"He smells like women's perfume and hair spray," Fertility says. "I don't see what my brother ever saw in him."
   The perfume and hair spray were from spraying the roses, but I can't tell her that.
   "The other thing is he had chipped red nail polish on his fingernails."
   It was red spray paint from me touching up the roses.
   "And he's a terrible dancer."
   Right now, me getting killed would be redundant.
   "And his teeth are weird, not rotten, but crooked and little."
   You could stab a knife right through my heart and you'd be too late.
   "And he has these gross little monkey hands."
   Right now, getting killed would be a breath of spring.
   "That's supposed to mean he has a little wiener dick."
   If Fertility keeps talking, my caseworker will have one less client in the morning.
   "And he's not obese," Fertility says, "he's not a whale, but he's too fat for me."
   In case there's a sniper outside, I open the blinds and stand my gross obese body in the window. Please, anybody with a rifle and a scope. Shoot me right here. Right in my big fat heart. Right in my little wiener.
   "He's not anything like you," Fertility says.
   Oh, I think she'd be surprised how much we're alike.
   "You're so mysterious."
   I ask, if she could change any one thing about this guy at the mausoleum, what would it be?
   "Just so he'd quit pestering me," she says, "I'd kill him."
   Well, she's not alone there. Be my guest. Take a number, and stand in line.
   "Forget about him," she says, and her voice is sinking deeper in her throat. "I called because I want to get you off. Tell me what you want me to do. Make me do something terrible."
   Opportunity knocks.
   Here's the next part of my big plan.
   This is something I'll go to Hell for, but I tell her, That guy you don't like, I want you to go screw his brains out and then tell me what it was like.
   She says, "No way. No day."
   Then I'm hanging up.
   She says, "Wait. What if I call you and lie? I could just make the whole thing up. You wouldn't know."
   No, I say, I'd know. I could tell.
   "No way am I going to sleep with that geek."
   What if she just kissed him?
   Fertility says, "No."
   What if she just took him out on a date? They could just go out for the afternoon. Get him out of the mortuary and he might look better. Take him on a picnic. Do something fun.
   Fertility says, "Then will you get together with me?"
   Definitely.
   The sun wakes me up where I'm crouched next to the stove with a butcher knife in my fist. The way I feel, the idea of getting killed isn't so bad. My back hurts. My eyes feel cut open with a razor. I get dressed, and I go to work.
   I sit in the back of the bus so no one can sit behind me with a knife, a poison dart, a piano-wire garrote.
   At the house where I work, the regular caseworker's car is in the driveway. On the lawn are some normal red-looking birds walking around in the grass. The sky is blue-colored the way you'd expect. Nothing looks out of the ordinary.
   In the house, the caseworker is on all fours scrubbing the kitchen tile with bleach and ammonia so strong it makes the air around her go all wavy with toxins that bring tears to my eyes.
   "I hope you don't mind," she says, still scrubbing. "This was in your daily planner for you to do today. I came over early."
   Bleach plus ammonia equals deadly chlorine gas.
   The tears rolling down my cheeks, I ask, did she get my messages?
   The caseworker does most of her breathing through a cigarette. The fumes must be nothing to her.
   "No, I called in sick," she says. "This cleaning things is just so fulfilling. There's some coffee and homemade muffins I just baked. Why don't you just relax?"
   I ask, doesn't she want to hear all about my problems? Take some notes? The killer called me last night. I was awake all night. He's picked me out to kill me. God forbid she should stop scrubbing the floor and get up and call the police for my sake.
   "Don't worry," she says. She dips her scrub brush in her bucket of cleaning water. "The suicide rate took a big jump last night. That's why I couldn't face the office this morning."
   The way she's scrubbing the floor, it will never come clean again. Once you scrub the clear gloss coat off a vinyl floor with an oxidizer like bleach, you're fucked. When she's done, the floor will be so porous, everything will stain. God forbid I should try and tell her this. She thinks she's doing a great job.
   I ask, So how does the high suicide rate keep me alive?
   "Don't you get it? We lost eleven more clients last night. Nine the night before. Twelve the night before that. We're looking at a landslide here," she says.
   So?
   "With numbers like that every night, if there is a killer, he doesn't need to kill anybody."
   She starts singing. Maybe the deadly chlorine gas is having its effect. Her scrubbing does a little soft-shoe dance to go with her song. She says, "This won't sound appropriate, but congratulations."
   I'm the last Creedish.
   "You're almost the last survivor."
   I ask how many others.
   "In this town, one," she says. "Nationwide, only five."
   Let's play like old times, I say. I tell her, Let's us get out the old Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and pick out a new way for me to go crazy. Let's do it. Just for old times' sake. Get the book.
   The caseworker sighs and looks down at me reflected with my face wet with tears in her puddle of dirty scrub water on the floor. "Listen," she says, "I've got some real work to do here. Besides, the DSM is lost. I haven't seen it in a couple days."
   She scrubs back and forth, saying, "Not that I miss it."
   Okay, this has been a tough ten years. Almost all her clients are gone. She's stressed out. Burned out. No, incinerated. Cremated. She sees herself as a failure.
   She's suffering from what's called Learned Helplessness.
   "Besides," she says, scrubbing hard, here and there at the last spots where the vinyl is still intact, "I can't hold your hand forever. If you're going to kill yourself, I can't stop you, and it's not my fault. According to my records, you're perfectly happy and adjusted. We have the tests. There's empirical evidence to prove it."
   The fumes in here make it so I have to sniff back my tears.
   She says, "Kill yourself or don't kill yourself, but stop torturing me. I'm trying to move on with my life."
   She says, "Every day in America people kill themselves. The problem isn't worse just because you know most of them."
   She says, "Don't you think it's time you cut your own meat?"
   The rumor was you had to squeeze a frog to death with your bare hand. You had to eat a live earthworm. To prove you could obey just as Abraham did when he tried to kill his son to make God happy, you had to cut off your little finger with an ax.
   That was the rumor.
   After that, you had to cut off someone else's little finger.
   You never saw anybody after they were baptized so you couldn't tell if they still had a little finger. You couldn't ask them if they had had to squeeze the frog.
   Right after you were baptized, you got on a truck and left the colony. You'd never see the colony again. The truck was headed out into the wicked outside world where they already had your first work assignment lined up for you. The big outside world with all its wonderful new sins, and the better you did on the tests, the better the job you'd get.
   You could figure out what some of the tests were going to be.
   The church elders told you right up front if you were too skinny or too fat for how tall you were. They set aside the whole year before your baptism for you to get yourself perfect. You were excused from work at home so you could go to special lessons all day. Bible lessons. Cleaning lessons. Etiquette, fabric care, and you know all the rest. If you were fat you ate to lose weight, and if you were too skinny you just ate.
   That whole year before baptism, every tree, every friend, everything you saw had the halo around it of your knowing you'd never see it again.
   By what you studied, you knew about most of the tests you'd get.
   Beyond that, the rumor was there was more we didn't know would happen.
   We knew by rumor that you'd be bare naked for part of the baptism. One church elder would put his hand on you and tell you to cough. Another elder would slide a finger up your anus.
   Another church elder would follow along with you and write on a card how well you did.
   You didn't know how you were supposed to study for a prostate exam.
   We all knew the baptisms took place in the meeting house basement. The daughters went to baptism in the spring with only the church women in attendance. Sons went in the fall with only the men there to tell you to get up on the scale naked and be weighed or ask you to recite a chapter and verse from the Bible.
   Job, Chapter Fourteen, Verse Five:"Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months are with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass."
   And you had to recite it naked.
   Psalm 101, Psalms of David, Verse Two:"I will behave myself wisely in a perfect way ... I will walk within my house with a perfect heart."
   You had to know how to make the best dust cloths (soak rags in diluted turpentine, then hang them to dry). You had to figure how deep to set a six-foot-tall gatepost so it could support a five-foot-wide gate. Another church elder would blindfold you and give you cloth samples to feel, and you had to say which was cotton or wool or a poly-cotton blend.
   You had to identify houseplants. Stains. Insects. Fix small appliances. Do elegant handwriting for invitations.
   We guessed about the tests from what we had to study in school. Other parts came from sons who weren't too bright. Sometimes your father would tell you inside information so you might score a little higher and get a better job assignment instead of a lifetime of misery. Your friends would tell each other, and then everybody would know.
   Nobody wanted to embarrass their family. And nobody wanted a lifetime of removing asbestos.
   The church elders were going to stand you in one place and you'd have to read a chart at the far end of the meeting hall.
   The church elders would give you a needle and thread and time how long you took to sew on a missing button.
   We knew about what kind of jobs we were headed for in the wicked outside world from what the elders said to scare or inspire us. To make us work harder, they told us about wonderful jobs in gardens bigger than anything we could picture this side of Heaven. Some jobs were in palaces so enormous you'd forget you were indoors. These gardens were called amusement parks. The palaces, hotels.
   To make us study even harder, they told us about jobs where you'd spend years pumping cesspools, burning offal, spraying poisons. Removing asbestos. There were jobs so terrible, they told us we'd be glad to run up and meet death halfway.
   There were jobs so boring, you'd find ways to cripple yourself so you couldn't work.
   So you memorized every minute of your last year in the church district colony.
   Ecclesiastes, Chapter Ten, Verse Eighteen:"By much slothfulness the building decayeth; and through idleness of the hands the house droppeth through."Lamentations, Chapter Five, Verse Five:"Our necks are under persecution: we labour, and have no rest."
   To keep bacon from curling, chill it a few minutes in the freezer before frying.
   Rub the top of your meat loaf with an ice cube, and the loaf won't crack while it bakes.
   To keep lace crisp, iron it between sheets of waxed paper.
   We were kept busy learning. We had a million facts to remember. We memorized half the Old Testament.
   We thought all this teaching was to make us smart.
   What it did was make us stupid.
   With all the little facts we learned, we never had the time to think. None of us ever considered what life would be like cleaning up after a stranger every day. Washing dishes all day. Feeding a stranger's children. Mowing a lawn. All day. Painting houses. Year after year. Ironing bedsheets.
   Forever and ever.
   Work without end.
   We were all of us so excited about passing tests, we never looked beyond the night of the baptism.
   We were all so worried about our worst fears, squeezing frogs, eating worms, poisons, asbestos, we never considered how boring life would be even if we succeeded and got a good job.
   Washing dishes, forever.
   Polishing silver, forever.
   Mowing the lawn.
   Repeat.

  The night before the baptism, my brother Adam took me out on the back porch of our family's house and gave me a haircut. Every other family in the church district colony with a seventeen-year-old son was giving him the exact same haircut.
   In the wicked outside world, they call this product standardization.
   My brother told me not to smile, but to stand straight up and down and answer any questions in a clear voice.
   In the outside world, they call this marketing.
   My mother was putting my clothes together in a bag for me to take with me. We were all of us pretending to sleep that night.
   In the wicked outside world, my brother told me, there were sins the church didn't know enough to forbid. I couldn't wait.
   The next night was our baptism, and we did everything we'd expected. Then nothing else. Just when you were ready to hack off your little finger and the finger of the son next to you, nothing happened. After you'd been poked and felt and weighed and questioned about the Bible and housework, then they told you to get dressed.
   You took your bag with your extra clothes inside, and you walked from the meeting house into a truck that was idling outside.
   The truck drove out into the wicked outside world, into the night, and nobody you knew would ever see you again.
   You never found out how high you scored.
   Even if you knew you'd done well, that good feeling didn't last very long.
   There was already a work assignment waiting for you.
   God forbid you should ever get bored and want more.
   It was church doctrine that the rest of your life would be the same work. The same being alone. Nothing would change. Every day. This was success. Here was the prize.
   Mowing the lawn.
   And mowing the lawn.
   And mowing the lawn.
   Repeat.
   Joke.



   On the bus on the way to our third date, Fertility and I are sitting in front of some guy when we overhear the temperature is eighty, ninety degrees, too hot for June anywhere, and the bus windows are open, with the smell of traffic making me a little sick. The vinyl seats are hot the way touching anything will feel in Hell, hot. The bus is Fertility's idea for going downtown. On a date, she told me. Downtown. It's the afternoon so only people without jobs or with night jobs or crazy people with Tourette's Syndrome are going anywhere.
   Here's the date she has to take me on since she won't sleep with me and won't even kiss me, no way, no day.
   Who's sitting behind us I can't imagine. He was nobody to notice, just a guy in a shirt. Blond hair. If you pressed me, I'd have to say ugly. I don't remember. The bus comes by the mausoleum every fifteen minutes, and we just got on. We met at Crypt 678, the same as every time.
   I do remember the joke. It's an old joke. Houses of the city are going by outside the bus, behind cars parked along the curb and between fences to mark the property lines, and the joker leans his head between Fertility and me and whispers, "What's harder than getting a camel through the eye of a needle?"
   These jokes are all over. No matter how not funny they are, you can't not hear them.
   Neither Fertility or me says anything back.
   And the joker whispers, "Buying life insurance to cover a Creedish church member."
