Choke

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 chick- ens 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.

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 just 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?"