Survivor

Thoughts From Chuck

"The books are never about what you think they are about. Survivor is really about our education system because I feel, more often than not, kids are sort of taught or trained to be the best possible cogs in some big corporate machine. They're not really taught in an empowered way that they can start their own company so that they can create and run their own lives. They are sort of taught to be just good employees, to just fit in."

For Mike Keefe and Mike Smith For Shawn Grant and Heidi Weeden and Matt Palahniuk

The agent in this book is not Edward Hibbert, who represents my work with all his humor, energy, and skill.

No one in this book is as clever as my editor, Gerry Howard. No one anywhere is as relentless and helpful as Lois Rosenthal.

This book would not exist without the Tuesday Night Writers' Workshop at Suzy's house.

Testing, testing. One, two, three. Testing, testing. One, two, three.

Maybe this is working. I don't know. If you can even hear me, I don't know.

But if you can hear me, listen. And if you're listening, then what you've found is the story of everything that went wrong. This is what you'd call the flight recorder of Flight 2039. The black box, people call it, even though it's orange, and on the inside is a loop of wire that's the permanent record of all that's left. What you've found is the story of what happened.

And go ahead.

You can heat this wire to white-hot, and it will still tell you the exact same story.

Testing, testing. One, two, three.

And if you're listening, you should know right off the bat the passengers are at home, safe. The passengers, they did what you'd call I their deplaning in the New Hebrides Islands. Then, after it was just him and me back in the air, the pilot parachuted out over somewhere. Some kind of water. What you'd call an ocean.

I'm going to keep saying it, but it's true. I'm not a murderer. And I'm alone up here. The Flying Dutchman.

And if you're listening to this, you should know that I'm alone in the cockpit of Flight 2039 with a whole crowd of those little child-sized bottles of mostly dead vodka and gin lined up on the place you sit at against the front windows, the instrument panel. In the cabin, the little trays of everybody's Chicken Kiev or Beef Stroganoff entrees are half eaten with the air conditioner cleaning up any leftover food smell. Magazines are still open to where people were reading. With all the seats empty, you could pretend everyone's just gone to the bathroom. Out of the plastic stereo headsets you can hear a little hum of prerecorded music.

Up here above the weather, it's just me in a Boeing 747-400 time capsule with two hundred leftover chocolate cake desserts and an upstairs piano bar which I can just walk up to on the spiral staircase and mix myself another little drink.

God forbid I should bore you with all the details, but I'm on autopilot up here until we run out of gas. Flame out, the pilot calls it. One engine at a time, each engine will flame out, he said. He wanted me to know just what to expect. Then he went on to bore me with a lot of details about jet engines, the venturi effect, increasing lift by increasing camber with the flaps, and how after all four engines flame out the plane will turn into a 450,000-pound glider. Then since the autopilot will have it trimmed out to fly in a straight line, the glider will begin what the pilot calls a controlled descent.

That kind of a descent, I tell him, would be nice for a change. You just don't know what I've been through this past year.

Under his parachute, the pilot still had on his nothing special blah-colored uniform that looked designed by an engineer. Except for this, he was really helpful. More helpful than I'd be with someone holding a pistol to my head and asking about how much fuel was left and how far would it get us. He told me how I could get the plane back up to cruising altitude after he'd parachuted out over the ocean. And he told me all about the flight recorder.

The four engines are numbered one through four, left to right.

The last part of the controlled descent will be a nosedive into the ground. This he calls the terminal phaseof the descent, where you're going thirty-two feet per second straight at the ground. This he calls terminal velocity,the speed where objects of equal mass all travel at the same speed. Then he slows everything down with a lot of details about Newtonian physics and the Tower of Pisa.

He says, "Don't quote me on any of this. It's been a long time since I've been tested."

He says the APU, the Auxiliary Power Unit, will keep generating electricity right up to the moment the plane hits the ground.

You'll have air-conditioning and stereo music, he says, for as long as you can feel anything.

The last time I felt anything, I tell him, was a ways back. About a year ago. Top priority for me is getting him off this plane so I can finally set down my gun.

I've clenched this gun so long I've lost all feeling.

What you forget when you're planning a hijack by yourself is somewhere along the line, you might need to neglect your hostages just long enough so you can use the bathroom.

Before we touched down in Port Vila, I was running all over the cabin with my gun, trying to get the passengers and crew fed. Did they need a fresh drink? Who needed a pillow? Which did they prefer, I was asking everybody, the chicken or the beef? Was that decaf or regular?

Food service is the only skill where I really excel. The problem was all this meal service and rushing around had to be one-handed, of course, since I had to keep hold of the gun.

When we were on the ground and the passengers and crew were deplaning, I stood at the forward cabin door and said, I'm sorry. I apologize for any inconvenience. Please have a safe and enjoyable trip and thank you for flying Blah-Blah Airlines.

When it was just the pilot and me left on board, we took off again.

The pilot, just before he jumps, he tells me how when each engine fails, an alarm will announce Flame Out in Engine Number One or Three or whichever, over and over. After all the engines are gone, the only way to keep flying will be to keep the nose up. You just pull back on the steering wheel. The yoke, he calls it. To move what he calls the elevators in the tail. You'll lose speed, but keep altitude. It will look like you have a choice, speed or height, but either way you're still going to nose-dive into the ground.

That's enough, I tell him, I'm not getting what you'd call a pilot's license. I just need to use the toilet like nobody's business. I just want him out that door.

Then we slow to 175 knots. Not to bore you with the details, but we drop to under 10,000 feet and pull open the forward cabin door. Then the pilot's gone, and even before I shut the cabin door, I stand at the edge of the doorway and take a leak after him. Nothing in my life has ever felt that good. If Sir Isaac Newton was right, this wouldn't be a problem for the pilot on his way down.

So now I'm flying west on autopilot at mach 0.83 or 455 miles per hour, true airspeed, and at this speed and latitude the sun is stuck in one place all the time. Time is stopped. I'm flying above the clouds at a cruising altitude of 39,000 feet, over the Pacific Ocean, flying toward disaster, toward Australia, toward the end of my life story, straight line southwest until all four engines flame out.

Testing, testing. One, two, three.

One more time, you're listening to the flight recorder of Flight 2039.

And at this altitude, listen, and at this speed, with the plane empty, the pilot says there are six or maybe seven hours of fuel left. So I'll try to make this quick.

The flight recorder will record my every word in the cockpit. And my story won't get bashed into a zillion bloody shreds and then burned with a thousand tons of burning jet. And after the plane wrecks, people will hunt down the flight recorder. And my story will survive.

Testing, testing. One, two, three.

It was just before the pilot jumped, with the cabin door pulled inside and the military ships shadowing us, with the invisible radar tracking us, in the open doorway with the engines shrieking and the air howling past, the pilot stood there in his parachute and yelled, "So why do you want to die so bad?"

And I yelled back for him to be sure and listen to the tape. "Then remember," he yelled. "You have only afew hours. And remember," he yelled, "you don't know exactly when the fuel will run out. There's always the chance you could die right in the middle of your life story."

And I yelled, So what else is new? And, Tell me something I don't know.

And the pilot jumped. I took a leak, then I pushed the cabin door back into place. In the cockpit, I push the throttle forward and pull the yoke back until we fly high enough. All that's left to do is press the button and the autopilot takes charge. That brings us back to right here.

So if you're listening to this, the indestructible black box of Flight 2039, you can go look and see where this plane ended its terminal descent and what's left. You'll know I'm not a pilot after you see the mess and the crater. If you're listening to this, you know that I'm dead.

And I have a few hours to tell my story here.

So I figure there's maybe a chance I'll get this story right.

Testing, testing. One, two, three.

The sky is blue and righteous in every direction. The sun is total and burning and just right there in front. We're on top of the clouds, and this is a beautiful day forever.

So let's us take it from the top. Let me start at the start.

Flight 2039, here's what really happened. Take one.

And.

Just for the record, how I feel right now is very terrific.

And.

I've already wasted ten minutes.

And.

Action.

The way I live, it's hard enough to bread a veal cutlet. Some nights it's different; it's fish or chicken. But the minute my one hand is covered in raw egg and the other's holding the meat someone is going to call me in trouble.

This is almost every night of my life now.

Tonight, a girl calls me from inside a pounding dance club. Her only words I can make out are "behind."

She says, "asshole."

She says what could be "muffin" or "nothing." The fact of the matter is you can't begin to fill in the blanks so I'm in the kitchen, alone and yelling to be heard over the dance mix wherever. She sounds young and worn out, so I ask if she'll trust me. Is she tired of hurting? I ask if there's only one way to end her pain, will she do it?

My goldfish is swimming around all excited inside the fishbowl on the fridge so I reach up and drop a Valium in its water.

I'm yelling at this girl: has she had enough?

I'm yelling: I'm not going to stand here and listen to her complain.

To stand here and try to fix her life is just a big waste of time. People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.

Most people who call me already know what they want. Some want to die but are just looking for my permission. Some want to die and just need a little encouragement. A little push. Someone bent on suicide won't have much sense of humor left. One wrong word, and they're an obituary the next week. Most of the calls I get, I'm only half listening anyway. Most of the people, I decide who lives and who dies just by the tone of their voice.

This is getting nowhere with the girl at the dance club so I tell her, Kill yourself.

She's saying, "What?"

Kill yourself.

She's saying, "What?"

Try barbiturates and alcohol with your head inside a dry cleaning

She says, "What?"

You cannot bread a veal cutlet and do a good job with only one hand so I tell her, now or never. Pull the trigger or don't. I'm with her right now. She's not going to die alone, but I don't have all night.

What sounds like part of the dance mix is her starting to cry really hard. So I hang up.

On top of breading a veal cutlet, these people want me to straighten their whole life out.

The phone in my one hand, I'm trying to get bread crumbs to stick with my other. Nothing should be this hard. You flop the cutlet in raw egg. Then you shake it dry, then crumbs. The problem with the cutlet is I can't get the crumbs right. Some places, the cutlet is bare. The crumbs are so thick in other places you can't tell what's inside.

It used to be this was a lot of fun. People just call you on the verge of suicide. Women would call. Here I am just alone with my goldfish, alone in my dirty kitchen breading a pork chop or whatnot, wearing just my boxers, hearing somebody's prayer. Dishing out guidance and punishment.

A guy will call. After I'm fast asleep, it happens. These calls will come all night if I don't unplug the phone. Some loser will call tonight just after the bars close to say he's sitting cross-legged on the floor in his apartment. He can't sleep without having these terrible nightmares. In his dreams, he sees planes full of people crash. It's so real and then no one will help him. He can't sleep. He can't get help. He tells me he's got a rifle tucked up under his chin and he wants me to give him one good reason not to pull the trigger.

He can't live with knowing the future and not being able to save anyone.

These victims, they call. These chronic sufferers. They call. They break up my own little tedium. It's better than television.

I tell him, Go ahead. I'm only half awake. It's three in the morning, and I have to work tomorrow. I tell him, Hurry before I fall back asleep, pull the trigger.

I tell him this isn't such a beautiful world that he has to stay in it and suffer. This isn't much of a world at all.

My job is most of the time I work for a housecleaning service. Full-time drudge. Part-time god.

Past experience tells me to hold the phone a ways from my ear when I hear the little click of the trigger. There's the blast, just a burst of static, and somewhere a receiver clunks to the floor. I'm the last person to talk to him, and I'm back asleep before the ringing in my ear starts to fade.

There's the obituary to look for the next week, six column inches about nothing that really mattered. You need the obituary, otherwise you're not sure if it happened or if it was just a dream. I don't expect you to understand.

It's a different kind of entertainment. It's a rush, having that kind of control. The guy with the shotgun was named Trevor Hollis in his obituary, and finding out he was a real person feels wonderful. It's murder, but it's not, depending on how much credit you take. I can't even say doing crisis intervention was my own idea.

The truth is this is a terrible world, and I ended his suffering. The idea came by accident when a newspaper did a feature about a real crisis hotline. The phone number in the paper was mine by mistake. It was a typo. Nobody read the correction they ran the next day, and people just started calling me day and night with their problems.

Please don't think I'm here to save lives. To be or not to be, I don't labor the decision. And don't think I'm above talking to women this way. Vulnerable women. Emotional cripples.

McDonald's almost hired me one time, and I only applied for the job to meet younger girls. Black girls, Hispanic, white, and Chinese girls, it says right on the job application how McDonald's hires different races and ethnic backgrounds. It's girls, girls, girls, buffet-style. Also on the application McDonald's says if you have any of the following diseases: Hepatitis a Salmonella Shigella Staphylococcus Giardia or Campylobacter, then you may not work there. This is more of a guarantee than you get meeting girls on the street. You can't be too careful. At least at McDonald's she's gone on the record saying she's clean. Plus, there's a very good chance she's going to be young. Pimple young. Giggling young. Silly young and as stupid as me.

Eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-year-old girls, I only want to talk to them. Community college girls. High school seniors. Emancipated minors.

It's the same with these suicide girls calling me up. Most of them are so young. Crying with their hair wet down in the rain at a public telephone, they call me to the rescue. Curled in a ball alone in bed for days, they call me. Messiah. They call me. Savior. They sniff and choke and tell me what I ask for in every little detail.

It's so perfect some nights to hear them in the dark. The girl will just trust me. The phone in my one hand, I can imagine my other hand is her.

