Choke

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 offered 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.