Survivor

I told the agent I already knew my childhood.

Over the phone he said, "This version's better."

Version?

"We'll have an even hotter version for the movie." The agent asks, "So who do you want to be you?"

I want to be me.

"In the movie, I mean."

I ask him to hold please. Already being famous was turning into less freedom and more of a schedule of decisions and task after task after task. The feeling isn't so great but it's familiar.

Then the police were at the front door and then they were inside the den with the dead caseworker, taking her picture with a camera from different angles and asking me to put down my drink so they could ask questions about the night before.

It's right then I locked myself in the bathroom and had what the psychology textbooks would call a quickie existential crisis.

The man who I work for calls from his restaurant bathroom about his hearts of palm salad, and my day is pretty much complete.

Live or die?

I come out the bathroom door past the police and go right to the phone. To the man who I work for, I tell him to use his salad fork. Skewer each heart. Tines down. Lift the heart to his mouth and suck out the juice. Then, place it in the breast pocket of his double-breasted, Brooks-Brothered. pin-striped suit jacket.

He says, "Got it." And my job in this house is finished.

My one hand is holding the telephone, and with my other I'm motioning for the police to put more rum in the next batch of daiquiris.

The agent tells me not to bother with any luggage. New York has a stylist already building a wardrobe of marketable all-cotton sackcloth-style religious sportswear they want me to promote.

Luggage reminds me of hotels reminds me of chandeliers reminds me of disasters reminds me of Fertility Hollis. She's the only thing I'm leaving behind. Only Fertility knows anything about me, even if she doesn't know much. Maybe she knows my future, but she doesn't know my past. Now nobody knows my past.

Except maybe Adam.

Between the two of them, they know more about my life than me.

According to my itinerary, the agent says, the car will be here in five minutes.

It's time to keep living.

It's time to reenlist.

In the limousine, there should be dark sunglasses. I want to be obviously incognito. I want black leather seats and tinted windows. I tell the agent, I want crowds at the airport chanting my name. I want more blender drinks. I want a personal fitness trainer. I want to lose fifteen pounds. I want my hair to be thicker. I want my nose to look smaller. Capped teeth. A cleft chin. High cheekbones. I want a manicure, and I want a tan.

I try to remember everything else Fertility doesn't like about I look.

It's somewhere above Nebraska I remember I left my fish behind.

And it must be hungry.

It's part of Creedish tradition that even labor missionaries had something, a cat, a dog, a fish, to care for. Most times it was a fish. Just something to need you home at night. Something to keep you from living alone.

The fish is something to make me settle in one place. According to church colony doctrine, it's why men marry women and why women have children. It's something to live your life around.

It's crazy, but you invest all your emotion in just this one tiny goldfish, even after six hundred and forty goldfish, and you can't just let the little thing starve to death.

I tell the flight attendant, I've got to go back, while she's fighting against my one hand that's holding her by the elbow.

An airplane is just so many rows of people sitting and all going in the same direction a long ways off the ground. Going to New York's a lot the way I imagine going to Heaven would be.

It's too late, the flight attendant says. Sir. This is a nonstop. Sir. Maybe after we land, she says, maybe I could call someone. Sir.

But there isn't anybody.

Nobody will understand.

Not the apartment manager.

Not the police.

The flight attendant yanks her elbow away. She gives me a look and moves up the aisle.

Everyone else I could call is dead.

So I call the only person who can help. I call the last person I want to talk to, and she picks up on the first ring.

An operator asks if she'd accept the charges, and somewhere hundreds of miles behind me Fertility said yes.

I said hi, and she said hi. She doesn't sound at all surprised.

She asked, "Why weren't you at Trevor's crypt today? We had a date."

I forgot, I say. My whole life is about forgetting. It's my most valuable job skill.

It's my fish, I say. It's going to die if nobody feeds it. Maybe this doesn't sound important to her, but that fish means the whole world to me. Right now, that fish is the only thing I care about, and Fertility needs to go there and feed it, or better yet, take it home to live with her.

"Yeah," she says. "Sure. Your fish."

Yes. And it needs to be fed every day. There's the kind of food it likes best next to the fish bowl on my fridge, and I give her the address.

She says, "Enjoy going off to become a big international spiritual leader."

We're talking from farther and farther away as the plane takes me east. The sample chapters of my autobiography are on the seat next to me, and they're a complete shock.

I ask, how did she know?

She says, "I know a lot more than you give me credit for."

Like what for instance? I ask, what else does she know?

Fertility says, "What are you afraid I might know?"

The flight attendant goes on the other side of a curtain and says, "He's worried about a goldfish." Some women behind the curtain laugh and one says, "Is he retarded?"

As much to the flight crew as to Fertility I say, It just so happens that I'm the last survivor of an almost extinct religious cult.

Fertility says, "How nice for you."

I say, And I can't ever see her again.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah."

I say, People want me in New York by tomorrow. They're planning something big.

And Fertility says, "Of course they are."

I say, I'm sorry I won't ever get to dance with her anymore.

And Fertility says, "Yes, you will."

Since she knows so much, I ask her, what's the name of my fish?

"Number six forty-one."

And miracle of miracles, she's right.

"Don't even try keeping a secret," she says. "With all the dreams I've been having every night, not much surprises me."

After just the first fifty flights of stairs, my breath won't stay inside me long enough to do any good. My feet fly out behind me. My heart is jumping against the ribs it's behind inside my chest. The insides of my mouth and tongue are thick and stuck together with dried-up spit.

Where I'm at is one of those stair climbing machines the agent has installed. You climb and climb forever and never get off the ground. You're trapped in your hotel room. It's the mystical sweat lodge experience of our time, the only sort of Indian vision quest we can schedule into our daily planner.

Our StairMaster to Heaven.

Around the sixtieth floor, sweat is stretching my shirt down to my knees. The lining of my lungs feels the way a ladder looks in nylon stockings, stretched, snagged, a tear. In my lungs. A rupture. The way a tire looks before a blowout, that's how my lungs feel. The way it smells when your electric heater or hair dryer burns off a layer of dust, that's how hot my ears feel.

Why I'm doing this is because the agent says there's thirty pounds too much of me for him to make famous.

If your body is a temple, you can pile up too much deferred maintenance. If your body is a temple, mine was a real fixer-upper.

Somehow, I should've seen this coming.

The same way every generation reinvents Christ, the agent's giving me the same makeover. The agent says nobody is going to worship anybody with my role of flab around his middle. These days, people aren't going to fill stadiums to get preached at by somebody who isn't beautiful.

This is why I'm going nowhere at the rate of seven hundred calories an hour.

Around the eightieth floor, my bladder feels nested between the top of my legs. When you pull plastic wrap off something in the microwave and the steam sunburns your fingers in an instant, my breath is that hot.

You're going up and up and up and not getting anywhere. It's the illusion of progress. What you want to think is your salvation.

What people forget is a journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too.

It's not as if the great coyote spirit comes to you, but around the eighty-first floor, these random thoughts from out of the ozone just catch in your head. Silly things the agent told you, now they add up. The way you feel when you're scrubbing with pure ammonia fumes and right then while you're scrubbing chicken skin off the barbecue grill, every stupid thing in the world, decaffeinated coffee, alcohol, free beer, StairMasters, makes perfect sense, not because you're any smarter, but because the smart part of your brain's on vacation. It's that kind of faux wisdom. That kind of Chinese food enlightenment where you know that ten minutes after your head clears, you'll forget it all.

Those clear plastic bags you get a single serving of honey-roasted peanuts in on a plane instead of a real meal, that's how small my lungs feel. After eighty-five floors, the air feels that thin. Your arms pumping, your feet jam down on every next step. At this point, your every thought is so profound.

The way bubbles form in a pan of water before it comes to a boil, these new insights just appear.

Around the ninetieth floor, every thought is an epiphany.

Paradigms are dissolving right and left.

Everything ordinary turns into a powerful metaphor.

The deeper meaning of everything is right there in your face.

And it's all so significant.

It's all so deep.

So real.

Everything the agent's been telling me makes perfect sense. For instance, if Jesus Christ had died in prison, with no one watching and with no one there to mourn or torture him, would we be saved?

With all due respect.

According to the agent, the biggest factor that makes you a saint is the amount of press coverage you get.

Around the one hundredth floor, it all comes clear. The whole universe, and this isn't just the endorphins talking. Any higher than the hundredth floor and you enter a mystical state.

The same as if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, you realize, if no one had been there to witness the agony of Christ, would we be saved?

The key to salvation is how much attention you get. How high a profile you get. Your audience share. Your exposure. Your name recognition. Your press following.

The buzz.

Around the one hundredth floor, the sweat is parting your hair all over. The boring mechanics of how your body works are all too clear, your lungs are sucking air to put in your blood, your heart pumps blood to your muscles, your hamstrings pull themselves short, cramping to pull your legs up behind you, your quadriceps cramp to put your knees out in front of you. The blood delivers air and food to burn inside the mito-whatever in the middle of your every muscle cell.

The skeleton is just a way to keep your tissue off the floor. Your sweat is just a way to keep you cool.

The revelations come at you from every direction.

Around the one hundred and fifth floor, you can't believe you're the slave to this body, this big baby. You have to keep it fed and put it to bed and take it to the bathroom. You can't believe we haven't invented something better. Something not so needy. Not so time-consuming.

You realize that people take drugs because it's the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world.

It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.

You realize that there's no point in doing anything if nobody's watching.

You wonder, if there had been a low turnout at the crucifixion, would they have rescheduled?

You realize the agent was right. You've never seen a crucifix with a Jesus who wasn't almost naked. You've never seen a fat Jesus. Or a Jesus with body hair. Every crucifix you've ever seen, the Jesus could be shirtless and modeling designer jeans or men's cologne.

Life is every way the agent said. You realize that if no one's watching, you might as well stay home. Play with yourself. Watch broadcast television.

It's around the one hundred and tenth floor you realize that if you're not on videotape, or better yet, live on satellite hookup in front of the whole world watching, you don't exist.

You're that tree falling in the forest that nobody gives a rat's ass about.

It doesn't matter if you do anything. If nobody notices, your life will add up to a big zero. Nada. Cipher.

Fake or not, it's these kinds of big truths that swarm inside you.

You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past. We can't give up our concept of who we were. All those adults playing archaeologist at yard sales, looking for childhood artifacts, board games, CandyLand, Twister, they're terrified. Trash becomes holy relics. Mystery Date. Hula Hoops. Our way of getting nostalgic for what we just threw in the trash, it's all because we're afraid to evolve. Grow, change, lose weight, reinvent ourselves. Adapt.

That's what the agent says to me on the StairMaster. He's yelling at me, "Adapt!"

Everything's accelerated except me and my sweaty body with its bowel movements and body hair. My moles and yellow toenails. And I realize I'm stuck with my body, and already it's falling apart. My backbone feels hammered out of hot iron. My arms swing thin and wet on each side of me.

Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it's the only way they can get anything really finished.

The agent's yelling that no matter how great you look, your body is just something you wear to accept your Academy Award.

Your hand is just so you can hold your Nobel Prize.

Your lips are only there for you to air-kiss a talk show host.

And you might as well look great.

It's around the one hundred and twentieth floor you have to laugh. You're going to lose it anyway. Your body. You're already losing it. It's time you bet everything.

This is why when the agent comes to you with anabolic steroids, you say yes. You say yes to the back-to-back tanning sessions. Electrolysis? Yes. Teeth capping? Yes. Dermabrasion? Yes. Chemical peels? According to the agent, the secret to getting famous is you just keep saying yes.

It's in the car coming from the airport the agent shows me his cure for cancer. It's called ChemoSolv. It's supposed to dissolve a tumor, he says and opens his briefcase to take out a brown prescription bottle with dark capsules inside.

This is jumping back a little ways to before I met the stair climbing machine, to my first face-to-face with the agent the night he picks me up at the airport in New York. Before he tells me I'm too fat to be famous yet. Before I'm a product being launched. It's dark outside when my plane first lands in New York. Nothing's too spectacular. It's night, with the same moon as we have back home, and the agent's just a regular man standing where I get off the plane, wearing glasses with his brown hair parted on one side.

We shake hands. A car drives up to the curb outside, and we get in the back. He pinches the crease in each trouser leg to lift it as he steps into the car. How he looks is custom-tailored.

How he looks is eternal and durable. Just meeting him, there's that guilt I feel whenever I buy something impossible to recycle.

"This other cancer cure we have is called Oncologic," he says and hands another brown bottle across to me sitting next to him in the backseat. This is a nice car, the way it's black leather and padded all over inside. The ride is smoother than on the airplane.

It's more dark capsules inside the second bottle, and pasted around the bottle is a pharmacy label the way you always see. The agent takes out another bottle.

"This is one of our cures for AIDS," he says. "This is our most popular one." He takes out bottle after bottle. "Here we have our leading cure for antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis. Here's liver cirrhosis. Here's Alzheimer's. Multiple Neuritis. Multiple Myeloma. Multiple Sclerosis. The rhinovirus," he says, shaking each one so the pills inside rattle, and handing them over to me.

ViralSept, it says on one bottle.

MaligNon, another bottle says.

CerebralSave.

Kohlercaine.

Nonsense words.

These are all same-sized brown plastic bottles with white child-guard caps and prescription labels from the same pharmacy.

The agent comes packaged in a medium-weight gray wool suit and is equipped with only his briefcase. He features two brown eyes behind glasses. A mouth. Clean fingernails. Nothing is remarkable about him except what he's telling me.

