Choke

Chapter 44

MY MOTHER'S DEAD. My mom's dead, and Paige Marshall is a lunatic.

Everything she told me she made up. Including the idea that I'm, oh I can't even say it: Him. Including that she loves me.

Okay, likes me.

Including that I'm a natural-born nice person. I'm not.

And if motherhood is the new God, the only thing sacred we have left, then I've killed God.

It's jamais vu. The French opposite of deja vu where everybody is a stranger no matter how well you think you know them.

Me, all I can do is go to work and stagger around Colonial Dunsboro, reliving the past again and again in my mind. Smelling the chocolate pudding smeared on my fingers. I'm stuck in the moment when my morn's heart stopped heaving and the sealed plastic bracelet proved Paige was an inmate. Paige, not my mom, was the deluded one.

I was the deluded one.

At that moment, Paige looked up from the chocolate mess smeared all over the bed. She looked at me and said, "Run. Go. Just get out."

See also: "The Blue Danube Waltz."

Staring at her bracelet was everything I could do.

Paige came around the bed to grab my arm and said, "Let them think I did this." She dragged me to the doorway, saying, "Let them think she did it to herself." She looked up and down the hallway and said, "I'll wipe your prints off the spoon and put it in her hand. I'll tell people you left the pudding with her yesterday."

As we pass doors, they all snap locked. It's from her bracelet.

Paige points me to an outside door and says she can't go any closer or it won't open for me.

She says, "You were not here today. Got it?"

She said a lot of other stuff, but none of it counts.

I'm not loved. I'm not a beautiful soul. I'm not a good-natured, giving person. I'm not anybody's savior.

All of that's bogus now that she's insane.

"I just murdered her," I say.

The woman who just died, who I just smothered in chocolate, she wasn't even my mother.

"It was an accident," Paige says.

And I say, "How can I be sure of that?"

Behind me, as I stepped outside, somebody must have found the body, because they kept announcing, "Nurse Remington to Room 158. Nurse Remington, please come immediately to Room 158."

I'm not even Italian.

I'm an orphan.

I stagger around Colonial Dunsboro with the birth-deformed chickens, the drug- addicted citizens, and the field-trip kids who think this mess has anything to do with the real past. There's no way you can get the past right. You can pretend. You can delude yourself, but you can't re-create what's over.

The stocks in the middle of the town square are empty. Ursula leads a milk cow past me, both of them smelling like dope smoke. Even the cow's eyes are dilated and bloodshot.

Here, it's always the same day, every day, and there should be some comfort in that. The same as those television shows where the same people are trapped on the same desert island for season after season and never age or get rescued, they just wear more makeup.

This is the rest of your life.

A herd of fourth-graders run by, screaming. Behind them's a man and a woman. The man's holding a yellow notebook, and he says, "Are you Victor Mancini?"

The woman says, "That's him."

And the man holds the notebook up and says, "Is this yours?"

It's my fourth step from the sexaholics group, my complete and ruthless moral inventory of myself. The diary of my sex life. All my sins accounted for.

And the woman says, "So?" To the man with the notebook, she says, "Arrest him, already."

The man says, "Do you know a resident of the St. Anthony's Constant Care Center named Eva Muehler?"

Eva the squirrel. She must've seen me this morning, and she's told them what I did. I killed my mom. Okay, not my mom. That old woman.

The man says, "Victor Mancini, you're under arrest for suspicion of rape."

The girl with the fantasy. It must be she filed charges. The girl with the pink silk bed I ruined. Gwen.

"Hey," I say. "She wanted me to rape her. It was her idea."

And the woman says, "He's lying. That's my mother he's bad-mouthing."

The man starts reciting the Miranda deal. My rights.

And I say, "Gwen's your mother?"

Just by her skin, you can tell this woman's older than Gwen by ten years.

Today, the whole world must be deluded.

And the woman shouts, "Eva Muehler is my mother! And she says you held her down and told her it was a secret game."

That's it. "Oh, her," I say. I say, "I thought you meant this other rape."

The man stops in the middle of his Miranda deal and says, "Are you even listening to your rights, here?"

It's all in the yellow notebook, I tell them. What I did. It was just me accepting responsibility for every sin in the world. "You see," I say, "for a while, I really did think I was Jesus Christ."

From behind his back, the man snaps out a pair of handcuffs.

The woman says, "Any man who would rape a ninety-year-old woman has to be crazy."

I make a nasty face and tell her, "No kidding."

And she says, "Oh, so now you're saying my mother's not attractive?"

And the man snaps the cuffs around one of my hands. He turns me around and snaps my hands together behind my back and says, "How about we go somewhere and straighten this all out?"

In front of all the losers of Colonial Dunsboro, in front of the druggies and the crippled chickens and the kids who think they're getting an education and His Lord High Charlie the Colonial Governor, I'm arrested. It's the same as Denny in the stocks, but for real.

And in another sense, I want to tell them all not to think they're any different.

Around here, everybody's arrested.