Choke (29 page)

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. Nothing’s 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.”

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.

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. Anthony’s.

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.