Friday, October 29, 2010
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Good Afternoon.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Hey, Whomever.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
It's Still Windy
“I promise I’ll be safe, dear, it’s only a little fog. You worry too much.”
Those were his last words to her.
It was a dark April night, and it was foggy out. Very foggy. Warrenville hadn’t seen such fog in innumerable years, although there were certain senior members that would tell you time and time again that they remembered fog like this from their childhood. The fog was like a liquid. It was so dense, so there, that even though it was past ten p.m. it still seemed darkly bright, because the fog reflected back what little light there was. Nothing could be seen after ten yards, except light, which carried eerily well in the fog. Orbs of light from distant cars or street lamps wavered, twinkling in intensity, but it was impossible to tell if the lamp was yards or dozens of yards away.
James was heading out to the gas station a few miles away to get a pack of cigarettes. It wasn’t the closest one to the house he shared with his wife, but it certainly had the cheapest cigarettes. Besides, he could use the few extra minutes as a kind of break. Not that he disliked his wife; you weren’t married for 10 years because you disliked somebody. He simply enjoyed time for himself, and sought out short respites like this readily.
He turned off of his road and on to Main Street. He could see his turn signals amplified in the hazy air around his car, and it was honestly a bit odd for him to look at. His eyes weren’t used to seeing light reflected off of what looked like visible air. Sure, when he usually put on his signal he saw it flashing dimly back from trees, and the bumpers of other cars. But in this sense, it looked like the light was glowing back right out of the foggy air. A right turn led him deeper into the fog; his road had more wispy, unevenness than the fog here.
He glanced up into his rear-view mirror, and he saw one headlight palely shining through the fog at him. The lone left headlight was somewhat rectangular; it reminded him of a headlight belonging to some boxy, angular car one would expect to find in the barrio of some high-crime video game. Something like an El Camino, maybe. It was probably about 100 yards behind him, his only reference point in this the fact that it had just crested a hill. The headlight seemed to hover resolutely the same distance behind his car and above the ground, matching his exact speed. When he went around a curve, it did too, momentarily shifting more into the quadrant of his side mirror, only to swing back to directly behind him, slightly to the driver’s side. He’d crest a small hill, and it would momentarily whiff out, only to blink back to life seconds later.
This car behind him made him uneasy. He wouldn’t be able to explain why, and didn’t even have a concrete answer for himself, but it did. It was that kind of faceless panic children get when they have to trek down a long hallway in the dark, afraid that a boogeyman is waiting to jump out of every shadow and doorway on the way. Or that feeling that late-night commuters get when returning home, that feeling that showing their back to the rest of the dark, unseen world when unlocking the front door is madness, inviting all kinds of assaults from the baddies that are invariably lurking in the shrubbery. That momentary terror when, at 2 a.m., we hear a floorboard creak in the supposedly empty house, and are catatonically frozen, sure that there’s a bloodthirsty invader in our home, and that he or she hardly has anything nice in mind. This kind of fear is the worst kind; it’s completely irrational, we know it’s irrational and could not justify it if we tried, but it simply cannot be argued away.
James felt this kind of momentary panic upon seeing this headlight. He had no idea why he should; surely it was just another late-night driver braving the fog for some kind of errand, perhaps picking up bread or milk (or both). And it wasn’t as if the driver were following him. Main Street was the main street, after all. Still, he just couldn’t shake that silly unease.
He turned right at the fork he came to, and moments later, in the restricted view of his rear-view mirror, he saw that lone headlight swing back to being pointed at him. This meant nothing, though; this road was just as likely as any for the car to have turned onto. Despite knowing that he was being stupid, James still wished that the car had continued on Main and left him on his own merry way. And he could really use a cigarette.
The light wavered as the car went over a slight dip in the asphalt, and as James glanced at it, he couldn’t help but think that the car was closer. He, of course, had absolutely no way of knowing this; but, like the panic, the feeling was concretely there. Perhaps it was that it felt like it was less time between when he and the headlight went over the dip than it was when he and then the headlight went over the hill? Maybe it was minute differences in the size of the headlight? It certainly wasn’t any kind of identifiable normal depth perception; because of the fog, everything was simply either less than about ten yards, or more than ten yards. The headlight, although perhaps a slight bit closer, still fit into the latter category.
