Chuck Palahniuk - Choke

Paige shrugs. "You have to trade your youth for something. ..."

The monitor cycles to a view of the empty loading dock behind St. Anthony's.

Now in voice-over, my mom's voice says, "But how did you make the commitment?"

And Paiges voice-over says, "I don't knew. One day, I just wanted to be a doctor …," and fades into some other room.

The monitor cycles to a view of the front parking lot, where a tow truck is parked and the driver is kneeling next to a blue car. The front desk girl stands off to one side with her arms folded.

I dial-switch from number to number, listening.

The monitor cycles to show me sitting with my ear to the intercom speaker.

There's the clatter of somebody typing on number five. On eight, there's the whir of a blow-dryer. On two, I hear my mom's voice saying, "You know the old phrase 'Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it'? Well, I think those who remember their past are even worse off."

In voice-over, Paige says, "Those who remember the past tend to get the story really screwed up."

The monitor cycles to show them going down a corridor, a book open in my mom's lap. Even in black-and-white, you can tell it's her diary. And she's reading it, smiling.

She looks up, twisting to see Paige behind the wheelchair, and says, "In my opinion, those who remember the past are paralyzed by it."

And Paige pushes her along, saying, "How about: 'Those who can forget the past are way ahead of the rest of us'?"

And their voices fade out again.

There's somebody snoring on number three. On number ten, there's the creak of a rocking chair.

The monitor cycles to show the front parking lot, where the girl is signing something on a clipboard.

Before I can find Paige again, the front desk girl will be back, saying her tires are fine. She'll be looking at me sideways, again.

What Would Jesus NOT Do?

As it turns out, some asshole just let the air out of them.

WEDNESDAYS MEAN NICO.

Fridays mean Tanya.

Sundays mean Leeza, and I catch her in the parking lot at the community center. Two doors down from the sexaholics meeting, we waste some sperm in a janitor's closet with a mop next to us, left standing in a bucket of gray water. There's cases of toilet tis- sue for Leeza to lean over, and I'm splitting her ass so hard that with my every drive, she head-butts a shelf of folded rags. I'm licking the sweat off her back for a nicotine buzz.

This is life on earth as I knew it. The kind of rough, messy sex where you first want to spread some newspapers. This is me trying to put things back the way they were before Paige Marshall. Period revival. Me trying to reconstruct how my life worked until just a few weeks ago. How my dysfunction used to function so beautifully.

Asking the back of Leeza's scrubby hair, I say, "You'd tell me if I was getting too sweet, wouldn't you?"

Pulling her hips back against me, I say, "Tell the truth."

I'm ramming at a regular steady pace, asking, "You don't think I'm getting soft, do you?"

To keep from triggering, I picture airplane crash sites and stepping in crap.

My dog burning hard, I imagine police photos of car wrecks and point-blank shotgun damage. To keep from feeling anything, I just keep stuffing it.

Stuffing dick, stuffing feelings. When you're a sexaholic, it's for sure the same thing.

Plugged in deep, I reach around her. Forced in tight, I reach under her to twist a hard pointed nipple in each hand.

And sweating her dark brown shadow into the light brown case of toilet paper, Leeza says, "Ease up." She says, "Just what are you trying to prove?"

That I'm an unfeeling jerk.

That I really don't care.

What would Jesus NOT do?

Leeza, Leeza with her three-hour release form, she grips the case of toilet paper and hacks and coughs, and with my hands I feel her abs spasm rock-hard and rippling between my fingers. The muscles of her pelvic floor, the pubococcygeus muscles, called the PC muscles for short, they spasm and the clenched drag on my dog is incredible.

See also: Grafenberg Spot.

See also: Goddess Spot.

See also: Tantric Sacred Spot.

See also: Taoist Black Pearl.

Leeza spreads her hands open against the wall and shoves herself back at me.

All these names for the same place, all these symbols for the real thing. The Federation of Feminist Health Care Centers calls it the urethral sponge. The seventeenth- century Dutch anatomist Regnier de Graaf called this same mass of erectile tissue, nerves, and glands the female prostate. All these names for the two inches of urethra you can feel through the front wall of the vagina. The anterior wall of the vagina. What some people call the bladder neck.

All of this just the same bean-shaped territory everybody wants to name.

To stake with their own flag. Their symbol.

To keep from triggering, I picture first-year anatomy and dissecting out the two legs of the clitoris, the crura, each about as long as your index finger. Picture dissecting out the corpus cavernosa, the two cylinders of erectile tissue in the penis. We cut out the ovaries. We removed the testes. You learn to cut out all the nerves and lay them off to one side. The cadavers stinking with Formalin, formaldehyde. That new-car smell.

With this cadaver stuff in mind, you can ride for hours without getting anywhere.

You can kill a lifetime without feeling anything but skin. That's the magic of these sexaholic chicks.

When you're an addict, you can go without feeling anything except drunk or stoned or hungry. Still, when you compare this to other feelings, to sadness, anger, fear, worry, despair, and depression, well, an addiction no longer looks so bad. It looks like a very viable option.

Monday, I stay home after work and sort through my mom's old tapes from therapy sessions. Here are two thousand years of women on one shelf. Here's my mother's voice, steady and deep the way it was when I was a little shit.

The bordello of the subconscious.

Bedtime stories.

Imagine a heavy weight pressing your body, settling your head and arms, deeper and deeper into the cushions of the couch. The tape playing in headphones, remember to fall asleep on a towel.

Here's the name Mary Todd Lincoln on one taped session.

No way. Too ugly.

See also: The Wallis Simpson session.

See also: The Martha Ray session.

Here's the three Bronte sisters. Not real women, but symbols, just their names as empty shells you can project into, you can fill with antique stereotypes and cliches, milk- white skin and bustles, button shoes and hoop skirts. Naked except for whalebone corsets and crochet snoods, here are Emily and Charlotte and Anne Bronte lying around naked and bored on horsehair settees one fetid hot afternoon in the parlor. Sex symbols. You fill in the rest, the props and positions, the rolltop desk, the pump organ. Insert yourself as Heathcliff or Mr. Rochester. Just put in the tape and relax.

As if we can ever imagine the past. The past, the future, life on other planets, everything is such an extension, such a projection of life as we know it.

Me locked in my room, Denny comes and goes.

As if it's just some innocent accident, I catch myself thumbing through the Marshalls in the phone book. She's not listed. After work some nights, I take the bus that goes past St. Anthony's. She's never in any of the windows. Riding past, you can't guess which is her car in the parking lot. I don't get off.

Whether I'd slash her tires or leave a love note, I don't know.

Denny comes and goes, and every day there's fewer rocks in the house. And if you don't see somebody every day, you see them change. Me watching from an upstairs window, Denny comes and goes pushing bigger and bigger rocks in a shopping cart, and every day, Denny looks a little bigger inside his old plaid shirt. His face gets tan, his chest and shoulders get big enough to spread the plaid out so it doesn't hang in folds. He's not huge, but he's bigger, big for Denny.