"Palahniuk, Chuck - Choke" - читать интересную книгу автора (Palahniuk Chuck)

CHOKE

CHOKE

by Chuck Palahniuk

________________________________________

Anchor ISBN: 0-385-72092-0

Book design by Dana Leigh Treglia

eBook scanned & proofed by Binwiped 11-21-02

Chapter 1

If you're going to read this, don't bother.

After a couple pages, you won't want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you're still in one piece.

Save yourself.

There has to be something better on television. Or since you have so much time on your hands, maybe you could take a night course. Become a doctor. You could make something out of yourself. Treat yourself to a dinner out. Color your hair.

You're not getting any younger.

What happens here is first going to piss you off. After that it just gets worse and worse.

What you're getting here is a stupid story about a stupid little boy. A stupid true life story about nobody you'd ever want to meet. Picture this little spaz being about waist high with a handful of blond hair, combed and parted on one side. Picture the icky little shit smiling in old school photos with some of his baby teeth missing and his first adult teeth coming in crooked. Picture him wearing a stupid sweater striped blue and yellow, a birthday sweater that used to be his favorite. Even that young, picture him biting his dickhead fingernails. His favorite shoes are Keds. His favorite food, fucking corn dogs.

Imagine some dweeby little boy wearing no seat belt and riding in a stolen school bus with his mommy after dinner. Only there's a police car parked at their motel so the Mommy just blows on past at sixty or seventy miles an hour.

This is about a stupid little weasel who, for sure, used to be about the stupidest little rat fink crybaby twerp that ever lived.

The little cooz.

The Mommy says, "We'll have to hurry," and they drive uphill on a narrow road, their back wheels wagging from side to side on the ice. In their headlights the snow looks blue, spreading from the edge of the road out into the dark forest.

Picture this all being his fault. The little peckerwood.

The Mommy stops the bus a little ways back from the base of a rock cliff, so the headlights glare against its white face, and she says, "Here's as far as we're going to get," and the words come boiling out as white clouds that show how big inside her lungs are.

The Mommy sets the parking brake and says, "You can get out, but leave your coat in the bus."

Picture this stupid runt letting the Mommy stand him right in front of the school bus. This bogus little Benedict Arnold just stands looking into the glare of the headlights, and lets the Mommy pull the favorite sweater off over his head. This wimpy little squealer just stands there in the snow, half naked, while the bus's motor races, and the roar echoes off the cliff, and the Mommy disappears to somewhere behind him in the night and the cold. The headlights blind him, and the motor noise covers any sound of the trees scraping together in wind. The air is too cold to breathe more than a mouthful at a time so this little mucous membrane tries to breathe twice as fast.

He doesn't run away. He doesn't do anything.

From somewhere behind him, the Mommy says, "Now whatever you do, don't turn around."

The Mommy tells him how there used to be a beautiful girl in ancient Greece, the daughter of a potter.

Like every time she gets out of jail and conies back to claim him, the kid and the Mommy have been in a different motel every night. They'll eat fast food for every meal, and just drive all day, every day. At lunch today, the kid tried to eat his corn dog while it was still too hot and almost swallowed it whole, but it got stuck and he couldn't breathe or talk until the Mommy charged around from her side of the table.

Then two arms were hugging him from behind, lifting him off his feet, and the Mommy whispered, "Breathe! Breathe, damn it!"

After that, the kid was crying, and the entire restaurant crowded around.

At that moment, it seemed the whole world cared what happened to him. All those people were hugging him and petting his hair. Everybody asked if he was okay.

It seemed that moment would last forever. That you had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.

"Okay. There," the Mommy said as she wiped his mouth, "now I've given you life."

The next moment, a waitress recognized him from a photograph on an old milk carton, and then the Mommy was driving the evil little squealer back to their motel room at seventy miles an hour.

On the way back, they'd got off the highway and bought a can of black spray paint.

Even after all their rushing around, where they've arrived is the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.

Now from behind him, this stupid kid hears the rattle of the Mommy shaking the spray paint, the marble inside the can knocking from end to end, and the Mommy says how the ancient Greek girl was in love with a young man.

"But the young man was from another country and had to go back," the Mommy says.

There's a hissing sound, and the kid smells spray paint. The bus motor changes sounds, clunks, running faster now and louder, and the bus rocks a little from tire to tire.

So the last night the girl and her lover would be together, the Mommy says, the girl brought a lamp and set it so it threw the lover's shadow on the wall.

The hiss of spray paint stops and starts. There's a short hiss, after that a longer hiss.

And the Mommy says how the girl traced the outline of her lover's shadow so she would always have a record of how he looked, a document of this exact moment, the last moment they would be together.

Our little crybaby just keeps looking straight into the headlights. His eyes water, and when he shuts them he can see the light shining, red, right through his eyelids, his own flesh and blood.

And the Mommy says how the next day, the girl's lover was gone, but his shadow was still there.

Just for a second, the kid looks back to where the Mommy is tracing the outline of his stupid shadow against the cliff face, only the boy's so far away that his shadow falls a head taller than the mother. His skinny arms look big around. His stubby legs stretch long. His pinched shoulders spread wide.

And the Mommy tells him, "Don't look. Don't move a muscle or you'll ruin all my work."

And the doofus little tattletale turns to stare into the headlights.

The can of spray paint hisses, and the Mommy says that before the Greeks, nobody had any art. This was how painting pictures was invented. She tells the story of how the girl's father used the outline on the wall to model a clay version of the young man, and that's the way sculpture was invented.

For serious, the Mommy told him, "Art never comes from happiness."

Here is where symbols were born.

The kid stands, shivering now in the glare, trying to not move, and the Mommy keeps working, telling the huge shadow how someday it will teach people everything that she's taught it. Someday it will be a doctor saving people. Returning them to happiness. Or something better than happiness: peace.

It'll be respected.

Someday.

This is even after the Easter Bunny turned out to be a lie. Even after Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and Saint Christopher and Newtonian physics and the Niels Bohr model of the atom, this stupid, stupid kid still believed the Mommy.

Someday, when he's grown up, the Mommy tells the shadow, the kid will come back here and see how he's grown into the exact outline she'd planned for him this night.

The kid's bare arms shake with the cold.

And the Mommy said, "Control yourself, damn it. Hold still or you'll ruin everything."

And the kid tried to feel warmer, but no matter how bright they were, the headlights didn't give off any heat.

"I need to make a clear outline," the Mommy said. "If you tremble, you'll turn out all blurred."

It wasn't until years later, until this stupid little loser was through college with honors and he'd busted his hump to get into the University of Southern California School of Medicine—until he was twenty-four years old and in his second year of medical school, when his mother was diagnosed and he was named as her guardian—it wasn't until then that it dawned on this little stooge that growing strong and rich and smart was only the first half of your life story.

Now the kid's ears ache with the cold. He feels dizzy and hyperventilated. His little stool-pigeon chest is all dimpled chicken skin. His nipples are pinched up by the cold into hard red pimples, and the little ejaculate tells himself: For real, I deserve this.

And the Mommy says, "Try to at least stand up straight."

The kid rolls his shoulders back and imagines the headlights are a firing squad. He deserves pneumonia. He deserves tuberculosis.

See also: Clare, RN.

See also: Pearl, CNA.

The magic of sex is it's acquisition without the burden of possessions. No matter how many women you take home, there's never a storage problem.

To Dr. Marshall, her ears and nervous hands, I say, "I don't want her force-fed."

The nurses still watching, Dr. Marshall cups a hand behind my arm and walks me farther away from them, saying, "I've been talking to your mother. She's quite a woman. Her political actions. All her demonstrations. You must love her very much."

And I say, "Well, I wouldn't go as far as that."

We stop, and Dr. Marshall whispers something so I have to step closer to hear. Too close. The nurses still watching. And breathing against my chest, she says, "What if we could completely restore your mother's mind?" Clicking and unclicking her pen, she says, "What if we could make her the intelligent, strong, vibrant woman she used to be?"

My mother, the way she used to be.

"It may be possible," says Dr. Marshall.

And not thinking how it sounds, I say, "God forbid."

Then real fast, I say that's probably not such a great idea.

And down the hall, the nurses are laughing, their hands cupped over their mouths. And from even that far away, you can hear Dina say, "It would serve him right."

On my next visit, I'm still Fred Hastings and my kids both get straight As in school. That week, Mrs. Hastings is painting our dining room green.

"Blue is better," my mom says, "for a room you're going to put any sort of food in."

After that, the dining room is blue. We live on East Pine Street. We're Catholics. We save our money at City First Federal. We drive a Chrysler.

All at my mom's suggestion.

The next week, I start writing things down, the details, so I won't forget who I'm supposed to be from one week to the next. The Hastings always drive to Robson Lake for our vacation, I write. We fish for steelhead. We want the Packers to win. We never eat oysters. We were buying land. Each Saturday, I first sit in the dayroom and study my notes while the nurse goes to see if my mom is awake.

Whenever I step into her room and introduce myself as Fred Hastings, she points the remote control to turn the television off.

Boxwoods around a house are fine, she tells me, but privets would be better.

And I write it down.

The best kind of people drink scotch, she says. Clean your gutters in October, then again in November, she says. Wrap your car's air filter in toilet paper for longer service life. Prune evergreens only after the first frost. And ash makes the best firewood.

I write it all down. I inventory what's left of her, the spots and wrinkles and her swollen or empty skin and flakes and rashes, and I write reminders to myself.

Every day: Wear sunblock.

Cover your gray.

Don't go insane.

Eat less fats and sugars.

Do more sit-ups.

Don't start forgetting stuff.

Trim the hair in your ears.

Take calcium.

Moisturize. Every day.

Freeze time to stay in one place forever.

Do not get frigging old.

She says, "Do you hear anything from my son, Victor? Do you remember him?"

I stop. I feel my heart ache, but I've forgotten what that feeling means.

Victor, my mom says, never comes to visit, and if he does, he never listens. Victor's busy and distracted and doesn't care. He's dropped out of medical school and is making a big mess out of his life.

She picks at the lint on her blanket. "He's got some minimum-wage kind of job as a tour guide or something," she says. She sighs, and her terrible yellow hands find the remote control.

I ask, wasn't Victor looking after her? Didn't he have a right to live his own life? I say, maybe Victor is so busy because he's out every night, literally killing himself to pay her bills for constant care. That's three grand each month just to break even. Maybe that's why Victor left school. I say, just for the sake of argument, that maybe Victor's doing his frigging best.

I say, it could be that Victor does more than anybody gives him credit for.

And my mom smiles and says, "Oh Fred, you're still the defender of the hopelessly guilty."

My mom turns on the television, and a beautiful woman in a glittering evening dress hits another beautiful young woman over the head with a bottle. The bottle doesn't even mess her hair, but it gives her amnesia.

Maybe Victor's struggling with problems of his own, I say.

The one beautiful woman reprograms the amnesia woman into thinking she's a killer robot that must do the beautiful woman's bidding. The killer robot accepts her new identity so easy you have to wonder if she's just faking the amnesia and was always looking for a good reason to go on a killing spree.

Me talking to my mom, my anger and resentment just sort of piddles out as we sit and watch.

My mother used to serve eggs scrambled with dark flakes of the nonstick coating from the frying pan. She cooked with aluminum pots, and we drank lemonade out of spun aluminum cups while we chewed on their soft cold lips. We used underarm deodorants made with aluminum salts. For sure, there's about a million ways we could've got to this point.

During a commercial, my mom asks for just one good thing about Victor's personal life. What did he do for fun? Where did he see himself in another year? Another month? Another week?

By now, I have no idea.

"And just what the hell do you mean," she says, "about Victor killing himself every night?"

Chapter 7

After the waiter's gone, I fork up half my sirloin steak and go to cram it all in my mouth, and Denny says, "Dude." He says, "Don't do it, here."

The people all around us, eating in their dressy clothes. With the candles and the crystal. With all the extra specialty forks. Nobody suspects a thing.

My lips crack, trying to get around the chunk of steak, the meat salty and juicy with fat and crushed pepper. My tongue pulls back to make more room, and the drool in my mouth wells up. Hot juice and drool slop out on my chin.

People who say red meat will kill you, they don't know the half of it.

Denny looks around quick, and says, through his teeth says, "You're getting greedy, my friend." He shakes his head and says, "Dude, you can't fool people into loving you."