"Just name a disease," he says, "and we have a cure ready for it."

He lifts two more handfuls of brown bottles from his briefcase and shakes them. "I brought all these to prove a point."

Every second, the car we're in slides deeper and deeper through the dark into New York City. Around us, other cars keep pace. The moon keeps pace. I say how I'm surprised all these diseases still exist in the world.

"It's a shame," the agent says, "how medical technology is still lagging behind the marketing side of things. I mean, we've had all the sales support in place for years, the coffee mug giveaways to physicians, the feel-good magazine ads, the total product launch, but it's the same old violin in the background. R&D is still years behind. The lab monkeys are still dropping like flies."

His two perfect rows of teeth look set in his mouth by a jeweler.

The pills for AIDS look just like the pills for cancer look just like the pills for diabetes. I ask, So these things really aren't invented?

"Let's not use that word, 'invented,'" the agent says. "It makes everything sound so contrived."

But they aren't real?

"Of course they're real," he says and plucks the first two bottles out of my hands. "They're copyrighted. We have an inventory of almost fifteen thousand copyrighted names for products that are still in development," he says. "And that includes you."

He says, "That's just my point."

He's developing a cure for cancer?

"We're a total concept marketing slash public relations organization," he says. "Our job is to create the concept. You patent a drug. You copyright the name. As soon as someone else develops the product they come to us, sometimes by choice, sometimes not."

I ask him, Why sometimes not?

"The way this works is we copyright every conceivable combination of words, Greek words, Latin, English, what-have-you. We get the legal rights to every conceivable word a pharmaceutical company might use to name a new product. For diabetes alone, we have an inventory of one hundred forty names," he says. He hands me stapled-together pages from out of his briefcase in his lap.

GlucoCure, I read.

InsulinEase.

PancreAid. Hemazine. Glucodan. Growdenase. I turn to the next page, and bottles slip out of my lap and roll along the car floor with the pills inside rattling.

"If the drug company that ever cures diabetes wants to use any combination of words even vaguely related to the condition, they'll have to lease that right from us."

So the pills I have here, I say, these are sugar pills. I twist one bottle open and shake a tablet, dark red and shining, into my palm. I lick it, and it's candy-coated chocolate. Others are gelatin capsules with powdered sugar inside.

"Mock-ups," he says. "Prototypes."

He says, "My point is that every bit of your career with us is already in place, and we've been prophesying your arrival for more than fifteen years."

He says, "I'm telling you this so you can relax."

But the Creedish church district disaster was only ten years ago.

And I put a pill, an orange Geriamazone, in my mouth.

"We've been tracking you," he says. "As soon as the Creedish survival numbers dipped below one hundred, we started the campaign rolling. The whole media countdown over the last six months, that was our doing. It needed some fine-tuning. It wasn't anything specific at first, all the copy is pretty much search-and-replace, fill-in-the-blank, universal-change stuff, but it's all in the can. All we needed was a warm body and the survivor's name. That's where you enter the picture."

From another bottle, I shake out two dozen Inazans and hold them under my tongue until their black candy shells dissolve. Chocolate melts out.

The agent takes out more sheets of printed paper and hands them to me.

Ford Merit, I read.

Mercury Rapture.

Dodge Vignette.

He says, "We have names copyrighted for cars that haven't been designed, software that's never been written, miracle dream cures for epidemics still on the horizon, every product we can anticipate."

My back teeth crunch a sweet overdose of blue Donnadons.

The agent eyes me sitting there and sighs. "Enough with the empty calories, already," he says. "Our first big job is to modify you so you'll fit the campaign." He asks, "Is that your real hair color?"

I pour a million milligrams of Jodazones in my mouth.

"Not to mince words," the agent says, "but you're about thirty pounds heavier than we need you to be."

The bogus pills I can understand. What I don't understand is how he could begin planning a campaign around something before it happened. No way could he have a campaign planned before the Deliverance.

The agent takes off his glasses and folds them. He sets them inside his briefcase and takes back the printed lists of future miracle products, drugs and cars, and he puts the lists in his briefcase. He tug- of-wars the pill bottles out of my hands, all of them silent and empty.

"The truth is," he says, "nothing new ever happens."

He says, "We've seen it all."

He says, "Listen."

In 1653, he says, the Russian Orthodox church changed a few old rituals. Just some changes in the liturgy. Just words. Language. In Russian, for God's sake. Some Bishop Nikon introduced the changes as well as the western manners that were becoming popular in Russian court life at the time, and the bishop started excommunicating anyone who rebelled against these changes.

Reaching around in the dark by my feet, he picks up the other pill bottles.

According to the agent, the monks who didn't want to change the way they worshiped fled to remote monasteries. The Russian authorities hunted and persecuted them. By 1665, small groups of monks began burning themselves to death. These group suicides in northern Europe and western Siberia continued through the 1670s. In 1687, some two thousand seven hundred monks captured a monastery, locked themselves inside, and burned it. In 1688, another fifteen hundred "Old Believers" burned themselves alive in their locked monastery. By the end of the seventeenth century, an estimated twenty thousand monks had killed themselves instead of submitting to the government.

He snaps his briefcase shut and leans forward.

"These Russian monks kept killing themselves until 1897," he says. "Sound familiar?"

You have Samson in the Old Testament, the agent says. You have the Jewish soldiers who killed themselves in the Masada. You have seppuku among the Japanese. Sati among the Hindu. Endura among the Cathari during the twelfth century in southern France. He ticked off group after group on his fingertips. There were the Stoics. There were the Epicureans. There were the tribes of Guiana Indians who killed themselves so they could be reborn as white men.

"Closer to here and now, the People's Temple mass suicide of 1978 left nine hundred twelve dead."

The Branch Davidian disaster of 1993 left seventy-six dead.

The Order of the Solar Temple mass suicide and murder in 1994 killed fifty-three people.

The Heaven's Gate suicide in 1997 killed thirty-nine.

"The Creedish church thing was just a blip in the culture," he says. "It was just one more predictable mass suicide in a world filled with splinter groups that limp along until they're confronted.

Maybe their leader is about to die, as was the case with the Heaven's Gate group, or they're challenged by the government, like what happened around the Russian monks or the People's Temple or the Creedish church district."

He says, "Actually, it's awfully boring stuff. Anticipating the future based on the past. We might as well be an insurance company; nevertheless, it's our job to make cult suicide look fresh and exciting every time around."

After knowing Fertility, I wonder if I'm the last person in the world who ever gets caught by surprise. Fertility with her dreams of disaster and this guy with his clean shave and his closed loop of history, they're two peas trapped in the same boring pod.

"Reality means you live until you die," the agent says. "The real truth is nobody wants reality."

The agent closes his eyes and presses his open palm to his forehead. "The truth is the Creedish church was nothing special," he says. "It was founded by a splinter group of Millerites in 1860 during the Great Awakening, during a period when in California alone, splinter religions founded more than fifty Utopian communities."

He opens one eye and points a finger at me. "You have something, a pet, a bird or a fish."

I ask how he knows this, about my fish.

"It's not necessarily true, but it's probable," he says. "The Creedish granted their labor missionaries what was known as Mascot Privilege, the right to own a pet, in 1939. It was the year a Creedish biddy stole an infant from the family where she worked. Having a pet was supposed to sublimate your need to nurture a dependent."

A biddy stole somebody's baby.

"In Birmingham, Alabama," he says. "Of course, she killed herself the minute she was found."

I ask what else does he know.

"You have a problem with masturbation."

That's easy, I say. He read that in my Survivor Retention record.

"No," he says. "Lucky for us, all the client records for your caseworker are missing. Anything we say about you will be uncontested. And before I forget, we took six years off your life. If anyone asks, you're twenty-seven."

So how does he know so much about my, you know, about me?

"Your masturbation?"

My crimes of Onan.

"It seems that all you labor missionaries had a problem with masturbation."

If he only knew. Somewhere in my lost case history folder are the records of my being an exhibitionist, a bipolar syndrome, a myso-phobic, a shoplifter, etc. Somewhere in the night behind us, the caseworker is taking my secrets to her grave. Somewhere half the world behind me is my brother.

Since he's such an expert, I ask the agent if there are ever murders of people who were supposed to kill themselves but just didn't. In these other religions, did anyone ever go around killing the survivors?

"With the People's Temple there was an unexplained handful of survivors murdered," he says. "And the Order of the Solar Temple. It was the Canadian government's trouble with the Solar Temple that prompted our government's Survivor Retention Program. With the Solar Temple, little groups of French and Canadian followers kept killing themselves and killing each other for years after the original disaster. They called the killings 'Departures.'"

He says, "Members of the Temple Solaire burned themselves alive with gasoline and propane explosions they thought would blast them to eternal life on the star Sirius," and he points into the night sky. "Compared to that, the Creedish mess was infinitely tame."

I ask, has he anticipated anything about a surviving church member hunting down and killing any leftover Creedish?

"A surviving church member, other than you?" the agent asks.

Yes.

"Killing people, you say?"

Yes.

Looking out the car at the New York lights going by, the agent says, "A killer Creedish? Oh heavens, I hope not."

Looking out at the same lights behind tinted glass, at the star Sirius, looking past my own reflection with chocolate smeared around my mouth, I say, yeah. Me too.

"Our whole campaign is based on the fact that you're the last survivor," he says. "If there's another Creedish alive in the world, you're wasting my time. The entire campaign is down the tubes. If you're not the only living Creedish in the world, you're worthless to us."

He opens his briefcase a crack and takes out a brown bottle. "Here," he says, "take a couple Serenadons. These are the best anti-anxiety treatment ever invented."

They just don't exist yet.

"Just pretend," he says, "for the placebo effect." And he shakes two into my hand.

People are going to say it's the steroids that made me go crazy.

The Durateston 250.

The Mifepristone abortion pills from France.

The Plenastril from Switzerland.

The Masterone from Portugal.

These are the real steroids, not just the copyrighted names of future drugs. These are the injectables, the tablets, the transdermal patches.

People will be so sure the steroids made me into this, this crazy plane hijacker flying around the world until I kill myself. As if people know anything about being a celebrated famous celebrity spiritual leader. As if any one of those people isn't already looking around for a new guru to make sense out of their risk-free boredom of a lifestyle while they watch the news on television and pass judgment on me. People are all looking for that, a hand to hold. Reassurance. The promise that everything will be all right. That's all they wanted from me. Stressed, desperate, celebrated me. ***Underpressure me. None of these people know the first thing about being a big, glamorous, big, charismatic, big role model.

It's stair climbing around floor number one hundred and thirty you start raving, ranting, speaking in tongues.

Not that any one person except maybe Fertility knows the kind of day-in and day-out effort it took to be me at this point.

Imagine how you'd feel if your whole life turned into a job you couldn't stand.

No, everybody thinks their whole life should be at least as much fun as masturbation.

I'd like to see these people even try to live out of hotel rooms and find low-fat room service and do a halfway convincing job of faking a deep inner peace and at-oneness with God.

When you get famous, dinner isn't food anymore; it's twenty ounces of protein, ten ounces of carbohydrates, salt-free, fat-free, sugar-free fuel. This is a meal every two hours, six times a day. Eating isn't about eating anymore. It's about protein assimilation.

It's about cellular rejuvenation cream. Washing is about exfoliation. What used to be breathing is respiration.

I'd be the first to congratulate anybody if they could do a better job of faking flawless beauty and delivering vague inspiring messages:

Calm down. Everyone, breathe deep. Life is good. Be just and kind. Be the love.

As if.

At most events, those deep inner messages and beliefs went from the writing team to me in the last thirty seconds before I went onstage. That's what the silent opening prayer was all about. It gives me a minute to look down on the podium and read over my script.

Five minutes go by. Ten minutes. The 400 milligrams of Deca-Durabolin and testosterone cypionate you just spiked backstage is still a round little bolus in the skin on your ass. The fifteen thousand paying faithful are kneeling right there in front of you with their heads bowed. The way an ambulance screams down a quiet street, that's how those chemicals feel going into your bloodstream.

The liturgical robes I started wearing onstage are because with enough Equipoise in your system, half the time you're packing wood.

Fifteen minutes go by with all those people on their knees.

Whenever you're ready, you just say it, the magic word.

Amen.

And it's showtime.

"You are children of peace in a universe of everlasting life and a limitless abundance of love and well-being, blah, blah, blah. Go in peace."

Where the writing team comes up with this copy, I don't know.

Let's not even mention the miracles I performed on national television. My little halftime miracle during the Super Bowl. All those disasters I predicted, the lives I saved.

You know the old saying: It's not whatyou know.

It's whoyou know.

People think it's so simple to be me and go up in front of people in a stadium and lead them in prayer and then be seat-belted on a jet headed for the next stadium within the hour, all the time preserving a vibrant, healthy facade. No, but these people will still call you crazy for hijacking a plane. People don't know the first thing about vibrant dynamic healthy vibrancy.

Let them even try to find enough of me to autopsy. It's nobody's business if my liver function is impaired. Or if maybe my spleen and gallbladder are enormous from the effects of human growth hormone. As if they themselves wouldn't inject anything sucked from the pituitary glands of dead cadavers if they thought they could look as good as I did on television.

The risk of being famous is you have to take levothyroxine sodium to stay thin. Yes, you have your central nervous system to worry about. There's the insomnia. Your metabolism ramps up. Your heart pounds. You sweat. You're nervous all the time, but you look terrific.

Just remember, your heart is only beating so you can be a regular dinner guest at the White House.

