The Beginning of the End

Hello all.

I’m sitting here in my English class as I’m starting this. We’re supposed to be working on our prospectuses (prospecti?), but seeing as I don’t have Internet and therefore cannot do any research, all I can really get done is “This is what my paper will probably be about. K? Thx.” So I decided that, since after this class I’ll be walking to Starbucks and then will be working on the blog, I’d go ahead and start now. Fun, huh?

First, though, before were get starting on Chapter 30 (which I believe is the chapter we’re due to discuss), I need to comment on something from the last chapter that I rather forgot to mention. I mentioned, briefly, that Jessie’s newest idea about how to be able to escape her containment was not suicide, that she was merely risking her life in order to save it, despite her previous hopelessness. There’s more that I’d like to say about it. There’s a rather beautiful form of elegance in this situation. Jessie has (or had) pretty much just given up. However, this last ditch attempt could very well get it out. Or it could kill her. The beauty is this: if she has to seriously injure herself to get out, it’s still better than dying slowly in this trap. Or, inversely, if she tries to get out this way and ends up bleeding out, it’s still better than dying slowly in this trap. So, with this new idea, no matter what the outcome, she’s saved herself from a slow, painful, torturous death. So, it’s kind of a win-win, don’t you think?

I’m sorry if that explanation was a bit hard to follow; I had a hard time translating the thoughts in my head into literal language in order to explain it, and I fear that I didn’t do it justice. King does a pretty good job of explaining it, though, so Read. The. Book.

So. Chapter 30. Not too much happens this chapter, but the reader is still on edge in anticipation.

She starts off by steeling herself for what she’s about to do, and then breaks it on the side of the shelf. She notices how the sound is not nearly representative of her situation. It’s rather normal, not at all matching the intense, suspenseful feeling she has as she breaks it. It’s funny to note that she’s already cut herself: her fingers are spiked with little glass shards because of the tight grip she had on the glass. Still, this grip was necessary; it would certainly be most frustrating were she to drop the glass now.

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.