by Чак Паланик
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.
Chapter 44
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 deja 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 morn'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.
Chapter 45
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."
Chapter 46
In most twelve-step recovery programs, the fourth step makes you write a complete and relentless story of your life as an addict. Every lame, suck-ass moment of your life, you have to get a notebook and write it down. A complete inventory of your crimes. That way it's always in your head. Then you have to fix it all. This goes for alcoholics, drug abusers, and overeaters as well as sex addicts.
This way you can go back and review the worst of your life anytime you want.
Still, those who remember the past aren't necessarily any better off.
My yellow notebook, in here is everything about me, seized with a search warrant. About Paige and Denny and Beth. Nico and Leeza and Tanya. The detectives read through it, sitting across a big wood table from me in a locked soundproof room. One wall is a mirror, for sure with a video camera behind it.
And the detectives ask me, what was I hoping to accomplish by admitting to other peoples crimes?
They ask me, what was I trying to do?
To complete the past, I tell them.
All night, they read my inventory and ask me, what does all this mean?
Nurse Flamingo. Dr. Blaze. "The Blue Danube Waltz."
What we say when we can't tell the truth. What anything means anymore, I don't know.
The police detectives ask if I know the whereabouts of a patient named Paige Marshall. She's wanted for questioning about the apparent smothering death of a patient named Ida Mancini. My apparent mother.
Miss Marshall disappeared last night from a locked ward. There's no visible signs of forced escape. No witnesses. Nothing. She's just vanished.
The staff at St. Anthony's were humoring her in the delusion, the police tell me, that she was a real doctor. They let her wear an old lab coat. It made her more cooperative.
The staff say she and I were pretty chummy.
"Not really," I say. "I mean, I saw her around, but I didn't really know anything about her."
The detectives tell me I don't have a lot of friends among the nursing staff.
See also: Clare, RN.
See also: Pearl, CNA.
See also: Colonial Dunsboro.
See also: The sexaholics.
I don't ask if they've bothered checking for Paige Marshall in the year 2556.
Digging in my pocket, I find a dime. I swallow it, and it goes down.
In my pocket, I find a paper clip. But it goes down, too.
While the detectives look through my mom's red diary, I look around for anything larger. Something too large to swallow.
I've been choking to death for years. By now this should be easy.
After a knock on the door, they bring in a dinner tray. A hamburger on a plate. A napkin. A bottle of ketchup. The backup in my guts, the swelling and pain, make it so I'm starving, but I can't eat.
They ask me, "What's all this in the diary?"
I open the hamburger. I open the bottle of ketchup. I need to eat to survive, but I'm so full of my own shit.
It's Italian, I tell them.
Still reading, the detectives ask, "What's this stuff that looks like maps? All these pages of drawings?"
It's funny, but I'd forgot all that. Those are maps. Maps I did when I was a little boy, a stupid, gullible little shit. You see, my mom told me that I could reinvent the whole world. That I had that kind of power. That I didn't have to accept the world the way it stood, all property-lined and micromanaged. I could make it anything I wanted.
That's how crazy she was.
And I believed her.
And I slip the cap from the bottle of ketchup into my mouth. And I swallow.
In the next instant, my legs snap straight so fast my chair flies over behind me. My hands go to gripping around my throat. I'm on my feet and gaping at the painted ceiling, my eyes rolled back. My chin stretches out away from my face.
Already the detectives are half out of their seats.
From not breathing, the veins in my neck swell. My face gets red, gets hot. Sweat springs up on my forehead. Sweat blots through the back of my shirt. With my hands, I hold tight around my neck.
Because I can't save anybody, not as a doctor, not as a son. And because I can't save anybody, I can't save myself.
Because now I'm an orphan. I'm unemployed and unloved. Because my guts hurt, and I'm dying anyway, from the inside out.
Because you have to plan your getaway.
Because after you've crossed some lines, you just keep crossing them.
And there's no escaping from constant escape. Distracting ourselves. Avoiding confrontation. Getting past the moment. Jacking off. Television. Denial.
The detectives look up from the diary, and one says, "Don't panic. It's like it says in the yellow notebook. He's just faking it."
They stand and watch me.
My hands around my throat, I can't draw any air. The stupid little boy who cried wolf.
Like that woman with her throat full of chocolate. The woman not his mommy.
For the first time in longer than I can remember, I feel peaceful. Not happy. Not sad. Not anxious. Not horny. Just all the higher parts of my brain closing up shop. The cerebral cortex. The cerebellum. That's where my problem is.
I'm simplifying myself.
Somewhere balanced in the perfect middle between happiness and sadness.
Because sponges never have a bad day.
Chapter 47
One morning the school bus pulled up to the curb, and while his foster mother stood waving, the stupid little boy got on. He was the only passenger, and the bus blew past the school at sixty miles per hour. The bus driver was the Mommy.
This was the last time that she came back to claim him.
Sitting behind the huge steering wheel and looking up at him in the visor mirror, she said, "You'd be amazed how easy it is to rent one of these."
She turned into an on-ramp for the freeway and said, "This gives us a good six hours head start before the bus company reports this crate stolen."
The bus rolled down onto the freeway, and the city rolled by outside, and after there wasn't a house every second, the Mommy told him to come sit up next to her. She took a red diary from a bag of stuff and took out a map, all folded.
With one hand, the Mommy shook the map open across the steering wheel, and with her other hand she unrolle
d her window. She worked the steering wheel with her knees. With just her eyes, she looked back and forth between the road and the map.
Then she crumpled the map and fed it out the window.
The whole time, the stupid boy just sat there.
She said to get the red diary.
When he tried to give it, she said, "No. Open it to the next page." She said to find a pen in the glove compartment and fast, because there was a river coming up.
The road cut through everything, all the houses and farms and trees, and in a moment they were on a bridge going across a river that went off forever on both sides of the bus.
"Quick," the Mommy said. "Draw the river."
As if he'd just discovered this river, as if he'd just discovered the whole world, she said to draw a new map, a map of the world just for himself. His own personal world.
"I don't want you to just accept the world as it's given," she said.
She said, "I want you to invent it. I want you to have that skill. To create your own reality. Your own set of laws. I want to try and teach you that."
The boy had a pen now, and she said to draw the river in the book. Draw the river, and draw the mountains up ahead. And name them, she said. Not with words he already knew, but to make up new words that didn't already mean a bunch of other stuff.
To create his own symbols.
The little boy thought with the pen in his mouth and the book open in his lap, and after a little, he drew it all.
And what's stupid is, the little boy forgot all this. It wasn't until years later that the police detectives found this map. That he remembered he did this. That he could do this. He had this power.
And the Mommy looked at his map in the rearview mirror and said, "Perfect." She looked at her watch, and her foot pressed down, and they went faster, and she said, "Now write it in the book. Draw the river on our new map. And get ready, there's lots more stuff that needs a name coming up."
She said, "Because the only frontier left is the world of intangibles, ideas, stories, music, art."
She said, 'Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it."