It's not that I want to get married. I admire guys who can commit to a tattoo.

After the newspaper got the phone number right, the calls started to peter out. The loads of people who called me at first, they were all dead or pissed off at me. No new people were calling. They wouldn't hire me at McDonald's, so I made a bunch of big sticky labels.

The labels had to stand out. You need the stickers to be easy to read at night and by somebody crying on drugs or drunk. The stickers I use are just black on white with the black letters saying:

Give Yourself, Your Life, Just One More Chance. Call Me for Help. Then my phone number.

My second choice was:

If You're a Young Sexually Irresponsible Girl with a Drinking Problem, Get the Help You Need. Call—and then my phone number.

Take my word for it. Don't make this second kind of sticker. With this kind of sticker, someone from the police will pay you a visit. Just from your phone number, they can use a reverse directory and put your name on a list as a probable felon. Forever after that you'll hear the little click ... click ... click ... of a wiretap behind every telephone call you ever make.

Take my word for it.

If you use the first kind of sticker, you'll get people calling to confess sins, complain, ask advice, seek approval.

The girls you meet are never very far from their worst-case scenario. A harem of women will be clutching their telephones on the brink and asking you to call back, please, call back. Please.

Call me a sexual predator, but when I think of predators I think of lions, tigers, big cats, sharks. This isn't so much a predator versus prey relationship. This isn't a scavenger, a vulture, or a laughing hyena versus a carcass. This isn't a parasite versus a host.

We're all miserable together.

It's the opposite of a victimless crime.

What's most important is you need to put the stickers in public telephones. Try inside dirty phone booths near bridges over deep water. Put them next to taverns where people with no place to go get thrown out at closing time.

In no time at all, you'll be in business.

You'll need one of those speakerphones where it sounds like you're calling from deep inside somewhere. Then people will call in crisis and hear you flush the toilet. They'll hear the roar of the blender and know how you couldn't care less.

These days, what I need is one of those cordless telephone headsets. A kind of Walkman of human misery. Live or die. Sex or death. This way, you can make hands-free life-and-death decisions every hour when people call to talk about their one terrible crime. You give out penance. You sentence people. You give guys on the edge the phone numbers of girls in the same position.

The same as most prayers, the bulk of what you hear is complaints and demands. Help me. Hear me. Lead me. Forgive me.

The phone is ringing again already. The thin little coating of crumbs on the veal cutlet is almost impossible for me to get right, and on the phone is a new girl, crying. I ask right away if she'll trust me. I ask if she'll tell me everything.

My goldfish and me, both of us are just here swimming in one place.

The cutlet looks dug out of a box.

To calm this girl down, to get her to listen, I tell her the story about my fish. This is fish number six hundred and forty-one in a lifetime of goldfish. My parents bought me the first one to teach me about loving and caring for another living breathing creature of God. Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet that someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground.

The night before I left home, my big brother told me everything he knew about the outside world.

In the outside world, he said, women had the power to change the color of their hair. And their eyes. And their lips.

We were on the back porch in just the light from the kitchen window. My brother, Adam, was cutting my hair the way he cut wheat, gathering handfuls of it and cutting it with a straight razor at about the halfway point. He'd pinch my chin between his thumb and forefinger and force me to look at him straight on, his brown eyes darting back and forth between each of my sideburns.

To get my sideburns even, he'd cut one, then the other, then the first, over and over until both sideburns were gone.

My seven little brothers were sitting along the edges of the porch, watching the darkness for all the evils Adam described.

In the outside world, he said, people kept birds inside their houses. He'd seen it.

Adam had been outside the church district colony just one time, when he and his wife had to register their marriage to make it legal with the government.

In the outside world, he said, people were visited in their houses by spirits they called television.

Spirits spoke to people through what they called the radio.

People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were too scared of being alone.

He went on cutting my hair, not for style as much as he was pruning it the way he'd prune a tree. Around us on the porch boards, the hair piled up, not so much cut as harvested.

In the church district colony, we hung bags of cut hair in the orchard to scare away deer. Adam told me the rule about not wasting anything is one of the blessings you give up when you leave the church colony. The hardest blessing you give up is silence.

In the outside world, he told me, there was no real silence. Not the fake silence you get when you plug your ears so you hear nothing but your heart, but real out-of-doors silence.

The week they were married, he and Biddy Gleason rode in a bus from the church district colony, escorted by a church elder. The whole trip, the bus was loud inside. The automobiles on the road with them were roaring. People in the outside world said something stupid with their every breath, and when they didn't talk their radios filled the gap with the copied voices of people singing the same songs over and over.

Adam said the other blessing you have to give up in the outside world is darkness. You can close your eyes, and sit in a cupboard, but that's not the same thing. The darkness at night in the church district colony is complete. The stars are thick above us in this kind of darkness. You can see how the moon is rough with mountain ranges and etched with rivers and smoothed with oceans.

On a night without the moon or stars you can't see a thing, but you can imagine anything.

At least that's how I remember.

My mother was inside the kitchen ironing and folding the clothes I'd be allowed to take with me. My father was I don't know where. I'd never see either of them again.

It's funny, but people always ask if she was crying. They ask if my father cried and threw his arms around me before I left. And people are always amazed when I say no. Nobody cried or hugged.

Nobody cried or hugged when we sold a pig either. Nobody cried and hugged before they killed a chicken or picked an apple.

Nobody lay awake at night wondering if the wheat they'd raised was truly happy and fulfilled being made into bread.

My brother was just cutting my hair. My mother was just done ironing and she'd sat down to sew. She was pregnant. I remember she was always pregnant, and my sisters were all around her with their skirts spread on the kitchen benches or on the floor, all of them sewing.

People always ask if I was scared or excited or what.

According to church doctrine only the firstborn son, Adam, would ever marry and grow old in the church district. When we turned seventeen the rest of us, me and my seven brothers and five sisters, would all go out for work. My father lives here because he was the firstborn son in his family. My mother lives here because the church elders chose her for my father.

People are always so disappointed if I tell them the truth, that none of us lived in oppressed turmoil. None of us resented the church. We just lived. None of us were tortured by feelings very much.

That was the complete depth of our faith. Call it shallow or deep. There was nothing that could scare us. That's how people raised in the church district colony believed. Whatever happened in the world was a decree from God; a task to be completed. Any crying or joy just got in the way of your being useful. Any emotion was decadent. Anticipation or regret was a silly extra; a luxury.

That was the definition of our faith. Nothing was to be known. Anything was to be expected.

In the outside world, Adam said it was a bargain with the devil that powered automobiles and carried airplanes across the sky. Evil flowed through electric wires to make people lazy. People put their dishes back in the cupboard dirty, and the cupboard washed them. Water in pipes carried away their garbage and shit so that it was someone else's problem. Adam pinched my chin with his thumb and forefinger and leaned down to look me straight in the face, and said how in the outside world, people looked in mirrors.

Right in front of him on the bus, he said, people had mirrors and everyone was busy seeing how they looked. It was shameful.

I remember that was the last haircut I got for a long long time, but I don't really remember why. My head was a bristling field of straw with just the short hairs that were left.

In the outside world, Adam said, all the counting was done inside machines.

All the food was fed to people by waitresses.

The one time he left the colony, my brother and his wife and the church elder who escorted them stayed overnight in a hotel in downtown Robinsville, Nebraska. They didn't any of them sleep. The next day the bus brought them home for the rest of their lives.

A hotel, he told me, was a big house where a lot of people lived and ate and slept, but no one knew each other. He said that described most families in the outside world.

Churches in the outside world, my brother told me, were just the local stores that sold people lies made up in the distant factories of giant religions.

He said a lot more I don't remember.

That haircut was sixteen years ago.

My father had sired Adam and me and all fourteen of his children by the time he was the age I am now.

I was seventeen years old the night I left home.

The way my father looked the last time I saw him is the way I look now.

Looking at Adam was as good as looking in a mirror. He was my big brother by just three minutes and thirty seconds, but in the Creedish church district there was no such thing as twins.

That last night I ever saw Adam Branson, I remember thinking my big brother was a very kind and a very wise man.

That's how stupid I was.

Part of my job is to preview the menu for a dinner party tonight. This means taking a bus from the house where I work to another big house, and asking some strange cook what they expect everybody to eat. Who I work for doesn't like surprises, so part of my job is telling my employers ahead of time if tonight they'll be asked to eat something difficult like a lobster or an artichoke. If there's anything threatening on the menu, I have to teach them how to eat it right.

This is what I do for a living.

The house where I clean, the man and woman who live here are never around. That's just the kind of jobs they have. only details I know about them are from cleaning what they own. All I can figure out is from picking up after them. Cleaning up their little messes, day after day. Rewinding their videotapes: Full Service Anal EscortsThe giant breasts of Letha*** Weapons. The adventures of little Sinderella.

By the time my bus drops me off here, the people who I work for are gone to work downtown. By the time they drive home, I'm back downtown in my housing voucher studio apartment that used to be just a tiny hotel room until somebody crowded in a stove and a fridge to raise the rent. The bathroom's still out in the hall.

The only way I ever talk to my employers is by speakerphone..,. This is just a plastic box sitting on their kitchen counter and yelling at me to get more done.

Ezekiel, Chapter Nineteen, Verse Seven:"And he knew their desolate palaces..." something, something, something. You can't keep the whole Bible balanced in your head. You wouldn't have room to remember your name.

The house I've been cleaning the last six years is about what you'd expect, big, and it's in a real tony part of town. This is compared to where I live. All the studio apartments in my neighborhood are the same as a warm toilet seat. Somebody was there just a second before you and somebody will be there the minute you get up. The part of town where I go to work every morning, there are paintings on the walls. Behind the front door, there are rooms and rooms nobody ever goes into. Kitchens where nobody cooks. Bathrooms that never get dirty. The money they leave out to test me, will I take it, the money is never less than a fifty-dollar bill, dropped behind the dresser as if by accident. The clothes they own look designed by an architect.

Next to the speakerphone is a fat daily planner book they keep full of things for me to get done. They want me to account for my next ten years, task by task. Their way, everything in your life turns into an item on a list. Something to accomplish. You get to see how your life looks flattened out.

The shortest distance between two points is a time line, a schedule, a map of your time, the itinerary for the rest of your life.

Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list.

"I want to be able to look at your planner," the speakerphone yells at me, "and know exactly where I can find you at four o'clock on this day five years from now. I want you to be that exact."

Seeing it down in black and white, somehow you're always disappointed in your life expectancy. How little you'll really get done. The resume of your future.

It's two o'clock Saturday afternoon so according to my daily planner, I'm about to boil five lobsters for them to practice eating. That's how much money they make.

The only way I can afford to eat veal is when I smuggle it home on the bus sitting in my lap.

The secret to boiling a lobster is simple. First you fill a kettle with cold water and a pinch of salt. You can use equal parts of water and vermouth or vodka. You can add some seaweed to the water for a stronger flavor. These are the basics they teach in Home Economics.

Most everything else I know is from the messes these people leave behind.

Just ask me how to get bloodstains out of a fur coat.

No, really, go ahead.

Ask me.

The secret is cornmeal and brushing the fur the wrong way. The tricky part is keeping your mouth shut.

To get blood off of piano keys, polish them with talcum powder or powdered milk.

This isn't the most marketable job skill, but to get bloodstains out of wallpaper, put on a paste of cornstarch and cold water. This will work just as well to get blood out of a mattress or a davenport. The trick is to forget how fast these things can happen. Suicides. Accidents. Crimes of passion.

Just concentrate on the stain until your memory is completely erased. Practice really does make perfect. If you could call it that.

Ignore how it feels when the only real talent you have is for hiding the truth. You have a God-given knack for committing a terrible sin. It's your calling. You have a natural gift for denial. A blessing.

If you could call it that.

Even after sixteen years of cleaning people's houses, I want to think the world is getting better and better, but really I know it's not. You want there to be some improvement in people, but there won't be. And you want to think there's something you can get done.

Cleaning this same house every day, all that gets better is my skill at denying what's wrong.

God forbid I should ever meet who I work for in person.

Please don't get the idea I don't like my employers. The caseworker has gotten me lots worse postings. I don't hate them. I don't love them, but I don't hate them. I've worked for lots worse.

Just ask me how to get urine stains out of drapes and a tablecloth.

Ask me what's the fastest way to hide bullet holes in a living-room wall. The answer is toothpaste. For larger calibers, mix a paste of equal parts starch and salt.

Call me the voice of experience.

Five lobsters is how many I figure they'll take to learn the tricky details of getting the back open. The carapace, I figure. Inside's the brain or the heart you're supposed to be hunting for. The trick is to put the lobsters in the water and then turn up the heat. The secret is to go slow. Allow at least thirty minutes for the water to reach a hundred degrees. This way, the lobsters are supposed to die a painless death.

My daily planner tells me to keep busy, polishing the copper the best way, with half a lemon dipped in salt.

These lobsters we have to practice with are called Jumbos since they're around three pounds apiece. Lobsters under a pound are called Chickens. Lobsters missing a claw are called Culls. The ones I take out of the refrigerator packed in wet seaweed will need to boil about half an hour. This is more stuff you learn in Home Economics.

Of the two large forward claws, the larger claw lined with what look like molars is called the Crusher. The smaller claw lined with incisors is called the Cutter. The smaller side legs are called the Walking Legs. On the underside of the tail are five rows of small fins called Swimmerets. More Home Economics. If the front row of swimmerets is soft and feathery, the lobster is female. If the front row is hard and rough, the lobster is male.