Your central nervous system is just so you can address the UN General Assembly.

Amphetamines are the most American drug. You get so much done. You look terrific, and your middle name is Accomplishment.

"Your whole body," the agent is yelling, "is just how you model your designer line of sportswear!"

Your thyroid shuts down natural production of thyroxine.

But you still look terrific. And you are, you're the American Dream. You are the constant-growth economy.

According to the agent, the people out there looking for a leader, they want vibrant. They want massive. They want dynamic. Nobody wants a little skinny god. They want a thirty-inch drop between your chest and waist sizes. Big pecs. Long legs. Cleft chin. Big calves.

They want more than human.

They want larger than life size.

Nobody wants just anatomically correct.

People want anatomical enhancement. Surgically augmented. New and improved. Silicone-implanted. Collagen-injected.

Just for the record, after my first three-month cycle of Deca-Durabolin I couldn't reach down far enough to tie my shoes; my arms were that big. Not a problem, the agent says, and he hires someone to tie all my shoes for me.

After I cycled some Russian-made Metahapoctehosich for seventeen weeks all my hair fell out, and the agent bought me a wig.

'You have to meet me halfway on this," the agent tells me. "Nobody wants to worship a God who ties his own shoes."

Nobody wants to worship you if you have the same problems, the same bad breath and messy hair and hangnails, as a regular person. You have to be everything regular people aren't. Where they fail, you have to go all the way. Be what people are too afraid to be. Become whom they admire.

People shopping for a messiah want quality. Nobody is going to follow a loser. When it comes to choosing a savior, they won't settle for just a human being.

"For you, a wig is better," the agent said. "It's got the level of consistent perfection we can trust. Getting out of helicopters, the wash of the prop, every minute in public, you can't control how real hair is going to look."

How the agent explained his plan to me was, we weren't targeting the smartest people in the world, just the most.

He said, "Think of yourself from now on as a diet cola."

He said, "Think of those young people out in the world struggling with outdated religions or with no religions, think of those people as your target market."

People are looking for how to put everything together. They need a unified field theory that combines glamour and holiness, fashion and spirituality. People need to reconcile being good and being good- looking.

After day after day of no solid food, limited sleep, climbing thousands of stairs, and the agent yelling his ideas to me over and over, this all made perfect sense.

The music team was busy writing hymns even before I was under contract. The writing team was putting my autobiography to bed. The media team was doing press releases, merchandise licensing agreements, the skating shows: The Creedish Death Tragedy on Ice, the satellite hookups, tanning appointments. The image team has creative control on appearance. The writing team has control of every word that comes out of my mouth.

To cover the acne I got from cycling Laurabolin, I started wearing makeup. To cure the acne, someone on the support team got me a prescription for Retin-A.

For the hair loss, the support team was spritzing me with Rogaine.

Everything we did to fix me had side effects we had to fix.Then the fixes had side effects to fix and so on and so on.

Imagine a Cinderella story where the hero looks in the mirror and who's looking back is a total stranger. Every word he says is written for him by a team of professionals. Everything he wears is chosen or designed by a team of designers.

Every minute of every day is planned by his publicist.

Maybe now you're starting to get a picture.

Plus your hero is spiking drugs you can only buy in Sweden or Mexico so he can't see down past his own jutting-out chest. He's tanned and shaved and wigged and scheduled because people in Tucson, people in Seattle, or Chicago or Baton Rouge, don't want an avatar with a hairy back.

It's around floor number two hundred that you reach the highest state.

You're gone anaerobic, you're burning muscle instead of fat, but your mind is crystal-clear.

The truth is that all this was just part of the suicide process. Because tanning and steroids are only a problem if you plan to live a long time.

Because the only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn't it just lie there and rot?

And if Christ had died from a barbiturate overdose, alone on the bathroom floor, would He be in Heaven?

This wasn't a question of whether or not I was going to kill myself. This, this effort, this money and time, the writing team, the drugs, the diet, the agent, the flights of stairs going up to nowhere, all this was so I could off myself with everyone's full attention.

This one time, the agent asked me where I saw myself in five years.

Dead, I told him. I see myself dead and rotting. Or ashes, I can see myself burned to ashes.

I had a loaded gun in my pocket, I remember. Just the two of us were standing in the back of a crowded, dark auditorium. I remember it was the night of my first big public appearance.

I see myself dead and in Hell, I said.

I remember I was planning to kill myself that night.

I told the agent, I figured I'd spend my first thousand years of Hell in some entry-level position, but after that I wanted to move into management. Be a real team player. Hell is going to see enormous growth in market share over the next millennium. I wanted to ride the crest.

The agent said that sounded pretty realistic.

We were smoking cigarettes, I remember. Down onstage, some local preacher was doing his opening act. Part of his warm-up was to get the audience hyperventilated. Loud singing does the job. Or chanting. According to the agent, when people shout this way or sing "Amazing Grace" at the top of their lungs, they breathe too much. People's blood should be acid. When they hyperventilate the carbon dioxide level of their blood drops, and their blood become alkaline.

"Respiratory alkalosis," he says.

People get light-headed. People fall down with their ears ringing, their fingers and toes go numb, they get chest pains, they sweat. This is supposed to be rapture. People thrash on the floor with their hands cramped into stiff claws.

This is what passes for ecstasy.

"People in the religion business call it 'lobstering,'" the agent says. "They call it speaking in tongues."

Repetitive motions add to the effect, and the opening act down onstage runs through the usual drills. The audience claps in unison. Long rows of people hold hands and sway together in their delirium. People do that rainbow hands.

Whoever invented this routine, the agent tells me, they pretty much run things in Hell.

I remember the corporate sponsor was SummerTime Old-Fashioned Instant Lemonade.

My cue is when the opening act calls me down onto the stage, my part of the show is putting a spell on everybody.

"A naturalistic trance state," the agent says.

The agent takes a brown bottle out of his blazer pocket. He says, "Take a couple Endorphinols if you feel any emotion coming on."

I tell him to give me a handful.

To get ready for tonight, staffers went and visited local people to give them free tickets to the show. The agent is telling me this for the hundredth time. The staffers ask to use the bathroom during their visit and jot down notes about anything they find in the medicine cabinet. According to the agent, the Reverend Jim Jones did this and it worked miracles for his People's Temple.

Miracles probably isn't the right word.

Up on the pulpit is a list of people I've never met and their life-threatening conditions.

Mrs. Steven Brandon, I just have to call out. Come down and have your failing kidneys touched by God.

Mr. William Doxy, come down and put your crippled heart in God's hands.

Part of my training was how to press my fingers into somebody's eyes hard and fast so the pressure registered on their optic nerve as a flash of white light.

"Divine light," the agent says.

Part of my training was how to press my hands over somebody's ears so hard they heard a buzzing noise I could tell them was the eternal Om.

"Go," the agent says.

I've missed my cue.

Down onstage, the opening preacher is shouting Tender Branson into a microphone. The one, the only, the last survivor, the great Tender Branson.

The agent tells me, "Wait." He plucks the cigarette out of my mouth and pushes me down the aisle. "Now, go," he says.

All the hands reach out into the aisle to touch me. The spotlight's so bright onstage in front of me. In the dark around me are the smiles of a thousand delirious people who think they love me. All I have to do is walk into the spotlight.

This is dying without the control issues.

The gun is heavy and banging my hip in my pants pocket.

This is having a family without being familiar. Having relations without being related.

Onstage, the spotlights are warm.

This is being loved without the risk of loving anyone in return.

I remember this was the perfect moment to die.

It wasn't Heaven, but it was as close as I was ever going to get.

I raised my arms and people cheered. I lowered my arms and people were silent. The script was there on the podium for me to read. The typewritten list told me who out in the dark was suffering from what.

Everybody's blood was alkaline. Everybody's heart was there for the taking. This is how it felt to shoplift. This is how it felt to hear confessions over my crisis hotline. This is how I imagined sex.

With Fertility on my mind, I started to read the script:

We are all the divine products of creation.

We are each of us the fragments that make up something whole and beautiful.

Each time I paused, people would hold their breath.

The gift of life, I read from the script, is precious.

I put my hand on the gun loaded with bullets in my pocket.

The precious gift of life must be preserved no matter now painful and pointless it seemed. Peace, I told them, is a gift so perfect that only God should grant it. I told people, only God's most selfish children would steal God's greatest gift, His only gift greater than life. The gift of death.

This lesson is to the murderer, I said. This is to the suicide. This is to the abortionist. This is to the suffering and sick.

Only God has the right to surprise His children with death.

I had no idea what I was saying until it was too late. And maybe it was a coincidence, or maybe the agent knew what I had in mind when I'd asked him to get me some bullets and a gun, but what happened is the script really screwed up my whole plan. There was no way I could read this and then kill myself. It would just look so stupid.

So I never did kill myself.

The rest of the evening went as planned. People went home feeling saved, and I told myself I'd kill myself some other time. The moment was all wrong. I procrastinated, and timing was everything.

Besides.

Eternity was going to seem like forever.

With the crowds of smiling people smiling at me in the dark, me who spent my life cleaning bathrooms and mowing the lawn, I told myself, why rush anything?

I'd backslid before, I'd backslide again. Practice makes perfect.

If you could call it that.

I figured, a few more sins would help round out my resume.

This is the upside of already being eternally damned.

I figured, Hell could wait.

Before this plane goes down, before the flight recorder tape runs out, one of the things I want to apologize for is the Book of Very Common Prayer.

People need to know the Book of Very Common Prayerwas not my idea. Yes, it sold two hundred million copies, worldwide. It did. Yes, I let them put my name on it, but the book was the agent's brainchild. Before that the book was the idea of some nobody on the writing team. Some copywriter trying to break into the big time, I forget.

What's important is the book was not my idea.

What happened is one day, the agent comes up to me with that dancing light in his brown eyes that means a deal. According to my publicist, I'm booked solid. This is after we did that line of Bibles I was autographing in bookstores. We had a million plus feet of guaranteed shelf space in bookstores, and I was on tour.

"Don't expect a book tour to be something fun," the agent tells me.

The thing about book signings, the agent says, is they're exactly the same as the last day of high school when everyone wants you to write in their high school annual, only a book tour can go on for the rest of your life.

According to my itinerary, I'm in a Denver warehouse signing stock when the agent pitches me on his idea for a weeny book of meditations people can use in their everyday lives. He sees this as a paperback of little prose poems. Fifty pages, tops. Little tributes to the environment, children, safe stuff. Mothers. Pandas. Topics that step on nobody's toes. Common problems. We put my name on the spine, say I wrote it, run the product up a flagpole.

What else people need to know is I never saw the finished book until after the second press run, after it had sold more than fifty thousand copies. Already people weren't not just a little pissed off, but all the fuss only upped sales.

What happened is one day I'm in the green room waiting to co-host some daytime television project. This is way fast forward, after the autographed Bible book tour. The idea here is if I co-host and enough people tune in, I'll spin off with a vehicle of my own. So I'm in the green room trading toenail secrets with somebody, the actress Wendi Daniels or somebody, and she asks me to sign her copy of the book. The Book of Very Common Prayer.This is the first time I ever see a copy, I swear. On a stack of my own autographed Bibles, I swear.

According to Wendi Daniels, I can smooth out the swelling under my eyes by rubbing in a dab of hemorrhoid cream.

Then she hands it to me, the Book of Very Common Prayer,and my name is just so right there on the spine. Me, me, me. There I am.

There inside are the prayers people think I wrote:

The Prayer to Delay Orgasm

The Prayer to Lose Weight

The feeling, the way it feels when laboratory product-testing animals are ground up to make hot dogs, that's how hurt I felt.

The Prayer to Stop Smoking

Our most Holy Father,

Take from me the choice You have given.

Assume control of my will and habits.

Wrest from me power over my own behavior.

May it be Your decision how I act.

May it be by Your hands, my every failing.

Then if I still smoke, may I accept that my smoking is

Your will.

Amen.

The Prayer to Remove Mildew Stains The Prayer to Prevent Hair Loss

God of ultimate stewardship,

Shepherd of thine flock,

As You would succor the least of Your charges,

As You would rescue the most lost of Your lambs,

Restore to me the full measure of my glory.

Preserve in me the remainder of my youth.

All of Creation is Yours to provide.

All of Creation is Yours to withhold.

God of limitless bounty,

Consider my suffering.

Amen.

The Prayer to Induce Erection

The Prayer to Maintain an Erection

The Prayer to Silence Barking Dogs

The Prayer to Silence Car Alarms

The way all this felt, I looked terrible on television. My spin-off television show, well, I had to kiss that goodbye. One minute after we were off the air, I was being all over the telephone long-distance to the agent in New York. Everything on my end of the conversation was furious.

All he cared about was the money.

"What's a prayer?" he says. "It's an incantation," he says, and he's yelling back at me over the phone. "It's a way for people to focus their energy around a specific need. People need to get clear on a single intention and accomplish it."

The Prayer to Prevent Parking Tickets

The Prayer to Stop Plumbing Leaks

"People pray to solve problems, and these are the honest-to-God problems that people worry about," the agent's still yelling at me.

The Prayer for Increased Vaginal Sensitivity

"A prayer is how the squeaky wheel gets greased," he says. That's how made out of cheese his heart is. "You pray to make your needs known."

The Prayer Against Drivetrain Noise

The Prayer for a Parking Space

Oh, divine and merciful God,

History is without equal for how much I will adore

You, when You give me today, a place to park.

For You are the provider.

