by Чак Паланик
Denny here with me, Denny reaches into the back of his pants and pulls out a page of the classified ads from the newspaper all folded up in a little square. For sure this is contraband. His Royal High Governorship sees this and Denny's going to be banished to unemployment. For real, right out in the barnyard in front of the cow shed, Denny hands me this newspaper page.
Except for the newspaper, we're being so authentic it's like nothing we're wearing's even been washed in this century.
People are snapping pictures, trying to take some part of you home as a souvenir. People point video cameras, trying to trap you into their vacation. They're all shooting you, shooting the crippled chickens. Everybody's trying to make every minute of the present last forever. Preserve every second.
Inside the cow shed, there's the gurgle of somebody sucking air through a bong. You can't see them, but there's that silent tension of a bunch of people leaned together in a circle, trying to hold their breath. A girl coughs. Ursula, the milkmaid. There's so much reefer in there a cow coughs.
This is when we're supposed to be harvesting dried cow things, you know, cow piles, and Denny goes, "Read it, dude. The circled ad." He opens the page for me to see. "That ad, there," he says. There's one little classified circled in red ink.
With the milkmaid around. The tourists. There's nothing less than a trillion ways we're about to get caught. For real, Denny could not be more obvious.
Against my hand, the paper's still warm from Denny's butt, and when I go, "Not here, dude," and try to give the paper back. . .
When I do that, Denny says, "Sorry, I didn't mean to, you know, incriminate you. If you want, I can just read it for you."
The grade-schoolers who come here, it's a big deal for them to visit the henhouse and watch the eggs hatch. Still, a regular chick isn't as interesting as, say, a chicken with only one eye or a chicken with no neck or with a stunted paralyzed leg, so the kids shake the eggs. Shake them hard and put them back to hatch.
So if what's born is deformed or insane? It's all for the sake of education.
The lucky ones are just born dead.
Curiosity or cruelty, for sure, me and Dr. Marshall would go around and around on this point.
I shovel up some cow piles, careful so they don't break in half. So the wet insides don't stink. With all the cow crap on my hands, I have to not bite my nails.
Next to me, Denny reads:
"Free to good home, twenty-three-year-old male, recovering self-abuser, limited income and social skills, house-trained." Then he reads a phone number. It's his phone number.
"It's my folks, dude, that's their phone number," Denny says. "It's like they're hinting."
He found this left on his bed last night.
Denny says, "They mean me."
I say I understand that part. With a wood shovel, I'm still getting the poops, piling them in a big woven thing. You know. A basket thing.
Denny says, can he come live with me?
"We're talking plan Z here," Denny says. "I'm only asking you as a last resort."
Because he doesn't want to bug me or because he's not nuts about living with me, I don't ask.
You can smell corn chips on Denny's breath. Another violation of historic character. He's such a shit magnet. The milkmaid, Ursula, comes out of the cow shed and looks at us with her stoner eyes just about filled with blood.
"If there was a girl you liked," I say to him, "if she wanted to have sex just so she could get pregnant, would you?"
Ursula grabs her skirts up and comes stomping through the cow poop in her wooden clogs. She kicks a blind chicken that's in her way. Somebody snaps her picture, kicking. A married couple start to ask Ursula to hold their baby for a picture, but then maybe they see her eyes.
"I don't know," Denny says. "A baby's not like having a dog. I mean, a baby lives a long time, dude."
"But what if she wasn't planning to have the baby?" I say.
Denny's eyes go up and then down, looking at nothing, then he looks at me. "I don't understand," he says. "You mean like sell it?"
"I mean like sacrifice it," I say.
And Denny says, "Dude."
"Just supposing," I say, "she's going to scramble its little unborn fetus brain and suck the mess out with a big needle and then inject that stuff into the head of somebody you know who has brain damage, to cure them," I say.
Denny's lips hang open a crack. "Dude, you don't mean me, do you?
I mean my mom.