Another turn to the right, and the headlight still resolutely followed. The fog thinned slightly here, and he could make out faint outlines looming out at him from the nearby houses. Every so often a dim glow would show that a light was on in a living room or kitchen. A few times he saw dim parade of blue lights, which would have been running parallel to someone’s sidewalk. Past the line of obscured sight, the shapes made no real figure; there was no ground or trees, and the houses, it appeared, were simply abstract geometric shapes that his brain told itself would come together this way and that to make actual forms. Aside from the small patch of road visible in either direction, the headlight, and his own car, he was alone, floating along through a milky grey void.
It was curious that the headlight would still be behind him. The road he was currently on was a very minor of side roads, almost a rural-suburban alley, and he was merely using it as shortcut over to the road on which resided his destination. Certainly it could be possible that the headlight’s car was also using this road as a shortcut, right? Although, he hadn’t seen any other cars out on the road tonight, and that the one he did see would have an identical route by mere coincidence seemed improbable.
But surely not as improbable as the car following me, he thought. That kind of thing was reserved for movies and the paranoid delusions of a schizophrenic. People didn’t actually tail people in real life. Crime was a real thing, though, and it was this fact that kept alive the small spark of panic smoldering in the farthest back reaches of his mind. The part of the brain that deals simply with ‘primal’ notions: eat, sleep, happy, sad, tired, scared.
He decided to drive erratically, if only to get himself to stop worrying. He turned left into a development, and, of course, the headlight followed. He then turned right, kept straight at a stop sign, and then made a right again. The headlight followed, shining from between the dim monoliths on either side of the road, and even seemed to not stop at the stop sign. That might have just been a trick of the fog though; with a loss of a real sense of distance, speed as well seemed insubstantial.
As he turned left out of the development and back on to the road, so did the headlight, and he could have sworn it seemed closer still. He thought he could almost make out the faint criss-cross of the grill on the front of the car. At this point, despite his rationality telling him that it was simply ridiculous to think that someone was following him, he started to breath a little more rapidly, and his stomach felt light, felt as if it was somewhere around his lungs. His mind was dualistic; at the same time as he was telling himself that his fears were completely preposterous, that there must be a logical explanation to this, he was also convinced that this car was indeed following him, and with no good intentions for the end result.
He pressed on the gas, and his car slid up to 45 m.p.h. He crested another hill, and took a quick right, before the headlight crested the hill as well. He sped down the road as far as he could, ignoring the signs telling him that the acceptable speed was much lower than his, until he could barely see the main road anymore through the fog. He pulled to the side of the road, killed his engine, and cut off his lights.
He watched his rearview mirror, not breathing. Ten unbearably long seconds later, he saw the faint angular shape of a car with one stalwart headlight fighting through the fog. It coasted down the hill, not even slowing at the road he was on, and delved into the fog past the point of sight.
He exhaled heavily, and nearly hit himself on the forehead. How could he be so childish? Of course the car wasn’t following him; that was preposterous. Things like that just didn’t happen. He simply shared the road with another car as he left for his errand. Was that so weird? Not at all. In fact, for all he knew, maybe the driver of that car was headed for the same gas station he was heading to; his goal the very same low cigarette prices.
He restarted his car, and after making a rather awkward K-turn and narrowly missing a mailbox (it was, after all, rather hard to see), which seemed to form from the fog itself he headed back towards the main road. He slowed at the stop sign, and with the refracted glow from his turn signal guiding the way, pulled slowly back on to the road. He started to set off down the hill, now only half a mile from the gas station, when he nearly slammed on the brakes.
The headlight had turned off of the road he had just been on.
There was no way that that was possible, though. He saw the car head down the hill, with only one headlight. And there was simply no way that the car could have somehow doubled back and gotten behind him on the road without him seeing. And it couldn’t have looped around; the road that had served as his hiding place was a dead end.
Still, the headlight was very much there, behind him, and although he couldn’t see far in front of him, he felt sure that he would see no car farther on the road even if it weren’t for the fog. This, somehow, was the same car, the same headlight, and it had somehow gotten behind him. In fact, it was closer now than ever, he felt like he could almost see a dull, oblong cross branding the front end.
