Choke

Chapter 29

AFTER DENNY'S MOVED IN, I find a block of salt-and-pepper granite in the fridge. Denny lugs home chunks of basalt, his hands stained red with iron oxide. He wraps his pink baby blanket around black granite cobbles and smooth washed river rocks and slabs of sparkling mica quartzite and brings them home on the bus.

All those babies that Denny adopts. A whole generation piling up.

Denny carts home sandstone and limestone one blocky soft pink armload at a time. In the driveway, he hoses the mud off them. Denny stacks them behind the sofa in the living room. He stacks them in the kitchen corners.

Every day, I come home from a hard day in the eighteenth century, and here's a big lava rock on the kitchen counter next to the sink. There's this little gray boulder on the second shelf down in the fridge.

"Dude," I say. "Why's there a rock in the fridge."

Denny's here in the kitchen, taking warm clean rocks out of the dishwasher and swiping them with a dish towel, and he says, "Because that's my shelf, you said so." He says, "And that's not just a rock, that's granite."

"But why in the fridge?" I go.

And Denny says, "Because the oven is already full."

The oven is full of rocks. The freezer is full. The kitchen cabinets are so full they're coming down off the wall.

The plan was only one rock a day, but Denny's got such an addictive personality. Now he has to cart home a half-dozen rocks every day just to maintain his habit. Every day the dishwasher is running and the kitchen counters are spread with my mom's good bath towels covered with rocks so they can air-dry. Round gray rocks. Square black rocks. Broken brown and streaked yellow rocks. Travertine limestone. Every new batch that Denny brings home, he loads in the dishwasher and throws the clean, dry rocks from the day before into the basement.

At first you can't see the basement floor because of all the rocks. Then the rocks are piling up around the bottom step. Then the basement's filled to halfway up the stairs. Now you open the basement door and the rocks piled inside spill out into the kitchen. Anymore, there is no basement.

"Dude, the place is filling up," I say. "It feels like we're living in the bottom half of an hourglass."

Like somehow we're running out of time.

Being buried alive.

Denny in his dirty clothes, his waistcoat coming apart under the arms, his cravat hanging in threads, he waits at each bus stop cradling each pink bundle against his chest. He bounces each armload when the muscles in his arms start to fall asleep. After the bus comes, Denny with dirt smeared on his cheeks snores leaned against the drumming metal inside of the bus, still holding his baby.

At breakfast I say, "Dude, you said your plan was one rock each day."

And Denny says, "That's all I do. Just one."

And I say, "Dude, you are such a junkie." I say, "Don't lie. I know you're doing at least ten rocks a day."

Putting a rock in the bathroom, in the medicine cabinet, Denny says, "Okay, so I'm a little ahead of schedule."

There's rocks hidden in the toilet tank, I tell him.

And I say, "Just because it's rocks doesn't mean this still isn't substance abuse."

Denny with his running nose, with his shaved head, his baby blanket wet in the rain, he waits at each bus stop, coughing. He shifts the bundle from arm to arm. With his face tucked in close, he pulls up the pink satin edge of the blanket. To better protect his baby this looks like, but really to hide the fact that it's volcanic tufa.

The rain's running off the back of his tricorner hat. Rocks tear out the inside of his pockets.

Inside his sweaty clothes, carrying all that weight, Denny keeps getting skinnier and skinnier.

Heaving around what looks like a baby, it's just a waiting game until somebody in the neighborhood gets him nailed for child abuse and neglect. People are just itching to declare somebody an unfit parent and put some kid in a foster home, hey but that's just been my experience.

Every night, I come home from a long evening of choking to death and there's Denny with some new rock. Quartz or agate or marble. Feldspar or obsidian or argillite.

Every night I come home from forging heroes out of nobodies, and the dishwasher's running. I still have to sit down and do the day's accounts, total the checks, send today's thank-you letters. A rock's sitting on my chair. My papers and stuff on the dining-room table, it's all covered with rocks.

At first, I tell Denny, no rocks in my room. He can put the rocks anywhere else. Put them in the hallways. Put them in the closets. After that I'm saying, "Just don't be putting rocks in my bed."

"But you never sleep on that side," Denny says.

I say, "That's not the point. No rocks go in my bed, that's the point."

I come home from a couple hours of group therapy with Nico or Leeza or Tanya, and there's rocks inside the microwave oven. There's rocks in the clothes dryer. Rocks inside the washing machine.

Sometimes it's three or four in the morning before Denny's in the driveway hosing off a new rock, some nights a rock so big he has to roll it inside. Then he's piling it on top the other rocks in the bathroom, in the basement, in my mom's room.

This is Denny's full-time occupation, this hustling rocks home.

Denny's last day at work, at his banishment, His Royal Colonial Governorship stood at the doors to the Customs House and read from a little leather book. His hands almost hid the little thing, but it was black leather with the pages edged with gold paint and a few ribbons dangled from the top of the spine, one black, one green, and one red ribbon.