If the lobster is female, look for a bony heart-shaped hollow between the two rear walking legs. This is where the female will still be carrying live sperm if she's had sex within the past two years.

The speakerphone rings while I'm setting the lobsters, three male and two female, no sperm, in the pot on the stove.

The speakerphone rings as I turn up the heat just another notch.

The speakerphone rings while I wash my hands.

The speakerphone rings while I go pour myself a cup of coffee and mix in cream and sugar.

The speakerphone rings while I take a handful of seaweed from the lobster bag and sprinkle it in on top of the lobsters in the pot. One lobster lifts a crusher claw for a stay of execution. Crusher claws and cutter claws, they're all rubber-banded.

The speakerphone rings while I go wash and dry my hands again.

The speakerphone rings, and I answer it.

Gaston House, I say.

"Gaston Residence!"the speakerphone yells at me. "Say it, Gaston Residence!Say it the way we told you how!"

What they teach you in Home Economics is it's correct to call a house a residenceonly in printing and engraving. We've gone over this a million times.

I drink a little coffee and fiddle with the heat under the lobsters. The speakerphone keeps yelling, "Is anyone there? Hello? Have we been cut off?"

This couple I work for, at one party they were the only guests who didn't know to lift the doily with the finger bowl. Since then, they've been addicted to learning etiquette. They still say it's pointless, it's useless, but they're terrified of not knowing every little ritual.

The speakerphone keeps yelling, "Answer me! Damn it! Tell me about the party tonight! What kind of food are we going up against? We've been worried sick all day!"

I look in the cabinet over the stove for the lobster gear, the nutcrackers and nutpicks and bibs.

Thanks to my lessons, these people know all three acceptable ways to place your dessert silver. It's my doing that they can drink iced tea the right way with the long spoon still in the glass. This is tricky, but you have to hold the spoon handle between your index and middle fingers, against the edge of the glass opposite your mouth. Be careful to not poke your eye out. Not a lot of people know this way. You see people taking the wet spoon out and looking for a place to set it and not wreck the tablecloth. Or worse, they just put it anywhere and leave a wet tea stain.

When the speakerphone goes silent, then and only then do I start.

I ask the speakerphone, Are you listening?

I tell the speakerphone, Picture a dinner plate.

Tonight, I say, the spinach souffleacute; will be at the one-o'clock position. The beets thing will be at four o'clock. A meat thing with slivered almonds was going to be on the other half of the plate in the nine-o'clock position. To eat it, the guests would have to use a knife. And there are going to be bones in the meat.

This is the best posting I've ever had, no kids, no cats, no-wax floors, so I don't want to botch it. If I didn't care, I'd start telling who I work for to do any monkey business I could imagine. Like: You eat the sorbet by licking it out of the bowl, dog-dish fashion.

Or: Pick up the lamb chop with your teeth and shake your head vigorously, side to side.

And what's terrible is they'd probably do this. It's because I've never steered them wrong, they trust me.

Except for teaching them etiquette, my toughest challenge is living down to their expectations.

Ask me how to repair stab holes in nightgowns, tuxedos, and hats. My secret is a little clear nail polish on the inside of the puncture.

Nobody teaches you all the job skills you need in Home Economics, but over enough time, you pick them up. In the church district where I grew up, they teach you the way to make candles drip less is soak them in strong salt water. Store candles in the freezer until ready to use. That's their kind of household hint. Light candles with a strand of raw spaghetti. Sixteen years I've been cleaning for people in their homes, and never has anybody asked me to walk around with a piece of spaghetti on fire in my hand.

No matter what they stress in Home Economics, it's just not a priority in the outside world.

For example, no one teaches you that green-tinted moisturizer will help hide red, slapped skin. And any gentleman who's ever been backhanded by a lady with her diamond ring should know a styptic pencil will stop the bleeding. Close the gash with a dab of Super Glue and you can be photographed at a movie premier, smiling and without stitches or a scar.

Always keep a red washcloth around for wiping up blood, and you'll never have a stain to presoak.

My daily planner tells me I'm sharpening a butcher knife.

About the dinner tonight, I keep briefing who I work for about what to expect.

The important part is not to panic. Yes, there's going to be a lobster they'll have to deal with.

There's going to be a single saltcellar. A game course will be served after the roast. The game is going to be squab. It's a kind of bird, and if there's anything more complicated to eat than a lobster, it's a squab. All those little bones you have to dismantle, everybody dressed up for their dissection. Another wine will come after the aperitif, the sherry with the soup course, the white wine with the lobster, the red with the roast, another red wine with the greasy ordeal of the squab. By this time, the table will be spotted with everybody's piddling island archipelagoes of dressings and sauces and wine sprayed across the white tablecloth.

This is how my job goes. Even in a good posting, nobody wants to know where the male guest of honor is supposed to sit.

That exquisite dinner your teachers in Home Economics talked about, the pause with fresh flowers and demitasse after a perfect day of poise and elegant living, well, nobody gives a rat's ass about that.

Tonight, at some moment between the soup course and the roast, everybody at the table will get to mutilate a big dead lobster. Thirty-four captains of industry, thirty-four successful monsters, thirty- four acclaimed savages in black tie will pretend they know how to eat.

And after the lobster, the footmen will present hot finger bowls with floating slices of lemon, and these thirty-four botched autopsies will end with garlic and butter up to the elbow of every sleeve and every smiling greasy face will look up from sucking out meat from some cavity in the thorax.

After seventeen years of working in private houses every day, the things I know the most about are slapped faces, creamed corn, black eyes, wrenched shoulders, beaten eggs, kicked shins, scratched corneas, chopped onions, bites of all sorts, nicotine stains, sexual lubricants, knocked-out teeth, split lips, whipped cream, twisted arms, vaginal tears, deviled ham, cigarette burns, crushed pineapple, hernias, terminated pregnancies, pet stains, shredded coconut, gouged eyes, sprains, and stretch marks.

The ladies who you work for, after they sob for hours on end, make them use blue or mauve eyeliner to make their bloodshot eyes look whiter. The next time someone socks a tooth out of her husband's mouth, save the tooth in a glass of milk until he can see the dentist. In the meantime, mix zinc oxide and oil of cloves into a white paste. Rinse the empty socket and pack it with the paste for a quick and easy filling that hardens lickety-split.

For tear stains in a pillow case, treat them the same way you would a perspiration stain. Dissolve five aspirin in water and daub the stain until it's gone. Even if there's a mascara stain, the problem's solved.

If you could call it solved.

Whether you clean a stain, a fish, a house, you want to think you're making the world a better place, but really you're just letting things get worse. You think maybe if you just work harder and faster, you can hold off the chaos, but then one day you're changing a patio lightbulb with a five-year life span and you realize how you'll only be changing this light maybe ten more times before you'll be dead.

Time is running out. There isn't the kind of energy you used to have. You start to slow down.

You start to give in.

This year there's hair on my back, and my nose keeps getting bigger. How my face looks every morning is more and more what you'd call a mug.

After working in these rich houses, I know the best way to get blood out of the trunk of a car is not to ask any questions.

The speakerphone is saying, "Hello?"

The best way to keep a good job is just do what they want.

The speakerphone is saying, "Hello?"

To get lipstick out of a collar, rub in a little white vinegar.

For stubborn protein-based stains, like semen, try rinsing with cold salt water, then wash as usual.

This is valuable on-the-job training. Feel free to take notes.

To pick up broken glass from that jimmied bedroom window or smashed highball, you can blot up even the tiniest shards with a slice of bread.

Stop me if you already know all this.

The speakerphone is saying, "Hello?"

Been there. Done that.

What else they teach you in Home Economics is the correct way to respond to a wedding invitation. How to address the Pope. The right way to monogram silver. In the Creedish church school, they teach how the world can be a perfect elegant little stage play of perfect manners where you're the director. The teachers, they paint a picture of dinner parties where everyone will already know how to eat a lobster.

Then it's not.

Then all you can do is get lost in the tiny details of every day doing the same tasks over and over.

There's the fireplace to clean.

There's the lawn to mow.

Turn all the bottles in the wine cellar.

There's the lawn to mow, again.

There's the silver to polish.

Repeat.

Still, just one time, I'd like to prove I know something better. I can do more than just cover up. The world can be a lot better than we settle for. All you have to do is ask.

No, really, go ahead. Ask me.

How do you eat an artichoke?

How do you eat asparagus?

Ask me.

How do you eat a lobster?

The lobsters in the pot look dead enough so I lift one out. I tell the speakerphone, First, twist off each of the big front claws.

The other lobsters I'll put in the refrigerator for them to practice taking apart. To the speakerphone I say, Take notes.

I crack the claws and eat the meat inside.

Then bend the lobster backward until its tail snaps away from its body. Snap off the tip of the tail, the Telson, and use a seafood fork to push out the tail meat. Remove the intestinal vein that runs the length of the tail. If the vein is clear, the lobster hasn't eaten anything for a while. A thick dark vein is fresh and still full of dung.

I eat the tail meat.

The seafood fork, I tell the speakerphone with my mouth full, the seafood fork is the little baby fork with three prongs.

Next, you unhinge the back shell, the carapace, from the body, and eat the green digestive gland called the Tomalley. Eat the copper-based blood that congeals into white gunk. Eat the coral-colored immature egg masses.

I eat them all.

Lobsters have what you'd call an "open" circulatory system where the blood just sloshes around inside their cavities, bathing the different organs.

The lungs are spongy and tough, but you can eat them, I tell the speakerphone and lick my fingers. The stomach is the tough sack of what look like teeth just behind the head. Don't eat the stomach.

I dig around inside the body. I suck the little meat out of each walking leg. I bite off the tiny gill bailers. I bypass the ganglia of the brain.

I stop.

What I find is impossible.

The speakerphone is yelling, "Okay, now what? Was that everything? What's there left to eat?"

This can't be happening because according to my daily planner, it's almost three o'clock. I'm supposed to be outside digging up the garden. At four, I'll rearrange the flower beds. At five-thirty, I'll pull up the salvia and replace them with Dutch iris, roses, snapdragons, ferns, ground cover.

The speakerphone is yelling, "What is happening there? Answer me! What's gone wrong?"

I check my schedule, and it says I'm happy. I'm productive. I work hard. It's all right down here in black and white. I'm getting things done.

The speakerphone yells, "What do we do next?"

Today is just one of those days the sun comes out to really humiliate you.

The speakerphone yells, "What's there left to do?"

I ignore the speakerphone because there's nothing left to do. Almost nothing's left.

And maybe this is just a trick of the light, but I've eaten almost the whole lobster before I notice the heart beat.

According to my daily planner, I'm trying to keep my balance. I'm up at the top of a ladder with my arms full of fake flowers: roses, daisies, delphiniums, stock. I'm trying to keep from falling, my toes curled up tight in my shoes. I'm collecting another polyester bouquet, an obituary from last week all folded up in my shirt pocket.

The man I killed last week is around here somewhere. What's left of him. The one with the shotgun under his chin, sitting alone in his empty apartment, asking over the phone for me to give him just one good reason not to pull the trigger, I'm sure enough going to find him. Trevor Hollis.

Gone But Not Forgotten.

Resting in Peace.

Called from This Life.

Or he's going to find me. That's what I always hope.

Up at the top of a ladder, I must be twenty, twenty-five, thirty feet above the gallery floor while I pretend to catalog another artificial flower, my glasses pinching at the end of my nose. My pen leaves words in my notebook. Specimen Number 786, I'm writing, is a red rose around a hundred years old.

What I hope is everybody else here is dead.

Part of my job is I have to arrange fresh flowers around the house where I work. I have to pick flowers out of the garden I'm supposed to tend.

What you need to understand is I'm not a ghoul.

The petals and calyx (sepals) of the rose are red celluloid. First created in 1863, celluloid is the oldest and least stable form of plastic. I'm writing in my notebook, the leaves of the rose are green-tinted celluloid.

I stop writing and look over my glasses. Down at the end of the gallery and so far away she's just a tiny black outline against a huge stained-glass window is somebody. The stained glass is a picture of somewhere, Sodom or Jericho or the Temple of Solomon being destroyed by fire in the Old Testament, silent and blazing. Twisted feathers of orange and red flame twist around falling blocks of stone, pillars, friezes, and out of this walks a figure in a little black dress getting bigger as she gets close.

And what I hope is she's dead. My secret wish is right now to be romancing this dead girl. A dead girl. Any dead girl. I'm not what you'd call choosy.

The lie I tell people is I'm doing research into the evolution of artificial flowers during the Industrial Revolution. All this is supposed to be my thesis for Nature and Design 456. Why I'm so old is I'm a graduate student.

The girl has long red hair that women only have these days if it's part of some orthodox religion. From up so high on my ladder, the thin bendable little arms and legs of the girl make me look again and again and wonder if someday I could be a pedophile.

Although not the oldest specimen in my study, this rose I pretend to examine is the most fragile. The female sex organ, the Pistil, including the Stigma, the Style, and the Ovary, are cast jet. The male sex organs, the Stamen, include a wire Filament topped with a tiny glass Anther.

Part of my job is I have to grow fresh flowers in the garden, but I can't. I can't grow a weed.

