Invisible Monsters Remix

type of bikini, which he wears to look nude in the next scene. Dave Matthews jokes about this stripper wear. “I always thought you stuffed it, man,” he says, loud against the noise of thunder and jets, “but that’s all you in that banana hammock.”

Jump to the Sundance Film Festival, to some crowded nightclub surrounded by snowdrifts where the film’s producers are negotiating a deal with 20th Century Fox. Otherwise the shuttle buses circling through Park City are filled with people weeping openly because distributors are buying little else. The next day every phone in every Sundance theater starts to vibrate, so many that it’s the equivalent of a cell phone earthquake. The day’s screenings are effectively ruined because Heath Ledger’s body has just been found.

Jump to Switzerland, where Choke is showing at the Locarno International Film Festival, projected on a screen larger than a billboard, before an audience of seven thousand people in the medieval town square. In the past few weeks my mother has been diagnosed with lung cancer, and I’m commuting between this real-life tragedy and the media events to launch a movie about a woman dying in a hospital bed. My schedule goes like this: hospital, Switzerland, hospital, London, hospital, New York, hospital, Los Angeles. It was a coincidence in 1999 when the film of Fight Club was released and my father was shot and killed. Now Choke is being released and my mother is dying in a hospital. It’s my sister who points this out, and suggests I’ve brought a curse on our family. She’s joking, but she’s not. I do all of my crying in airplane toilets. Twice, flight attendants knock at the door, loudly asking me to return to my seat because they’ve heard the noise and assume I’m having wild sex.

During the press junket at the Beverly Hills Hilton I catch up with Anjelica Huston, who’s splitting her schedule between gala star-studded media events and—sadly, yes—her husband’s hospital bed. I keep trusting that these pieces will fall into some perfect order. If Amy Hempel were writing this, the pacing would be spot-on, with each moment juxtaposed perfectly. This account would be something beyond me parroting her style. Amy, Amy could offer some redemption. In this world of chaos, I keep hoping to wake up one morning …enlightened.

In the Swiss Alps I had no cell phone coverage, and the voice mails from my mother have accumulated: updates about her chemotherapy, her blood work, her garden. Each one ends with I love you instead of Good-bye. Instead of pressing seven to erase them, I press nine to save them for another ninety days. I can’t listen to them all before I just start pressing nine.

The next morning, room service delivers a lavish breakfast to my sumptuous penthouse suite at the Hilton, and there folded on the table next to my egg white omelet and my whole-wheat toast, no butter, and my coffee, black, no sugar, is the Sunday Los Angeles Times, and on the front page is an obituary for David Foster Wallace. Next to that are a knife …a fork …and a bud vase holding a yellow rose. Two days earlier, a few miles east of here, while I was pretending to journalists that Choke is a romantic comedy—because who ever heard of selling a romantic tragedy?—David Foster Wallace hung himself. It’s not until he’s dead, and I’m reading his obituary, that I see we have the same birthday. We were both born on February 21, 1962. Please don’t ask me if this means something. Please don’t ask me if anything makes sense.

Anjelica Huston’s husband dies.

Flash.

My mother dies. I erase the message from the trapped makeup artist and wonder if anyone ever helped her escape. Otherwise, I keep pressing nine, trying to buy the sound of my mother’s voice, her words, another three months, then another three months. Then, yet another three months.

Flash.

Every story is an experiment in collecting, organizing, and presenting details. An inventory of facts. Yes, all of this effort is being expended to preserve the memories of one person …I mean, I keep quilting together these moments I’ve loved, but as per usual I’ve failed. The heaped-up truths, they’re already starting to teeter sideways. Coincidence fatigue sets in. Pathos overload occurs, and after five pages the details shudder and topple into dust. A better architect could keep his lines plumb and distribute the stresses, but me, I can only start over:

Where you’re supposed to be is at home folding the clean laundry …

Where you’re supposed to be is feeding the dog …

The caterers are passing Thai salad rolls with peanut dipping sauce. The caterers are passing blackened tilapia topped with a sweet corn salsa. If you ask me why I keep trying, all I can say is: So far, so good.

I’m still pressing nine. I’m always pressing nine.

Where I’m at is a big Episcopal church in downtown Newark, New Jersey, sitting in the dark while I try to write down everything. But isn’t that always the impossible impulse? Don’t we always try to rescue the doomed bits and pieces of life, in the hope that a mere story can become Noah’s Ark and deliver all the living things of the past to a bright and glorious immortality?

Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Thirteen