Удушье (Choke)

property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and ad­ dressed and recorded. Nobody had left much room for adven­ture, except maybe the kind you could buy. On a roller coaster. At a movie. Still, it would always be that kind of faux excitement. You know the dinosaurs aren't going to eat the kids. The test au­diences have outvoted any chance of even a major faux disaster. And because there's no possibility of real disaster, real risk, we're left with no chance for real salvation. Real elation. Real excite­ment. Joy. Discovery. Invention.

The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.

Without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace.

Unless everything can get worse, it won't get any better.

This is all stuff the Mommy used to tell him.

She used to say, 'The only frontier you have left is the world of intangibles. Everything else is sewn up too tight.'

Caged inside too many laws.

By intangibles, she meant the Internet, movies, music, stories, art, rumors, computer programs, anything that isn't real. Virtual realities. Make-believe stuff. The culture.

The unreal is more powerful than the real.

Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.

Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.

But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

If you can change the way people think, she said. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives. And that's the only lasting thing you can create.

Besides, at some point, the Mommy used to say, your memo­ries, your stories and adventures, will be the only things you'll have left.

At her last trial, before this last time she went to jail, the Mommy had sat up next to the judge and said, 'My goal is to be an engine of excitement in people's lives.'

She'd stared straight into the stupid little boy's eyes and said, 'My purpose is to give people glorious stories to tell.'

Before the guards took her into the back wearing handcuffs, she'd shouted, 'Convicting me would be redundant. Our bureau­cracy and our laws have turned the world into a clean, safe work camp.'

She shouted, 'We are raising a generation of slaves.'

And it was back to prison for Ida Mancini.

'Incorrigible' isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

The unidentified woman, the one who ran down the aisle during the ballet, she was screaming, 'We are teaching our chil­dren to be helpless.'

Running down the aisle and out a fire exit, she'd yelled, 'We're so structured and micromanaged, this isn't a world any­more, it's a damn cruise ship.'

Sitting, waiting with the police detectives, the stupid little shitface troublemaker asked if maybe the defense lawyer Fred Hastings could be there, too.

And one detective said a filthy word under his breath.

And right then, the fire alarm bell went off.

And even with the bell ringing, the detectives still asked:

'DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW TO GET IN TOUCH WITH YOUR MOTHER?'

Screaming against the bell, they asked: