Удушье (Choke)

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.'