   The truth is, nobody laughs at these jokes except me, and I only laugh so I'll fit in. I laugh so I won't not fit in. The main thing I worry about in public is maybe people can tell I'm a survivor. The church costume I got rid of years ago. God forbid I should look like one of those stupid crazy people in the Midwest who all killed themselves because they thought their God was calling them home.
   My mother, my father, my brother Adam, my sisters, my other brothers, they're all dead and in the ground getting laughed at, but I'm alive. I still have to live in this world and get along with people.
   So I laugh.
   Because I have to do something, make some noise, shout, scream, cry, swear, howl, I laugh. It's all just different ways to vent.
   These jokes are everywhere this morning, and you have to do something not to start crying all the time. Nobody laughs harder than me.
   The joker whispers, "Why did the Creedish cross the road?"
   Maybe he's not even talking to Fertility and me.
   "Because he couldn't get any cars to hit him."
   Behind everybody is the roar of the bus, pushed down the street by its engine in the back, putting out stink-colored smoke.
   Today, all the jokes are because of the newspaper. From where I sit, I can see the headline below the fold on the front pages of five people hiding behind today's morning edition. It says:
   "Cult Survivors Dwindle"
   The article says how the curtain is almost closed on the tragedy of the Creedish church mass suicide ten years ago. The article says how the last surviving members of the Creedish church, the cult based in central Nebraska that committed mass suicide rather than face an FBI investigation and national attention, well, the newspaper says only six church members are known to still exist. They don't name names, but I must be one of the last half-dozen.
   The rest of the story jumps to page A9, but you get the gist. When you read between the lines, it says, Good riddance.
   They don't write anything about suspect deaths where it looked like murder. There's nothing about how a killer is maybe stalking those last six church survivors.
   Behind me, the joker whispers, "What do you call a Creedish with blond hair?"
   In my head I tell him, Dead. I've heard all these jokes.
   "What do you call a Creedish with red hair?"
   Dead.
   "With brown hair?"
   Dead.
   The guy whispers, "What's the difference between a Creedish and a corpse?"
   Just a matter of hours.
   The guy whispers, "What did the Creedish yell when the hearse drove by?"
   Taxi!
   The guy whispers, "How can you pick out a Creedish on a crowded bus?"
   Someone pulls the cord for the next stop and rings the bell.
   And Fertility twists around to say, "Shut up." She goes loud enough to bring people out from behind their newspapers, she says, "You're joking about suicide, about people that people loved that are dead. So just shut up."
   It's really loud she says this. How bright her eyes are, gray but looking silver, it makes me wonder if Fertility isn't Creedish or if she's still peeved about her brother being dead. She's being such an overreaction.
   The bus pulls to the curb right then, and the joker gets up in the aisle and starts out. The same as in church, we're sitting in the bench seats with the aisle down the middle of the bus. The guy waiting in line to get off, his pants are the baggy brown wool only a survivor would wear in this heat. The church costume suspenders crisscross his back. The brown wool jacket is folded over his arm. He shuffles up the aisle of the bus, he stops a minute while other people get off, and he turns and just touches the brim of his straw hat. He's familiar from somewhere, but it's been so long. His smell is sweat and wool and straw of a farm.
   Where I know him from I can't remember. His voice, I remember. His voice, just his voice, over my shoulder, into my telephone.
   May you die with all your work done.
   His face is the face I see in the mirror.
   Not even thinking, I say his name out loud.
   Adam. Adam Branson.
   The joker says, "Do I know you from somewhere?"
   But I say, No.
   The line moves a few steps, taking him farther away, and tie says, "Didn't we grow up together?"
   And I say, No.
   Standing at the door of the bus, he shouts, "Aren't you my brother?"
   And I shout, No.
   And he's gone.
   Luke, Chapter Twenty-two, Verse Thirty-four:" ... thou shalt thrice deny that thou knowest me."
   The bus starts back into traffic.
   The only way to describe the guy is ugly. Geeky. A tad overweight. A loser. Pathetic at best. A victim. My big brother by three minutes. A Creedish.
   According to her body language, the psychology textbooks would say Fertility is pissed off at me for laughing. Her legs are crossed at the knee and ankle. She looks out the window as if where we're at is any different.
   According to my daily planner, right now I should be waxing the dining-room floor. There's the gutters to clean. There's a stain to clean up in the driveway where I work. I should be peeling the white asparagus for dinner tonight.
   I shouldn't be out on a date with a lovely and angry Fertility Hollis even if I killed her brother and she has the secret hots for my voice on the phone at night but can't stand me in person.
   The truth is, it doesn't matter what I should do. What any survivor should do. According to everything we grew up believing, we're corrupt and evil and unclean.
   The air moving along downtown in the bus with us is hot and dense, mixed in with bright sunlight and burning gasoline. Flowers move by, planted in the ground, roses that should have a smell, red, yellow, orange all the way open but without effect. The lanes of traffic move along relentless as a conveyor belt.
   Everything we can do is wrong as long as we're still alive.
   The feeling is you have no control. The feeling is that we're being delivered.
   It's not like we're traveling. We're being processed. It's more like we're just waiting. It's just a matter of time.
   There's nothing I can do right, and my brother's out there to kill me.
   The buildings of downtown start to pile up along the sidewalk. The traffic gets slow. Fertility lifts her arm to pull the cord, ding, and the bus stops to let us out in front of a department store. Artificial men and women are posed in the windows wearing clothes. Smiling. Laughing. Pretending to have a good time. I know just how they feel.
   The clothes I'm wearing are just pants and a plaid shirt, but they belong to the man who I work for. All morning, I was upstairs trying on different combinations of clothes and going downstairs to where the caseworker was vacuuming lampshades to ask her what she thought.
   There's a big clock above the doors into the store, and Fertility looks up. She says to me, "Hurry. We have to be there by two o'clock."
   She takes my hand in her amazing cold hand, cold and dry even in the heat, and we push in through the doors, into the air conditioning and first floor with piles of what's there to buy on tables and inside glass cases, locked.
   "We have to be on the fifth floor," Fertility says, her hand tight around mine and pulling. We charge up the escalators. Second floor, Men's. Third floor, Children's. Fourth floor, Junior Miss. Fifth floor, Women's.
   That kind of recorded music comes out the vents in the ceiling. It's a Cha-Cha. Two slow steps and three fast. There's a crossover step and a women's under-arm turn. Fertility taught me.
   This is less of a date than I thought. Clothes on racks, hanging on hangers. Salespeople walk around dressed really well and asking if they can help. None of this is anything I haven't seen before.
   I ask, does she want to dance, here?
   "Wait a minute," Fertility says. "Just wait."
   What happens first is the smell of smoke.
   "Back here," Fertility says, and leads me into the forest of long dresses for sale.
   Then what happens is bells start ringing, and people head for the escalators, stepping down them the way they would ordinary stairs since the escalators are stopped. People are walking down the up escalator, and this looks as wrong as breaking a law. A saleslady empties out her register into a zippered bag, and looks across the floor at some people by the elevators, standing, looking up at the elevator numbers, holding big glossy shopping bags with handles and stuff folded inside.
   The bells are still ringing. The smoke is thick enough for us to watch it roll across the lights in the ceiling.
   "Don't use the elevators," the saleslady shouts. "When it's a fire, the elevators don't work. You'll have to use the stairs."
   She rushes over to them through the maze of clothes on racks, the zippered bag tucked in her arm, quarterback-style, and she herds them through a door marked EXIT.
   Then it's just Fertility and me, and the lights flicker and go out.
   In the dark, the smoke and the feel of satin all around us, the rub of cut velvet, the cold of silk, the smooth of polished cotton, the bells ringing, all the dresses, the scratch of wool, the cold of Fertility's hand on mine, she says, "Don't worry."
   The little green signs shine at us across the dark, saying EXIT.
   The bells ringing.
   "Just stay calm," Fertility says.
   The bells ringing.
   "Any minute now," Fertility says.
   Bright orange flashes in the dark on the other side of the floor, breaking everything into strange shapes of orange against black. The dresses and pants between here and there are hanging black shapes of people with arms and legs that burst into flame.
   The shapes of a thousand people burning and collapsing head toward us. The bells are ringing so loud you feel it, and only Fertility's cold hand is keeping me here.
   "It's any second now," she says.
   The heat's close enough to feel. The smoke's thick enough to taste. Not twenty feet away, the scarecrow shapes of women made by clothes on hangers start smoldering and slump to the floor. Breathing gets hard, and my eyes won't stay open.
   And the bells ring.

  My clothes feel ironed hot and dry against me.
   The fire is that close.
   Fertility says, "Isn't this great? Don't you just love it?"
   I put my hand up and it makes a shadow of cool between my face and the rack of rayon burning next to us.
   This is the way to tell about fabric content. Pull a few threads off a garment, and hold them over a flame. If they don't burn, it's wool. If they burn slowly, it's cotton. If they torch the way the slacks next to us are blazing, the fabric is synthetic. Polyester. Rayon. Nylon.
   Fertility says, "It's right now."
   Then it's cold before I can think why. It's wet. Water pours down. The orange light flickers, lower, lower, gone. The smokes washes out of the air.
   One by one, spotlights blink on to show what's left in huge shadows of black and white. The ringing bells stop. The recorded Cha-Cha music comes back on.
   "I saw this all happen in a dream," Fertility says. "We were never in any real danger."
   This is the same as her and Trevor on the ocean liner that only sank halfway.
   "Next week," Fertility says, "there's a commercial bakery that's going to explode. You want to go watch? I see at least three or four people getting killed."
   My hair, her hair, my clothes, her clothes, there isn't a smudge or burn on us.
   Daniel, Chapter Three, Verse Twenty-seven:" ... the fire had no power, nor was an hair of their head singed, neither were their coats changed, nor the smell of fire had passed on them."
   Been there, I'm thinking. Done that.
   "Hurry," she says. "Some firemen will be coming up here in a few minutes." She takes my hands in hers and says, "Let's not let this Cha-Cha go to waste."
   One, two, cha cha cha. We dance, three, four, cha cha cha.
   The wreckage, the burned arms and legs of the clothes tangled on the floor around us, the ceiling hanging down, the water still falling, everything soaking wet, we dance one, two, cha cha cha.
   And that's just how they find us.
   There's a gas station going to explode next week. There's a pet store where all the canaries, their whole inventory of hundreds of canaries, will escape. Fertility has previewed all this in dream after dream. There's a hotel where a water pipe is leaking right this moment. For weeks, the water has been dripping inside the walls, dissolving plaster, rotting wood, rusting metal, and at 3:04 next Tuesday afternoon, the mammoth crystal chandelier in the middle of the lobby ceiling will drop.
   In her dream, there's a rattle of lead crystal thingamabobs, then a spray of plaster dust. Some bracket will pop the head off a rusted bolt. In Fertility's dream, the bolt head lands, plop, on the carpet next to an old man with luggage. He picks it up and turns it over in his palm, looking at the rust and the shining steel inside the stress fracture.
   A woman pulling her luggage on wheels stops next to the man and asks if he's waiting in line.
   The old man says, "No."
   The woman says, "Thank you."
   A clerk at the desk hits a bell and says, "Front please!"
   A bellhop steps forward.
   At that moment the chandelier falls.
   That's how exact Fertility's dreams get, and in each dream she looks for another detail. The woman is wearing a red suit, jacket and skirt with a Christian Dior gold chain belt. The old man has blue eyes. His hand holding the bolt head has a gold wedding band. The bellhop has a pierced ear, but he's got the earring out.
   Behind the desk clerk, Fertility says, there's a complicated French Baroque clock inside a frou-frou case of gilded lead with seashells and dolphins supporting the clock dial. The time is 3:04 p.m.
   Fertility told me all this with her eyes closed. Remembering it or making it up, I couldn't tell.
   I Thessalonians, Chapter Five, Verse Twenty:"Despise not prophesyings."
   The chandelier will blink out at the second it falls so everybody underneath will look up. What happens after that, she can't say. She always wakes up. The dreams always end there, at the moment the chandelier falls or the plane crashes. Or the train derails. The lightning strikes. The earth quakes.
   She's started keeping a calendar of upcoming disasters. She shows it to me. I show her the daily planner book the people I work for keep. On tap for next week, she has a bakery explosion, the loose canaries, the gas station fire, the hotel chandelier.
   Fertility says to take my pick. We'll pack a lunch and make a real day out of it.
   For next week, I have mowing the lawn, twice. Polishing the brass fireplace tool set. Checking the dates on everything in the freezer. Rotating the canned goods in the pantry. Buying the people I work for wedding anniversary gifts to give each other.
   I say, Sure. Whatever she wants.
   This was right after the firemen discovered us doing the Cha-Cha inside the burned-out fifth-floor women's department without a mark on us. After they took our statements and made us sign insurance forms letting them off the hook, they escorted us down to the street. We're back outside when I ask Fertility, Why?
   Why doesn't she call anybody and warn them before a disaster?
   "Because nobody wants bad news," she says and shrugs. "Trevor told people every time he had a dream, and it just got him in trouble."
   Nobody wanted to believe in a talent this incredible, she said. They'd accuse Trevor of being a terrorist or an arsonist.
   A pyromaniac, according to the Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
   In another century, they'd have accused him of being a warlock.
   So Trevor killed himself.