Next to us, a married couple with wedding rings, gray hair, they eat without looking up, each of them head down, reading a program from the same play or concert. When the woman's wine is gone, she reaches for the bottle to fill her own glass. She doesn't fill his. The husband's wearing a thick gold wristwatch.

Denny sees me watching the old couple and says, "I'll warn them. I swear."

He watches for waiters who might know about us. He's glaring at me with his bottom teeth stuck out.

The bite of steak is so big my jaws can't come together. My cheeks bulge. My lips pucker tight to close, and I have to breathe through my nose while I try to chew.

The waiters in black jackets, each with a nice towel folded over one arm. The violin music. The silver and china. This isn't the normal kind of place we'd do this, but we're running out of restaurants. There are only so many places to eat in any town, and this is for sure the kind of stunt you never repeat in the same place.

I drink a little wine.

At another table near us, a young couple hold hands while they eat.

Maybe it will be them, tonight.

At another table, a man in a suit eats staring off into space.

Maybe he'll be tonight's hero.

I drink some wine and try to swallow, but the steak's too much. It sits in the back of my throat. I don't breathe.

In the next instant, my legs snap straight so fast my chair flies over behind me. My hands go to gripping around my throat. I'm on my feet and gaping at the painted ceiling, my eyes rolled back. My chin stretches out away from my face.

With his fork, Denny reaches over the table to steal my broccoli and goes, "Dude, you are way overacting."

Maybe it will be the eighteen-year-old busboy or the corduroy guy in the turtleneck sweater, but one of these people will treasure me for the rest of their life.

Already people are half out of their seats.

Maybe the woman with the wrist corsage.

Maybe the man with the long neck and wire-framed glasses.

This month, I got three birthday cards, and it's not even the fifteenth. Last month, I got four. The month before, I got six birthday cards. Most of these people I can't remember. God bless them, but they'll never forget me.

From not breathing, the veins in my neck swell. My face gets red, gets hot. Sweat springs up on my forehead. Sweat blots through the back of my shirt. With my hands, I hold tight around my neck, the universal sign language for someone choking to death. Even now, I get birthday cards from people who don't speak English.

The first few seconds, everybody is looking for someone else to step in and be the hero.

Denny reaches over to steal the other half of my steak.

With my hands still tight around my throat, I stagger over and kick him in the leg.

With my hands, I yank at my tie.

I rip open my collar button.

And Denny says, "Hey, dude, that hurt."

The busboy hangs back. No heroics for him.

The violinist and the wine steward are neck and neck, headed my way.

From another direction, a woman in a short black dress is pushing through the crowd. Coming to my rescue.

From another direction, a man strips off his dinner jacket and charges forward. Somewhere else, a woman screams.

This never takes very long. The whole adventure lasts one, two minutes, tops. That's good, since that's about how long I can hold my breath with a mouthful of food.

My first choice would be the older man with the thick gold wristwatch, somebody who will save the day and pick up our check for dinner. My personal choice is the little black dress for the reason she has nice tits.

Even if we have to pay for our own meal, I figure you have to spend money to make money.

Shoveling food into his face, Denny says, "Why you do this is so infantile."

I stagger over and kick him, again.

Why I do this is to put adventure back into people's lives.

Why I do this is to create heroes. Put people to the test.

Like mother, like son.

Why I do this is to make money.

Somebody saves your life, and they'll love you forever. It's that old Chinese custom where if somebody saves your life, they're responsible for you forever. It's as if now you're their child. For the rest of their lives, these people will write me. Send me cards on the anniversary. Birthday cards. It's depressing how many people get this same idea. They call you on the phone. To find out if you're feeling okay. To see if you maybe need cheering up. Or cash.

It's not as if I spend the money phoning up escort girls. Keeping my mom in St. Anthony's Care Center costs around three grand each month. These Good Samaritans keep me alive. I keep her. It's that simple.

You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel so strong. You save people by letting them save you.

All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog.

People really need somebody they feel superior to. So stay downtrodden.

People need somebody they can send a check at Christmas. So stay poor.

"Charity" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

You're the proof of their courage. The proof they were a hero. Evidence of their success. I do this because everybody wants to save a human life with a hundred people watching.

With the sharp tip of his steak knife, Denny's sketching on the white tablecloth, sketching the architecture of the room, the cornices and paneling, the broken pediments above each doorway, all this while still chewing. He lifts his plate to his mouth and just shovels in the food.

To perform a tracheotomy, you'd find the dent just below the Adam's apple, but just above the cricoid cartilage. With a steak knife, make a half-inch horizontal incision, then pinch the incision and insert your finger to open it. Insert a "trache" tube; a drinking straw or half a ballpoint pen works best.

If I can't be a great doctor saving hundreds of patients, this way I'm a great patient creating hundreds of would-be doctors.

Closing in fast is a man in a tuxedo, dodging between the onlookers, running with his steak knife and his ballpoint pen.

By choking, you become a legend about themselves that these people will cherish and repeat until they die. They'll think they gave you life. You might be the one good deed, the deathbed memory that justifies their whole existence.

So be the aggressive victim, the big loser. A professional failure.

People will jump through hoops if you just make them feel like a god.

It's the martyrdom of Saint Me.

Denny scrapes my plate onto his and keeps forking food into his mouth.

The wine steward is here. The little black dress is up against me. The man with the thick gold watch.

In another minute, the arms will come around me from behind. Some stranger will be hugging me tight, double-fisting me under the rib cage and breathing into my ear, "You're okay."

Breathing into your ear, "You're going to be fine."

Two arms will hug you, maybe even lift you off your feet, and a stranger will whisper, "Breathe! Breathe, damn it!"

Somebody will pound you on the back the way a doctor pounds a newborn baby, and you'll let fly with your mouthful of chewed steak. In the next second, you'll both be collapsed on the floor. You'll be sobbing while someone tells you how everything is all right. You're alive. They saved you. You almost died. They'll hold your head to their chest and rock you, saying, "Everybody get back. Make some room, here. The show's over."

Already, you're their child. You belong to them.

They'll put a glass of water to your lips and say, "Just relax. Hush. It's all over."

Hush.

For years to come, this person will call and write. You'll get cards and maybe checks.

Whoever it is, this person will love you.

Whoever will be so proud. Even if maybe your real folks aren't. This person will be proud of you because you make them so proud of themselves.

You'll sip the water and cough just so the hero can wipe your chin with a napkin.

Do anything to cement this new bond. This adoption. Remember to add details. Stain their clothes with snot so they can laugh and forgive you. Cling and clutch. Really cry so they can wipe your eyes.

It's okay to cry as long as you're faking it.

Just don't hold anything back. This is going to be the best story of somebody's life.

What's most important is unless you want a nasty trache scar, you'd better be breathing before anybody gets near you with a steak knife, a pocketknife, a box cutter.

Another detail to remember is when you blast out your mouthful of wet crud, your ground wad of dead meat and drool, you'll need to be facing straight at Denny. He's got parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins up the ass, a thousand people who have to save him from every mess-up. That's why Denny will never understand me.

The rest of the people, everyone else in the restaurant, sometimes they'll stand there and applaud. People will cry with relief. People just pour out of the kitchen. Within minutes, they'll be telling the story to each other. Everybody will buy drinks for the hero. Their eyes all shining with eye juice.

They'll all shake the hero's hand.

They'll pat the hero on the back.

It's so much more their birth than it is yours, but for years to come this person will send you a birthday card on this day and month. They'll become another member of your own very very extended family.

And Denny will just shake his head and ask for a dessert menu.

That's why I do all this. Go to all this trouble. To showcase just one brave stranger. To save just one more person from boredom. It's not just for the money. It's not just for the adoration.

But neither one hurts.

It's all so easy. It's not about looking good, at least not on the surface—but you still win. Just let yourself be broken and humiliated. Just your whole life, keep telling people, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. . . .

Chapter 8

Eva follows me down the hallway with her pockets full of roast turkey. There's chewed-up Salisbury steak in her shoes. Her face, the powdery crushed velvet mess of her skin, is a hundred wrinkles that all run into her mouth, and she wheels along after me, saying, "You. Don't you run away from me."

Her hands woven with lumpy veins, she wheels herself along. Hunched in her wheelchair, pregnant with her own huge swollen spleen, she keeps after me, saying, "You hurt me."

Saying, "You can't deny it."

Wearing a bib the color of food, she says, "You hurt me, and I'm telling Mother."

Where they have my mom, she has to wear a bracelet. Not a jewelry kind of bracelet, it's a strip of thick plastic that's heat-sealed around her wrist so she can never take it off. You can't cut it. You can't melt it apart with a cigarette. People have tried all these ways to get out.

Wearing the bracelet, every time you walk around the hallways, you hear locks snapping shut. A magnetic strip or something sealed inside the plastic gives off a signal. It stops the elevator doors from opening for you to get on. It locks almost every door if you get within four feet. You can't leave the floor you're assigned. You can't get to the street. You can go into the garden or the dayroom or the chapel or the dining room, but nowhere else in the world.

If somehow you do get past an exterior door, for sure the bracelet sets off an alarm.

This is St. Anthony's. The rugs, the drapes, the beds, pretty much everything is flameproof. It's all stain-resistant. You could do just about anything anywhere, and they could wipe it up. It's what they call a care center. It feels bad, telling you all this. Spoiling the surprise, I mean. You'll see it all yourself, soon enough. That is, if you live too long.

Or if you just give up and go nuts ahead of schedule.

My mom, Eva, even you, eventually everybody gets a bracelet.

This isn't one of those snake pit places. You don't smell urine the minute you step in the door. Not for three grand every month. It used to be a convent a century ago, and the nuns planted a beautiful old rose garden, beautiful and walled and fully escape-proof.

Video security cameras watch you from every angle.

From the minute you get in the front door, there's a slow scary migration of the residents edging toward you. Every wheelchair, all the people with walkers and canes, they all see a visitor and come creeping.

Tall, glaring Mrs. Novak is an undresser.

The woman in the room next to my mom is a squirrel.

With an undresser, they take their clothes off at every possible moment. These are the folks who the nurses dress in what look like shirt and pants combinations, but are really jumpsuits. The shirts are sewn into the waistband of the pants. The shirt buttons and the fly are fake. The only way in or out is a long zipper up the back. These are old people with limited range of motion, so an undresser, even what they call an aggressive undresser, is trapped three times over. In her clothes, in her bracelet, in her care center.

A squirrel is someone who chews her food and then forgets what to do next. They forget how to swallow. Instead, she spits each chewed mouthful in her dress pocket. Or in her handbag. This is less cute than it sounds.

Mrs. Novak is Mom's roommate. The squirrel is Eva.

At St. Anthonys, the first floor is for people who forget names and run around naked and put chewed food in their pockets, but who are otherwise pretty undamaged. Here are also some young people fried on drugs and smoked by massive head traumas. They walk and talk, even if it's just word salad, a constant stream of words that seem random.

"Fig people road little dawn singing rope purple veil gone," that's how they talk.

The second floor is for bed patients. The third floor is where people go to die.

Mom's on the first floor for now, but nobody's there forever.

How Eva got here is, people will take their aging parents to some public place and just leave them behind with no identification. These are old Dorothys and Ermas with no idea who or where they are. People think the city or state government or whoever will collect them. Kind of what the government does with litter.

The same as what happens when you ditch your old car and take the license plates and the VIN decal off so the city has to tow it away.

No kidding, but this is called granny dumping, and St. Anthony's has to take a certain number of dumped grannies and ecstasy-fried street kids and suicidal bag ladies. Only they don't call them bag ladies, or call the street girls prosti-tots. My guess is somebody slowed their car down and just shoved Eva out the door and never shed a tear. Kind of what people do with pets they can't house-train.

Eva still trailing me, I get to my mom's room and she's not there. Instead of Mom, her bed's empty with a big wet dent sunk in the mattress soaked with urine. It's shower time, I figure. A nurse takes you down the hall to a big tiled room where they can hose you clean.

Here at St. Anthony's, they show the movie The Pajama Game every Friday night, and every Friday all the same patients crowd in to see it for the first time.

They have bingo, crafts, visiting pets.

They have Dr. Paige Marshall. Wherever she's disappeared to.

They have fireproof bibs that cover you from your neck to your ankles so you don't set fire to yourself while you smoke. They have Norman Rockwell posters. A hair dresser comes twice a week to do your hair. That costs extra. Incontinence costs extra. Dry cleaning costs extra. Monitoring urine output costs extra. Stomach tubes.