It's called a neural transplant. Some people call it a neural graft, and it's the only effective way to rebuild my mom's brain at this late stage. It would be better known except for problems getting, you know, the key ingredient.
"A ground-up baby," Denny says.
I say, "A fetus."
Fetal tissue, Paige Marshall said. Dr. Marshall with her skin and her mouth.
Ursula stops next to us, and she points at the newspaper in Denny's hand. She says, "Unless the date on that's 1734, you're fucked. That's a violation of character."
The hair on Denny's head is trying to grow back, except some is ingrown and trapped under red or white pimples.
Ursula steps away, then turns back. "Victor," she says, "if you need me, I'll be churning."
I say, later. And she slogs off.
Denny says, "Dude, so it's like a choice between your mom and your firstborn?"
It's not a big deal, the way Dr. Marshall sees it. We do it every day. Kill the unborn to save the elderly. In the gold wash of the chapel, breathing her reasons into my ear, she asked, every time we burn a gallon of gas or an acre of rain forest, aren't we killing the future to preserve the present?
The whole pyramid scheme of Social Security.
She said, with her breasts wedged between us, she said, I'm doing this because I care about your mother. The least you could do is your small part.
I didn't ask what she meant by small part.
And Denny says, "So tell me the truth about yourself."
I don't know. I couldn't go through with it. With the fucking part.
"No," Denny says. "I mean, did you read your mom's diary yet?"
No, I can't. I'm a little stuck around this dicey baby-killing issue.
Denny looks me hard in the eye and says, "Are you really, like, a cyborg? Is that your mom's big secret?"
"A what?" I say.
"You know," he says, "an artificial humanoid created with a limited life span, but implanted with false childhood memories so you think you're really a real person, except you're really going to die soon?"
And I look at Denny hard and say, "So, dude, my mom told you I'm some kind of a robot?'
"Is that what her diary says?" Denny says.
Two women come up, holding out a camera, and one says, "Do you mind?"
"Say cheese," I tell them and snap their picture smiling in front of the cow shed, then they walk away with another fleeting memory that almost got away. Another petrified moment to treasure.
"No, I haven't read the diary," I say. "I haven't fucked Paige Marshall. I can't do jack shit until I decide about this."
"Okay, okay," Denny says, to me he says, "then are you really just a brain in a pan somewhere being stimulated with chemicals and electricity into thinking you have a real life?"
"No," I go. "I'm definitely not a brain. That's not it."
"Okay," he says. "Maybe you're an artificially intelligent computer program that interacts with other programs in a simulated reality."
And I go, "What does that make you?"
"I'd be just another computer," Denny says. Then he says, "I get your point, dude. I can't even figure out change for the bus."
Denny narrows his eyes and tilts his head back, looking at me with one eyebrow cocked. "Here's my last guess," he says.
He says, "Okay, the way I figure it, you're just the subject of an experiment and the whole world you know is just an artificial construct populated by actors who play the roles of everybody in your life, and the weather is ju
st special effects and the sky is painted blue and the landscape everywhere is just a set. Is that it?"
And I go, "Huh?"
"And I'm really a brilliantly talented and gifted actor," Denny says, "and I'm just pretending to be your stupid masturbation-addicted loser best friend."
Somebody snaps a picture of me gritting my teeth.
And I look at Denny, and say, "Dude, you're not pretending anything."
At my elbow is some tourist guy grinning at me. "Victor, hey," he says. "So this is where you work."
Where he knows me from, I haven't the foggiest.
Medical school. College. A different job. Or it could be he's just another sex maniac from my group. It's funny. He doesn't look like a sexaholic, but nobody ever does.
"Hey, Maude," he says and elbows the woman he's with. "This is the guy I'm always telling you about. I saved this guy's life."
And the woman says, "Oh my gosh. So it's true?" She pulls her head into her shoulders and rolls her eyes. "Reggie here is always bragging about you. I guess I always thought he was exaggerating."
"Oh, yeah," I say. "Old Reg here, yeah, he saved my life."
And Denny says, "Anymore, who hasn't?"
