Удушье (Choke)

'Like, when you're thinking about the rest of your life,' she said, and she put her hand over her eyes, 'you're never really thinking more than a couple years down the road.'

And what else she said is, 'By the time you're thirty, your worst enemy is yourself.'

Another thing she said was, 'The Enlightenment is over. What we're living in now is the Dis-Enlightenment.'

The radio said the police had been notified about the stalled car.

The Mommy turned up the radio, loud. 'Damn,' she said. 'Please tell me that's not us.'

'It said a gold Duster,' the boy said. 'That's our car.'

And the Mommy said, 'That shows how little you know.'

She opened her door and said to slide over and get out on her side. She watched the fast cars just missing, driving past them. 'This isn't our car,' she said.

The radio yelled how it appeared the occupants were aban­doning the vehicle.

The Mommy shook her hand for him to take. 'I'm not your mother,' she said. 'It's nothing like that.' Under her fingernails was more dried nose blood.

The radio yelled after them. The driver of the gold Duster and a small child were now a hazard themselves as they were at­tempting to dodge across four lanes of freeway traffic.

She said, 'I figure we have about thirty days to pile up a life­time of happy adventures. That's until my credit cards run out.'

She said, 'That's thirty days unless we get caught, first.'

Cars honked and swerved. The radio yelled after them. Heli­copters roared closer down.

And the Mommy said, 'Now just like with 'The Blue Danube Waltz,' hold on to my hand, tight.' She said, 'And don't think.' She said, 'Just run.'

Chapter 16

The next patient is a female

, about twenty-nine years old, with a mole high on the inside of her thigh that doesn't look right. It's hard to tell in this light, but it looks too big, asymmetrical, with shades of blue and brown. The edges are irregular. The skin around it abraded.

I ask her if she's been scratching it.

And is there any history of skin cancer in her family?

Sitting next to me with his yellow legal pad on the table in front of him, Denny's holding one end of a cork over his cigarette

lighter, turning the cork until the end is burned black, and Denny says, 'Dude, for serious.' He says, 'You've got some weird hostility tonight. Did you act out?'

He says, 'You always hate the whole world after you get laid.'

The patient falls to her knees, her knees spread wide apart. She leans back and starts to pump herself at us in slow motion. Just by contracting her butt muscles, she tosses her shoulders, her breasts, her mons pubis. Her entire body lunges at us in waves.

The way to remember the symptoms of melanoma is the let­ters ABCD.

Asymmetrical

shape.