They have lessons every day in how to tie your shoe, how to button a button, snap a snap. Buckle a buckle. Someone will demonstrate Velcro. Someone will teach you how to zip your zipper. Every morning, they tell you your name. Friends who've known each other sixty years get reintroduced. Every morning.

These are doctors, lawyers, captains of industry, who, day to day, can't master a zipper anymore. This is less teaching than it is damage control. You might as well try to paint a house that's on fire.

Here at St. Anthony's, Tuesday means Salisbury steak. Wednesday means mushroom chicken. Thursday is spaghetti. Friday, baked fish. Saturday, corned beef. Sunday, roast turkey.

They have thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles for you to do while you're running out the clock. There isn't a mattress in the place a dozen people haven't already died on.

Eva's wheeled her chair up to my mom's doorway and she's sitting there, looking pale and wilted, as if she's a mummy somebody just unwrapped and then set its thin cruddy hair. Her curly blue head never stops bobbing in slow, tight little prizefighter circles.

"Don't come near me," Eva says every time I look at her. "Dr. Marshall won't let you hurt me," she says.

Until the nurse gets back, I just sit on the edge of my mom's bed and wait.

My mom has one of those clocks where each hour is marked by the call of a different bird. Prerecorded. One o'clock is the American Robin. Six is the Northern Oriole.

Noon is the House Finch.

The Black-capped Chickadee means eight o'clock. The White-breasted Nuthatch means eleven.

You get the idea.

The problem is, associating birds with specific times can get confusing. Especially if you're outside. You turn from a clock watcher to a bird watcher. Every time you hear the lovely trill of the White-throated Sparrow, you think: Is it ten o'clock already?

Eva wheels a little bit into my mom's room. "You hurt me," she says to me. "And I never told Mother."

These old people. These human ruins.

It's already half-past the Tufted Titmouse, and I have to catch my bus and be at work by the time the Blue Jay sings.

Eva thinks I'm her big brother who diddled her about a century ago. My mom's roommate, Mrs. Novak with her horrible big hanging breasts and ears, she thinks I'm her bastard business partner who gypped her out of a patent for the cotton gin or the fountain pen or something.

Here I get to be all things to all women.

"You hurt me," Eva says and rolls a little closer. "And I've never forgotten it for a minute."

Every time I visit, some old raisin down the hall with wild eyebrows, she calls me Eichmann. Another woman with a clear plastic tube of piss looping out from under her bathrobe, she accuses me of stealing her dog and wants it back. Anytime I pass this other old woman who sits in her wheelchair, slumped inside a pile of pink sweaters, she hisses at me. "I saw you," she says, and looks at me with one cloudy eye. "The night of the fire, I saw you with them!"

You can't win. Every man who's ever passed through Eva's life has probably been her big brother in some form. Whether she knew it or not, she's spent her whole life waiting and expecting men to diddle her. For serious, even mummied up in her wrinkled skin, she's still eight years old. Stuck. Just the same as Colonial Dunsboro with its granola crew of burnouts, everybody at St. Anthony's is trapped in their past.

I'm no exception, and don't think you are either.

Just as stuck as Denny in the stocks, Eva's arrested in her development.

"You," Eva says, and pokes a trembling finger at me. "You hurt my woo-woo."

These stuck old people.

"Oh, you said it was just our game," she says and rolls her head, her voice getting sing song. "It was just our secret game, but then you put your big man thing inside me." Her bony, carved little finger keeps poking in the air at my crotch.

For serious, just the idea makes my big man thing want to run screaming from the room.

The trouble is, anywhere else at St. Anthonys it's the same deal. Another old skeleton thinks I borrowed five hundred dollars from her. Another baggy old woman calls me the devil.

"And you hurt me," Eva says.

It's tough not to come here and soak up the blame for every crime in history. You want to shout in everybody's old toothless face. Yes, I kidnapped that Lindbergh baby.

The Titanic thing, I did that.

That Kennedy assassination deal, yeah, that was me.

The big World War II gizmo, that atom bomb contraption, well guess what? That was my doing.

The AIDS bug? Sorry. Me, again.

The correct way to handle a case like Eva is to redirect her attention. Distract her by mentioning lunch or the weather or how nice her hair looks. Her attention span is about a clock tick long, and you can shove her on to a more pleasant topic.

You can guess this is how men have been handling Eva's hostility for her whole life. Just distract her. Get through the moment. Avoid confrontation. Run away.

That's pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our own attention. Jacking off. Denial.

Her whole body leaning forward, her little stick finger trembles in the air at me.

Screw it.

She's already pretty much engaged to become Mrs. Death.

"Yeah, Eva," I say. "I boned you." And I yawn. "Yup. Every chance I got, I stuck it in you and humped out a load."

They call this psychodrama. You could call it just another kind of granny dumping.

Her twisted little finger wilts, and she settles back between the arms of her wheelchair. "So you finally admit it," she says.

"Hell yes," I say. "You're a great piece of ass, baby sis."

She looks off at a blank spot on the linoleum floor and says, "After all these years, he admits it."

This is role-playing therapy, only Eva doesn't know it's not for real.

Her head still loops in little circles, but her eyes come back to me. "And you're not sorry?" she says.

Well, I guess if Jesus could die for my sins, I suppose I can soak up a few for other people. We all get our chance to play scapegoat. Take the blame.

The martyrdom of Saint Me.

The sins of every man in history landing square on my back.

"Eva," I say. "Baby, sweetheart, little sister, love of my life, of course I'm sorry. I was a pig," I say and look at my watch. "You were just such a hot tamale that I was out of control."

Like I need this shit to deal with. Eva just stares at me with her big hyperthyroid eyes until a big tear splurts out of one eye and cuts through the powder on her wrinkled cheek.

I roll my eyes at the ceiling and say, "Okay, I hurt your little woo-woo, but that was eighty frigging years ago, so get over it. Move on with your life."

Then her horrible hands come up, wasted and veined as tree roots or old carrots, and they cover her face. "Oh, Colin," she says behind them. "Oh, Colin."

She takes her hands away, and her face is hosed with eye juice. "Oh, Colin," she whispers, "I forgive you." And her face nods toward her chest, bobbing with short breaths and sniffs, and her terrible hands bring the edge of her bib up to wipe at her eyes.

We just sit there. Jeez, I wish I had some chewing gum. My watch says twelve thirty-five.

She wipes her eyes and sniffs and looks up a little. "Colin," she says. "Do you still love me?"

These frigging old people. Jesus H.

And just in case you're wondering, I'm not a monster.

Just like something in a frigging book, for real I say, "Yeah, Eva." I say, "Yeah, for sure, I guess I can probably still love you."

Eva sobs now, her face hanging over her lap, her whole body rocking. "I'm so glad," she says, her tears dropping straight, gray stuff from her nose dripping right into her empty hands.

She says, "I'm so glad," and she's still crying, and you can smell the chewed-up Salisbury steak squirreled away in her shoe, the chewed mushroom chicken in the pocket of her smock. That, and the damn nurse is never going to get my mom back from her shower, and I have to be back at work in the eighteenth century by one o'clock.

It's hard enough remembering my own past so I can do my fourth step. Now it's mixed up with the past of these other people. Which defense attorney I am, today, I can't remember. I look at my fingernails. I ask Eva, "Is Dr. Marshall here, do you think?" I ask, "Do you know if she's married?"

The truth about myself, who I really am, my father and everything, if my mom knows then she's too freaked out with guilt to tell.

I ask Eva, "Could you maybe cry somewhere else?"

Then it's too late. The Blue Jay starts singing.

And Eva, she still won't shut up, crying and rocking, her bib pressed to her face, the plastic bracelet trembling around one wrist, she's saying, "I forgive you, Colin. I forgive you. I forgive you. Oh, Colin, I forgive ..."

Chapter 9

It was one afternoon when our stupid little boy and his foster mother were in a shopping mall that they heard the announcement. This was summer, and they were shopping for back to school, the year he was going to be in fifth grade. The year you had to wear shirts with stripes to really fit in. This was years and years ago. This was only his first foster mother.

Up-and-down stripes, he was telling her when they heard it.

The announcement:

"Would Dr. Paul Ward," the voice told everybody, "please meet your wife in the cosmetics department of Woolworth's."

This was the first time the Mommy came back to claim him.

"Dr. Ward, please meet your wife in the cosmetics department of Woolworth's."

That was the secret signal.

So the kid lied and said he needed to find the bathroom and instead he went to Woolworth's, and there, opening boxes of hair color, was the Mommy. She had a big yellow wig that made her face look too small and smelled like cigarettes. With her fingernails, she opened each box and took out the dark brown bottle of dye inside. She'd open another box and take out the other bottle. She put the one bottle in the other box and put it back on the shelf. She opened another box.

"This one's pretty," the Mommy said, looking at the picture of a woman smiling on the box. She switched the bottle inside with another bottle. All the bottles the same dark brown glass.

Opening another box, she said, "Do you think she's pretty?"

And the kid's so stupid he says, "Who?"

"You know who," the Mommy said. "She's young, too. I just saw the two of you looking at clothes. You were holding her hand, so don't lie."

And the kid was so stupid he didn't know to just run away. He couldn't begin to even think about the very definite terms of her parole or the restraining order or why she'd been in jail for the past three months.

And switching bottles of blond into boxes for redheads and bottles of black into boxes for blondes, the Mommy said, "So do you like her?"

"You mean Mrs. Jenkins?" the boy said.

Not closing the boxes just perfect, the Mommy was putting them back on the shelf a little messed up, a little faster, and she said, "Do you like her?"

And like this is going to help, our little stooge said, "She's just a foster mom."

And not looking at the kid, still looking at the woman smiling on the box in her hand, the Mommy said, "I asked you if you liked her."

A shopping cart rattled up next to them in the aisle and a blond lady reached past to take a bottle with a blond picture but a bottle of some other color inside it. This lady put the box in her cart and got away.

"She thinks of herself as a blonde," the Mommy said. "What we have to do is mess with people's little identity paradigms."

What the Mommy used to call "Beauty Industry Terrorism."

The little boy looked after the lady until she was too far away to help.

"You already have me," the Mommy said. "So what do you call this foster one?"

Mrs. Jenkins.

"And do you like her?" the Mommy said, and turned to look at him for the first time.

And the little boy pretended to make up his mind and said, "No?"

"Do you love her?"

"No."

"Do you hate her?"

And this spineless little worm said, "Yes?"

And the Mommy said, "You got that right." She leaned down to look him in the eyes and said, "How much do you hate Mrs. Jenkins?"

And the little cooz said, "Lots and lots?"

"And lots and lots and lots," the Mommy said. She put her hand for him to take and said, "We have to be fast. We have a train to catch."

Then leading him through the aisles, tugging his boneless little arm toward daylight outside the glass doors, the Mommy said, "You are mine. Mine. Now and forever, and don't you ever forget it."

And pulling him through the doors, she said, "And just in case the police or anybody asks you later on, I'm going to tell you all the dirty, filthy things this so-called foster mother did to you every time she could get you alone."

Chapter 10

Where I live now, in my mom's old house, I sort through my mom's papers, her college report cards, her deeds, statements, accounts. Court transcripts. Her diary, still locked. Her entire life.

The next week, I'm Mr. Benning, who defended her on the little charge of kidnapping after the school bus incident. The week after, I'm public defender Thomas Welton, who plea-bargained her sentence down to six months after she was charged with assaulting the animals in the zoo. After him, I'm the American civil liberties attorney who went to bat with her on the malicious mischief charge stemming from the disturbance at the ballet.

There's an opposite to deja vu. They call it jamais vu. It's when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar.

"How is Victor doing?" my mom asks me on my next visit.

Whoever I am. Whatever public defender du jour.

Victor who? I want to ask.

"You don't want to know," I say. It would break your heart. I ask her, "What was Victor like as a little boy? What did he want from the world? Did he have any big goal he dreamed about?"

At this point, how my life starts to feel is like I'm acting in a soap opera being watched by people on a soap opera being watched by people on a soap opera being watched by real people, somewhere. Every time I visit, I watch the halls for another chance to talk with the doctor with her little black brain of hair, her ears and glasses.

Dr. Paige Marshall with her clipboard and attitude. Her scary dreams about helping my mom live another ten or twenty years.

Dr. Paige Marshall, another potential dose of sexual anesthetic.

See also: Nico.

See also: Tanya.

See also: Leeza.

More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself.

My life makes about as much sense as a Zen koan.

A House Wren sings, but whether it's a real bird or it's four o'clock I'm not sure.