And You are the source.

From You all good is delivered.

Within You all is found.

In Your care will I find respite. With Your

guidance, will I find peace.

To stop, to rest, to idle, to park.

These are Yours to give me. This is what I ask.

Amen.

Seeing how I'm just about to die here, people need to know that my personal intention all along has been to serve the glory of God. Pretty much. Not that you can find this in our mission statement, but that's my general overall plan. I want to at least make an effort. This new book just looked so not at all pious. So not even a little devout.

The Prayer Against Excessive Underarm Wetness

The Prayer for a Second Interview

The Prayer to Locate a Lost Contact Lens

Still, even Fertility says I'm way off base about the book. Fertility wanted a second volume.

It's Fertility who says, some stadiums when I'm up front praising God, I'm the same as people wearing clothes printed with Mickey Mouse or Coca-Cola. I mean, it's so easy. It's not even a real choice. You can't go wrong. Fertility says, praising God is just such a safe thing to do. You don't even have to give it any thought.

"Be fruitful and multiply," Fertility says to me. "Praise God. There's no real risk. This is just our default setting."

What saved the Book of Very Common Prayerwas, people were using every prayer. Some people were pissed off, mostly religious people who resented the competition, but by this point our cash now was down. Our total revenues were leveling off. It was market saturation. People had the prayers committed to memory. People were stuck in traffic reciting the Prayer to Make Traffic Move.Men were reciting the Prayer to Delay Orgasm,and it worked at least as well as multiplication tables. My best option seemed to be to just keep my mouth shut and smile.

Besides, the attendance figures were down at my personal appearances, this looked to be the beginning of the end. My Peoplemagazine cover was already three months behind me.

And there's no such thing as Celebrity Outplacement.

You don't see faded movie stars or whoever going back to community college for retraining. The only field left to me was doing the game show circuit, and I'm not that smart.

I'd peaked, and timing-wise, this looked like another good window to do my suicide, and I almost did. The pills were in my hand. That's how close I came. I was planning to overdose on meta-testos- terone.

Then the agent calls on the telephone, loud, real loud, the way it sounds when a million screaming Christians are screaming your name in Kansas City, that's the kind of excitement that's in his voice.

Over the phone in my hotel room the agent tells me about the best booking of my career. It's next week. It's a thirty-second slot between a tennis shoe commercial and a national taco restaurant spot, prime time during sweeps week.

It amazes me to think those pills were almost in my mouth.

This is just so not boring anymore.

Network television, a million billion people watching, this would be the prime moment, my last chance to pull a gun and shoot myself with a decent audience share.

This would be such a totally not-ignored martyrdom.

"One catch," the agent tells me over the phone. He's shouting, "The catch is I told them you'd do a miracle."

A miracle.

"Nothing too big. You don't have to part the Red Sea or anything," he says. "Turning water into wine would be enough, but remember, no miracle and they won't run the spot."

Enter Fertility Hollis back into my life in Spokane, Washington, where I'm eating pie and coffee, incognito in a Shari's restaurant, when she comes in the front door and heads straight for my table. You can't call Fertility Hollis anybody's fairy godmother, but you might be surprised where she turns up.

But most times you wouldn't.

Fertility with her old-colored gray eyes as bored as the ocean.

Fertility with her every exhale an exhausted sigh.

She's the blase eye of the hurricane that's the world around her.

Fertility with her arms and face hanging slack as some jaded survivor, some immortal, an Egyptian vampire after watching the million years of television repeats we call history, she slumps into the seat across from me being glad since I needed her for a miracle anyway.

This is back when I could still give my entourage the slip. I wasn't a nobody yet, but I was on the cusp. Thanks to my media slump. My publicity doldrums.

The way Fertility slouches with her elbows on the table and her face propped in her hands, her bored- colored red hair hanging limp in her face, you'd guess she's just arrived from some planet with not as much gravity as Earth. As if just being here, as skinny as she is she weighs eight hundred pounds.

How she's dressed is just separates, slacks and a top, shoes, dragging a canvas tote bag. The air- conditioning is working, and you can smell her fabric softener, sweet and fake.

How she looks is watered-down.

How she looks is disappearing.

How she looks is erased.

"Don't stress," she says. "This is just me not wearing any makeup. I'm here on an assignment."

Her job.

"Right," she says. "My evil job."

I ask, How's my fish?

She says, "Fine."

No way could meeting her here be a coincidence. She has to be following me.

"What you forget is I know everything," Fertility says. She asks, "What time is it?"

I tell her, One fifty-three in the afternoon.

"In eleven minutes the waitress will bring you another piece of pie. Lemon meringue, this time. Later, only about sixty people will show up for your appearance tonight. Then, tomorrow morning, something called the Walker River Bridge will collapse in Shreveport. Wherever that is."

I say she's guessing.

"And," she says and smirks, "you need a miracle. You need a miracle, bad."

Maybe I do, I say. These days, who doesn't need a miracle? How does she know so much?

"The same way I know," she says and nods toward the other side of the dining room, "that waitress over there has cancer. I know the pie you're eating will upset your stomach. Some movie theater in China will burn in a couple minutes, give or take what time it is in Asia. Right now in Finland, a skier is triggering an avalanche that will bury a dozen people."

Fertility waves and the waitress with cancer is coming over.

Fertility leans across the table and says, "I know all this because I know everything."

The waitress is young and with hair and teeth and everything, meaning nothing about her looks wrong or sick, and Fertility orders a chicken stir-fry with vegetables and sesame seeds. She asks, does it come with rice?

Spokane is still outside the windows. The buildings. The Spokane River. The sun we all have to share. A parking lot. Cigarette butts.

I ask, so why didn't she warn the waitress?

"How would you react if a stranger told you that kind of news? It would just wreck her day," Fertility says. "And all her personal drama would just hold up my order."

It's cherry pie I'm eating that's going to upset my stomach. The power of suggestion.

"All you have to do is pay attention to the patterns," Fertility says. "After you see all the patterns, you can extrapolate the future."

According to Fertility Hollis, there is no chaos.

There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns.

If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself.

What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. What we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish.

There is no free will.

There are no variables.

"There is only the inevitable," Fertility says. "There's only one future. You don't have a choice."

The bad news is we don't have any control.

The good news is you can't make any mistakes.

The waitress across the dining room looks young and pretty and doomed.

"I pay attention to the patterns," Fertility says.

She says she can't not pay attention.

"They're in my dreams more and more every night," she says. "Everything. It's the same as reading a history book about the future, every night."

So she knows everything.

"So I know you need a miracle to go on television with."

What I need is a good prediction.

"That's why I'm here," she says and takes a fat daily planner book out of her tote bag. "Give me a time window. Give me a date for your prediction."

I tell her, Any time during the week after next.

"How about a multiple-car accident," she says, reading from her book.

I ask, How many cars?

"Sixteen cars," she says. "Ten dead. Eight injured."

Does she have anything flashier?

"How about a casino fire in Las Vegas," she says. "Topless showgirls in big feather headdresses on fire, stuff like that."

Any dead?

"No. Minor injuries. A lot of smoke damage, though." .

Something bigger.

"A tanning salon explosion."

Something dazzling.

"Rabies in a national park."

Boring.

"Subway collision."

She's putting me to sleep.

"A fur activist strapped with bombs in Paris."

Skip it.

"Oil tanker capsizes."

Who cares about that stuff?

"Movie star miscarries."

Great, I say. My public will think I'm a real monster when that comes true.

Fertility pages around in her daily planner.

"Geez, it's summer," she says. "We don't have a lot of choices in disasters."

I tell her to keep looking.

"Next week, Ho Ho the giant panda the National Zoo is trying to breed will pick up a venereal disease from a visiting panda."

No way am I going to say that on television.

"How about a tuberculosis outbreak?"

Yawn.

"Freeway sniper?"

Yawn.

"Shark attack?"

She must really be scraping the bottom of the barrel.

"A broken racehorse leg?"

"A slashed painting in the Louvre?"

"A ruptured prime minister?"

"A fallen meteorite?"

"Infected frozen turkeys?"

"A forest fire?"

No, I tell her.

Too sad.

Too artsy.

Too political.

Too esoteric.

Too gross.

No appeal.

"A lava flow?" Fertility asks.

Too slow. No real drama. Mostly just property damage.

The problem is disaster movies have everybody expecting too much from nature.

The waitress brings the chicken stir-fry and my lemon meringue pie and fills our coffee cups. Then she smiles and goes off to die.

Fertility pages back and forth in her book.

In my guts, the cherry pie is putting up a fight. Spokane is outside. The air conditioning is inside. Nothing even looks like a pattern.

Fertility Hollis says, "How about killer bees?" I ask, Where? "Arriving in Dallas, Texas." When?

"Next Sunday morning, at ten past eight." A few? A swarm? How many? "Zillions." I tell her, Perfect.

Fertility lets out a sigh and digs into her chicken stir-fry. "Shit," she says, "That's the one I knew you'd pick all along."

So a zillion killer bees buzz into Dallas, Texas, at ten past eight on Sunday morning, right on schedule. This is despite the fact I only had a crummy fifteen percent market share of the television audience for my spot.

The next week, the network slots me for a full minute, and some heavy hitters, the drug companies, the car makers, the oil and tobacco conglomerates, are lining up as definite maybe sponsors if I can come up with an even bigger miracle.

For all the wrong reasons, the insurance companies are very interested.

Between now and next week, I'm on the road making weeknight appearances in Florida. It's the Jacksonville-Tampa-Orlando-Miami circuit. It's the Tender Branson Miracle Crusade. One night each.

My Miracle Minute, that's what the agent and the network want to call it, well it takes about zero effort to produce. Someone points a camera at you with your hair combed and a tie around your neck, and you look somber and talk straight into the lens:

The Ipswich Point Lighthouse will topple tomorrow.

Next week, the Mannington Glacier in Alaska will collapse and capsize a cruise ship that's sightseeing too close.

The week after that, mice carrying a deadly virus will turn up in Chicago, Tacoma, and Green Bay.

This is exactly the same as being a television newscaster, only before the fact.

The way I see the process happening is I'll get Fertility to give me a couple dozen predictions at a time, and I'll just tape a season's worth of Miracle Minutes. With a year in the can, I'll be free to make personal appearances, endorse products, sign books. Maybe do some consulting. Do cameo walk-ons in movies and television.

Don't ask me when because I don't remember, but somewhere along the way I keep forgetting to commit suicide.

If the publicist ever put killing myself on my schedule I'd be dead. Seven p.m., Thursday, drink drain cleaner. No problem. But what with the killer bees and the demands on my time, I keep stressing about what if I can't find Fertility again. This, and my entourage is with me every step of the way. The team's always dogging me, the publicist, the schedulers, the personal fitness trainer, the orthodontist, the dermatologist, the dietician.

The killer bees got less accomplished than you'd expect. They didn't kill anybody, but they got a lot of attention. Now I needed an encore.

A collapsing stadium. A mining cave-in.

A train derailment.

The only moment I'm ever alone is when I go sit on the toilet, and even then I'm surrounded.

Fertility is nowhere.

In almost every public men's room, there's a hole chipped in the wall between one toilet stall and the next. This is chipped through solid wood an inch thick by somebody with just their fingernails. This is done over days or months at a time. You see these holes scratched through marble, through steel. As if someone in prison is trying to escape. The hole is only big enough to look though, or talk. Or put a finger through or a tongue or a penis, and escape just that little bit at a time.

What people call these openings is "glory holes."

It's the same as where you'd find a vein of gold.

Where you'd find glory.

I'm on a toilet in the Miami airport, and right at my elbow there's the hole in the stall wall, and all around the hole are messages left by men who sat here before me.

John M was here 3/14/64.

Carl B was here Jan. 8, 1976.

Epitaphs.

Some of them are scratched here fresh. Some are covered up but scratched so deep they're still readable under decades of paint.

Here are the shadows left behind by a thousand moments, a thousand moods, of needs traced here on the wall by men who are gone. Here is the record of their being here. Their visit. Their passing. Here's what the caseworker would call a primary source document.

A history of the unacceptable.

Be here tonight for a free blow job. Saturday, June 18, 1973.

All this is scratched in the wall.

Here are words without pictures. Sex without names. Pictures without words. Scratched here is a naked woman with her long legs spread wide, her round staring breasts, her long flowing hair and no face.

Squirting huge teardrops toward her hairy vagina is a severed penis as big as a man.

Heaven, the words say, is an all-you-can-eat pussy buffet.

Heaven is getting fucked up the ass.

Go to Hell faggot.

Been there.

Go suck shit.

Done that.

These are only a few of the voices around me when a real voice, a woman's voice, whispers, "You need another disaster, don't you?"

The voice is coming through the hole, but when I look, all you can see are two lipsticked lips. Red lips, white teeth, a flash of wet tongue says, "I knew you'd be here. I know everything."

Fertility.

At the hole now is a plain gray-colored eye made big with blue shadow and eyeliner and blinking lashes heavy with mascara. The pupil pulses large and then small. Then the mouth appears to say, "Don't sweat it. Your plane will be delayed for another couple hours."

On the wall next to the mouth it says, I suck and swallow.

Next to that it says, I only want to love her if she'd just give me the chance.

There's a poem that starts, Warm inside you is the love ... The rest of the poem is washed down the wall and erased by ejaculate.

The mouth says, "I'm here on an assignment."

It must be her evil job.

"It's my evil job," she says. "It's the heat."

It's not something we talk about.

She says, "I don't want to talk about it."

