Choke

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.