by Чак Паланик
So just frigging tell me, flat out, I ask her, what does my mom's diary say about me?
She looks at the bloody string just yanked out of my mouth, and she looks down at my bits of blood and food flicked onto her lab coat and says, "It's a fairly common delusion among mothers." She leans in with the string and loops it around another tooth.
Bits of stuff, half-digested stuff I didn't know was there, it's all breaking loose and coming out. With her pulling my head around by the floss, I could be a horse in harness at Colonial Dunsboro.
"Your poor mother," Paige Marshall says, looking through the blood flecked on her eyeglass lenses, "she's so delusional she truly believes you're the second coming of Christ."
Chapter 23
Anytime somebody in a new car offered them a ride, the Mommy told the driver, "No." They'd stand at the side of the road and watch the new Cadillac or the Buick or Toyota disappear, and the Mommy would say, "The smell of a new car is the smell of death."
This was the third or fourth time she came back to claim him.
The glue and resin smell in new cars is formaldehyde, she'd tell him, the same thing they use to preserve dead bodies. It's in new houses and new furniture. It's called off-gassing. You can inhale formaldehyde from new clothes. After you inhale enough, expect stomach cramps, vomiting, and diarrhea.
See also: Liver failure.
See also: Shock.
See also: Death.
If you're looking for enlightenment, the Mommy said, a new car isn't the answer.
Along the side of the road would be foxgloves blooming, tall stalks of purple-and-white flowers. "Digitalis," the Mommy said, "doesn't work, either."
From eating foxglove flowers, you get nausea, delirium, and blurred vision.
Above them, a mountain held itself against the sky, catching clouds and coated with pine trees and then some snow higher up. It was so big that no matter how long they walked, it was still in the same place.
The Mommy took the white tube out of her purse. She pinched onto one shoulder of the stupid little boy for balance and sniffed hard with the tube stuck up one side of her nose. Then she dropped the tube onto the gravel edge of the road and just stood looking at the mountain.
This was a mountain so big they would always be walking past it.
When the Mommy let go, the stupid boy picked up the tube. He wiped the blood off with his shirttail and handed it back to her.
"Trichloroethane," the Mommy said and held the tube for him to see. "All my extensive testing has shown this to be the best treatment for a dangerous excess of human knowledge."
She buried the tube back in her purse.
"That mountain, for example," she said. She took the boy's stupid chin between her thumb and forefinger and made him look with her. "That big glorious mountain. For one transitory moment, I think I may have actually seen it."
Another car slowed down, something brown and four-door, something too late-model, so the Mommy waved it away.
For one flash, the Mommy had seen the mountain without thinking of logging and ski resorts and avalanches, managed wildlife, plate tectonic geology, microclimates, rain shadow, or yin-yang locations. She'd seen the mountain without the framework of language. Without the cage of associations. She'd seen it without looking through the lens of everything she knew was true about mountains.
What she'd seen in that flash wasn't even a "mountain." It wasn't a natural resource. It had no name.
"That's the big goal," she said. "To find a cure for knowledge."
For education. For living in our heads.
Cars went by on the highway, and the Mommy and little boy kept walking with the mountain still sitting there.
Ever since the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible, humanity had been a little too smart for its own good, the Mommy said. Ever since eating that apple. Her goal was to find, if not a cure, then at least a treatment that would give people back their innocence.
Formaldehyde didn't work. Digitalis didn't work.
None of the natch highs seemed to do the job, not smoking mace or nutmeg or peanut skins. Not dill or hydrangea leaves or lettuce juice.
At night, the Mommy used to sneak the little boy through the backyards of other people. She'd drink the beer people left out for slugs and snails, and she'd nibble their jimson weed and nightshade and catnip. She'd squeeze up next to parked cars and smell inside their gas tank. She'd unscrew the cap in their lawn and smell their heating oil.
"I figure if Eve could get us into this mess, then I can get us out," the Mommy said. "God really likes to see a go-getter."
Other cars slowed down, cars with families, full of luggage and family dogs, but the Mommy just waved them all past.
"The cerebral cortex, the cerebellum," she said, "that's where your problem is."
If she could just get down to using only her brain stem, she'd be cured.
This would be somewhere beyond happiness and sadness.
You don't see fish agonized by wild mood swings.
Sponges never have a bad day.
The gravel crushed and shifted under their feet. The cars going by made their own hot wind.
"My goal," the Mommy said, "is not to uncomplicate my life."
She said, "My goal is to uncomplicate myself"
She told the stupid little boy, morning glory seeds didn't work. She'd tried them. The effects didn't last. Sweet potato leaves didn't work. Neither did pyrethrum extracted from chrysanthemums. Neither would sniffing propane. Neither did the leaves of rhubarb or azaleas.
After a night in someone's yard, the Mommy left a bite out of almost every plant for people to find.