Congratulations, I whisper. About the killer bees, I mean.

Scratched on the wall is, What do you call a Creedish girl who goes down?

Dead.

What do you call a Creedish fag who takes dick up the ass?

The mouth says, "You need another disaster, don't you?"

More like fifteen or twenty, I whisper.

"No," the mouth says. "You're turning out just like every guy I've ever trusted," she says. "You're greedy."

I just want to save people.

"You're a greedy pig."

I want to save people from disasters.

"You're just a dog doing a trick."

This is only so I can kill myself.

"I don't want you dead."

Why?

"Why what?"

Why does she want me alive? Is it because she likes me?

"No," the mouth says. "I don't hate you, but I need you."

But she doesn't not like me?

The mouth says, "Do you have any idea how boring it is to be me? To know everything? To see everything coming from a million miles away? It's getting unbearable. And it's not just me."

The mouth says, "We're all bored."

The wall says, I fucked Sandy Moore.

All around that, ten others have scratched, Me too.

Someone else has scratched, Has anybody here not fucked Sandy Moore?

Next to that is scratched, I haven't.

Next to that is scratched, Faggot.

"We all watch the same television programs," the mouth says. "We all hear the same things on the radio, we all repeat the same talk to each other. There are no surprises left. There's just more of the same. Reruns."

Inside the hole, the red lips say, "We all grew up with the same television shows. It's like we all have the same artificial memory implants. We remember almost none of our real childhoods, but we remember everything that happened to sitcom families. We have the same basic goals. We all have the same fears."

The lips say, "The future is not bright."

"Pretty soon, we'll all have the same thoughts at the same time. We'll be in perfect unison. Synchronized. United. Equal. Exact. The way ants are. Insectile. Sheep."

Everything is so derivative.

A reference to a reference to a reference.

"The big question people ask isn't 'What's the nature of existence?'" the mouth says. "The big question people ask is 'What's that from?'"

I listened at the hole the way I listened to people confess over the telephone, the way I listened at crypts for signs of life. I asked, so why does she need me?

"Because you grew up in a different world," the mouth says.

"Because if anybody is going to surprise me, it's going to be you. You're not part of the mass culture, not yet. You're my only hope of seeing anything new. You're the magic prince that can break this spell of boredom. This trance of day-after-day sameness. Eventhere. Done that. You're a control group of one."

But no, I whisper, I'm not all that different.

"Yes, you are," the mouth says. "And your staying different is my only hope."

So give me some predictions.

"No."

Why not?

"Because I'll never see you again. The world of people will eat you up, and I'll lose you. From now on, I'll give you one prediction each week."

How?

"This way," the mouth says. "Just like right now. And don't worry. I'll find you."

According to my itinerary, I'm in a dark television studio on a brown sofa, a 60/40 poly-wool blend by the feel of it, a broadloom weave, treated to resist stains and fading at the center of a dozen stage lights. My hair styled by. My clothes designed by. My jewelry provided by.

My autobiography says I've never been more joyful and fulfilled in my joy of living life every day to its fullest. The press releases say I'm taping a new television program, a half hour every late night when I'll take calls from people needing advice. I'll offer new perspectives. According to the press releases, every so often the show will include a new prediction. A disaster, an earthquake, tidal wave, rain of locusts could be headed your way, so you'd better tune in, just in case.

It's sort of the evening news before the fact. The press release calls the new show Peace of Mind.If you could call it that.

It's Fertility who said I'd be famous someday. She said I'd be telling the whole world about her so I'd better get my facts straight.

Fertility said, after I was famous to describe her eyes as catlike.

Her hair, she said, was storm-tossed. Those were her exact words.

Yeah, and her lips were bee-stung.

She said her arms are as smooth as a skinless chicken breast. According to Fertility, the way she walked was fun-loving. "After you're famous," she told me, "don't make me look like a monster or a victim or anything." Fertility said, "You're going to sell out your entire religion and everything you believe in, just don't lie about me. Okay? Please."

So part of my being famous is I do this weekly sit-down program with a famous television journalist to introduce me. She segues to commercial break. She feeds me the people calling in with questions. The Teleprompter feeds me the answers. People call in on the toll-free line. Help me. Heal me. Feed me. Hear me. It's what I used to do in my dodgy apartment at night only broadcast nationwide. Messiah. Savior. Deliver us. Save us.

The confessions to me in my apartment, the confessions to me on national television, they're all just the same as my story right now into the cockpit flight recorder. My confessional.

With the kinds of drugs I was taking at that point in my career, if you want to sleep at night, you don't want to read the package insert. The side effects include nothing you'd do on national television. Vomiting, flatulence, diarrhea.

The side effects include: headache, fever, dizziness, rashes, sweating.

I could tick them all off:

Dyspepsia.

Constipation.

Malaise.

Somnolence.

Taste perversions.

According to my personal trainer, it's the Primabolin that's making my head buzz. My hands shake. Sweat stands on the back of my neck. It could be a drug interaction.

According to my personal trainer, this is a good thing. Just sitting here, I'm losing weight.

According to my personal trainer, the best way to get illegal steroids is you find a cat sick with leukemia and take it around to veterinarians who will prescribe preloaded syringes of animal steroids equivalent to the best steroids for human use. He said if the I lives long enough, you can stockpile a year's worth.

When I asked him what happens to the cat, he asked, why should he care?

The journalist sits across from me. How her legs look with the rest of her body is not too long. She shows just enough ear for earrings. All her problems are hidden inside. All her flaws are underneath. The only smell she gives off, even her breath, is hair spray. How she's folded into her chair, her legs crossed at the knee, her hands folded in her lap, is less good posture than it is some flesh-and-blood origami.

According to the storyboards, I'm on a sofa in the island of hot light surrounded by television cameras and cables and silent technicians doing their jobs around me in the dark. The agent is there in the shadows with his arms crossed and looking at his watch. The agent turns to where some writers are marking last-minute revisions to the copy before it appears on the Teleprompter.

On a little table next to the sofa is a glass of ice water, and if I pick it up my hand shakes so much the ice cubes ring until the agent shakes his head at me, his mouth making a silent no.

We're taping.

According to the journalist, she feels my pain. She's read my autobiography. She knows all about my humiliation. She's read all about the humiliating ordeal it must've been to be naked and sold as a slave, naked. Me being just seventeen or eighteen years old and all those people, everyone in the cult, being there to see me, naked. A naked slave, she says, in slavery. Naked.

The agent is in my line of sight just over the journalist's shoulder, with the writers crowded around him in the dark, clothed.

Next to the agent, the Teleprompter screen tells me: I FELT VIOLATED BY BEING AUCTIONED NAKED AS A SLAVE.

According to the Teleprompter: I FELT DEEPLY HUMILIATED. According to the Teleprompter: I FELT USED AND DEFILED ... MOLESTED.

The staff writers bunch up around the Teleprompter and mouth the words as I read them aloud.

While I read all this out loud with the cameras watching me, the journalist looks off into the darkness at the director and touches her wrist. The director holds up two fingers, then eight fingers. A technician steps into the light and pats a curl back over the journalist's ear.

The Teleprompter tells me: I WAS SEXUALLY ABUSED. SEXUAL ABUSE WAS COMMONPLACE AMONG THE CREEDISH CULT MEMBERS. INCEST WAS AN EVERYDAY PART OF FAMILY LIFE. SO WAS SEX WITH ALL SORTS OF ANIMALS. SATAN WORSHIP WAS POPULAR. THE CREEDISH SACRIFICED CHILDREN TO SATAN ALL THE TIME, BUT NOT BEFORE ABUSING THEM LIKE CRAZY. THEN THE CREEDISH CHURCH ELDERS KILLED THEM. DRANK THEIR BLOOD. THESE WERE KIDS I SAT NEXT TO IN SCHOOL EVERY DAY. THE CHURCH ELDERS ATE THEM. WHEN THERE WAS A FULL MOON, CHURCH ELDERS DANCED NAKED, WEARING JUST THE SKINS OF DEAD CREEDISH CHILDREN. Yeah, I say, it was all really, really stressful. The Teleprompter says: YOU CAN FIND ALL THE VIVID ACCOUNTS OF THE CREEDISH SEX CRIMES IN MY BOOK. IT'S CALLED SAVED FROM SALVATION AND IT'S IN BOOKSTORES EVERYWHERE.

In the shadows, the agent and the writers give each other silent high fives. The agent gives me a big thumbs-up.

My hands are numb. I can't feel my face. My tongue belongs to somebody else. My lips are dead with circumoral paresthesia.

Side effects.

Peripheral paresthesia kills any feeling in my feet. My whole body feels as far away and detached as the picture of me wearing a black suit and sitting on a brown sofa on the studio monitor, the way it's supposed to feel as your soul goes up to Heaven and watches the rest of you, the flesh and blood of you, die.

The director is waving his fingers at me, two fingers on his one hand and four on his other. What he's trying to tell me I don't know.

Most of what's on the Teleprompter is from my autobiography I didn't write. The terrible childhood I didn't have. According to the Teleprompter, the Creedish are all burning in Hell.

The Teleprompter tells me: I'll NEVER GET OVER THE PAINFUL HUMILIATING PAIN NO MATTER HOW RICH I GET WHEN I INHERIT THE CREEDISH CHURCH DISTRICT LAND.

According to the Teleprompter: MY NEWEST BOOK, THE BOOK OF VERY COMMON PRAYER, IS AN IMPORTANT TOOL FOR COPING WITH STRESSES WE ALL EXPERIENCE. IT*S CALLED THE BOOK OF VERYCOMMON PRAYER AND IT'S IN BOOKSTORES EVERYWHERE.

According to the journalist watching the director watch the agent watch me watch the Teleprompter, according to her I'm very happy and fulfilled now that I'm free of the Creedish Death Cult. When we come back, she tells the cameras, we'll take calls from viewers at home.

The journalist breaks to commercial.

During the commercial, she asks me if my growing up was really all that terrible. The agent steps up and says, yes. It was. It was terrifying. A technician trailing wires from his belt and from around his head steps up and asks, do I need some water? The agent says, no. The director asks if I need to use the bathroom, and the agent says I'm fine. He says I don't like dealing with a crowd of strangers asking me questions. I've evolved beyond physical needs. Then the camera techs roll their eyes, and the director and journalist look at each other and shrug as if I'm the one who sends them away.

Then the director says we're taping, and the journalist says that caller number one is on the air.

"If I'm in a crowded restaurant," the caller is a woman's voice coming over the studio speakers, "this is a very expensive restaurant, and someone eating next to me passes gas, not just once but over and over, and it's horrible, what should I do?"

The journalist cups one hand over her face. The director turns his back. The agent looks at the writers writing my response for the Teleprompter.

To stall for time, the journalist asks what the caller was eating.

"Something with pork," the caller says. "It doesn't matter. The smell was so bad I couldn't taste anything else."

The Teleprompter says: THE LORD GOD HAS GIVEN US MANY SENSES.

The Teleprompter is stalling for time, too.

AMONG THESE IS THE SENSE OF SMELL AND THE SENSE OF TASTE.

As the lines of copy appear on the Teleprompter, I just read them aloud.

BUT ONLY MAN JUDGES WHICH GIFTS ARE GOOD AND BAD. TO GOD THE SMELL OF OFFAL IS EQUAL TO THE SMELL OF FINE PORK OR WINE.

I have no idea where they're going with this.

DO NOT SUFFER AND DO NOT REJOICE. BE NOT COMPLIMENTED OR OFFENDED BY SUCH GIFTS. JUDGE NOT, LEST YE BE JUDGED.

The director mouths the words Burma Shave. The journalist says caller number two, you're on the air.

Caller number two asks what I think of thong swimwear.

The Teleprompter says: ABOMINATION.

I say, After years of presoaking for rich people, I think the people who make thong swimwear and underwear should just make the thong part black to begin with.

The journalist says caller number three, you're on the air.

"There's a guy I like, but he's avoiding me."

It's Fertility, it's her voice, on loudspeakers, talking to me, talking about me all over North America. Is she going to force a spat here on television? My thoughts branch into a flow chart of the lies I've told and my possible responses to what she might start.

Is she going to expose me and my disaster predictions?

Has she put two and two together and guessed that I coached her brother to commit suicide? Or has she known that all along? And if she knows I killed her brother, then what?

"This guy who won't call me, I told him about what I do," she says. "My job. And he disapproves, but he pretends he's okay with it."

The journalist asks, what exactly is Fertility's job?

The Teleprompter is blank.

Then all of America is about to know a big secret about either Fertility or me. Her evil job. My murderous suicide hotline. Her disaster dreams. My borrowed predictions.

"I have an agent named Dr. Ambrose," Fertility says, "except he's not a real doctor."

Fertility told me one time that everyone in the world, even garbage haulers and dishwashers, will be signed by an agent someday. Her Dr. Ambrose would find couples with money looking for someone to have their baby. A surrogate mother. Dr. Ambrose calls it the procedure. It's conducted in utero with the birth father in bed with Fertility and his wife waiting outside the door.

"The wife will be in the hallway, knitting or listing baby names," Fertility says, "and the husband will be carefully emptying the teeny-weeny contents of his testicles into me."

The first time she told me about her job, back when I was a nobody doing crisis intervention at home, she told me Fertility Hollis is a stage name. She said her real name was Gwen, but she hated that.

"My being with the birth father is more naturopathic, says Dr. Ambrose. That's his pitch to desperate couples. It isn't adultery. It's holistic."

