A. Look at that.
Q. What? (She points to a web of cracks in the tile.)
A. This face, right here. It’s him! (He squeezes in next to his mother, gets down on his hands and knees, and scrutinizes the craquelure.)
Q. Where do you see a face?
A. Right here. I think that might be the Imaginary Intern!
Q. I don’t see a face.
A. Here, sweetheart, here…these are the eyes, here’s the nose…it’s in sort of semi-profile.
Q. That’s not the Imaginary Intern.
A. It’s not? Are you sure?
Q. I’m sure.
A. I was so excited. I was sitting here and I looked down and I thought, Oh my goodness!
Q. Mom, how would you even know what the Imaginary Intern looks like? You’ve never even seen the Imaginary Intern.
A. I just had a very clear picture in my mind of what he looks like from everything you said about him. (MARK cants his head to the side and, squinting his eyes, gives this particular configuration of cracks another appraisal.)
Q. The Imaginary Intern has a…a fuller face. More boyish. Not so gaunt, y’know? That sort of looks like…like…who’s that guy, that actor with the big nose?
A. Karl Malden?
Q. (Laughing.) No, Mom, today! He was in, uh…he was in that movie The Pianist…and, um…what is that, uh…Summer of Sam. He was in a beer commercial…I think it was a Stella Artois commercial. God, I can picture him perfectly, and I just cannot think of his name…
A. You know something funny? I’ve just never liked beer. It looks so good on a hot day…But I just never liked it.
Q. Oh, that Woody Allen movie, Midnight in Paris…he was in that…He played Salvador Dalí…Adrien Brody!
A. I love that movie!
Q. Did you ever see Un Chien Andalou? It’s better. (He sighs.)
Q. You know, you really scared the shit out of me. I didn’t know what happened to you.
A. That’s so silly of you. I just had to pee.
Q. You remember that poor little boy, James Bulger…that, that toddler who was kidnapped from the mall in England, and he was subsequently murdered, and the whole abduction was caught on CCTV cameras? I thought for a minute that — I don’t know — I thought that…that something like that might have happened to you…but sort of inside out, y’know? Here, the mom is kidnapped and the little boy is left in the mall frantically searching for her. I even thought for a minute that those guys might have taken you.
A. What guys?
Q. The Panda Express and the Sbarro guys.
A. I’m not such a pushover, you know. I wouldn’t let two guys just abscond with me like that.
Q. I was freaking, seriously. I was getting the tintinnabulation, the tinea versicolor, the pruritus ani…it was, like, textbook. (MARK’S MOM is examining another pattern of cracks on the floor.)
Q. Mom, why did you stop me before? It seemed like you stopped me just as I started talking about how magnificent and loving Mercedes was when she took care of me.
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.