Choke

  As automatic as sneezing, I said, I’m sorry. Sorry I fucked her cat. Sorry I drove over her flower beds. Sorry I shot down her husband’s fighter plane. Sorry I flushed her hamster down the toilet. I sighed at her and said, “Did I forget anything?”

  Paige said, “Mrs. Tsunimitsu, I need you to open wide for me.”

  And Mrs. Tsunimitsu said, “I was with my son’s family, dining out, and you almost choked to death.” She says, “My son saved your life.”

  She says, “I was so proud of him. He still tells people that story.”

  Paige Marshall looks up at me.

  “Secretly,” Mrs. Tsunimitsu said, “I think my son, Paul, always felt like a coward until that night.”

  Paige sat back and looked from the old woman to me, back and forth.

  Mrs. Tsunimitsu clasped her hands together below her chin, closed her eyes, and smiled. She said, “My daughter-in-law had wanted a divorce, but after she saw Paul save you, she fell back in love.”

  She said, “I knew you were faking. Everybody else saw what they wanted to see.”

  She said, “You have an enormous capacity for love in you.”

  The old woman sat there smiling and said, “I can tell you have the most generous of hearts.”

  And fast as sneezing, I told her:

  “You’re a fucking wrinkled old lunatic.”

  And Paige winces.

  I tell everybody, I’m tired of being jerked around. Okay? So let’s just not pretend. I don’t have fuck for a heart. You people are not going to make me feel anything. You are not going to get to me.

  I’m a stupid, callous, scheming bastard. End of story.

  This old Mrs. Tsunimitsu. Paige Marshall. Ursula. Nico, Tanya, Leeza. My mom. Some days, life just looks like me versus every stupid chick in the whole damn world.

  With one hand, I grab Paige Marshall around the arm and yank her toward the door.

  Nobody’s going to trick me into feeling Christlike.

  “Listen to me,” I say. I shout, “If I wanted to feel anything, I’d go to a frigging movie!”

  And old Mrs. Tsunimitsu smiles and says, “You can’t deny the goodness of your true nature. It’s shining for everyone to see.”

  To her I say, shut up. To Paige Marshall I say, “Come on.”

  I’ll prove to her I’m no Jesus Christ. Anybody’s true nature is bullshit. There is no human soul. Emotion is bullshit. Love is bullshit. And I’m dragging Paige down the hallway.

  We live and we die and anything else is just delusion. It’s just passive chick bullshit about feelings and sensitivity. Just made-up subjective emotional crap. There is no soul. There is no God. There’s just decisions and disease and death.

  What I am is a dirty, filthy, helpless sexaholic, and I can’t change, and I can’t stop, and that’s all I’ll ever be.

  And I’ll prove it.

  “Where are you taking me?” Paige says, stumbling, her glasses and lab coat still flecked with food and blood.

  Already, I’m imagining junk so as not to trigger too fast, stuff like pets soaked in gasoline and set on fire. I’m picturing the dumpy Tarzan and his trained chimp. I’m thinking, here’s just another stupid chapter in my fourth step.

  To make time stand still. To fossilize this moment. To make the fucking last forever.

  I’m taking her in the chapel, I tell Paige. I’m the child of a lunatic. Not a child of God.

  Let God prove me wrong. He can nail me with a lightning bolt.

  I’m going to take her on the frigging altar.

  Chapter 25

  It was malicious endangerment this time or reckless abandonment or criminal neglect. There were so many laws the little boy couldn’t keep them straight.

  It was third-degree harassment or second-degree disregard, first-degree disdain or second-degree nuisance, and it got so the stupid kid was terrified to do anything except what everybody else did. Anything new or different or original was probably against the law.

  Anything risky or exciting would land you in jail.

  That’s why everybody was so eager to talk to the Mommy.

  She’d been out of jail for only a couple weeks this time, and already stuff had started to happen.

  There were so many laws and, for sure, about countless ways you could screw up.

  First the police asked about the coupons.

  Somebody had gone to a downtown copy shop and used a computer to design and print hundreds of coupons that promised a free meal for two, a seventy-five-dollar value with no expiration date. Each coupon was folded inside a cover letter that thanked you for being such a valued customer and said the enclosed coupon was a special promotion.

  All you had to do was eat dinner at the Clover Inn Restaurant.

  When the server presented the bill, you could just pay with the coupon. Tip included.

  Somebody did all that. Mailed out hundreds of these coupons.

  It had all the earmarks of an Ida Mancini stunt.

  The Mommy had been a server at the Clover Inn for her first week out of the halfway house, but she got fired for telling people stuff they didn’t want to know about their food.

  Then she just disappeared. A few days later, an unidentified woman had run screaming down the center aisle of a theater during the quiet, boring part of some big fancy ballet dance.

  This is why the police got the stupid little boy out of school one day and brought him downtown. To see if maybe he’d heard from her. From the Mommy. If maybe he knew where she was hiding.

  About this same time, several hundred very angry customers flooded into a fur salon with fifty-percent-discount coupons they got in the mail.

