And old Mrs. Tsunimitsu smiles and says, "You can't deny the goodness of your true nature. It's shining for everyone to see."

To her I say, shut up. To Paige Marshall I say, "Come on."

I'll prove to her I'm no Jesus Christ. Anybody's true nature is bullshit. There is no human soul. Emotion is bullshit. Love is bullshit. And I'm dragging Paige down the hallway.

We live and we die and anything else is just delusion. It's just passive chick bullshit about feelings and sensitivity. Just made-up subjective emotional crap. There is no soul. There is no God. There's just decisions and disease and death.

What I am is a dirty, filthy, helpless sexaholic, and I can't change, and I can't stop, and that's all I'll ever be.

And I'll prove it.

"Where are you taking me?" Paige says, stumbling, her glasses and lab coat still flecked with food and blood.

Already, I'm imagining junk so as not to trigger too fast, stuff like pets soaked in gasoline and set on fire. I'm picturing the dumpy Tarzan and his trained chimp. I'm thinking, here's just another stupid chapter in my fourth step.

To make time stand still. To fossilize this moment. To make the fucking last forever.

I'm taking her in the chapel, I tell Paige. I'm the child of a lu­natic. Not a child of God.

Let God prove me wrong. He can nail me with a lightning bolt.

I'm going to take her on the frigging altar.

Chapter 25

It was malicious endangerment this time or reckless abandonment or criminal neglect. There were so many laws the little boy couldn't keep them straight.

It was third-degree harassment or second-degree disregard, first-degree disdain or second-degree nuisance, and it got so the stupid kid was terrified to do anything except what everybody else did. Anything new or different or original was probably against the law.

Anything risky or exciting would land you in jail.

That's why everybody was so eager to talk to the Mommy.

She'd been out of jail for only a couple weeks this time, and already stuff had started to happen.

There were so many laws and, for sure, about countless ways you could screw up.

First the police asked about the coupons.

Somebody had gone to a downtown copy shop and used a computer to design and print hundreds of coupons that prom­ised a free meal for two, a seventy-five-dollar value with no expi­ration date. Each coupon was folded inside a cover letter that thanked you for being such a valued customer and said the en­closed coupon was a special promotion.

All you had to do was eat dinner at the Clover Inn Restaurant.

When the server presented the bill, you could just pay with the coupon. Tip included.

Somebody did all that. Mailed out hundreds of these coupons.

It had all the earmarks of an Ida Mancini stunt.

The Mommy had been a server at the Clover Inn for her first week out of the halfway house, but she got fired for telling people stuff they didn't want to know about their food.

Then she just disappeared. A few days later, an unidentified woman had run screaming down the center aisle of a theater dur­ing the quiet, boring part of some big fancy ballet dance.

This is why the police got the stupid little boy out of school one day and brought him downtown. To see if maybe he'd heard from her. From the Mommy. If maybe he knew where she was hiding.

About this same time, several hundred very angry customers flooded into a fur salon with fifty-percent-discount coupons they got in the mail.

About this time, a thousand very scared people arrived at the county sexually transmitted disease clinic, demanding to be tested after they received letters on the county letterhead warning them that some former sex partner had been diagnosed with an infectious disease.

The police detectives took the little stooge downtown in a plain car and then upstairs in a plain building and sat with him and his foster mother, asking, has Ida Mancini attempted to con­tact you?

Have you any idea from where she's receiving funds?

Why do you think she's doing these awful things?

And the little boy just waited.

Help would come soon enough.

The Mommy, she used to tell him she was sorry. People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, orga­nized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become. With the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and ad­dressed and recorded. Nobody had left much room for adven­ture, except maybe the kind you could buy. On a roller coaster. At a movie. Still, it would always be that kind of faux excitement. You know the dinosaurs aren't going to eat the kids. The test au­diences have outvoted any chance of even a major faux disaster. And because there's no possibility of real disaster, real risk, we're left with no chance for real salvation. Real elation. Real excite­ment. Joy. Discovery. Invention.

The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.

Without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace.

Unless everything can get worse, it won't get any better.

This is all stuff the Mommy used to tell him.

She used to say, "The only frontier you have left is the world of intangibles. Everything else is sewn up too tight."

Caged inside too many laws.

By intangibles, she meant the Internet, movies, music, stories, art, rumors, computer programs, anything that isn't real. Virtual realities. Make-believe stuff. The culture.

The unreal is more powerful than the real.

Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.

Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.

But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

If you can change the way people think, she said. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives. And that's the only lasting thing you can create.

Besides, at some point, the Mommy used to say, your memo­ries, your stories and adventures, will be the only things you'll have left.

At her last trial, before this last time she went to jail, the Mommy had sat up next to the judge and said, "My goal is to be an engine of excitement in people's lives."

She'd stared straight into the stupid little boy's eyes and said, "My purpose is to give people glorious stories to tell."

Before the guards took her into the back wearing handcuffs, she'd shouted, "Convicting me would be redundant. Our bureau­cracy and our laws have turned the world into a clean, safe work camp."

She shouted, "We are raising a generation of slaves."

And it was back to prison for Ida Mancini.

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

The unidentified woman, the one who ran down the aisle during the ballet, she was screaming, "We are teaching our chil­dren to be helpless."