Choke

Chapter 13

BECAUSE OF THE HEAT, Denny strips off his coat, then his sweater. Without undoing the buttons, even the cuffs or the collar one, he pulls his shirt off over his head, inside out, so now his head and hands are bagged in red plaid flannel. The T-shirt underneath works up around his armpits while he's fighting the shirt off his head, and his bare stomach looks rashy and caved-in. Some long twisted hairs sprout around his little dot nipples. His nipples look cracked and sore.

"Dude," Denny says, still struggling inside his shirt. "Too many layers. Why's it got to be so hot in here?"

Because it's a kind of a hospital. It's a constant care residence.

Over his jeans and belt, you can see the dead elastic waistband of his bad underpants. Orange rust stains show on the loose elastic. In front, a few coiled hairs poke out. There's yellowy sweat stains on, for real, his underarm skin.

The front desk girl is sitting right here, watching with her face all bunched up tight around her nose.

I try and tug his T-shirt back down, and there's for sure many colors of lint in his navel. At work in the locker room, I've seen Denny pull his pants off inside out with the underpants still on them the way I did when I was little.

And still with his head wrapped up in his shirt, Denny goes, "Dude, can you help me? There's a button somewheres I don't know about."

The front desk girl is giving me her look. She's got the telephone receiver halfway to her ear.

With most of his clothes on the floor next to him, Denny gets skinnier until he's down to just his sour T-shirt and his jeans with dirt on each knee. His tennis shoes are double-knotted with the knots and eye holes glued forever with dirt.

It's somewhere around a hundred degrees here because most of these people don't have any circulation, I tell him. It's a lot of old folks here.

It smells clean, which means you only smell chemicals, cleaning stuff, or perfumes. You have to know the pine smell is covering up shit somewhere. Lemon means somebody vomited. Roses are urine. After an afternoon at St. Anthony's, you never want to smell another rose the rest of your life.

The lobby has stuffed furniture and fake plants and flowers.

This decorator stuff will peter out after you get beyond the locked doors.

To the front desk girl, Denny says, "Will anybody mess with my junk if I just leave it here?" He means the pile of his old clothes. He says, "I'm Victor Mancini." He looks at me. "And I'm here to see my mom?"

To Denny, I go, "Dude, jeez, she doesn't have brain damage." To the desk girl, I say, "I'm Victor Mancini. I'm here all the time to see my mom, Ida Mancini. She's in Room 158."

The girl presses a phone button and says, "Paging Nurse Remington. Nurse Remington to the front desk, please." Her voice comes out huge through the ceiling.

You have to wonder if Nurse Remington is a real person.

You have to wonder if maybe this girl thinks Denny's just another aggressive chronic undresser.

Denny goes to kick his clothes under a stuffed chair.

A fat man comes jogging down the hall with one hand pressed over a bouncing chest pocket full of pens and another hand on his hip holster of hot pepper spray. Keys jingle on his other hip. To the front desk girl, he says, "So what's the situation here?"

And Denny says, "Is there a bathroom I can use? Like, for civilians?"

The problem is Denny.

So he'll hear her confession, he needs to meet what's left of my mom. My plan is I'll introduce him as Victor Mancini.

This way Denny can find out who I really am. This way my mom can find some peace. Gain some weight. Save me the cost of a tube. Not die.

When Denny's back from the bathroom, the guard is walking us to the living part of St. Anthony's and Denny says, "There's no lock on the bathroom door here. I was settled on the can and some old lady just barged in on me."

I ask if she wanted sex.

And Denny says, "How's that again?"

We go through a set of doors the guard has to unlock, then another set. As we walk, his keys bounce against his hip. Even the back of his neck has a big roll of fat.

"Your mom?" Denny says. "So does she look like you?"

"Maybe," I say, "except, you know ..."

And Denny says, "Except starved and with no brain left, right?"

And I go, "Stop already." I say, "Okay, she was a shitty mother, but she's the only mom I have."

"Sorry, dude," Denny says, and he goes, "But won't she notice I'm not you?"

Here at St. Anthony's, they have to close the curtains before it gets dark, since if a resident sees themself reflected in a window they'll think somebody's peeping in at them. It's called "sun-downing." When all the old folks get crazy at sunset.

