Choke

  See also: Tanya.

  Dr. Marshall tilts her pelvis at me and says, “Do you know how most patients like your mother die?”

  They starve. They forget how to swallow and breathe food and drink into their lungs by accident. Their lungs fill with rotting matter and liquid, they develop pneumonia, and they die.

  I say, I know.

  I say maybe there’s worse things you can do than just letting somebody old die.

  “This isn’t just some old person,” Paige Marshall says. “This is your mother.”

  And she’s almost seventy years old.

  “She’s sixty-two,” Paige says. “If there’s anything you can do to save her and you don’t, you’re killing her with neglect.”

  “In other words,” I say, “I should do you?”

  “I’ve heard about your track record from some of the nurses,” Paige Marshall says. “I know you have no issues around recreational sex. Or is it just me? Am I just not your type? Is that it?”

  The two of us get quiet. A certified nurse’s aide walks past, pushing a cart of bundled sheets and damp towels. Her shoes have rubber soles and the cart has rubber wheels. The floor is ancient cork tile polished dark with traffic, so she goes by without a sound, just the stale trailing urine smell.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” I say. “I want to fuck you. I really want to fuck you.”

  Down the hall, the nurse’s aide stops and looks back at us. She says, “Hey Romeo, why don’t you give poor Dr. Marshall a break?”

  Paige says, “It’s fine, Miss Parks. This is between Mr. Mancini and myself.”

  We both stare back until she smirks and pushes her cart off around the next corner. Her name’s Irene, Irene Parks, and yeah, okay, we did it in her car in the parking lot about this time last year.

  See also: Caren, RN.

  See also: Jenine, CNA.

  At the time, I thought each of them was going to be somebody special, but without their clothes, they could’ve been anybody. Now her ass is about as inviting as a pencil sharpener.

  To Dr. Paige Marshall I say, “There you are so wrong.” I say, “I want to fuck you so bad I can taste it.” I say, “And no, I don’t want anybody to die, but I don’t want my mom back the way she’s always been.”

  Paige Marshall exhales. She sucks her mouth into a tight little knot and just glares at me. She holds her clipboard to her chest with her arms crossed over it.

  “So,” she says. “This hasn’t anything to do with sex. You just don’t want your mother to recover. You just can’t deal with strong women, and you think that if she dies, then your issue about her will also.”

  From her room, my mom calls, “Morty, what am I paying you for?”

  Paige Marshall says, “You can lie to my patients and complete their life conflicts, but don’t lie to yourself.” Then she says, “And don’t lie to me.”

  Paige Marshall says, “You’d rather see her dead than see her recover.”

  And I say, “Yes. I mean, no. I mean, I don’t know.”

  All my life, I’ve been less my mother’s child than her hostage. The subject of her social and political experiments. Her own private lab rat. Now she’s mine, and she’s not going to escape by dying or getting better. I just want one person I can rescue. I want one person who needs me. Who can’t live without me. I want to be a hero, but not just one time. Even if it means keeping her crippled, I want to be someone’s constant savior.

  “I know, I know, I know this sounds terrible,” I say, “but I don’t know. … This is what I think.”

  Here’s where I should tell Paige Marshall what I really think.

  I mean, I’m just tired of being wrong all the time just because I’m a guy.

  I mean, how many times can everybody tell you that you’re the oppressive, prejudiced enemy before you give up and become the enemy. I mean, a male chauvinist pig isn’t born, he’s made, and more and more of them are being made by women.

  After long enough, you just roll over and accept the fact that you’re a sexist, bigoted, insensitive, crude, cretinist cretin. Women are right. You’re wrong. You get used to the idea. You live down to expectations.

  Even if the shoe doesn’t fit, you’ll shrink into it.

  I mean, in a world without God, aren’t mothers the new god? The last sacred unassailable position. Isn’t motherhood the last perfect magical miracle? But a miracle that’s impossible for men.