The lie I tell myself is I'm here to gather flowers, fresh ones for inside the house. I steal the fake flowers for sticking out in the garden. The people I work for only look at their garden from inside so I stick the bare dirt full of fake greenery, ferns or needlepoint ivy, then I stick in fake seasonal flowers. The landscaping is beautiful as long as you don't look too close.

The flowers look so lifelike. So natural. So peaceful.

The best place to find bulbs for forcing is in the Dumpster behind the mausoleum. Thrown away are plastic pots of dormant bulbs, hyacinths and tulips, tiger and stargazer lilies, daffodils and crocus ready to take home and bring back to life.

Specimen Number 786, I write, occurs in the vase of Crypt 2387, in the highest tier of Crypts, in the lesser south gallery, on the seventh floor of the Serenity wing. This location, I write, thirty feet above the floor of the gallery, might account for the almost perfect condition of this rose, found on one of the oldest crypts in one of the original wings of the Columbia Memorial Mausoleum.

Then I steal the rose.

What I tell people who see me here is another story.

The official version for why I'm here is this mausoleum provides the best examples of artificial flowers dating back into the mid nineteenth century. Each of the six main wings, the Serenity wing, the Contentment wing, the Eternity, Tranquillity, Harmony, and New Hope wings, is five to eighteen stories tall. The concrete honeycomb of every wall is nine feet thick so it can accommodate even the longest casket inserted lengthwise. Air doesn't circulate in the miles of galleries. Visitors seldom visit. Their typical visit is short. The average year-round temperature and humidity are low and constant.

The oldest specimens derive from the culture of Victorian flower language. Based on the 1840 classic Le langage des fleursby Madame de la Tour, purple lilacs meant death. White lilacs, the genus Syringa,meant the first discovery of love.

The geranium meant gentility.

The buttercup, childishness.

Because most artificial flowers were made to decorate hats, a mausoleum provides the best specimens that still exist.

That's what I tell people. My official version of the truth.

During the day, if people see me with my notebook and my pen, most times I'm at the top of a ladder swiping some bunch of fake pansies left at a crypt high in the wall. It's for a college class is what I cup my hand around my mouth and whisper down to them.

I'm conducting a study.

Sometimes I'll be here late at night. This is after everyone's gone. Then I'll be walking around alone after midnight and my dream is that some night around the next corner will be an open crypt in the wall and near it will be a desiccated cadaver, the skin wilted on its face and its dress suit stiff and blotched with the fluids dripping and leaked out of its body. I'll come across this carcass in some dim gallery, silent except for the buzz of a single fluorescent tube flashing strobes of lightning in the last few moments before it will leave me in the dark, forever, with this dead monster.

The cadaver eyes should be collapsed into dark sockets, and I want it to stumble blind and clutching the cold marble walls with smears of rotted paste that expose the bones inside each hand. The tired mouth of it hanging open, the lost nose of it just two dark holes, the loose shirt of it resting low on the exposed collarbones.

I'll be looking for names I know from the obituaries. Carved here forever are the names of people who took my advice.

Go ahead. Kill yourself.

Beloved Son. Gentle Daughter. Devoted Friend.

Pull the trigger.

Exalted soul.

Here I am. It's payback time. I dare you to.

Come and get me.

I want to be chased by flesh-eating zombies.

I want to be walking past the marble slab covering a crypt and hear something scratching and struggling inside. At night, I flatten my ear cold against the marble and wait. This is why I'm really here.

Specimen Number 786, I write in my notebook, has a main stem of green cotton-covered 30-gauge millinery wire. Each leaf stem appears to be 20-gauge.

Not that I'm crazy or anything, I just want some proof that death isn't the end. Even if crazed zombies grabbed me in some dark hall one night, even if they tore me apart, at least that wouldn't be the absolute end. There would be some comfort in that.

It would prove some kind of life after death, and I would die happy. So I wait. So I watch. I listen. I put my ear to each cold crypt. I write, No activity within Crypt 7896.

No activity within Crypt 7897.

No activity within Crypt 7898.

I write, Specimen Number 45 is a white Bakelite rose. The oldest synthetic plastic, Bakelite was invented in 1907 when a chemist heated a mixture of phenol and formaldehyde. In the language of Victorian flower culture, a white rose means silence.

The day I meet the girl is the best day to document new flowers. It's the day after Memorial Day weekend when the crowds are gone for another year. It's with everyone gone that I first see this girl I hope will be dead.

The day after Memorial Day, the janitor comes along with a rolling garbage bin and collects all the fresh flowers. The lowest grade of fresh flowers is what florists call "Funeral Grade."

The janitor and I have crossed paths, but we've never spoken. Him in his blue coveralls, he caught me one time with my ear to a crypt. The circle of his flashlight spotlighting me there, even that time he only looked the other way. With the heel of one shoe in my hand, I was knocking and saying, Hello. In Morse code I was asking, could anybody hear me?

The problem with Funeral Grade flowers is they only look good for one day. A day later, they start to rot. Then with flowers hanging from the bronze vase attached to each crypt, hanging there dark and withered, dripping their stink water on the marble floor and furry with mold, it's too easy to imagine what's happening to the beloved sealed inside.

The day after Memorial Day, the janitor throws them out. The wilting flowers.

Left behind is a new crop of fake peonies, dark magenta and soaked with dye to make their silk almost black. This year there are artificially perfumed sprays of plastic orchids. The long poly-silk vines of blue and white huge morning glories are worth the trouble to steal.

The oldest old specimens include flowers made of chiffon, organza, velvet, velveteen georgette, crepe de chine, and wide satin ribbon. Heaped in my arms are snapdragons, sweet peas, and salvia. Hollyhocks, four-o'clocks, and forget-me-nots. Fake and beautiful but stiff and scratchy, this year the new flowers are spritzed with clear droplets of polystyrene plastic dew.

This year, this girl is here a day late with a nothing-special assortment of polyester tulips and anemone, the classic Victorian flower of sorrow and death, of sickness and desertion, and watching her from my ladder, at the far end of the west gallery, on the sixth floor of Contentment, making notes in my little field guide, is me.

The flower in front of me is Specimen 237, a postwar rayon chrysanthemum, postwar because there wasn't silk enough or rayon or wire enough to make flowers during World War Two. Wartime flowers are crepe paper or rice paper, and even in the constant dry fifty degrees of the Columbia Memorial Mausoleum, these flowers have all crumbled to dust.

In front of me is Crypt Number 678, Trevor Hollis, age twenty-four, survived by his mother and father and his sister. Much Beloved. Loving Son. In Loving Remembrance. My latest victim. I've found him.

Crypt Number 678 is in a tier high up in the gallery wall. The only way to get a closer look is with a stepladder or a casket lift, and even from the top of a stepladder, two steps higher than is safe, I can see something is different about the girl. It's something European. Something malnourished. It isn't the daily recommended allowance of food and sunshine that make you beautiful by any North American standard. There's something waxy about how her arms and legs come out of her dress looking raw and white. You could see her living behind barbed wire. And coming up inside me is the desperate hope that maybe she's dead. This is how I feel watching old movies at home where vampires and zombies come back from the grave, hungry for human flesh. Inside me is the same desperate hope I have watching the ravenous undead and thinking, Oh please, oh please, oh please.

The craving inside of me is to be clutched at by some dead girl. To put my ear to her chest and be hearing nothing. Even getting munched on by zombies beats the idea that I'm only flesh and blood, skin and bone. Demon or angel or evil spirit, I just need something to show itself. Ghoulie or ghosty or long-legged beastie, I just want my hand held.

From up here in the sixth tier of crypts, her black dress looks ironed to a high gloss. The thin white arms and legs of her look covered tight in a newer low-quality kind of human skin. Even from up high, her face looks mass-produced.

Song of Solomon, Chapter Seven, Verse One:"How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, prince's daughter! the joints of thy thighs are like jewels ... "

Even with the sun on everything outside, everything inside is still cold to the touch. The light is through stained glass. The smell is rain soaked into the walls made of cement. The feel of everything is polished marble. The sound is somewhere, the drip of old rain sliding along rebar, the drip of rain through the cracked skylights, the drip of rain inside unsold crypts.

Rolled airy shapes of collected dust and dander and hair wander around the floor. Ghost turds, people call those.

The girl looks up and has to see me, and then she's coming soundless in her black felt kind of shoes across the marble floor.

You can get lost easy enough here. Hallways run into hallways at odd angles. Finding the right crypt takes a map. Galleries open into galleries in telescope vistas so long the carved sofa or the marble statue at the far end could be something you'd never imagine. The repeating pastel soft shades of marble are so after you're lost you don't panic.

The girl walks up to the ladder, and I'm trapped at the top, halfway between her at my feet and the heaven of angels painted on the ceiling. The wall of polished marble crypts reflects me full-length among the epitaphs.

This Stone Erected in the Honor.

Erected on This Spot.

Erected in Loving Tribute.

I am all of the above.

My cold fingers feel crabbed around my pen. Specimen Number 98 is a pink camellia of china silk. The absolute pink proves the cultivated silk was boiled in soapy water to remove all sericin***. The primary stem is a wire cast in green polypropylene typical of shrubs of the period. A camellia is supposed to mean unmatched excellence.

The girl's plain round mask of a face looks up at me from the foot of the ladder. How to tell if she's alive or a ghost, I don't know. There's too much of her dress for me to see any rise and fall of her chest. The air is too warm for her breathing to show.

Song of Solomon, Chapter Seven, Verse Two:"Thy navel is like a round goblet which wanteth not liquor: thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies."

The Bible collapses sex and food a lot.

Here with Specimen Number 136, little conch shells painted pink to look like rosebuds, and Specimen Number 78, the Bakelite daffodil, I want to be hugged in her cold, dead arms and told that life has no absolute end. My life is not some Funeral Grade bit of compost that will rot tomorrow and be outlived by my name in an obituary.

The feeling in those miles of marble walls with people sealed inside, you get the sense we're in a crowded building dense with thousands of people, but at the same time, we're alone. A year could pass between her asking a question and my answer.

My breath fogs the carved dates that bracket the short life of Trevor Hollis. The epitaph reads:

To the World He Was a Loser, But to Me He Was the World.

Trevor Hollis, do your worst. I dare you, come and seek your revenge.

Her head thrown back, the girl smiles up at me standing above her. Against the gray of everything stone, her red hair blazes, and up at me, she says, "You brought flowers."

My arms shift and some flowers, violas, daisies, dahlias, float down around her.

She catches a hydrangea and says, "Nobody's been here to visit since the funeral."

Song of Solomon, Chapter Seven, Verse Three:"Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins."

Her mouth with its too-thin red-red lips looks cut open with a knife. She says, "Hi. I'm Fertility."

She hands the flower up and holds it in the air as if I'm not impossibly out of her reach, and she asks, "So, how did you know my brother, Trevor?"

Her name was Fertility Hollis. That's her full name, no kidding, and she's what I really want to share about the next day with my caseworker.

It's part of my terms of observation, I have to meet with my caseworker for one hour, once a week. In exchange, I keep getting housing vouchers. The program makes me eligible for subsidized housing. Free government cheese, powdered milk, honey, and butter. Free job placement. These are just a few of the perks you get in the Federal Survivor Retention Program. My dodgy little apartment and surplus cheese. My dodgy little job with all the veal I can smuggle home on the bus. You get just enough to make ends meet.

You don't get anything really choice, you don't get handicapped parking, but once a week for one hour, you get a caseworker. Every Tuesday, mine drives up to the house where I'm working in her plain-colored government pool car with her professional compassion and case history folders and her mileage log for keeping track of the miles between each client visit. This week, she has twenty-four clients. Last week, she had twenty-six.

Every Tuesday she comes to listen.

Every week, I ask her how many survivors are left, nationwide.

She's in the kitchen scarfing daiquiris and tortilla chips. Her shoes are kicked off and her canvas tote bag full of client files is on the kitchen table between us while she takes out a clipboard and flips through the client weekly status forms to put mine on top. She wipes her fingertip down a column of numbers, and says, "One hundred and fifty-seven survivors. Nationwide."

She starts filling in the date and checks her watch for the time to write on my weekly check-in form. She turns her clipboard around for me to read and hands it over for my signature at the bottom. This is to prove she was here. That we talked. We shared. She handed me a pen. We opened our hearts. Hear me, heal me, save me, believe me. It's not her fault if after she leaves I cut my throat.

While I'm signing the form she asks, "Did you know the woman down the street who worked in the big gray-and-tan house?"

No. Yeah. Okay, I know who she's talking about.

"Big woman. Long blond hair in a braid. A real Brunhilde***," the caseworker says. "Well, she checked out two nights ago. She hung herself with an extension cord." The caseworker looks at her fingernails, first with her fingers curled into her palms, then with her fingers spread wide. She goes back into her big tote bag and gets a bottle of bright red fingernail polish. "Well," she says. "Good riddance. I never liked her."

I hand the clipboard back and ask, Anybody else?

"A gardener," she says. She starts shaking the little bottle of bright red with a long white top next to her ear. With her other hand, she flips through the forms to find one. She holds the clipboard up for me to see this week's check-in form for Client Number 134, stamped with the big red word RELEASED. Then the date.

The stamp is something left over from an inpatient hospital program. In some other program RELEASED used to mean a client was set free. Now it means a client is dead. Nobody wanted to special-order a stamp that said DEAD. The caseworker told me this a few years ago when the suicides started back up again. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. This is how things get recycled.

