Choke (31 page)

In most twelve-step recovery programs, the fourth step makes you
write a complete and relentless story of your life as an addict. Every lame, suck-ass moment of your life, you have to get a notebook and write it down. A complete inventory of your crimes. That way it’s always in your head. Then you have to fix it all. This goes for alcoholics, drug abusers, and overeaters as well as sex addicts.

This way you can go back and review the worst of your life anytime you want.

Still, those who remember the past aren’t necessarily any better off.

My yellow notebook, in here is everything about me, seized with a search warrant. About Paige and Denny and Beth. Nico and Leeza and Tanya. The detectives read through it, sitting across a big wood table from me in a locked soundproof room. One wall is a mirror, for sure with a video camera behind it.

And the detectives ask me, what was I hoping to accomplish by admitting to other people’s crimes?

They ask me, what was I trying to do?

To complete the past, I tell them.

All night, they read my inventory and ask me, what does all this mean?

Nurse Flamingo. Dr. Blaze. “The Blue Danube Waltz.”

What we say when we can’t tell the truth. What anything means anymore, I don’t know.

The police detectives ask if I know the whereabouts of a patient named Paige Marshall. She’s wanted for questioning about the apparent smothering death of a patient named Ida Mancini. My apparent mother.

Miss Marshall disappeared last night from a locked ward. There’s no visible signs of forced escape. No witnesses. Nothing. She’s just vanished.

The staff at St. Anthony’s were humoring her in the delusion, the police tell me, that she was a real doctor. They let her wear an old lab coat. It made her more cooperative.

The staff say she and I were pretty chummy.

“Not really,” I say. “I mean, I saw her around, but I didn’t really know anything about her.”

The detectives tell me I don’t have a lot of friends among the nursing staff.

See also: Clare, RN.

See also: Pearl, CNA.

See also: Colonial Dunsboro.

See also: The sexaholics.

I don’t ask if they’ve bothered checking for Paige Marshall in the year 2556.

Digging in my pocket, I find a dime. I swallow it, and it goes down.

In my pocket, I find a paper clip. But it goes down, too.

While the detectives look through my mom’s red diary, I look around for anything larger. Something too large to swallow.

I’ve been choking to death for years. By now this should be easy.

After a knock on the door, they bring in a dinner tray. A hamburger on a plate. A napkin. A bottle of ketchup. The backup in my guts, the swelling and pain, make it so I’m starving, but I can’t eat.

They ask me, “What’s all this in the diary?”

I open the hamburger. I open the bottle of ketchup. I need to eat to survive, but I’m so full of my own shit.

It’s Italian, I tell them.

Still reading, the detectives ask, “What’s this stuff that looks like maps? All these pages of drawings?”

It’s funny, but I’d forgot all that. Those are maps. Maps I did when I was a little boy, a stupid, gullible little shit. You see, my mom told me that I could reinvent the whole world. That I had that kind of power. That I didn’t have to accept the world the way it stood, all property-lined and micromanaged. I could make it anything I wanted.

That’s how crazy she was.

And I believed her.

And I slip the cap from the bottle of ketchup into my mouth. And I swallow.

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.

Already the detectives are half out of their seats.

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.

Because I can’t save anybody, not as a doctor, not as a son. And because I can’t save anybody, I can’t save myself.

Because now I’m an orphan. I’m unemployed and unloved. Because my guts hurt, and I’m dying anyway, from the inside out.

Because you have to plan your getaway.

Because after you’ve crossed some lines, you just keep crossing them.

And there’s no escaping from constant escape. Distracting ourselves. Avoiding confrontation. Getting past the moment. Jacking off. Television. Denial.

The detectives look up from the diary, and one says, “Don’t panic. It’s like it says in the yellow notebook. He’s just faking it.”

They stand and watch me.

My hands around my throat, I can’t draw any air. The stupid little boy who cried wolf.

Like that woman with her throat full of chocolate. The woman not his mommy.

For the first time in longer than I can remember, I feel peaceful. Not happy. Not sad. Not anxious. Not horny. Just all the
higher parts of my brain closing up shop. The cerebral cortex. The cerebellum. That’s where my problem is.

I’m simplifying myself.

Somewhere balanced in the perfect middle between happiness and sadness.

Because sponges never have a bad day.

One morning the school bus pulled up to the curb, and while his foster
mother stood waving, the stupid little boy got on. He was the only passenger, and the bus blew past the school at sixty miles per hour. The bus driver was the Mommy.

This was the last time that she came back to claim him.