  And maybe men say they’re glad not to give birth, all the pain and blood, but really that’s just so much sour grapes. For sure, men can’t do anything near as incredible. Upper body strength, abstract thought, phalluses—any advantages men appear to have are pretty token.

  You can’t even hammer a nail with a phallus.

  Women are already born so far ahead ability-wise. The day men can give birth, that’s when we can start talking about equal rights.

  I don’t tell Paige all that.

  Instead, I say how I just want to be one person’s guardian angel.

  “Revenge” isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind.

  “Then save her by fucking me,” says Dr. Marshall.

  “But I don’t want her saved all the way,” I say. I’m terrified of losing her, but if I don’t, I may lose myself.

  There’s still my mom’s red diary in my coat pocket. There’s still the chocolate pudding to get.

  “You don’t want her to die,” Paige says, “and you don’t want her to recover. Just what do you want?”

  “I want somebody who can read Italian,” I say.

  Paige says, “Like what?”

  “Here,” I say and show her the diary. “It’s my mom’s. It’s in Italian.”

  Paige takes the book and leafs through it. Her ears look red and excited around the edge. “I took four years of Italian as an undergrad,” she says. “I can tell you what it says.”

  “I just want to keep control,” I say. “For a change, I want to be the adult.”

  Still leafing through the book, Dr. Paige Marshall says, “You want to keep her weak so you’re always the one in charge.” She looks up at me and says, “It sounds as if you’d like to be God.”

  Chapter 19

  Black-and-white chickens stagger around Colonial Dunsboro, chickens with their heads flattened. Here are chickens with no wings or only one leg. There are chickens with no legs, swimming with just their ragged wings through the barnyard mud. Blind chickens without eyes. Without beaks. Born that way. Defective. Born with their little chicken brains already scrambled.

  There’s an invisible line between science and sadism, but here it’s made visible.

  It’s not that my brains are going to fare much better. Just look at my mom.

  Dr. Paige Marshall should see them all struggle along. Not that she’d understand.

  Denny here with me, Denny reaches into the back of his pants and pulls out a page of the classified ads from the newspaper all folded up in a little square. For sure this is contraband. His Royal High Governorship sees this and Denny’s going to be banished to unemployment. For real, right out in the barnyard in front of the cow shed, Denny hands me this newspaper page.

  Except for the newspaper, we’re being so authentic it’s like nothing we’re wearing’s even been washed in this century.

  People are snapping pictures, trying to take some part of you home as a souvenir. People point video cameras, trying to trap you into their vacation. They’re all shooting you, shooting the crippled chickens. Everybody’s trying to make every minute of the present last forever. Preserve every second.

  Inside the cow shed, there’s the gurgle of somebody sucking air through a bong. You can’t see them, but there’s that silent tension of a bunch of people leaned together in a circle, trying to hold their breath. A girl coughs. Ursula, the milkmaid. There’s so much reefer in there a cow coughs.

  This is when we’re supposed to be harvesting dried cow things, you know, cow piles, and Denny goes, “Read it, dude. T
he circled ad.” He opens the page for me to see. “That ad, there,” he says. There’s one little classified circled in red ink.

  With the milkmaid around. The tourists. There’s nothing less than a trillion ways we’re about to get caught. For real, Denny could not be more obvious.

  Against my hand, the paper’s still warm from Denny’s butt, and when I go, “Not here, dude,” and try to give the paper back …

  When I do that, Denny says, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to, you know, incriminate you. If you want, I can just read it for you.”

  The grade-schoolers who come here, it’s a big deal for them to visit the henhouse and watch the eggs hatch. Still, a regular chick isn’t as interesting as, say, a chicken with only one eye or a chicken with no neck or with a stunted paralyzed leg, so the kids shake the eggs. Shake them hard and put them back to hatch.

  So if what’s born is deformed or insane? It’s all for the sake of education.

  The lucky ones are just born dead.

  Curiosity or cruelty, for sure, me and Dr. Marshall would go around and around on this point.

  I shovel up some cow piles, careful so they don’t break in half. So the wet insides don’t stink. With all the cow crap on my hands, I have to not bite my nails.

