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  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.

  My yellow notebook, in here is everything about me, seized with a search warrant. About Paige and Denny and Beth. Nico and Leeza and Tanya. The detectives read through it, sitting across a big wood table from me in a locked soundproof room. One wall is a mirror, for sure with a video camera behind it.

  And the detectives ask me, what was I hoping to accomplish by admitting to other people’s crimes?

  They ask me, what was I trying to do?

  To complete the past, I tell them.

  All night, they read my inventory and ask me, what does all this mean?

  Nurse Flamingo. Dr. Blaze. “The Blue Danube Waltz.”

  What we say when we can’t tell the truth. What anything means anymore, I don’t know.

  The police detectives ask if I know the whereabouts of a patient named Paige Marshall. She’s wanted for questioning about the apparent smothering death of a patient named Ida Mancini. My apparent mother.

  Miss Marshall disappeared last night from a locked ward. There’s no visible signs of forced escape. No witnesses. Nothing. She’s just vanished.

  The staff at St. Anthony’s were humoring her in the delusion, the police tell me, that she was a real doctor. They let her wear an old lab coat. It made her more cooperative.

  The staff say she and I were pretty chummy.

  “Not really,” I say. “I mean, I saw her around, but I didn’t really know anything about her.”

  The detectives tell me I don’t have a lot of friends among the nursing staff.

  See also: Clare, RN.

  See also: Pearl, CNA.

  See also: Colonial Dunsboro.

  See also: The sexaholics.

  I don’t ask if they’ve bothered checking for Paige Marshall in the year 2556.

  Digging in my pocket, I find a dime. I swallow it, and it goes down.

  In my pocket, I find a paper clip. But it goes down, too.

  While the detectives look through my mom’s red diary, I look around for anything larger. Something too large to swallow.

  I’ve been choking to death for years. By now this should be easy.

  After a knock on the door, they bring in a dinner tray. A hamburger on a plate. A napkin. A bottle of ketchup. The backup in my guts, the swelling and pain, make it so I’m starving, but I can’t eat.

  They ask me, “What’s all this in the diary?”

  I open the hamburger. I open the bottle of ketchup. I need to eat to survive, but I’m so full of my own shit.

  It’s Italian, I tell them.

  Still reading, the detectives ask, “What’s this stuff that looks like maps? All these pages of drawings?”

  It’s funny, but I’d forgot all that. Those are maps. Maps I did when I was a little boy, a stupid, gullible little shit. You see, my mom told me that I could reinvent the whole world. That I had that kind of power. That I didn’t have to accept the world the way it stood, all property-lined and micromanaged. I could make it anything I wanted.

  That’s how crazy she was.
/>   And I believed her.

  And I slip the cap from the bottle of ketchup into my mouth. And I swallow.

  In the next instant, my legs snap straight so fast my chair flies over behind me. My hands go to gripping around my throat. I’m on my feet and gaping at the painted ceiling, my eyes rolled back. My chin stretches out away from my face.

  Already the detectives are half out of their seats.

  From not breathing, the veins in my neck swell. My face gets red, gets hot. Sweat springs up on my forehead. Sweat blots through the back of my shirt. With my hands, I hold tight around my neck.

  Because I can’t save anybody, not as a doctor, not as a son. And because I can’t save anybody, I can’t save myself.

  Because now I’m an orphan. I’m unemployed and unloved. Because my guts hurt, and I’m dying anyway, from the inside out.

  Because you have to plan your getaway.

  Because after you’ve crossed some lines, you just keep crossing them.

  And there’s no escaping from constant escape. Distracting ourselves. Avoiding confrontation. Getting past the moment. Jacking off. Television. Denial.

  The detectives look up from the diary, and one says, “Don’t panic. It’s like it says in the yellow notebook. He’s just faking it.”

  They stand and watch me.

  My hands around my throat, I can’t draw any air. The stupid little boy who cried wolf.

  Like that woman with her throat full of chocolate. The woman not his mommy.

  For the first time in longer than I can remember, I feel peaceful. Not happy. Not sad. Not anxious. Not horny. Just all the higher parts of my brain closing up shop. The cerebral cortex. The cerebellum. That’s where my problem is.

  I’m simplifying myself.

  Somewhere balanced in the perfect middle between happiness and sadness.

  Because sponges never have a bad day.

  Chapter 47

  One morning the school bus pulled up to the curb, and while his foster mother stood waving, the stupid little boy got on. He was the only passenger, and the bus blew past the school at sixty miles per hour. The bus driver was the Mommy.

  This was the last time that she came back to claim him.

  Sitting behind the huge steering wheel and looking up at him in the visor mirror, she said, “You’d be amazed how easy it is to rent one of these.”

  She turned into an on-ramp for the freeway and said, “This gives us a good six hours head start before the bus company reports this crate stolen.”

  The bus rolled down onto the freeway, and the city rolled by outside, and after there wasn’t a house every second, the Mommy told him to come sit up next to her. She took a red diary from a bag of stuff and took out a map, all folded.

  With one hand, the Mommy shook the map open across the steering wheel, and with her other hand she unrolled her window. She worked the steering wheel with her knees. With just her eyes, she looked back and forth between the road and the map.

  Then she crumpled the map and fed it out the window.

  The whole time, the stupid boy just sat there.

  She said to get the red diary.

  When he tried to give it, she said, “No. Open it to the next page.” She said to find a pen in the glove compartment and fast, because there was a river coming up.

  The road cut through everything, all the houses and farms and trees, and in a moment they were on a bridge going across a river that went off forever on both sides of the bus.