You could put most of these folks in front of a mirror and tell them it's a television special about old dying miserable people, and they'd watch for hours.

The problem is my mom won't talk to me when I'm Victor, and she won't talk to me when I'm her attorney. My only hope is to be her public defender while Denny's me. I can goad. He can listen. Maybe then she'll talk.

Think of this as some kind of Gestalt ambush.

Along the way, the guard asks wasn't I the guy who raped Mrs. Field's dog?

No, I tell him. It's a long story, I say. About eighty years long.

We find Mom in the dayroom, sitting at a table with a shattered jigsaw puzzle spread out in front of her. There must be a thousand pieces, but there's no box to show how it's supposed to look. It could be anything.

Denny says, "That's her?" He says, "Dude, she looks nothing like you."

My mom's pushing puzzle pieces around, some of them turned over so the gray cardboard side shows, and she's trying to fit them together.

"Dude," Denny says. He turns a chair around and sits at the table so he can lean forward on the chair back. "In my experience, these puzzles work best if you find all the flat edge pieces first."

My mom's eyes crawl all over Denny, his face, his chapped lips, his shaved head, the holes open in the seams of his T-shirt.

"Good morning, Mrs. Mancini," I say. "Your son, Victor, is here to visit you. This is him." I say, "Don't you have something important to tell him?"

"Yeah," Denny says, nodding. "I'm Victor." He starts picking up pieces with a flat edge. "Is this blue part supposed to be sky or water?" he says.

And my mom's old blue eyes start to fill up with juice.

"Victor?" she says.

She clears her throat. Staring at Denny, she says, "You're here."

And Denny keeps spreading the puzzle pieces with his fingers, picking out the flat ones and getting them off to one side. On the stubble of his shaved head, from his red plaid shirt, there are lumps of red lint.

And my mom's old hand creaks out across the table and closes around Denny's hand. "It's so good to see you," she says. "How are you? It's been so long." A little eye juice tips out the bottom of one eye and follows the wrinkles to the corner of her mouth.

"Jeez," Denny says, and he pulls his hand back. "Mrs. Mancini, your hands are freezing."

My mother says, "I'm sorry."

You can smell some kind of cafeteria food, cabbage or beans, that's being cooked down to mush.

This whole time, I'm still standing here.

Denny pieces together a few inches of the edge. To me, he says, "So when do we meet this perfect lady doctor of yours?"

My mom says, "You're not going already, are you?" She looks at Denny, her eyes swamped and her old eyebrow bushes kissing together in the middle above her nose. "I've missed you so much," she says.

Denny says, "Hey, dude, we lucked out. Here's a corner!"

My mom's shaky, boiled-looking old hand shakes over and picks a clump of red lint off Denny's head.

And I say, "Excuse me, Mrs. Mancini." I say, "But wasn't there something you needed to tell your son?"

My mom just looks at me, then at Denny. "Can you stay, Victor?" she says. "We need to talk. There's so much I need to explain."

"So explain," I say.

Denny says, "Here's an eye, I think." He says, "So is this supposed to be somebody's face?"

My mom holds one shaky old hand open at me, and she says, "Fred, this is between my son and me. This is an important family matter. Go someplace. Go watch the television, and let us visit in private."

And I say, "But."

But my mom says, "Go."

Denny says, "Here's another corner." Denny picks out all the blue pieces and puts them off to one side. All the pieces are the same basic shape, liquid crosses. Melted swastikas.

"Go try to save someone else for a change," my mom says, not looking at me. Looking at Denny, she says, "Victor will come find you when we're done."

She watches me until I step back as far as the hallway. After that she says something to Denny I can't hear. Her shaky hand reaches to touch Denny's shiny blue scalp, to touch it just behind one ear. Where her pajama sleeve stops, her old wrist shows stringy and thin brown as a boiled turkey neck.

Still nosing around in the puzzle, Denny flinches.

A smell comes around me, a diaper smell, and a broken voice behind me says, "You're the one who threw all my second-grade primers in the mud."

Still watching my mom, trying to see what she's saying, I go, "Yeah, I guess."

"Well, here, at least you're honest" the voice says. A dried little mushroom of a woman slips her skeleton's arm through mine. "Come along with me," she says. "Dr. Marshall would like very much to talk to you. Alone somewhere."

She's wearing Denny's red plaid shirt.