  Next to me, Denny reads:

  “Free to good home, twenty-three-year-old male, recovering self-abuser, limited income and social skills, house-trained.” Then he reads a phone number. It’s his phone number.

  “It’s my folks, dude, that’s their phone number,” Denny says. “It’s like they’re hinting.”

  He found this left on his bed last night.

  Denny says, “They mean me.”

  I say I understand that part. With a wood shovel, I’m still getting the poops, piling them in a big woven thing. You know. A basket thing.

  Denny says, can he come live with me?

  “We’re talking plan Z here,” Denny says. “I’m only asking you as a last resort.”

  Because he doesn’t want to bug me or because he’s not nuts about living with me, I don’t ask.

  You can smell corn chips on Denny’s breath. Another violation of historic character. He’s such a shit magnet. The milkmaid, Ursula, comes out of the cow shed and looks at us with her stoner eyes just about filled with blood.

  “If there was a girl you liked,” I say to him, “if she wanted to have sex just so she could get pregnant, would you?”

  Ursula grabs her skirts up and comes stomping through the cow poop in her wooden clogs. She kicks a blind chicken that’s in her way. Somebody snaps her picture, kicking. A married couple start to ask Ursula to hold their baby for a picture, but then maybe they see her eyes.

  “I don’t know,” Denny says. “A baby’s not like having a dog. I mean, a baby lives a long time, dude.”

  “But what if she wasn’t planning to have the baby?” I say.

  Denny’s eyes go up and then down, looking at nothing, then he looks at me. “I don’t understand,” he says. “You mean like sell it?”

  “I mean like sacrifice it,” I say.

  And Denny says, “Dude.”

  “Just supposing,” I say, “she’s going to scramble its little unborn fetus brain and suck the mess out with a big needle and then inject that stuff into the head of somebody you know who has brain damage, to cure them,” I say.

  Denny’s lips hang open a crack. “Dude, you don’t mean me, do you?”

  I mean my mom.

  It’s called a neural transplant. Some people call it a neural graft, and it’s the only effective way to rebuild my mom’s brain at this late stage. It would be better known except for problems getting, you know, the key ingredient.

  “A ground-up baby,” Denny says.

  I say, “A fetus.”

  Fetal tissue, Paige Marshall said. Dr. Marshall with her skin and her mouth.

  Ursula stops next to us, and she points at the newspaper in Denny’s hand. She says, “Unless the date on that’s 1734, you’re fucked. That’s a violation of character.”

  The hair on Denny’s head is trying to grow back, except some is ingrown and trapped under red or white pimples.

  Ursula steps away, then turns back. “Victor,” she says, “if you need me, I’ll be churning.”

  I say, later. And she slogs off.

  Denny says, “Dude, so it’s like a choice between your mom and your firstborn?”

  It’s not a big deal, the way Dr. Marshall sees it. We do it every day. Kill the unborn to save the elderly. In the gold wash of the chapel, breathing her reasons into my ear, she asked, every time we burn a gallon of gas or an acre of rain forest, aren’t we killing the future to preserve the present?

  The whole pyramid scheme of Social Security.

  She said, with her breasts wedged between us, she said, I’m doing this because I care about your mother. The least you could do is your small part.

  I didn’t ask what she meant by small part.

  And Denny says, “So tell me the truth about yourself.”

  I don’t know. I couldn’t go through with it. With the fucking part.

  “No,” Denny says. “I mean, did you read your mom’s diary yet?”

  No, I can’t. I’m a little stuck around this dicey baby-killing issue.

  Denny looks me hard in the eye and says, “Are you really, like, a cyborg? Is that your mom’s big secret?”

  “A what?” I say.

  “You know,” he says, “an artificial humanoid created with a limited life span, but implanted with false childhood memories so you think you’re really a real person, except you’re really going to die soon?”

  And I look at Denny hard and say, “So, dude, my mom told you I’m some kind of a robot?”

  “Is that what her diary says?” Denny says.