It wasn't fraud or prostitution, she told me.

"It's in the Bible," Fertility says.

It costs five thousand dollars.

"You know, Genesis Chapter Thirty, Rachel and Bilhah, Leah and Zilpah."

Bilhah didn't use birth control, I want to tell her. Zilpah didn't make five grand, tax-free. They were real slaves. They didn't travel all over the nation getting plugged by would-be fathers hungry for an heir.

Fertility will live with a couple for up to one full week, but every time they conduct the procedure it's another five grand. With some men, this can mean fifteen grand in one night. Plus the couple has to pay her airfare.

"Dr. Ambrose is just a voice on the telephone that arranges the arrangement," Fertility says. "It's not as if he's a real person. The couple pays him and he sends me half the money in cash. There's never a return address. He's such a coward."

I know that feeling.

The Teleprompter says: SLUT.

"All I have to do is not conceive, and I'm a big success."

It's her vocation, she told me, being barren.

The Teleprompter says: HARLOT.

Over the speakers she says it, "I'm sterile."

The Teleprompter says: WHORE.

It's her one marketable job skill. It's her calling.

Here's the job she was born to do.

She pays no taxes. She loves to travel. She lives on the road in rich places, and the hours are flexible. She told me, some nights, she falls asleep during the procedure. With some birth fathers, she dreams of arson, of falling bridges and landslides.

"I don't think I'm doing anything wrong," she says. "I think I'm making lemons into lemonade."

The Teleprompter says: BURN IN THE HOT ETERNAL FIRES OF HELL YOU HEATHEN DEVIL SLATTERN.

Fertility says, "So what do you think?"

The journalist is staring at me so hard she hasn't noticed some hair that's slipped down over her forehead. The director is staring at me. The agent is staring. The journalist gulps. The writers are feeding copy into the Teleprompter.

PRAY TO DIE ADULTEROUS DEVIL WHORE.

All of America is tuned in.

YOU ARE BEYOND FORGIVENESS EVIL DEVIL GIRL.

The agent shakes his head, no.

The Teleprompter screen goes blank for a moment. The writers write. The copy reappears.

YOU ARE BEYOND FORGIVENESS EVIL DEVIL WOMAN.

Says Fertility's voice, "So what do you think?"

HARLOT

The agent points at me, points at the Teleprompter screen, points at me, over and over, fast.

TROLLOP

"You're not going to pass some big judgment on me, are you?"

JEZEBEL

There's just dead air going out to the satellite. Somebody has to say something.

With my numb mouth I read the words on the Teleprompter. With no feeling in my lips, I just say what they tell me to say.

The journalist asks, "Caller number three? Are you still there?"

The director is flashing his fingers at us, five, four, three, two, one. Then he pulls his index finger across his throat.

What else I want people to know before my plane crash is I didn't dream up the idea for the PornFill.

The agent is always pushing paper in front of me and saying, sign this.

He tells me, sign here.

And here.

Here.

And here.

The agent tells me to just initial next to each paragraph. He tells me, don't bother reading this bit, I won't understand.

That's how the PornFill happened.

It was not my idea to take all twenty thousand acres of the Creedish church district and turn it into the repository for this nation's outdated pornography. Magazines. Playing cards. Videocassettes. Compact disks. Worn-out dildos. Punctured blowup dolls. Artificial vaginas. The bulldozers are out there twenty-four hours a day pushing mountains of that around. This is twenty thousand acres. Two-zero- zero-zero-zero acres. Every square foot of Creedish property. Wildlife is displaced. The groundwater is contaminated.

It's being compared to Love Canal, and it's not my fault.

Before the flight recorder tape runs out, people need to know who to blame. It's the agent. The Book of Very Common Prayer.The Peace of Mindtelevision show. The American PornFill Corporation. The Genesis Campaign. The Tender Branson Dashboard Statuette. Even my botched Super Bowl halftime special, the agent brain-stormed them all.

And they all made tons of money.

But what's important is none of them was my idea.

With the PornFill, the agent pitches it to me one day in Dallas or Memphis. My whole life at that point was stadiums and hotel rooms separated by time on airplanes instead of real distance. The whole world was just carpet patterns rushing by under my feet. Low-pile poly-nylon florals or corporate logos on a field of dark blue or gray that won't show cigarette burns or dirt.

The whole world was just public toilets with Fertility in the stall next to mine, whispering:

"There's a cruise ship hitting an iceberg tomorrow night."

Whispering, "At two o'clock p.m., eastern standard time, next Wednesday, the Bolivian gray panther will become extinct."

The agent is saying, a major problem for most Americans is disposing of pornographic material in a safe, private manner. Throughout America, he says, are vast collections of Playboymagazines or Screwmagazines that don't excite anybody anymore. There are warehouses and shelves full of videotaped nobodies with long sideburns or blue eye shadow humping away to bad pirated music. What America needs, he says, is a place to ship this stale smut where it can decompose out of the sight of children and prudes.

His pitch to me comes after the agent's already run a feasibility study on landfilling paper, plastic, elastic, latex, rubber, leather, steel fasteners, zippers, chrome rings, Velcro, vinyl, petroleum– and water-based lubricants, and nylon.

His idea is to set up collection sites where people can drop off porno, no questions asked. From there, local franchises will ship the porno in the same type of specialized biohazard containers used for sharps and dressings contaminated with infectious disease. The porno will be hauled to the former Creedish church district colony in central Nebraska where it'll be sorted. The three categories will include:

Soft Core.

Hard Core.

And Child.

The first category will be allowed to rot on the surface of the ground. The second category will be bulldozed into the ground. The third will be handled only by uninterested people wearing full-body disposable rip-stop coveralls including 50-mil rubber gloves and boots and breathing through masks, who'll seal the kiddie porn in underground vaults where it can sit out its bazillion-year half-life.

According to the agent, we need to get people panicking about the porno threat.

We're going to push for government action that makes it mandatory to dispose of porno in safe, clean ways. Our ways. The same as used motor oil or asbestos, if people want to get rid of it, they'll have to pay.

We'll show people discarded porno filling the streets, corrupting children, inspiring sex crimes.

We'll charge by the ton to accept the stuff. The local collection franchises will pass the cost on to their customers, plus an extra margin for profit. We make money. The local franchises make money. Joe Blow is free to shop for fresh porno. The porno industry gets rich.

Okay, the agent told me. Richer.

According to the agent, it was all going to be a win, win, win, win situation.

Then it wasn't.

The agent was already drafting the federal law that now requires you to pay a deposit on all pornographic material. The deposit funnels back through the government to pay for the interment of pornographic materials found abandoned. Money from this special porno tax was earmarked for a porno super-fund to clean up illegal dump sites. Some special user tax dollars were going to rehabilitate sex addicts, but not very much.

Before I ever heard word one about the PornFill, the environmental impact statement was already dummied up.

The perc*** tests were faked.

The publicist had faxes going out to church groups day and night, testing the waters. The lobbyists were making a discreet push.

There was the twenty thousand acres of the Creedish church district with its ghosts nobody wanted to buy. And there were the millions of personal stockpiles of pornography that no one wanted. It made sense to everybody except me.

It wasn't a decision I made. I explored some alternatives. I said The Prayer to Create Extra Storage Space.I swallowed 4000 milligrams of chocolate Gamacease prototypes. I thought that might solve the problem for America. I said The Prayer to Recycle Accumulated Newspapers,but this wasn't the same. I said The Prayer to Procrastinate,but the agent just would not let the issue drop.

According to the newspaper one morning, the Sensitive Materials Interment Bill had passed the House and the Senate and the president was signing it into law.

The agent just kept telling me, sign this.

Initial here. And here. And here.

I said the Prayer for Signing Important Documents You Don't Read.

According to Fertility, it was the PornFill that drove my brother Adam out of hiding.

My only part in the project was I signed some papers.

Since then, everybody in America thinks it's my fault they have to pay an extra two-dollar deposit when they buy a skin magazine.

After that, Adam Branson came out of hiding and put a gun to Fertility's bored head to force her to track me down.

As if Fertility couldn't see that coming.

Fertility knew everything.

Fertility said to describe my brother's threat to kill her as well-intentioned.

Later on, when it was my turn to hold the same gun to the pilot's head on this airplane, then I understood how fast these things happen.

Still. I'm the one people hate.

Me, I'm the brother with the Tender Branson National Sensitive Materials Sanitary Landfill named after me.

The last time Fertility saw the new buffed, bulked, tanned, and shaved me in person, she said I was improved beyond recognition. She said, "You need a disaster?"

She said, "Look in a mirror."

Adam was still out hunting me for sport. Adam is the brother Fertility told me to describe as "a saint."

Before this plane goes down or before the flight recorder tape runs out, some other mistakes I want to clean up

include the following:

The Peace of Mindtelevision show

The Tender Branson Dashboard Statuette

The board game Bible Trivia. As if anything God says is trivial.

The secret the agent told me was to have a lot of things in the pipeline. That way, when one failed you always have hope.

So there was:

The Bible Diet

The book Money-Making Secrets of the Bible

The book Sex Secrets of the Bible

The Bible Book of Remodeling Kitchens and Bathrooms

There was the Tender Branson Room Freshener.

There was the Genesis Campaign.

There was the Book of Very Common Prayer,Volume II, but the prayers were getting a little witchy:

For example, The Prayer to Make Someone Love You.

Or, The Prayer to Strike Your Enemy Blind.

All of these are brought to you by the good people of Tender Branson Enterprises. None of them was my idea.

The Genesis Campaign was the most not my idea. I fought the Genesis Campaign tooth and nail. The problem was, there were people asking if I was a virgin. Intelligent people were asking if it wasn't a little demented, my still being a virgin at my age.

People were asking, what was my problem with sex?

What was wrong with me?

The Genesis Campaign was the agent's quick fix. More and more everything in my life was a fix for an earlier fix for an earlier fix until I forget what the original problem was. The problem in this case was you just can't be a middle-aged virgin in America without something being wrong with you. People can't conceive of a virtue in someone else that they can't conceive in themselves. Instead of believing you're stronger, it's so much easier to imagine you're weaker. You're addicted to self-abuse. You're a liar. People are always ready to believe the opposite of what you tell them.

You're not just self-controlled.

You were castrated as a child.

The Genesis Campaign was a very iffy media event.

The quick fix was the agent decided to get me married.

The agent tells me this, riding in the limo one day.

Riding with us, the personal trainer tells me that tiny insulin needles are best because they don't snag against the inside of the vein. The publicist is there too, and she and the agent look out the tinted windows while the trainer sharpens a needle against the scratch pad of a matchbook and shoots me up with 50 milligrams of Laurabolin.

This doesn't not hurt, using insulin needles.

The thing about sex, the agent tells me, is no matter how much you crave it, you can forget. Back when he was a teenager, the agent developed an allergy to milk. He used to love milk, but he couldn't drink it. Years later, they developed lactose-free milk he can drink, but now he hates the taste of milk.

When he quit drinking alcohol because of a kidney problem, he thought he'd go crazy. Now he never thinks about having a drink.

To keep me from wrinkling the skin on my face, the team dermatologist has injected most of the muscles around my mouth and eyes with Botox, the botulinum toxin, to paralyze these muscles for the next six months.

With the peripheral paresthesia side effects of all my drug interactions, I can hardly feel my hands and feet. With the Botox injections, I can barely move my face. I can talk and smile, but only in a very limited way.

This is in the limo going to the plane going to the next stadium, God knows where. According to the agent, Seattle is just the general geographic area around the Kingdome. Detroit is the people who live around the Silverdome. We're never going to Houston, we're going to the Astrodome. The Superdome. The Mile High Stadium. RFK Stadium. Jack Murphy Stadium. Jacobs Field. Shea Stadium. Wrigley Field. All of these places have towns, but that doesn't matter.

The events coordinator is riding with us also, and gives me a list of names, applicants, women who want to marry me, and the agent gives me a list of questions to memorize. At the top of the page, the first question is:

"What woman in the Old Testament did God turn into a condiment?"

The events coordinator is planning a big romantic wedding on the fifty-yard line during Super Bowl halftime. The wedding colors will depend on which teams make it to the Super Bowl. The religion will depend on the bidding war, a very hush-hush bidding war going on for me to convert to Catholic or Jewish or Protestant now that the Creedish church is belly-up.

The second question on the list is:

"What woman in the Old Testament was eaten by dogs?"

The other option the agent is considering is that we avoid the middle man and found our own major religion. Establish our own brand recognition. Sell direct to the customer.

The third question on the list is:

"Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?"

In the limo, the six or seven of us sit facing each other on two bench seats with our knees mixed together between us.

According to the publicist, the wedding is set. A committee has already chosen a good nondenominational bride so my asking the questions will be a fake. The committee is in the limo with us. People are mixing drinks at the wet bar and passing them to each other. The bride is going to be the woman just hired as assistant .events coordinator. She's in the limo with us, sitting in the seat across from me, and she leans forward.

Hi, she says. And she's sure we'll be very happy together.

The agent says, we need a big miracle to do at the wedding.

The publicist says, the biggest.

The agent says I need to come up with the biggest miracle of my career.

With Fertility pissed at me, with my brother still at large, with the Laurabolin needled into my bloodstream, the dating game scheme for choosing a sacred vessel, the Genesis Project, the complete stranger here to marry and deflower me, and the pressure for me to commit suicide, I don't know what.

The undersecretary to the media coordinator says we're out of vodka. He's in the limo with us. We're out of white wine, too. We have loads of tonic water.