  About this time, a thousand very scared people arrived at the county sexually transmitted disease clinic, demanding to be tested after they received letters on the county letterhead warning them that some former sex partner had been diagnosed with an infectious disease.

  The police detectives took the little stooge downtown in a plain car and then upstairs in a plain building and sat with him and his foster mother, asking, has Ida Mancini attempted to contact you?

  Have you any idea from where she’s receiving funds?

  Why do you think she’s doing these awful things?

  And the little boy just waited.

  Help would come soon enough.

  The Mommy, she used to tell him she was sorry. People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become. With the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and addressed and recorded. Nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. On a roller coaster. At a movie. Still, it would always be that kind of faux excitement. You know the dinosaurs aren’t going to eat the kids. The test audiences have outvoted any chance of even a major faux disaster. And because there’s no possibility of real disaster, real risk, we’re left with no chance for real salvation. Real elation. Real excitement. Joy. Discovery. Invention.

  The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.

  Without access to true chaos, we’ll never have true peace.

  Unless everything can get worse, it won’t get any better.

  This is all stuff the Mommy used to tell him.

  She used to say, “The only frontier you have left is the world of intangibles. Everything else is sewn up too tight.”

  Caged inside too many laws.

  By intangibles, she meant the Internet, movies, music, stories, art, rumors, computer programs, anything that isn’t real. Virtual realities. Make-believe stuff. The culture.

  The unreal is more powerful than the real.

  Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.

  Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.

  But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and o
n.

  If you can change the way people think, she said. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives. And that’s the only lasting thing you can create.

  Besides, at some point, the Mommy used to say, your memories, your stories and adventures, will be the only things you’ll have left.

  At her last trial, before this last time she went to jail, the Mommy had sat up next to the judge and said, “My goal is to be an engine of excitement in people’s lives.”

  She’d stared straight into the stupid little boy’s eyes and said, “My purpose is to give people glorious stories to tell.”

  Before the guards took her into the back wearing handcuffs, she’d shouted, “Convicting me would be redundant. Our bureaucracy and our laws have turned the world into a clean, safe work camp.”

  She shouted, “We are raising a generation of slaves.”

  And it was back to prison for Ida Mancini.

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

  The unidentified woman, the one who ran down the aisle during the ballet, she was screaming, “We are teaching our children to be helpless.”

  Running down the aisle and out a fire exit, she’d yelled, “We’re so structured and micromanaged, this isn’t a world anymore, it’s a damn cruise ship.”

  Sitting, waiting with the police detectives, the stupid little shitface troublemaker asked if maybe the defense lawyer Fred Hastings could be there, too.

  And one detective said a filthy word under his breath.

  And right then, the fire alarm bell went off.

  And even with the bell ringing, the detectives still asked:

  “DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW TO GET IN TOUCH WITH YOUR MOTHER?”

  Screaming against the bell, they asked:

  “CAN YOU AT LEAST TELL US WHO SHE MIGHT TARGET NEXT?”

  Shouting against the alarm, the foster mother asked:

  “DON’T YOU WANT TO HELP US HELP HER?”

  And the alarm stopped.

  A lady stuck her head in the door and said, “Don’t panic, guys. It looks like another false alarm.”

  A fire alarm is never about a fire, not anymore.

  And this dumb-fuck little boy says, “May I use your bathroom?”

  Chapter 26

  The half-moon looks up at us, reflected in a silver pie tin of beer. Denny and me kneel in somebody’s backyard, and Denny kicks away the snails and slugs with little kicks of his index finger. Denny lifts the pie tin, full to the brim, bringing his reflection and his real face closer and closer until his fake lips meet his own lips.

  Denny drinks about half the beer and says, “This is how they drink beer in Europe, dude.”

  Out of slug traps?

  “No, dude,” Denny says. He hands me the pie tin and says, “Flat and warm.”

  I kiss my own reflection and drink, the moon watching over my shoulder.

  On the sidewalk waiting for us is a baby stroller with its wheels splayed out wider at the bottom than the top. The bottom of the stroller drags against the ground, and wrapped in the pink baby blanket is a boulder of sandstone too big for Denny or me to lift. A pink rubber baby head is balanced inside the top edge of the blanket.

  “About having sex in a church,” Denny says, “tell me you didn’t.”

  It’s not so much that I didn’t. I couldn’t.

  Couldn’t bone, shaft, drill, core, screw. All those euphemisms that aren’t.

  Denny and me, we’re just two regular guys taking the baby out for a stroll at midnight. Just a couple of nice young guys in this fine neighborhood of big houses, each set back on its lawn. All these houses with their self-contained, climate-controlled, smug illusion of security.

  Denny and me, we’re about as innocent as a tumor.

  Harmless as a psilocybin toadstool.

  This is such a fine neighborhood, even the beer they leave out for the animals is imported from Germany or Mexico. We hop the fence into the next backyard and snoop under the plants for our next round.

  Ducking to look under leaves and bushes, I say, “Dude.” I say, “You don’t think I’m a good-hearted person, do you?”

  And Denny says, “Hell no, dude.”

  After a few blocks, all those backyards of beer, I know Denny’s being honest. I say, “You don’t think I’m really a secretly sensitive and Christlike manifestation of perfect love?”