  Two women come up, holding out a camera, and one says, “Do you mind?”

  “Say cheese,” I tell them and snap their picture smiling in front of the cow shed, then they walk away with another fleeting memory that almost got away. Another petrified moment to treasure.

  “No, I haven’t read the diary,” I say. “I haven’t fucked Paige Marshall. I can’t do jack shit until I decide about this.”

  “Okay, okay,” Denny says, to me he says, “then are you really just a brain in a pan somewhere being stimulated with chemicals and electricity into thinking you have a real life?”

  “No,” I go. “I’m definitely not a brain. That’s not it.”

  “Okay,” he says. “Maybe you’re an artificially intelligent computer program that interacts with other programs in a simulated reality.”

  And I go, “What does that make you?”

  “I’d be just another computer,” Denny says. Then he says, “I get your point, dude. I can’t even figure out change for the bus.”

  Denny narrows his eyes and tilts his head back, looking at me with one eyebrow cocked. “Here’s my last guess,” he says.

  He says, “Okay, the way I figure it, you’re just the subject of an experiment and the whole world you know is just an artificial construct populated by actors who play the roles of everybody in your life, and the weather is just special effects and the sky is painted blue and the landscape everywhere is just a set. Is that it?”

  And I go, “Huh?”

  “And I’m really a brilliantly talented and gifted actor,” Denny says, “and I’m just pretending to be your stupid masturbation-addicted loser best friend.”

  Somebody snaps a picture of me gritting my teeth.

  And I look at Denny, and say, “Dude, you’re not pretending anything.”

  At my elbow is some tourist guy grinning at me. “Victor, hey,” he says. “So this is where you work.”

  Where he knows me from, I haven’t the foggiest.

  Medical school. College. A different job. Or it could be he’s just another sex maniac from my group. It’s funny. He doesn’t look like a sexaholic, but nobody ever does.

  “Hey, Maude,” he says and elbows the woman he�
��s with. “This is the guy I’m always telling you about. I saved this guy’s life.”

  And the woman says, “Oh my gosh. So it’s true?” She pulls her head into her shoulders and rolls her eyes. “Reggie here is always bragging about you. I guess I always thought he was exaggerating.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I say. “Old Reg here, yeah, he saved my life.”

  And Denny says, “Anymore, who hasn’t ?”

  Reggie says, “Are you making out okay these days? I tried to send as much cash as I could. Was it enough to take care of that wisdom tooth you needed yanked?”

  And Denny says, “Oh, for crying out loud.”

  A blind chicken with half a head and no wings, shit smeared all over it, stumbles up against my boot, and when I reach down to pet it, the thing’s shivering inside its feathers. It makes a soft clucking, cooing sound that’s almost a purr.

  It’s nice to see something more pathetic than I feel right now.

  Then I catch myself with a fingernail in my mouth, cow crap. Chicken shit.

  See also: Histoplasmosis. See also: Tapeworms.

  And I go, “Yeah, the money.” I say, “Thanks, dude.” And I spit. Then I spit again. There’s the click of Reggie taking my picture. Just another stupid moment people have to make last forever.

  And Denny looks at the newspaper in his hand and says, “So, dude, can I come live at your mom’s house? Yes or no?”

  Chapter 20

  The Mommy’s three-o’clock appointment would show up clutching a yellow bath towel, and around his finger would be the blank groove where there should be a wedding ring. The second the door was locked, he’d try and give her the cash. He’d start to take off his pants. His name was Jones, he’d tell her. His first name Mister.

  Guys here to see her for the first time were all the same. She’d tell him, pay me after. Don’t be in such a rush. Keep all your clothes on. There’s no hurry.

  She’d tell him the appointment book was full of Mr. Joneses, Mr. Smiths, John Does, and Bob Whites, so he’d better come up with a better alias. She’d tell him to lie down on the couch. Close the blinds. Dim the lights.

  This is how she could make a pile of money. It didn’t violate the terms of her parole, but only because the parole board lacked imagination.