Everybody looks at me.

No matter how much I do, they still want more, better, faster, different, newer, bigger. Fertility was right.

And now the agent's telling me I need the biggest miracle of my career. He says, "You need to get to completion on this."

Amen, I tell him. No kidding.

People are always asking me if I can operate a toaster. Do I know what a lawn mower does?

Do I know what hair conditioner is for?

People don't want for me to act too worldly. They're looking for me to have a kind of Garden of Eden, pre-apple innocence. A kind of baby Jesus naivete. People ask, do I know how a television works?

No, I don't, but most people don't.

The truth is I wasn't a rocket scientist to begin with, and every day I'm losing ground. I'm not stupid, but I'm getting there. You can't live in the outside world all your adult life and not get the hang of things. I know how to work a can opener.

The hardest part of my being a famous celebrated celebrity religious leader is having to live down to people's expectations.

People ask, do I know what a hair dryer is for?

According to the agent, the secret to staying on top is to be non-threatening. Be nothing. Be a blank space people can fill in. Be a mirror. I'm the religious version of a lottery winner. America is full of rich and famous people, but I'm supposed to be that rare combination: celebrated and stupid, famous and humble, innocent and rich. You just live your humble life, people think, your Joan of Arc everyday life, your Virgin Mary life washing dishes, and one day your number will come up.

People ask, do I know what a chiropractor is?

People think sainthood is just something that happens to you. The whole process should be that easy. As if you can be Lana Turner at Schwab's drugstore when you're discovered. Maybe in the eleventh century you could be that passive. Nowadays there's laser resurfacing to remove those fine lines around your mouth before you tape your Christmas television special. Now we have chemical peels. Dermabrasion. Joan of Arc had it easy.

Nowadays, people are asking, do I know about checking accounts?

People ask all the time why I'm not married. Do I have impure thoughts? Do I believe in God? Do I touch myself?

Do I know what a paper shredder does?

I don't know. I don't know. I have my doubts. I won't tell. And I have the agent to tell me all about paper shredders.

Around this part of the story, a copy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disordersshows up in the mail. Some clerk on the incoming mail team directs it to an assistant media interface director who hands it off to a low-level publicist who routes it to the daytime scheduler who slips it onto my breakfast tray in the hotel suite. Alongside my morning's 430 grams of complex carbohydrates and 600 grams of egg albumin protein, here's the dead caseworker's missing DSM.

The mail comes in ten sacks at a time. I have my own zip code.

Help me. Heal me. Save me. Feed me, the letters say.

Messiah. Savior. Leader, they call me.

Heretic. Blasphemer. Antichrist. Devil, they call me.

So I'm sitting up in bed with my breakfast tray across my lap, and I'm reading the manual. There's no return address on the package it came in, but inside the cover is the signature of the caseworker. It's weird how the name outlives the person, the signifier outlasts the signified, the symbol the symbolized. The same as the name carved into stone on each crypt at the Columbia Memorial Mausoleum, only the caseworker's name is left.

We feel so superior to the dead.

For example, if Michelangelo was so damn smart, why'd he die?

How I feel reading the DSM is, I may be a fat stupid dummy, but I'm still alive.

The caseworker's still dead, and here's proof that everything she studied and believed in all her life is already wrong. In the back of this edition of the DSM are the revisions from the last edition. Already, the rules have changed.

Here are the new definitions of what's acceptable, what's normal, what's sane.

Inhibited Male Orgasm is now Male Orgasmic Disorder.

What was Psychogenic Amnesia is now Dissociative Amnesia.

Dream Anxiety Disorder is now Nightmare Disorder.

Edition to edition, the symptoms change. Sane people are insane by a new standard. People who used to be called insane are the picture of mental health.

Without even knocking, the agent comes in with the morning newspapers and catches me in bed, reading. I tell him, Look what came in the mail, and he yanks the book out of my hands and asks me if I know what incriminating evidence is. The agent reads the caseworker's name inside the cover and asks, "Do you know what first-degree murder is?" The agent is holding the book with his one hand and smacking it with his other. "Do you know how it's going to feel to sit in the electric chair?"

Smack.

"Do you realize what a murder conviction will do to ticket sales at your upcoming events?"

Smack.

"Have you ever heard the phrase People's Exhibit A?"

I don't know what he's talking about.

The sound of vacuum cleaners in the hallway makes me feel lazy. It's almost noon, and I'm still in bed.

"I'm talking about this," the agent says and holds the book gripped in his two hands and pushed in my face. "This book," he says, "it's what the police would call a souvenir of the kill."

The agent says the police detectives are every day asking to talk to me about the caseworker's being found dead. The FBI is every day asking the agent what happened to the DSM that disappeared with her case history records the week before she choked to death on chlorine gas. The government isn't happy I fled the scene. The agent asks me, "Do you know how close you are to having a warrant out for your arrest?"

Do I know what a prime murder suspect is?

Do I know how me having this book will look?

I'm still sitting in bed eating toast, no butter, and oatmeal, no brown sugar. I'm stretching my arms and saying, Forget it. Relax. The book came in the mail.

The agent asks me if that seems more than a little convenient.

His point is it's possible I sent the book to myself. The DSM makes a good reminder of my old life. As rough as being me can feel, what with the drugs and schedule and zero personal integrity, it feels better than me cleaning toilets over and over. And it's not as if I've never stolen anything before. Another good way to shoplift is you find an item and cut off the price tag. This works best in really big stores with too many departments and clerks for any one person to know everything. Find a hat or gloves or an umbrella, cut off the price tag, and turn it in at the Lost and Found department. You don't even have to leave the store with it.

If the store finds out the item is stock, it just goes back on the sales floor.

Most times, the item just goes into a lost and found bin or a rack, and if no one claims it in thirty days, it's yours.

And since nobody lost it, nobody will come looking.

No big department store puts a genius in charge of the Lost and Found department.

The agent asks, "Do you know what money laundering is?"

This could be the same scam. As if I killed the caseworker and then mailed the book to myself. Laundered it, so to speak. As if I sent it to myself so I could act innocent about sitting here propped on my 200-thread-count Egyptian cotton pillows, gloating over my kill, eating breakfast until noon.

The idea of laundering anything makes me homesick for the sound of clothes with zippers going around and around in a clothes dryer.

Here in my hotel suite, you don't have to look very far to find a motive. The caseworker's file on me had all the records of how she cured me, me the exhibitionist, me the pedophile, me the shoplifter.

The agent asks, do I know what an FBI interrogation is like?

He asks, do I really think the police are that stupid?

"Assuming you're not the murderer," the agent asks, "do you know who sent the book? Who might try and set you up to take this fall?"

Maybe. Probably, yes, I do.

The agent's thinking it's someone from an enemy religion, a Catholic, Baptist, Taoist, Jewish, Anglican jealous rival.

It's my brother, I tell him. I have an older brother who might still be alive, and it's easy to picture Adam Branson out murdering survivors in ways the police would think was suicide. The caseworker was doing my job for me. It's easy to imagine her falling into a trap meant to kill me, a bottle of ammonia mked*** with bleach and just waiting under the sink for me to unscrew the cap and drop dead from the smell.

The book drops out of the agent's one hand and lands open on the rug. The agent's other hand goes up to claw through his hair. "Mother of God," he says. He says, "You'd better not be telling me you have a brother still alive."

Maybe, I say. Probably, maybe, yes, I do. I saw him on a bus one time. This was maybe two weeks before the caseworker died.

The agent pins his eyes on me in bed covered with toast crumbs and says, "No, you didn't. You never saw anybody."

His name is Adam Branson.

The agent shakes his head, "No, it isn't."

Adam called me at home and threatened to kill me.

The agent says, "Nobody threatened to kill you."

Yes he did. Adam Branson is roaming the country, killing survivors, to take us all to Heaven, or to show the world Creedish unity, or to seek revenge on whoever blew the whistle on the labor missionary movement, I don't know.

The agent asks, "Do you understand the phrase public backlash?"

The agent asks, "Do you know what your career will be worth if people find out you're not the sole survivor of the legendary evil Creedish Death Cult?"

The agent asks, "What if this brother of yours is arrested and tells the truth about the cult? He'll blast everything the team of writers has been telling the world about your life growing up."

The agent asks, "What then?"

I don't know.

"Then you're nothing," he says.

"Then you're just another famous liar," he says.

"The whole world will hate you," he says.

He's yelling, "Do you know what the prison sentencing guidelines are for conducting a public hoax? For misrepresentation? For false advertising? For libel?"

Then he comes in close enough to whisper, "Do I need to tell you that prison makes Sodom and Gomorrah look like Minneapolis and St. Paul by comparison?"

He'll tell me what I know, the agent says. He picks up the DSM off the floor and wraps it in today's newspaper. He says I don't have a brother. He says I never saw the DSM. I never saw any brother. I regret the death of the caseworker. I miss my all-dead family. I deeply loved the caseworker. I'm forever grateful for her help and guidance, and I pray every minute my dead family isn't burning in Hell. He says I resent the police always attacking me because they're too lazy to go out and find the caseworker's real killer. He says I just want closure on all this tragic sad death stuff. He says I just want to get on with my life.

He says I trust and cherish the guidance I get every day from my wonderful agent. He tells me I'm deeply grateful.

Quick before the maid comes in to clean the room, the agent says, he's taking the DSM straight to the paper shredder.

He says, "Now get your ass out of bed, you lazy sack of shit, and remember what I just told you because someday soon you'll be telling it all to the police."

From the toilet stalls on either side of my stall come moans and breathing. Sex or bowel movements, I can't tell the difference. The stall I'm in has a hole in the partitions on each side of me, but I can't look.

If Fertility is here yet, I don't know.

If Fertility is here and sitting next to me, quiet until we're alone, I'll beg for my big miracle.

Next to the hole on my right is written, Here I sit all downhearted, tried to shit and only farted.

Next to that is written, Story of my life.

Next to the hole on my left is written, Show hard for hand job.

Next to that is written, Kiss my ass.

Next to that is written, With pleasure.

This is in the New Orleans airport, which is the airport closest to the Superdome, where tomorrow there's the Super Bowl, where at halftime I'm getting married.

And time is running out.

Outside in the hallway, my entourage and my new bride have been waiting more than two hours for me, while I've been sitting here so long my insides are ready to drop out of my ass. My pants are crushed around my ankles. The paper toilet seat liner is wick-ing water up from the toilet bowl to wet my bare skin. The smell of people's business is thick in every breath I take.

Toilet after toilet flushes, but every time the last man leaves another arrives.

On the wall is scratched, You know how both life and porno movies end. The only difference is life startswith the orgasm.

Next to that is scratched, It's getting to the end that's the exciting part.

Next to that is scratched, How tantric.

Next to that is scratched, It smells like shit in here.

The last toilet flushes. The last man washes his hands. The last footsteps go out the door.

Into the hole on my left, I whisper, Fertility? Are you there?

Into the hole on my right, I whisper, Fertility? Is that you?

There's nothing but my fear another man will walk in to read his newspaper and let loose with another spectacular six-course bowel movement.

Then from the hole on my right comes, "I hate that you called me a harlot on television."

I whisper back, I'm sorry. I was only reading the script they gave me.

"I know that."

I know she knows that.

The red mouth inside the hole says, "I called knowing you'd betray me. Free will had nothing to do with it. It was a Jesus/Judas thing. You're pretty much just my pawn."

Thanks, I say.

Footsteps come into the men's room and whoever it is, he settles in the stall on my left.

To the hole on my right, I whisper, We can't talk now. Someone's come in.

"It's okay," the red mouth says. "It's just big brother."

Big brother?

The mouth says, "Your brother, Adam Branson."

And through the hole on my left comes the barrel of a gun.

And a voice, a man's voice, says, "Hello, little brother."

The gun stuck through the hole aims around, blind, pointing at my feet, pointing at my chest, my head, the stall door, the toilet bowl.

Next to the barrel of the gun is scratched, Suck this.

"Don't freak," Fertility says. "He's not going to kill you. I know that much."

"I can't see you," Adam says, "but I have six bullets, and one of them is bound to find you."

"You're not going to kill anybody," the red mouth tells the black gun, the two of them talking back and forth across my bare white lap. "He was at my apartment all last night putting that gun against my head, and all he did was mess up my hair."

"Shut up," the gun says.

The mouth says, "He doesn't have any bullets in it."

The gun says, "Shut up!"

The mouth says, "I had another dream about you last night. I know what they did to you as a child. I know what happened to you was terrible. I understand why you're terrified of having sex."

I whisper, Nothing happened to me.

The gun says, "I tried to stop it, but just the idea of what the elders were doing to you kids made me sick."

I whisper, It wasn't that bad.

"In my dream," the mouth says, "you were crying. You were just a little boy the first time, and you had no idea what was about to happen."

I whisper, I've put all that behind me. I'm a famous celebrated religious celebrity.

The gun says, "No, you haven't."

Yes, I have.

"Then why are you still a virgin?" the mouth says.

I'm getting married tomorrow.

The mouth says, "But you won't have sex with her."

I say, She's a very lovely and charming girl.

The mouth says, "But you won't have sex with her. You won't consummate the marriage."

The gun says to the mouth, "That's how the church worked it with all the tenders and biddies so they'd never want sex in the outside world."

The mouth says to the gun, "Well, the whole practice was just sadistic."

Speaking of marriages, I say, I could use the biggest miracle you've got.

"You need more than that," the mouth says. "Tomorrow morning while you're getting married, your agent is going to drop dead. You're going to need a good miracle and a good lawyer."