"This guy drank some kind of herbicide," she says. Her hands twist the bottle between them. They twist. They twist until her knuckles look white. She says, "These people will do anything to make me look incompetent."

She knocks the bottle on the edge of the table and tries to twist it open again. "Here," she says and hands it across the table to me. "Open this for me, will you?"

I open the bottle, no problem, and hand it back.

"So did you know these two?" she says.

Well, no. I didn't know them. I knew who they were, but I don't remember them from before. I didn't know them from growing up, but over the past few years I'd seen them around the neighborhood. They still wore the old regulation church clothes. The man wore the suspenders, the baggy pants, the long-sleeved shirt with the collar buttoned on even the hottest day of summer. The woman wore the blah-colored smock of a dress I remember church women had to wear. On her head, she still wore the bonnet. The man always wore the wide-brimmed hat, straw in summer, black felt in winter.

Yeah. Okay. I saw them around. They were hard to miss.

"When you saw them," the caseworker says as she's sliding the little paintbrush, red on red, down the length of each nail, "were you upset? Did seeing people from your old church ever make you sad? Did you cry? Seeing people the way they used to dress when you were part of the church, did it maybe make you angry?"

The speakerphone rings.

"Does it make you remember your parents?"

The speakerphone rings.

"Does it make you angry about what happened to your family?"

The speakerphone rings.

"Do you ever remember what it was like before the suicides?"

The speakerphone rings.

The caseworker says, "Are you going to answer that?"

In a minute. First I have to check my daily planner. I hold the fat book up for her to see the list of everything I'm supposed to get done today. The people I work for try to call and trip me up. God forbid I should be inside to answer the phone if right this minute I'm supposed to be outside cleaning the pool.

The speakerphone rings.

According to my daily planner book, I'm supposed to be steaming the drapes in the blue guest room. Whatever that means.

The caseworker's crunching tortilla chips so I wave at her to quiet down.

The speakerphone rings, and I answer it.

The speakerphone yells, "What can you tell us about tonight's banquet?"

Relax, I say. It's a no-brainer. Salmon with no bones. Some kind of bite-sized carrots. Braised endive.

"What's that?"

It's a burned leaf, I say. You eat it with the little fork farthest to the left. Tines down. You already know braised endive. I know you know braised endive. You had it last year at a Christmas party. You love braised endive. Eat just three bites, I tell the speakerphone. I promise you'll love it.

The speakerphone asks, "Could you get the stains out of the fireplace mantel?"

According to my daily planner book, I'm not supposed to do that task until tomorrow.

"Oh," the speakerphone says. "We forgot."

Yeah. Right. You forgot.

Sleazes.

You could call me a gentleman's gentleman but you'd be wrong on both counts.

"Anything else we should know about?"

It's Mother's Day.

"Oh, shit. Fuck. Damn!" the speakerphone says. "Have you gone ahead and sent something? Are we covered?"

Of course. I sent each of their mothers a beautiful flower arrangement, and the florist will bill their account.

"What did you say in the card?"

I said:

To My Dearest Mother Whom I Cherish and Always Remember. A Loving Son/Daughter Has Never Had a Mother Who Loved Him/Her More. With My Deepest Love. Then the applicable signature.

Then P.S.: a dried flower is just as lovely as a fresh one.

"Sounds good. That should hold them for another year," the speakerphone says. "Remember to water all the plants in the sun-porch. It's written in the planner book."

Then they hang up. They never have to remind me to do anything. They just have to have the last word.

No sweat off my back.

The caseworker is fanning her fresh red nails back and forth in front of her mouth and blowing them dry. Between long exhales, she asks, "Your family?"

She blows her nails.

She asks, "Your own mother?"

She blows her nails.

"Do you remember your mother?"

She blows her nails.

"Do you think she felt anything?"

She blows her nails.

"I mean, when she killed herself?"

Matthew, Chapter Twenty-four, Verse Thirteen:"But he that shall endure to the end, the same shall be saved."

According to my daily planner, I should be cleaning the air conditioner filter. I should be dusting the green living room. There's the brass doorknobs to polish. There's all the old newspapers to recycle.

The hour is almost up, and what I never got to talk about was Fertility Hollis. How we met at the mausoleum. We walked around for an hour, and she told me about different twentieth-century art. movements and how they depicted Jesus crucified. In the oldest wing of the mausoleum, the wing called Contentment, Jesus is gaunt and romantic with a woman's huge wet eyes and long eyelashes. In the wing built in the 1930s, Jesus is a Social Realist with huge superhero muscles. In the forties, in the Serenity wing, Jesus becomes an abstract assembly of planes and cubes. The fifties Jesus is polished fruitwood, a Danish Modern skeleton. The sixties Jesus is pegged together out of driftwood.

There's no seventies wing, and in the eighties wing, there's no Jesus, just the same secular green polished marble and brass you'd find in a department store.

Fertility talked about art and we wandered through Contentment, Serenity, Peace, Joy, Salvation, Rapture, and Enchantment.

She told me her name was Fertility Hollis.

I told her to call me Tender Branson. That's as close as I have to a real name name.

Every week from now on, she's going to visit her brother's crypt. That's where she promised to be next Wednesday.

The caseworker asks, "It's been ten years. Why don't you ever want to open up and share any feelings about your dead family?"

I'm sorry, I tell her, but I really need to get back to work. I tell her our hour is up.

Before it's too late, before we get too close to my plane crash, I need to explain about my name. Tender Branson. It's not really a name. It's more of a rank. It's the same as somebody in another culture naming a child Lieutenant Smith or Bishop Jones. Or Governor Brown. Or Doctor Moore. Sheriff Peterson.

The only names in Creedish culture were family names. The family name came from the husband. A family name was the way to claim property. The family name was a label.

My family name is Branson.

My rank is Tender Branson. It's the lowest rank.

The caseworker asked one time if the family name wasn't a kind of endorsement or a curse when sons and daughters were contracted for work in the outside world.

Since the suicides, people in the outside world have the same lurid picture of Creedish culture that my brother, Adam, had of them.

In the outside world, my brother told me, people were as reckless as animals and fornicated with strangers on the street.

These days, people in the outside world will ask me if certain family names brought higher prices. Did some family names bring lower labor contract prices?

These people usually go on to ask if some Creedish fathers would impregnate their daughters to increase cash flow. They'll ask if the Creedish children who weren't allowed to marry were castrated, meaning was I. They'll ask if Creedish sons masturbated or went with farm animals or sodomized each other, meaning do I.

Did I. Was I.

Strangers will ask me to my face if I'm a virgin.

I don't know. I forget. Or the entire issue is none of your business.

For the record, my brother Adam Branson was my older brother by three minutes and thirty seconds, but by Creedish standards it could've been years.

Since Creedish doctrine didn't recognize a second-place finisher.

In every family, the firstborn son was named Adam, and it was Adam Branson who would inherit our land in the church district colony.

All sons after Adam were named Tender. In the Branson family that makes me one of at least eight Tender Bransons my parents released to be labor missionaries.

All daughters, the first through the last, were named Biddy.

Tenders are workers who tend.

Biddies do your bidding.

It's a good guess that both words are slang, nicknames for longer traditional names, but I don't know what.

I know that if the church elders chose a Biddy Branson to marry the Adam of another family, her first name, really her rank, changed to Author.

When she married Adam Maxton, Biddy Branson would become Author Maxton.

The parents of that Adam Maxton were also called Adam and Author Maxton, until their just-married son and his wife had a child. After that, you addressed both members of the older couple as Elder Maxton.

Most couples, by the time her firstborn son had his first child, the female Elder Maxton would be dead from having child after child after child.

Almost all the church elders were men. A man could become a church elder by the time he was thirty- five if he was quick enough.

It wasn't complicated.

It was nothing compared to the outside world and its ranking system of parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, all of them with their own first names.

In Creedish culture, your name told everybody just where you belonged. Tender or Biddy. Adam or Author. Or Elder. Your name told you just how your life would go.

People ask if I'm ever mad that I lost the right to own property and raise a family just because my brother was three and a half minutes ahead of me. And I've learned to tell them yes. That's what people in the outside world want to hear. But it's not true. I've never been mad.

This would be the same as getting angry over the idea that if you had been born with longer fingers you might be a concert violinist.

It's the same as wishing that your parents had been taller, thinner, stronger, happy. There are details in the past you have no control over.

The truth is, Adam was born first. And maybe Adam envied me because I would get to go out and see the outside world. While I was packing to leave, Adam was getting married to a Biddy Gleason he'd hardly met.

It was the body of church elders who kept elaborate charts of who'd married which biddy from which family so that what people in the outside world call "cousins" never married. Every generation as the Adams started turning seventeen, the church elders met to assign them wives as far from their family history as possible. Every generation, there was a season of marriages. There were almost forty families in the church district colony, and every generation almost every family would have at-home weddings and parties. For a tender or a biddy, a wedding season was something you'd watch only from around the edges.

If you were a biddy, it was something you might dream of happening to you.

If you were a tender, you didn't dream.

Tonight, the calls come the same as every night. Outside's a full moon. People are ready to die for their bad grades in school. Their family upsets. Their boyfriend problems. Their dodgy little jobs. This is while I'm trying to butterfly a couple of stolen lamb chops.

People are calling long-distance with the operator asking if I'll accept the charges for a collect cry for attention from John Doe.

Tonight I'm trying out a new way to eat salmon en croute,a sexy new turn of the wrist, a little flourish for the people who I work for to wow the other guests at their next dinner party. A little parlor trick. Here's the etiquette equivalent of ballroom dancing. I'm working up a showy little routine for getting creamed onions into your mouth. I've just about perfected a failsafe technique for mopping up extra saged cream when the phone rings, again.

A guy's calling to say he's failing Algebra II.

Just as a point of practice, I say, Kill yourself.

A woman calls and says her kids won't behave.

Without missing a beat, I tell her, Kill yourself.

A man calls to say his car won't start.

Kill yourself.

A woman calls to ask what time the late movie starts.

Kill yourself.

She asks, "Isn't this 555-1327? Is this the Moorehouse CinePlex?"

I say, Kill yourself. Kill yourself. Kill yourself.

A girl calls and asks, "Does it hurt very much to die?"

Well, sweetheart, I tell her, yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living.

"I was just wondering," she says. "Last week, my brother killed himself."

This has to be Fertility Hollis. I ask, how old was her brother? I make my voice sound deeper, different enough I hope so she won't know me.

"Twenty-four," she says, not crying or anything. She doesn't even sound all that sad.

Her voice makes me think of her mouth makes me think of her breath makes me think of her breasts.

I Corinthians, Chapter Six, Verse Eighteen:"Flee fornication ... he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body."

In my new, deeper voice, I ask her to talk about what she's feeling.

"Timing-wise," she says, "I can't decide. Spring term is almost over, and I'm really hating my job. My lease on my apartment is almost run out. The tags on my car expire next week. If I'm ever going to do it, this just seems like a good time to kill myself."

There are a lot of good reasons to live, I tell her, and hope she won't ask for a list. I ask, isn't there someone who shares her grief over her brother? Maybe an old friend of her brother's who can help support her in this tragedy?

"Not really."

I ask, nobody else goes to her brother's grave?

"Nope."

I ask, not one person? Nobody else puts flowers on the grave? Not a single old friend? "Nope."

It's clear I made a big impression.

"No," she says. "Wait. There is this one pretty weird guy." Great. I'm weird.

I ask, how does she mean, weird?

"You remember those cult people who all killed themselves?" she says. "It was about seven or eight years ago. Their whole town they started, they all went to church and drank poison, and the FBI found them all holding hands on the floor, dead. This guy reminded me of that. It wasn't so much his dorky clothes, but his hair was cut like he did it himself with his eyes closed."

It was ten years ago, and all I want to do is hang up.

II Chronicles, Chapter Twenty-one, Verse Nineteen:" ... his bowels fell out ... "

"Hello," she says. "Anybody still here?"

Yeah, I say. What else?

"Nothing else," she says. "He was just at my brother's crypt with a big bunch of flowers."

You see, I say. That's just the kind of loving person she needs to run to in this crisis.

"I don't think so," she says.

Is she married, I ask.

"No."

Is she seeing anybody?

"No."

Then get to know this guy, I tell her. Let your mutual loss bring the two of you together. This could be a big breakthrough in romance for her.

"I don't think so," she says. "First of all, you didn't see this guy. I mean, I always wondered if my brother might be a homosexual, and this weird guy with all the flowers just confirms all my suspicions. Besides, he wasn't that attractive."

Lamentations, Chapter Two, Verse Eleven:" ... my bowels are troubled, my liver is poured upon the earth ... "

I say, Maybe if he got a better haircut. You could help him out. Give him a makeover.

"I don't think so," she says. "This guy is pretty intensively ugly. He has his terrible haircut with these long sideburns that come down almost to his mouth. It's not like when guys use a little topiary facial hair the way women use makeup, you know, to hide the fact they have a double chin or they don't have any cheekbones. This guy just doesn't have any good features to work with. That and he's queer."

I Corinthians, Chapter Eleven, Verse Fourteen:"Doth not even nature itself teach you, that if a man have long hair it is a shame unto him?"

I say, she has no proof he's a sodomite.

"What kind of proof do you need?"

I say, ask him. Isn't she supposed to see him again?

