Mark Leyner - Gone with the Mind

A. (Without looking up from the craquelure.) I just didn’t want to hear any more.

Q. About Mercedes?

A. No, no, no…About you being sick, and about you being in so much discomfort and feeling so…so undignified. I just couldn’t…I just couldn’t stand it. (She looks at him.)

A. You know, when you were diagnosed, when you told me…I was terror-stricken…so that I forced myself, I suppose, not really to think about it deeply. But it changed my whole life. It changed the things I thought about before I went to sleep certainly…every single bloody night. And I…I faced the knowledge that something awful might happen by not facing the knowledge, if that makes any sense at all. By knowing it and trying very hard to set it back one level, so that I could keep going and not show you that I was frightened. And I kept thinking this thing that might make no kind of sense, as we’re talking about this — I kept thinking that if there were only some way I could make it be me and not you…Because parents should die and not their children. And I still feel the same way. I want to be the first to go…and leave everybody happy, healthy, and in wonderful shape. I’d also like to leave all of you rich if I could, but I haven’t figured that one out yet. (Returning her attention to the floor, she continues.)

A. Is this video game you were talking about…is it like a suicide?

Q. No, no…it’s like the story of a son umbilicated to his mother, a son moored in port. The “death” should be read figuratively — it’s a heaving up of the anchor. Freud talked about how the human body longs to return to the indeterminacy of the inorganic…about an urge in organic life to restore an earlier state of things. That’s sort of what I was trying to get at, I guess.

A. It almost seems like overkill to me.

Q. What do you mean?

A. Well, there’s a mall shooter, there’s a flood, there’s going back into a mother’s womb and unraveling the father’s and mother’s DNA in the zygote…

Q. A couple of years ago, I read an article about a woman named Cecilia Chang, a dean and a fund-raiser at St. John’s University, who was involved in this, this huge fraud and corruption scandal. And toward the end of her trial, less than twenty-four hours after testifying, convinced that she was going to be convicted, she committed suicide at her home in, uh…in Queens. She started a fire in her bedroom fireplace and closed the flue. She went downstairs to the kitchen and turned on the gas. She slit her wrists. And then she hanged herself with stereo speaker wire from a lowered attic ladder. And I remember thinking, Fuck, this woman was not leaving anything to chance! So, I think that was probably the inspiration for that…y’know, that redundancy in the game.

A. Did you really ask the surgeon to look in my brain and see why I talk so much?

Q. I have to think there’s a correlation between hyperemesis gravidarum and projectile logorrhea. And I really do believe that there’s a genetic link between a mother’s pathologically excessive talkativeness and a son’s persistent fantasy of gesticulating from a balcony and haranguing a crowd in a piazza. Don’t you?

A. Well, as long as you brought up Freud…I think we need to ask two psychoanalytical questions here: What does the form of this autobiography displace, repress, or disavow? And what is striking in its absence here? What is being occluded? Because, doesn’t the real story always consist of the very content that’s being occluded?

Q. Look, all I know is that everyone, at one point in his or her life, has had to suck some microcephalic moron’s dick for cab fare, figuratively speaking, of course…But it just seems to be getting harder and harder for me as I get older. (She reaches up behind her, tears off a few sheets of toilet paper, and wipes some grime off another pattern on the tile.)

A. What time is Mussolini picking you up?

Q. Very funny.

A. You said it was like a flight-simulation game, right?

Q. Yeah.

A. Well, when you play, where can you go? Where can you go in the flying balcony?

Q. Well initially you just sort of fly around here…so I was thinking, like, y’know, Paramus, Mahwah, Ramsey, Wayne, uh…Hackensack.

A. That doesn’t seem like such a great a game to me.

Q. Well, Mom, that would just be like the first level. And also, you’ve got to keep in mind that you’re…well, you’re not “dead” exactly, but the psychophysical aggregate that was “you” has disaggregated.

A. You know something that occurred to me when you were talking before? I think you’re too hard on yourself about your father.

Q. No, I’m too impatient with him. I’m an impatient person. There’s a blind guy who works out at my gym, and the other day he passed gas. And it was pretty loud. And, my immediate reaction was like, Eww, dude, gross…but then I thought that the farting is probably some kind of echolocation technique that the guy is using so he can navigate around the gym…which would be really cool, y’know? But my first reaction, my sort of default response was just this kind of impatient judgment without taking the time to try and understand what was going on… (MARK’S MOM points to another indeterminate visage on the floor.)

A. You know who that looks like a little bit?

Q. I think that looks a little like Julianne Moore…if Julianne Moore had cystic acne or something.

A. Where are you looking?

Q. Over here.

A. No, Mark — here, here . Tell me who that looks like to you. You see where I’m talking about? Here — there’s a head and the neck…

Q. Are you talking about that guy who does the show on the Food Network? You think it looks like that guy?

A. What guy?

Q. The guy who hosts that show where they give you the different foods and you have to combine them somehow into a meal…like Arctic char, goji berries, mascarpone cheese, and cotton candy… Chopped . The host of Chopped . You think that looks like the host of Chopped ?

A. No, no, no. It looks like that lovely Italian anesthesiologist I was talking about before, remember? The one that made a pass at me when I was pregnant with you.

Q. Mom, how could I possibly recognize someone who made a pass at you when you were pregnant with me? What did I have, like intrauterine X-ray vision or something? You wanna know who that actually looks like to me now? Remember I took you to that incredibly brutal, gory Korean movie? Uh, what was that called? Uh… I Saw the Devil . Remember that? And you walked out.

A. Oh God, yes! Why did you take me to something like that?

Q. Mom, when I suggested it, you told me you’d read about it in the Times and wanted to go see it with me.

A. I must have gotten it mixed up with something else.

Q. Well, anyway — it sort of looks like the guy who played the serial killer…uh…Choi Min-sik. (She shrugs.)

A. You know I wanted to ask you something — you mentioned a couple of times what if someone asked you to give advice to young writers, but you never really gave a straight answer. Do you actually have any advice you’d give?

Q. Well, you know what?…Seriously…this is a straight answer…and I think this is true for everyone, and so logically it must be true for young writers: never eat candy out of those, those open bins they have in the lobbies of movie theaters. I went to this multiplex once to see, uh…I don’t remember what I was seeing…but, I was in the men’s room before the movie started, and I watched this guy come out of a…a stall, and not wash his hands, and he heads straight for those candy bins in the lobby, and he sticks his gross, unwashed, E. coli hand in this bin of sour gummy worms or whatever it was and rummages the fuck around in there. I mean, that’s like direct ass-to-mouth candy. (That’s a…a porn expression. You probably don’t know that one…)