   With a little help from yours truly.
   "So that's why I don't tell people anymore," Fertility says. "Maybe if it was an orphanage that was going to burn down, maybe I'd tell, but these people killed my brother, so why should I do them any favors?"
   The way I can save human lives here is to tell Fertility the truth, I killed her brother, but I don't. We sit at the bus stop not talking until her bus is within sight. She writes me her phone number on a sales receipt she picks up off the ground. This is good for three-hundred-plus dollars if I take it back to the store and work my scam. Fertility says to pick a disaster and give her a call. The bus takes her away to wherever, to work, to dinner, to dream.
   According to my daily planner, I'm dusting baseboards. I'm clipping hedges right now. I'm mowing the lawn. I'm detailing the cars. I should be ironing, but I know the caseworker is getting my work done.
   According to the Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, I should go into a store and shoplift. I should go work off some pent-up sexual energy.
   According to Fertility, I should pack a lunch to eat while we watch strangers get killed. I can picture us on a velvet love seat in the hotel lobby, sipping tea Tuesday afternoon in our front-row seat.
   According to the Bible, I should be, I don't know what.
   According to Creedish church doctrine, I should be dead.
   None of the above really catches my fancy so I just walk around downtown. Outside the commercial bakery there's the smell of bread where in five days Fertility says, boom. In the back of the pet store, the hundreds of canaries flutter from side to side of their stinking crowded cage. Next week, they'll all be free. Then what? I want to tell them, stay in the cage. There are better things than freedom. There are worse things than living a long bored life in some stranger's house and then dying and going to canary heaven.
   At the gas station Fertility says will explode, the attendants pump gas, happy enough, not unhappy, young, not knowing that next week they'll be dead or unemployed depending on who works what shift.
   It gets dark pretty fast.
   Outside the hotel, in through the big plate glass lobby windows, the chandelier looms over victim after victim. A woman with a pug a on a leash. A family: mother, father, three little kids. The clock behind the desk says it's still a long ways from 3:04 next Tuesday afternoon. It would be safe to stand there for days and days but not for one second too long.
   You could go in past the doormen in their gold braid and tell the manager his chandelier was going to fall.
   Everyone he loves will die.
   Even he will die, someday.
   God will come back to judge us.
   All his sins will a him into Hell.
   You can tell people the truth, but they'll never believe you until the event. Until it's too late. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble.
   So you just walk home.
   There's dinner to start. There's a shirt you need to iron for tomorrow. Shoes to shine. You have dishes to wash. New recipes to master.
   There's something called Wedding Soup that takes six pounds of bone marrow to make. Organ meats are big this year. The people I work for want to eat right on the cutting edge. Kidneys. Livers. Inflated pig bladders. The intermediate cow stomach stuffed with watercress and fennel, cud-style. They want animals stuffed with the most unlikely other animals, chickens stuffed with rabbit. Carp stuffed with ham. Goose stuffed with salmon.
   There's so much I need to get home and perfect.
   To bard a steak, you cover it with strips of fat from some other animal to protect it while it cooks. This is what I'm up to when the phone rings.
   Of course, it's Fertility.
   "You were right about that weird guy," she says.
   I ask, About what?
   "That guy, Trevor's boyfriend," she says. "He really needs somebody. I took him out on a date like you wanted, and one of those cult people was on the bus with us. They had to be twin brothers. They looked that much alike."
   I say, maybe she's wrong. Most of those cult people are dead. They were crazy and stupid and almost all of them are dead. It's in the newspaper. Everything they believed in turned out to be wrong.
   "The guy on the bus asked if they were related, and Trevor's boyfriend said no."
   Then they weren't related, I say. You'd have to recognize your own brother.
   Fertility says, "That's the sad part. He did recognize the guy. He even said a name, Brad or Tim or something."
   Adam.
   I say, So how is that sad?
   "Because it was such an obvious, pathetic denial," she says. "It's so obvious he's trying to pass as a normal happy person. It was so sad I even gave him my phone number. I felt sorry for him. I mean I want to help him embrace his past. Besides," Fertility says, "I have a feeling he's headed for some terrible shit."
   Like what shit, I ask. What does she mean, shit?
   "Misery," she says. "It's still pretty vague. Disasters. Pain. Mass murder. Don't ask me how I know. It's a long story."
   Her dreams. The gas station, the canaries, the hotel chandelier, and now me.
   "Listen," she says. "We still need to talk about us getting together, but not right now."
   Why?
   "My evil job is getting a little thick right now, so if somebody called Dr. Ambrose calls to ask if you know Gwen, say you don't know me. Tell him we never met, okay?"
   Gwen?
   I ask, Who's Dr. Ambrose?
   "That's just his name," Fertility says. Gwen says. "He's not a real doctor, I don't think. He's more like my booking agent. This isn't what I want to be doing, but I work on contract for him."
   I ask, what is it she does on contract?
   "It's nothing not legal. I have it all under control. Pretty much."
   What?
   And she tells me, and the alarms and sirens start going off.
   How I'm feeling is smaller and smaller.
   The alarms and flashing lights and sirens are all around me.
   How I'm feeling is less and less.



   Here in the cockpit of Flight 2039, the first of the four engines has just flamed out. Where we're at right here is the beginning of the end.
   Part of her doing suicide intervention is my caseworker has to mix me another gin and tonic. This is while I'm talking long-distance on the telephone. A producer for The Dawn Williams Show is holding on line two. All the lines are blinking blinking. Somebody from Barbara Walters is holding on line three. Top priority is my getting somebody to handle the buzz. The breakfast dishes are piled up in the sink not washing themselves.
   Top priority is my hooking up with a good agent.
   Upstairs, the beds are still unmade.
   The garden needs to be repainted.
   Over the telephone, this one top agent is stressing about what if I'm not the sole survivor. This has to be the case is what I'm saying. The caseworker wouldn't be dropping by for a breakfast gin and tonic if there hadn't been another suicide last night. Right here on the kitchen table I have spread out in front of me all the other case history folders.
   The government's whole Survivor Retention Program is what you'd call a washout. It's the caseworker mixing me gin and tonics who needs some suicide intervention.
   Just to make sure I don't go south on her, the caseworker is eyeing me. Just to keep her out of my way, I have her slicing a lime. Get me some cigarettes. Mix me a fresh drink, I say, or I'll kill myself. I swear. I'll go in the bathroom and hack all my veins open with a razor.

  The caseworker brings my new gin and tonic back to where we're sitting at the kitchen table and asks if I want to help identify some bodies. This is supposed to help me achieve closure. After all, she says, they are my people, my flesh and blood. My kith and kin.
   She's fanning the same ten-year-old government photos out on the table. Staring up at me are hundreds of dead people laid out shoulder to shoulder in rows on the ground. Their skin is all bruised black from the cyanide. They're bloated so much the dark homemade clothes on them are tight. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. The whole recycling process should be that quick and easy, but it's not. The bodies lying there stiff and rank. This is the caseworker trying to jump-start my emotions. I'm repressing my grief, she says.
   Would I like to wade in and what you'd call ID these dead people?
   If there is a killer out there, she says, I can help her find the person who should be pictured here dead but isn't.
   Thanks, I say. No, thanks. Without even looking, I know Adam Branson won't be dead in any of her pictures.
   As the caseworker goes to sit down, I ask would she mind closing the curtains. There's a van from a network affiliate outside shooting video for a satellite feed through the kitchen window. The dirty breakfast dishes piled up in the foreground, that's not how I want to look on the news tonight. The dirty dishes in the sink, me and the caseworker sitting at the kitchen table with the telephone and all her manila folders spread out on the yellow-and-white-check tablecloth, gin and tonics in hand at ten a.m.
   The voice-over of the newscaster will be saying how the sole survivor of America's latest death cult, the Creedish, is on suicide watch following the tragic string of suicides that one by one have claimed the lives of the remaining cult survivors.
   Then, cut to commercial.
   The caseworker goes through her last client folders. Brannon, deceased. Walker, deceased. Phillips, deceased. Everybody, deceased. Everybody except me.
   The girl last night, the only other remaining survivor of the Creedish church district, she ate dirt. There's even a name for it. They call it geophagy. This was popular among the Africans brought to America as slaves. Popular probably isn't the right word.
   She knelt down in the backyard of the house where she'd served for eleven years, and she spooned the dirt out of a rose bed and right into her mouth. This is all in the caseworker's report. Then something called an esophageal rupture happened, then peritonitis, then around sunrise she was dead.
   The girl before that one died with her head in the oven. The boy before her cut his throat. This is exactly what the church taught. One day the wickedness of the kings of the world would destroy us, oh sorrow, and armies of the world would march upon us, wailing, and the purest children of God would have to deliver themselves unto the Lord by their own hand. The Deliverance.
   Yea, and everybody not delivered unto the Lord among the first leavings should follow behind as soon as possible.
   So for the past ten years, one after another, men and women, maids and gardeners and factory workers all over the country, have been giving themselves up. Despite the Survivor Retention Program.
   Except for me.
   I ask the caseworker, would she mind making the beds? If I have to make one more hospital corner, I swear, I'll stick my head in the food processor. If she agrees, I promise to be alive when she gets back.
   Upstairs she goes. I say, Thanks.
   After the caseworker told me about everybody in the Creedish district colony being dead and all, the first thing I did was start smoking. The smartest thing I've ever done is start smoking. When the caseworker dropped by to say rise and shine, and the only other surviving Creedish went south last night, then I sat myself in the kitchen and upped my suicide process with a good stiff drink.
   It's church doctrine that says I have to kill myself. They don't say it has to be a hurry-hurry instant quick death.
   The newspaper's still out on the doorstep. The breakfast dishes, unwashed. The people I work for, they've gone off to escape the spotlight. This is after years of my rewinding their rental porn and presoaking their stains. He's a banker. She's a banker. They have cars. They own this lovely house. They own me to make the beds and mow the lawn. The truth be told, they probably left so they wouldn't come home one night and find me suicided on the kitchen floor.
   Their four telephone lines are still holding. The Dawn Williams Show. Barbara Walters. The agent is saying to get a hand mirror and practice looking sincere and innocent.
   One of the manila folders has my name on the tab. The top sheet inside the folder is all the basics about the documented persons who survived the Creedish colony disaster. The agent is saying: product endorsements.
   The agent is saying: my own religious program. It's documented in the folder how for more than two hundred years, Americans had considered the Creedish the most pious, the most hardworking, decent, sensible people left on Earth.
   The agent is saying: a million-dollar advance for my life story in hardcover.
   The background sheet says how ten years ago a local sheriff served the elders of the Creedish church district with a search warrant. There were charges of child abuse. It was some crazy anonymous allegation that families in the church district were having children and having children and having children. And none of these children were documented, no birth certificates, no social security numbers, nothing. All of these births occurred within the church district. All of these children had attended church district schools. None of these children would ever be allowed to marry or raise children. When they turned seventeen, they were all baptized as adult church members and then sent off into the world. This has all become what you would call public knowledge. The agent is saying: my own exercise video. The agent is saying: an exclusive for the cover of People magazine.
   Somebody leaked these crazy rumors to some child welfare peon, and the next thing is the sheriff and two carloads of deputies are being dispatched to the Creedish church district in Bolster County, Nebraska, to count heads and make sure everything is official. It was the sheriff who called in the FBI.
   The agent on the phone is saying: talk show circuit. The FBI learned how children sent out into the world were considered labor missionaries by the Creedish. It was the government investigation that called it white slavery. The television people called it the Child Slave Cult.
   These kids would be placed when they turned seventeen by Creedish overseers in the outside world who found them jobs as manual labor or domestic help on a cash-pay basis. Temp jobs that could last for years.
   It was the newspapers who called it the Church of Slave Labor.
   The church district would pocket the cash, and the outside world got an army of clean, honest little Christian maids and gardeners and dishwashers and housepainters who'd been raised to believe the only way they could earn a soul is if they worked to death for nothing more than room and board.
   The agent is saying to me: syndicated newspaper column.
   When the FBI moved in to make arrests, they found the entire population of the district colony shut up in the meeting house. Maybe the same person who leaked this crazy story about child slaves as a cash crop, it could be this same person had let the colony know the government was about to invade. Every farm going into Bolster County was deserted. It would come out later that every cow, every pig, chicken, pigeon, cat, and ass*** was dead. Even goldfish in fishbowls were poisoned. Every Creedish perfect little farm with its white farmhouse and red barn was silent as the National Guard drove past. Every field of potatoes was silent and empty under blue sky and a few clouds.
   The agent is saying: my very own Christmas Special.
   According to the background report, here with the manila folders, the kitchen table, the caseworker making beds upstairs, the heat of the lighter as I light another cigarette, this practice of sending labor missionaries had gone on for more than a hundred years. The Creedish had just gotten richer and bought more land and had more children. More children had disappeared out of the valley every year. Girls were shipped out in the spring and boys in the fall.
   The agent is saying: my own fragrance.
   The agent is saying: my own line of autographed Bibles.
   The missionaries were invisible in the outside world. The church wasn't troubled with paying taxes. According to church doctrine, the most noble you could be was to just do your work and hope to live long enough to show the district an enormous profit. The rest of your life was supposed to be a burden, making the beds of other people. Caring for other people's babies. Cooking food for other people.
