Chuck Palahniuk - Choke

I say, I know.

I say maybe there's worse things you can do than just letting somebody old die.

"This isn't just some old person," Paige Marshall says. "This is your mother."

And she's almost seventy years old.

"She's sixty-two," Paige says. "If there's anything you can do to save her and you don't, you're killing her with neglect."

"In other words," I say, "I should do you?"

"I've heard about your track record from some of the nurses," Paige Marshall says. "I know you have no issues around recreational sex. Or is it just me? Am I just not your type? Is that it?"

The two of us get quiet. A certified nurse's aide walks past, pushing a cart of bundled sheets and damp towels. Her shoes have rubber soles and the cart has rubber wheels. The floor is ancient cork tile polished dark with traffic, so she goes by without a sound, just the stale trailing urine smell.

"Don't get me wrong," I say. "I want to fuck you. I really want to fuck you."

Down the hall, the nurse's aide stops and looks back at us. She says, "Hey Romeo, why don't you give poor Dr. Marshall a break?"

Paige says, "It's fine, Miss Parks. This is between Mr. Mancini and myself."

We both stare back until she smirks and pushes her cart off around the next corner. Her name's Irene, Irene Parks, and yeah, okay, we did it in her car in the parking lot about this time last year.

See also: Caren, RN.

See also: Jenine, CNA.

At the time, I thought each of them was going to be somebody special, but without their clothes, they could've been anybody. Now her ass is about as inviting as a pencil sharpener.

To Dr. Paige Marshall I say, "There you are so wrong." I say, "I want to fuck you so bad I can taste it." I say, "And no, I don't want anybody to die, but I don't want my mom back the way she's always been."

Paige Marshall exhales. She sucks her mouth into a tight little knot and just glares at me. She holds her clipboard to her chest with her arms crossed over it.

"So," she says. "This hasn't anything to do with sex. You just don't want your mother to recover. You just can't deal with strong women, and you think that if she dies, then your issue about her will also."

From her room, my mom calls, "Morty, what am I paying you for?"

Paige Marshall says, "You can lie to my patients and complete their life conflicts, but don't lie to yourself." Then she says, "And don't lie to me."

Paige Marshall says, "You'd rather see her dead than see her recover."

And I say, "Yes. I mean, no. I mean, I don't know."

All my life, I've been less my mother's child than her hostage. The subject of her social and political experiments. Her own private lab rat. Now she's mine, and she's not going to escape by dying or getting better. I just want one person I can rescue. I want one person who needs me. Who can't live without me. I want to be a hero, but not just one time. Even if it means keeping her crippled, I want to be someone's constant savior.

"I know, I know, I know this sounds terrible," I say, "but I don't know... . This is what I think."

Here's where I should tell Paige Marshall what I really think.

I mean, I'm just tired of being wrong all the time just because I'm a guy.

I mean, how many times can everybody tell you that you're the oppressive, prejudiced enemy before you give up and become the enemy. I mean, a male chauvinist pig isn't born, he's made, and more and more of them are being made by women.

After long enough, you just roll over and accept the fact that you're a sexist, bigoted, insensitive, crude, cretinist cretin. Women are right. You're wrong. You get used to the idea. You live down to expectations.

Even if the shoe doesn't fit, you'll shrink into it.

I mean, in a world without God, aren't mothers the new god? The last sacred unassailable position. Isn't motherhood the last perfect magical miracle? But a miracle that's impossible for men.

And maybe men say they're glad not to give birth, all the pain and blood, but really that's just so much sour grapes. For sure, men can't do anything near as incredible. Upper body strength, abstract thought, phalluses—any advantages men appear to have are pretty token.

You can't even hammer a nail with a phallus.

Women are already born so far ahead ability-wise. The day men can give birth, that's when we can start talking about equal rights.

I don't tell Paige all that.

Instead, I say how I just want to be one person's guardian angel.

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

"Then save her by fucking me," says Dr. Marshall.

"But I don't want her saved all the way," I say. I'm terrified of losing her, but if I don't, I may lose myself.

There's still my mom's red diary in my coat pocket. There's still the chocolate pudding to get.

"You don't want her to die," Paige says, "and you don't want her to recover. Just what do you want?"

"I want somebody who can read Italian," I say.

Paige says, "Like what?"

"Here," I say and show her the diary. "It's my mom's. It's in Italian."

Paige takes the book and leafs through it. Her ears look red and excited around the edge. "I took four years of Italian as an undergrad," she says. "I can tell you what it says."

"I just want to keep control," I say. "For a change, I want to be the adult."

Still leafing through the book, Dr. Paige Marshall says, "You want to keep her weak so you're always the one in charge." She looks up at me and says, "It sounds as if you'd like to be God."

BLACK-AND-WHITE CHICKENS STAGGER around Colonial Dunsboro, chickens with their heads flattened. Here are chickens with no wings or only one leg. There are chickens with no legs, swimming with just their ragged wings through the barnyard mud. Blind chick- ens without eyes. Without beaks. Born that way. Defective. Born with their little chicken brains already scrambled.

There's an invisible line between science and sadism, but here it's made visible.

It's not that my brains are going to fare much better. Just look at my mom.

Dr. Paige Marshall should see them all struggle along. Not that she'd understand.

Denny here with me, Denny reaches into the back of his pants and pulls out a page of the classified ads from the newspaper all folded up in a little square. For sure this is contraband. His Royal High Governorship sees this and Denny's going to be banished to unemployment. For real, right out in the barnyard in front of the cow shed, Denny hands me this newspaper page.

Except for the newspaper, we're being so authentic it's like nothing we're wearing's even been washed in this century.

People are snapping pictures, trying to take some part of you home as a souvenir. People point video cameras, trying to trap you into their vacation. They're all shooting you, shooting the crippled chickens. Everybody's trying to make every minute of the present last forever. Preserve every second.

Inside the cow shed, there's the gurgle of somebody sucking air through a bong. You can't see them, but there's that silent tension of a bunch of people leaned together in a circle, trying to hold their breath. A girl coughs. Ursula, the milkmaid. There's so much reefer in there a cow coughs.

This is when we're supposed to be harvesting dried cow things, you know, cow piles, and Denny goes, "Read it, dude. The circled ad." He opens the page for me to see. "That ad, there," he says. There's one little classified circled in red ink.

With the milkmaid around. The tourists. There's nothing less than a trillion ways we're about to get caught. For real, Denny could not be more obvious.

Against my hand, the paper's still warm from Denny's butt, and when I go, "Not here, dude," and try to give the paper back...