Sitting behind the huge steering wheel and looking up at him in the visor mirror, she said, “You’d be amazed how easy it is to rent one of these.”

She turned into an on-ramp for the freeway and said, “This
gives us a good six hours head start before the bus company reports this crate stolen.”

The bus rolled down onto the freeway, and the city rolled by outside, and after there wasn’t a house every second, the Mommy told him to come sit up next to her. She took a red diary from a bag of stuff and took out a map, all folded.

With one hand, the Mommy shook the map open across the steering wheel, and with her other hand she unrolled her window. She worked the steering wheel with her knees. With just her eyes, she looked back and forth between the road and the map.

Then she crumpled the map and fed it out the window.

The whole time, the stupid boy just sat there.

She said to get the red diary.

When he tried to give it, she said, “No. Open it to the next page.” She said to find a pen in the glove compartment and fast, because there was a river coming up.

The road cut through everything, all the houses and farms and trees, and in a moment they were on a bridge going across a river that went off forever on both sides of the bus.

“Quick,” the Mommy said. “Draw the river.”

As if he’d just discovered this river, as if he’d just discovered the whole world, she said to draw a new map, a map of the world just for himself. His own personal world.

“I don’t want you to just accept the world as it’s given,” she said.

She said, “I want you to invent it. I want you to have that skill. To create your own reality. Your own set of laws. I want to try and teach you that.”

The boy had a pen now, and she said to draw the river in the book. Draw the river, and draw the mountains up ahead. And name them, she said. Not with words he already knew, but to
make up new words that didn’t already mean a bunch of other stuff.

To create his own symbols.

The little boy thought with the pen in his mouth and the book open in his lap, and after a little, he drew it all.

And what’s stupid is, the little boy forgot all this. It wasn’t until years later that the police detectives found this map. That he remembered he did this. That he could do this. He had this power.

And the Mommy looked at his map in the rearview mirror and said, “Perfect.” She looked at her watch, and her foot pressed down, and they went faster, and she said, “Now write it in the book. Draw the river on our new map. And get ready, there’s lots more stuff that needs a name coming up.”

She said, “Because the only frontier left is the world of intangibles, ideas, stories, music, art.”

She said, “Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.”

She said, “Because I won’t always be around to nag you.”

But the truth is, the kid didn’t want to be responsible for himself, for his world. The truth is, the stupid little shit was already planning to make a scene in the next restaurant, to get the Mommy arrested and out of his life forever. Because he was tired of adventure, and he thought his precious, boring, stupid life would just go on and on forever.

He was already choosing between safety, security, contentment, and her.

Driving the bus with her knees, the Mommy reached over and squeezed his shoulder and said, “What do you want for lunch?”

And as if it was just an innocent answer, the little boy said, “Corn dogs.”

In another minute, the arms come around me from behind. Some police
detective is hugging me tight, double-fisting me under the rib cage, breathing into my ear, “Breathe! Breathe, damn it!”

Breathing into my ear, “You’re okay.”

Two arms hug me, lift me off my feet, and a stranger whispers, “You’re going to be fine.”

Periabdominal pressure.

Somebody pounds me on the back the way a doctor pounds a newborn baby, and I let fly with the bottle cap. My bowels burst
loose down my pant leg with the two rubber balls and all the shit piled up behind them.

My entire private life made public.

Nothing left to hide.

The monkey and the chestnuts.

In the next second, I’m collapsed on the floor. I’m sobbing while someone tells me how everything is all right. I’m alive. They saved me. I almost died. They hold my head to their chest and rock me, saying, “Just relax.”

They put a glass of water to my lips and say, “Hush.”

They say it’s all over.

Mobbed around Denny’s castle are a thousand people I can’t remember,
but who will never forget me.

It’s almost midnight. Stinking and orphaned and unemployed and unloved, I pick my way through the crowd until I get to Denny, standing in the middle, and I say, “Dude.”

And Denny goes, “Dude.” Watching the mob of people holding rocks.

He says, “You should definitely not be here right now.”

After we were on TV, all day Denny says, all these smiling
people keep turni!. Beautiful rocks. Rocks like you won’t believe. Quarried granite and ashlar basalt. Dressed blocks of sandstone and limestone. They come one by one, bringing mortar and shovels and trowels.

They all ask, each of them, “Where’s Victor?”

This is so many people they filled the block so nobody could get any work done. They all wanted to give me their stone in person. All these men and women, they’ve all been asking Denny and Beth if I’m doing okay.