   Forever and ever.
   Work without end.
   The plan was little by little to bring about a Creedish paradise by acquiring the whole world an acre at a time.
   Until the FBI vans rolled to a stop an official three hundred feet outside the doors of the church district meeting house. The air was still, according to the official investigation into the massacre. No sound came from the church.
   The agent is saving: inspirational Tapes.
   The agent is saying: Caesars Palace.
   It was then that everybody in the world started calling the Creedish the Old Testament Death Cult.
   The cigarette smoke chokes past the point where my throat would close it out and sits thick in my chest. The caseworker folders document the stragglers. Survivor Retention Client Number Sixty-three, Biddy Patterson, age approximately twenty-nine, killed herself by ingesting cleaning solvent three days after the colony district incident.
   Survivor Retention Client Tender Smithson, age forty-five, killed himself by stepping out of a window of the building where he worked as a janitor.
   The agent is saying: my own 1-976 salvation hotline.
   The smoke hot and dense inside me feels the way I would if I had a soul.
   The agent is saying: my own infomercial.
   The people black and swollen with their giving up. Long rows of people the FBI carried dead out of the meeting house, they lie there black with the cyanide in their last communion. These are the people who whatever they imagined was coming down the road, they'd rather die than meet it.
   They died together in one mass, holding each other by the hand so tight the FBI had to pry at their dead fingers to take them apart.
   The agent is saying: Celebrity Superstar.
   It's church doctrine that right now while the caseworker is gone, I should take a knife from the dishes in the sink and hack out my windpipe. I should spill my guts out onto the kitchen floor.
   The agent says he'll handle the buzz with The Dawn Williams Shaw and Barbara Walters.
   Among the deceased is a manila folder with my own name on it. In it, I write:
   Survivor Retention Client Number Eighty-four has lost everyone he ever loved and everything that gave his life meaning. He is tired and sleeps most of the time. He has started drinking and smoking. He has no appetite. He seldom bathes and hasn't shaved in weeks.
   Ten years ago, he was the hardworking salt of the earth. All he wanted was to go to Heaven. Sitting here today, everything that he worked for in the world is lost. All his external rules and controls are gone.
   There is no Hell. There is no Heaven.
   Still, just dawning on him is the idea that now anything is possible.
   Now he wants everything.
   I shut the folder and slip it back in the pile.
   Just between him and me, the agent asks, is there any chance I'm going to off myself soon?
   Staring up through my gin and tonic, the sunken faces of everybody from my past are dead in the government pictures under my drink. After moments like this, you're whole life is gravy.
   I freshen my drink.
   I light another cigarette.
   Really, my life no longer has a point. I'm free. This and I stand to inherit twenty thousand acres of central Nebraska.
   How this feels is just like ten years ago, when I rode with the police downtown. And once again, I am weak. And minute by minute I'm moving away from salvation and into the future.
   Kill myself?
   Thanks, I say. No, thanks.
   Let's not rush anything here.
   What I'm busy telling the police all morning is I left the caseworker still alive and scrubbing the brick around the fireplace in the den. The problem is the flue doesn't open right and smoke comes out the front. The people who I work for burn wet wood. What I tell the police is I'm innocent.
   I didn't kill anybody.
   According to my daily planner, I was supposed to scrub the brick yesterday.
   This is how my day's gone so far.
   First the police are hammering me about why did I kill my caseworker. Then the agent's calling to promise me the world. Fertility, Fertility, Fertility is out of the picture. Let's just say I'm not comfortable with how she earns a living. Plus, I'd just as soon not know about all the misery in my future.
   So I lock myself in the bathroom to try to collate what's all happened. The downstairs green bathroom.
   How my statement to the police goes is first the caseworker was dead facedown on the bricks in front of the fireplace in the den with her black capri pants still on and all bunched up around her ass from the way she's fallen there. Her white shirt's untucked with the sleeves rolled up to each elbow. The room's choking with deadly chlorine gas and the sponge is still squeezed in her dead fish white hand.
   Before that, I was climbing in through the basement window we left unlocked so I could come and go without the television people dogging me with their cameras and paper cups of coffee and their professional concern as if they're getting paid enough to really care. As if this doesn't happen with another feature story for them to cover every two days. It does.
   So I'm locked in the bathroom and now the police are outside the door to ask if I'm throwing up and say the man who I work for is on the speakerphone yelling at them for directions on how to eat a salad.
   The police are asking, did the caseworker and I have a fight?
   Look at my daily planner book for yesterday, I tell them. We never had time.
   From starting work until eight in the morning, I was supposed to be caulking windows. The planner's open on the kitchen counter next to the speakerphone. I was supposed to be painting trim.
   From eight until ten I was scrubbing the oil stains out in the driveway. From ten until lunch was for cutting back the hedges. Lunch until three was for sweeping porches. Three until five was for changing the water in all the flower arrangements. Five to seven was for scrubbing the fireplace brick.
   Every last minute of my life has been preordained, and I'm sick and tired of it.
   How this feels is I'm just another task in God's daily planner: the Italian Renaissance penciled in for right after the Dark Ages.
   To everything there is a season.
   For every trend, fad, phase. Turn, turn, turn.

   Ecclesiastes, Chapter Three, Verses something through something.
   The Information Age is scheduled immediately after the Industrial Revolution. Then the Postmodern Era, then the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Famine. Check. Pestilence. Check. War. Check. Death. Check. And between the big events, the earthquakes and tidal waves, God's got me squeezed in for a cameo appearance. Then maybe in thirty years, or maybe next year, God's daily planner has me finished.
   Through the bathroom door, the police are asking me, did I hit her? The caseworker. Did I ever steal her case history files and her DSM? All her files are missing.
   She drank, is what I tell them. She took psychotropic drugs. She mixed bleach with ammonia inside closed unventilated areas. I don't know how she spent her free time, but she talked about dating a wide variety of lowlifes.
   And she had those files yesterday.
   The last thing I said to her was you can't get brick clean without sandblasting it, but she was so sure muriatic acid would do the job. One of her boyfriends swore by it.
   When I climbed in through the basement window this morning she was dead on the floor with chlorine gas and muriatic acid all over half the brick wall, and it was still as dirty as ever, only now she was part of the mess.
   Between her black capri pants and her little white socks and red canvas shoes, her calf muscles are smooth and white with everything of her that used to be red turned blue, her lips, her cuticles, the rim of each eye.
   The truth is I didn't kill the caseworker, but I'm glad someone did.
   She was my only connection to the last ten years. She was the last thing holding me onto my past.
   The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again.
   The truth is you will be.
   And the secret is, this will hurt less and less each time until you can't feel a thing.
   Trust me on this.
   With her lying there dead after our ten years of heart-to-heart talks every week, my first thought was, here's just something else for me to pick up.
   The police are asking through the bathroom door, why did I make a batch of strawberry daiquiris before I called them?
   Because we were out of raspberries.
   Because, can't they see, it just does not matter. Time was not of the essence.
   Think of this as valuable on-the-job training. Think of your life as a sick joke.
   What do you call a caseworker who hates her job and loses every client?
   Dead.
   What do you call the police worker zipping her into a big rubber bag?
   Dead.
   What do you call the television anchor on camera in the front yard?
   Dead.
   It does not matter. The joke is we all have the same punch line.
   The agent is holding on line one with what only looks like a whole new future to offer.
   The man who I work for is shouting over the speakerphone that he's at a business lunch in some restaurant only he's calling from his cell phone in the toilet because he doesn't know how to eat the hearts of palm salad. As if this is really important.
   Hey, I shout back. Me too.
   Hiding in the toilet, I mean.
   There's a terrible dark joy when the only person who knows all your secrets is finally dead. Your parents. Your doctor. Your therapist. Your caseworker. The sun's outside the bathroom window trying to show us we're all being stupid. All you have to do is look around.
   What they teach you in the church district colony is to desire nothing. Keep a mild and downcast countenance. Preserve a modest posture and demeanor. Speak in a simple and quiet tone.
   And just look how well their philosophy has turned out.
   Them dead. Me alive. The caseworker dead. Everybody dead.
   I rest my case.
   Here in the bathroom with me are razor blades. Here is iodine to drink. Here are sleeping pills to swallow. You have a choice. Live or die.
   Every breath is a choice.
   Every minute is a choice.
   To be or not to be.
   Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you reenlist.
   If I let the agent make me famous that wasn't going to change anything important.
   What do you call a Creedish who gets his own talk show?
   Dead.
   What do you call the Creedish who goes around in a limousine and eats steak?
   Dead.
   Whatever direction I go in, I really don't have anything to lose.
   According to my daily planner I should burn zinc in the fireplace to clear the chimney of soot.
   Outside the bathroom window, the sun is watching police workers with the caseworker zipped inside a rubber bag belted to a gurney they're wheeling between them down the driveway to an ambulance with the lights not on.
   For a long time after I found her, I stood over the body drinking my strawberry daiquiri and just looking at her there, blue and facedown. You didn't have to be Fertility Hollis to see this coming from way back. Her black hair was poking out the red bandanna tied around her head. A little drool had dripped outside the corner of her dead mouth onto a brick. Her whole body looked covered in dead skin.
   All along, you could've guessed this would happen. Someday it would happen to us all.
   Behaving myself just was not going to work anymore. It was time to make trouble.
   So I made another blender full of daiquiris and called the police and told them not to hurry, nobody here was going anywhere.
   Then I called the agent. The truth is there's always been someone to tell me what to do. The church. The people who I work for. The caseworker. And I can't stand the idea of being alone. I can't bear the thought of being free.
   The agent said to hold on and give my statement to the police. The second I could leave, he'd send a car. A limousine.
   My black-and-white stickers are all over town still telling people:
   Give Yourself, Your Life, Just One More Chance. Call Me for Help. Then my phone number.
   Well, all those desperate people were on their own.
   The limousine would take me to the airport, the agent said. The airplane would take me to New York. Already a team of people I'd never met, people in New York who knew nothing about me, were writing my autobiography. The agent said the first six chapters would be faxed to me in the limousine so I could commit my childhood to memory before I give any interviews.
   I told the agent I already knew my childhood.
   Over the phone he said, "This version's better."
   Version?
   "We'll have an even hotter version for the movie." The agent asks, "So who do you want to be you?"
   I want to be me.
   "In the movie, I mean."
   I ask him to hold please. Already being famous was turning into less freedom and more of a schedule of decisions and task after task after task. The feeling isn't so great but it's familiar.
   Then the police were at the front door and then they were inside the den with the dead caseworker, taking her picture with a camera from different angles and asking me to put down my drink so they could ask questions about the night before.
   It's right then I locked myself in the bathroom and had what the psychology textbooks would call a quickie existential crisis.
   The man who I work for calls from his restaurant bathroom about his hearts of palm salad, and my day is pretty much complete.
   Live or die?
   I come out the bathroom door past the police and go right to the phone. To the man who I work for, I tell him to use his salad fork. Skewer each heart. Tines down. Lift the heart to his mouth and suck out the juice. Then, place it in the breast pocket of his double-breasted, Brooks-Brothered. pin-striped suit jacket.
   He says, "Got it." And my job in this house is finished.
   My one hand is holding the telephone, and with my other I'm motioning for the police to put more rum in the next batch of daiquiris.
   The agent tells me not to bother with any luggage. New York has a stylist already building a wardrobe of marketable all-cotton sackcloth-style religious sportswear they want me to promote.
   Luggage reminds me of hotels reminds me of chandeliers reminds me of disasters reminds me of Fertility Hollis. She's the only thing I'm leaving behind. Only Fertility knows anything about me, even if she doesn't know much. Maybe she knows my future, but she doesn't know my past. Now nobody knows my past.
   Except maybe Adam.
   Between the two of them, they know more about my life than me.
   According to my itinerary, the agent says, the car will be here in five minutes.
   It's time to keep living.
   It's time to reenlist.
   In the limousine, there should be dark sunglasses. I want to be obviously incognito. I want black leather seats and tinted windows. I tell the agent, I want crowds at the airport chanting my name. I want more blender drinks. I want a personal fitness trainer. I want to lose fifteen pounds. I want my hair to be thicker. I want my nose to look smaller. Capped teeth. A cleft chin. High cheekbones. I want a manicure, and I want a tan.
   I try to remember everything else Fertility doesn't like about I look.
   It's somewhere above Nebraska I remember I left my fish behind.
   And it must be hungry.
   It's part of Creedish tradition that even labor missionaries had something, a cat, a dog, a fish, to care for. Most times it was a fish. Just something to need you home at night. Something to keep you from living alone.
   The fish is something to make me settle in one place. According to church colony doctrine, it's why men marry women and why women have children. It's something to live your life around.
   It's crazy, but you invest all your emotion in just this one tiny goldfish, even after six hundred and forty goldfish, and you can't just let the little thing starve to death.
   I tell the flight attendant, I've got to go back, while she's fighting against my one hand that's holding her by the elbow.
   An airplane is just so many rows of people sitting and all going in the same direction a long ways off the ground. Going to New York's a lot the way I imagine going to Heaven would be.