The reasonable part of his head seemed to have nothing more to say, and that left room for his panic to grow and expand until it was pushing his heart out through the front of his chest on every beat. He felt a cold sweat break out on his forehead and arms, and heard his breath catch. He moved his foot to the right and pushed it down, hard, and his car lurched forward. He sped down the hill, nearly reaching 70 in a matter of seconds, and still the headlight stayed the same distance behind him, seamlessly matching his speed. He would not let himself think that every time he looked up, it appeared closer; there was enough rationale left to tell him that that message applied to the side mirrors and not the center one. Still, he accelerated as fast as he could.
He glanced at the road, and had just enough time to jerk to the left, avoiding another mailbox by mere inches. The headlight didn’t move at all, left or right, and stayed simply at a spot just to the left of center. And it still was getting closer, he was sure of it now. Whether it was his empirical senses or his fearful brain telling him so, he was sure of it. He could see the somewhat solid form of the front end of the car jutting out from the fog, and he was briefly reminded of a boat breaking through a particularly high wave.
He went on like this, slowing only to negotiate turns, and looking at his rearview mirror more often than at the road. The car was closer, he knew it, he saw it, and he had no idea what it wanted or what he should do. It was inching, closer and closer, a dull blue hunk of metal pushing through the translucent, almost-there membrane of the fog. His arms started shaking, and his car started to make rapid waves in his lane, moving left and right by inches as his hands tried to grip the wheel through a film of sweat. In some absent part of his mind his fingers moaned from gripping so tightly, but he noticed this as much as he noticed that no matter how hard he pushed with his right leg, the pedal would not go farther so long as there was a car floor board under it.
He could no longer see the place where the wheels of the headlight’s car met the asphalt, and all that remained of the car was a bumper that seemed to float under one solitary light. The windshield should have been there, but the glow from the headlight was amplified to the point that it drowned out all else. And it was still looming, inch-by-inch. He desperately tried to nudge his car into going faster, but it would not speed up.
The headlight suddenly seemed to drift to the left, and for a moment he absurdly thought that the car was passing him. Suddenly, though, he realized what that must mean, and just as he looked down from the headlight to his windshield he-
CRAAASH.
The Buick stuck the trunk of rather large oak tree, and although a few small blossoms drifted lazily through the fog from unseen heights, the tree remained the immovable object to the car’s very stoppable force. The front end of the car, which had been traveling at nearly 80 miles per hour, had folded into something that resembled both a bowtie and an accordion. The back end bucked up as the air bags deployed, which quickly bloomed a bright red in the fog. The lights on the front end were shattered.
After the sound of the crash echoed out, all that was left was a low purring, as a car trudged by obliviously on the road. Its single headlight fought onward through the fog, and within moments, it was gone.
And that’s it. Not too bad, again, relatively speaking.
‘Til next time.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Another Day That's Far Too Rainy and Windy
Friday, March 26, 2010
Skeleton Crew
It's Altogether Far Too Windy
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Here's Another One
As I sat here, typing away, it fell.
The story plummeted, like a stone into a well, like a virgin star into a warping black hole; the story fell right into the abyss of non-being.
Of course, the story did not physically cease to exist. It was still very much there, appearing glaringly on the screen of my computer, like a neon, finger-pointing obituary in the Sunday post. It was almost morbidly depressing that it was still here; it stood as stark reminder of my failed ability.
For, in essence, in everything except body, it was dead. Gone. Vanished. The spark I felt as I churned out the tale, mechanically pounding the keys as my mind raced from point to point, was gone. I no longer was writing the story, with all of the shapes finding their corresponding holes by mere design, no longer penning what I saw in my head without giving it an editorial eye; rather, I was trying desperately and fleetingly to find answers to the impossible questions that sprung to life from the dull, still text in front of me. I felt as if I was chasing the fraying end of a piece of fabric, with two strands fraying for every one I bound. It was a dreadful feeling, really. I would see a hole, and seek to answer it, and in doing so create more paradoxes, contradictions, and irrationalities. Every time I tried to advance the story, it felt like I took it back a few steps.
And so, the story fell. It collapsed in on itself, pulling apart all of the silkily fine tendons holding it together. It was like watching a marble drop into a delicate, dew-filled spider’s web. I tried to save it, I truly did; however, I was riding the story down. Every time I would try to grab the tale, to pull it upwards, I only was able to shift positions; now, the story was riding me down. I threw lines up to the mouth of the hole, clever little loopholes that choked off any protruding discrepancies, but it was to no avail, for the spiny problems quickly cut through even the most logical of containments.