"My memory isn't any good," my mom says. She's rubbing her temples with the thumb and index finger of one hand, and says, "I worry that I should tell Victor the truth about himself." Propped on her stack of pillows, she says, "Before it's too late, I wonder if Victor has a right to know who he really is."

"So just tell him," I say. I bring food, a bowl of chocolate pudding, and try to sneak the spoon into her mouth. "I can go call," I say, "and Victor can be here in a couple minutes."

The pudding is lighter brown and smelly under a cold dark brown skin.

"Oh, but I cant," she says. "The guilt is so bad, I can't even face him. I don't even know how he'll react."

She says, "Maybe it's better Victor never finds out."

"So tell me," I say. "Get it off your chest," I say, and I promise not to tell Victor, not unless she says it's okay.

She squints at me, her old skin all cinching tight around her eyes. With chocolate pudding smeared in the wrinkles around her mouth, she says, "But how do I know I can trust you? I'm not even sure who you are."

I smile and say, "Of course you can trust me."

And I stick the spoon in her mouth. The black pudding just sits on her tongue. It's better than a stomach tube. Okay, it's cheaper.

I take the remote control out of her reach and tell her, "Swallow."

I tell her, "You have to listen to me. You have to trust me."

I say, "I'm him. I'm Victor's father."

And her milky eyes swell at me while the rest of her face, her wrinkles and skin, seem to slide into the collar of her nightgown. With one terrible yellow hand, she makes the sign of the cross and her mouth hangs open to her chest. "Oh, you're him, and you've come back," she says. "Oh, blessed Father. Holy Father," she says. "Oh, please forgive me."

Chapter 11

This is me talking to Denny, locking him in the stocks again, this time for having a stamp on the back of his hand from some nightclub, and I say, "Dude."

I say, "It's so weird."

Denny's got both hands in place for me to lock them. He's got his shirt tucked in tight. He knows to bend his knees a little to take the stress off his back. He remembers to visit the restroom before he gets locked up. Our Denny's turned into a regular expert at getting punished. In good old Colonial Dunsboro, masochism is a valuable job skill.

It is in most jobs.

Yesterday at St. Anthony's, I tell him, it was the same as that old movie where there's a guy and a painting, and the guy gets to party and live to be about a hundred years old, and he never looks any different. The painting of him, it keeps getting uglier and trashed with alcohol-related everything and the nose falls off from secondary syphilis and the clap.

All the residents at St. Anthony's, now they're all eyes closed and humming. Everybody's all smiling and righteous.

Except me. I'm their stupid painting.

"Congratulate me, dude," Denny says. "Being in the stocks so much, I put together four weeks of sobriety. For sure, that's like four weeks more than I've had since I was thirteen."

My mom's roommate, I tell him, Mrs. Novak, she's all nodding and satisfied now that I've finally fessed up to stealing her invention for toothpaste.

Another old lady is jabbering and happy as a parrot since I admitted to peeing in her bed every night.

Yeah, I tell them all, I did it. I burned down your house. I bombed your village. I deported your sister. I sold you a shitty blue Nash Rambler in 1968. Then, yeah, I killed your dog.

So get over it!

I tell them, heap it on me. Make me play the big passive bottom in your guilt gang bang. I'll take everybody's load.

And after everybody's humped out their load in my face, they're all smiling and humming. They're laughing at the ceiling, still all crowded around me, patting my hand and saying it's all right, they forgive me. They're gaining fucking weight. The whole hen party's chatting at me, and this real tall nurse walks by, and she says, "Well, aren't you Mister Popular."

Denny sniffs.

"You need a snot rag, dude?" I say.

The weird part is my mom's not getting any better. No matter how much I play Pied Piper and take the blame away from these people. No matter how much fault I sponge up, my mom doesn't believe I'm me anymore, that I'm Victor Mancini. So she won't unload her own big secret. So she's going to need some stomach tube thing.

"Sobriety is okay enough," Denny says, "but someday, I'd like to live a life based on doing good stuff instead of just not doing bad stuff. You know?"

What's even weirder, I tell him, is I'm figuring how I can turn my new popularity into a fast broom closet ram session with this tall nurse, maybe get her to throat my dog. A nurse thinks you're a caring nurturing guy who's patient with hopeless old people, and you're halfway to boning her.

See also: Caren, RN.

See also: Death.

With the edge of his hand, Denny smears the cork lines to add shadow and depth. It's the woman onstage with her hands over her eyes, her mouth slightly open, and Denny picks at it fast, his eyes going back to the woman for details, her belly button, the curve of her hipbones. My only gripe is the way Denny draws women is not the way they look for real. In Denny's version, the cheesy thighs on some woman will look rock-solid. The bagged-out eyes on some other woman will become clear and toned underneath.

"You got any cash left over, dude?" Denny says. "I don't want her to move on just yet."

But I'm broke, and the girl moves on to the next guy down along the stage.

"Let's see, Picasso," I tell him.

And Denny scratches under his eye and leaves a big smudge of soot. Then he tips the legal pad enough for me to see a naked woman with her hands over her eyes, sleek and tensing every muscle tight, none of her looks trashed by gravity or ultraviolet light or poor nutrition. She's smooth but soft. Flexed but relaxed. She's a total physical impossibility.

"Dude," I say, "you made her look too young."

The next patient is Cherry Daiquiri again, coming back around, not smiling this time, sucking hard on the inside of one cheek and asking me, "This mole I have? You sure it's cancer? I mean, I don't know, but how scared should I be . . . ?"

Without looking at her, I hold up one finger. This is international sign language for Please wait. The doctor will see you shortly.

"No way are her ankles that thin," I tell Denny. "And her ass is way bigger than you have there."

I lean over to see what Denny's doing, then look down the stage to the last patient. "You need to make her knees lumpier," I say.

The downstage dancer gives me a filthy look.

Denny just keeps sketching. He makes her eyes huge. He fixes her split ends. He gets everything all wrong.

"Dude," I say. "You know, you're not a very good artist."

I say, "For serious, dude, I don't see that at all."

Denny says, "Before you go trash the whole world, you need to be calling your sponsor, bad." He says, "And in case you still give a shit, your mom said you need to read what's in her dictionary."

To Cherry crouching there in front of us, I say, "If you're really serious about saving your life, I'm going to have to talk to you someplace private."

"No, not dictionary," Denny says, "it's diary. In case you ever wonder where you really come from, it's all in her diary."

And Cherry dangles one leg over the edge and starts climbing down off the stage.

I ask him, what's in my mom's diary?

And drawing his little pictures, seeing the impossible, Denny says, "Yeah, diary. Not dictionary, dude. The stuff about your real dad is in her diary."

Chapter 17

At St. Anthony's, the front desk girl yawns behind her hand, and when I ask if maybe she wants to go get a cup of coffee, then she looks at me sideways and says, "Not with you."

And really, I'm not hitting on her. I'll watch her desk long enough for her to go get some coffee. This isn't a come-on.

Really.

I say, "Your eyes look tired."

All she does all day is sign a few people in and out. She watches the video monitor that shows the insides of St. Anthony's, each corridor, the dayroom, the dining room, the garden, the screen switching from one to the next every ten seconds. The screen grainy, black-and-white. On the monitor, the dining room shows for ten seconds, empty with all the chairs upside down on each table, their chrome legs in the air. A long corridor appears for the next ten seconds with somebody heaped on a bench against one wall.

Then for the next ten furry black-and-white seconds, there's Paige Marshall pushing my mom in a wheelchair down some other long corridor.

The front desk girl says, "I'll only be gone a minute."

Next to the video monitor is an old speaker. Covered in nubby sofa mohair is this old radio kind of speaker with a dial switch surrounded by numbers. Each number is some room in St. Anthony's. On the desk is a microphone you can use to make announcements. By turning the dial switch to a number, you can listen in on any room in the building.

And for just a moment, my mom's voice comes from the speaker, saying, "I've defined myself, all my life, by what I was against..."

The girl switches the intercom dial to nine, and now you can hear Spanish radio and the clatter of metal pans back in the kitchen, back where the coffee is.

I tell the girl, "Take your time." And, "I'm not the monster you maybe heard from some of the bitter, angry types around here."

Even with me being so nice, she puts her purse in her desk and locks it. She says, "This won't take me more than a couple minutes. Okay?"

Okay.

Then she's gone through the security doors, and I'm sitting behind her desk. Watching the monitor: the dayroom, the garden, some corridor, each for ten seconds. Watching for Paige Marshall. With one hand, I'm dial-switching from number to number, listening in each room for Dr. Marshall. For my mom. In black-and-white, almost live.

Paige Marshall with all her skin.

Another question from the sex addict checklist:

Do you cut the inside out of your pants pockets so you can masturbate in public?

In the dayroom is some grayhead, facedown in a puzzle.

In the speaker there's just static. White noise.

Ten seconds later, in the crafts room is a table of old women. Women I confessed to, for wrecking their cars, for wrecking their lives. Taking the blame.

I turn up the volume and put my ear against the cloth of the speaker. Not knowing which number means which room, I dial-switch through the numbers and listen.

My other hand I slip into what used to be my britches pocket.

Going number to number, somebody's sobbing on number three. Wherever that is. Somebody's swearing on five. Praying on eight. Wherever that is. The kitchen again on nine, the Spanish music.

The monitor shows the library, another corridor, then it shows me, a grainy black-and-white me, crouched behind the front desk, peering into the monitor. Me with one hand crabbed around the intercom control dial. My other blurry hand is jammed to the elbow inside my britches. Watching. A camera on the lobby ceiling watching me.

Me watching for Paige Marshall.

Listening. For where to find her.

"Stalking" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

The monitor shows me one old woman after another. Then for ten seconds, there's Paige pushing my mom in a wheelchair down another corridor. Dr. Paige Marshall. And I dial around until I hear my mom's voice.

"Yes," she says, "I fought against everything, but more and more I worry that I was never for anything."

The monitor shows the garden, old women hunched over walkers. Mired in gravel.

"Oh, I can criticize and complain and judge everything, but what does that get me?" my mom keeps saying in voice-over as the monitor cycles to show other rooms.

The monitor shows the dining room, empty.

The monitor shows the garden. More old people.

This could be some very depressing website. Death Cam.

Some kind of black-and-white documentary.

"Griping isn't the same as creating something," my mom's voice-over says. "Rebelling isn't rebuilding. Ridiculing isn't replacing ..." And the voice in the speaker fades out.

The monitor shows the dayroom, the woman facedown in her puzzle.

And I dial-switch from number to number, searching.

On number five, her voice is back. "We've taken the world apart," she says, "but we have no idea what to do with the pieces ..." And her voice is gone, again.

The monitor shows one empty corridor after another stretching into darkness.

On number seven, the voice comes back: "My generation, all of our making fun of things isn't making the world any better," she says. "We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own."

Out of the speaker, her voice says, "I used rebellion as a way to hide out. We use criticism as a fake participation."

The voice-over says, "It only looks as if we've accomplished something."

The voice-over says, "I've never contributed anything worthwhile to the world."

And for ten seconds, the monitor shows my mom and Paige in the corridor just outside the crafts room.

Out of the speaker, scratchy and far away, Paige's voice says, "What about your son?"

My nose pressed to the monitor, I'm so close.

And now the monitor shows me with my ear pressed to the speaker, one hand shaking something, fast, inside my pant leg.

In voice-over, Paige says, "What about Victor?"

And for serious, I am so ready to trigger.

And my mom's voice says, "Victor? No doubt Victor has his own way of escaping."

Then her voice-over laughs and says, "Parenthood is the opiate of the masses!"

And now on the monitor, the front desk girl is standing right behind me with a cup of coffee.

Chapter 18

My next visit, my mom's thinner, if that's possible. Her neck looks as small around as my wrist, the yellow skin sunk into deep hollows between her cords and throat. Her face doesn't hide the skull inside. She rolls her head to one side so she can see me in the doorway, and some kind of gray jelly is caked in the corners of each eye.

The blankets are slack and tented empty between the two peaks of her hipbones. The only other landmarks you can recognize are her knees.

She twines one terrible arm through the chrome bed rail, terrible and thin as a chicken foot reaching toward me, and she swallows. Her jaws work with effort, her lips webbed with spit, and then she says it, reaching out, she says it.

"Morty," she says, "I am not a pimp." Her hands knotted in fists, she shakes them in the air and says, "I'm making a feminist statement. How can it be prostitution if all the women were dead?"