   It's too late, the flight attendant says. Sir. This is a nonstop. Sir. Maybe after we land, she says, maybe I could call someone. Sir.
   But there isn't anybody.
   Nobody will understand.
   Not the apartment manager.
   Not the police.
   The flight attendant yanks her elbow away. She gives me a look and moves up the aisle.
   Everyone else I could call is dead.
   So I call the only person who can help. I call the last person I want to talk to, and she picks up on the first ring.
   An operator asks if she'd accept the charges, and somewhere hundreds of miles behind me Fertility said yes.
   I said hi, and she said hi. She doesn't sound at all surprised.
   She asked, "Why weren't you at Trevor's crypt today? We had a date."
   I forgot, I say. My whole life is about forgetting. It's my most valuable job skill.
   It's my fish, I say. It's going to die if nobody feeds it. Maybe this doesn't sound important to her, but that fish means the whole world to me. Right now, that fish is the only thing I care about, and Fertility needs to go there and feed it, or better yet, take it home to live with her.
   "Yeah," she says. "Sure. Your fish."
   Yes. And it needs to be fed every day. There's the kind of food it likes best next to the fish bowl on my fridge, and I give her the address.
   She says, "Enjoy going off to become a big international spiritual leader."
   We're talking from farther and farther away as the plane takes me east. The sample chapters of my autobiography are on the seat next to me, and they're a complete shock.
   I ask, how did she know?
   She says, "I know a lot more than you give me credit for."
   Like what for instance? I ask, what else does she know?
   Fertility says, "What are you afraid I might know?"
   The flight attendant goes on the other side of a curtain and says, "He's worried about a goldfish." Some women behind the curtain laugh and one says, "Is he retarded?"
   As much to the flight crew as to Fertility I say, It just so happens that I'm the last survivor of an almost extinct religious cult.
   Fertility says, "How nice for you."
   I say, And I can't ever see her again.

  "Yeah, yeah, yeah."
   I say, People want me in New York by tomorrow. They're planning something big.
   And Fertility says, "Of course they are."
   I say, I'm sorry I won't ever get to dance with her anymore.
   And Fertility says, "Yes, you will."
   Since she knows so much, I ask her, what's the name of my fish?
   "Number six forty-one."
   And miracle of miracles, she's right.
   "Don't even try keeping a secret," she says. "With all the dreams I've been having every night, not much surprises me."
   After just the first fifty flights of stairs, my breath won't stay inside me long enough to do any good. My feet fly out behind me. My heart is jumping against the ribs it's behind inside my chest. The insides of my mouth and tongue are thick and stuck together with dried-up spit.
   Where I'm at is one of those stair climbing machines the agent has installed. You climb and climb forever and never get off the ground. You're trapped in your hotel room. It's the mystical sweat lodge experience of our time, the only sort of Indian vision quest we can schedule into our daily planner.
   Our StairMaster to Heaven.
   Around the sixtieth floor, sweat is stretching my shirt down to my knees. The lining of my lungs feels the way a ladder looks in nylon stockings, stretched, snagged, a tear. In my lungs. A rupture. The way a tire looks before a blowout, that's how my lungs feel. The way it smells when your electric heater or hair dryer burns off a layer of dust, that's how hot my ears feel.
   Why I'm doing this is because the agent says there's thirty pounds too much of me for him to make famous.
   If your body is a temple, you can pile up too much deferred maintenance. If your body is a temple, mine was a real fixer-upper.
   Somehow, I should've seen this coming.
   The same way every generation reinvents Christ, the agent's giving me the same makeover. The agent says nobody is going to worship anybody with my role of flab around his middle. These days, people aren't going to fill stadiums to get preached at by somebody who isn't beautiful.
   This is why I'm going nowhere at the rate of seven hundred calories an hour.
   Around the eightieth floor, my bladder feels nested between the top of my legs. When you pull plastic wrap off something in the microwave and the steam sunburns your fingers in an instant, my breath is that hot.
   You're going up and up and up and not getting anywhere. It's the illusion of progress. What you want to think is your salvation.
   What people forget is a journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too.
   It's not as if the great coyote spirit comes to you, but around the eighty-first floor, these random thoughts from out of the ozone just catch in your head. Silly things the agent told you, now they add up. The way you feel when you're scrubbing with pure ammonia fumes and right then while you're scrubbing chicken skin off the barbecue grill, every stupid thing in the world, decaffeinated coffee, alcohol, free beer, StairMasters, makes perfect sense, not because you're any smarter, but because the smart part of your brain's on vacation. It's that kind of faux wisdom. That kind of Chinese food enlightenment where you know that ten minutes after your head clears, you'll forget it all.
   Those clear plastic bags you get a single serving of honey-roasted peanuts in on a plane instead of a real meal, that's how small my lungs feel. After eighty-five floors, the air feels that thin. Your arms pumping, your feet jam down on every next step. At this point, your every thought is so profound.
   The way bubbles form in a pan of water before it comes to a boil, these new insights just appear.
   Around the ninetieth floor, every thought is an epiphany.
   Paradigms are dissolving right and left.
   Everything ordinary turns into a powerful metaphor.
   The deeper meaning of everything is right there in your face.
   And it's all so significant.
   It's all so deep.
   So real.
   Everything the agent's been telling me makes perfect sense. For instance, if Jesus Christ had died in prison, with no one watching and with no one there to mourn or torture him, would we be saved?
   With all due respect.
   According to the agent, the biggest factor that makes you a saint is the amount of press coverage you get.
   Around the one hundredth floor, it all comes clear. The whole universe, and this isn't just the endorphins talking. Any higher than the hundredth floor and you enter a mystical state.
   The same as if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, you realize, if no one had been there to witness the agony of Christ, would we be saved?
   The key to salvation is how much attention you get. How high a profile you get. Your audience share. Your exposure. Your name recognition. Your press following.
   The buzz.
   Around the one hundredth floor, the sweat is parting your hair all over. The boring mechanics of how your body works are all too clear, your lungs are sucking air to put in your blood, your heart pumps blood to your muscles, your hamstrings pull themselves short, cramping to pull your legs up behind you, your quadriceps cramp to put your knees out in front of you. The blood delivers air and food to burn inside the mito-whatever in the middle of your every muscle cell.
   The skeleton is just a way to keep your tissue off the floor. Your sweat is just a way to keep you cool.
   The revelations come at you from every direction.
   Around the one hundred and fifth floor, you can't believe you're the slave to this body, this big baby. You have to keep it fed and put it to bed and take it to the bathroom. You can't believe we haven't invented something better. Something not so needy. Not so time-consuming.
   You realize that people take drugs because it's the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world.
   It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.
   You realize that there's no point in doing anything if nobody's watching.
   You wonder, if there had been a low turnout at the crucifixion, would they have rescheduled?
   You realize the agent was right. You've never seen a crucifix with a Jesus who wasn't almost naked. You've never seen a fat Jesus. Or a Jesus with body hair. Every crucifix you've ever seen, the Jesus could be shirtless and modeling designer jeans or men's cologne.
   Life is every way the agent said. You realize that if no one's watching, you might as well stay home. Play with yourself. Watch broadcast television.
   It's around the one hundred and tenth floor you realize that if you're not on videotape, or better yet, live on satellite hookup in front of the whole world watching, you don't exist.
   You're that tree falling in the forest that nobody gives a rat's ass about.
   It doesn't matter if you do anything. If nobody notices, your life will add up to a big zero. Nada. Cipher.
   Fake or not, it's these kinds of big truths that swarm inside you.
   You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past. We can't give up our concept of who we were. All those adults playing archaeologist at yard sales, looking for childhood artifacts, board games, CandyLand, Twister, they're terrified. Trash becomes holy relics. Mystery Date. Hula Hoops. Our way of getting nostalgic for what we just threw in the trash, it's all because we're afraid to evolve. Grow, change, lose weight, reinvent ourselves. Adapt.
   That's what the agent says to me on the StairMaster. He's yelling at me, "Adapt!"
   Everything's accelerated except me and my sweaty body with its bowel movements and body hair. My moles and yellow toenails. And I realize I'm stuck with my body, and already it's falling apart. My backbone feels hammered out of hot iron. My arms swing thin and wet on each side of me.
   Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it's the only way they can get anything really finished.
   The agent's yelling that no matter how great you look, your body is just something you wear to accept your Academy Award.
   Your hand is just so you can hold your Nobel Prize.
   Your lips are only there for you to air-kiss a talk show host.
   And you might as well look great.
   It's around the one hundred and twentieth floor you have to laugh. You're going to lose it anyway. Your body. You're already losing it. It's time you bet everything.
   This is why when the agent comes to you with anabolic steroids, you say yes. You say yes to the back-to-back tanning sessions. Electrolysis? Yes. Teeth capping? Yes. Dermabrasion? Yes. Chemical peels? According to the agent, the secret to getting famous is you just keep saying yes.
   It's in the car coming from the airport the agent shows me his cure for cancer. It's called ChemoSolv. It's supposed to dissolve a tumor, he says and opens his briefcase to take out a brown prescription bottle with dark capsules inside.
   This is jumping back a little ways to before I met the stair climbing machine, to my first face-to-face with the agent the night he picks me up at the airport in New York. Before he tells me I'm too fat to be famous yet. Before I'm a product being launched. It's dark outside when my plane first lands in New York. Nothing's too spectacular. It's night, with the same moon as we have back home, and the agent's just a regular man standing where I get off the plane, wearing glasses with his brown hair parted on one side.
   We shake hands. A car drives up to the curb outside, and we get in the back. He pinches the crease in each trouser leg to lift it as he steps into the car. How he looks is custom-tailored.
   How he looks is eternal and durable. Just meeting him, there's that guilt I feel whenever I buy something impossible to recycle.
   "This other cancer cure we have is called Oncologic," he says and hands another brown bottle across to me sitting next to him in the backseat. This is a nice car, the way it's black leather and padded all over inside. The ride is smoother than on the airplane.
   It's more dark capsules inside the second bottle, and pasted around the bottle is a pharmacy label the way you always see. The agent takes out another bottle.
   "This is one of our cures for AIDS," he says. "This is our most popular one." He takes out bottle after bottle. "Here we have our leading cure for antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis. Here's liver cirrhosis. Here's Alzheimer's. Multiple Neuritis. Multiple Myeloma. Multiple Sclerosis. The rhinovirus," he says, shaking each one so the pills inside rattle, and handing them over to me.
   ViralSept, it says on one bottle.
   MaligNon, another bottle says.
   CerebralSave.
   Kohlercaine.
   Nonsense words.
   These are all same-sized brown plastic bottles with white child-guard caps and prescription labels from the same pharmacy.
   The agent comes packaged in a medium-weight gray wool suit and is equipped with only his briefcase. He features two brown eyes behind glasses. A mouth. Clean fingernails. Nothing is remarkable about him except what he's telling me.
   "Just name a disease," he says, "and we have a cure ready for it."
   He lifts two more handfuls of brown bottles from his briefcase and shakes them. "I brought all these to prove a point."
   Every second, the car we're in slides deeper and deeper through the dark into New York City. Around us, other cars keep pace. The moon keeps pace. I say how I'm surprised all these diseases still exist in the world.
   "It's a shame," the agent says, "how medical technology is still lagging behind the marketing side of things. I mean, we've had all the sales support in place for years, the coffee mug giveaways to physicians, the feel-good magazine ads, the total product launch, but it's the same old violin in the background. R&D is still years behind. The lab monkeys are still dropping like flies."
   His two perfect rows of teeth look set in his mouth by a jeweler.
   The pills for AIDS look just like the pills for cancer look just like the pills for diabetes. I ask, So these things really aren't invented?
   "Let's not use that word, 'invented,'" the agent says. "It makes everything sound so contrived."
   But they aren't real?
   "Of course they're real," he says and plucks the first two bottles out of my hands. "They're copyrighted. We have an inventory of almost fifteen thousand copyrighted names for products that are still in development," he says. "And that includes you."
   He says, "That's just my point."
   He's developing a cure for cancer?
   "We're a total concept marketing slash public relations organization," he says. "Our job is to create the concept. You patent a drug. You copyright the name. As soon as someone else develops the product they come to us, sometimes by choice, sometimes not."
   I ask him, Why sometimes not?
   "The way this works is we copyright every conceivable combination of words, Greek words, Latin, English, what-have-you. We get the legal rights to every conceivable word a pharmaceutical company might use to name a new product. For diabetes alone, we have an inventory of one hundred forty names," he says. He hands me stapled-together pages from out of his briefcase in his lap.
   GlucoCure, I read.
   InsulinEase.
   PancreAid. Hemazine. Glucodan. Growdenase. I turn to the next page, and bottles slip out of my lap and roll along the car floor with the pills inside rattling.
   "If the drug company that ever cures diabetes wants to use any combination of words even vaguely related to the condition, they'll have to lease that right from us."
   So the pills I have here, I say, these are sugar pills. I twist one bottle open and shake a tablet, dark red and shining, into my palm. I lick it, and it's candy-coated chocolate. Others are gelatin capsules with powdered sugar inside.
   "Mock-ups," he says. "Prototypes."