It fell, deeper and faster down the pit of inadequacy with every letter I typed. Finally, I knew what must be done, and, inhaling, braced myself for the inevitable, unfortunate truth.
I wrenched myself from the tale. I reached into the depths of my own heart, pulling the vine-like tendrils that had wrapped themselves around my muscle, and as they came off, amid crimson spurts and splatters, I saw that they pulled with them bits of me, of my soul, my mind, my everything. I ripped myself away as I pulled them from my core. I took a last look at those now-and-forever lost pieces of me, and I pushed off from the story, leaping impossibly high from it and simultaneously damning it to the eternal plunge even more rapidly. I leapt, and felt the last vestiges of it leave me. I leapt, reaching for the delete key as my only hope for a support.
My hand grabbed earth.
Writing
Inhale.
Feel the air filling you. Feel the expansive, vast feeling of your lungs dominating your chest cavity. This is a beautiful feeling. Such a mundane act, one that is committed hundreds of times a day, takes precedent, pushing aside those organs responsible for much more dramatic actions, like eating, or even the heart pumping blood, for that matter. The human need for air is most important. It’s beautifully symbolic, isn’t it?
Inhale.
You see, although mundane, this gesture is really the most important. They say that truly the only way to die is to have your brain not get enough oxygen. Most people think it is the heart stopping, or the loss of blood, but it always, always, is caused either directly or indirectly because of a lack of oxygen.
Inhale.
The first obvious ones are drowning and asphyxiation. In either case, you are physically prevented from breathing. A lack of air entering the lungs means that there is now a limited, finite amount of oxygen. Once it is used up, and the brain cannot get anymore, the person dies.
Inhale.
But what about when someone bleeds to death? Ah, yes, this is often considered a particularly...important way to die. But it still boils down to a lack of oxygen reaching the brain. If all of the blood leaves the body, then there is no longer any blood coursing through the veins and arteries, and therefore, no longer any blood providing sweet oxygen to the brain.
Inhale.
No matter what it is, aside from events involving the dissolution of the brain itself, any death is ultimately caused by asphyxiation of the brain, from heart attacks to poison. It makes you appreciate what was previously an action that’s taken for granted, doesn’t it? When you think that something you do dozens of times a day is so delicately intertwined with your existence, well, it’s kind of scary.
Inhale.
And your breaths are numbered.
Again, I'm not at all bragging about my writing skills, nor am I under the impression that any of it is worth reading. I simply felt like putting it up here; it is also rather King influenced, at least from an idealogical stand point (most of the pieces written that night are, actually). I would, again, greatly appreciate any input any of you might be willing to spare, though.
The Beginning of the End
Hello all.
The chapter ends with her lowering her wrist towards a particularly sharp protrusion of the glass, which is now sitting back on the shelf.
Before I move onto the next chapter, I'd like to note a few things. First, I'm now at Starbucks. I made the 2.1 mile walk in about 30-35 minutes, which surely isn't bad, considering. Not fast, but I definitely wasn't dragging my feet. So, now I've got an iced green tea lemonade, and have a mix on my iPod that contains Paramore, Motion City Soundtrack, The Thermals, Phantom Planet, and The Avett Brothers. There's probably more on it, but that's all I can think of right now. In short, I'm pretty okay.
I'd also like to comment on the font. I don't know if it will actually post in this font, it's called American Typewriter, and it doesn't appear to be on the list of fonts available when I compose a post in Blogger. I was using it earlier because I was typing the entry in Word (I was at school, and couldn't get internet so I couldn't type right into Blogger), and I like it. Kind of. Either way, it's the font I'm typing in. Even if it does transpose onto my blog, I will probably change it at some point, because it will bother me to have one post in a completely different font than all of the others. But I just wanted to explain in case it caused you to wonder.
The final note before proceeding is that, again, you might want to brace yourself (selves?). This chapter is finally the one in which Jessie carries out her revolting but necessary plan, and although I'm sure that my post wont be nearly as gruesome as King's actual text, it's going to be a topic that's hard to stomach regardless. Enjoy.
Chapter 31.
The chapter pretty much jumps right in. Jessie lowers her wrist to the glass, and pierces it. Once it pokes through her skin, she starts to move her wrist along it, cutting perpendicularly in relation to her arm. The blood starts flowing, and it's not the typical, spurting, exaggerated type thing from movies like Kill Bill. Although, what it does do is almost graver; it's more real. The blood comes out in a simple, heavy flow, coating her arm and wrist in no time. It's not enough, however, and so she must continue.