Those cosmetic drugs, she said, those mood equalizers and antidepressants, they only treat the symptoms of the bigger problem.
Every addiction, she said, was just a way to treat this same problem. Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple.
Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and the glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood.
Ahead of them on the highway was a restaurant parked all around with trucks bigger than the restaurant itself. Some of the new cars the Mommy didn't want were parked there. You could smell a lot of different food being fried in the same hot oil. You could smell the truck engines idle.
"We don't live in the real world anymore," she said. "We live in a world of symbols."
The Mommy stopped and put her hand in her purse. She held the boy's shoulder and stood looking up at the mountain. "Just one last little peek at reality," she said. "Then we'll have lunch."
Then she put the white tube in her nose and breathed in.
Chapter 24
Recording to Paige Marshall, my mom came from Italy already pregnant with me. This was the year after somebody had broken into a church in northern Italy. This is all in my mom's diary.
According to Paige Marshall.
My mom had gambled on some new kind of fertility treatment. She was almost forty. She wasn't married, she didn't want a husband, but somebody had promised her a miracle.
This same somebody, they knew somebody who'd stolen a shoe box from under the bed of a priest. In that shoe box was the last earthly remains of a man. Somebody famous.
It was his foreskin.
This was a religious relic, the kind of bait used to draw crowds into churches during the Middle Ages. This is only one of several famous penises still around. In 1977, an American urologist bought the inch-long dried penis of Napoleon Bonaparte for about four thousand dollars. Rasputin's foot-long penis is supposed to lie on velvet in a polished wooden box in Paris. John Dillinger's twenty-inch monster is supposed to be bottled in formaldehyde at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
According to Paige Marshall, it's in my mom's diary that six women were o
ffered embryos created from this genetic material. Five of those never came to term.
The sixth is me. It was the foreskin of Jesus Christ.
This is how crazy my mom was. Even twenty-five years ago, she was this cracked.
Paige laughed and leaned in to floss the teeth of another old woman.
"You have to give your mother credit for originality," she said.
According to the Catholic Church, Jesus was reunited with the foreskin at his resurrection and ascension. According to the story of Saint Teresa of Avila, when Jesus appeared to her and took her as his bride, he used the foreskin as her wedding ring.
Paige snapped the string out from between the woman's teeth and flicked blood and food onto the lenses of her own black glasses. The black brain of her hair tilted from side to side as she tried to see the old woman's top row of teeth.
She said, "Even if your mothers story is true, there's no proof the genetic material came from the actual historical figure. It's more likely your father was just some poor Jewish nobody."
The old woman in the recliner, stretching her mouth around Dr. Marshall's hands, rolled her eyes to stare at me.
And Paige Marshall said, "This should make it okay for you to cooperate."
Cooperate?
"With my course of treatment for your mother," she said.
To kill an unborn baby. I said, even if I wasn't him, I still didn't think Jesus would approve.
"Of course he would," Paige said. She snapped the string to flick a lump of tooth jam at me. "Didn't God sacrifice his own son to save people? Isn't that the story?"
Here it is again, the fine line between science and sadism. Between a crime and a sacrifice. Between murdering your own child and what Abraham almost did to Isaac in the Bible.
The old woman pulled her face away from Dr. Marshall, tonguing the string and bits of bloody food out of her mouth. She looked at me and said in her creaking voice, "I know you."
As automatic as sneezing, I said, I'm sorry. Sorry I fucked her cat. Sorry I drove over her flower beds. Sorry I shot down her husband's fighter plane. Sorry I flushed her hamster down the toilet. I sighed at her and said, "Did I forget anything?"
Paige said, "Mrs. Tsunimitsu, I need you to open wide for me."
And Mrs. Tsunimitsu said, "I was with my son's family, dining out, and you almost choked to death." She says, "My son saved your life."
She says, "I was so proud of him. He still tells people that story."
Paige Marshall looks up at me.
"Secretly," Mrs. Tsunimitsu said, "I think my son, Paul, always felt like a coward until that night."
Paige sat back and looked from the old woman to me, back and forth.
Mrs. Tsunimitsu clasped her hands together below her chin, closed her eyes, and smiled. She said, "My daughter-in-law had wanted a divorce, but after she saw Paul save you, she fell back in love."
She said, "I knew you were faking. Everybody else saw what they wanted to see."
She said, "You have an enormous capacity for love in you."
The old woman sat there smiling and said, "I can tell you have the most generous of hearts."
And fast as sneezing, I told her:
"You're a fucking wrinkled old lunatic."
And Paige winces.
I tell everybody, I'm tired of being jerked around. Okay? So let's just not pretend. I don't have fuck for a heart. You people are not going to make me feel anything. You are not going to get to me.
I'm a stupid, callous, scheming bastard. End of story.