   He says, "My point is that every bit of your career with us is already in place, and we've been prophesying your arrival for more than fifteen years."
   He says, "I'm telling you this so you can relax."

   But the Creedish church district disaster was only ten years ago.
   And I put a pill, an orange Geriamazone, in my mouth.
   "We've been tracking you," he says. "As soon as the Creedish survival numbers dipped below one hundred, we started the campaign rolling. The whole media countdown over the last six months, that was our doing. It needed some fine-tuning. It wasn't anything specific at first, all the copy is pretty much search-and-replace, fill-in-the-blank, universal-change stuff, but it's all in the can. All we needed was a warm body and the survivor's name. That's where you enter the picture."
   From another bottle, I shake out two dozen Inazans and hold them under my tongue until their black candy shells dissolve. Chocolate melts out.
   The agent takes out more sheets of printed paper and hands them to me.
   Ford Merit, I read.
   Mercury Rapture.
   Dodge Vignette.
   He says, "We have names copyrighted for cars that haven't been designed, software that's never been written, miracle dream cures for epidemics still on the horizon, every product we can anticipate."
   My back teeth crunch a sweet overdose of blue Donnadons.
   The agent eyes me sitting there and sighs. "Enough with the empty calories, already," he says. "Our first big job is to modify you so you'll fit the campaign." He asks, "Is that your real hair color?"
   I pour a million milligrams of Jodazones in my mouth.
   "Not to mince words," the agent says, "but you're about thirty pounds heavier than we need you to be."
   The bogus pills I can understand. What I don't understand is how he could begin planning a campaign around something before it happened. No way could he have a campaign planned before the Deliverance.
   The agent takes off his glasses and folds them. He sets them inside his briefcase and takes back the printed lists of future miracle products, drugs and cars, and he puts the lists in his briefcase. He tug-of-wars the pill bottles out of my hands, all of them silent and empty.
   "The truth is," he says, "nothing new ever happens."
   He says, "We've seen it all."
   He says, "Listen."
   In 1653, he says, the Russian Orthodox church changed a few old rituals. Just some changes in the liturgy. Just words. Language. In Russian, for God's sake. Some Bishop Nikon introduced the changes as well as the western manners that were becoming popular in Russian court life at the time, and the bishop started excommunicating anyone who rebelled against these changes.
   Reaching around in the dark by my feet, he picks up the other pill bottles.
   According to the agent, the monks who didn't want to change the way they worshiped fled to remote monasteries. The Russian authorities hunted and persecuted them. By 1665, small groups of monks began burning themselves to death. These group suicides in northern Europe and western Siberia continued through the 1670s. In 1687, some two thousand seven hundred monks captured a monastery, locked themselves inside, and burned it. In 1688, another fifteen hundred "Old Believers" burned themselves alive in their locked monastery. By the end of the seventeenth century, an estimated twenty thousand monks had killed themselves instead of submitting to the government.
   He snaps his briefcase shut and leans forward.
   "These Russian monks kept killing themselves until 1897," he says. "Sound familiar?"
   You have Samson in the Old Testament, the agent says. You have the Jewish soldiers who killed themselves in the Masada. You have seppuku among the Japanese. Sati among the Hindu. Endura among the Cathari during the twelfth century in southern France. He ticked off group after group on his fingertips. There were the Stoics. There were the Epicureans. There were the tribes of Guiana Indians who killed themselves so they could be reborn as white men.
   "Closer to here and now, the People's Temple mass suicide of 1978 left nine hundred twelve dead."
   The Branch Davidian disaster of 1993 left seventy-six dead.
   The Order of the Solar Temple mass suicide and murder in 1994 killed fifty-three people.
   The Heaven's Gate suicide in 1997 killed thirty-nine.
   "The Creedish church thing was just a blip in the culture," he says. "It was just one more predictable mass suicide in a world filled with splinter groups that limp along until they're confronted.
   Maybe their leader is about to die, as was the case with the Heaven's Gate group, or they're challenged by the government, like what happened around the Russian monks or the People's Temple or the Creedish church district."
   He says, "Actually, it's awfully boring stuff. Anticipating the future based on the past. We might as well be an insurance company; nevertheless, it's our job to make cult suicide look fresh and exciting every time around."
   After knowing Fertility, I wonder if I'm the last person in the world who ever gets caught by surprise. Fertility with her dreams of disaster and this guy with his clean shave and his closed loop of history, they're two peas trapped in the same boring pod.
   "Reality means you live until you die," the agent says. "The real truth is nobody wants reality."
   The agent closes his eyes and presses his open palm to his forehead. "The truth is the Creedish church was nothing special," he says. "It was founded by a splinter group of Millerites in 1860 during the Great Awakening, during a period when in California alone, splinter religions founded more than fifty Utopian communities."
   He opens one eye and points a finger at me. "You have something, a pet, a bird or a fish."
   I ask how he knows this, about my fish.
   "It's not necessarily true, but it's probable," he says. "The Creedish granted their labor missionaries what was known as Mascot Privilege, the right to own a pet, in 1939. It was the year a Creedish biddy stole an infant from the family where she worked. Having a pet was supposed to sublimate your need to nurture a dependent."
   A biddy stole somebody's baby.
   "In Birmingham, Alabama," he says. "Of course, she killed herself the minute she was found."
   I ask what else does he know.
   "You have a problem with masturbation."
   That's easy, I say. He read that in my Survivor Retention record.
   "No," he says. "Lucky for us, all the client records for your caseworker are missing. Anything we say about you will be uncontested. And before I forget, we took six years off your life. If anyone asks, you're twenty-seven."
   So how does he know so much about my, you know, about me?
   "Your masturbation?"
   My crimes of Onan.
   "It seems that all you labor missionaries had a problem with masturbation."
   If he only knew. Somewhere in my lost case history folder are the records of my being an exhibitionist, a bipolar syndrome, a myso-phobic, a shoplifter, etc. Somewhere in the night behind us, the caseworker is taking my secrets to her grave. Somewhere half the world behind me is my brother.
   Since he's such an expert, I ask the agent if there are ever murders of people who were supposed to kill themselves but just didn't. In these other religions, did anyone ever go around killing the survivors?
   "With the People's Temple there was an unexplained handful of survivors murdered," he says. "And the Order of the Solar Temple. It was the Canadian government's trouble with the Solar Temple that prompted our government's Survivor Retention Program. With the Solar Temple, little groups of French and Canadian followers kept killing themselves and killing each other for years after the original disaster. They called the killings 'Departures.'"
   He says, "Members of the Temple Solaire burned themselves alive with gasoline and propane explosions they thought would blast them to eternal life on the star Sirius," and he points into the night sky. "Compared to that, the Creedish mess was infinitely tame."
   I ask, has he anticipated anything about a surviving church member hunting down and killing any leftover Creedish?
   "A surviving church member, other than you?" the agent asks.
   Yes.
   "Killing people, you say?"
   Yes.
   Looking out the car at the New York lights going by, the agent says, "A killer Creedish? Oh heavens, I hope not."
   Looking out at the same lights behind tinted glass, at the star Sirius, looking past my own reflection with chocolate smeared around my mouth, I say, yeah. Me too.
   "Our whole campaign is based on the fact that you're the last survivor," he says. "If there's another Creedish alive in the world, you're wasting my time. The entire campaign is down the tubes. If you're not the only living Creedish in the world, you're worthless to us."
   He opens his briefcase a crack and takes out a brown bottle. "Here," he says, "take a couple Serenadons. These are the best anti-anxiety treatment ever invented."
   They just don't exist yet.
   "Just pretend," he says, "for the placebo effect." And he shakes two into my hand.
   People are going to say it's the steroids that made me go crazy.
   The Durateston 250.
   The Mifepristone abortion pills from France.
   The Plenastril from Switzerland.
   The Masterone from Portugal.
   These are the real steroids, not just the copyrighted names of future drugs. These are the injectables, the tablets, the transdermal patches.
   People will be so sure the steroids made me into this, this crazy plane hijacker flying around the world until I kill myself. As if people know anything about being a celebrated famous celebrity spiritual leader. As if any one of those people isn't already looking around for a new guru to make sense out of their risk-free boredom of a lifestyle while they watch the news on television and pass judgment on me. People are all looking for that, a hand to hold. Reassurance. The promise that everything will be all right. That's all they wanted from me. Stressed, desperate, celebrated me. ***Underpressure me. None of these people know the first thing about being a big, glamorous, big, charismatic, big role model.
   It's stair climbing around floor number one hundred and thirty you start raving, ranting, speaking in tongues.
   Not that any one person except maybe Fertility knows the kind of day-in and day-out effort it took to be me at this point.
   Imagine how you'd feel if your whole life turned into a job you couldn't stand.
   No, everybody thinks their whole life should be at least as much fun as masturbation.
   I'd like to see these people even try to live out of hotel rooms and find low-fat room service and do a halfway convincing job of faking a deep inner peace and at-oneness with God.
   When you get famous, dinner isn't food anymore; it's twenty ounces of protein, ten ounces of carbohydrates, salt-free, fat-free, sugar-free fuel. This is a meal every two hours, six times a day. Eating isn't about eating anymore. It's about protein assimilation.
   It's about cellular rejuvenation cream. Washing is about exfoliation. What used to be breathing is respiration.
   I'd be the first to congratulate anybody if they could do a better job of faking flawless beauty and delivering vague inspiring messages:
   Calm down. Everyone, breathe deep. Life is good. Be just and kind. Be the love.
   As if.
   At most events, those deep inner messages and beliefs went from the writing team to me in the last thirty seconds before I went onstage. That's what the silent opening prayer was all about. It gives me a minute to look down on the podium and read over my script.
   Five minutes go by. Ten minutes. The 400 milligrams of Deca-Durabolin and testosterone cypionate you just spiked backstage is still a round little bolus in the skin on your ass. The fifteen thousand paying faithful are kneeling right there in front of you with their heads bowed. The way an ambulance screams down a quiet street, that's how those chemicals feel going into your bloodstream.
   The liturgical robes I started wearing onstage are because with enough Equipoise in your system, half the time you're packing wood.
   Fifteen minutes go by with all those people on their knees.
   Whenever you're ready, you just say it, the magic word.
   Amen.
   And it's showtime.
   "You are children of peace in a universe of everlasting life and a limitless abundance of love and well-being, blah, blah, blah. Go in peace."
   Where the writing team comes up with this copy, I don't know.
   Let's not even mention the miracles I performed on national television. My little halftime miracle during the Super Bowl. All those disasters I predicted, the lives I saved.
   You know the old saying: It's not what you know.
   It's who you know.
   People think it's so simple to be me and go up in front of people in a stadium and lead them in prayer and then be seat-belted on a jet headed for the next stadium within the hour, all the time preserving a vibrant, healthy facade. No, but these people will still call you crazy for hijacking a plane. People don't know the first thing about vibrant dynamic healthy vibrancy.
   Let them even try to find enough of me to autopsy. It's nobody's business if my liver function is impaired. Or if maybe my spleen and gallbladder are enormous from the effects of human growth hormone. As if they themselves wouldn't inject anything sucked from the pituitary glands of dead cadavers if they thought they could look as good as I did on television.
   The risk of being famous is you have to take levothyroxine sodium to stay thin. Yes, you have your central nervous system to worry about. There's the insomnia. Your metabolism ramps up. Your heart pounds. You sweat. You're nervous all the time, but you look terrific.

   Just remember, your heart is only beating so you can be a regular dinner guest at the White House.
   Your central nervous system is just so you can address the UN General Assembly.
   Amphetamines are the most American drug. You get so much done. You look terrific, and your middle name is Accomplishment.
   "Your whole body," the agent is yelling, "is just how you model your designer line of sportswear!"
   Your thyroid shuts down natural production of thyroxine.
   But you still look terrific. And you are, you're the American Dream. You are the constant-growth economy.
   According to the agent, the people out there looking for a leader, they want vibrant. They want massive. They want dynamic. Nobody wants a little skinny god. They want a thirty-inch drop between your chest and waist sizes. Big pecs. Long legs. Cleft chin. Big calves.
   They want more than human.
   They want larger than life size.
   Nobody wants just anatomically correct.
   People want anatomical enhancement. Surgically augmented. New and improved. Silicone-implanted. Collagen-injected.
   Just for the record, after my first three-month cycle of Deca-Durabolin I couldn't reach down far enough to tie my shoes; my arms were that big. Not a problem, the agent says, and he hires someone to tie all my shoes for me.
   After I cycled some Russian-made Metahapoctehosich for seventeen weeks all my hair fell out, and the agent bought me a wig.
   'You have to meet me halfway on this," the agent tells me. "Nobody wants to worship a God who ties his own shoes."
   Nobody wants to worship you if you have the same problems, the same bad breath and messy hair and hangnails, as a regular person. You have to be everything regular people aren't. Where they fail, you have to go all the way. Be what people are too afraid to be. Become whom they admire.
   People shopping for a messiah want quality. Nobody is going to follow a loser. When it comes to choosing a savior, they won't settle for just a human being.
   "For you, a wig is better," the agent said. "It's got the level of consistent perfection we can trust. Getting out of helicopters, the wash of the prop, every minute in public, you can't control how real hair is going to look."