It mentions here, in the narration, I believe, the idea of a de-gloving injury. This, it would seem, is the kind of injury where a portion of skin is removed in a sheet, and one would think it is thus names because of the process of removing a glove. Just a note, keep in mind.
The second note is just on how sheerly determined the will to survive can be. I wont say it's only Jessie, because we all very well may act similarly in these kinds of situations, but regardless, it's hard to imagine. Willfully being able to slice open your wrist is enough, but being able to continue to do so after being cut, and feeling the cut, and seeing the rush of blood which has recently been displaced, thats gotta take some moxie.
I'd also like to say that the word 'cringe' is written on my notes in large, capital letters, and nearly every note about this chapter has an arrow pointing back to 'cringe'. Just to give you an idea. This whole chapter is hard to read, afterwards I was still slightly dizzy and on edge, but you just can't put it down.
So, she finally cuts all around her wrist, thinking that if should be enough blood (you think?), but that if it's not, oh well. Theres not much more she can do. Still, though, that stupid bone under her thumb stops her. She pulls, and every so often it will give an eighth of an inch or so before seeming even more resolutely stuck. The narration describes the skin on her hand bunching up slightly, the way a throw rug will if someone tries to move a table without lifting it thats on top of it.
Finally, when she's about to just completely give out and almost die out of mere frustration, her wrist completely comes free. Permission to exhale and try to slow your heart rate. And thus she begins her task of sliding the bed across the room towards the bureau and the elusive keys.
Chapter 32.
Jessie makes it over to the bureau, and she almost messes up. She drops the first key, and trying to pick it up off the floor, with her only free hand horribly mutilated and numb, would be like trying to pick up a greased dime off a floor with no fingernails. Luckily, Gerald had enough sense to get two keys, and, being as careful as possible, manages to unlock her left hand. Jessie G. is no longer a bound woman.
And yet, she still has voices in her head. Coming to terms with her abuse didn't help. Escaping her prison didn't help. It would seem that these are guests with an indefinite invitation.
SHe does get a prize for getting out of her trap though. The attached bathroom is taunting her with moist, wet smells, and for the first time in what seems like ages, Jessie is able to answer those calls. She decides, though, that climbing over the bed will be much too difficult, and the last thing she needs at this point is to faint and then die from blood loss. I would like to comment, though: how on earth has she not already fainted? She figures that she's lost about a pint of blood already, and even if her estimate is accurate, surely she the physical activity of all this would cause her to faint. She manages, though, at least for now.
She manages to quench her thirst in the bathroom. The most important thing about this, though, aside from the very real importance for the survival of our protagonist, is that she no longer associates the minerally, handful-of-pennies smell of the lake water with negativity. She has, it would seem, moved finally past that, and the only thing that that smells brings her is the promise of life.
Chapter 33.
Our heroine starts off this chapter by rummaging through the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. She finds a maxi pad, and uses it and some medical tape as makeshift tourniquet. I was mentally screaming at her, throughout this part of the book, that she should hold her arm above her head, so that it would decrease the blood pressure there and she wouldn't lose as much blood as fast. Oh well. She clutches it stupidly to her chest.
Another not about her makeshift tourniquet is that, previously in the part of the book, I thought "Hey, the handcuffs might not be super tight on her wrists, but if she fastened one as tight as it would go farther up on her arm, it surely would be tight enough to cut off the blood flow." Now I'm no med student, but this certainly seems like a good idea. Granted, she might not want to have anything to do with the handcuffs any more, but she has the key, so they would no longer have to be chained to the bed, and also since she has the key, she would not be trapped in them; she could take them off whenever she wanted to. And a cuff certainly would make for a much more efficient tourniquet. Oh well.
She ventures over to the phone, which she had previously written off as completely useless (she was bound, remember?). She tries it, and it's dead. Of course. She has an internal argument about whether or not Gerald has unplugged it, or if the Man has cut it. During this argument she formulates the idea of trying to just drive out of here. Even if the phone works, you see, by the time any emergency services people get there the Man very well may have come back, at which point having escaped will do her no good.
After fighting admirably, though, Jessie faints. Who knows what she'll wake up to?
