Удушье (Choke)

I didn't ask what she meant by small part.

And Denny says, 'So tell me the truth about yourself.'

I don't know. I couldn't go through with it. With the fucking part.

'No,' Denny says. 'I mean, did you read your mom's diary yet?'

No, I can't. I'm a little stuck around this dicey baby-killing issue.

Denny looks me hard in the eye and says, 'Are you really, like, a cyborg? Is that your mom's big secret?'

'A what?' I say.

'You know,' he says, 'an artificial humanoid created with a limited life span, but implanted with false childhood memories so you think you're really a real person, except you're really going to die soon?'

And I look at Denny hard and say, 'So, dude, my mom told you I'm some kind of a robot?'

'Is that what her diary says?' Denny says.

Two women come up, holding out a camera, and one says, 'Do you mind?'

'Say cheese,' I tell them and snap their picture smiling in front of the cow shed, then they walk away with another fleeting memory that almost got away. Another petrified moment to treasure.

'No, I haven't read the diary,' I say. 'I haven't fucked Paige Marshall. I can't do jack shit until I decide about this.'

'Okay, okay,' Denny says, to me he says, 'then are you really just a brain in a pan somewhere being stimulated with chemicals and electricity into thinking you have a real life?'

'No,' I go. 'I'm definitely not a brain. That's not it.'

'Okay,' he says. 'Maybe you're an artificially intelligent com­puter program that interacts with other programs in a simulated reality.'

And I go, 'What does that make you?'

'I'd be just another computer,' Denny says. Then he says, 'I get your point, dude. I can't even figure out change for the bus.'

Denny narrows his eyes and tilts his head back, looking at me with one eyebrow cocked. 'Here's my last guess,' he says.

He says, 'Okay, the way I figure it, you're just the subject of an experiment and the whole world you know is just an artificial construct populated by actors who play the roles of everybody in your life, and the weather is just special effects and the sky is painted blue and the landscape everywhere is just a set. Is that it?'

And I go, 'Huh?'

'And I'm really a brilliantly talented and gifted actor,' Denny says, 'and I'm just pretending to be your stupid masturbation-addicted loser best friend.'

Somebody snaps a picture of me gritting my teeth.

And I look at Denny, and say, 'Dude, you're not pretending anything.'

At my elbow is some tourist guy grinning at me. 'Victor, hey,' he says. 'So this is where you work.'

Where he knows me from, I haven't the foggiest.

Medical school. College. A different job. Or it could be he's just another sex maniac from my group. It's funny. He doesn't look like a sexaholic, but nobody ever does.

'Hey, Maude,' he says and elbows the woman he's with. 'This is the guy I'm always telling