Choke

Chapter 36

SO SATURDAY MEANS VISITING MY MOM.

In the lobby of St. Anthony's, talking to the front desk girl, I tell her I'm Victor Mancini and I'm here to see my mom, Ida Mancini.

I say, "Unless, I mean, unless she's dead."

The front desk girl gives me that look, the one where you tuck your chin down and look at the person you feel so, so sorry for. You tilt your face down so your eyes have to look up at the person. That look of submission. Lift your eyebrows into your hairline as you look up. It's that look of infinite pity. Squash your mouth down into a frowny face, and you'll know the exact way the front desk girl is looking at me.

And she says, "Of course your mother is still with us."

And I say, "Don't take this the wrong way, but I kind of wish she wasn't."

Her face forgets for a second how sorry she is, and her lips pull back to show her teeth. The way to make most women break eye contact is to run your tongue around your lips. The ones who don't look away, for serious, bingo.

Just go back, she tells me. Mrs. Mancini is still on the first floor.

It's Miss Mancini, I tell her. My mom's not married, unless you count me in that creepy Oedipal way.

I ask if Paige Marshall is here.

"Of course she is," the front desk girl says, now with her face turned a little away from me, looking at me out the corner of her eye. The look of distrust.

Beyond the security doors, all the crazy old Irmas and Lavernes, the Violets and

Olives start their slow migration of walkers and wheelchairs coming my way. All the chronic undressers. All the dumped grannies and squirrels with their pockets full of chewed food, the ones who forget how to swallow, their lungs full of food and drink.

All of them, smiling at me. Beaming. They're all wearing those plastic bracelets that keep the doors locked, but they still look better than I feel.

In the dayroom, the smell of roses and lemons and pine. The loud little world begging for attention from inside the television. The shattered jigsaw puzzles. Nobody's moved my mom up to the third floor yet, the death floor, and in her room Paige Mar- shall's sitting in a tweed recliner, reading her clipboard with her glasses on, and when she sees me says, "Look at you." She says, "Your mother isn't the only one who could use a stomach tube."

I say I got her message.

My mom is. She's just in bed. She's just asleep is all, her stomach just a bloated little mound under the covers. Her bones are the only thing left in her arms and hands. Her head sunk in her pillow, she squeezes her eyes shut. The corners of her jaw swell as her teeth clench for a moment, and she brings her whole face together to swallow.

Her eyes fall open, and she stretches her green-gray fingers at me, in a creepy underwater way, a slow-motion swimming stroke, trembling the way light does at the bottom of a swimming pool, when you're little and staying overnight in some motel just off some highway. The plastic bracelet hangs around her wrist, and she says, "Fred."

She swallows again, her whole face bunching with the effort, and says, "Fred Hastings." Her eyes roll to one side and she smiles at Paige. "Tammy," she says. "Fred and Tammy Hastings."

Her old defense attorney and his wife.

All my notes for being Fred Hastings are at home. If I drive a Ford or a Dodge, I can't remember. How many kids I'm supposed to have. What color did we finally paint the dining room. I can't remember a single detail about how I'm supposed to live my life.

Paige still sitting in the recliner, I step close to her and put a hand on her lab coat shoulder and say, "How are you feeling, Mrs. Mancini?"

Her terrible green-gray hand comes up level and rocks from side to side, the universal sign language for so-so. With her eyes closed, she smiles and says, "I was hoping you'd be Victor."

Paige shrugs my hand off her shoulder.

And I say, "I thought you liked me better."

I say, "Nobody likes Victor very much."

My mother stretches her fingers toward Paige and says, "Do you love him?"

Paige looks at me.

"Fred, here," my mom says, "do you love him?"

Paige starts clicking and unclicking her ballpoint pen, fast. Not looking at me, looking at the clipboard in her lap, she says,

"I do."

And my mom smiles. And stretching her fingers toward me, she says, "And do you love her?"

Maybe the way a porcupine thinks about its stinking stick, if you'd call that love.

Maybe the way a dolphin loves the smooth sides of its pool.

And I say, "I guess."

My mom tucks her chin into her neck sideways, eyeballing me, and says, "Fred."

And I say, "Okay, yes." I say, "I love her."

