Choke

Chapter 3

ANYMORE, WHEN I GO TO VISIT MY MOM, I don't even pretend to be myself.

Hell, I don't even pretend to know myself very well.

Not anymore.

My mom, it's like her sole occupation at this point is losing weight. What's left of her is so thin, she has to be a puppet. Some kind of special effect. There's just not enough of her yellow skin left to fit a real person inside. Her thin puppet arms hover around on the blankets, always picking at bits of lint. Her shrunken head will collapse around the drinking straw in her mouth. When I used to come as myself, as Victor, her son Victor Mancini, none of those visits lasted ten minutes before she'd ring for the nurse and tell me she was just too tired.

Then one week, my mom thinks I'm some court-appointed public defender who represented her a couple times, Fred Hastings. Her face opens up when she sees me and she lies back into her stack of pillows and shakes her head a little, saying, "Oh, Fred." She says, "My fingerprints were all over those boxes of hair dye. It was reckless endangerment, open and shut, but it was still a brilliant sociopolitical action."

I tell her that's not how it looked on the store's security camera.

Plus, there was the kidnapping charge. It was all on videotape.

And she laughs, she actually laughs and says, "Fred, you were such a fool to try and save me."

She talks that way a half hour, mostly about that misguided incident with the hair dye. Then she asks me to bring her a newspaper from the dayroom.

In the hall outside her room is some doctor, a woman in a white coat holding a clipboard. She has, it looks like, long dark hair twisted into the shape of a little black brain on the back of her head. She's not wearing makeup so her face just looks like skin. A pair of black-framed glasses are folded and sticking out of her chest pocket.

Is she in charge of Mrs. Mancini, I ask.

The doctor looks at the clipboard. She unfolds the glasses and slips them on and looks again, the whole time saying, "Mrs. Mancini, Mrs. Mancini, Mrs. Mancini ..."

She keeps clicking and unclicking a ballpoint pen in one hand.

I ask, "Why is she still losing weight?"

The skin along the parts in her hair, the skin above and behind the doctor's ears, is as clear and white as the skin inside her other tan lines must look. If women knew how their ears come across, the firm fleshy edge, the little dark hood at the top, all the smooth contours coiled and channeling you to the tight darkness inside, well, more women would wear their hair down.

"Mrs. Mancini," she says, "needs a feeding tube. She feels hunger, but she's forgotten what the feeling means. Consequently, she doesn't eat."

I say, "How much is this tube going to cost?"

A nurse down the hall calls, "Paige?"

This doctor looks at me in my britches and waistcoat, my powdered wig and buckle shoes, and she says, "What are you supposed to be?"

The nurse calls, "Miss Marshall?"

My job, it's too hard to explain here. "I just happen to be the backbone of early colonial America."

"Which is?" she says.

"An Irish indentured servant."

She just looks at me, nodding her head. Then she looks down at the chart. "It's either we put a tube into her stomach," the doctor says. "Or she'll starve to death."

I look into the dark secret insides of her ear and ask if we could maybe explore some other options.

Down the hall, the nurse stands with her fists planted on her hips and shouts, "Miss Marshall!"

And the doctor winces. She holds up an index finger to stop me talking, and she says, "Listen." She says, "I really do have to finish rounds. Let's talk more on your next visit."

Then she turns and walks the ten or twelve steps to where the nurse is waiting and says, "Nurse Gilman." She says, her voice rushed and the words crushed together, "You can at least pay me the respect of calling me Dr. Marshall." She says, "Especially in front of a visitor." She says, "Especially if you're going to shout down the length of a hallway. It's a small courtesy, Nurse Gilman, but I think I've earned that, and I think if you start behaving like a professional yourself, you'll find everyone around you will be a great deal more cooperative... ."

By the time I get the newspaper from the dayroom, my mom's asleep. Her terrible yellow hands are crossed on her chest, a plastic hospital bracelet heat-sealed around one wrist.