I'm here with a nice bunch of flowers and a get-well card. This is right after work, so I'm in my britches and waistcoat. My buckle shoes and the clocked stockings that show off my skinny calves are spattered with mud.

And my mom says, "Morty, you have to get the whole case thrown out of court." And she sighs back into her stack of pillows. Drool from her mouth has turned the white pillowcase light blue where it meets the side of her face.

A get-well card is not going to fix this.

Her hand claws the air, and she says, "Oh, and Morty, you need to call Victor."

Her room has that smell, the same smell as Denny's tennis shoes in September after he's worn them all summer without socks.

A nice bunch of flowers won't even make a dent.

In my waistcoat pocket is her diary. Stuck in the diary is a past-due bill from the care center. I stick the flowers in her bedpan while I go hunt for a vase and maybe something to feed her. As much of that chocolate pudding stuff as I can carry. Something I can spoon into her mouth and make her swallow.

The way she looks I can't bear to be here and I can't bear to not be here. As I leave she says, "You've got to get busy and find Victor. You have to make him help Dr. Marshall. Please. He has to help Dr. Marshall save me."

As if anything ever happens by accident.

Outside in the hallway is Paige Marshall, wearing her glasses, reading something off a clipboard. "I just thought you'd like to know," she says. She leans back against the handrail that lines the hallway and says, "Your mother is down to eighty-five pounds this week."

She moves the clipboard behind her back, gripping it and the handrail with both hands. The way she stands puts her breasts forward. Tilts her pelvis at me. Paige Marshall runs her tongue along the inside of her bottom lip and says, "Have you thought any more about taking some action?"

Life support, tube feeding, artificial respirators—in medicine they call this stuff "heroic measures."

I don't know, I say.

We stand there, waiting for each other to give an inch.

Two smiling old ladies wander past us, and one points and says to the other, "There's that nice young man I told you about. He's the one who strangled my pet cat."

The other lady, her sweater is buttoned wrong, and she says, "You don't say." She says, "He beat my sister almost to death one time."

They wander away.

"It's sweet," Dr. Marshall says, "what you're doing, I mean. You're giving these people completion on the biggest issues in their lives."

The way she looks right now, you have to think about multiple car pile-ups. Imagine two bloodmobiles colliding head on. The way she looks, you'd have to think of mass graves to even log thirty seconds in the saddle.

Think of spoiled cat food and ulcerated cankers and expired donor organs.

That's how beautiful she looks.

If she'll excuse me, I still need to find some pudding.

She says, "Is it that you have a girlfriend? Is that your reason?"

The reason why we didn't have sex in the chapel a few days ago. The reason why even with her naked and ready, I couldn't. The reason why I ran.

For a complete listing of other girlfriends, please refer to my fourth step.

See also: Nico.

See also: Leeza.

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: Death.

If you're looking for enlightenment, the Mommy said, a new car isn't the answer.

Along the side of the road would be foxgloves blooming, tall stalks of purple-and-white flowers. "Digitalis," the Mommy said, "doesn't work, either."

From eating foxglove flowers, you get nausea, delirium, and blurred vision.

Above them, a mountain held itself against the sky, catching clouds and coated with pine trees and then some snow higher up. It was so big that no matter how long they walked, it was still in the same place.

The Mommy took the white tube out of her purse. She pinched onto one shoulder of the stupid little boy for balance and sniffed hard with the tube stuck up one side of her nose. Then she dropped the tube onto the gravel edge of the road and just stood looking at the mountain.

This was a mountain so big they would always be walking past it.

When the Mommy let go, the stupid boy picked up the tube. He wiped the blood off with his shirttail and handed it back to her.

"Trichloroethane," the Mommy said and held the tube for him to see. "All my extensive testing has shown this to be the best treatment for a dangerous excess of human knowledge."

She buried the tube back in her purse.

"That mountain, for example," she said. She took the boy's stupid chin between her thumb and forefinger and made him look with her. "That big glorious mountain. For one transitory moment, I think I may have actually seen it."

Another car slowed down, something brown and four-door, something too late-model, so the Mommy waved it away.

For one flash, the Mommy had seen the mountain without thinking of logging and ski resorts and avalanches, managed wildlife, plate tectonic geology, microclimates, rain shadow, or yin-yang locations. She'd seen the mountain without the framework of language. Without the cage of associations. She'd seen it without looking through the lens of everything she knew was true about mountains.

What she'd seen in that flash wasn't even a "mountain." It wasn't a natural resource. It had no name.

"That's the big goal," she said. "To find a cure for knowledge."

For education. For living in our heads.

Cars went by on the highway, and the Mommy and little boy kept walking with the mountain still sitting there.

Ever since the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible, humanity had been a little too smart for its own good, the Mommy said. Ever since eating that apple. Her goal was to find, if not a cure, then at least a treatment that would give people back their innocence.

Formaldehyde didn't work. Digitalis didn't work.

None of the natch highs seemed to do the job, not smoking mace or nutmeg or peanut skins. Not dill or hydrangea leaves or lettuce juice.

At night, the Mommy used to sneak the little boy through the backyards of other people. She'd drink the beer people left out for slugs and snails, and she'd nibble their jimson weed and nightshade and catnip. She'd squeeze up next to parked cars and smell inside their gas tank. She'd unscrew the cap in their lawn and smell their heating oil.

"I figure if Eve could get us into this mess, then I can get us out," the Mommy said. "God really likes to see a go-getter."

Other cars slowed down, cars with families, full of luggage and family dogs, but the Mommy just waved them all past.

"The cerebral cortex, the cerebellum," she said, "that's where your problem is."

If she could just get down to using only her brain stem, she'd be cured.

This would be somewhere beyond happiness and sadness.

You don't see fish agonized by wild mood swings.

Sponges never have a bad day.

The gravel crushed and shifted under their feet. The cars going by made their own hot wind.

"My goal," the Mommy said, "is not to uncomplicate my life."

She said, "My goal is to uncomplicate myself"

She told the stupid little boy, morning glory seeds didn't work. She'd tried them. The effects didn't last. Sweet potato leaves didn't work. Neither did pyrethrum extracted from chrysanthemums. Neither would sniffing propane. Neither did the leaves of rhubarb or azaleas.

After a night in someone's yard, the Mommy left a bite out of almost every plant for people to find.

Those cosmetic drugs, she said, those mood equalizers and antidepressants, they only treat the symptoms of the bigger problem.

Every addiction, she said, was just a way to treat this same problem. Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple.

Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and the glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood.

Ahead of them on the highway was a restaurant parked all around with trucks bigger than the restaurant itself. Some of the new cars the Mommy didn't want were parked there. You could smell a lot of different food being fried in the same hot oil. You could smell the truck engines idle.

"We don't live in the real world anymore," she said. "We live in a world of symbols."

The Mommy stopped and put her hand in her purse. She held the boy's shoulder and stood looking up at the mountain. "Just one last little peek at reality," she said. "Then we'll have lunch."

Then she put the white tube in her nose and breathed in.

Chapter 24

Recording to Paige Marshall, my mom came from Italy already pregnant with me. This was the year after somebody had broken into a church in northern Italy. This is all in my mom's diary.

According to Paige Marshall.

My mom had gambled on some new kind of fertility treatment. She was almost forty. She wasn't married, she didn't want a husband, but somebody had promised her a miracle.

This same somebody, they knew somebody who'd stolen a shoe box from under the bed of a priest. In that shoe box was the last earthly remains of a man. Somebody famous.

It was his foreskin.

This was a religious relic, the kind of bait used to draw crowds into churches during the Middle Ages. This is only one of several famous penises still around. In 1977, an American urologist bought the inch-long dried penis of Napoleon Bonaparte for about four thousand dollars. Rasputin's foot-long penis is supposed to lie on velvet in a polished wooden box in Paris. John Dillinger's twenty-inch monster is supposed to be bottled in formaldehyde at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

According to Paige Marshall, it's in my mom's diary that six women were offered embryos created from this genetic material. Five of those never came to term.

The sixth is me. It was the foreskin of Jesus Christ.

This is how crazy my mom was. Even twenty-five years ago, she was this cracked.

Paige laughed and leaned in to floss the teeth of another old woman.

"You have to give your mother credit for originality," she said.

According to the Catholic Church, Jesus was reunited with the foreskin at his resurrection and ascension. According to the story of Saint Teresa of Avila, when Jesus appeared to her and took her as his bride, he used the foreskin as her wedding ring.

Paige snapped the string out from between the woman's teeth and flicked blood and food onto the lenses of her own black glasses. The black brain of her hair tilted from side to side as she tried to see the old woman's top row of teeth.

She said, "Even if your mothers story is true, there's no proof the genetic material came from the actual historical figure. It's more likely your father was just some poor Jewish nobody."

The old woman in the recliner, stretching her mouth around Dr. Marshall's hands, rolled her eyes to stare at me.

And Paige Marshall said, "This should make it okay for you to cooperate."

Cooperate?

"With my course of treatment for your mother," she said.

To kill an unborn baby. I said, even if I wasn't him, I still didn't think Jesus would approve.

"Of course he would," Paige said. She snapped the string to flick a lump of tooth jam at me. "Didn't God sacrifice his own son to save people? Isn't that the story?"

Here it is again, the fine line between science and sadism. Between a crime and a sacrifice. Between murdering your own child and what Abraham almost did to Isaac in the Bible.

The old woman pulled her face away from Dr. Marshall, tonguing the string and bits of bloody food out of her mouth. She looked at me and said in her creaking voice, "I know you."

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 its 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 on.

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 1 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 past 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.

Denny tips the boulder out of the stroller, and it lands in the tall grass beside the sidewalk. He shakes out the pink blanket and hands me two corners. Between us, we fold it, and Denny says, "If you can have the opposite of a role model, he'd be my Uncle Don."

Then Denny flops the folded blanket into the stroller and starts to push the stroller toward home.

And I call after him, "Dude. You don't want this rock?"

And Denny says, "Those mothers against drunk driving, for sure, they threw a party when they found out old Don Menning was dead."

Wind lifts and crushes the tall grass. Nobody but plants lives here now, and across the dark center of the block you can see the porch lights of houses on the other side. The black zigzags of old apple trees are outlines in between.

"So," I go, "is this a park??

And Denny says, "Not really." Still walking away, he says, "It's mine."

I pitch the doll head at him and say, "For real?"

"Since my folks called a couple days ago," he says, and he catches the head and drops it into the stroller. Under the streetlights, past everybody's dark house, we walk.

My buckle shoes flashing, my hands stuffed in my pockets, I say, "Dude?" I say, "You don't really think I'm anything like Jesus Christ, do you?"

I say, "Please say no."

We walk.

And pushing his empty stroller, Denny says, "Face it, dude. You nearly did sex on God's table. You're already shame spiraling big-time."

We walk, and the beer's wearing off, and it's a surprise how the night air's so cold.

And I say, "Please, dude. Tell me the truth."

I'm not good and kind and caring or any of that happy horse-shit.

I'm nothing but a thoughtless, brain-dead, loser dude. That I can live with. This is who I am. Just a puss-pounding, seam-reaming, dog-driving, fucking helpless sex addict asshole, and I can't ever, ever let myself forget that.

I say, "Tell me again I'm an insensitive asshole."

Chapter 27

How tonight's supposed to work is I hide in the bedroom closet while the girl's taking a shower. Then when she comes out all shiny with sweat, the air steamy and fogged with hair spray and perfume, she comes out naked except for a lacy bathrobe. Then I jump out with some pantyhose stretched over my face and wearing sunglasses. I throw her on the bed. I put a knife to her throat. Then I rape her.

Simple as that. The shame spiral continues.

Just keep asking yourself: "What would Jesus NOT do?"

Only I can't rape her on the bed, she says, the spread is pale pink silk and will spot. And not on the floor because the carpet hurts her skin. We agreed on the floor, but on a towel. Not a good guest towel, she said. She told me she'd leave a ratty towel on the dresser, and I'd need to spread it on the floor ahead of time so as not to break the mood.

She'd leave the bedroom window unlocked before she got in the shower.

So I'm hiding in the closet, naked with all her dry cleaning sticking to me, the pantyhose over my head, wearing sunglasses and holding the dullest knife I could find, waiting. The towel's spread on the floor. The pantyhose are so hot my face is running with sweat. The hair plastered to my head starts to itch.

Not by the window, she'd told me. And not by the fireplace. She said to rape her near the armoire, but not too near. She said to try and spread the towel in a high-traffic area where the carpet wouldn't show as much wear.

