by Чак Паланик
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 s
wallows. 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: Jenine, CNA.
At the time, I thought each of them was going to be somebody special, but without their clothes, they could've been anybody. Now her ass is about as inviting as a pencil sharpener.
To Dr. Paige Marshall I say, "There you are so wrong." I say, "I want to fuck you so bad I can taste it." I say, "And no, I don't want anybody to die, but I don't want my mom back the way she's always been."
Paige Marshall exhales. She sucks her mouth into a tight little knot and just glares at me. She holds her clipboard to her chest with her arms crossed over it.
"So," she says. "This hasn't anything to do with sex. You just don't want your mother to recover. You just can't deal with strong women, and you think that if she dies, then your issue about her will also."
From her room, my mom calls, "Morty, what am I paying you for?"
Paige Marshall says, "You can lie to my patients and complete their life conflicts, but don't lie to yourself." Then she says, "And don't lie to me."
Paige Marshall says, "You'd rather see her dead than see her recover."
And I say, "Yes. I mean, no. I mean, I don't know."
All my life, I've been less my mother's child than her hostage. The subject of her social and political experiments. Her own private lab rat. Now she's mine, and she's not going to escape by dying or getting better. I just want one person I can rescue. I want one person who needs me. Who can't live without me. I want to be a hero, but not just one time. Even if it means keeping her crippled, I want to be someone's constant savior.
"I know, I know, I know this sounds terrible," I say, "but I don't know. . . . This is what I think."
Here's where I should tell Paige Marshall what I really think.
I mean, I'm just tired of being wrong all the time just because I'm a guy.
I mean, how many times can everybody tell you that you're the oppressive, prejudiced enemy before you give up and become the enemy. I mean, a male chauvinist pig isn't born, he's made, and more and more of them are being made by women.
After long enough, you just roll over and accept the fact that you're a sexist, bigoted, insensitive, crude, cretinist cretin. Women are right. You're wrong. You get used to the idea. You live down to expectations.
Even if the shoe doesn't fit, you'll shrink into it.
I mean, in a world without God, aren't mothers the new god? The last sacred unassailable position. Isn't motherhood the last perfect magical miracle? But a miracle that's impossible for men.
And maybe men say they're glad not to give birth, all the pain and blood, but really that's just so much sour grapes. For sure, men can't
do anything near as incredible. Upper body strength, abstract thought, phalluses—any advantages men appear to have are pretty token.
You can't even hammer a nail with a phallus.
Women are already born so far ahead ability-wise. The day men can give birth, that's when we can start talking about equal rights.
I don't tell Paige all that.
Instead, I say how I just want to be one person's guardian angel.
"Revenge" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.
"Then save her by fucking me," says Dr. Marshall.
"But I don't want her saved all the way," I say. I'm terrified of losing her, but if I don't, I may lose myself.
There's still my mom's red diary in my coat pocket. There's still the chocolate pudding to get.
"You don't want her to die," Paige says, "and you don't want her to recover. Just what do you want?"
"I want somebody who can read Italian," I say.
Paige says, "Like what?"
"Here," I say and show her the diary. "It's my mom's. It's in Italian."
Paige takes the book and leafs through it. Her ears look red and excited around the edge. "I took four years of Italian as an undergrad," she says. "I can tell you what it says."
"I just want to keep control," I say. "For a change, I want to be the adult."
Still leafing through the book, Dr. Paige Marshall says, "You want to keep her weak so you're always the one in charge." She looks up at me and says, "It sounds as if you'd like to be God."
Chapter 19
Black-and-white chickens stagger around Colonial Dunsboro, chickens with their heads flattened. Here are chickens with no wings or only one leg. There are chickens with no legs, swimming with just their ragged wings through the barnyard mud. Blind chickens without eyes. Without beaks. Born that way. Defective. Born with their little chicken brains already scrambled.
There's an invisible line between science and sadism, but here it's made visible.
It's not that my brains are going to fare much better. Just look at my mom.
Dr. Paige Marshall should see them all struggle along. Not that she'd understand.