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Grace was concentrating her energies on Gayet; and she had the fever, as if
she were gambling her own organs once again.
Undoubtedly, Grace expected Joan and Pfeiffer to go straight for Gayet, who
had read the cards.
So Joan went for Grace, who was in the gambler's frenzy as the hand was being
played. Joan slipped past Grace's thoughts, worked her way into the woman's
mind, through the dark labyrinths and channels of her memory, and into the
dangerous country of the unconscious. Invisible as air, she listened to Grace,
read her, discovered: A sexual miasma. Being brutally raped as a child. After
a riot in Manosque. Raped in a closet, for God's sake. The man tore her open
with a rifle barrel, then inserted himself. Taking her, piece by bloody piece,
just as she was taking Gayet. Just as others had taken her in rooms like this,
in this casino, in this closet.
And Gayet, now Joan could see him through Grace, unperturbable Gayet, who had
so much money and so little life, who was so afraid of his wife's past, of her
lovers and liberations he called perversions. But he called everything a
perversion.
How she hated him beneath what she called love.
But he looked just like the man who had raped her in that closet so long ago.
She could not remember the man's face-so effectively had she blocked it out of
her mind yet she was stunned when she first met Gayet. She felt attracted to
him, but also repelled; she was in love.
Through Joan, Pfeiffer saw Gayet's cards: a deuce and a six of clubs. He could
call his hand, but he wasn't sure of the deuce. It looked like a heart, but it
could just as easily be a diamond. If he called it wrong, he would lose the
hand, and his heart.
I can't be sure, Pfeiffer said to Joan, expecting help.
But Joan was in trouble. Grace had discovered her, and she was stronger than
Joan had ever imagined. Joan was trapped inside Grace's mind; and Grace, who
could not face what Joan had found, denied it.
And snapped.
In that instant, Joan felt that she was Grace. She felt all of Grace's pain
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and the choking weight of memory, as souls and selves incandescently merged.
But before Joan and Grace could fuse inescapably, Joan recoiled, realizing
that she was fighting for her life. She screamed for the gamesmaster to
deactivate the game. But her screams were lost as
Grace instantly slipped into the gamesmaster's mind and caught him, too. She
had the psychotic's strength of desperation, and Joan realized that Grace
would kill them all rather than face the truth about herself and Gayet.
Furiously Grace went after Pfeiffer. To kill him. She blamed him for Joan's
presence, and Joan felt crushing pain, as if she were being buried alive in
the dirt of Grace's mind. She tried to wrench herself away from Grace's
thoughts, lest they intertwine with, and become, her own.
She felt Grace's bloodlust . . . her need to kill Pfeiffer.
Grace grasped Pfeiffer with a thought, wound dark filaments around him that
could not be turned away by white thought or anything else.
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And like a spider, she wrapped her prey in darkness and looked for
physiological weakness, any flaw, perhaps a blood vessel that might rupture in
his head ....
Joan tried to pull herself away from the pain, from the concrete weight
crushing her. Ironically, she wondered if thought had mass. What a stupid
thought to die with, she told herself, and she suddenly remembered a story her
father had told her about a dying rabbi who was annoyed at the minyan praying
around him because he was trying to listen to two washerwomen gossiping
outside.
Many years later, her father confessed to her that it wasn't really a Jewish
story at all; it was
Buddhist. She held on to that thought, remembered how her father had laughed
after his confession.
The pain eased as she followed her thoughts: If thought had mass . . .
She was thinking herself free, escaping Grace by finding the proper angle, as
if thought and emotion and pain were purely mathematical.
That done in an instant.
But if she were to save Pfeiffer's life, and her own, she would have to do
something immediately.
She showed Grace her past. Showed her that she had married Gayet because he
had the face of the man who had raped her as a child.
Gayet, seeing this too, screamed. How he loathed Grace, but not nearly as much
as she loathed herself. He had tried to stop Grace, but he was too weak. He,
too, had been caught.
As if cornered, as if she were back in the closet with her rapist, she
attacked Gayet. Only now she had a weapon. She thought him dead, trapped him
in a scream, and, as if he were being squeezed from the insides, his blood
pressure rose. She had found a weakened blood vessel in his head, and it
ruptured.
The effort weakened Grace, and a few seconds later the gamesmaster was able to
regain control and disconnect everyone. Gayet was immediately hooked in to a
life-support unit which applied CPR
techniques to keep his heart beating.
But he was dead ....
There would be some rather sticky legal complications, but by surviving,
Pfeiffer had won the game, had indeed beaten Grace and won all of Gayet's
organs.
As Pfeiffer gazed through the transparent walls of the transpod that whisked
him and Joan out of
Paris, away from its dangers and sordid delights, he felt something new and
delicate toward Joan.
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It was newfound intimacy and gratitude . . . and love.
Joan, however, still carried the echoes of Grace's thoughts, as if a part of
her had irreversibly fused with Grace. She too felt something new for
Pfeiffer. Perhaps it was renewal, an evolution of her love.
They were in love . . . yet even now Joan felt the compulsion to gamble again.
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