This is a girl named Gwen I met in the Recovery section of a bookstore. It's hard to say who picked up whom, but she was pretending to read a twelve-step book about sexual addiction, and I was wearing my lucky camo pants and cruising her over a copy of the same book, and I figured what's one more dangerous liaison.

Birds do it. Bees do it.

I need that rush of endorphins. To tranquilize me. I crave the peptide phenylethylamine. This is who I am. An addict. I mean, who's counting?

In the bookstore coffee shop, Gwen said to get some rope, but not nylon rope because it hurt too much. Hemp gives her an inflamed rash. Black electrical tape would work, too, but not over her mouth, and not duct tape.

"Pulling off duct tape," she said, "is about as erotic as getting my legs waxed."

We compared our schedules, and Thursday was out. Friday I had my regular sexaholics meeting. No chits for me this week. Saturday I spent at St. Anthony's. Most Sunday nights she helped run a bingo event at her church, so we settled on Monday. Monday at nine, not eight, because she worked until late in the evening, and not ten because I had to be at work early the next morning.

So Monday comes. The electrical tape is ready. The towel's spread, and when I leap at her with the knife she says, "Are those my pantyhose you're wearing?"

I twist one of her arms behind her back and put the chilled blade to her throat.

"For crying out loud," she says. "This is way out of bounds. I said you could rape me. I did not say you could ruin my pantyhose."

With my knife hand, I grab the front edge of her lacy bathrobe and try to tug it off her shoulder.

"Stop, stop, stop," she says and slaps my hand away, "Here, let me do it. You're just going to ruin it." She twists away from me.

I ask if I can take off my sunglasses.

"No," she says and slips out of her robe. Then she goes to the open closet and hangs the robe on a padded hanger.

But I can't hardly see.

"Don't be so selfish," she says. Naked now, she takes my hand and presses it around one of her wrists. Then she slips her arm behind her back, turning to press her bare back to me. My dog's nosing higher and higher, and her warm slick butt crack's gumming me, and she says, "I need you to be a faceless attacker."

I tell her its too embarrassing to buy a pair of pantyhose. A guy buying pantyhose is either a criminal or a pervert; either way the cashier will hardly take your money.

"Jeez, quit whining," she says. "Every rapist I've ever been with has brought his own pantyhose."

Plus I tell her, when you're looking at the pantyhose rack, they have all those colors and sizes. Nude, charcoal, beige, tan, black, cobalt, and none of them come in just "head-sized."

She twists her face away and groans. "Can I tell you something? Can I tell you just one thing?"

I say, what?

And she says, "Your breath is really bad."

Back in the bookstore coffee shop, while we were still scripting, she said, "Make sure and put the knife in a freezer beforehand. I need it to be really really cold."

I asked if maybe we could just use a rubber knife.

And she said, "The knife is very important to my total experience."

She said, "It's best if you put the edge of the knife to my throat before it gets to room temperature."

She said, "But be careful, because if you cut me by accident"—she leaned toward me over the table, jabbing her chin at me—"if you even scratch me, I swear I'll have you in jail before you can get your pants back on."

She sipped her herbal chai and set the cup back in its saucer and said, "My sinuses would appreciate it if you didn't wear any kind of cologne or aftershave or deodorant with a strong scent, because I'm very sensitive."

These horny sexaholic chicks, they have such a high tolerance. They just can't not get banged. They just can't stop, no matter how degrading things get.

God, how I love being codependent.

In the coffee shop, Gwen lifts her purse into her lap and digs around inside it. "Here," she says and unfolds a photocopied list of the details she wants to include. At the top of the list it says:

Rape is about power. It is not romantic. Do not fall in love with me. Do not kiss me on the mouth. Do not expect to linger after the act. Do not ask to use my bathroom.

That Monday night in her bedroom, pressed into me naked, she says, "I want you to hit me." She says, "But not too hard and not too soft. Just hit me hard enough so I come."

One of my hands is holding her arm behind her back. She's grinding her butt against me, and she's got a kick-ass tanned little bod except her face is pale and waxy with too much moisturizer. In the mirrored closet door, I can see her front with my face peeking over her shoulder. Her hair and sweat pools in the crack where my chest and her back press together. Her skin has that hot-plastic tanning-bed smell. My other hand is holding the knife, so I ask, does she want me to hit her with the knife?

"No," she says. "That would be stabbing. Hitting someone with a knife is stabbing." She says, "Put the knife down and use your open hand."

So I go to toss the knife.

And Gwen says, "Not on the bed."

So I toss the knife on the dresser, and I raise my hand to slap. From behind her, this is really awkward.

And she says, "But not in the face."

So I move my hand a little lower.

And she says, "And do not hit my breasts unless you want to give me lumps."

See also: Dr. Paige Marshall.

Tanya yanks again, and my dog triggers, the white soldiers gobbing against the bedroom wallpaper beside her face. She yanks again, and my dog's coughing dry and still coughing.

And still triggering dry, I say, "Damn. For serious, I felt that."

What would Jesus NOT do?

Leaning forward with both my hands spread against the wall, my knees folding a little, I say, "Easy does it." I tell Tanya, "You're not starting a lawn mower."

And Tanya kneeling under me, still looking at the greasy, stinking balls on the floor, says, "Oh boy." She lifts the string of red rubber balls for me to see, and she says, "There are supposed to be ten."

There's only eight and what looks like a lot of empty string.

My ass hurts so much, I finger around back there and then check my fingers for blood. As much as I hurt right now, you'd be amazed there's not blood everywhere.

And gritting my teeth, I say, "That was fun, don't you think?"

And Tanya says, "I need you to sign my release form so I can get back to jail." She's dangling the string of balls into her black bag and says, "You're going to want to stop by an emergency room."

See also: Leeza.

See also: Tanya.

And I come around the table to drop myself into a plastic chair.

With everybody watching, I say, "Hello. I'm Victor."

Looking into Nico's eyes, I say, "My name is Victor Mancini, and I'm a sexaholic."

And I say how I've been stuck on my fourth step for what seems like forever.

The feeling is less like an ending than just another starting point.

And still leaning in the doorway, not just eye juice but tears, rolling black mascara tears, burst out of Nico's eyes, and she smears them away with her hand. Nico says, she shouts, "Well, I'm not!" And out of the sleeve of her coat, her bra drops on the floor.

Nodding at her, I say, "And this is Nico."

And Nico says, "You people can all get fucked." She snatches up her bra and she's gone.

It's then everybody says, Hello Victor.

And the group leader says, "Okay."

He says, "As I was saying, the best place to find insight is to remember where you lost your virginity...."

Chapter 40

Somewhere north-northeast above Los Angeles, I was getting sore, so I asked Tracy if she'd let up for a minute. This is another lifetime ago.

With a big hank of white spit looped between my knob and her lower lip, her whole face hot and flushed from choking, still holding my sore dog in her fist, Tracy settles back on her heels and says how in the Kama Sutra, it tells you to make your lips really red by wiping them with sweat from the testicles of a white stallion.

"For real," she says.

Now there's a weird taste in my mouth, and I look hard at her lips, her lips and my dog the same big purple color. I say, "You don't do that stuff, do you?"

The doorknob rattles and we both look, fast, to make sure it's locked.

This is that first time, what every addiction is about getting back to. That first time that no subsequent time is ever as good as.

Nothing's worse than when a little kid opens the door. What's next worst is when some man throws open the door and doesn't understand. Even if you're still alone, when a kid opens the door you have to, fast, cross your legs. Pretend it's all an accident. An adult guy might slam the door, might yell, "Lock it next time, ya moron," but he's still the only one blushing.

After that, what's worse, Tracy says, is being a woman the Kama Sutra would call an elephant woman. Especially if you're with what they call a hare man.

This animal thing refers to genital size.

Then she says, "I didn't mean that to sound the way it did."

The wrong person opens the door, and you're in their nightmares all week.

Your best defense is unless somebody is on the make, no matter who opens the door and sees you sitting there, they always assume it's their mistake. Their fault.

I always did. I used to walk in on women or men riding the toilet on airplanes on trains or Greyhound buses or in those little single-seat either/or unisex restaurant bathrooms, I'd open the door to see some stranger sitting there, some blonde all blue eyes and teeth with a ring through her navel and wearing high heels, with her g-string stretched down between her knees and the rest of her clothes and bra folded on the little counter next to the sink. Every time this happened I'd always wonder, why the hell don't people bother to lock the door?

As if this ever happens by accident.

Nothing on the circuit happens by accident.

It could be, on the train somewhere between home and work, you'll open a bathroom door to find some brunette, with her hair pinned up and only her long earrings trembling down alongside her smooth white neck, and she's just sitting inside with the bottom half of her clothes on the floor. Her blouse open with nothing inside but her hands cupped under each breast, her fingernails, her lips, her nipples all the same cross between brown and red. Her legs as smooth white as her neck, smooth as a car you could drive two hundred miles an hour, and her hair the same brunette all over, and she licks her lips.

You slam the door and say, "Sorry."

And from somewhere deep inside, she says, "Don't be."

And she still doesn't lock the door. The little sign still saying:

Vacant.

How this happens is I used to fly round-trip from the East Coast to Los Angeles when I was still in the medical program at USC. During breaks in the school year. Six times I opened the door on the same yoga redhead naked from the waist down with her skinny legs pulled up cross-legged on the toilet seat, filing her nails with the scratch pad of a matchbook, as if she's trying to catch herself on fire, wearing just a silky blouse knotted over her breasts, and six times she looks down at her freckled pink self with the road crew orange rug around it, then her eyes the same gray as tin metal look up at me, slow, and every time says, "If you don't mind," she says, "I'm in here."

Six times, I slam the door in her face.

All I can think to say is, "Don't you speak English?"

Six times.

This all takes less than a minute. There isn't time to think.

But it happens more and more often.

Some other trip, maybe cruising altitude between Los Angeles and Seattle, you'll open the door on some surfer blond with both tanned hands wrapped around the big purple dog between his legs, and Mr. Kewl shakes the stringy hair off his eyes, points his dog, squeezed shiny wet inside a glossy rubber, he points this straight at you and says, "Hey, man, make the time...."

It gets to be, every time you go to the bathroom, the little sign says vacant, but it's always somebody.

Another woman, two knuckles deep and disappearing into herself.

A different man, his four inches dancing between his thumb and forefinger, primed and ready to cough up the little white soldiers.

You begin to wonder, just what do they mean by vacant.

Even in an empty bathroom, you find the smell of spermicidal foam. The paper towels are always used up. You'll see the print of a bare foot on the bathroom mirror, six feet up, near the top of the mirror, the little arched print of a woman's foot, the five round spots left by her toes, and you'd wonder, what happened here?

Like with coded public announcements, "The Blue Danube Waltz" or Nurse Flamingo, you wonder, what's going on?

You wonder, what aren't they telling us?

You'll see a smear of lipstick on the wall, down almost to the floor, and you can only imagine what was going on. There's the dried white stripes from the last pull-out moment when somebody's dog tossed his white soldiers against the plastic wall.

Some flights the walls will still be wet to the touch, the mirror fogged. The carpet sticky. The sink drain is sucked full, choked with every color of little curled hair. On the bathroom counter, next to the sink, is the perfect round outline in jelly, contraceptive jelly and mucus, of where somebody set her diaphragm. Some flights, there's two or three different sizes of perfect round outlines.

These are the domestic leg of longer flights, transpacific or flights over the pole. Ten-to-sixteen-hour flights. Direct flights, Los Angeles to Paris. Or from anywhere to Sydney.

My Los Angeles trip number seven, the yoga redhead whips her skirt off the floor and hurries out after me. Still zipping herself up in the back, she trails me all the way to my seat and sits next to me, saying, "If your goal is to hurt my feelings, you could give lessons."

She's got this shining soap opera kind of hairdo, only now her blouse is buttoned with a big floppy bow in the front and everything, pinned down with a big jewelry brooch.

You say it again, "Sorry."

This is westbound, somewhere north-northwest above Atlanta.

"Listen," she says, "I work just too hard to take this kind of shit. You hear me?"

You say, "I'm sorry."

"I'm on the road three weeks out of every month," she says. "I'm paying for a house I never see . . . soccer camp for my kids ... just the cost of my dad's nursing home is incredible. Don't I deserve something? I'm not bad-looking. The least you can do is not shut the door in my face."

This is really what she says.

She ducks down to put her face between me and the magazine I'm pretending to read. "Don't make like you don't know," she says. "It's not like sex is anything secret."

