Choke Page 23

  Still with my eyes closed, I sniff and say, “Tell me what’s happening.”

  And something soft and cotton and not very clean-smelling closes around my nose, and Denny says, “Blow, dude.”

  And then everybody’s gone. Almost everybody.

  Denny’s castle, the walls are pulled down, the rocks busted and rolled away from how hard they fell. The columns are toppled. The colonnades. The pedestals thrown over. The statues, smashed. Busted rock and mortar, rubble fills the courtyards, fills the fountains. Even the trees are splintered and flattened down under the fallen rock. The battered stairways lead to nowhere.

  Beth sits on a rock, looking at a busted statue that Denny made of her. Not how she looked for real, but how she looked to him. As beautiful as he thinks. Perfect. Busted, now.

  I ask, earthquake?

  And Denny says, “You’re close, but this was some other kind of act of God.”

  There wasn’t one stone on top of another.

  Denny sniffs and says, “You smell like crap, dude.”

  I’m not supposed to leave town until further notice, I tell him. The police asked me.

  Outlined in the headlights is just one last person. Just a hunched black silhouette until the headlights veer off, the parked car drives away.

  In the moonlight, we look, Denny and Beth and I, to see who’s still here.

  It’s Paige Marshall. Her white lab coat smudged and the sleeves rolled up. The plastic bracelet around her wrist. Her deck shoes are wet and squishing.

  Denny steps forward and tells her, “I’m sorry, but there’s been a gross misunderstanding.”

  And I tell him, no, it’s cool. It’s not what he thinks.

  Paige steps closer and says, “Well, I’m still here.” Her black hair is all undone, the little black brain of her bun. Her eyes all swollen and red all around them, she sniffs and shrugs and says. “I guess that means I’m insane.”

  We all look down at the scattered rocks, just rocks, just some brown lumps of nothing special.

  One leg of my pants is wet with shit and still sticking to my leg on the inside, and I say, “Well.” I say, “I guess I’m not saving anybody.”

  “Yeah, well.” Paige holds up her hand and says, “You think you can get this bracelet off me?”

  I say, yeah. We can try.

  Denny is kicking through the fallen rock, rolling rocks with his foot until he stoops to pick one up. Then Beth goes to help him.

  Paige and I just look at each other, at who each other is for real. For the first time.

  We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heros or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are.

  Letting our past decide our future.

  Or we can decide for ourselves.

  And maybe it’s our job to invent something better.

  In the trees, a mourning dove calls. It must be midnight.

  And Denny says, “Hey, we could use some help here.”

  Paige goes, and I go. The four of us dig with our hands under the edge of the rock. In the dark, the feeling is rough and cold and takes forever, and all of us together, we struggle to just put one rock on top of another.

  “You know that ancient Greek girl?” Paige says.

  Who drew the outline of her lost lover.? I say, yeah.

  And she says, “You know that eventually she just forgot him and invented wallpaper.”

  It’s creepy, but here we are, the Pilgrims, the crackpots of our time, trying to establish our own alternate reality. To build a world out of rocks and chaos.

  What it’s going to be, I don’t know.

  Even after all that rushing around, where we’ve ended up is the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.

  And maybe knowing isn’t the point.

  Where we’re standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JUNE 2002

  Copyright © 2001 by Chuck Palahniuk

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2001.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Portions of this book have previously appeared in Playboy.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows:

  Palahniuk, Chuck.

  Choke: a novel / by Chuck Palahniuk.

  p. cm.

  1. Alzheimer’s disease—Patients—Fiction. 2. Sex addiction—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3566.A4554 C47 2001

  813′.54—dc21

  00-063905

  eISBN: 978-1-4000-3270-9

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.0