Читать онлайн "Choke" - Паланик Чак - RuLit

Dr. Paige Marshall with her clipboard and attitude. Her scary dreams about helping my mom live another ten or twenty years.

Dr. Paige Marshall, another potential dose of sexual anesthetic.

See also: Leeza.

More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself.

My life makes about as much sense as a Zen koan.

A House Wren sings, but whether it's a real bird or it's four o'clock I'm not sure.

"My memory isn't any good," my mom says. She's rubbing her temples with the thumb and index finger of one hand, and says, "I worry that I should tell Victor the truth about himself." Propped on her stack of pillows, she says, "Before it's too late, I wonder if Victor has a right to know who he really is."

"So just tell him," I say. I bring food, a bowl of chocolate pudding, and try to sneak the spoon into her mouth. "I can go call," I say, "and Victor can be here in a couple minutes."

The pudding is lighter brown and smelly under a cold dark brown skin.

"Oh, but I cant," she says. "The guilt is so bad, I can't even face him. I don't even know how he'll react."

She says, "Maybe it's better Victor never finds out."

"So tell me," I say. "Get it off your chest," I say, and I promise not to tell Victor, not unless she says it's okay.

She squints at me, her old skin all cinching tight around her eyes. With chocolate pudding smeared in the wrinkles around her mouth, she says, "But how do I know I can trust you? I'm not even sure who you are."

I smile and say, "Of course you can trust me."

And I stick the spoon in her mouth. The black pudding just sits on her tongue. It's better than a stomach tube. Okay, it's cheaper.

I take the remote control out of her reach and tell her, "Swallow."

I tell her, "You have to listen to me. You have to trust me."

I say, "I'm him. I'm Victor's father."

And her milky eyes swell at me while the rest of her face, her wrinkles and skin, seem to slide into the collar of her nightgown. With one terrible yellow hand, she makes the sign of the cross and her mouth hangs open to her chest. "Oh, you're him, and you've come back," she says. "Oh, blessed Father. Holy Father," she says. "Oh, please forgive me."

Chapter 11

THIS IS ME TALKING TO DENNY, locking him in the stocks again, this time for having a stamp on the back of his hand from some nightclub, and I say, "Dude."

I say, "It's so weird."

Denny's got both hands in place for me to lock them. He's got his shirt tucked in tight. He knows to bend his knees a little to take the stress off his back. He remembers to visit the restroom before he gets locked up. Our Denny's turned into a regular expert at getting punished. In good old Colonial Dunsboro, masochism is a valuable job skill.

It is in most jobs.

Yesterday at St. Anthony's, I tell him, it was the same as that old movie where there's a guy and a painting, and the guy gets to party and live to be about a hundred years old, and he never looks any different. The painting of him, it keeps getting uglier and trashed with alcohol-related everything and the nose falls off from secondary syphilis and the clap.

All the residents at St. Anthony's, now they're all eyes closed and humming. Everybody's all smiling and righteous.

Except me. I'm their stupid painting.

"Congratulate me, dude," Denny says. "Being in the stocks so much, I put together four weeks of sobriety. For sure, that's like four weeks more than I've had since I was thirteen."

My mom's roommate, I tell him, Mrs. Novak, she's all nodding and satisfied now that I've finally fessed up to stealing her invention for toothpaste.

Another old lady is jabbering and happy as a parrot since I admitted to peeing in her bed every night.

Yeah, I tell them all, I did it. I burned down your house. I bombed your village. I deported your sister. I sold you a shitty blue Nash Rambler in 1968. Then, yeah, I killed your dog.

So get over it!

I tell them, heap it on me. Make me play the big passive bottom in your guilt gang bang. I'll take everybody's load.

And after everybody's humped out their load in my face, they're all smiling and humming. They're laughing at the ceiling, still all crowded around me, patting my hand and saying it's all right, they forgive me. They're gaining fucking weight. The whole hen party's chatting at me, and this real tall nurse walks by, and she says, "Well, aren't you Mister Popular."

Denny sniffs.

"You need a snot rag, dude?" I say.

The weird part is my mom's not getting any better. No matter how much I play Pied Piper and take the blame away from these people. No matter how much fault I sponge up, my mom doesn't believe I'm me anymore, that I'm Victor Mancini. So she won't unload her own big secret. So she's going to need some stomach tube thing.

"Sobriety is okay enough," Denny says, "but someday, I'd like to live a life based on doing good stuff instead of just not doing bad stuff. You know?"

What's even weirder, I tell him, is I'm figuring how I can turn my new popularity into a fast broom closet ram session with this tall nurse, maybe get her to throat my dog. A nurse thinks you're a caring nurturing guy who's patient with hopeless old people, and you're halfway to boning her.