Choke

by Chuck Palahniuk

It seemed that moment would last forever. That you had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.

For serious, the Mommy told him, “Art never comes from happiness.”

The kid stands, shivering now in the glare, trying to not move, and the Mommy keeps working, telling the huge shadow how someday it will teach people everything that she’s taught it. Someday it will be a doctor saving people. Returning them to happiness. Or something better than happiness: peace. It’ll be respected. Someday.

it wasn’t until then that it dawned on this little stooge that growing strong and rich and smart was only the first half of your life story.

Because in most twelve-step recovery programs, the fourth step makes you take inventory of your life. 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, every sin is right at your fingertips. 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 any time you want.

The old rule about how a thing of beauty is a joy forever, in my experience, even the most beauteous thing is only a joy for about three hours, tops. After that, she’ll want to tell you all about her childhood traumas.

say, “What if that cleaning woman walks in?” And Nico stirs me around inside herself, saying, “Oh yeah. That would be so hot.”

The minute something better than sex comes along, you call me. Have me paged.

These are people you shake hands with every day. Not ugly, not beautiful. You stand next to these legends on the elevator. They serve you coffee. These mythological creatures tear your ticket stub. They cash your paycheck. They put the Communion wafer on your tongue.

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.

The stupid shit we do for money.

“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.”

This is the worst problem with living history museums. They always leave the best parts out. Like typhus. And opium. And scarlet letters. Shunning. Witch-burning.

My job is I’m supposed to be some Irish indentured servant. For six dollars an hour, it’s incredibly realistic.

I’m not so much a good friend as I’m the doctor who wants to adjust your spine every week. Or the dealer who sells you heroin.

I’m not so much a good friend as I’m the savior who wants you to worship him forever.

And I say, “Everything in moderation, dude. Even recovery.” I’m not so much a good friend as I’m the parent who never wants you to really grow up.

That if you could acquire enough, accomplish enough, you’d never want to own or do another thing. That if you could eat or sleep enough, you’d never need more. That if enough people loved you, you’d stop needing love. That you could ever be smart enough. That you could someday get enough sex.

And it’s funny how when somebody saves you, the first thing you want to do is save other people. All other people. Everybody.

shame. Then she turns on the television, some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems.

The magic of sex is it’s acquisition without the burden of possessions. No matter how many women you take home, there’s never a storage problem.

It feels bad, telling you all this. Spoiling the surprise, I mean. You’ll see it all yourself, soon enough. That is, if you live too long. Or if you just give up and go nuts ahead of schedule. My mom, Eva, even you, eventually everybody gets a bracelet.

Here at St. Anthony’s, they show the movie The Pajama Game every Friday night, and every Friday all the same patients crowd in to see it for the first time.

Every morning, they tell you your name. Friends who’ve known each other sixty years get reintroduced. Every morning.

These are doctors, lawyers, captains of industry, who, day to day, can’t master a zipper anymore. This is less teaching than it is damage control. You might as well try to paint a house that’s on fire.

There isn’t a mattress in the place a dozen people haven’t already died on.

That’s pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our own attention. Jacking off. Denial.

In good old Colonial Dunsboro, masochism is a valuable job skill.

More and more, the hardest part of crying is when I can’t stop.

You could put most of these folks in front of a mirror and tell them it’s a television special about old dying miserable people, and they’d watch for hours.

“It’s pathetic,” Paige says, “how we can’t live with the things we can’t understand. How if we can’t explain something we’ll just deny it.”

The way humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.

“You tell me, what does it get you if you can square root a triangle and then some terrorist shoots you in the head? It gets you nothing! This is the real education you need.”

It’s funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with the frame than with the artwork itself.

My only gripe is the way Denny draws women is not the way they look for real. In Denny’s version, the cheesy thighs on some woman will look rock-solid. The bagged-out eyes on some other woman will become clear and toned underneath.

This could be some very depressing website. Death Cam.

A get-well card is not going to fix this.

maybe men say they’re glad not to give birth, all the pain and blood, but really that’s just so much sour grapes. For sure, men can’t do anything near as incredible. Upper body strength, abstract thought, phalluses—any advantages men appear to have are pretty token.

It’s not a big deal, the way Dr. Marshall sees it. We do it every day. Kill the unborn to save the elderly. In the gold wash of the chapel, breathing her reasons into my ear, she asked, every time we burn a gallon of gas or an acre of rain forest, aren’t we killing the future to preserve the present? The whole pyramid scheme of Social Security.

“You know,” he says, “an artificial humanoid created with a limited life span, but implanted with false childhood memories so you think you’re really a real person, except you’re really going to die soon?” And I

“Okay, okay,” Denny says, to me he says, “then are you really just a brain in a pan somewhere being stimulated with chemicals and electricity into thinking you have a real life?”

“Okay,” he says. “Maybe you’re an artificially intelligent computer program that interacts with other programs in a simulated reality.”

“Okay, the way I figure it, you’re just the subject of an experiment and the whole world you know is just an artificial construct populated by actors who play the roles of everybody in your life, and the weather is just special effects and the sky is painted blue and the landscape everywhere is just a set. Is that it?”

“My goal,” the Mommy said, “is not to uncomplicate my life.” She said, “My goal is to uncomplicate myself.”

I tell everybody, I’m tired of being jerked around. Okay? So let’s just not pretend. I don’t have fuck for a heart. You people are not going to make me feel anything. You are not going to get to me. I’m a stupid, callous, scheming bastard. End of story.

I’m taking her in the chapel, I tell Paige. I’m the child of a lunatic. Not a child of God. Let God prove me wrong. He can nail me with a lightning bolt. I’m going to take her on the frigging altar.

With the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and addressed and recorded. Nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. On a roller coaster. At a movie.

The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom. Without access to true chaos, we’ll never have true peace. Unless everything can get worse, it won’t get any better.

The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

If you can change the way people think, she said. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives. And that’s the only lasting thing you can create.