  “No way, dude,” Denny says. “You’re an asshole.”

  And I say, “Thanks. Just checking.”

  And Denny stands up using just his legs in slow motion, and in a pie tin between his hands is another reflection of the night sky, and Denny says, “Bingo, dude.”

  About me in the church I tell him, I’m more disappointed in God than in myself. He should’ve hammered me with a lightning bolt. I mean, God’s god. I’m just an asshole. I didn’t even take off Paige Marshall’s clothes. Still with her stethoscope around her neck, dangling between her breasts, I pushed her back on the altar. I didn’t even take off her lab coat.

  The stethoscope against her own chest, she said, “Go fast.” She said, “I want you to stay in synch with my heart.”

  It’s not fair how a woman never has to think of shit to keep from coming.

  And me, I just couldn’t. Already, that Jesus idea was just killing my hard-on.

  Denny hands me the beer, and I drink. Denny spits out a dead slug and says, “Better drink through your teeth, dude.”

  Even in a church, even laid up on an altar, without her clothes, Paige Marshall, Dr. Paige Marshall, I didn’t want her to become just another piece of ass.

  Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.

  Because nothing is as exciting as your fantasy.

  Breathe in. And then, out.

  “Dude,” Denny says. “This is got to be my nightcap. Let’s get the rock and head home.”

  And I say, just one more block, okay? Just one more round of backyards. I’m not near drunk enough to forget my day.

  This is such a fine neighborhood. I jump the fence to the next backyard and land on my head in somebody’s rose bush. Somewhere a dog’s barking.

  The whole time we were up at the altar, me trying to get my dog hard, the cross, polished and blond wood, was looking down on us. No tortured man. No crown of thorns. No flies circling and sweat. No stink. No blood and suffering, not in this church. No rain of blood. No plague of locusts.

  Paige, the whole time with the stethoscope in her ears, just listened to her own heart.

  The angels on the ceiling were painted over. The light through the stained-glass window was thick and gold and swimming with dust. The light fell in a thick solid shaft, a warm heavy shaft that spilled on us.

  Attention please, would Dr. Freud please pick up the white courtesy telephone.

  A world of symbols, not the real world.

  Denny looks at me stuck and bleeding from the rose thorns, my clothes ripped, lying in a bush, and says, “Okay, I mean it.” He says, “This is, for sure, last call.”

  The smell of roses, the smell of incontinence at St. Anthony’s.

  A dog’s barking and scratching to get out the back door of the house. A light comes on in the kitchen to show somebody in the window. Then the back-porch light comes on, and it’s amazing how fast I tear my ass out of that bush and run to the street.

  Coming the other way on the sidewalk are a couple, leaned together and walking with an arm around each other. The woman rubs her cheek on the man’s lapel, and the man kisses the crown of her head.

  Denny’s already pushing the stroller, so fast the front wheels catch in a sidewalk crack, and the baby’s rubber head pitches out. Glass eyes staring wide open, the pink head bounces past the happy couple and rolls into the gutter.

  To me, Denny says, “Dude, you want to fetch that for me?”

  My clothes shredded and gummy with blood, thorns stuck in my face, I trot pas
t the couple and nab the head out of the leaves and trash.

  The man yelps and pulls back.

  And the woman says, “Victor? Victor Mancini. Oh, my God.”

  She must’ve saved my life, because I don’t know who the hell she is.

  In the chapel, after I gave up, after we were buttoning our clothes shut, I said to Paige, “Forget fetal tissue. Forget resenting strong women.” I say, “You want to know the real reason why I won’t fuck you?”

  Doing up the buttons of my britches, I told her, “Maybe the truth is I really want to like you instead.”

  And with both hands above her head, making her black hair brain tight again, Paige said, “Maybe sex and affection aren’t mutually exclusive.”

  And I laughed. My hands tying my cravat, I told her, yes. Yes, they are.

  Denny and me, we get to the seven hundred block of, the street sign says Birch Street. To Denny pushing the stroller, I say, “Wrong way, dude.” I point behind us and say, “My mom’s house is back there.”

  Denny keeps pushing, the bottom of the stroller making a growling sound against the sidewalk. The happy couple are drop-jawed, still watching us from two blocks back.

  I trot along next to him, tossing the pink doll head from hand to hand. “Dude,” I say. “Turn back around.”

  Denny says, “We have to see the eight hundred block first.”

  What’s there?

  “It’s supposed to be nothing,” Denny says. “My Uncle Don used to own it.”

  The houses end, and the eight hundred block is just land with more houses on the block after that. The land is just tall grass planted around the edges with old apple trees, their bark all wrinkled and twisting up into the darkness. Inside a bunch of brush, blackberry whips, and scrub, more thorns on every twig, the middle of the land is clear.

  On the corner is a billboard sign, plywood painted white with a picture across the top of red-brick houses built against each other and people waving from windows with flower boxes. Under the houses, black words say: Coming Soon Menningtown Country Townhouses. Under the billboard, the ground’s snowed with peeling paint chips. Up close, the billboard is curling, the brick townhouses cracked and faded pink.