"Well," she says, "I told him I'd meet him at the crypt next week, but I don't know. I didn't mean it. I pretty much just said that just to get away from him. He was just so needy and pathetic. He followed me all over the mausoleum for an hour."

But she still has to meet him, I say. She promised. Think of poor dead Trevor, her brother. What would Trevor think of her ditching his one remaining friend?

She asks, "How did you know his name?"

Whose name?

"My brother, Trevor. You said his name."

She must've said it first, I say. Just a minute ago she said it. Trevor. Twenty-four. Killed himself last week. Homosexual. Maybe. Had a secret lover who desperately needs her shoulder to cry on.

'You caught all that? You're a good listener," she says. "I'm impressed. What do you look like?"

Ugly, I say. Hideous. Ugly hair. Ugly past. She wouldn't like the looks of me at all.

I ask about her brother's friend, maybe lover, widower, is she going to meet him next week like she promised?

"I don't know," she says. "Maybe. I'll meet the dork next week if you'll do something for me right now."

Just remember, I tell her. You have the chance to make a big difference in someone's loneliness. Here's a perfect chance to bring love and supportive nurturing support to a man who needs your love desperately.

"Fuck love," she says, her voice dropping lower to meet mine. "Say something to get me off."

I don't know what she means.

"You know what I mean," she says.

Genesis, Chapter Three, Verse Twelve:" ... The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat."

Listen, I say. I'm not alone here. All around me are caring nurturing volunteers giving their time.

"Do it," she says. "Lick my tits."

I say she's taking advantage of my naturally caring nurturing nature. I tell her I'll have to hang up now.

She says, "Put your mouth all over me."

I say, I'm hanging up now.

"Harder," she says. "Do it harder. Oh, harder, do me harder," she laughs and says. "Lick me. Lick me. Lick me. Lick. Me."

I say, I'm hanging up now. But I don't.

Fertility's saying, "You know you want me. Tell me what you want me to do. You know you want to. Make me do something terrible."

And before I can even take myself out, Fertility Hollis screams a ragged howling porn goddess orgasm scream.

And I hang up.

I Timothy, Chapter Five, Verse Fifteen:"For some are already turned aside after Satan."

How I feel is cheap and used, dirty and humiliated. Dirty and tricked and thrown away.

Then the phone rings. It's her. This has to be her so I don't pick up-All night long the phone rings, and I sit here feeling cheated and don't dare answer.

About ten years ago I had my first one-on-one session with my caseworker, who's a real person with a name and an office but I don't want to get her in trouble. She has her own set of problems. She has a degree in social work. She's thirty-five years old and can't keep a boyfriend. Ten years ago she was twenty-five and just out of college and she was swamped with collecting the clients assigned to her as part of the federal government's brand-new Survivor Retention Program.

What happened was a policeman came to the front door of the house where I worked back then. Ten years ago, I was twenty-three years old, and this was still my first posting because I still worked really hard. I didn't know any better. The yards around the house were always wet dark green and clipped so smooth they rolled out soft and perfect as a green mink coat. Nothing inside the house ever looked depreciated. When you're twenty-three, you think you can keep up this level of performance forever.

A ways back from the policeman at the front door were two more police and the caseworker standing in the driveway by a police car.

You can't understand how good my work felt up to the moment I opened that door. My whole life growing up, I'd been working toward this, toward baptism and getting placed in a job cleaning houses in the wicked outside world.

When the people I worked for had sent the church a donation for my first month's work, I was beaming. I really believed I was helping create Heaven on Earth.

No matter how people stared at me, I wore the mandatory church costume everywhere, the hat, the baggy trousers with no pockets. The long-sleeved white shirt. No matter how hot it got, I wore the brown coat if I went out in public, no matter what silly things people said to me.

"How come you can wear shirts with buttons?" somebody at the hardware store would want to know.

Because I'm not Amish.

"Do you have to wear special secret undergarments?"

I think they were talking about Mormons.

"Isn't it against your religion to live outside your colony?"

That sounds more like the Mennonites.

"I've never met a Hutterite before."

You still haven't.

It felt good to stand out from the world, just mysterious and pious. You weren't a lantern under any basket. You stood out righteous as a sore thumb. You were the one holy man to keep God from crushing all of the Sodom and Gomorrah seething around you in the Valley Plaza Shopping Center.

You were everyone's savior, whether they knew it or not. On a sweltering day in your heavy blah- colored wool, you were a martyr burning at the stake.

It felt even more wonderful to meet someone dressed the same as you. The brown pants or the brown dress, we all wore the same lumpy brown potato shoes. The two of you would come together in a quiet little pocket of conversation. There were so few things we were allowed to say to each other in the outside world. You could only say three or four things so you wanted to start slow and not hurry a word. Shopping was the only reason you were allowed out in public, and this was only if you were trusted with money.

If you met someone from the church district colony, you could say:

May you die*** in complete service in your lifetime.

You could say:

Praise and glory to the Lord for this day through which we labor.

You could say:

May our efforts bring all those around us to Heaven.

And you could say:

May you die with all your work complete.

That was the limit.

You'd see someone else looking righteous and hot in their church district costume, and you'd run through this little handful of conversation in your head. The two of you would rush together and you weren't allowed to touch. No hugging. No handshaking. You would say one approved bit. She would say one. The two of you would go back and forth until each of you had said two lines. You kept your heads bowed, and you each went back to your task.

Those were just the smallest parts of the smallest part of all the rules you had to remember. Growing up inside the church district colony, half your studies were about church doctrine and rules. Half were about service. Service included gardening, etiquette, fabric care, cleaning, carpentry, sewing, animals, arithmetic, getting out stains, and tolerance.

Rules for the outside world included you had to write weekly letters of confession back to the elders in the church district. You had to refrain from eating candy. Drinking and smoking were forbidden. Present a clean and orderly appearance at all times. You could not indulge in broadcast forms of entertainment. You could not participate in sexual relations.

Luke, Chapter Twenty, Verse Thirty-five:"But they which shall be accounted worthy ... neither marry, nor are given in marriage."

Elders of the Creedish church made celibacy sound as easy as choosing not to play baseball.

Just say no.

The other rules just went on and on. God forbid you should ever dance. Or eat refined sugar. Or sing. But the most important rule to remember was always:

If the members of the church district colony felt summoned by God, rejoice. When the apocalypse was imminent, celebrate, and all Creedish must deliver themselves unto God, amen.

And you had to follow.

It didn't matter how far away. It didn't matter how long you'd been working outside the district colony. Since listening to broadcast communication was a no-no, it might take years for all church members to find out about the Deliverance. Church doctrine named it that. The Deliverance. The flight to Egypt. The flight out of Egypt. People are all the time running from one place to another in the Bible.

You might not find out for years, but the moment you found out, you had to find a gun, drink some poison, drown, hang, slash, or jump.

You had to deliver yourself to Heaven.

This is why there were three police and the caseworker here to collect me.

The policeman said, "This isn't going to be easy for you to hear," and I knew I'd been left behind.

It was the apocalypse, the Deliverance, and despite all my work and all the money I'd earned toward our plan, Heaven on Earth just wasn't going to happen.

Before I could think, the caseworker stepped forward and said, "We know what you've been programmed to do at this point. We're prepared to hold you for observation to prevent that."

Back when the church district colony first decreed the Deliverance, there were around fifteen hundred church district members scattered all over the country in job postings. A week later, there would be six hundred. A year later, four hundred.

Since then, even a couple of caseworkers have killed themselves.

The government found me and most of the other survivors by our letters of confession we sent back to the church district colony every month. We didn't know we were writing and sending our wages to church elders who were already dead and in Heaven. We couldn't know that caseworkers were reading our tally every month of how many times we swore or had unpure thoughts. Now there was nothing I could tell the caseworker that she didn't already know.

Ten years have passed, and you never see surviving church members together. The survivors who see each other now, there's nothing left between us except embarrassment and disgust. We've failed in our ultimate sacrament. Our shame is for ourselves. Our disgust is for each other. The survivors who still wear church costume do it to brag about their pain. Sackcloth and ashes. They couldn't save themselves. They were weak. The rules are all gone, and it doesn't matter. We're all going overnight express delivery straight to Hell.

And I was weak.

So I took the trip downtown in the back of a police car, and sitting beside me, the caseworker said, "You were the innocent victim of a terrible oppressive cult, but we're here to help you get back on your feet."

The minutes were already taking me farther and farther away from what I should've done.

The caseworker said, "I understand you have a problem with masturbation. Would you like to talk about it?"

Every minute made it harder to do what I'd promised at my baptism. Shoot, cut, choke, bleed, or jump.

The world was passing by so fast outside the car my eyes went goofy.

The caseworker said, "Your life has been a miserable nightmare up to now, but you're going to be okay. Are you hearing me? Be patient, and you'll be just fine."

This was almost ten years ago, and I'm still waiting.

The easy thing to do was give her the benefit of the doubt.

Jump ahead ten years, and not much has changed. Ten years of therapy, and I'm still in about the same place. This probably isn't something we should celebrate.

We're still together. Today's our weekly session number five hundred and something, and today we're in the blue guest bathroom. This is different from the green, white, yellow, or lavender guest bathrooms. This is how much money these people make. The caseworker's sitting on the edge of the bathtub with her bare feet soaking in a few inches of warm water. Her shoes are on the closed lid of the toilet with her martini glass of grenadine, crushed ice, superfine sugar, and white rum. After every couple of questions she leans over with the ballpoint pen still in her hand and pinches the stem of the glass, holding the pen and glass crossed chop-stick style.

Her latest boyfriend is out of the picture, she told me.

God forbid she should offer to help clean.

She takes a drink. She puts the glass back while I answer. She writes on the yellow legal pad rested on her knees, asks another question, takes another drink. Her face looks paved under a layer of makeup.

Larry, Barry, Jerry, Terry, Gary, all her lost boyfriends run together. She says her lists of lost clients and lost boyfriends are running neck and neck.

This week, she says, we've hit a new low, one hundred and thirty-two survivors, nationwide, but the suicide rate is leveling off.

According to my daily planner, I'm scrubbing the grout between the six-sided little blue tiles on the floor. This is more than a trillion miles of grout. Laid end to end, just the grout in this bathroom would stretch to the moon and back, ten times, and all of it's shitty with black mildew. The ammonia I dip a toothbrush in and scrub with, the way it smells mixed with her cigarette smoke, makes me tired and my heart pound.

And maybe I'm a little out of my head. The ammonia. The smoke. Fertility Hollis keeps calling me at home. I don't dare answer the phone, but I know for sure it's her.

"Have any strangers approached you, lately?" the caseworker asks.

She asks, "Have you gotten any phone calls you'd describe as threatening?"

The way the caseworker keeps asking me stuff with half her mouth clamped around her cigarette looks the way a dog would sit there drinking a pink martini and snarling at you. A cigarette, a sip, a question; breathing, drinking, and asking, she demonstrates all the basic applications for the human mouth.

She never used to smoke but more and more she tells me she can't stand the idea of living to a ripe old age.

"Maybe if just one little part of my life was working out," she tells a new cigarette in her hand before she lights up. Then something invisible somewhere starts to beep and beep and beep until she presses on her watch to stop it. She twists to reach her tote bag on the floor beside the toilet and gets a plastic bottle.

"Imipramine," she says. "Sorry I can't offer you one."

Early on, the retention program tried to baby-sit all the survivors by giving them medication, Xanax, Prozac, Valium, imipramine. The plan crashed because too many clients tried to hoard their weekly prescriptions for three weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, depending on their body weight, and then downed their stash with a scotch chaser.

Even if the medication didn't work for the clients, it's been great for the caseworkers.

"Have you noticed anyone following you," the caseworker asks, "anyone with a gun or a knife, at night or when you walk home from your bus stop?"

I scrub the cracks between the tiles from black to brown to white and ask, why is she asking me these things?

"No reason," she says.

No, I say, I'm not threatened.

"I tried to call you on the phone this week, and there was never any answer," she says. "What's up?"

I tell her nothing's up.

The real truth I'm not answering the phone is I don't want to talk to Fertility Hollis until I can see her in person. Over the phone, she sounded so turned on sexwise I can't risk it. Here I am competing with myself. I don't want her falling in love with me as a voice on the phone while at the same time she's trying to ditch me as a real person. It's best if she never talks to me on the phone ever again. The living, breathing creepy geeky ugly me can't stand up to her fantasy, so I have a plan, a terrible plan, to make her hate me and at the same time fall in love with me. The plan is to unseduce her. Unattract her.

"When you're not in your apartment," the caseworker asks, "does anyone else have access to the food you eat?"

Tomorrow is my next afternoon with Fertility Hollis at the mortuary, if she shows up. Then the first part of my plan will get off the ground.

The caseworker asks, "Have you gotten any threatening or unexplained mail?"

She asks, "Are you even listening to me?"

I ask, so what's with all these questions? I say I'm going to drink this bottle of ammonia if she won't tell me what's going on.

The caseworker checks her watch. She taps the point of her pen on her tablet, and makes me wait for her to take a puff on her cigarette and blow out the smoke.

If she really wants to help me, I tell her and I hand her a toothbrush, then she needs to start scrubbing.

She puts down her drink and takes the toothbrush. She rubs back and forth over an inch of grout on the tiled wall beside her. She stops and looks, scrubs some more. She takes another look.