She brings her terrible green-gray fingers back to rest on her mounded belly and says, "You two are so lucky." She closes her eyes and says, "Victor isn't very good at loving people."

She says, "What I'm most afraid of is, after I'm gone, there will be no one left in the entire world who'll love Victor."

These frigging old people. These human ruins.

Love is bullshit. Emotion is bullshit. I am a rock. A jerk. I'm an uncaring asshole and proud of it.

What would Jesus NOT do?

If it comes down to a choice between being unloved and being vulnerable and sensitive and emotional, then you can just keep your love.

If what I just said about loving Paige was a lie or a vow, I don't know. But it was a trick. This is just heaps more chick bullshit. There is no human soul, and I am absolutely for sure seriously not going to fucking cry.

My mom, her eyes stay closed, and her chest inflates and deflates in long, deep cycles.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Imagine a heavy weight pressing your body, settling your head and arms, deeper and deeper.

And she's asleep.

Paige stands up from the recliner and nods her head toward the door, and I follow her out into the hallway.

She looks around and says, "You want to go to the chapel?"

I'm not really in the mood.

"To talk," she says.

I say, okay. Walking with her, I say, "Thanks for back there. For lying, I mean."

And Paige says, "Who says I was lying?"

Does that mean she loves me? That's impossible.

"Okay," she says. "Maybe I fibbed a little. I like you. Some."

Breathe in. Breathe out.

In the chapel, Paige shuts the door behind us and says, "Feel," and takes my hand to hold it against her flat stomach. "I checked my temperature. It's not my time anymore."

With the load already building up behind whatever in my guts, I tell her, "Yeah?" I say, "Well, I may have beat you to it."

Tanya and her rubber butt toys.

Paige turns and walks away from me, slow, and still turned away she says, "I don't know how to talk to you about this."

The sun through the stained-glass window, a whole wall in a hundred shades of gold. The blond wood cross. Symbols. The altar and the Communion rail, it's all here. Paige goes to sit on one of the benches, a pew, and she sighs. Her one hand grips the top of her clipboard, and her other lifts some clipped papers to show something red underneath them.

My mom's diary.

She hands the diary to me and says, "You can check the facts yourself. In fact, I recommend you do so. If only for your own peace of mind."

I take the book, and it's still gibberish inside. Okay, Italian gibberish.

And Paige says, "The only good thing is there's no absolute assurance that the genetic material they used was from the actual historic figure."

Everything else checks out, she says. The dates, the clinics, the specialists. Even the church people she talked to have insisted the material stolen, the tissue the clinic cultured, was the only authenticated foreskin. She says this has opened a giant political can of worms in Rome.

"The only other good thing," she says, "is I didn't tell anybody who you were."

Jesus Christ, I say.

"No, I mean who you are now," she says.

And I say, "No, I was just swearing."

How this feels is like I just got back the results on a bad biopsy. I say, "So what does this mean?"

Paige shrugs. "When you think about it, nothing," she says. She nods toward the diary in my hand and says, "Unless you want to ruin your life, I'd recommend you burn that."

I ask, how does this affect us, her and me?

"We shouldn't see each other anymore," she says, "if that's what you mean."

I ask, she doesn't believe this junk, does she?

And Paige says, "I've seen you with the patients here, the way they're all at peace after they talk to you." Sitting there, she leans forward with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, and she says, "I just can't take the chance that your mother is right. Not everybody I talked to in Italy could be delusional. I mean, what if you're really the beautiful and divine son of God?"

The blessed and perfect mortal manifestation of God.

A belch rumbles up from my blockage, and the taste in my mouth is acid.

"Morning sickness" isn't the right term, but it's the first term that comes to mind.

"So what you're saying is you only sleep with mortals?" I say.

And Paige leaning forward, she gives me that pity look, the one the front desk girl does so well with her chin tucked to her chest, her eyebrows lifted into her hairline, and she says, "I'm so sorry I butted in. I promise you, I won't tell a soul."

And what about my mom?

Paige sighs and shrugs. "That's easy. She's delusional. Nobody would believe her."

No, I meant, will she die soon?

"Probably," Paige says, "unless there's a miracle."