Chuck Palahniuk - Choke

"I do."

And my mom smiles. And stretching her fingers toward me, she says, "And do you love her?"

Maybe the way a porcupine thinks about its stinking stick, if you'd call that love.

Maybe the way a dolphin loves the smooth sides of its pool.

And I say, "I guess."

My mom tucks her chin into her neck sideways, eyeballing me, and says, "Fred."

And I say, "Okay, yes." I say, "I love her."

She brings her terrible green-gray fingers back to rest on her mounded belly and says, "You two are so lucky." She closes her eyes and says, "Victor isn't very good at loving people."

She says, "What I'm most afraid of is, after I'm gone, there will be no one left in the entire world who'll love Victor."

These frigging old people. These human ruins.

Love is bullshit. Emotion is bullshit. I am a rock. A jerk. I'm an uncaring asshole and proud of it.

What would Jesus NOT do?

If it comes down to a choice between being unloved and being vulnerable and sensitive and emotional, then you can just keep your love.

If what I just said about loving Paige was a lie or a vow, I don't know. But it was a trick. This is just heaps more chick bullshit. There is no human soul, and I am absolutely for sure seriously not going to fucking cry.

My mom, her eyes stay closed, and her chest inflates and deflates in long, deep cycles.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Imagine a heavy weight pressing your body, settling your head and arms, deeper and deeper.

And she's asleep.

Paige stands up from the recliner and nods her head toward the door, and I follow her out into the hallway.

She looks around and says, "You want to go to the chapel?"

I'm not really in the mood.

"To talk," she says.

I say, okay. Walking with her, I say, "Thanks for back there. For lying, I mean."

And Paige says, "Who says I was lying?"

Does that mean she loves me? That's impossible.

"Okay," she says. "Maybe I fibbed a little. I like you. Some."

Breathe in. Breathe out.

In the chapel, Paige shuts the door behind us and says, "Feel," and takes my hand to hold it against her flat stomach. "I checked my temperature. It's not my time anymore."

With the load already building up behind whatever in my guts, I tell her, "Yeah?" I say, "Well, I may have beat you to it."

Tanya and her rubber butt toys.

Paige turns and walks away from me, slow, and still turned away she says, "I don't know how to talk to you about this."

The sun through the stained-glass window, a whole wall in a hundred shades of gold. The blond wood cross. Symbols. The altar and the Communion rail, it's all here. Paige goes to sit on one of the benches, a pew, and she sighs. Her one hand grips the top of her clipboard, and her other lifts some clipped papers to show something red underneath them.

My mom's diary.

She hands the diary to me and says, "You can check the facts yourself. In fact, I recommend you do so. If only for your own peace of mind."

I take the book, and it's still gibberish inside. Okay, Italian gibberish.

And Paige says, "The only good thing is there's no absolute assurance that the genetic material they used was from the actual historic figure."

Everything else checks out, she says. The dates, the clinics, the specialists. Even the church people she talked to have insisted the material stolen, the tissue the clinic cultured, was the only authenticated foreskin. She says this has opened a giant political can of worms in Rome.

"The only other good thing," she says, "is I didn't tell anybody who you were."

Jesus Christ, I say.

"No, I mean who you are now," she says.

And I say, "No, I was just swearing."

How this feels is like I just got back the results on a bad biopsy. I say, "So what does this mean?"

Paige shrugs. "When you think about it, nothing," she says. She nods toward the diary in my hand and says, "Unless you want to ruin your life, I'd recommend you burn that."

I ask, how does this affect us, her and me?

"We shouldn't see each other anymore," she says, "if that's what you mean."

I ask, she doesn't believe this junk, does she?

And Paige says, "I've seen you with the patients here, the way they're all at peace after they talk to you." Sitting there, she leans forward with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, and she says, "I just can't take the chance that your mother is right. Not everybody I talked to in Italy could be delusional. I mean, what if you're really the beautiful and divine son of God?"

The blessed and perfect mortal manifestation of God.

A belch rumbles up from my blockage, and the taste in my mouth is acid.

"Morning sickness" isn't the right term, but it's the first term that comes to mind.

"So what you're saying is you only sleep with mortals?" I say.

And Paige leaning forward, she gives me that pity look, the one the front desk girl does so well with her chin tucked to her chest, her eyebrows lifted into her hairline, and she says, "I'm so sorry I butted in. I promise you, I won't tell a soul."

And what about my mom?

Paige sighs and shrugs. "That's easy. She's delusional. Nobody would believe her."

No, I meant, will she die soon?

"Probably," Paige says, "unless there's a miracle."

URSULA STOPS TO CATCH HER BREATH and looks up at me. She shakes the fingers of her one hand and squeezes the wrist with her other hand and says, "If you were a churn, we'd have butter a half hour ago."

I go, sorry.

She spits in her hand and makes a fist around my dog and says, "This sure isn't like you."

Anymore, I won't even pretend to know what I'm like.

For sure this is just another slow day in 1734, so we're flopped in a pile of hay in the stable. Me with my arms crossed behind my head, Ursula is curled up against me. We don't move very much or the dry hay pokes us through our clothes. We both look up into the rafters, the wood beams and woven underside of the thatched roof. Spiders dangle down on their strands of web.

Ursula starts yanking and says, "You see Denny on television?"

When?

"Last night."

What for?

Ursula shakes her head, "Building something. People are complaining. People think it's some kind of church, and he won't say what kind."

It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed. Even if it's for sure unexplainable. Even God.

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

It's not a church, I say. I throw my cravat back over one shoulder and pull the front of my shirt out of my pants.

And Ursula says, "They think it's a church on TV."

With the fingertips of one hand, I press around my navel, the umbilicus, but digital palpation is inconclusive. I tap and listen for changes in sound that might indicate a solid mass, but pre-cussing is inconclusive.

The big trapdoor muscle that keeps the shit inside you, doctors call that the rectal shelf, and after you shove something above that shelf, no way is it coming out without a lot of help. In hospital emergency rooms, they call this kind of help colorectal foreign bodies management.

To Ursula, I say, could she put her ear against my bare stomach and tell me if she hears anything.

"Denny never was very together," she says, and leans in to press her warm ear against my belly button. Navel. Umbilicus, doctors would call it.

A typical patient presenting colorectal foreign bodies is a male in his forties or fifties. The foreign body is almost always what the doctors call self-administered.

And Ursula says, "What am I listening for?"

Positive bowel sounds.

"Gurgles, squeaks, rumbles, anything," I say. Anything that indicates I'll have a bowel movement someday, and the stool isn't just packing up behind some obstruction.