Reggie says, "Are you making out okay these days? I tried to send as much cash as I could. Was it enough to take care of that wisdom tooth you needed yanked?"
And Denny says, "Oh, for crying out loud."
A blind chicken with half a head and no wings, shit smeared all over it, stumbles up against my boot, and when I reach down to pet it, the thing's shivering inside its feathers. It makes a soft clucking, cooing sound that's almost a purr.
It's nice to see something more pathetic than I feel right now.
Then I catch myself with a fingernail in my mouth, cow crap. Chicken shit.
See also: Histoplasmosis. See also: Tapeworms.
And I go, "Yeah, the money." I say, "Thanks, dude." And I spit. Then I spit again. There's the click of Reggie taking my picture. Just another stupid moment people have to make last forever.
And Denny looks at the newspaper in his hand and says, "So, dude, can I come live at your mom's house? Yes or no?"
Chapter 2O
The Mommy's three-o'clock appointment would show up clutching a yellow bath towel, and around his finger would be the blank groove where there should be a wedding ring. The second the door was locked, he'd try and give her the cash. He'd start to take off his pants. His name was Jones, he'd tell her. His first name Mister.
Guys here to see her for the first time were all the same. She'd tell him, pay me after. Don't be in such a rush. Keep all your clothes on. There's no hurry.
She'd tell him the appointment book was full of Mr. Joneses, Mr. Smiths, John Does, and Bob Whites, so he'd better come up with a better alias. She'd tell him to lie down on the couch. Close the blinds. Dim the lights.
This is how she could make a pile of money. It didn't violate the terms of her parole, but only because the parole board lacked imagination.
To the man on the couch, she'd say, "Shall we get started?"
Even if a guy said he wasn't after sex, the Mommy would still tell him to bring a towel. You brought a towel. You paid in cash. Don't ask her to bill you later or bill some insurance company, because she just couldn't be bothered. You pay cash, then you file the claim.
You only get fifty minutes. Guys had to know what they wanted.
This means the woman, the positions, the setting, the toys. Don't spring anything fancy on her at the last minute.
She'd tell Mr. Jones to lie back. Close his eyes.
Allow all the tension in your face to melt away. Your forehead first; let it go slack. Relax the spot between your eyes. Imagine your forehead smooth and relaxed. Then the muscles around your eyes, smooth and relaxed. Then the muscles around your mouth. Smooth and relaxed.
Even if guys said they were just looking to lose some weight, they wanted sex. If they wanted to quit smoking. Manage stress. Quit biting their nails. Cure hiccups. Stop drinking. Clear up their skin. Whatever the issue, it was because they weren't getting laid. Whatever they said they wanted, they'd get sex here and the problem was solved.
If the Mommy was a compassionate genius or a slut, you don't know.
Sex pretty much cures everything.
She was the best therapist in the business, or she was a whore that fucked with your mind. She didn't like being so slam bam with her clients, but she'd never planned to earn a living this way.
This kind of session, the sex kind, had first happened by accident. A client who wanted to quit smoking wanted to be regressed to the day he was eleven and took his first puff. So he could remember how bad it tasted. So he could quit by going back and never starting. That was the basic idea.
On his second session, this client wanted to meet with his father, who was dead of lung cancer, just to talk. This is still pretty much normal. People want to meet with famous dead people all the time, for guidance, for advice. It was so real that on his third session, the client wanted to meet Cleopatra.
To each client, the Mommy said, let all the tension drain from your face to your neck, then from your neck to your chest. Relax your shoulders. Allow them to roll back and press into the couch. Imagine a heavy weight pressing your body, settling your head and arms deeper and deeper into the cushions of the couch.
Relax your arms, your elbows, your hands. Feel the tension trickle down into each finger, then relax and imagine the tension draining out through each fingertip.
What she did was put him in a trance, hypnotic induction, and guide the experience. He wasn't going back in time. None of it was real. What was most important is he wanted this to happen.
