Удушье (Choke)

your paycheck. They put the Communion wafer on your tongue.

In the women's room, inside Nico, I cross my arms behind my head.

For the next I don't know how long, I've got no problems in the world. No mother. No medical bills. No shitty museum job. No jerk-off best friend. Nothing.

I feel nothing.

To make it last, to keep from triggering, I tell Nice's flowered backside how beautiful she is, how sweet she is and how much I need her. Her skin and hair. To make it last. Because this is the only time I can say it. Because the moment this is over, we'll hate each other. The moment we find ourselves cold and sweating on the bathroom floor, the moment after we both come, we won't want to even look at each other.

The only person we'll hate more than each other is ourselves.

These are the only few minutes I can be human.

Just for these minutes, I don't feel lonely.

And riding me up and down, Nico says, 'So when do I get to meet your mom?'

And, 'Never,' I say. 'That's impossible, I mean.'

And Nico, her whole body clenched and jacking me with her boiling wet insides, she says, 'She in prison or a loony bin or something?'

Yeah, for a lot of her life.

Ask any guy about his mom during sex, and you can delay the big blast forever.

And Nico says, 'So is she dead now?'

And I say, 'Sort of.'

Chapter 3

Anymore, when I go to visit my mom

, I don't even pretend to be myself.

Hell, I don't even pretend to know myself very well.

Not anymore.

My mom, it's like her sole occupation at this point is losing weight. What's left of her is so thin, she has to be a puppet. Some kind of special effect. There's just not enough of her yellow skin left to fit a real person inside. Her thin puppet arms hover around on the blankets, always picking at bits of lint. Her shrunken head will collapse around the drinking straw in her mouth. When I used to come as myself, as Victor, her son Victor Mancini, none of those visits lasted ten minutes before she'd ring for the nurse and tell me she was just too tired.

Then one week, my mom thinks I'm some court-appointed public defender who represented her a couple times, Fred Hast­ings. Her face opens up when she sees me and she lies back into her stack of pillows and shakes her head a little, saying, 'Oh, Fred.' She says, 'My fingerprints were all over those boxes of hair dye. It was reckless endangerment, open and shut, but it was still a brilliant sociopolitical action.'

I tell her that's not how it looked on the store's security camera.

Plus, there was the kidnapping charge. It was all on video­tape.

And she laughs, she actually laughs and says, 'Fred, you were such a fool to try and save me.'

She talks that way a half hour, mostly about that misguided incident with the hair dye. Then she asks me to bring her a news­paper from the dayroom.

In the hall outside her room is some doctor, a woman in a white coat holding a clipboard. She has, it looks like, long dark hair twisted into the shape of a little black brain on the back of her head. She's not