Choke

Chapter 49

MOBBED AROUND DENNY'S CASTLE are a thousand people I can't remember, but who will never forget me.

It's almost midnight. Stinking and orphaned and unemployed and unloved, I pick my way through the crowd until I get to Denny, standing in the middle, and I say, "Dude."

And Denny goes, "Dude." Watching the mob of people holding rocks.

He says, "You should definitely not be here right now."

After we were on TV, all day Denny says, all these smiling people keep turning up with rocks. Beautiful rocks. Rocks like you won't believe. Quarried granite and ashlar basalt. Dressed blocks of sandstone and limestone. They come one by one, bringing mortar and shovels and trowels.

They all ask, each of them, "Where's Victor?"

This is so many people they filled the block so nobody could get any work done. They all wanted to give me their stone in person. All these men and women, they've all been asking Denny and Beth if I'm doing okay.

They say I looked really terrible on television.

All it will take is one person to brag about being a hero. Being a savior, and how he'd saved Victor's life in a restaurant.

Saved my life.

The term "powder keg" pretty much nails it.

Out on the edge of things, some hero's got everybody talking. Even in the dark, you can see the revelation ripple through the crowd. It's the invisible line between the people still smiling and the people not.

Between everybody who's still a hero and the people who know the truth.

And everybody stripped of their proudest moment, they start looking around. All these people reduced from saviors to fools in an instant, they're going a little nuts.

"You need to scram, dude," Denny says.

The crowd is so thick you can't see Denny's work, the columns and walls, the statues and stairways. And somebody shouts, "Where's Victor?"

And someone else shouts, "Give us Victor Mancini!"

And for sure, I deserve this. A firing squad. My whole overextended family.

Someone turns on the headlights of some car, and I'm spotlighted against a wall.

My shadow looming horrible over all of us.

Me, the deluded little rube who thought you could ever earn enough, know enough, own enough, run fast enough, hide well enough. Fuck enough.

Between me and the headlights are the outlines of a thousand faceless people. All the people who thought they loved me. Who thought they'd given me back my life. The legend of their lives, evaporated. Then one hand comes up with a rock, and I close my eyes.

From not breathing, the veins in my neck swell. My face gets red, gets hot.

Something thuds at my feet. A rock. Another rock thuds. A dozen more. A hundred more thuds. Rocks crash and the ground shakes. Rocks crumble together around me and everyone's shouting.

It's the martyrdom of Saint Me.

My eyes closed and watering, the headlights shine red through my eyelids, through my own flesh and blood. My eye juice.

More thuds against the ground. The ground quakes and people scream with effort. More shaking and crashing. More swearing. And then everything gets quiet.

To Denny I say, "Dude."

Still with my eyes closed, I sniff and say, "Tell me what's happening."

And something soft and cotton and not very clean-smelling closes around my nose, and Denny says, "Blow, dude."

And then everybody's gone. Almost everybody.

Denny's castle, the walls are pulled down, the rocks busted and rolled away from how hard they fell. The columns are toppled. The colonnades. The pedestals thrown over. The statues, smashed. Busted rock and mortar, rubble fills the courtyards, fills the fountains. Even the trees are splintered and flattened down under the fallen rock. The battered stairways lead to nowhere.

Beth sits on a rock, looking at a busted statue that Denny made of her. Not how she looked for real, but how she looked to him. As beautiful as he thinks. Perfect. Busted, now.

I ask, earthquake?

And Denny says, "You're close, but this was some other kind of act of God."

There wasn't one stone on top of another.

Denny sniffs and says, "You smell like crap, dude."

I'm not supposed to leave town until further notice, I tell him. The police asked me.

Outlined in the headlights is just one last person. Just a hunched black silhouette until the headlights veer off, the parked car drives away.

In the moonlight, we look, Denny and Beth and I, to see who's still here.

It's Paige Marshall. Her white lab coat smudged and the sleeves rolled up. The plastic bracelet around her wrist. Her deck shoes are wet and squishing.

Denny steps forward and tells her, "I'm sorry, but there's been a gross misunderstanding."

And I tell him, no, it's cool. It's not what he thinks.

Paige steps closer and says, "Well, I'm still here." Her black hair is all undone, the little black brain of her bun. Her eyes all swollen and red all around them, she sniffs and shrugs and says. "I guess that means I'm insane."

We all look down at the scattered rocks, just rocks, just some brown lumps of nothing special.

One leg of my pants is wet with shit and still sticking to my leg on the inside, and I say, "Well." I say, "I guess I'm not saving anybody."

"Yeah, well." Paige holds up her hand and says, "You think you can get this bracelet off me?"

I say, yeah. We can try.

Denny is kicking through the fallen rock, rolling rocks with his foot until he stoops to pick one up. Then Beth goes to help him.

Paige and I just look at each other, at who each other is for real. For the first time.

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heros or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are.

Letting our past decide our future.

Or we can decide for ourselves.

And maybe it's our job to invent something better.

In the trees, a mourning dove calls. It must be midnight.

And Denny says, "Hey, we could use some help here."

Paige goes, and I go. The four of us dig with our hands under the edge of the rock. In the dark, the feeling is rough and cold and takes forever, and all of us together, we struggle to just put one rock on top of another.

"You know that ancient Greek girl?" Paige says.

Who drew the outline of her lost lover? I say, yeah.

And she says, "You know that eventually she just forgot him and invented wallpaper."

It's creepy, but here we are, the Pilgrims, the crackpots of our time, trying to establish our own alternate reality. To build a world out of rocks and chaos.

What it's going to be, I don't know.

Even after all that rushing around, where we've ended up is the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.

And maybe knowing isn't the point.

Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.