The Mommy, she just gave the play-by-play story. The blow-by-blow description. The color commentary. Imagine listening to a baseball game over the radio. Imagine how real it can seem. Now imagine it from inside a heavy theta-level trance, a deep trance where you hear and smell. You taste and feel. Imagine Cleopatra rolling out of her carpet, naked and perfect and everything you've always wanted.
Imagine Salome. Imagine Marilyn Monroe. If you could go back to any period in history and get with any woman, women who would do everything you could imagine. Incredible women. Famous women.
The theater of the mind. The bordello of the subconscious.
That's how it started.
Sure, what she did was hypnosis, but it wasn't real past-life regression. It was more a kind of guided meditation. She'd tell Mr. Jones to focus on the tension in his chest and let it recede. Let it flow down to his waist, his hips, his legs. Imagine water spiraling down a drain. Relax each part of your body, and let the tension flow down to your knees, your shins, your feet.
Imagine smoke drifting away. Let it diffuse. Watch it vanish. Disappear. Dissolve.
In her appointment book, next to his name it said Marilyn Monroe, the same as most guys here for their first time. She could live on just doing Marilyn. She could live on just doing Princess Diana.
To Mr. Jones, she said, imagine you're looking up at a blue sky, and imagine a tiny airplane skywriting the letter Z. Then let the wind erase the letter. Then imagine the plane writing the letter Y. Let the wind erase it. Then the letter X. Erase it. Then the letter W.
Let the wind erase it.
All she really did was set the stage. She just introduced men to their ideal. She set them up on a date with their subconscious because nothing is as good as you can imagine it. No one is as beautiful as she is in your head. Nothing is as exciting as your fantasy.
Here you'd have the sex you'd only dreamt about. She'd set the stage and make the introductions. The rest of the session, she'd watch the clock and maybe read a book or do a crossword puzzle.
Here you'd never be disappointed.
Buried deep in his trance, a guy would lie there and twitch and hump, a dog chasing rabbits in a dream. Every few guys, she'd get a screamer or a moaner or a groaner. You have to wonder what the people in the room
next door would think. Guys in the waiting room heard the fuss, and it would drive them wild.
After the session, a guy would be soaked with sweat, his shirt wet and sticking to him, his pants stained. Some could pour the sweat out of their shoes. They could shake it out of their hair. The couch in her office was Scotchgarded, but it never really got a chance to really dry out. Now it's sealed inside a clear plastic slipcover, more to keep the years of mess inside it than to protect it from the outside world.
So guys each had to bring a towel, in their briefcases, in paper bags, in their gym bags with a clean change of clothes. In between clients, she'd spray around air fresheners. She'd open the windows.
To Mr. Jones, she'd say, make all the tension in your body collect in your toes, then drain out. All the tension. Imagine your whole body slack. Relaxed. Collapsed. Relaxed. Heavy. Relaxed. Empty. Relaxed.
Breathe with your stomach instead of your chest. In, and then out.
In, and then out.
Breathing in.
And then out. Smooth and even.
Your legs are tired and heavy. Your arms are tired and heavy.
At first, what the stupid little boy remembers is the Mommy did house cleansings, not any kind of vacuuming and dusting, but spiritual cleaning, exorcisms. The hardest part was getting the people at the Yellow Pages to run her ad under the heading "Exorcist." You go and burn sage. Say the Lord's Prayer and walk around. Maybe beat a clay drum. Declare the house clean. Clients will pay for just doing that.
Cold spots, bad smells, eerie feelings—most people don't need an exorcist. They need a new furnace or a plumber or an interior decorator. The point is, it's not important what you think. What's important is that they're sure they have a problem. Most of those jobs come through realtors. In this city, we have a real estate disclosure law, and people will admit to the dumbest faults, not just asbestos and buried oil tanks, but ghosts and poltergeists. Everybody wants more excitement from their life than they'll ever get. Buyers on the verge of closing, they'll need a little reassurance about the house. The realtor calls, and you put on a little show, burn some sage, and everybody wins.
They get what they want, plus a good story to tell. An experience.