Удушье (Choke)

Already, you're their child. You belong to them.

They'll put a glass of water to your lips and say, 'Just relax. Hush. It's all over.'

Hush.

For years to come, this person will call and write. You'll get cards and maybe checks.

Whoever it is, this person will love you.

Whoever will be so proud. Even if maybe your real folks aren't. This person will be proud of you because you make them so proud of themselves.

You'll sip the water and cough just so the hero can wipe your chin with a napkin.

Do anything to cement this new bond. This adoption. Re­member to add details. Stain their clothes with snot so they can laugh and forgive you. Cling and clutch. Really cry so they can wipe your eyes.

It's okay to cry as long as you're faking it.

Just don't hold anything back. This is going to be the best story of somebody's life.

What's most important is unless you want a nasty trache scar, you'd better be breathing before anybody gets near you with a steak knife, a pocketknife, a box cutter.

Another detail to remember is when you blast out your mouthful of wet crud, your ground wad of dead meat and drool, you'll need to be facing straight at Denny. He's got parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins up the ass, a thou­sand people who have to save him from every mess-up. That's why Denny will never understand me.

The rest of the people, everyone else in the restaurant, some­times they'll stand there and applaud. People will cry with relief. People just pour out of the kitchen. Within minutes, they'll be telling the story to each other. Everybody will buy drinks for the hero. Their eyes all shining with eye juice.

They'll all shake the hero's hand.

They'll pat the hero on the back.

It's so much more their birth than it is yours, but for years to come this person will send you a birthday card on this day and month. They'll become another member of your own very very extended family.

And Denny will just shake his head and ask for a dessert menu.

That's why I do all this. Go to all this trouble. To showcase just one brave stranger. To save just one more person from bore­dom. It's not just for the money. It's notjust forthe adoration.

But neither one hurts.

It's all so easy. It's not about looking good, at least not on the surface—but you still win. Just let yourself be broken and humil­iated. Just your whole life, keep telling people, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. . . .

Chapter 8

Eva follows me down the hallway

with her pockets full of roast turkey. There's chewed-up Salisbury steak in her shoes. Her face, the powdery crushed velvet mess of her skin, is a hundred wrin­kles that all run into her mouth, and she wheels along after me, saying, 'You. Don't you run away from me.'

Her hands woven with lumpy veins, she wheels herself along. Hunched in her wheelchair, pregnant with her own huge swollen spleen, she keeps after me, saying, 'You hurt me.'

Saying, 'You can't deny it.'