Удушье (Choke)

My hands around my throat, I can't draw any air. The stupid little boy who cried wolf.

Like that woman with her throat full of chocolate. The woman not his mommy.

For the first time in longer than I can remember, I feel peace­ful. Not happy. Not sad. Not anxious. Not horny. Just all the higher parts of my brain closing up shop. The cerebral cortex. The cerebellum. That's where my problem is.

I'm simplifying myself.

Somewhere balanced in the perfect middle between happi­ness and sadness.

Because sponges never have a bad day.

Chapter 47

One morning the school bus pulled up to the curb

, and while his foster mother stood waving, the stupid little boy got on. He was the only passenger, and the bus blew past the school at sixty miles per hour. The bus driver was the Mommy.

This was the last time that she came back to claim him.

Sitting behind the huge steering wheel and looking up at him in the visor mirror, she said, 'You'd be amazed how easy it is to rent one of these.'

She turned into an on-ramp for the freeway and said, 'This gives us a good six hours head start before the bus company re­ports this crate stolen.'

The bus rolled down onto the freeway, and the city rolled by outside, and after there wasn't a house every second, the Mommy told him to come sit up next to her. She took a red diary from a bag of stuff and took out a map, all folded.

With one hand, the Mommy shook the map open across the steering wheel, and with her other hand she unrolled her win­dow. She worked the steering wheel with her knees. With just her eyes, she looked back and forth between the road and the map.

Then she crumpled the map and fed it out the window.

The whole time, the stupid boy just sat there.

She said to get the red diary.

When he tried to give it, she said, 'No. Open it to the next page.' She said to find a pen in the glove compartment and fast, because there was a river coming up.

The road cut through everything, all the houses and farms and trees, and in a moment they were on a bridge going across a river that went off forever on both sides of the bus.

'Quick,' the Mommy said. 'Draw the river.'

As if he'd just discovered this river, as if he'd just discovered the whole world, she said to draw a new map, a map of the world just for himself. His own personal world.

'I don't want you to just accept the world as it's given,' she said.

She said, 'I want you to invent it. I want you to have that skill. To create your own reality. Your own set of laws. I want to try and teach you that.'

The boy had a pen now, and she said to draw the river in the book. Draw the river, and draw the mountains up ahead. And name them, she said. Not with words he already knew, but to make up new words that didn't already mean a bunch of other stuff.

To create his own symbols.

The little boy thought with the pen in his mouth and the book open in his lap, and after a little, he drew it all.