And I say, "Sex?"

And she puts a hand over her mouth and sits back.

She says, "Oh, gosh, I'm so sorry. I just thought..." and reaches up to push the little red stewardess button.

A flight attendant comes past, and the redhead orders two double bourbons.

I say, "I hope you're planning to drink them both."

And she says, "Actually, they're both for you."

This would be my first time. That first time that no subsequent time is ever as good as.

"Don't let's fight," she says and gives me her cool white hand. "I'm Tracy."

A better place this could've happened is a Lockheed TriStar 500 with its strip mall of five large bathrooms isolated in the rear of the tourist-class cabin. Spacious. Soundproof. Behind everybody's back where they can't see who comes and goes.

Compared to that, you have to wonder what kind of animal designed the Boeing 747-400, where it seems every bathroom opens onto a seat. For any real discretion, you have to trek back to the toilets in the back of the rear tourist cabin. Forget the single lower-level sidewall bathroom in business class unless you want everybody to know what you've got going.

It's simple.

If you're a guy, how it works is you sit in the bathroom with your Uncle Charlie whipped out, you know, the big red panda, and you work him up to parade attention, you know, the full upright position, and then you just wait in your little plastic room and hope for the best.

Think of it as fishing.

If you're Catholic, it's the same feeling as sitting in a confessional. The waiting, the release, the redemption.

Think of it as catch-and-release fishing. What people call "sport fishing."

The other way how it works is you just open doors until you find something you like. It's the same as the old game show where whatever door you choose, that's the prize you take home. It's the same as the lady and the tiger.

Behind some doors, it's somebody expensive back from first class for some slumming, a little cabin-class rough trade. Less chance she'll meet anybody she knows. Behind other doors, you'll get some aged beef with his brown tie thrown back over one shoulder, his hairy knees spread against the wall on each side, petting his leathery dead snake and then he says, "Sorry bud, nothing personal."

Those times, you'll be too grossed even to say, "As if."

Or, "In your dreams, buddy."

Still, the reward rate is just great enough to keep you pushing your luck.

The tiny space, the toilet, two hundred strangers just a few inches away, it's so exciting. The lack of room to maneuver, it helps if you're double-jointed. Use your imagination. Some creativity and a few simple stretching exercises and you can be knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door. You'll be amazed how fast the time flies.

Half the thrill is the challenge. The danger and risk.

So, it's not the Great American West or the race to the South Pole or being the first man to walk on the moon.

It's a different kind of space exploration.

You're mapping a different kind of wilderness. Your own vast interior landscape.

It's the last frontier to conquer, other people, strangers, the jungle of their arms and legs, hair and skin, the smells and moans that is everybody you haven't done. The great unknowns. The last forest to devastate. Here's everything you've only imagined.

You're Chris Columbus sailing over the horizon.

You're the first caveman to risk eating an oyster. Maybe this particular oyster isn't new, but it's new to you.

Suspended in the nowhere, in the halfway fourteen hours between Heathrow and Jo-burg, you can have ten true-life adventures. Twelve if the movie's bad. More if the flight's full, less if there's turbulence. More if you don't mind a guy's mouth doing the job, less if you return to your seat during meal service.

What's not so great about that first time is, when I'm drunk and first getting bounced on by the redhead, by Tracy, what happens is we hit an air pocket. Me gripping the toilet seat, I drop with the plane, but Tracy's blasted off, champagne popping off me with the rubber still inside, hitting the plastic ceiling with her hair. My trigger goes the same instant, and my gob's suspended in the air, weightless hanging white soldiers in the midway between her still against the ceiling and me still on the can. Then slam, we come back together, her and the rubber, me and my gob, planted back down on me, reassembled pop-beads-style, all one-hundred-plus pounds of her.

After those kind of good times, it's a wonder I'm not wearing a truss.

And Tracy laughs and says, "I love it when that happens!"

After that, just normal turbulence bounces her hair in my face, her nipples against my mouth. Bounces the pearls around her neck. The gold chain around my neck. Juggles my dice in their sack, pulled up tight over the empty bowl.

Here and there, you pick up little tips to improve your performance. Those old French Super Caravelles for example, with their triangular windows and real curtains, they have no first-class toilet, only two in the back of tourist, so you'd best not try anything fancy. Your basic Indian tantric position works okay. Both of you standing face to face, the woman lifts one leg along the side of your thigh. You go at it the same as in "splitting the reed" or the classic flanquette. Write your own Kama Sutra. Make stuff up.

Go ahead. You know you want to.

This is assuming the two of you are anywhere close to the same height. Otherwise, I can't be blamed for what happens.

And don't expect to get spoon-fed here. I'm assuming some basic knowledge on your part.

Even if you're stuck on a Boeing 757—200, even in the tiny forward toilet, you can still manage a modified Chinese position where you're sitting on the toilet and the woman settles onto you facing away.

Somewhere north-northeast above Little Rock, Tracy tells me, "Pompoir would make this a snap. It's when Albanian women just milk you with their constrictor vaginae muscles."

They jerk you off with just their insides?

Tracy says, "Yeah."

Albanian women?

"Yeah."

I say, "Do they have an airline?"

Something else you learn is when a flight attendant comes knocking, you can wrap things up fast with the Florentine Method, where the woman grips the man around the base and pulls his skin back, tight, to make it more sensitive. This speeds up the process considerably.

To slow things down, press hard on the underside at the base of the man. Even if this doesn't stop the event, the whole mess will back up into his bladder and save you both a lot of cleanup. Experts call this "Saxonus."

The redhead and me, in the big rear bathroom of a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 Series 30CF, she shows me the negresse position, where she gets her knees up on either side of the sink and I press my open hands on the back of her pale shoulders.

Her breath fogging the mirror, her face red from being crouched down, Tracy says, "It's in the Kama Sutra that if a man massages himself with juice from pomegranate, pumpkin, and cucumber seeds, he'll swell up and stay huge for six months."

This advice has a kind of Cinderella deadline to it.

She sees the look on my face in the mirror and says, "Cripes, don't take everything so personally."

Somewhere due north above Dallas, I'm trying to work up more spit while she tells me the way to make a woman never leave you is to cover her head with nettle thorns and monkey dung.

And I'm, like, no kidding?

And if you bathe your wife in buffalo milk and cow bile, any man who uses her will become impotent.

I say, I wouldn't be surprised.

If a woman soaks a camel bone in marigold juice and puts the liquid on her eyelashes, any man she looks at will become bewitched. In a pinch, you can use peacock, falcon, or vulture bones.

"Look it up," she says. "It's all in the big book."

Somewhere south-southeast above Albuquerque, my face coated thick as egg white from licking her, my cheeks rug-burned from her hair, Tracy says how ram's testicles boiled in sugared milk will restore your virility.

Then she says, "I didn't mean that the way it sounded."

And I thought I was doing pretty good. Considering two double bourbons, and I've been on my feet for three hours at this point.

Somewhere south-southwest above Las Vegas, both of us our tired legs flu-shaky, she shows me what the Kama Sutra calls "browsing." Then "sucking the mango." Then "devouring."

Struggling together in our tight little wipe-clean plastic room, suspended in a time and place where anything goes, this isn't bondage, but it's close.

Gone are the golden old Lockheed Super Constellations where each port and starboard bathroom was a two-room suite: a dressing room with a separate toilet room behind a door.

The sweat running down the smooth muscles of her. The two of us bucking together, two perfect machines doing a job we're designed for. Some minutes we're touching with just the sliding part of me and the little edges of her getting raw and pulled out, my shoulders leaning back squared against the plastic wall, the rest of me bucking forward from the waist down. From standing on the floor, Tracy gets one foot up on the edge of the sink and leans on her raised knee.

It's easier to see ourselves in the mirror, flat and behind glass, a movie, a download, a magazine picture, somebody else, not us, somebody beautiful without a life or a future outside this moment.

Your best bet on a Boeing 767 is the large center toilet in the rear of the tourist-class cabin. You're just plum out of luck on the Concorde, where the toilet compartments are minuscule, but that's just my opinion. If all you're doing is peeing or doing your contact lenses or tooth brushing, I'm sure they're roomy enough.

But if you have any ambition to manage what the Kama Sutra calls "the crow" or "cuissade" or anything where you'll need more than two inches of back-and-forth motion, you'd better hope you get a European Airbus 300/310 with its party-sized rear tourist-class toilets. For the same kind of countertop space and legroom, you can't do better than the two rear toilets in a British Aerospace One-Eleven for plush.

Somewhere north-northeast above Los Angeles, I'm getting sore, so I ask Tracy to let up.

And I say, "Why do you do this?"

And she says, "What?"

This.

And Tracy smiles.

The people you meet behind unlocked doors are tired of talking about the weather. These are people tired of safety. These people have remodeled too many houses. These are tanned people who've given up smoking and white sugar and salt, fat, and beef. They're people who've watched their parents and grandparents study and work for a lifetime only to end up losing it all. Spending everything just to stay alive on a feeding tube. Forgetting even how to chew and swallow.

"My father was a doctor," Tracy says. "The place where he's at now, he can't even remember his own name."

These men and women sitting behind unlocked doors know a bigger house is not the answer. Neither is a better spouse, more money, tighter skin.

"Anything you can acquire," she says, "is only another thing you'll lose."

The answer is there is no answer.

For real, this is a way heavy moment.

"No," I say and run a finger between her thighs. "I meant this. Why do you shave your bush?"

"Oh, that," she says and rolls her eyes, smiling. "It's so I can wear g-string panties."

While I settle on the toilet, Tracy's examining the mirror, not seeing herself as much as checking what's left of her makeup, and with one wet finger she wipes away the smudged edge of her lipstick. With her fingers, she rubs away the little bite marks around her nipples. What the Kama Sutra would call Scattered Clouds.

Talking to the mirror, she says, "The reason I do the circuit is because, when you think about it, there's no good reason to do anything,"

There is no point.

These are people who don't want an orgasm as much as they just want to forget. Everything. For just two minutes, ten minutes, twenty, a half hour.

Or maybe when people are treated like cattle, that's how they act. Or maybe that's just an excuse. Maybe they're just bored. It could be that nobody's made to sit all day in a cramped packing crate full of other people without moving a muscle.

"We're healthy, young, awake and alive people," Tracy says. "When you look at it, which act is more unnatural?"

She's putting back on her blouse, rolling her pantyhose back up.

"Why do I do anything?" she says. "I'm educated enough to talk myself out of any plan. To deconstruct any fantasy. Explain away any goal. I'm so smart I can negate any dream."

Me still sitting here naked and tired, the flight crew announces our descent, our approach into the greater Los Angeles area, then the current time and temperature, then information about connecting flights.

And for a moment, this woman and I just stand and listen, looking up at nothing.

"I do this, this, because it feels good," she says and buttons her blouse. "Maybe I don't really know why I do it. In a way, this is why they execute killers. Because once you've crossed some lines, you just keep crossing them."

Both hands behind her back, zipping up her skirt, she says, "The truth is I don't really want to know why I do casual sex. I just keep doing," she says, "because the minute you give yourself a good reason, you'll start chipping away at it."

She steps back into her shoes and pats her hair on the sides and says, "Please don't think this was anything special."

Unlocking the door, she says, "Relax." She says, "Someday, everything we just did will look like small potatoes to you."

Edging out into the passenger cabin, she says, "Today is just the first time you've crossed this particular line." Leaving me naked and alone, she says, "Don't forget to lock the door behind me." Then she laughs and says, "That's if you want it locked anymore."

Chapter 41

The front desk girl doesn't want any coffee.

She doesn't want to go check on her car in the parking lot.

She says, "If anything happens to my car, I'll know who to blame."

And I tell her, shhhhhhhhh.

I tell her I hear something important, a gas leak or a baby crying somewhere.

It's my mom's voice, muffled and tired, coming over the intercom speaker from some unknown room.

Standing at the desk in the lobby of St. Anthony's, we listen, and my mom says, "The slogan for America is 'Not Good Enough.' Nothing's ever fast enough. Nothings big enough. We're never satisfied. We're always improving ..."

The front desk girl says, "I don't hear any gas leak."

The faint, tired voice says, "I spent my life attacking everything because I was too afraid to risk creating anything ..."

And the front desk girl cuts it off. She presses the microphone and says, "Nurse Remington to the front desk. Nurse Remington to the front desk, immediately."

The fat security guard with his chest pocket full of pens.

