Удушье (Choke)

Bits of stuff, half-digested stuff I didn't know was there, it's all breaking loose and coming out. With her pulling my head around by the floss, I could be a horse in harness at Colonial Dunsboro.

'Your poor mother,' Paige Marshall says, looking through the blood flecked on her eyeglass lenses, 'she's so delusional she truly believes you're the second coming of Christ.'

Chapter 23

Anytime somebody in a new car

offered them a ride, the Mommy told the driver, 'No.' They'd stand at the side of the road and watch the new Cadil­lac or the Buick or Toyota disappear, and the Mommy would say, 'The smell of a new car is the smell of death.'

This was the third or fourth time she came back to claim him.

The glue and resin smell in new cars is formaldehyde, she'd tell him, the same thing they use to preserve dead bodies. It's in new houses and new furniture. It's called off-gassing. You can in­hale formaldehyde from new clothes. After you inhale enough, expect stomach cramps, vomiting, and diarrhea.

See also: Liver failure.

See also: Shock.

See also: Death.

If you're looking for enlightenment, the Mommy said, a new car isn't the answer.

Along the side of the road would be foxgloves blooming, tall stalks of purple-and-white flowers. 'Digitalis,' the Mommy said, 'doesn't work, either.'

From eating foxglove flowers, you get nausea, delirium, and blurred vision.

Above them, a mountain held itself against the sky, catching clouds and coated with pine trees and then some snow higher up. It was so big that no matter how long they walked, it was still in the same place.

The Mommy took the white tube out of her purse. She pinched onto one shoulder of the stupid little boy for balance and sniffed hard with the tube stuck up one side of her nose. Then she dropped the tube onto the gravel edge of the road and just stood looking at the mountain.

This was a mountain so big they would always be walking past it.

When the Mommy let go, the stupid boy picked up the tube. He wiped the blood off with his shirttail and handed it back to her.

'Trichloroethane,' the Mommy said and held the tube for him to see. 'All my extensive testing has shown this to be the best treatment for a dangerous excess of human knowledge.'

She buried the tube back in her purse.

'That mountain, for example,' she said. She took the boy's stupid chin between her thumb and forefinger and made him look with her. 'That big glorious mountain. For one transitory moment, I think I may have actually seen it.'

Another car slowed down, something brown and four-door, something too late-model, so the Mommy waved it away.

For one flash, the Mommy had seen the mountain without thinking of logging and ski resorts and avalanches, managed wildlife, plate tectonic geology, microclimates, rain shadow, or yin-yang locations. She'd seen the mountain without the frame­work of language. Without the cage of associations. She'd seen it without looking through the lens of everything she knew was true about mountains.

What she'd seen in that flash wasn't even a 'mountain.' It wasn't a natural resource. It had no name.

'That's the big goal,' she said. 'To find a cure for knowl­edge.'

For education. For living in our heads.