Choke (30 page)

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.

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 déjà 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 mom’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.”

See also: “The Blue Danube Waltz.”

Staring at her bracelet was everything I could do.

Paige came around the bed to grab my arm and said, “Let them think I did this.” She dragged me to the doorway, saying, “Let them think she did it to herself.” She looked up and down the hallway and said, “I’ll wipe your prints off the spoon and put it in her hand. I’ll tell people you left the pudding with her yesterday.”

As we pass doors, they all snap locked. It’s from her bracelet.

Paige points me to an outside door and says she can’t go any closer or it won’t open for me.

She says, “You were not here today. Got it?”

She said a lot of other stuff, but none of it counts.

I’m not loved. I’m not a beautiful soul. I’m not a good-natured, giving person. I’m not anybody’s savior.

All of that’s bogus now that she’s insane.

“I just murdered her,” I say.

The woman who just died, who I just smothered in chocolate, she wasn’t even my mother.

“It was an accident,” Paige says.

And I say, “How can I be sure of that?”

Behind me, as I stepped outside, somebody must have found
the body, because they kept announcing, “Nurse Remington to Room 158. Nurse Remington, please come immediately to Room 158.”

I’m not even Italian.

I’m an orphan.

I stagger around Colonial Dunsboro with the birth-deformed chickens, the drug-addicted citizens, and the field-trip kids who think this mess has anything to do with the real past. There’s no way you can get the past right. You can pretend. You can delude yourself, but you can’t re-create what’s over.

The stocks in the middle of the town square are empty. Ursula leads a milk cow past me, both of them smelling like dope smoke. Even the cow’s eyes are dilated and bloodshot.

Here, it’s always the same day, every day, and there should be some comfort in that. The same as those television shows where the same people are trapped on the same desert island for season after season and never age or get rescued, they just wear more makeup.

This is the rest of your life.

A herd of fourth-graders run by, screaming. Behind them’s a man and a woman. The man’s holding a yellow notebook, and he says, “Are you Victor Mancini?”

The woman says, “That’s him.”

And the man holds the notebook up and says, “Is this yours?”

It’s my fourth step from the sexaholics group, my complete and ruthless moral inventory of myself. The diary of my sex life. All my sins accounted for.

And the woman says, “So?” To the man with the notebook, she says, “Arrest him, already.”

The man says, “Do you know a resident of the St. Anthony’s Constant Care Center named Eva Muehler?”

Eva the squirrel. She must’ve seen me this morning, and she’s
told them what I did. I killed my mom. Okay, not my mom. That old woman.

The man says, “Victor Mancini, you’re under arrest for suspicion of rape.”

The girl with the fantasy. It must be she filed charges. The girl with the pink silk bed I ruined. Gwen.

“Hey,” I say. “She wanted me to rape her. It was her idea.”

And the woman says, “He’s lying. That’s my mother he’s bad-mouthing.”

The man starts reciting the Miranda deal. My rights.

And I say, “Gwen’s your
mother?”

Just by her skin, you can tell this woman’s older than Gwen by ten years.

Today, the whole world must be deluded.

And the woman shouts,
“Eva Muehler
is my mother! And she says you held her down and told her it was a secret game.”

That’s it. “Oh, her,” I say. I say, “I thought you meant this
other
rape.”

The man stops in the middle of his Miranda deal and says, “Are you even listening to your rights, here?”

It’s all in the yellow notebook, I tell them. What I did. It was just me accepting responsibility for every sin in the world. “You see,” I say, “for a while, I really did think I was Jesus Christ.”

From behind his back, the man snaps out a pair of handcuffs.

The woman says, “Any man who would rape a ninety-year-old woman has to be crazy.”

I make a nasty face and tell her, “No kidding.”

And she says, “Oh, so now you’re saying my mother’s not attractive?”

And the man snaps the cuffs around one of my hands. He turns me around and snaps my hands together behind my back
and says, “How about we go somewhere and straighten this all out?”

In front of all the losers of Colonial Dunsboro, in front of the druggies and the crippled chickens and the kids who think they’re getting an education and His Lord High Charlie the Colonial Governor, I’m arrested. It’s the same as Denny in the stocks, but for real.

And in another sense, I want to tell them all not to think they’re any different.

Around here, everybody’s arrested.

The minute before I left St. Anthony’s for the last time, the minute
before I was out the door and running, Paige tried to explain.

Yes, she was a doctor. Talking in a rush, her words crowded together. Yes, she was a patient committed here. Clicking and unclicking her ballpoint pen, fast. She was really a doctor of genetics, and she was only a patient here because she’d told the truth. She wasn’t trying to hurt me. Pudding still smeared around her mouth. She was just trying to do her job.

In the hallway, during our last moment together, Paige pulled
my sleeve so I’d have to look at her, and she said, “You have to believe this.”

Her eyes were bulging so the whites showed all around the iris, and the little black brain of her hair was coming loose.

She was a doctor, she said, a specialist in genetics. From the year 2556. And she’d traveled back in time to become impregnated by a typical male of this period in history. So she could preserve and document a genetic sampling, she said. They needed the sample to help cure a plague. In the year 2556. This wasn’t a cheap and easy trip. Traveling in time was the equivalent of what space travel is for humans now, she said. It was a chancy, expensive gamble, and unless she came back impregnated with an intact fetus, any future missions would be canceled.

Here in my 1734 costume, bent double with my impacted bowels, I’m still stuck on her idea of a
typical male.

“I’m only locked in here because I told people the truth about myself,” she says. “You were the only available reproductive male.”

Oh, I say, that makes this all
lots
better. Now everything makes perfect sense.

She just wanted me to know that, tonight, she was to be recalled to the year 2556. This would be the last time we’d ever see each other, and she just wanted me to know that she was grateful.

“I’m profoundly grateful,” she said. “And I do love you.”

And standing there in the hallway, in the strong light from the sun rising outside the windows, I took a black felt-tipped pen from the chest pocket of her lab coat.

The way she stood with her shadow falling on the wall behind her for the last time, I started to trace her outline.

And Paige Marshall said, “What’s that for?”

It’s how art was invented.

And I said, “Just in case. It’s just in case you’re not crazy.”