Choke

A fat man comes jogging down the hall with one hand pressed over a bouncing chest pocket full of pens and another hand on his hip holster of hot pepperspray. Keys jingle on his other hip. To the front desk girl, he says, "So what's the situation here?"

And De

The problem is De

So he'll hear her confession, he needs to meet what's left of my mom. My plan is I'll introduce him as Victor Mancini.

This way De

When De

I ask if she wanted sex.

And De

We go through a set of doors the guard has to unlock, then another set. As we walk, his keys bounce against his hip. Even the back of his neck has a big roll of fat.

"Your mom?" De

"Maybe," I say, "except, you know . . ."

And De

And I go, "Stop already." I say, "Okay, she was a shitty mother, but she's the only mom I have."

"Sorry, dude," De

Here at St. Anthony's, they have to close the curtains before it gets dark, since if a resident sees themself reflected in a window they'll think somebody's peeping in at them. It's called "sun-downing." When all the old folks get crazy at sunset.

You could put most of these folks in front of a mirror and tell them it's a television special about old dying miserable people, and they'd watch for hours.

The problem is my mom won't talk to me when I'm Victor, and she won't talk to me when I'm her attorney. My only hope is to be her public defender while De

Think of this as some kind of Gestalt ambush.

Along the way, the guard asks wasn't I the guy who raped Mrs. Field's dog?

No, I tell him. It's a long story, I say. About eighty years long.

We find Mom in the dayroom, sitting at a table with a shat­tered jigsaw puzzle spread out in front of her. There must be a thousand pieces, but there's no box to show how it's supposed to look. It could be anything.

De

My mom's pushing puzzle pieces around, some of them turned over so the gray cardboard side shows, and she's trying to fit them together.

"Dude," De

My mom's eyes crawl all over De

"Good morning, Mrs. Mancini," I say. "Your son, Victor, is here to visit you. This is him." I say, "Don't you have something important to tell him?"

"Yeah," De

And my mom's old blue eyes start to fill up with juice.

"Victor?" she says.

She clears her throat. Staring at De

And De

And my mom's old hand creaks out across the table and closes around De

"Jeez," De

My mother says, "I'm sorry."

You can smell some kind of cafeteria food, cabbage or beans, that's being cooked down to mush.

This whole time, I'm still standing here.

De

My mom says, "You're not going already, are you?" She looks at De

De

My mom's shaky, boiled-looking old hand shakes over and picks a clump of red lint off De

And I say, "Excuse me, Mrs. Mancini." I say, "But wasn't there something you needed to tell your son?"

My mom just looks at me, then at De

"So explain," I say.

De

My mom holds one shaky old hand open at me, and she says, "Fred, this is between my son and me. This is an important fam­ily matter. Go someplace. Go watch the television, and let us visit in private."

And I say, "But."

But my mom says, "Go."

De

"Go try to save someone else for a change," my mom says, not looking at me. Looking at De

She watches me until I step back as far as the hallway. After that she says something to De

Still nosing around in the puzzle, De

A smell comes around me, a diaper smell, and a broken voice behind me says, "You're the one who threw all my second-grade primers in the mud."

Still watching my mom, trying to see what she's saying, I go, "Yeah, I guess."

"Well, here, at least you're honest" the voice says. A dried lit­tle mushroom of a woman slips her skeleton's arm through mine. "Come along with me," she says. "Dr. Marshall would like very much to talk to you. Alone somewhere."

She's wearing De

Chapter 14

Leaning her head back, her little black brain, Paige Marshall points up into the vaulted beige ceiling. "There used to be angels," she says. "The story is they were incredibly beautiful, with blue feath­ery wings and real gilded halos."

The old woman leads me to the big chapel at St. Anthony's, big and empty since it used to be a convent. One whole wall is a window of stained glass in a hundred different colors of gold. The other wall is just a big wood crucifix. Between the two is Paige Marshall in her white lab coat, golden in the light, under the black brain of her hair. She's wearing her black glasses and looking up. All of her black and gold.