Choke

Chapter 41

THE FRONT DESK GIRL DOESN'T WANT ANY COFFEE.

She doesn't want to go check on her car in the parking lot.

She says, "If anything happens to my car, I'll know who to blame."

And I tell her, shhhhhhhhh.

I tell her I hear something important, a gas leak or a baby crying somewhere.

It's my mom's voice, muffled and tired, coming over the intercom speaker from some unknown room.

Standing at the desk in the lobby of St. Anthony's, we listen, and my mom says, "The slogan for America is 'Not Good Enough.' Nothing's ever fast enough. Nothings big enough. We're never satisfied. We're always improving ..."

The front desk girl says, "I don't hear any gas leak."

The faint, tired voice says, "I spent my life attacking everything because I was too afraid to risk creating anything ..."

And the front desk girl cuts it off. She presses the microphone and says, "Nurse Remington to the front desk. Nurse Remington to the front desk, immediately."

The fat security guard with his chest pocket full of pens.

But when she lets go of the microphone, the intercom voice comes on again, faint and whispery.

"Nothing was ever good enough," my mom says, "so here at the end of my life, I'm left with nothing …"

And her voice fades away.

There's nothing left. Only white noise. Static.

And now she's going to die.

Unless there's a miracle.

The guard blows through the security doors, looking at the front desk girl, asking, "So? What's the situation here?"

And on the monitor, in grainy black-and-white, she points at me bent double with the ache in my guts, me carrying my swollen gut around in both hands, and she says, "Him."

She says, "This man needs to be restricted from the property, starting right now."