In the women's room, inside Nico, I cross my arms behind my head.

For the next I don't know how long, I've got no problems in the world. No mother. No medical bills. No shitty museum job. No jerk-off best friend. Nothing.

I feel nothing.

To make it last, to keep from triggering, I tell Nice's flowered backside how beautiful she is, how sweet she is and how much I need her. Her skin and hair. To make it last. Because this is the only time I can say it. Because the moment this is over, we'll hate each other. The moment we find ourselves cold and sweating on the bathroom floor, the moment after we both come, we won't want to even look at each other.

The only person we'll hate more than each other is ourselves.

These are the only few minutes I can be human.

Just for these minutes, I don't feel lonely.

And riding me up and down, Nico says, "So when do I get to meet your mom?"

And, "Never," I say. "That's impossible, I mean."

And Nico, her whole body clenched and jacking me with her boiling wet insides, she says, "She in prison or a loony bin or something?"

Yeah, for a lot of her life.

Ask any guy about his mom during sex, and you can delay the big blast forever.

And Nico says, "So is she dead now?"

And I say, "Sort of."

Chapter 3

Anymore, when I go to visit my mom, I don't even pretend to be myself.

Hell, I don't even pretend to know myself very well.

Not anymore.

My mom, it's like her sole occupation at this point is losing weight. What's left of her is so thin, she has to be a puppet. Some kind of special effect. There's just not enough of her yellow skin left to fit a real person inside. Her thin puppet arms hover around on the blankets, always picking at bits of lint. Her shrunken head will collapse around the drinking straw in her mouth. When I used to come as myself, as Victor, her son Victor Mancini, none of those visits lasted ten minutes before she'd ring for the nurse and tell me she was just too tired.

Then one week, my mom thinks I'm some court-appointed public defender who represented her a couple times, Fred Hast­ings. Her face opens up when she sees me and she lies back into her stack of pillows and shakes her head a little, saying, "Oh, Fred." She says, "My fingerprints were all over those boxes of hair dye. It was reckless endangerment, open and shut, but it was still a brilliant sociopolitical action."

I tell her that's not how it looked on the store's security camera.

Plus, there was the kidnapping charge. It was all on video­tape.

And she laughs, she actually laughs and says, "Fred, you were such a fool to try and save me."

She talks that way a half hour, mostly about that misguided incident with the hair dye. Then she asks me to bring her a news­paper from the dayroom.

In the hall outside her room is some doctor, a woman in a white coat holding a clipboard. She has, it looks like, long dark hair twisted into the shape of a little black brain on the back of her head. She's not wearing makeup so her face just looks like skin. A pair of black-framed glasses are folded and sticking out of her chest pocket.

Is she in charge of Mrs. Mancini, I ask.

The doctor looks at the clipboard. She unfolds the glasses and slips them on and looks again, the whole time saying, "Mrs. Mancini, Mrs. Mancini, Mrs. Mancini . . ."

She keeps clicking and unclicking a ballpoint pen in one hand.

I ask, "Why is she still losing weight?"

The skin along the parts in her hair, the skin above and be­hind the doctor's ears, is as clear and white as the skin inside her other tan lines must look. If women knew how their ears come across, the firm fleshy edge, the little dark hood at the top, all the smooth contours coiled and channeling you to the tight darkness inside, well, more women would wear their hair down.

"Mrs. Mancini," she says, "needs a feeding tube. She feels hunger, but she's forgotten what the feeling means. Conse­quently, she doesn't eat."

I say, "How much is this tube going to cost?"

A nurse down the hall calls, "Paige?"

This doctor looks at me in my britches and waistcoat, my powdered wig and buckle shoes, and she says, "What are you supposed to be?"

The nurse calls, "Miss Marshall?"

My job, it's too hard to explain here. "I just happen to be the backbone of early colonial America."

"Which is?" she says.

"An Irish indentured servant."

She just looks at me, nodding her head. Then she looks down at the chart. "It's either we put a tube into her stomach," the doc­tor says. "Or she'll starve to death."

I look into the dark secret insides of her ear and ask if we could maybe explore some other options.

Down the hall, the nurse stands with her fists planted on her hips and shouts, "Miss Marshall!"

And the doctor winces. She holds up an index finger to stop me talking, and she says, "Listen." She says, "I really do have to finish rounds. Let's talk more on your next visit."

Then she turns and walks the ten or twelve steps to where the nurse is waiting and says, "Nurse Gilman." She says, her voice rushed and the words crushed together, "You can at least pay me the respect of calling me Dr. Marshall." She says, "Especially in front of a visitor." She says, "Especially if you're going to shout down the length of a hallway. It's a small courtesy, Nurse Gilman, but I think I've earned that, and I think if you start behaving like a professional yourself, you'll find everyone around you will be a great deal more cooperative. . . ."

By the time I get the newspaper from the dayroom, my mom's asleep. Her terrible yellow hands are crossed on her chest, a plastic hospital bracelet heat-sealed around one wrist.

Chapter 4

The moment Denny bends over, his wig falls off and lands in the mud and horse poop and about two hundred Japanese tourists giggle and crowd forward to get his shaved head on videotape.

I go, "Sorry," and go to pick up the wig. It's not very white anymore, and it smells bad since, for sure, about a million dogs and chickens take a leak here every day.

Since he's bent over, his cravat hangs in his face, blinding him. "Dude," Denny says, "tell me what's happening."

Here I am, the backbone of early colonial America.

The stupid shit we do for money.

From the edge of the town square, His Lord High Charlie, the colonial governor, is watching us, standing with his arms crossed, his feet planted about ten feet apart. Milkmaids carry around buckets of milk. Cobblers hammer on shoes. The black­smith bangs away on the same piece of metal, pretending the same as everybody else not to be watching Denny bent over in the middle of the town square, getting locked in the stocks again.

"They caught me chewing gum, dude," Denny says to my feet.

Being bent over, his nose starts to run, and he sniffs. "For sure," he says and sniffs, "His Highness is going to blab to the town council this time."