   How the agent explained his plan to me was, we weren't targeting the smartest people in the world, just the most.
   He said, "Think of yourself from now on as a diet cola."
   He said, "Think of those young people out in the world struggling with outdated religions or with no religions, think of those people as your target market."
   People are looking for how to put everything together. They need a unified field theory that combines glamour and holiness, fashion and spirituality. People need to reconcile being good and being good-looking.
   After day after day of no solid food, limited sleep, climbing thousands of stairs, and the agent yelling his ideas to me over and over, this all made perfect sense.
   The music team was busy writing hymns even before I was under contract. The writing team was putting my autobiography to bed. The media team was doing press releases, merchandise licensing agreements, the skating shows: The Creedish Death Tragedy on Ice, the satellite hookups, tanning appointments. The image team has creative control on appearance. The writing team has control of every word that comes out of my mouth.
   To cover the acne I got from cycling Laurabolin, I started wearing makeup. To cure the acne, someone on the support team got me a prescription for Retin-A.
   For the hair loss, the support team was spritzing me with Rogaine.
   Everything we did to fix me had side effects we had to fix. Then the fixes had side effects to fix and so on and so on.
   Imagine a Cinderella story where the hero looks in the mirror and who's looking back is a total stranger. Every word he says is written for him by a team of professionals. Everything he wears is chosen or designed by a team of designers.
   Every minute of every day is planned by his publicist.
   Maybe now you're starting to get a picture.
   Plus your hero is spiking drugs you can only buy in Sweden or Mexico so he can't see down past his own jutting-out chest. He's tanned and shaved and wigged and scheduled because people in Tucson, people in Seattle, or Chicago or Baton Rouge, don't want an avatar with a hairy back.
   It's around floor number two hundred that you reach the highest state.
   You're gone anaerobic, you're burning muscle instead of fat, but your mind is crystal-clear.
   The truth is that all this was just part of the suicide process. Because tanning and steroids are only a problem if you plan to live a long time.
   Because the only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.
   If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn't it just lie there and rot?
   And if Christ had died from a barbiturate overdose, alone on the bathroom floor, would He be in Heaven?
   This wasn't a question of whether or not I was going to kill myself. This, this effort, this money and time, the writing team, the drugs, the diet, the agent, the flights of stairs going up to nowhere, all this was so I could off myself with everyone's full attention.
   This one time, the agent asked me where I saw myself in five years.
   Dead, I told him. I see myself dead and rotting. Or ashes, I can see myself burned to ashes.
   I had a loaded gun in my pocket, I remember. Just the two of us were standing in the back of a crowded, dark auditorium. I remember it was the night of my first big public appearance.
   I see myself dead and in Hell, I said.
   I remember I was planning to kill myself that night.
   I told the agent, I figured I'd spend my first thousand years of Hell in some entry-level position, but after that I wanted to move into management. Be a real team player. Hell is going to see enormous growth in market share over the next millennium. I wanted to ride the crest.
   The agent said that sounded pretty realistic.
   We were smoking cigarettes, I remember. Down onstage, some local preacher was doing his opening act. Part of his warm-up was to get the audience hyperventilated. Loud singing does the job. Or chanting. According to the agent, when people shout this way or sing "Amazing Grace" at the top of their lungs, they breathe too much. People's blood should be acid. When they hyperventilate the carbon dioxide level of their blood drops, and their blood become alkaline.
   "Respiratory alkalosis," he says.
   People get light-headed. People fall down with their ears ringing, their fingers and toes go numb, they get chest pains, they sweat. This is supposed to be rapture. People thrash on the floor with their hands cramped into stiff claws.
   This is what passes for ecstasy.
   "People in the religion business call it 'lobstering,'" the agent says. "They call it speaking in tongues."
   Repetitive motions add to the effect, and the opening act down onstage runs through the usual drills. The audience claps in unison. Long rows of people hold hands and sway together in their delirium. People do that rainbow hands.
   Whoever invented this routine, the agent tells me, they pretty much run things in Hell.
   I remember the corporate sponsor was SummerTime Old-Fashioned Instant Lemonade.
   My cue is when the opening act calls me down onto the stage, my part of the show is putting a spell on everybody.
   "A naturalistic trance state," the agent says.
   The agent takes a brown bottle out of his blazer pocket. He says, "Take a couple Endorphinols if you feel any emotion coming on."
   I tell him to give me a handful.
   To get ready for tonight, staffers went and visited local people to give them free tickets to the show. The agent is telling me this for the hundredth time. The staffers ask to use the bathroom during their visit and jot down notes about anything they find in the medicine cabinet. According to the agent, the Reverend Jim Jones did this and it worked miracles for his People's Temple.
   Miracles probably isn't the right word.
   Up on the pulpit is a list of people I've never met and their life-threatening conditions.
   Mrs. Steven Brandon, I just have to call out. Come down and have your failing kidneys touched by God.
   Mr. William Doxy, come down and put your crippled heart in God's hands.
   Part of my training was how to press my fingers into somebody's eyes hard and fast so the pressure registered on their optic nerve as a flash of white light.
   "Divine light," the agent says.
   Part of my training was how to press my hands over somebody's ears so hard they heard a buzzing noise I could tell them was the eternal Om.
   "Go," the agent says.
   I've missed my cue.
   Down onstage, the opening preacher is shouting Tender Branson into a microphone. The one, the only, the last survivor, the great Tender Branson.
   The agent tells me, "Wait." He plucks the cigarette out of my mouth and pushes me down the aisle. "Now, go," he says.
   All the hands reach out into the aisle to touch me. The spotlight's so bright onstage in front of me. In the dark around me are the smiles of a thousand delirious people who think they love me. All I have to do is walk into the spotlight.
   This is dying without the control issues.
   The gun is heavy and banging my hip in my pants pocket.
   This is having a family without being familiar. Having relations without being related.
   Onstage, the spotlights are warm.
   This is being loved without the risk of loving anyone in return.
   I remember this was the perfect moment to die.
   It wasn't Heaven, but it was as close as I was ever going to get.
   I raised my arms and people cheered. I lowered my arms and people were silent. The script was there on the podium for me to read. The typewritten list told me who out in the dark was suffering from what.
   Everybody's blood was alkaline. Everybody's heart was there for the taking. This is how it felt to shoplift. This is how it felt to hear confessions over my crisis hotline. This is how I imagined sex.
   With Fertility on my mind, I started to read the script:
   We are all the divine products of creation.
   We are each of us the fragments that make up something whole and beautiful.
   Each time I paused, people would hold their breath.
   The gift of life, I read from the script, is precious.
   I put my hand on the gun loaded with bullets in my pocket.
   The precious gift of life must be preserved no matter now painful and pointless it seemed. Peace, I told them, is a gift so perfect that only God should grant it. I told people, only God's most selfish children would steal God's greatest gift, His only gift greater than life. The gift of death.
   This lesson is to the murderer, I said. This is to the suicide. This is to the abortionist. This is to the suffering and sick.
   Only God has the right to surprise His children with death.
   I had no idea what I was saying until it was too late. And maybe it was a coincidence, or maybe the agent knew what I had in mind when I'd asked him to get me some bullets and a gun, but what happened is the script really screwed up my whole plan. There was no way I could read this and then kill myself. It would just look so stupid.
   So I never did kill myself.
   The rest of the evening went as planned. People went home feeling saved, and I told myself I'd kill myself some other time. The moment was all wrong. I procrastinated, and timing was everything.
   Besides.
   Eternity was going to seem like forever.
   With the crowds of smiling people smiling at me in the dark, me who spent my life cleaning bathrooms and mowing the lawn, I told myself, why rush anything?
   I'd backslid before, I'd backslide again. Practice makes perfect.
   If you could call it that.
   I figured, a few more sins would help round out my resume.
   This is the upside of already being eternally damned.
   I figured, Hell could wait.
   Before this plane goes down, before the flight recorder tape runs out, one of the things I want to apologize for is the Book of Very Common Prayer.
   People need to know the Book of Very Common Prayer was not my idea. Yes, it sold two hundred million copies, worldwide. It did. Yes, I let them put my name on it, but the book was the agent's brainchild. Before that the book was the idea of some nobody on the writing team. Some copywriter trying to break into the big time, I forget.
   What's important is the book was not my idea.
   What happened is one day, the agent comes up to me with that dancing light in his brown eyes that means a deal. According to my publicist, I'm booked solid. This is after we did that line of Bibles I was autographing in bookstores. We had a million plus feet of guaranteed shelf space in bookstores, and I was on tour.
   "Don't expect a book tour to be something fun," the agent tells me.
   The thing about book signings, the agent says, is they're exactly the same as the last day of high school when everyone wants you to write in their high school annual, only a book tour can go on for the rest of your life.
   According to my itinerary, I'm in a Denver warehouse signing stock when the agent pitches me on his idea for a weeny book of meditations people can use in their everyday lives. He sees this as a paperback of little prose poems. Fifty pages, tops. Little tributes to the environment, children, safe stuff. Mothers. Pandas. Topics that step on nobody's toes. Common problems. We put my name on the spine, say I wrote it, run the product up a flagpole.
   What else people need to know is I never saw the finished book until after the second press run, after it had sold more than fifty thousand copies. Already people weren't not just a little pissed off, but all the fuss only upped sales.

   What happened is one day I'm in the green room waiting to co-host some daytime television project. This is way fast forward, after the autographed Bible book tour. The idea here is if I co-host and enough people tune in, I'll spin off with a vehicle of my own. So I'm in the green room trading toenail secrets with somebody, the actress Wendi Daniels or somebody, and she asks me to sign her copy of the book. The Book of Very Common Prayer. This is the first time I ever see a copy, I swear. On a stack of my own autographed Bibles, I swear.
   According to Wendi Daniels, I can smooth out the swelling under my eyes by rubbing in a dab of hemorrhoid cream.
   Then she hands it to me, the Book of Very Common Prayer, and my name is just so right there on the spine. Me, me, me. There I am.
   There inside are the prayers people think I wrote:
   The Prayer to Delay Orgasm
   The Prayer to Lose Weight
   The feeling, the way it feels when laboratory product-testing animals are ground up to make hot dogs, that's how hurt I felt.
   The Prayer to Stop Smoking
   Our most Holy Father,
   Take from me the choice You have given.
   Assume control of my will and habits.
   Wrest from me power over my own behavior.
   May it be Your decision how I act.
   May it be by Your hands, my every failing.
   Then if I still smoke, may I accept that my smoking is
   Your will.
   Amen.
   The Prayer to Remove Mildew Stains The Prayer to Prevent Hair Loss
   God of ultimate stewardship,
   Shepherd of thine flock,
   As You would succor the least of Your charges,
   As You would rescue the most lost of Your lambs,
   Restore to me the full measure of my glory.
   Preserve in me the remainder of my youth.
   All of Creation is Yours to provide.
   All of Creation is Yours to withhold.
   God of limitless bounty,
   Consider my suffering.
   Amen.
   The Prayer to Induce Erection
   The Prayer to Maintain an Erection
   The Prayer to Silence Barking Dogs
   The Prayer to Silence Car Alarms
   The way all this felt, I looked terrible on television. My spin-off television show, well, I had to kiss that goodbye. One minute after we were off the air, I was being all over the telephone long-distance to the agent in New York. Everything on my end of the conversation was furious.
   All he cared about was the money.
   "What's a prayer?" he says. "It's an incantation," he says, and he's yelling back at me over the phone. "It's a way for people to focus their energy around a specific need. People need to get clear on a single intention and accomplish it."
   The Prayer to Prevent Parking Tickets
   The Prayer to Stop Plumbing Leaks
   "People pray to solve problems, and these are the honest-to-God problems that people worry about," the agent's still yelling at me.
   The Prayer for Increased Vaginal Sensitivity
   "A prayer is how the squeaky wheel gets greased," he says. That's how made out of cheese his heart is. "You pray to make your needs known."
   The Prayer Against Drivetrain Noise
   The Prayer for a Parking Space
   Oh, divine and merciful God,
   History is without equal for how much I will adore
   You, when You give me today, a place to park.
   For You are the provider.
   And You are the source.
   From You all good is delivered.
   Within You all is found.
   In Your care will I find respite. With Your
   guidance, will I find peace.
   To stop, to rest, to idle, to park.
   These are Yours to give me. This is what I ask.
   Amen.
   Seeing how I'm just about to die here, people need to know that my personal intention all along has been to serve the glory of God. Pretty much. Not that you can find this in our mission statement, but that's my general overall plan. I want to at least make an effort. This new book just looked so not at all pious. So not even a little devout.
   The Prayer Against Excessive Underarm Wetness
   The Prayer for a Second Interview
   The Prayer to Locate a Lost Contact Lens
   Still, even Fertility says I'm way off base about the book. Fertility wanted a second volume.
   It's Fertility who says, some stadiums when I'm up front praising God, I'm the same as people wearing clothes printed with Mickey Mouse or Coca-Cola. I mean, it's so easy. It's not even a real choice. You can't go wrong. Fertility says, praising God is just such a safe thing to do. You don't even have to give it any thought.
