The woman who just died, who I just smothered in chocolate, she wasn't even my mother.
"It was an accident," Paige says.
And I say, "How can I be sure of that?"
Behind me, as I stepped outside, somebody must have found the body, because they kept announcing, "Nurse Remington to Room 158. Nurse Remington, please come immediately to Room 158."
I'm not even Italian.
I'm an orphan.
I stagger around Colonial Dunsboro with the birth-deformed chickens, the drug-addicted citizens, and the field-trip kids who think this mess has anything to do with the real past. There's no way you can get the past right. You can pretend. You can delude yourself, but you can't re-create what's over.
The stocks in the middle of the town square are empty. Ursula leads a milk cow past me, both of them smelling like dope smoke. Even the cow's eyes are dilated and bloodshot.
Here, it's always the same day, every day, and there should be some comfort in that. The same as those television shows where the same people are trapped on the same desert island for season after season and never age or get rescued, they just wear more makeup.
This is the rest of your life.
A herd of fourth-graders run by, screaming. Behind them's a man and a woman. The man's holding a yellow notebook, and he says, "Are you Victor Mancini?"
The woman says, "That's him."
And the man holds the notebook up and says, "Is this yours?"
It's my fourth step from the sexaholics group, my complete and ruthless moral inventory of myself. The diary of my sex life. All my sins accounted for.
And the woman says, "So?" To the man with the notebook, she says, "Arrest him, already."
The man says, "Do you know a resident of the St. Anthony's Constant Care Center named Eva Muehler?"
Eva the squirrel. She must've seen me this morning, and she's told them what I did. I killed my mom. Okay, not my mom. That old woman.
The man says, "Victor Mancini, you're under arrest for suspicion of rape."
The girl with the fantasy. It must be she filed charges. The girl with the pink silk bed I ruined. Gwen.
"Hey," I say. "She wanted me to rape her. It was her idea."
And the woman says, "He's lying. That's my mother he's bad-mouthing."
The man starts reciting the Miranda deal. My rights.
And I say, "Gwen's your mother?"
Just by her skin, you can tell this woman's older than Gwen by ten years.
Today, the whole world must be deluded.
And the woman shouts, "Eva Muehler is my mother! And she says you held her down and told her it was a secret game."
That's it. "Oh, her," I say. I say, "I thought you meant this other rape."
The man stops in the middle of his Miranda deal and says, "Are you even listening to your rights, here?"
It's all in the yellow notebook, I tell them. What I did. It was just me accepting responsibility for every sin in the world. "You see," I say, "for a while, I really did think I was Jesus Christ."
From behind his back, the man snaps out a pair of handcuffs.
The woman says, "Any man who would rape a ninety-year-old woman has to be crazy."
I make a nasty face and tell her, "No kidding."
And she says, "Oh, so now you're saying my mother's not attractive?"
And the man snaps the cuffs around one of my hands. He turns me around and snaps my hands together behind my back and says, "How about we go somewhere and straighten this all out?"
In front of all the losers of Colonial Dunsboro, in front of the druggies and the crippled chickens and the kids who think they're getting an education and His Lord High Charlie the Colonial Governor, I'm arrested. It's the same as Denny in the stocks, but for real.
And in another sense, I want to tell them all not to think they're any different.
Around here, everybody's arrested.
Chapter 45
The minute before I left St. Anthony's for the last time, the minute before I was out the door and running, Paige tried to explain.
Yes, she was a doctor. Talking in a rush, her words crowded together. Yes, she was a patient committed here. Clicking and unclicking her ballpoint pen, fast. She was really a doctor of genetics, and she was only a patient here because she'd told the truth. She wasn't trying to hurt me. Pudding still smeared around her mouth. She was just trying to do her job.
In the hallway, during our last moment together, Paige pulled my sleeve so I'd have to look at her, and she said, "You have to believe this."
Her eyes were bulging so the whites showed all around the iris, and the little black brain of her hair was coming loose.
She was a doctor, she said, a specialist in genetics. From the year 2556. And she'd traveled back in time to become impregnated by a typical male of this period in history. So she could preserve and document a genetic sampling, she said. They needed the sample to help cure a plague. In the year 2556. This wasn't a cheap and easy trip. Traveling in time was the equivalent of what space travel is for humans now, she said. It was a chancy, expensive gamble, and unless she came back impregnated with an intact fetus, any future missions would be canceled.
Here in my 1734 costume, bent double with my impacted bowels, I'm still stuck on her idea of a typical male.
"I'm only locked in here because I told people the truth about myself," she says. "You were the only available reproductive male."
Oh, I say, that makes this all lots better. Now everything makes perfect sense.
She just wanted me to know that, tonight, she was to be recalled to the year 2556. This would be the last time we'd ever see each other, and she just wanted me to know that she was grateful.
"I'm profoundly grateful," she said. "And I do love you."
And standing there in the hallway, in the strong light from the sun rising outside the windows, I took a black felt-tipped pen from the chest pocket of her lab coat.
The way she stood with her shadow falling on the wall behind her for the last time, I started to trace her outline.
And Paige Marshall said, "What's that for?"
It's how art was invented.
And I said, "Just in case. It's just in case you're not crazy."
Chapter 46
In most twelve-step recovery programs, the fourth step makes you write a complete and relentless story of your life as an addict. Every lame, suck-ass moment of your life, you have to get a notebook and write it down. A complete inventory of your crimes. That way it's always in your head. Then you have to fix it all. This goes for alcoholics, drug abusers, and overeaters as well as sex addicts.
This way you can go back and review the worst of your life anytime you want.
Still, those who remember the past aren't necessarily any better off.