Chapter 34.
She wakes up. It's dark. That means that it's nighttime, and that the Man very well may have returned. The dog certainly seems to think so; he's howling and screaming and panicking. She tried to tell herself that it's not so, that He's not back, that maybe she still has time before it's too late. That's when she hears the floorboard creak.
This stops her heart (and mine), and she nearly breaks down, begging no one at all to make it not true.
Its interesting, here; she briefly entertains the idea that she may be asleep, that all of this is a dream, and quickly dismisses it. She knows she's awake; everything seems too real to be a dream. This is something all of us can attest to, right now, you know you're awake, but can't really say how, you just know. Do we get these same thoughts in dreams? It's odd; often, we think dreams are real when they are in fact dreams, but we very rarely mistake waking life for dreaming. How do we know we're truly awake? Do we simply always feel that whatever state we're in is the true one, and we only find out that dreams are dreams when we wake from them into this world? If this is so, it would certainly suggest that 'awake' is more real than 'dreaming', otherwise how would we know that we were dreaming? This one would have to be more real, to some degree, but what is it that tells us that? Who knows.
So, despite all of her wishes otherwise, she's right. The man is in the house, and as she passes her husbands study, she sees him and is stunned. He beckons to her as he did before, holding out his box of treasures. She thinks (hopes) that he merely is after her jewelry, and throws her wedding rings at him in attempt to let him have his keepsake for this venture. After this, perhaps realizing that he means to have her bones as well as her jewels, she bolts. Multiple times he almost catches up to her, but she makes it out of the house and then trips and falls. She is terrified that any second he will come bounding out of the house and it will be all over. For some reason, though, he doesn't, and she manages to make it to her car.
She begins to make it down the driveway, and here's the real heart-stopper. She glances up into her rearview mirror and there He sits, in her back seat as casually as if they were going to the movies. How, though, we must wonder. Even in the heat of the moment, my over-active brain could not help by try to figure out how on earth he managed to get into the car without her seeing him. Perhaps when she had fallen, he snuck past her, knowing her goal, and somehow got into the car to lie in wait.
However he got there, he sure seems to be there. He leans forward, and starts whispering the names of all her voices and family members in her ear, as if they were exchanging secrets. She completely loses control, and crashes into the tree. The chapter ends telling us that her rearview mirror looks out onto her empty driveway and on her equally as empty backseat. So He wasn't there at all, at least not in her car; she manages to be chained to a bed for nearly 30 hours, completely destroy her wrist in order to escape, only to faint and crash her car because of fear-induced hallucination. Poor girl.
Chapter 35 begins some time later. It's October, and the Ordeal happens in February. She reflects on the aftermath of her incident, about how people always seemed to want to know all the grisly details and no one even seemed to really feel anything but pity. She's gotten herself a maid, now, and after three or so surgeries, her right hand is finally healing up.
She's writing something, and for a good bit of the chapter, we don't know what. Could it be about the ordeal? Surely not; she makes known the fact that she's pretty much made a job about not having to retell it, not having to go relive the events by explaining it to anyone.
She almost has completely convinced herself that the Man was now real, that he was merely a hallucination. The footprint either wasn't there or has since been cleaned; the police find no evidence of either it or the earring on the floor of the bedroom.
She has seen a newspaper article, though, that completely changes her mind. There He is, the Man, the Space Cowboy, staring out at her. He's a serial killer who's been arrested for disturbing graves, cannibalism, murder, and grave-robbing. He's one messed up dude. This convinces her that he's real, and she is then determined to find out everything about what he'd done, so solidify him in her mind, to prove that he was real, and furthermore (and most importantly) to make her know that he's behind bars so she can finally stop being terrified constantly that he'll come back for her.
We also find out that she was indeed writing about the ordeal, and the aftermath, and is writing to none other than the real-life Ruth Neary. The book mentions that the Ordeal part of her letter spans 7 or 8 pages (something like that), so she must have given a condensed version, because the Ordeal part of the book took nearly 300 pages.
36.
Sip (custom creation: kind of an iced vanilla rooibos chai latte [made with teabags, not chai base] with vanilla syrup-it's pretty good).