But when she lets go of the microphone, the intercom voice comes on again, faint and whispery.

"Nothing was ever good enough," my mom says, "so here at the end of my life, I'm left with nothing …"

And her voice fades away.

There's nothing left. Only white noise. Static.

And now she's going to die.

Unless there's a miracle.

The guard blows through the security doors, looking at the front desk girl, asking, "So? What's the situation here?"

And on the monitor, in grainy black-and-white, she points at me bent double with the ache in my guts, me carrying my swollen gut around in both hands, and she says, "Him."

She says, "This man needs to be restricted from the property, starting right now."

Chapter 42

How it showed up on the news last night was just me shouting, waving my arms in front of the camera, with Denny a little ways behind me, working to set a rock in a wall, and Beth just a little behind him, hammering a boulder into dust, trying to carve a statue.

On TV, I'm jaundiced yellow, hunchbacked from the swell and weight of my guts coming apart on the inside. Bent over, I'm lifting my face to look into the camera, my neck looping from my head down into my collar. My neck as thin as an arm, my Adam's apple sticks out as big as an elbow. This is yesterday right after work, so I'm still wearing my Colonial Dunsboro blousey linen shirt and my britches. With the buckle shoes and the cravat, this doesn't help.

"Dude," Denny says, sitting next to Beth at Beth's apartment while we watch ourselves on TV. He says, "You don't look so hot."

I look like that dumpy Tarzan from my fourth step, the one bent over with the monkey and the roasted chestnuts. The tubby savior with his beatific smile. The hero with nothing left to hide.

On TV, all I was trying to do was explain to everybody that there was no controversy. I was trying to convince people that I'd started the mess by calling the city and saying I lived nearby and some nutcase was building without a permit, I didn't know what. And the worksite posed a hazard to area children. And the guy doing the work didn't look too savory. And it was no doubt a Satanic church.

Then I'd called them at the TV station and said the same stuff.

And that's how this all started.

The part about how I did all this just to make Denny need me, well, I didn't explain that part. Not on television.

For real, all my explanation got left on the cutting-room floor because on TV, I'm just this sweaty bloated maniac trying to put my hand over the camera lens, yelling at the reporter to go away and swatting my other hand at the microphone boom that swings through the shot.

"Dude," Denny says.

Beth videotaped my little fossilized moment, and we watch it over and over.

Denny says, "Dude, you look possessed by the devil or something."

Really, I'm possessed by a whole different deity. This is me trying to make good. I'm trying to work some little miracles so I can build up to the big stuff.

Sitting here with a thermometer in my mouth, I check and it says 101 degrees. The sweat keeps juicing out of me, and to Beth I say, "I'm sorry about your sofa."

Beth takes the thermometer for a look, then puts her cool hand on my forehead.

And I say, "I'm sorry I used to think you were a stupid airhead bimbo."

Being Jesus means being honest.

And Beth says, "That's okay." She says, "I never cared what you thought. Only Denny." She shakes the thermometer and slips it back under my tongue.

Denny rewinds the tape, and there I am, again.

Tonight, my arms ache and my hands are soft and raw from working with the lime in the mortar. To Denny, I say, so how does it feel to be famous?

Behind me on television, the walls of rock rise and swell round into the base for a tower. Other walls rise around gaps for windows. Through a wide doorway, you can see a wide flight of stairs rising inside. Other walls trail off to suggest the foundations for other wings, other towers, other cloisters, colonnades, raised pools, sunken courtyards.

The voice of the reporter is asking, "This structure you're building, is it a house?"

And I say we don't know.

"Is it a church of some kind?"

We don't know.

The reporter leans into the shot, a man with brown hair combed into one fixed swell above his forehead. He tilts his hand-held microphone toward my mouth, asking, "What are you building, then?"

We won't know until the very last rock is set.

"But when will that be?"

We don't know.

After so long living alone, it feels good to say "we."

Watching me say this, Denny points at the TV and says, "Perfect."

Denny says, the longer we can keep building, the longer we can keep creating, the more will be possible. The longer we can tolerate being incomplete. Delay gratification.

Consider the idea of Tantric Architecture.

On TV, I tell the reporter, "This is about a process. This isn't about getting something done."

What's funny is I really think I'm helping Denny.

Every rock is a day Denny doesn't waste. Smooth river granite. Blocky dark basalt. Every rock is a little tombstone, a little monument to each day where the work most people do just evaporates or expires or becomes instantly outdated the moment it's done. I don't mention this stuff to the reporter, or ask him what happens to his work the moment after it goes out on the air. Airs. Is broadcast. Evaporates. Gets erased. In a world where we work on paper, where we exercise on machines, where time and effort and money passes from us with so little to show for it, Denny gluing rocks together seems normal.

I don't tell the reporter all that.

There I am, just waving and saying we need more rocks. If people will bring us rocks, we'd appreciate it. If people want to help, that would be great. My hair stiff and dark with sweat, my belly bloated over the front of my pants, I'm saying the only thing we don't know is how this will turn out. And what's more is we don't want to know.

Beth goes into the kitchenette to pop popcorn.

I'm starving but I don't dare eat.

On TV is the final shot of the walls, the bases for a long loggia of columns that will rise to a roof, someday. Pedestals for statues. Someday. Basins for fountains. The walls rise to suggest buttresses, gables, spires, domes. Arches rise to support vaults someday. Turrets. Someday. The bushes and trees are already growing in to hide and bury some of it. Branches grow in through the windows. The grass and weeds grow waist-high in some rooms. All of this spreading away from the camera, here's just a foundation we may none of us see completed in our lifetime.

I don't tell the reporter that.

From outside the shot, you can hear the cameraman shout, "Hey, Victor! Remember me? From the Chez Buffet? That time you almost choked ..."

The telephone rings and Beth goes to get it.

"Dude," Denny says, and rewinds the tape again. "What you just told them, that's just going to drive some people crazy."

And Beth says, "Victor, it's your mom's hospital. They've been trying to find you."

I yell back, "In a minute."

I tell Denny to run the tape again. I'm almost ready to deal with my mom.

Chapter 43

For my next miracle, I buy pudding. This is chocolate pudding, vanilla and pistachio pudding, butterscotch pudding, all of it loaded with fat and sugar and preservatives and sealed inside little plastic tubs. You just peel off the paper top and spoon it up.

Preservatives is what she needs. The more preservatives, I figure, the better.

A whole shopping bag full of puddings in my arms, I go to St. Anthonys.

It's so early the girl isn't at her desk in the lobby.

Sunk in her bed, my mom looks up from inside her eyes and says, "Who?"

It's me, I say.

And she says, "Victor? Is it you?"

And I say, "Yeah, I think so."

Paige isn't around. Nobody's around, it's so early on a Saturday morning. The sun's just coming in through the blinds. Even the television in the dayroom is quiet. Mom's roommate, Mrs. Novak the undresser, is curled on her side in the next bed, asleep, so I whisper.

I peel the top off the first chocolate pudding and find a plastic spoon in the shopping bag. With a chair pulled up beside her bed, I lift the first spoonful of pudding and tell her, "I'm here to save you."

I tell her I finally know the truth about myself. That I was born a good person. A manifestation of perfect love. That I can be good, again, but I have to start small. The spoon slips between her lips and leaves the first fifty calories inside.

With the next spoonful, I tell her, "I know what you had to do to get me."

The pudding just sits there, brown and glistening on her tongue. Her eyes blink, fast, and her tongue sweeps the pudding into her cheeks so she can say, "Oh, Victor, you know?"

Spooning the next fifty calories into her mouth, I say, "Don't be embarrassed. Just swallow."

Through the muck of chocolate, she says, "I can't stop thinking what I did is terrible."

"You gave me life," I say.

And turning her head away from the next spoonful, away from me, she says, "I needed United States citizenship."

The stolen foreskin. The relic.

I say that doesn't matter.

Reaching around, I spoon more into her mouth.

What Denny says is that maybe the second coming of Christ isn't something God will decide. Maybe God left it up to people to develop the ability to bring back Christ into their lives. Maybe God wanted us to invent our own savior when we were ready. When we need it most. Denny says maybe it's up to us to create our own messiah.

To save ourselves.

Another fifty calories go into her mouth.

Maybe with every little effort, we can work up to performing miracles.

Another spoonful of brown goes into her mouth.

She turns back to me, her wrinkles squeezing her eyes narrow. Her tongue sweeps pudding into her cheeks. Chocolate pudding wells out the corners of her mouth. And she says, "What the hell are you talking about?"

And I say, "I know that I'm Jesus Christ."

Her eyes fall open wide, and I spoon in more pudding.

"I know you came from Italy already impregnated with the sacred foreskin."

More pudding into her mouth.

"I know you wrote this all in Italian in your diary so I wouldn't read it."

More pudding into her mouth.

And I say, "Now I know my true nature. That I'm a loving caring person."

More pudding goes into her mouth.

"And I know I can save you," I say.

My mom, she just looks at me. Her eyes filled with total infinite understanding and compassion, she says, "What the fuck are you getting at?"

She says, "I stole you out of a stroller in Waterloo, Iowa. I wanted to save you from the kind of life you'd get."

Parenthood being the opiate of the masses.

See also: Denny with his baby stroller full of stolen sandstone.

She says, "I kidnapped you."

The poor deluded, demented thing, she doesn't know what she's saying.

I spoon in another fifty calories.

"It's okay," I tell her. "Dr. Marshall read your diary and told me the truth."

I spoon in more brown pudding.

Her mouth stretches open to speak, and I spoon in more pudding.

Her eyes bulge and tears slide down the sides of her face.

"It's okay. I forgive you," I tell her. "I love you, and I'm here to save you."

With another spoonful halfway to her mouth, I say, "All you have to do is swallow this."

Her chest heaves, and brown pudding bubbles out her nose. Her eyes roll back. Her skin, it's getting bluish. Her chest heaves again.

And I say, "Mom?"

Her hands and arms tremble, and her head arches back deeper into her pillow. Her chest heaves, and the mouthful of brown muck sucks back into her throat.

Her face and hands are more blue. Her eyes rolled over white. Everything smells like chocolate.

I press the nurse call button.

I tell her, "Don't panic."

I tell her, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry..."

Heaving and flopping, her hands clawing at her throat. This is how I must look choking in public.

Then Dr. Marshall's standing on the other side of her bed, with one hand tilting my mom's head back. With her other hand, she scoops pudding out of her mouth. To me, Paige says, "What's happened?"

I was trying to save her. She was delusional. She doesn't remember I'm the messiah. I'm here to save her.

Paige leans over and breathes into my mom. She stands again. She breathes into my mom's mouth again, and each time she stands there's more brown pudding smeared around Paige's mouth. More chocolate. The smell is everything we breathe.

Still holding a cup of pudding in one hand and the spoon in the other, I say, "It's okay. I can do this. Just like with Lazarus," I say. "I've done this before."

And I spread my hands open against her heaving chest.

I say, "Ida Mancini. I command you to live."

Paige looks up at me between breaths, her face smeared with brown. She says, "There's been a little misunderstanding."

And I say, "Ida Mancini, you are whole and well."

Paige leans over the bed and spreads her hands next to mine. She presses with all her strength, again and again and again. Heart massage.

And I say, "That's really not necessary." I say, "I am the Christ."

And Paige whispers, "Breathe! Breathe, damn it!"

And from somewhere higher up on Paige's forearm, somewhere tucked high up her sleeve, a plastic patient bracelet falls down to around Paige's hand.

It's then all the heaving, the flopping, the clawing and gasping, everything, it's right then when everything stops.

"Widower" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

Chapter 44

My mother's dead. My mom's dead, and Paige Marshall is a lunatic.

Everything she told me she made up. Including the idea that I'm, oh I can't even say it: Him. Including that she loves me.

Okay, likes me.

Including that I'm a natural-born nice person. I'm not.

And if motherhood is the new God, the only thing sacred we have left, then I've killed God.

It's jamais vu. The French opposite of deja vu where everybody is a stranger no matter how well you think you know them.

Me, all I can do is go to work and stagger around Colonial Dunsboro, reliving the past again and again in my mind. Smelling the chocolate pudding smeared on my fingers. I'm stuck in the moment when my morn's heart stopped heaving and the sealed plastic bracelet proved Paige was an inmate. Paige, not my mom, was the deluded one.

I was the deluded one.

At that moment, Paige looked up from the chocolate mess smeared all over the bed. She looked at me and said, "Run. Go. Just get out."