Chuck Palahniuk - Choke

My other hand I slip into what used to be my britches pocket.

Going number to number, somebody's sobbing on number three. Wherever that is. Somebody's swearing on five. Praying on eight. Wherever that is. The kitchen again on nine, the Spanish music.

The monitor shows the library, another corridor, then it shows me, a grainy black- and-white me, crouched behind the front desk, peering into the monitor. Me with one hand crabbed around the intercom control dial. My other blurry hand is jammed to the elbow inside my britches. Watching. A camera on the lobby ceiling watching me.

Me watching for Paige Marshall.

Listening. For where to find her.

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

The monitor shows me one old woman after another. Then for ten seconds, there's Paige pushing my mom in a wheelchair down another corridor. Dr. Paige Marshall. And I dial around until I hear my mom's voice.

"Yes," she says, "I fought against everything, but more and more I worry that I was never for anything."

The monitor shows the garden, old women hunched over walkers. Mired in gravel.

"Oh, I can criticize and complain and judge everything, but what does that get me?" my mom keeps saying in voice-over as the monitor cycles to show other rooms.

The monitor shows the dining room, empty.

The monitor shows the garden. More old people.

This could be some very depressing website. Death Cam.

Some kind of black-and-white documentary.

"Griping isn't the same as creating something," my mom's voice-over says.

"Rebelling isn't rebuilding. Ridiculing isn't replacing ..." And the voice in the speaker fades out.

The monitor shows the dayroom, the woman facedown in her puzzle.

And I dial-switch from number to number, searching.

On number five, her voice is back. "We've taken the world apart," she says, "but we have no idea what to do with the pieces ..." And her voice is gone, again.

The monitor shows one empty corridor after another stretching into darkness.

On number seven, the voice comes back: "My generation, all of our making fun of things isn't making the world any better," she says. "We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own."

Out of the speaker, her voice says, "I used rebellion as a way to hide out. We use criticism as a fake participation."

The voice-over says, "It only looks as if we've accomplished something."

The voice-over says, "I've never contributed anything worthwhile to the world."

And for ten seconds, the monitor shows my mom and Paige in the corridor just outside the crafts room.

Out of the speaker, scratchy and far away, Paige's voice says, "What about your son?"

My nose pressed to the monitor, I'm so close.

And now the monitor shows me with my ear pressed to the speaker, one hand shaking something, fast, inside my pant leg.

In voice-over, Paige says, "What about Victor?"

And for serious, I am so ready to trigger.

And my mom's voice says, "Victor? No doubt Victor has his own way of escaping."

Then her voice-over laughs and says, "Parenthood is the opiate of the masses!"

And now on the monitor, the front desk girl is standing right behind me with a cup of coffee.

MY NEXT VISIT, MY MOM'S THINNER, if that's possible. Her neck looks as small around as my wrist, the yellow skin sunk into deep hollows between her cords and throat. Her face doesn't hide the skull inside. She rolls her head to one side so she can see me in the doorway, and some kind of gray jelly is caked in the corners of each eye.

The blankets are slack and tented empty between the two peaks of her hipbones. The only other landmarks you can recognize are her knees.

She twines one terrible arm through the chrome bed rail, terrible and thin as a chicken foot reaching toward me, and she swallows. Her jaws work with effort, her lips webbed with spit, and then she says it, reaching out, she says it.

"Morty," she says, "I am not a pimp." Her hands knotted in fists, she shakes them in the air and says, "I'm making a feminist statement. How can it be prostitution if all the women were dead?"

I'm here with a nice bunch of flowers and a get-well card. This is right after work, so I'm in my britches and waistcoat. My buckle shoes and the clocked stockings that show off my skinny calves are spattered with mud.

And my mom says, "Morty, you have to get the whole case thrown out of court." And she sighs back into her stack of pillows. Drool from her mouth has turned the white pillowcase light blue where it meets the side of her face.

A get-well card is not going to fix this.

Her hand claws the air, and she says, "Oh, and Morty, you need to call Victor."

Her room has that smell, the same smell as Denny's tennis shoes in September after he's worn them all summer without socks.

A nice bunch of flowers won't even make a dent.

In my waistcoat pocket is her diary. Stuck in the diary is a past-due bill from the care center. I stick the flowers in her bedpan while I go hunt for a vase and maybe something to feed her. As much of that chocolate pudding stuff as I can carry. Something I can spoon into her mouth and make her swallow.

The way she looks I can't bear to be here and I can't bear to not be here. As I leave she says, "You've got to get busy and find Victor. You have to make him help Dr. Marshall. Please. He has to help Dr. Marshall save me."

As if anything ever happens by accident.

Outside in the hallway is Paige Marshall, wearing her glasses, reading something off a clipboard. "I just thought you'd like to know," she says. She leans back against the handrail that lines the hallway and says, "Your mother is down to eighty-five pounds this week."

She moves the clipboard behind her back, gripping it and the handrail with both hands. The way she stands puts her breasts forward. Tilts her pelvis at me. Paige Marshall runs her tongue along the inside of her bottom lip and says, "Have you thought any more about taking some action?"

Life support, tube feeding, artificial respirators—in medicine they call this stuff "heroic measures."

I don't know, I say.

We stand there, waiting for each other to give an inch.

Two smiling old ladies wander past us, and one points and says to the other, "There's that nice young man I told you about. He's the one who strangled my pet cat."

The other lady, her sweater is buttoned wrong, and she says, "You don't say." She says, "He beat my sister almost to death one time."

They wander away.

"It's sweet," Dr. Marshall says, "what you're doing, I mean. You're giving these people completion on the biggest issues in their lives."

The way she looks right now, you have to think about multiple car pile-ups. Imagine two bloodmobiles colliding head on. The way she looks, you'd have to think of mass graves to even log thirty seconds in the saddle.

Think of spoiled cat food and ulcerated cankers and expired donor organs.

That's how beautiful she looks.

If she'll excuse me, I still need to find some pudding.

She says, "Is it that you have a girlfriend? Is that your reason?"

The reason why we didn't have sex in the chapel a few days ago. The reason why even with her naked and ready, I couldn't. The reason why I ran.

For a complete listing of other girlfriends, please refer to my fourth step.

See also: Nico.

See also: Leeza.

See also: Tanya.

Dr. Marshall tilts her pelvis at me and says, "Do you know how most patients like your mother die?"

They starve. They forget how to swallow and breathe food and drink into their lungs by accident. Their lungs fill with rotting matter and liquid, they develop pneumonia, and they die.