Bedtime stories.

Imagine a heavy weight pressing your body, settling your head and arms, deeper and deeper into the cushions of the couch. The tape playing in headphones, remember to fall asleep on a towel.

Here's the name Mary Todd Lincoln on one taped session.

No way. Too ugly.

See also: The Wallis Simpson session.

See also: The Martha Ray session.

Here's the three Bronte sisters. Not real women, but symbols, just their names as empty shells you can project into, you can fill with antique stereotypes and cliches, milk-white skin and bustles, button shoes and hoop skirts. Naked except for whalebone corsets and crochet snoods, here are Emily and Charlotte and Anne Bronte lying around naked and bored on horsehair settees one fetid hot afternoon in the parlor. Sex symbols. You fill in the rest, the props and positions, the rolltop desk, the pump organ. Insert your­self as Heathcliff or Mr. Rochester. Just put in the tape and relax.

As if we can ever imagine the past. The past, the future, life on other planets, everything is such an extension, such a projec­tion of life as we know it.

Me locked in my room, Denny comes and goes.

As if it's just some innocent accident, I catch myself thumb­ing through the Marshalls in the phone book. She's not listed. After work some nights, I take the bus that goes past St. An­thony's. She's never in any of the windows. Riding past, you can't guess which is her car in the parking lot. I don't get off.

Whether I'd slash her tires or leave a love note, I don't know.

Denny comes and goes, and every day there's fewer rocks in the house. And if you don't see somebody every day, you see them change. Me watching from an upstairs window, Denny comes and goes pushing bigger and bigger rocks in a shopping cart, and every day, Denny looks a little bigger inside his old plaid shirt. His face gets tan, his chest and shoulders get big enough to spread the plaid out so it doesn't hang in folds. He's not huge, but he's bigger, big for Denny.

Watching Denny from the window, I am a rock. I am an is­land.

I call down, does he need any help?

On the sidewalk, Denny looks around, his arms hugging a rock to his chest.

"Up here," I say. "Do you need me to help you?"

Denny heaves the rock into his shopping cart and shrugs. He shakes his head and looks up at me, one hand shading his eyes. "I don't need help," he says, "but you can help if you want."

Never mind.

What I want is to be needed.

What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my atten­tion. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.

See also: Paige Marshall.

It's the same way a drug can be something good and some­thing bad.

You don't eat. You don't sleep. Eating Leeza isn't really eating. Sleeping with Sarah Bernhardt, you're not really asleep.

The magic of sexual addiction is you don't ever feel hungry or tired or bored or lonely.

On the dining-room table, all the new cards pile up. All the checks and best wishes from a lot of strangers who want to believe they're somebody's hero. Who think they're needed. Some woman writes about how she's started a prayer chain for me. A spiritual pyramid scheme. As if you can gang up on God. Bully Him around.

The fine line between praying and nagging.

Tuesday evening, a voice on the answering machine is asking for my permission to move my mom up to the third floor at St. Anthony's, the floor where you go to die. What I hear first is this isn't Dr. Marshall's voice.

Yelling back at the answering machine, I say, sure. Move the crazy bitch upstairs. Make her comfortable, but I'm not paying for any heroic measures. Feeding tubes. Respirators. The way I react could be nicer, but the soft way the administrator talks to me, the hush in her voice. The way she assumes that I'm a nice person.

I tell her soft little recorded voice not to call me again until Mrs. Mancini is good and dead.

Unless I'm scamming for money, I'd rather people hate me than feel sorry for me.

Hearing this, I'm not angry. I'm not sad. All I feel anymore is horny.

And Wednesdays mean Nico.

In the women's room, the padded fist of her pubic bone punching me in the nose, Nico wipes and smears herself up and down my face. For two hours, Nico laces her fingers together across the back of my head and pulls my face into her until I'm choking down pubic hair.

Tonguing inside her labia minora, I'm tonguing the folds of Dr. Marshall's ear. Breathing through my nose, I'm stretching my tongue toward salvation.

Thursday is Virginia Woolf, first. Then it's Anais Nin. Then there's just enough time for a session with Sacajawea before it's morning, and I have to go to work in 1734.

In between, I write down my past in my notebook. This is doing my fourth step, my fearless and complete moral inventory.

Fridays mean Tanya.

By Friday, there are no more rocks in my mom's house.

Tanya comes by the house, and Tanya means anal.

The magic of getting butt is she's as tight as a virgin every time. And Tanya brings toys. Beads and rods and probes, these all smell like bleach, and she smuggles them around in a black leather bag she keeps in the trunk of her car. Tanya works my dog with one hand and her mouth while she presses the first ball on a long string full of greasy red rubber balls against my trapdoor.

My eyes closed, I'm trying to relax enough.

Breathe in. Then out.

Think of the monkey and the chestnuts.

Slow and even, in and then out.

Tanya twisting the first ball against me, I say, "You'd tell me if I sounded too needy, wouldn't you?"

And the first ball pops inside.

"Why don't people believe me," I say, "when I tell them I just don't care?"

And the second ball pops in.

"I really really can't give a shit about anything," I say. Another ball pops in. "I'm not going to get hurt, again," I say. Something else pops inside me.

Tanya still throating my dog, she makes a fist around the dan­gling string and yanks.

Imagine a woman yanking your guts out. See also: My dying mother.

See also: Dr. Paige Marshall.

Tanya yanks again, and my dog triggers, the white soldiers gobbing against the bedroom wallpaper beside her face. She yanks again, and my dog's coughing dry and still coughing.

And still triggering dry, I say, "Damn. For serious, I felt that."

What would Jesus NOT do?

Leaning forward with both my hands spread against the wall, my knees folding a little, I say, "Easy does it." I tell Tanya, "You're not starting a lawn mower."

And Tanya kneeling under me, still looking at the greasy, stinking balls on the floor, says, "Oh boy." She lifts the string of red rubber balls for me to see, and she says, "There are supposed to be ten."

There's only eight and what looks like a lot of empty string.

My ass hurts so much, I finger around back there and then check my fingers for blood. As much as I hurt right now, you'd be amazed there's not blood everywhere.