"Oh my gosh," she says. "This is working. Look how clean it gets underneath." With her feet still soaking in a few inches of bath water, the caseworker moves around to reach the wall better and scrubs some more. "God, I forgot how good it feels to get something accomplished."

She doesn't notice, but I've stopped. I sit back on my heels and watch her really attack the mildew.

"Listen to me," she says, scrubbing in different directions to follow the grout around each little blue tile.

"None of this might be true," she says, "but it's for your own good. Things could be getting a tiny bit dangerous for you."

She isn't supposed to tell me, but some of the survivor suicides are looking a little suspect. Most of the suicides look fine. The majority are just normal run-of-the-mill everyday garden-variety suicides, she says, but in between are a few strange cases. In one case, a right-handed man shot himself with his left hand. In another case, a woman hung herself with a bathrobe tie, but one of her arms was dislocated and both her wrists were bruised.

"These weren't the only cases," the caseworker says, still scrubbing. "But there's a pattern."

At first, nobody in the program paid much attention, she says. Suicides are just suicides, especially in this population. Client suicides come in clusters. Stampedes. One or two will trigger as many as twenty. Lemmings.

The yellow legal pad on her lap slips to the floor, and she says, "Suicide is very contagious."

The pattern of these new false suicides shows they're more likely to occur when a cluster of natural suicides has ended.

I ask, what does she mean, false suicides?

I sneak her martini, and it has a weird mouthwash taste.

"Murders," the caseworker says. "Someone is maybe killing survivors and making it look like suicide."

When a cluster of real suicides dwindles out, the murders appear to happen to get the ball rolling again. After two or three murders that look like suicide, then suicide looks very fresh and attractive again and another dozen survivors get caught up in the trend and check out.

"It's easy to imagine a killer, just one person or a hit squad of church members out to make sure you all get to Heaven together," the caseworker says. "It sounds silly and paranoid, but it makes perfect sense."

The Deliverance.

So why is she asking me all these questions?

"Because fewer and fewer survivors are killing themselves these days," she says. "The natural trend of normal suicides is winding down. Whoever's doing this is going to kill again to get the suicide rate back up. The pattern of murders is spread all over the country," she says. She scrubs with her toothbrush. She dips it in the jar of ammonia. With her cigarette smoking in her one hand, she scrubs more. She says, "Except for the time they happen, there's no real pattern. It's men. It's women. Young. Old. You need to be careful because you could be next."

The only new person I've met in months is Fertility Hollis.

I ask the caseworker, her being a woman and all, How do women want a man to look? What does she look for in a sex partner?

She's leaving behind a crooked trail of clean white grout.

"The other thing to remember," the caseworker says, "is this might all have a natural explanation. It might be that nobody's going to kill you. You might have absolutely nothing at all to be terrified about."

Part of my job is gardening, so I spray everything with twice the recommended strength of poison, weeds and real plants alike. Then I straighten the beds of artificial salvia and hollyhocks. The look I'm after this season is a fake cottage garden. Last year, I did artificial French parterres. Before that was a Japanese garden of all plastic plants. All I have to do is yank all the flowers. Sort them, and stick them all back in the ground in a new pattern. Maintenance is a snap. Dull flowers get a little touch-up with red or yellow spray paint.

A shot of clear lacquer or hair spray stops silk flowers from fraying at the edge.

The fake yarrow and plastic nasturtiums need the dust hosed off them. The plastic roses wired onto the poisoned dead skeletons of the original rose bushes need a shot of smell.

Some kind of blue-colored birds are walking around the lawn as if they're looking for a lost contact lens.

For the roses, I empty the poison out of the sprayer and fill it with three gallons of water and half a bottle of Eternity by Calvin Klein. I spray the fake Shasta daisies with watered-down vanilla from the kitchen. The artificial asters get White Shoulders. For most of the other plants, I use aerosol cans of floral room freshener. The artificial lemon thyme I spray with Lemon Pledge furniture polish.

Part of my strategy for courting Fertility Hollis is to look ugly on purpose, and my getting dirty is a start. Looking a little rough around the edges. Still, it's hard to get dirty gardening when you never really touch the ground, but my clothes smell from the poison, and my nose is a little sunburned. With the wire stem of a plastic calla*** lily, I chop up a handful of the hard dead soil, and I rub it in my hair. I wedge the dirt in under my fingernails.

God forbid I should try and look good for Fertility. The worst strategy I could pursue is self- improvement. It would be a big mistake to dress up, make my best effort, comb my hair, maybe even borrow some swell clothes from the man I work for, something all-cotton and pastel shirtwise, brush my teeth, put on what they call deodorant and walk into the Columbia Memorial Mausoleum for my big second date still looking ugly, but showing signs I really tried to look good.

So here I am. This is as good as it gets. Take it or leave it.

As if I don't care what she thinks.

Looking good is not part of the big plan. My plan is to look like untapped potential. The look I'm going for is natural. Real. The look

I'm after is, raw material. Not desperate and needy, but ripe with potential. Not hungry. Sure, I want to look like I'm worth the effort. Washed but not ironed. Clean but not polished. Confident but humble.

Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn't glitter and shine.

Here's passive aggression in action.

My idea is to make ugly work in my favor. Establish a low baseline for contrast with my later on. Before and After. The frog and the prince.

It's two on Wednesday afternoon. According to my daily planner, I'm rotating the oriental rug in the pink drawing room so it won't get a wear pattern. You have to move all the furniture to another room, including the piano. Roll the rug. Roll the carpet pad. Vacuum. Mop the floor. The rug is twelve feet by sixteen feet. Then turn the pad and unroll it. Turn and unroll the carpet. Drag all the furniture back.

According to my daily planner book, this shouldn't take me more than half an hour.

Instead, I just fluff the traffic patterns in the carpet and untie the strand of fringe the people I work for tied in a knot. I tie another strand on the opposite end of the rug so the whole thing looks rotated. I move all the furniture a little and put ice in the little divots left in the carpet. As the ice melts, the matted divots will fluff back up.

I scuff the shine off my shoes. At the makeup mirror of the woman I work for, I put her mascara up inside each nostril until my nose hair looks thick and full. Then I catch a bus.

Another part of the Survivor Retention Program is you get a free bus pass every month. Stamped on the back of the pass it says: Property of the Department of Human Resources.

Non transferable.

The whole way to the mausoleum, I'm telling myself I don't give a shit if Fertility shows up or not.

A lot of half-gone church district prayers recite themselves in my mind. My head is just a mishmash of old prayers and responses.

May I be of complete and utmost service.

Let my every task lie my grace.

In my every labor lies my salvation.

Let my effort not be wasted.

Through my works may I save the world.

Really I'm thinking, oh please, oh please, oh please, be there this afternoon Fertility Hollis.

Inside the mausoleum front doors, there's the usual cheap reproductions of real beautiful music to make you feel not so alone. It's the same ten songs only with just the music and no singing. They don't play it except for certain days. Some of the old galleries in the Sincerity and New Hope wings never have the music. You don't hear it anywhere unless you really listen.

It's music as wallpaper, utilitarian, music as Prozac or Xanax to control how you feel. Music as aerosol room freshener.

I walk through the Serenity wing and don't see Fertility. I go through Faith, Joy, and Tranquillity, and she's not here. I swipe some plastic roses off some dead person's crypt so I won't show up empty- handed.

I'm heading into hatred, anger, fear, and resignation, and there, standing at Crypt 678 in Contentment, is Fertility Hollis with her red hair. She waits until I've been walked up next to her for two hundred and forty seconds before she turns and says hi.

She can't be the same person who was screaming her orgasm at me over the phone.

I say, Hi.

In her hands is a bunch of fake orange blossoms, nice enough but nothing I'd bother to steal. Her dress today is the same kind of brocade they make curtains out of, patterned white on a white background. It looks stiff and flame-retardant. Stain-repellent. Wrinkle-resistant. Mother-of-the-bride modest in her pleated skirt with long sleeves, she says, "Do you miss him, too?"

Everything about her looks martyr-proofed.

I ask, Miss who?

"Trevor," she says. She's barefoot on the stone floor.

Yeah right, Trevor, I tell myself. My secret sodomite lover. I forgot.

I say, Yeah. I miss him, too.

Her hair looks gathered in a field and piled on her head to dry. "Did he ever tell you about the cruise he took me on?"

No.

"It was completely illegal."

She looks from Crypt Number 678 to up at the ceiling where the music comes down from the little speakers next to the painted-on clouds and angels.

"First, he made me take dancing lessons with him. We learned all the ballroom dances they call the Cha-Cha and the Fox-trot. The Rumba and the Swing. The Waltz. The Waltz was easy."

The angels play their music above us for a minute, telling her something, and Fertility Hollis listens.

"Here," she says and turns to me. She takes my flowers and hers and puts them against the wall. She asks, "You can waltz, right?"

Wrong.

"I can't believe you could know Trevor and not know how to waltz," she says and shakes her head.

In her head, there's a picture of Trevor and me dancing together. Laughing together. Having anal sex. This is the handicap I'm up against, this and the idea I killed her brother.

She says, "Open your arms."

And I do.

She comes in face-to-face close with me and cups one hand on the back of my neck. Her other hand grabs my hand and pulls it out far away from us. She says, "Take your other hand and put it against my bra."

So I do.

"On my back!" she says, and twists away from me. "Put your hand on my bra where it crosses my spine."

So I do.

For our feet, she shows me how to step forward with my left foot, then my right foot, then bring my feet together while she does this all in the opposite direction.

"It's called a Box Step," she says. "Now listen to the music."

She counts, "One, two, three."

The music goes, One. Two. Three.

We count over and over, and step each time we count and we're dancing. The flowers in all the crypts up and down the walls lean out over us. The marble smooths under our feet. We're dancing. The light is through stained-glass windows. The statues are carved in their niches. The music comes out the speakers weak and echoes off the stone until it's moving back and forth in drafts and currents, notes and chords around us. And we're dancing.

"What I remember about the cruise," Fertility says, and her arm is curved to rest against the whole length of my arm. "I remember the faces of the last passengers as their lifeboats were lowered past the ballroom windows. Their orange canvas life vests sort of framed their heads, so their heads looked cut off and put on orange pillows, and they just stared with big wide-open fish eyes at Trevor and me still inside the ship's ballroom while the ship was starting to sink."

She was on a sinking boat?

"A ship," Fertility says. "It was called the Ocean Excursion.Try to say thatthree times fast."

And it was sinking?

"It was beautiful," she says. "The travel agent said not to come crying back to her. It was an old French Line ship, the travel agent warned us, only now it was sold to some outfit in South America. It was very art deco. It was trashed. It was the Chrysler Building floating sideways in the ocean and cruising up and down the Atlantic coast of South America full of lower-middle-class people from Argentina and their wives and kids. Argentineans. All the light fixtures on the walls were pink glass shaped into gigantic marquise-cut diamond shapes. Everything on the ship was in this pink diamond light and the carpets had big stains and worn-out spots."

We're dancing in place, and then we start to turn.

The one, two, three, box step of it. The forward and back of the hesitation step. The lift of the heel in a perfect bit of Cuban step-two-three, I turn with Fertility Hollis bent inside the hug of my arm. We turn again and again, we turn again, turn again, turn again.

And Fertility says how the lifeboats were gone. All the lifeboats were gone, and the ship trailed its empty lifeboat rigging in the relaxed Caribbean evening. The lifeboats rowed off into the sunset, the crowd in their orange life vests starting to wail and scam for their jewelry and prescriptions. People were doing that sign of the cross thing.

Fertility and I one, two, three; waltz, two, three, across the marble gallery.

In her story, Fertility and Trevor waltzed across the tilting mahogany parquet, the Versailles Ballroom tilting as the bow sank and the stern pointed the four-leaf clovers of each cloverleaf propeller into the evening air. A flock of little gilt ballroom chairs hurried past them and collected under a statue of that Greek moon goddess, Diana. The gold brocade curtains hung crooked across each window. They were the last passengers aboard the SS Ocean Excursion.

The steam was still up because the pink chandeliers—"Just like regular chandeliers," Fertility says, "but on an ocean liner they hang rigid as icicles"—the chandeliers in the Versailles Ballroom sparkled, and the public address system still filled the ship with a crackling music, one after another of elevator waltzes melting into each other as Trevor and Fertility turned, turned, turned.

As Fertility and I turn, turn, and step in place, then slide toe to toe across the mausoleum floor.

Below decks, the Caribbean was rising in the Trianon Dining Room, floating the edges of a hundred linen tablecloths.

The ship was drifting with all engines dead.

The warm blue water was spread out flat to the horizon in every direction.

Under even a little water, the checkerboard floor of mahogany and walnut parquet looked lost and out of reach. Here was one last look at the continent of Atlantis, with salt water rising around the statues and the marble pillars as Trevor and Fertility waltzed past the legend of a lost civilization, gold- painted carvings and carved French palace tables. Sea level rose diagonal against life-sized paintings of queens wearing crowns as the ship tilted and vases spilled flowers: roses and orchids and stalks of ginger into the water where bottles of champagne bobbed and Trevor and Fertility splashed past.

The metal skeleton of the ship, the bulkheads behind the lining of paneling and tapestries, shuddered and groaned.

I ask, was she going to drown herself?

"Don't be stupid," Fertility says with her head against my chest, breathing the poison smell all over me. "Trevor was never wrong. That was his whole problem."

Never wrong about what?

