Удушье (Choke)

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.

Chapter 45

The minute before I left St. Anthony's

for the last time, the minute before I was out the door and running, Paige tried to explain.

Yes, she was a doctor. Talking in a rush, her words crowded together. Yes, she was a patient committed here. Clicking and unclicking her ballpoint pen, fast. She was really a doctor of ge­netics, and she was only a patient here because she'd told the truth. She wasn't trying to hurt me. Pudding still smeared around her mouth. She was just trying to do her job.

In the hallway, during our last moment together, Paige pulled my sleeve so I'd have to look at her, and she said, 'You have to be­lieve this.'

Her eyes were bulging so the whites showed all around the iris, and the little black brain of her hair was coming loose.

She was a doctor, she said, a specialist in genetics. From the year 2556. And she'd traveled back in time to become impreg­nated by a typical male of this period in history. So she could pre­serve and document a genetic sampling, she said. They needed the sample to help cure a plague. In the year 2556. This wasn't a cheap and easy trip. Traveling in time was the equivalent of what space travel is for humans now, she said. It was a chancy, expen­sive gamble, and unless she came back impregnated with an in­tact fetus, any future missions would be canceled.

Here in my 1734 costume, bent double with my impacted bowels, I'm still stuck on her idea of a typical male.

'I'm only locked in here because I told people the truth about myself,' she says. 'You were the only available reproductive male.'