  “Quick,” the Mommy said. “Draw the river.”

  As if he’d just discovered this river, as if he’d just discovered the whole world, she said to draw a new map, a map of the world just for himself. His own personal world.

  “I don’t want you to just accept the world as it’s given,” she said.

  She said, “I want you to invent it. I want you to have that skill. To create your own reality. Your own set of laws. I want to try and teach you that.”

  The boy had a pen now, and she said to draw the river in the book. Draw the river, and draw the mountains up ahead. And name them, she said. Not with words he already knew, but to make up new words that didn’t already mean a bunch of other stuff.

  To create his own symbols.

  The little boy thought with the pen in his mouth and the book open in his lap, and after a little, he drew it all.

  And what’s stupid is, the little boy forgot all this. It wasn’t until years later that the police detectives found this map. That he remembered he did this. That he could do this. He had this power.

  And the Mommy looked at his map in the rearview mirror and said, “Perfect.” She looked at her watch, and her foot pressed down, and they went faster, and she said, “Now write it in the book. Draw the river on our new map. And get ready, there’s lots more stuff that needs a name coming up.”

  She said, “Because the only frontier left is the world of intangibles, ideas, stories, music, art.”

  She said, “Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.”

  She said, “Because I won’t always be around to nag you.”

  But the truth is, the kid didn’t want to be responsible for himself, for his world. The truth is, the stupid little shit was already planning to make a scene in the next restaurant, to get the Mommy arrested and out of his life forever. Because he was tired of adventure, and he thought his precious, boring, stupid life would just go on and on forever.

  He was already choosing between safety, security, contentment, and her.

  Driving the bus with her knees, the Mommy reached over and squeezed his shoulder and said, “What do you want for lunch?”

  And as if it was just an innocent answer, the little boy said, “Corn dogs.”

  Chapter 48

  In another minute, the arms come around me from behind. Some police detective is hugging me tight, double-fisting me under the rib cage, breathing into my ear, “Breathe! Breathe, damn it!”

  Breathing into my ear, “You’re okay.”

  Two arms hug me, lift me off my feet, and a stranger whispers, “You’re going to be fine.”

  Periabdominal pressure.

  Somebody pounds me on the back the way a doctor pounds a newborn baby, and I let fly with the bottle cap. My bowels burst loose down my pant leg with the two rubber balls and all the shit piled up behind them.

  My entire private life made public.

  Nothing left to hide.

  The monkey and the chestnuts.

  In the next second, I’m collapsed on the floor. I’m sobbing while someone tells me how everything is all right. I’m alive. They saved me. I almost died. They hold my head to their chest and rock me, saying, “Just relax.”

  They put a glass of water to my lips and say, “Hush.”

  They say it’s all over.

  Chapter 49

  Mobbed around Denny’s castle are a thousand people I can’t remember, but who will never forget me.

  It’s almost midnight. Stinking and orphaned and unemployed and unloved, I pick my way through the crowd until I get to Denny, standing in the middle, and I say, “Dude.”

  And Denny goes, “Dude.” Watching the mob of people holding rocks.

  He says, “You should definitely not be here right now.”

  After we were on TV, all day Denny says, all these smiling people keep turni!. Beautiful rocks. Rocks like you won’t believe. Quarried granite and ashlar basalt. Dressed blocks of sandstone and limestone. They come one by one, bringing mortar and shovels and trowels.

  They all ask, each of them, “Where’s Victor?”

  This is so many people they filled the block so nobody could get any work done. They all wanted to give me their stone in person. All these men and women, they’ve all been asking Denny and Beth if I’m doing okay.

  They say I looked really terrible on television.

  All it will take is one person to brag about being a hero. Being a savior, and how he’d saved Victor’s life in a restaurant.

  Sa
ved my life.

  The term “powder keg” pretty much nails it.

  Out on the edge of things, some hero’s got everybody talking. Even in the dark, you can see the revelation ripple through the crowd. It’s the invisible line between the people still smiling and the people not.

  Between everybody who’s still a hero and the people who know the truth.

  And everybody stripped of their proudest moment, they start looking around. All these people reduced from saviors to fools in an instant, they’re going a little nuts.

  “You need to scram, dude,” Denny says.

  The crowd is so thick you can’t see Denny’s work, the columns and walls, the statues and stairways. And somebody shouts, “Where’s Victor?”

  And someone else shouts, “Give us Victor Mancini!”

  And for sure, I deserve this. A firing squad. My whole overextended family.

  Someone turns on the headlights of some car, and I’m spotlighted against a wall.

  My shadow looming horrible over all of us.

  Me, the deluded little rube who thought you could ever earn enough, know enough, own enough, run fast enough, hide well enough. Fuck enough.

  Between me and the headlights are the outlines of a thousand faceless people. All the people who thought they loved me. Who thought they’d given me back my life. The legend of their lives, evaporated. Then one hand comes up with a rock, and I close my eyes.

  From not breathing, the veins in my neck swell. My face gets red, gets hot.

  Something thuds at my feet. A rock. Another rock thuds. A dozen more. A hundred more thuds. Rocks crash and the ground shakes. Rocks crumble together around me and everyone’s shouting.

  It’s the martyrdom of Saint Me.

  My eyes closed and watering, the headlights shine red through my eyelids, through my own flesh and blood. My eye juice.

  More thuds against the ground. The ground quakes and people scream with effort. More shaking and crashing. More swearing. And then everything gets quiet.

  To Denny I say, “Dude.”