"Like the smoke vanisheth, so shall thou drive them away and like as wax melteth at the fire," he read, "so let the ungodly perish at the presence of God."

Denny leaned closer to me and said, "The part about the smoke and the wax," Denny said, "I think he means me."

At one o'clock in the town square, His Lord High Charlie, the Colonial Governor, was reading to us, standing with his face bowed into his little book. A cold wind pulled the smoke out sideways from every chimney pot. The milkmaids were there. Cobblers were there. The blacksmith was there. All of them, their clothes and hair, their breath and wigs reeking of hash. Reeking of reefer. All of their eyes, red and wasted.

Goodwife Landson and Mistress Plain wept into their aprons, but only because mourning was in their job descriptions. A guard of men stood with muskets braced in both hands, ready to escort Denny out into the wilderness of the parking lot. The colony flag snapped, lowered to half mast at the peak of the Customs House roof. A crowd of tourists watched from behind their video cameras. They're eating popcorn out of boxes with the mutant chickens pecking crumbs at their feet. They're sucking cotton candy off their fingers.

"Instead of banishing me," Denny called out, "maybe I could just get stoned?" He said, "I mean, the rocks would make a nice going-away present."

All the wasted colonists jumped when Denny said "stoned." They looked at the colonial governor and then looked at their shoes, and it took a little bit for the red to drain out of their cheeks.

"We therefore commit his body to the earth, to be turned into corruption ... ," the governor read as a jetliner roared low, coming in for a landing, drowning out his little speech.

The guard escorted Denny to the gates of Colonial Duns-boro, two lines of men with guns marching with Denny between them. Through the gates, through the parking lot, they marched him to a bus stop on the edge of the twenty-first century.

"So, dude," I shout from the colony gates, "now that you're dead, what are you going to do with all your free time?"

"It's what I'm not going to do," Denny says. "And I'm sure as hell not going to act out."

This meant hunting rocks instead of jacking off. Staying so busy, hungry, tired, and poor he won't have any energy left to hunt porno and wham the ham.

The night after he's banished, Denny shows up at my mom's house with a rock in his arms and a policeman beside him. Denny wipes his nose on his sleeve.

The cop says, "Excuse me, but do you know this man?"

Then the cop says, "Victor? Victor Mancini? Hey, Victor, how's it going? Your life, I mean." And he holds one hand up with the big flat palm facing me.

I figure the cop means for me to high-five him, so I do, but I have to jump a little, since he's so tall. Still, my hand misses his. Then I say, "Yeah, that's Denny. It's okay. He lives here."

Talking to Denny, the cop says, "Get this. I save a guy's life, and he don't even remember me."

Of course.

"That time I almost choked!" I say.

And the cop says, "You remember!"

"Well," I say, "thanks for bringing old Denny here home safe and sound." I pull Denny inside and go to close the door.

And the cop says, "You doing okay now, Victor? Is there anything you need?"

I go to the dining-room table and write a name on a slip of paper. I hand it to the cop and say, "Could you arrange to make this guy's life a living hell? Maybe you could pull some strings and get him in for a rectal cavity search?"

The name on the paper is His Lord High Charlie, the Colonial Governor.

What would Jesus NOT do?

And the cop smiles and says, "I'll see what's possible."

And I shut the door in his face.

Now Denny heaves the rock onto the floor, and he asks do I have a couple bucks to spare. There's a chunk of ashlar granite at a stone supply yard. Good building rock, rock with good compression strength, costs so much per ton, and Denny figures he can get this one rock for ten bucks.

"A rock is a rock," he says, "but a square rock is a blessing."

The living room looks filled up by an avalanche. First the rocks were up around the bottom of the sofa. Then the end tables were buried with just the lampshades poking up out of the rocks. Granite and sandstone. Gray and blue and black and brown rocks. In some rooms, we walk around stooped against the ceiling.

So I ask, what's he going to build?

And Denny says, "Give me the ten bucks," Denny says, "and I'll let you help."

"All these stupid rocks," I say, "what's your goal?"

"This isn't about getting something done," Denny says. "It's about the doing, you know, the process."

"But what are you going to do with all these rocks?"

And Denny says, "I don't know until I collect enough."

"But what's enough?" I say.

"I don't know, dude," Denny says, "I just want the days of my life to add up to something."

The way every day of your life, the way it can just disappear in front of the television, Denny says he wants a rock to show for each day. Something tangible. Just one thing. A little monument to mark the end of each day. Each day he doesn't spend jacking himself off.

"Tombstone" isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

"This way, maybe my life will add up to something," he says, "something that will last."

I say there needs to be a twelve-step program for rock addicts.

And Denny says, "As if that would help." He says, "When was the last time you even thought about your fourth step?"