   "Be fruitful and multiply," Fertility says to me. "Praise God. There's no real risk. This is just our default setting."
   What saved the Book of Very Common Prayer was, people were using every prayer. Some people were pissed off, mostly religious people who resented the competition, but by this point our cash now was down. Our total revenues were leveling off. It was market saturation. People had the prayers committed to memory. People were stuck in traffic reciting the Prayer to Make Traffic Move. Men were reciting the Prayer to Delay Orgasm, and it worked at least as well as multiplication tables. My best option seemed to be to just keep my mouth shut and smile.
   Besides, the attendance figures were down at my personal appearances, this looked to be the beginning of the end. My People magazine cover was already three months behind me.
   And there's no such thing as Celebrity Outplacement.
   You don't see faded movie stars or whoever going back to community college for retraining. The only field left to me was doing the game show circuit, and I'm not that smart.
   I'd peaked, and timing-wise, this looked like another good window to do my suicide, and I almost did. The pills were in my hand. That's how close I came. I was planning to overdose on meta-testos-terone.
   Then the agent calls on the telephone, loud, real loud, the way it sounds when a million screaming Christians are screaming your name in Kansas City, that's the kind of excitement that's in his voice.
   Over the phone in my hotel room the agent tells me about the best booking of my career. It's next week. It's a thirty-second slot between a tennis shoe commercial and a national taco restaurant spot, prime time during sweeps week.
   It amazes me to think those pills were almost in my mouth.
   This is just so not boring anymore.
   Network television, a million billion people watching, this would be the prime moment, my last chance to pull a gun and shoot myself with a decent audience share.
   This would be such a totally not-ignored martyrdom.
   "One catch," the agent tells me over the phone. He's shouting, "The catch is I told them you'd do a miracle."
   A miracle.
   "Nothing too big. You don't have to part the Red Sea or anything," he says. "Turning water into wine would be enough, but remember, no miracle and they won't run the spot."
   Enter Fertility Hollis back into my life in Spokane, Washington, where I'm eating pie and coffee, incognito in a Shari's restaurant, when she comes in the front door and heads straight for my table. You can't call Fertility Hollis anybody's fairy godmother, but you might be surprised where she turns up.
   But most times you wouldn't.
   Fertility with her old-colored gray eyes as bored as the ocean.
   Fertility with her every exhale an exhausted sigh.
   She's the blase eye of the hurricane that's the world around her.
   Fertility with her arms and face hanging slack as some jaded survivor, some immortal, an Egyptian vampire after watching the million years of television repeats we call history, she slumps into the seat across from me being glad since I needed her for a miracle anyway.
   This is back when I could still give my entourage the slip. I wasn't a nobody yet, but I was on the cusp. Thanks to my media slump. My publicity doldrums.
   The way Fertility slouches with her elbows on the table and her face propped in her hands, her bored-colored red hair hanging limp in her face, you'd guess she's just arrived from some planet with not as much gravity as Earth. As if just being here, as skinny as she is she weighs eight hundred pounds.
   How she's dressed is just separates, slacks and a top, shoes, dragging a canvas tote bag. The air-conditioning is working, and you can smell her fabric softener, sweet and fake.
   How she looks is watered-down.
   How she looks is disappearing.
   How she looks is erased.
   "Don't stress," she says. "This is just me not wearing any makeup. I'm here on an assignment."
   Her job.
   "Right," she says. "My evil job."
   I ask, How's my fish?
   She says, "Fine."
   No way could meeting her here be a coincidence. She has to be following me.
   "What you forget is I know everything," Fertility says. She asks, "What time is it?"
   I tell her, One fifty-three in the afternoon.
   "In eleven minutes the waitress will bring you another piece of pie. Lemon meringue, this time. Later, only about sixty people will show up for your appearance tonight. Then, tomorrow morning, something called the Walker River Bridge will collapse in Shreveport. Wherever that is."
   I say she's guessing.
   "And," she says and smirks, "you need a miracle. You need a miracle, bad."
   Maybe I do, I say. These days, who doesn't need a miracle? How does she know so much?
   "The same way I know," she says and nods toward the other side of the dining room, "that waitress over there has cancer. I know the pie you're eating will upset your stomach. Some movie theater in China will burn in a couple minutes, give or take what time it is in Asia. Right now in Finland, a skier is triggering an avalanche that will bury a dozen people."
   Fertility waves and the waitress with cancer is coming over.
   Fertility leans across the table and says, "I know all this because I know everything."
   The waitress is young and with hair and teeth and everything, meaning nothing about her looks wrong or sick, and Fertility orders a chicken stir-fry with vegetables and sesame seeds. She asks, does it come with rice?
   Spokane is still outside the windows. The buildings. The Spokane River. The sun we all have to share. A parking lot. Cigarette butts.
   I ask, so why didn't she warn the waitress?
   "How would you react if a stranger told you that kind of news? It would just wreck her day," Fertility says. "And all her personal drama would just hold up my order."
   It's cherry pie I'm eating that's going to upset my stomach. The power of suggestion.
   "All you have to do is pay attention to the patterns," Fertility says. "After you see all the patterns, you can extrapolate the future."
   According to Fertility Hollis, there is no chaos.
   There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns.
   If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself.
   What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. What we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish.
   There is no free will.

   There are no variables.
   "There is only the inevitable," Fertility says. "There's only one future. You don't have a choice."
   The bad news is we don't have any control.
   The good news is you can't make any mistakes.
   The waitress across the dining room looks young and pretty and doomed.
   "I pay attention to the patterns," Fertility says.
   She says she can't not pay attention.
   "They're in my dreams more and more every night," she says. "Everything. It's the same as reading a history book about the future, every night."
   So she knows everything.
   "So I know you need a miracle to go on television with."
   What I need is a good prediction.
   "That's why I'm here," she says and takes a fat daily planner book out of her tote bag. "Give me a time window. Give me a date for your prediction."
   I tell her, Any time during the week after next.
   "How about a multiple-car accident," she says, reading from her book.
   I ask, How many cars?
   "Sixteen cars," she says. "Ten dead. Eight injured."
   Does she have anything flashier?
   "How about a casino fire in Las Vegas," she says. "Topless showgirls in big feather headdresses on fire, stuff like that."
   Any dead?
   "No. Minor injuries. A lot of smoke damage, though." .
   Something bigger.
   "A tanning salon explosion."
   Something dazzling.
   "Rabies in a national park."
   Boring.
   "Subway collision."
   She's putting me to sleep.
   "A fur activist strapped with bombs in Paris."
   Skip it.
   "Oil tanker capsizes."
   Who cares about that stuff?
   "Movie star miscarries."
   Great, I say. My public will think I'm a real monster when that comes true.
   Fertility pages around in her daily planner.
   "Geez, it's summer," she says. "We don't have a lot of choices in disasters."
   I tell her to keep looking.
   "Next week, Ho Ho the giant panda the National Zoo is trying to breed will pick up a venereal disease from a visiting panda."
   No way am I going to say that on television.
   "How about a tuberculosis outbreak?"
   Yawn.
   "Freeway sniper?"
   Yawn.
   "Shark attack?"
   She must really be scraping the bottom of the barrel.
   "A broken racehorse leg?"
   "A slashed painting in the Louvre?"
   "A ruptured prime minister?"
   "A fallen meteorite?"
   "Infected frozen turkeys?"
   "A forest fire?"
   No, I tell her.
   Too sad.
   Too artsy.
   Too political.
   Too esoteric.
   Too gross.
   No appeal.
   "A lava flow?" Fertility asks.
   Too slow. No real drama. Mostly just property damage.
   The problem is disaster movies have everybody expecting too much from nature.
   The waitress brings the chicken stir-fry and my lemon meringue pie and fills our coffee cups. Then she smiles and goes off to die.
   Fertility pages back and forth in her book.
   In my guts, the cherry pie is putting up a fight. Spokane is outside. The air conditioning is inside. Nothing even looks like a pattern.
   Fertility Hollis says, "How about killer bees?" I ask, Where? "Arriving in Dallas, Texas." When?
   "Next Sunday morning, at ten past eight." A few? A swarm? How many? "Zillions." I tell her, Perfect.
   Fertility lets out a sigh and digs into her chicken stir-fry. "Shit," she says, "That's the one I knew you'd pick all along."
   So a zillion killer bees buzz into Dallas, Texas, at ten past eight on Sunday morning, right on schedule. This is despite the fact I only had a crummy fifteen percent market share of the television audience for my spot.
   The next week, the network slots me for a full minute, and some heavy hitters, the drug companies, the car makers, the oil and tobacco conglomerates, are lining up as definite maybe sponsors if I can come up with an even bigger miracle.
   For all the wrong reasons, the insurance companies are very interested.
   Between now and next week, I'm on the road making weeknight appearances in Florida. It's the Jacksonville-Tampa-Orlando-Miami circuit. It's the Tender Branson Miracle Crusade. One night each.
   My Miracle Minute, that's what the agent and the network want to call it, well it takes about zero effort to produce. Someone points a camera at you with your hair combed and a tie around your neck, and you look somber and talk straight into the lens:
   The Ipswich Point Lighthouse will topple tomorrow.
   Next week, the Mannington Glacier in Alaska will collapse and capsize a cruise ship that's sightseeing too close.
   The week after that, mice carrying a deadly virus will turn up in Chicago, Tacoma, and Green Bay.
   This is exactly the same as being a television newscaster, only before the fact.
   The way I see the process happening is I'll get Fertility to give me a couple dozen predictions at a time, and I'll just tape a season's worth of Miracle Minutes. With a year in the can, I'll be free to make personal appearances, endorse products, sign books. Maybe do some consulting. Do cameo walk-ons in movies and television.
   Don't ask me when because I don't remember, but somewhere along the way I keep forgetting to commit suicide.
   If the publicist ever put killing myself on my schedule I'd be dead. Seven p.m., Thursday, drink drain cleaner. No problem. But what with the killer bees and the demands on my time, I keep stressing about what if I can't find Fertility again. This, and my entourage is with me every step of the way. The team's always dogging me, the publicist, the schedulers, the personal fitness trainer, the orthodontist, the dermatologist, the dietician.
   The killer bees got less accomplished than you'd expect. They didn't kill anybody, but they got a lot of attention. Now I needed an encore.
   A collapsing stadium. A mining cave-in.
   A train derailment.
   The only moment I'm ever alone is when I go sit on the toilet, and even then I'm surrounded.
   Fertility is nowhere.
   In almost every public men's room, there's a hole chipped in the wall between one toilet stall and the next. This is chipped through solid wood an inch thick by somebody with just their fingernails. This is done over days or months at a time. You see these holes scratched through marble, through steel. As if someone in prison is trying to escape. The hole is only big enough to look though, or talk. Or put a finger through or a tongue or a penis, and escape just that little bit at a time.
   What people call these openings is "glory holes."
   It's the same as where you'd find a vein of gold.
   Where you'd find glory.
   I'm on a toilet in the Miami airport, and right at my elbow there's the hole in the stall wall, and all around the hole are messages left by men who sat here before me.
   John M was here 3/14/64.
   Carl B was here Jan. 8, 1976.
   Epitaphs.
   Some of them are scratched here fresh. Some are covered up but scratched so deep they're still readable under decades of paint.
   Here are the shadows left behind by a thousand moments, a thousand moods, of needs traced here on the wall by men who are gone. Here is the record of their being here. Their visit. Their passing. Here's what the caseworker would call a primary source document.
   A history of the unacceptable.
   Be here tonight for a free blow job. Saturday, June 18, 1973.
   All this is scratched in the wall.
   Here are words without pictures. Sex without names. Pictures without words. Scratched here is a naked woman with her long legs spread wide, her round staring breasts, her long flowing hair and no face.
   Squirting huge teardrops toward her hairy vagina is a severed penis as big as a man.
   Heaven, the words say, is an all-you-can-eat pussy buffet.
   Heaven is getting fucked up the ass.
   Go to Hell faggot.
   Been there.
   Go suck shit.
   Done that.
   These are only a few of the voices around me when a real voice, a woman's voice, whispers, "You need another disaster, don't you?"
   The voice is coming through the hole, but when I look, all you can see are two lipsticked lips. Red lips, white teeth, a flash of wet tongue says, "I knew you'd be here. I know everything."
   Fertility.
   At the hole now is a plain gray-colored eye made big with blue shadow and eyeliner and blinking lashes heavy with mascara. The pupil pulses large and then small. Then the mouth appears to say, "Don't sweat it. Your plane will be delayed for another couple hours."
   On the wall next to the mouth it says, I suck and swallow.
   Next to that it says, I only want to love her if she'd just give me the chance.
   There's a poem that starts, Warm inside you is the love ... The rest of the poem is washed down the wall and erased by ejaculate.
   The mouth says, "I'm here on an assignment."
   It must be her evil job.
   "It's my evil job," she says. "It's the heat."
   It's not something we talk about.
   She says, "I don't want to talk about it."
   Congratulations, I whisper. About the killer bees, I mean.
   Scratched on the wall is, What do you call a Creedish girl who goes down?
   Dead.
   What do you call a Creedish fag who takes dick up the ass?
   The mouth says, "You need another disaster, don't you?"