Trevor Hollis had dreams, she told me. He'd dream a plane was going to crash. Trevor would tell the airline, and no one would believe him. Then the plane would crash and the FBI would bring him in for questioning. It was always easier to believe he was a terrorist than a psychic. The dreams got so he couldn't sleep. He didn't dare read a newspaper or watch television or he'd see the report of some two hundred people dying in a plane crash he knew would happen, but couldn't stop.

He couldn't save anybody.

"Our mom killed herself because she had the same kind of dreams," Fertility says. "Suicide is an old family tradition for us."

Still dancing, I tell myself, At least we have something in common.

"He knew the ship was only going to sink about halfway. Some valve or something was going to fail and water would fill the engine rooms and some of the big public rooms on the lower decks," Fertility says. "He knew from his dreams that we'd have hours with the whole ship to ourselves. We'd have all that food and wine. Then someone would come along to rescue us."

Still dancing, I ask, Is that why he killed himself?

The music is my only answer for a minute.

"You can't imagine how beautiful it all was, the flooded ballrooms with pianos under water and all the needlepoint furniture floating around," Fertility says against my chest. "It was my nicest memory, ever."

We dance past statues of saints in somebody else's religion. To me they're just rock shaped into glorified nobodies.

"The Atlantic water was so clear. It was pouring down the grand staircase," she says. "We just took off our shoes and kept dancing."

Still dancing, counting one to three, I ask, does she have the same kind of dreams?

"A little bit," she says. "Not very much. More and more all the time. More than I want to."

I ask, so is she going to kill herself the same as her brother?

"No," Fertility says. She lifts her head and smiles at me.

We dance, one, two, three.

She says, "No way would I shoot myself. I'd probably take pills."

At home is my stash of government-issue antidepressants, hypnodes, mood equalizers, sedatives, MAO inhibitors in the candy dish beside my goldfish on my fridge.

We dance, one, two, three.

She says, "Just kidding."

We dance.

She puts her head back on my chest and says, "It all depends on how terrible my dreams get."

It's that night I start answering the phone again. This is after I'm so horny I have to go downtown and hunt for something to steal. This isn't so much for the cash as to get off. It's okay. The caseworker says it's okay. It's a sexual release, she tells me. It's perfectly natural. You find what you want. You stalk it. You grab it and make it your own. After you've had it, you throw it away.

It was the caseworker who got me started shoplifting in the first place.

The caseworker called me a textbook example of kleptomania. She cited studies. My stealing, she said, was to prevent anybody from stealing my penis (Fenichel, 1945). Stealing was an impulse I couldn't control (Goldman, 1991). I stole because off a mood disorder (McElroy et al., 1991). It didn't matter what: shoes, masking tape, a tennis racket.

The only trouble is now even stealing doesn't give me the old feeling of wow.

Maybe this is because I've met Fertility.

Or maybe I've met Fertility because I'm getting bored with my sex life of crime.

Lately, I'm not even shoplifting, not in the classic, formal sense. Instead of stealing merchandise, I'll walk around downtown until I find a cash register receipt someone's just dropped.

You take the receipt into the store it's from. You pretend to shop until you find an item on the receipt. You take the item around the store for a while, then you use the receipt to return the item for cash. Of course this works best in big stores. It works best with itemized receipts. Don't use receipts that are old or dirty. Don't use the same receipt twice. Try to vary the stores you scam.

This is to real shoplifting what masturbation is to sex.

And of course, stores know all about this scam.

Other good scams include shopping with a big cup of soda you can drop small items into. Another way is to buy a cheap can of paint, then loosen the lid and drop something expensive inside. The metal of the can blocks the x-rays from the security system.

This afternoon, instead of finding a receipt, I just walk around trying to figure out the next part of my plan to grab Fertility and make her my own. Have her. Throw her away, maybe. I have to take advantage of her terrible dreams. Our dancing together has to be a tool I can use.

Fertility and I danced most of the afternoon. As the music changed, she taught me the basic Cha-Cha, the Cha-Cha crossover step, and the female under-arm Cha-Cha turn. She showed me the basic Fox- trot.

She told me what she did for a living was terrible. It was worse than anything I could imagine.

And when I asked, What?

She laughed.

Walking around downtown, I find a register receipt for a color television. This should feel like I've found a winning lottery ticket, but I put the receipt in a trash can.

Maybe what I liked most about dancing is the rules. In the world where anything goes, here are solid arbitrary rules. The Fox-trot is two slow steps and two fast. The Cha-Cha is two slow and three fast. The choreography, the discipline, isn't up for debate.

These are good old-fashioned rules. How to dance the Box Step isn't going to change every week.

To the caseworker, when we started together ten years ago I wasn't a crook. Originally, I was an obsessive-compulsive disorder. She'd just got her degree and still had all her textbooks to prove it. Obsessive-compulsives, she told me, would either check on things or clean them (Rachman & Hodgson, 1980). According to her, I was the second kind.

Really, I just liked to clean, but all my life I've been trained to obey. All I did was try and make her lousy diagnosis look right. The caseworker told me the symptoms, and I did my best to manifest them and then let her cure me.

After being obsessive-compulsive, I was a posttraumatic stress disorder.

Then I was an agoraphobic.

I was a panic disorder.

My feet are walking down the sidewalk in the one slow, two fast steps of a waltz. My head is counting one, two, three. Wherever you look among the pigeons there are big-ticket receipts all over the sidewalk. Walking around downtown, I pick up another receipt. This one's good for a hundred seventy-three dollars cash. Then I throw it away.

For about three months after I first met the caseworker, I was a dissociative identity disorder because I wouldn't tell the caseworker about my childhood.

Then I was a schizotypal personality disorder because I didn't want to join her weekly therapy group.

Then because she thought it would make a good case study, I had Koro Syndrome, where you're convinced your penis is getting smaller and smaller and when it disappears, you'll die (Fabian, 1991; Tseng etal., 1992).

Then she switched me to have Dhat Syndrome, where you're in crisis over the belief you're losing all your sperm when you have wet dreams or take a leak (Chadda & Ahuja, 1990). This is based on an old Hindu belief that it takes forty drops of blood to create a drop of bone marrow and forty drops of marrow to create a drop of sperm (Akhtar, 1988). She said it was no wonder I was so tired all the time.

Sperm makes me think of sex makes me think of punishment makes me think of death makes me think of Fertility Hollis. We did what the caseworker called Free Association.

Every session we had, she diagnosed me with another problem she thought I might have, and she gave me a book so I could study the symptoms. By the next week, I had whatever the problem was down pat.

One week, pyromaniac. One week, gender identity disorder.

She told me I was an exhibitionist so the next week, I mooned her.

She told me I was attention-deficient so I kept changing the subject. I was claustrophobic so we had to meet outside on the patio.

Walking around downtown, my feet switch to the two slow, three fast, two slow steps of a Cha-Cha. In my head is the same ten songs we listened to all afternoon. I pass up another receipt, as legal tender as a five-dollar bill on the sidewalk, and I Cha-Cha right past it.

The book the caseworker gave me was called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.We called it the DSM for short. She gave me a lot of her old textbooks to read, and inside were color photographs of models getting paid to look happy by holding naked babies overhead or walking hand in hand on a beach at sunset. For pictures of misery, models were getting paid to needle illegal drugs into their arms or slump alone at a table with a drink. It got so the caseworker could throw the DSM on the floor and whatever page it fell open to, that was how I'd try to look for the week.

We were happy enough this way. For a while. She felt she was making progress every week. I had a script to tell me how to act. It wasn't boring, and she gave me too many fake problems for me to stress about anything real. Every Tuesday, the caseworker would give me her diagnosis, and that was my new assignment.

Our first year together, there wasn't enough free time for me to consider suicide.

We did the Stanford-Binet to figure out how old my brain was. We did the Wechsler. We did the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. The Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory. The Beck Depression Inventory.

The caseworker found out everything about me except for the truth.

I just didn't want to be fixed.

Whatever my real problems might be, I didn't want them cured. None of the little secrets inside me wanted to be found and explained away. By myths. By my childhood. By chemistry. My fear was, what would be left? So none of my real grudges and dreads ever came out into the light of day. I didn't want to resolve any angst. I'd never talk about my dead family. Express my grief, she called it. Resolve it. Leave it behind.

The caseworker cured me of a hundred syndromes, none of them real, and then declared me sane. She was so happy and proud.

She sent me out into the light of day, cured. You are healed. Go forth. Walk. A miracle of modern psychology.

Arise.

Dr. Frankenstein and her monster.

It was pretty heady stuff when you're twenty-five years old.

The only side effect is now I tend to steal. My intro to kleptomania felt too good to leave behind. Until tonight.

Walking around downtown today, ten years later, I pick up another receipt. I throw it away. After ten years of stowing away my problems so the caseworker couldn't monkey around with them, all I have to do is dance the Cha-Cha with some girl and even my chronic stealing is gone. My one real psychosis I denied the caseworker is cured by a stranger.

That's all we did was dance. Fertility talked about her brother and how the FBI had his phone tapped so every time she talked to him she could hear the click ... click ... click ... of a government tape recorder in the background. Even before Trevor killed himself, she knew he would. It was in her first dream of the future. Fertility and I danced some more. Then she had to leave. Then she promised, next week, next Wednesday, same time, same place, she'd be there.

Tonight, streetlight to streetlight, I walk the Fox-trot. In my mind, I hear the waltz. The memory of Fertility Hollis is in my arms and resting against my chest. This is how I get home. Upstairs, the phone is already ringing off the hook. Maybe it's schizoids, paranoids, pedophiles.

Been there, I want to tell them. Done that.

Maybe it's Fertility Hollis wanting to talk about dancing with me today. Ready to give me her second impression of me.

Maybe she'll tell me in secret what's so terrible she does to earn money.

All the way from the elevator doors coming open, I run to answer the phone.

Hello.

The apartment door to the hallway is still open behind me. The fish needs to be fed. The curtains are still open, and it's almost dark outside. Anyone could see in here.

A man on the other end says, "May you be of complete service in your lifetime."

Without a thought I respond, Praise and glory to the Lord for this day through which we labor.

He says, "May our efforts bring all those around us to Heaven."

I ask, Who is this?

And he says, "May you die with all your work complete."

And he hangs up.

There's a way to polish chrome with club soda. To clean the ivory or bone handles on cutlery, rub them with lemon juice and salt. To get the shine off a suit, dampen the cloth with a weak mixture of water and ammonia, then iron with a damp pressing cloth.

The secret for making perfect boeuf Bourguignon is to add some orange peel.

To remove cherry stains, rub them with a ripe tomato and wash as usual.

The key is not to panic.

To make pants keep a sharp crease, turn them inside out and rub a bar of soap on the inside of the crease. Turn them right-side out and iron as usual.

The trick is to keep busy.

Despite the fact the killer called, I'm doing everything as usual.

The secret is to not let your imagination get carried away.

All night long, I'm cleaning. I can't sleep. To clean the oven, I'm baking a pan of ammonia. Another way to put a lasting crease in pants is to dampen your pressing cloth with water and vinegar. I dig today's dirt out from under each fingernail. If I don't open a window, I'm going to suffocate from the smell of baked ammonia.

Here, I have to just spit it out.

The caseworker is missing. Every ten minutes, I call the caseworker at her office and all I get is her message. Here's the first time in ten years I've called her, and this is all I hear. "Please leave a message at the beep."

I say, that crazy psycho she told me about, well, he called.

All night, I'm phoning her office every ten minutes.

Please leave a message at the beep.

She needs to get me some protection.

And her message machine keeps cutting me off. So I call back.

Please leave a message.

I need an armed, twenty-four-hour police escort.

Please leave a message.

Somebody could be in the hallway, and I need to use the bathroom.

Please leave a message.

The killer she told me about knows who I am. He called. He knows where I live. He has my telephone number.

Please leave a message.

Call me. Call me. Call me.

Please leave a message.

If I turn up suicided in the morning, it was murder.

Please leave a message.

If I end up dead from some murderer holding my head in the oven, it's because she never checks her messages.

Please leave a message.

Listen, I tell her machine. This is for real. This is not a paranoid delusion. She cured me of those, remember?

Please leave a message.

This isn't a schizoid fantasy. I'm not hallucinating. Take my word for it.

Please leave a message. Then her message tape runs out.

All night, I'm awake and listening with the refrigerator moved halfway in front of the hall door. I need to use the bathroom but not bad enough to risk my life. People go down the hallway, but nobody stops. Nobody touches my doorknob all night. The phone just rings and rings, and I have to answer it in case it's the caseworker, but it's never her. It's just the regular parade of human misery. Pregnant unweds. Chronic sufferers. Substance abusers. They have to dash off their confessions pretty fast before I hang up. I have to keep the line free.

Every phone call I get fills me with joy and terror since this could be the caseworker or the killer.

Approach or avoidance.

Positive and negative reinforcement for answering the phone.

In the middle of my panic, Fertility calls to say, "Hi, me again. I've been thinking about you all week. I wanted to ask if it's against the rules for us to meet. I'd really like to meet you."

Still listening for footsteps, expecting a shadow to fall across the crack of light under the hallway door, I'm lifting the window shade to see if anyone's on the fire escape. I ask her, what about her friend? Wasn't she supposed to meet him again today?

"Oh, him," Fertility says. "Yes, I saw him today."

And?

"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 Disordersand 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 Showis 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 Peoplemagazine.

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 Shawand 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.