Chuck Palahniuk - Choke

Watching Denny from the window, I am a rock. I am an island.

I call down, does he need any help?

On the sidewalk, Denny looks around, his arms hugging a rock to his chest.

"Up here," I say. "Do you need me to help you?"

Denny heaves the rock into his shopping cart and shrugs. He shakes his head and looks up at me, one hand shading his eyes. "I don't need help," he says, "but you can help if you want."

Never mind.

What I want is to be needed.

What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.

See also: Paige Marshall.

It's the same way a drug can be something good and something bad.

You don't eat. You don't sleep. Eating Leeza isn't really eating. Sleeping with Sarah Bernhardt, you're not really asleep.

The magic of sexual addiction is you don't ever feel hungry or tired or bored or lonely.

On the dining-room table, all the new cards pile up. All the checks and best wishes from a lot of strangers who want to believe they're somebody's hero. Who think they're needed. Some woman writes about how she's started a prayer chain for me. A spiritual pyramid scheme. As if you can gang up on God. Bully Him around.

The fine line between praying and nagging.

Tuesday evening, a voice on the answering machine is asking for my permission to move my mom up to the third floor at St. Anthony's, the floor where you go to die. What I hear first is this isn't Dr. Marshall's voice.

Yelling back at the answering machine, I say, sure. Move the crazy bitch upstairs. Make her comfortable, but I'm not paying for any heroic measures. Feeding tubes. Respirators. The way I react could be nicer, but the soft way the administrator talks to me, the hush in her voice. The way she assumes that I'm a nice person.

I tell her soft little recorded voice not to call me again until Mrs. Mancini is good and dead.

Unless I'm scamming for money, I'd rather people hate me than feel sorry for me.

Hearing this, I'm not angry. I'm not sad. All I feel anymore is horny.

And Wednesdays mean Nico.

In the women's room, the padded fist of her pubic bone punching me in the nose, Nico wipes and smears herself up and down my face. For two hours, Nico laces her fingers together across the back of my head and pulls my face into her until I'm choking down pubic hair.

Tonguing inside her labia minora, I'm tonguing the folds of Dr. Marshall's ear. Breathing through my nose, I'm stretching my tongue toward salvation.

Thursday is Virginia Woolf, first. Then it's Anais Nin. Then there's just enough time for a session with Sacajawea before it's morning, and I have to go to work in 1734.

In between, I write down my past in my notebook. This is doing my fourth step, my fearless and complete moral inventory.

Fridays mean Tanya.

By Friday, there are no more rocks in my mom's house.

Tanya comes by the house, and Tanya means anal.

The magic of getting butt is she's as tight as a virgin every time. And Tanya brings toys. Beads and rods and probes, these all smell like bleach, and she smuggles them around in a black leather bag she keeps in the trunk of her car. Tanya works my dog with one hand and her mouth while she presses the first ball on a long string full of greasy red rubber balls against my trapdoor.

My eyes closed, I'm trying to relax enough.

Breathe in. Then out.

Think of the monkey and the chestnuts.

Slow and even, in and then out.

Tanya twisting the first ball against me, I say, "You'd tell me if I sounded too needy, wouldn't you?"

And the first ball pops inside.

"Why don't people believe me," I say, "when I tell them I just don't care?"

And the second ball pops in.

Tanya still throating my dog, she makes a fist around the dangling string and yanks.

Imagine a woman yanking your guts out. See also: My dying mother.

See also: Dr. Paige Marshall.

Tanya yanks again, and my dog triggers, the white soldiers gobbing against the bedroom wallpaper beside her face. She yanks again, and my dog's coughing dry and still coughing.

And still triggering dry, I say, "Damn. For serious, I felt that."

What would Jesus NOT do?

Leaning forward with both my hands spread against the wall, my knees folding a little, I say, "Easy does it." I tell Tanya, "You're not starting a lawn mower."

And Tanya kneeling under me, still looking at the greasy, stinking balls on the floor, says, "Oh boy." She lifts the string of red rubber balls for me to see, and she says, "There are supposed to be ten."

There's only eight and what looks like a lot of empty string.

My ass hurts so much, I finger around back there and then check my fingers for blood. As much as I hurt right now, you'd be amazed there's not blood everywhere.

And gritting my teeth, I say, "That was fun, don't you think?"

And Tanya says, "I need you to sign my release form so I can get back to jail." She's dangling the string of balls into her black bag and says, "You're going to want to stop by an emergency room."

See also: Impacted colon.

See also: Bowel blockage.

See also: Cramping, fever, septic shock, heart failure.

It's been five days since I remember feeling hungry enough to eat. I haven't been tired. Or worried or angry or afraid or thirsty. If the air in here smells bad, I can't tell. I only know this is Friday because Tanya is here.

Paige and her dental floss. Tanya and her toys. Gwen with her safe word. All these women are yanking me around on a string.

"No, really," I tell Tanya. I sign the form, under sponsor, and say, "Really, nothing's wrong. I don't feel anything left inside."

And Tanya takes the form and says, "I can't believe that." What's funny is, I'm still not sure I believe it either.

WITHOUT INSURANCE OR EVEN A DRIVER'S LICENSE, I call a cab to come jump-start my mom's old car. On the radio, they talk about where to find traffic, a two-car accident on the bypass, a stalled tractor-trailer on the airport freeway. After I fill the gas tank, I just find an accident and get in line. Just to feel like I'm part of something.

Sitting in traffic, my heart would beat at regular speed. I'm not alone. Trapped there, I could just be a normal person headed home to a wife, kids, a house. I could pretend that my life was more than just waiting for the next disaster. That I knew how to function. The way other kids would "play house," I could play commuter.

After work, I go visit Denny on the empty block where he's laid out his rocks, the old Menningtown Country Townhouses block where he's pasting row on top of row with mortar until he's already got a wall, and I say, "Hey."

And Denny says, "Dude."

Denny says, "How's your mom?"

And I say I don't care.

Denny trowels a layer of gritty gray mud on top of the last row of stones. With the pointed steel end of the trowel, he fusses with the mortar until it's even. With a stick, he smoothes the joints between rocks he's already laid.

A girl's sitting under an apple tree close enough you can see she's Cherry Daiquiri from the strip club. A blanket is spread out under her, and she's lifting white cartons of take-out food from a brown grocery bag and opening each carton.

Denny starts bedding stones into the new mortar.

I say, "What are you building?"

Denny shrugs. He twists a square brown rock deeper into the mortar. With the trowel, he chinks mortar between two stones. Assembling his whole generation of babies into something huge.

Doesn't he need to build it on paper, first? I say, don't you need a plan? There's permits and inspections you have to get. You have to pay fees. There's building codes you have to know.