Choke (16 page)

Her watch said they had about forty minutes before the next client.

The fog is gone, Mr. Jones, and the shape just in front of you is Marilyn Monroe in a tight satin dress. Golden and smiling, her eyes half closed, her head tilts back. She stands in a field of tiny flowers and lifts her arms, and as you step closer her dress slips to the ground.

To the stupid little boy, the Mommy used to say this wasn’t sex. These weren’t real women as much as they were symbols. Projections. Sex symbols.

The power of suggestion.

To Mr. Jones, the Mommy would say, “Have at her.”

She’d say, “She’s all yours.”

That first night, Denny’s outside the front door holding something
wrapped in a pink baby blanket. This is all through the peephole in my mom’s door: Denny in his giant plaid coat, Denny cradling some baby to his chest, his nose bulging, his eyes bulging, everything bulging because of the peephole lens. Everything distorted. His hands clutching the bundle are white with the effort.

And Denny yells, “Open up, dude!”

And I open the door as far as the burglar chain will go. I go, “What you got there?”

And Denny tucks the blanket around his little bundle and says, “What’s it look like?”

“It looks like a baby, dude,” I say.

And Denny says, “Good.” He hefts the pink bundle and says, “Let me in, dude, this is getting heavy.”

Then I slip the chain. I step aside, and Denny charges in and over to one living-room corner, where he heaves the baby onto the plastic-covered sofa.

The pink blanket rolls and out rolls a rock, gray and granite-colored, scrubbed and smooth-looking. No baby, for real, just this boulder.

“Thanks for the baby idea,” Denny says. “People see a young guy with a baby, and they’re sweet to you,” he says. “They see a guy carrying a big rock, and they get all tensed up. Especially if you want to bring it on the bus.”

He tucks one edge of the pink blanket under his chin and starts folding it against his front and says, “Plus, with a baby you always get a seat. And if you forget your money they don’t kick you off.” Denny flops the folded blanket over his shoulder and says, “This your mom’s house?”

The dining-room table is covered with today’s birthday cards and checks, my thank-you letters, the big book of who and where. Beside that’s my mom’s old ten-key adding machine, the kind with a long slot-machine handle you pull along one side. Sitting back down, I start doing today’s deposit slip and say, “Yeah, it’s her house until the property tax people kick me out in a few months.”

Denny says, “It’s good you got a whole house, since my folks want all my rocks to move out with me.”

“Dude,” I say. “How many do you got?”

He’s got a rock for every day he has sobriety, Denny says. It’s what he does at night to stay occupied. Find rocks. Wash them.

Haul them home. It’s how his recovery is going to be about doing something big and good instead of just not doing little bad shit.

“It’s so I don’t act out, dude,” he says. “You have no idea how tough it is to find good rocks in a city. I mean, not like chunks of concrete or those plastic rocks people hide their extra keys inside.”

The total for today’s checks is seventy-five bucks. All from strangers who Heimlich Maneuvered me in some restaurant somewhere. This is nowhere near what I figure a stomach tube has got to cost.

To Denny, I say, “So how many days you got so far?”

“One hundred and twenty-seven rocks’ worth,” Denny says. He comes around the table next to me, looking at the birthday cards, looking at the checks, and says, “So where’s your mom’s famous diary?”

He picks up a birthday card.

“You can’t read it,” I say.

Denny says, “Sorry, dude,” and starts to put the card down.

No, I tell him. The diary. It’s written in some foreign language. That’s why he can’t read it. I can’t read it. How my mom thinks is she probably wrote it that way so I’d never sneak through it when I was a kid. “Dude,” I say, “I think it’s Italian.”

And Denny goes, “Italian?”

“Yeah,” I go, “you know, like spaghetti?”

Still with his big plaid coat on, Denny says, “You eat yet?”

Not yet. I seal the deposit envelope.

Denny says, “You think they’re going to banish me tomorrow?”

Yes, no, probably. Ursula saw him with the newspaper.

The deposit slip is ready for the bank tomorrow. All the thank-you letters, the underdog letters, are signed and stamped and ready to mail. I get my coat from the sofa. Next to it, Denny’s rock is squashing the springs down.

“So what’s with these rocks,” I say.

Denny’s opened the front door, and he’s standing there while I turn off some lights. In the doorway, he says, “I don’t know. But rocks are like, you know,
land.
It’s like these rocks are a kit. It’s land, but with some assembly required. You know, landowner-ship, but for right now it’s indoors.”

I say, “For sure.”

We go out and I lock the door behind us. The night sky is all fuzzy with stars. All out of focus. There’s no moon.

Outside on the sidewalk, Denny looks up at the mess and says, “What I think happened is when God wanted to make the earth out of chaos, the first thing he did was just get a lot of rocks together.”

While we walk, his new obsessive compulsion has my eyes already scanning vacant lots and places for rocks we can pick up.

Walking down to the bus stop with me, still with the pink baby blanket folded over his shoulder, Denny says, “I only take the rocks nobody wants.” He says, “I’ll just get one rock every night. Then I figure I’ll figure out the next part, you know—next.”

It’s such a creepy idea. Us taking home rocks. We’re collecting land.

“You know that girl, Daiquiri?” Denny says. “The dancer with the cancery mole.” He says, “You didn’t sleep with her, did you?”

We’re shoplifting real property. Burgling terra firma.

And I say, “Why not?”

We’re just an outlaw couple of land rustlers.

