Удушье (Choke)

The blankets are slack and tented empty between the two peaks of her hipbones. The only other landmarks you can recog­nize are her knees.

She twines one terrible arm through the chrome bed rail, ter­rible and thin as a chicken foot reaching toward me, and she swallows. Her jaws work with effort, her lips webbed with spit, and then she says it, reaching out, she says it.

'Morty,' she says, 'I am not a pimp.' Her hands knotted in fists, she shakes them in the air and says, 'I'm making a feminist statement. How can it be prostitution if all the women were dead?'

I'm here with a nice bunch of flowers and a get-well card. This is right after work, so I'm in my britches and waistcoat. My buckle shoes and the clocked stockings that show off my skinny calves are spattered with mud.

And my mom says, 'Morty, you have to get the whole case thrown out of court.' And she sighs back into her stack of pil­lows. Drool from her mouth has turned the white pillowcase light blue where it meets the side of her face.

A get-well card is not going to fix this.

Her hand claws the air, and she says, 'Oh, and Morty, you need to call Victor.'

Her room has that smell, the same smell as Denny's tennis shoes in September after he's worn them all summer without socks.

A nice bunch of flowers won't even make a dent.

In my waistcoat pocket is her diary. Stuck in the diary is a past-due bill from the care center. I stick the flowers in her bed­pan while I go hunt for a vase and maybe something to feed her. As much of that chocolate pudding stuff as I can carry. Some­thing I can spoon into her mouth and make her swallow.

The way she looks I can't bear to be here and I can't bear to not be here. As I leave she says, 'You've got to get busy and find Victor. You have to make him help Dr. Marshall. Please. He has to help Dr. Marshall save me.'

As if anything ever happens by accident.

Outside in the hallway is Paige Marshall, wearing her glasses, reading something off a clipboard. 'I just thought you'd like to know,' she says. She leans back against the handrail that lines the hallway and says, 'Your mother is down to eighty-five pounds this week.'

She moves the clipboard behind her back, gripping it and the handrail with both hands. The way she stands puts her breasts forward. Tilts her pelvis at me. Paige Marshall runs her tongue along the inside of her bottom lip and says, 'Have you thought any more about taking some action?'

Life support, tube feeding, artificial respirators—in medicine they call this stuff 'heroic measures.'

I don't know, I say.

We stand there, waiting for each other to give an inch.

Two smiling old ladies wander past us, and one points and says to the other, 'There's that nice young man I told you about. He's the one who strangled my pet cat.'

The other lady, her sweater is buttoned wrong, and she says, 'You don't say.' She says, 'He beat my sister almost to death one time.'

They wander away.

'It's sweet,' Dr. Marshall says, 'what you're doing, I mean. You're giving these people completion on the biggest issues in their lives.'

The way she looks right now, you have to think about multi­ple car pile-ups. Imagine two bloodmobiles colliding head on. The way she looks, you'd have to think of mass graves to even log thirty seconds in the saddle.

Think of spoiled cat food and ulcerated cankers and expired donor organs.

That's how beautiful she looks.

If she'll excuse me, I still need to find some pudding.