had to stand for everything I didn’t dare to talk about, even to Brandon. Do you understand? And all the time I was telling him, I kept saying stuff like “Then I thought I saw” and “I felt almost sure that.” I had to tell him, had to tell someone because the fear was eating me from the inside out like acid, but I tried to show him in every way I could that I wasn’t mistaking subjective feelings for objective reality. Above all I tried to keep him from seeing how scared I still was. Because I didn’t want him to think I was crazy. I didn’t care if he thought I was a little hysterical; that was a price I was willing to pay to keep from getting stuck with another nasty secret like the one about what my father did to me on the day of the eclipse, but I desperately didn’t want him to think I was crazy. I didn’t want him to even speculate on the possibility.