This old Mrs. Tsunimitsu. Paige Marshall. Ursula. Nico, Tanya, Leeza. My mom. Some days, life just looks like me versus every stupid chick in the whole damn world.
With one hand, I grab Paige Marshall around the arm and yank her toward the door.
Nobody's going to trick me into feeling Christlike.
"Listen to me," I say. I shout, "If I wanted to feel anything, I'd go to a frigging movie!"
And old Mrs. Tsunimitsu smiles and says, "You can't deny the goodness of your true nature. It's shining for everyone to see."
To her I say, shut up. To Paige Marshall I say, "Come on."
I'll prove to her I'm no Jesus Christ. Anybody's true nature is bullshit. There is no human soul. Emotion is bullshit. Love is bullshit. And I'm dragging Paige down the hallway.
We live and we die and anything else is just delusion. It's just passive chick bullshit about feelings and sensitivity. Just made-up subjective emotional crap. There is no soul. There is no God. There's just decisions and disease and death.
What I am is a dirty, filthy, helpless sexaholic, and I can't change, and I can't stop, and that's all I'll ever be.
And I'll prove it.
"Where are you taking me?" Paige says, stumbling, her glasses and lab coat still flecked with food and blood.
Already, I'm imagining junk so as not to trigger too fast, stuff like pets soaked in gasoline and set on fire. I'm picturing the dumpy Tarzan and his trained chimp. I'm thinking, here's just another stupid chapter in my fourth step.
To make time stand still. To fossilize this moment. To make the fucking last forever.
I'm taking her in the chapel, I tell Paige. I'm the child of a lunatic. Not a child of God.
Let God prove me wrong. He can nail me with a lightning bolt.
I'm going to take her on the frigging altar.
Chapter 25
It was malicious endangerment this time or reckless abandonment or criminal neglect. There were so many laws the little boy couldn't keep them straight.
It was third-degree harassment or second-degree disregard, first-degree disdain or second-degree nuisance, and it got so the stupid kid was terrified to do anything except what everybody else did. Anything new or different or original was probably against the law.
Anything risky or exciting would land you in jail.
That's why everybody was so eager to talk to the Mommy.
She'd been out of jail for only a couple weeks this time, and already stuff had started to happen.
There were so many laws and, for sure, about countless ways you could screw up.
First the police asked about the coupons.
Somebody had gone to a downtown copy shop and used a computer to design and print hundreds of coupons that promised a free meal for two, a seventy-five-dollar value with no expiration date. Each coupon was folded inside a cover letter that thanked you for being such a valued customer and said the enclosed coupon was a special promotion.
All you had to do was eat dinner at the Clover Inn Restaurant.
When the server presented the bill, you could just pay with the coupon. Tip included.
Somebody did all that. Mailed out hundreds of these coupons.
It had all the earmarks of an Ida Mancini stunt.
The Mommy had been a server at the Clover Inn for her first week out of the halfway house, but she got fired for telling people stuff they didn't want to know about their food.
Then she just disappeared. A few days later, an unidentified woman had run screaming down the center aisle of a theater during the quiet, boring part of some big fancy ballet dance.
This is why the police got the stupid little boy out of school one day and brought him downtown. To see if maybe he'd heard from her. From the Mommy. If maybe he knew where she was hiding.
About this same time, several hundred very angry customers flooded into a fur salon with fifty-percent-discount coupons they got in the mail.
About this time, a thousand very scared people arrived at the county sexually transmitted disease clinic, demanding to be tested after they received letters on the county letterhead warning them that some former sex partner had been diagnosed with an infectious disease.
The police detectives took the little stooge downtown in a plain car and then upstairs in a plain building and sat with him and his foster mother, asking, has Ida Mancini attempted to contact you?
Have you any idea from where she's receivin
g funds?
Why do you think she's doing these awful things?
And the little boy just waited.
Help would come soon enough.
The Mommy, she used to tell him she was sorry. People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become. With the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and addressed and recorded. Nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. On a roller coaster. At a movie. Still, it would always be that kind of faux excitement. You know the dinosaurs aren't going to eat the kids. The test audiences have outvoted any chance of even a major faux disaster. And because there's no possibility of real disaster, real risk, we're left with no chance for real salvation. Real elation. Real excitement. Joy. Discovery. Invention.
The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.
Without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace.
Unless everything can get worse, it won't get any better.
This is all stuff the Mommy used to tell him.
She used to say, "The only frontier you have left is the world of intangibles. Everything else is sewn up too tight."
Caged inside too many laws.
By intangibles, she meant the Internet, movies, music, stories, art, rumors, computer programs, anything that isn't real. Virtual realities. Make-believe stuff. The culture.
The unreal is more powerful than the real.
Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.
Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.
But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
If you can change the way people think, she said. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives. And that's the only lasting thing you can create.
Besides, at some point, the Mommy used to say, your memories, your stories and adventures, will be the only things you'll have left.