This chapter is mainly reflection (as are most of her 'letter' chapters). She first starts off about talking about waking up after having crashed her car. It's morning, and she's relatively unharmed, as is her car. She drives down the driveway, and even makes it to a convenience/general store, where she just sits for a moment and watches the people whose lives are completely unaffected by her crazy situation. Then, one of her and her husband's acquaintances from the lake notices her, and comes over, smiling. Then, seeing that she's covered in blood, begins to panic, and she faints as the other men from the general store are gathering around and for help.
She is helped, afterwards, by one her late husband's coworkers. Although he is motivated by the idea of buffering any bad press this situation would cause for his company, he also seems genuinely concerned for Jessie and wants to make sure she's okay. He kind of becomes her only friend afterwards, but even he initially disbelieves her when she confesses her thoughts that there was someone else in the house for part of her ordeal.
And, of course, there are still the ever-present voices.
Chapter 37 contains a bit more back story on the Man (I forget his name). He's one creepy dude. The finally catch him breaking into a graveyard, and masturbating. They raid his house, and there are countless bits of human beings everywhere, in jars, freezers, masks of human skin. In his truck they find a sandwich he had been about to eat (or had started eating) made with a human tongue.
It's weird; throughout the parts about how she found out and heard about him, I found a part of myself almost forgetting that she really did see him. Part of me started to be under the impression that she had just had a very, very accurate premonition of him, that he hadn't ever really been there at all. But he surely was.
Finally, the chapter wraps up with her reflection one how she realized it was him, what all made her concretely sure.
Chapter 38 switches to narration, whereas the previous chapters had been letter form (the letter to Ruth).
She convinces Brandon (her husbands coworker) to take her to the arraignment, stating that seeing him in person, knowing it's him that is being locked up, will finally offer her some closure.
He is one creepy dude. He has all of the deformities she thought she saw in the cabin; some disease causes him to have a very thin, narrow head, long arms and long fingers. HE shows no remorse at all, seems blissfully complacent to be where he is, and is doodling.
She for some reason gets his attention. the look of dawning comprehension on his face is described vividly, and give the reader the chills. He then even quotes her, repeating some phrase she said to him in the house, and pantomimes her being chained up and trying to get free. This must have been confusing for everyone present (remember, even those people who know who she was didn't know what happened to her, even Brandon didn't know what happened between them, only that she thought someone might have been in the house).
39 (back in letter form, very short) she, despite being yelled at by the judge and restrained by Brandon, manages to spit in the Man's face. This, for her, is a very, very real relief. This provides her with closure, this finally has her come to terms with everything, with all the fear he'd caused her.
Chapter 40 (the last one).
She concludes her letter to Ruth, apologizing for burdening her with all of the details of Jessie's imprisonment, and also for blowing her off all those years ago. She does hope that Ruth will write back, that maybe their friendship will be okay.
The main benefit of this is that Jessie is okay. I repeat, this girl who has been to Hell and back is finally okay, after 4 or so monthts.
She finishes the letter (adding a note to her maid on the outside, something like "Please mail this. If I come down and convince you to trash it, agree politely, and then leave and mail it first thing"), and stresses the point that she is okay.
The book ends with her going to sleep, and for the first time since, sleeping well.
So, what'd you think? Pretty good book, huh? It's definitely going to rank as one of my favorite King books. It was just so intense. Once it picked up, it was a real page-turner (pardon the cliche). Then entire time, I felt like I was there with Jessie, feeling the same things she felt, experiencing the same feeling she felt. I'm not sure any other book has grabbed onto my emotions so deeply and held them in it's control so well. I don't ever remember feeling such a wide range of real emotions based on the events of a book.
And I can't remember a book ever being so intense. When she was cutting her wrist, I was cringing and squirming in my chair. It honestly might not have been much worse if I were the one doing it; that's how deep and real and solid the feeling was. When she was recounting her father's abuse, I was actually physically getting mad. This book just connected with my emotions in a way that I can't even fully describe. Read it. You'll see what I mean, I assure you.
And the Man was definitely one of the best book baddies so far. Driving home late at night after either reading or blogging, I'd fearfully check my backseat for him. When I got home, every rustling leaf was His footstep. I genuinely had a sense of the Heebie Jeebies about him. It was crazy/great/creepy/impressive.
So, that's it for this book. Gerald's Game has been finished.
'Til next time (which will be in just a few moments; I'm going to start the next book's blog entries now, I still have a little bit of free time, but I wanted to have the blog entries be separate).
And thanks for reading.