Gerald's Game - Stephen King [13]
The image of a lake-loon taking a coffee-break, maybe floating in the water-cooler and chatting up a few of the lady loons, caused a dusty croaking sound in her throat. Under less unpleasant circumstances, that sound might have been termed a chuckle. It dissolved the last of her panic, leaving her still afraid but at least in charge of her thoughts and actions once more. It also left her with an unpleasant metallic taste on her tongue.
That's adrenaline, toots, or whatever glandular secretion your body dumps when you sprout claws and start climbing the walls, If anyone ever asks you what panic is, now you can tell them: an emotional blank spot that leaves you feeling as if you've been sucking on a mouthful of pennies.
Her forearms were buzzing, and the tingles of sensation had at last spread into her fingers as well. Jessie rolled her hands open and closed several times, wincing as she did so. She could hear the faint sound of the handcuff chains rattling against the bedposts and took a moment to wonder if she and Gerald had been mad it certainly seemed so now, although she had no doubt that thousands of people all over the world played similar games each and every day. She had read that there were even sexual free spirits who hanged themselves in their closets and then beat off as the blood-supply to their brains slowly decreased to nothing. Such news only served to increase her belief that men were not so much gifted with penises as cursed with them.
But if it had been only a game (only that and nothing more), why had Gerald felt it necessary to buy real handcuffs? That was sort of an interesting question, wasn't it?
Maybe, but I don't think it's the really important question just now, Jessie, do you? Ruth Neary asked from inside her head. It was really quite amazing how many different tracks the human mind could work on at the same time. On one of these she now found herself wondering what had become of Ruth, whom she had last seen ten years ago. It had been at least three years since Jessie had heard from her. The last communication had been a postcard showing a young man in an ornate red velvet suit with a ruff at the neck. The young man's mouth was open, and his long tongue had been protruding suggestively. SOME DAY MY PRINCE WILL TONGUE, the card had said. New Age wit, Jessie remembered thinking at the time. The Victorians had Anthony Trollope; the Lost Generation had H. L. Mencken; we got stuck with dirty greeting cards and bumper-sticker witticisms like AS A MATTER OF FACT, I DO OWN THE ROAD.
The card had borne a blurry Arizona postmark and the information that Ruth had joined a lesbian commune. Jessie hadn't been terribly surprised at the news; had even mused that perhaps her old friend, who could be wildly irritating and surprisingly, wistfully sweet (sometimes in the same breath) had finally found the hole on the great gameboard of life which had been drilled to accept her own oddly shaped peg.
She had put Ruth's card in the top left drawer of her desk, the one where she kept various odd lots of correspondence which would probably never be answered, and that had been the last time she'd thought about her old roomie until now — Ruth Neary, who lusted to own a Harley-Davidson barn-burner but who had never been able to master any standard transmission, even the one on Jessie's tame old Ford Pinto; Ruth, who often got lost on the UNH campus even after three years there; Ruth, who always cried when she forgot she was cooking something on the hotplate and burned it to a crisp. She did that last so often it was really a miracle she had never set their room — or the whole dorm — on fire. How odd that the confident no-bullshit voice in her head should turn out to be Ruth's.
The dog began to bark again. It sounded no closer, but it sounded no farther away, either. Its owner wasn't hunting birds, that was for sure; no hunter would have anything to do with such a canine blabbermouth.