And Denny says, “Her real name is Beth.”

The way Denny thinks, he’s probably got plans to start his own planet.

Dr. Paige Marshall stretches a string of something white tight between
her two gloved hands. She stands over a deflated old woman in a recliner chair, and Dr. Marshall says, “Mrs. Wintower? I need you to open your mouth as wide as you can.”

Latex gloves, the yellow way they make your hands look, this is just how cadaver skin looks. The medical cadavers from first-year anatomy with their shaved heads and pubic hair. The little stubble of the hairs. The skin could be chicken skin, cheap stewing chicken, turning yellow and dimpled with follicles. Feathers
or hair, it’s all just keratin. The muscles of the human thigh look the same as dark-meat turkey. During first-year anatomy, you can’t look at chicken or turkey and not be eating a cadaver.

The old woman tilts her head back to show her teeth wedged in their brown curve. Her tongue coated white. Her eyes are closed. This is how all these old women look at Communion, at Catholic Mass, when you’re an altar boy and have to follow along with the priest as he puts the wafer on tongue after old tongue. The church says you can receive the Host into your hand, then feed yourself, but not these old ladies. In church, you’ll still look down the Communion rail and see two hundred open mouths, two hundred old ladies stretching their tongues toward salvation.

Paige Marshall leans in and forces the white string between the old woman’s teeth. She pulls, and when the string twangs out from the mouth, some soft gray bits flick out. She runs the string between two more teeth, and the string comes out red.

For bleeding gums, see also: Oral cancers.

See also: Necrotizing ulcerative gingivitis.

The only good part about being an altar boy is you get to hold the paten under the chin of each person receiving Communion. This is a gold platter on a stick you use to catch the Host if it falls. Even if a Host hits the floor, you still have to eat it. At this point it’s consecrated. It’s become the body of Christ. The flesh incarnate.

I watch from behind while Paige Marshall puts the bloody string back into the old woman’s mouth again and again. Gray and white bits of smear collect on the front of Paige’s lab coat. Little specks of pink.

A nurse leans in the doorway and says, “Everybody okay in here?” To the old woman in the chair, she says, “Paige isn’t hurting you, is she?”

The woman gargles an answer.

The nurse says, “What was that?”

The old woman swallows and says, “Dr. Marshall is very gentle. She’s more gentle than when you do my teeth.”

“Almost done,” Dr. Marshall says. “You are being so good, Mrs. Wintower.”

And the nurse shrugs and leaves.

The good part of being an altar boy is when you hit somebody in the throat with the paten. People on their knees with their hands clasped in prayer, the little gaggy face they make right at the moment they are being so divine. I loved that.

As the priest puts the host on their tongue, he’ll say, “Body of Christ.”

And the person kneeling for Communion will say, “Amen.”

What’s best is to hit their throat so the “Amen” comes out as a gaga baby sound. Or they make a duck quack. Or chicken cluck. Still, you had to do this by accident. And you had to not laugh.

“All done,” Dr. Marshall says. She straightens up, and when she goes to toss the bloody string in the trash she sees me.

“I didn’t want to interrupt,” I say.

She’s helping the old woman out of the recliner and says, “Mrs. Wintower? Can you send Mrs. Tsunimitsu in to see me?”

Mrs. Wintower nods. Through her cheeks, you can see her tongue stretching around inside her mouth, feeling her teeth, sucking her lips into a tight pucker. Before she steps out into the hallway, she looks at me and says, “Howard, I’ve forgiven you for cheating on me. You don’t have to keep coming around.”

“Remember to send in Mrs. Tsunimitsu,” says Dr. Marshall.

And I say, “So?”

And Paige Marshall says, “So I have to do dental hygiene all day. What do you need?”

I need to know what it says in my Mom’s diary.

“Oh, that,” she says. She’s snapping off her latex gloves and
stuffing them into a hazardous-waste canister. “The only thing that diary proves is your mother was delusional since before you were born.”

Delusional how?

Paige Marshall looks at a clock on the wall. She waves at the chair, the vinyl leather-look recliner Mrs. Wintower just left, and says, “Take a seat.” She’s stretching on a new pair of latex gloves.

She wants to floss my teeth?

“It will help with your breath,” she says. She spools out a length of dental floss, and says, “Sit, and I’ll tell you what’s in the diary.”

So I sit, and my weight pushes a cloud of bad stink out of the recliner.

“That wasn’t me,” I say. “That smell, I mean. I didn’t do that.”

And Paige Marshall says, “Before you were born, your mother spent some time in Italy, right?”

“So that’s the big secret?” I say.

And Paige says, “What?”

That I’m
Italian?

“No,” Paige says. She leans into my mouth. “But your mother is Catholic, isn’t she?”

The string hurts as she snaps it between a couple teeth.

“Please be joking,” I say. Around her fingers, I say, “I’m not Italian
and
Catholic! This is too much to bear.”

I tell her I already know all this.

And Paige says, “Shut up.” She leans back.

“So who’s my father?” I say.

She leans into my mouth, and the string snaps between two back teeth. The taste of blood pools around the base of my tongue. She’s squinting her attention deep into me, and says, “Well, if you believe in the Holy Trinity, you’re your own father.”

I’m my own father?

Paige says, “My point is that your mother’s dementia appears to go back to before you were born. According to what’s written in her diary, she’s been deluded since at least her late thirties.”

She twangs the string out and bits of mouth food flick onto her coat.