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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."
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