The idea of my agent being dead isn't so bad.

"The police," the mouth says, "are going to suspect you."

But why?

"There's a bottle of that new cologne of yours, Truth, The Fragrance," the mouth says, "and he chokes to death breathing it."

"It's really bleach mixed with ammonia," the gun says.

I ask, Just like the caseworker?

"That's why the police will come after you," the mouth says.

But my brother killed the caseworker, I say.

"Guilty as charged," the gun says. "And I stole the DSM and your case history files."

The mouth says, "And he's the one who set things up for your agent to choke to death."

"Tell him the best part," the gun says to the mouth.

"More and more in my dreams," the mouth says, "the police have been suspecting you of murdering all the Creedish survivors whose suicides looked fake."

All the Creedish that Adam killed.

"Those are the ones," the gun says.

The mouth says, "The police think maybe you did all the killings to make yourself famous. Overnight, you went from being a fat ugly housecleaner to being a religious leader, and tomorrow you'll be accused of being the country's most successful serial killer."

The gun says, "Successful probably isn't the right word."

I say, I wasn't all that fat.

"What did you weigh?" the gun says, "And be honest."

On the wall it says, Today Is the Worst Day of the Rest of Your Life.

The mouth says, "You were fat. You are fat."

I ask, So why don't you just kill me now? Why don't you put some bullets in your gun and just shoot me?

"I have bullets loaded," the gun says, and the barrel swivels around to point at my face, my knees, my feet, Fertility's mouth.

The mouth says, "No, you don't have any bullets."

"Yes, I do," the gun says.

"Then prove it," the mouth says. "Shoot him. Right now. Shoot him. Shoot."

I say, Don't shoot me.

The gun says, "I don't feel like it."

The mouth says, "Liar."

"Well, maybe I wanted to shoot him a long time ago," the gun says, "but now the more famous he gets, the better. That's why I killed the caseworker and destroyed his mental health records. That's why I've set up the stupid phony bottle of chlorine gas for the agent to sniff."

I was only a pretend insane pervert with the caseworker, I say.

Scratched on the wall it says, Shit or get off the pot.

"It doesn't matter who kills the agent," the mouth says. "The police will be right on the fifty-yard line to arrest you for mass murder the second you step off camera."

"But don't worry," the gun says. "We'll be there to rescue you."

Rescue me?

"Just give them this miracle," the mouth says, "and there should be a few minutes of chaos so you can get out of the stadium."

I ask, Chaos?

The gun says, "Look for us in a car."

The mouth says, "A red car."

The gun says, "How do you know? We haven't stolen it yet."

"I know everything," the mouth says. "We'll steal a red car with an automatic transmission because I can't drive a stick."

"Okay," the gun says. "A red car."

"Okay," the mouth says.

I couldn't be more not excited. I say, Just give me the miracle.

And Fertility gives me the miracle. The biggest miracle of my career.

And she's right.

And there will be chaos.

There will be complete pandemonium.

At eleven o'clock the next morning, the agent is still alive.

The agent's alive at eleven-ten and at eleven-fifteen.

The agent's alive at eleven-thirty and eleven forty-five.

At eleven-fifty, the events coordinator chauffeurs me from the hotel to the stadium.

With everyone always around us, the coordinators and reps and managers, I can't ask the agent if he's brought a bottle of Truth, The Fragrance, and when he plans to sniff it next. I can't just tell him not to sniff any cologne today. That it's poison. That the brother I don't have and that I've never seen has got into the agent's luggage and set a trap. Every time I see the agent, every time he disappears into the bathroom or I have to turn my back for a minute, it could be the last time I see him.

It's not that I love the agent that much. I can easily enough picture myself at his funeral, what I'd wear, what I'd say in eulogy. Giggling. Then I see Fertility and me doing the Argentine Tango on his grave.

I just don't want to be on trial for mass murder.

It's what the caseworker would call an approach/avoidance situation.

Whatever I say about cologne, the entourage will repeat to the police if he turns up choked to death.

At four-thirty, we're backstage at the stadium with the folding tables and catered food and the rented wardrobe, the tuxes and the wedding dress hanging on racks, and the agent is still alive and asking me what I plan to proclaim as my big half time miracle.

I'm not telling.

"But is it big?" the agent wants to know.

It's big.

It's big enough to make every man in this stadium want to kick my ass.

The agent looks at me, one eyebrow raised, frowning.

The miracle I have is so big it will take every policeman in this city to keep the crowds from killing me. I don't tell the agent that. I don't say how that's the idea. The police will have their hands so full keeping me alive, they won't be able to arrest me for murder. I don't tell the agent that part.

At five o'clock, the agent is still alive, and I'm getting strapped into a white tuxedo with a white bow tie. The justice of the peace comes up and tells me everything is under control. All I have to do is breathe in and out.

The bride comes over in her wedding dress, rubbing petroleum jelly up and down her ring finger, and says, "My name is Laura."

This isn't the girl who was in the limo from the day before.

"That was Trisha," the bride says. Trisha got sick so Laura is being her understudy. It's okay. I'll still be married to Trisha even though she's not here. Trisha is the one the agent still wants.

Laura says, "The cameras won't know." She's wearing a veil.

People are eating the food brought in by the caterer. Near the steel doors that open onto the sidelines, people from the florist are ready to hustle the altar out onto the football field. The candelabras. The bowers covered with white silk flowers. Roses and peonies and white sweet peas and stock, all of them brittle and sticky with hair spray to keep them stiff. The armload of silk bouquet for the bride to carry is silk gladioli and white poly-silk dahlias and tulips trailing yards of white silk honeysuckle.

All of it looks beautiful and real if you're far enough away.

The field lights are bright, the makeup artist says, and gives me a huge red mouth.

At six o'clock, the Super Bowl begins. It's football. It's the Cardinals against the Colts.

Five minutes into the first quarter, it's Colts six, Cardinals zero, and the agent is still alive.

Near the steel doors that open into the stadium are the altar boys and bridesmaids dressed as angels, flirting and smoking cigarettes.

With the Colts on their forty-yard line, it's their second down and six, and the post-event scheduler is briefing me how I'll spend my honeymoon on a seventeen-city tour to promote the books, the games, the dashboard statuette. Founding my own major world religion isn't out of the picture. A world tour is in the works now that the pesky question about my having sex is covered. The plan includes goodwill tours to Europe, Japan, China, Australia, Singapore, South Africa, Argentina, the British Virgin Islands, and New Guinea, with me getting back to the United States in time to see my first child born.

Just so there's nothing left to guesswork, the coordinator tells me the agent has taken certain liberties to make sure my wife will have our first child at the end of my nine-month tour.

Long-range planning calls for my wife to have six, maybe seven children, a model Creedish family.

The events coordinator says I won't have to lift a finger.

This will be immaculate conception, as far as I'm involved.

The field lights are way too bright, the makeup artist says, and smears my cheeks with red.

At the end of the first quarter, the agent comes by to make me sign some papers. Profit-sharing documents, the agent tells me. The party known as Tender Branson, to be hereafter known as The Victim, grants the party hereafter known as The Agent the power to receive and distribute all monies payable to the Tender Branson Media and Merchandising Syndicate, including but not limited to book sales, broadcast programming, artwork, live performances, and cosmetics, namely men's cologne.

"Sign here," the agent says.

And here.

Here.

And here.

Someone is pinning a white rose to my lapel. Someone is on his knees shining my shoes. The makeup artist is still blending.

The agent now owns the copyright to my image. And my name.

It's the end of the first quarter with the game tied seven to seven, and the agent's still alive.

The personal fitness trainer needles me with 10 cc's of adrenaline to put some sparkle in my eyes.

The senior events coordinator says all I have to do is walk the fifty-yard line out to where the wedding party is standing in the center of the stadium. The bride will walk in from the opposing side. We'll all of us be standing on a platform of wooden boxes with five thousand white doves hidden underneath. The audio for the ceremony was all prerecorded in a studio, so that's what the audience will hear. I don't have to say a word until my prediction.

When I step on a switch hidden by my foot, that will release the doves. Walk. Talk. Doves. It's a cinch.

The wardrobe supervisor announces that we need to use the corset to get the silhouette we're after and tells me to hurry and strip in front of everybody. The angels, the staff, the caterers, the florist people. The agent. Now. Everything except my shorts and socks. Now. The wardrobe supervisor stands with the rubber-and-wire torture of the corset ready for me to step into, and says here's my last chance to take a leak for the next three hours.

"You wouldn't have to wear that monster," the agent tells me, "if you could keep the weight off."

It's four minutes into the second quarter and nobody can find the wedding ring.

The agent blames the events coordinator blames the wardrobe supervisor blames the properties manager blames the jeweler who was supposed to donate a ring in return for advertising time on the blimp circling the stadium. Outside, the blimp is going around the sky flashing the jeweler's name. Inside the agent is threatening to sue for breach of contract and trying to radio the blimp.

The events coordinator is telling me, "Fake the ring."

They'll have the cameras do a head-and-shoulders on me and the bride. Just fake putting a ring on Trisha's finger.

The bride says she's not Trisha.

"And remember," the coordinator says, "just mouth the words, it's all prerecorded."

It's nine minutes into the second quarter and the agent is still alive and yelling into his phone.

"Shoot it down," he's yelling. "Pull the plug. Give me a gun and I'll do it," he's yelling. "Just get that damn blimp out of the air."

"No can do," the events coordinator says. The minute the wedding party comes out of the stadium, the crew in the blimp will dump fifteen thousand pounds of rice over the parking lot.

"If you'll come with me," the senior scheduler says. It's time for us to take our places.

The Colts and Cardinals go chugging off the field, the score twenty to seventeen.

The crowd is screaming for more football.

The angels and property staff rush out with the altar and silk flowers, the candelabras flaming and the platform full of doves.

The corset is squeezing all my internal organs up into my throat.

The clock is ticking down to the start of the second half, and the agent is still alive. I can only inhale in little half breaths.

The personal fitness trainer sidesteps up next to me and says, "Here, this will put some color in your cheeks."

He puts a little bottle under my nose and says for me to sniff hard.

The crowd is stomping their feet, the clock ticks, the score is so close, and I sniff.

"Now the other nostril," the trainer says.

And I sniff.

And everything's disappeared. Except for the hum of my blood chugging through veins in my ears and my heart pumping against the squeeze of my corset, I'm not aware of anything.

Feel no evil. See no evil. Hear no evil. Fear no evil.

In the distance, the coordinator is waving me out onto the artificial grass. He's pointing down at the line chalked into the field, then pointing out at a group of people standing on the wedding platform covered with white flowers in the center of the field.

The hum of my blood is fading until I hear music. I'm walking past the coordinator, out into the stadium with the thousands screaming in their seats. The music blares out of nowhere. The blimp circles outside, flashing:

Congratulations from the Many Fine Products of the Philip Morris Family of Products.

The bride, Laura, Trisha, whoever, arrives from the opposing side.

Without opening his mouth, the justice of the peace says:

DO YOU, TENDER BRANSON, TAKE TRISHA CONNERS TO BE YOURS TO HAVE AND TO HOLD AND BE FRUITFUL AND MULTIPLY WITH AS MANY TIMES AS POSSIBLE AS LONG AS YOU BOTH SHALL LIVE?

You can feel the reverb from a hundred speakers.

Without opening my mouth, I say:

I DO.

Without opening his mouth, the justice of the peace says:

WILL YOU, TRISHA CONNERS, TAKE TENDER BRANSON AS LONG AS YOU BOTH SHALL LIVE?

And Laura lip-synchs:

I DO.

With the television cameras zooming in, we fake the rings.

We fake the kiss.

The veil stays pretty much in place. Laura stays Trisha. From a distance everything looks perfect.

Outside the shot, the police are starting out onto the field. The agent must be dead. The cologne. Chlorine gas.

The police are at the ten-yard line.

I ask the justice of the peace for a microphone, to make my big prediction, my miracle.

The police are at the twenty-yard line.

I get the microphone, but it's dead.

The police are at the twenty-five-yard line.

I saying, Testing, testing, one, two, three.

Testing, one, two, three.

The police are at the thirty-yard line, their handcuffs open and ready to snap on me.

The microphone comes to life and my voice blares from the sound system.

The police are at the forty-yard line saying, You have the right to remain silent.

If you choose to give up that right, anything you say can and will be used against you ...

And I give up my right.

I give my prediction.

The police are at the forty-five-yard line.

My voice blaring throughout the stadium, I say:

THE FINAL SCORE OF TODAY'S GAME WILL BE COLTS TWENTY-SEVEN, CARDINALS TWENTY-FOUR. THE COLTS WILL WIN TODAYS SUPER BOWL BY THREE POINTS.

And all hell breaks loose.

What's worse than that, engine number two has just flamed out. Up here alone in Flight 2039, I only have two engines left.

To do the job right, you take one sheet of the goldenrod paper and fold it around a sheet of the white paper. Slip a coupon inside the folded papers. Hold a sheet of merchandise stamps alongside the folded papers. Then fold a sheet of the letterhead paper around all of it, and stuff this into an envelope.

Stick the corresponding address label on the envelope, and you've earned three cents.

Do this thirty-three times, and you've earned almost a dollar.

Where we're at tonight is Adam Branson's idea.

The letter I'm folding starts:

Is the water that comes into the WILSON house bringing with it dangerous parasites?

Where we're at is supposed to be safe.

The goldenrod around the white, the coupon inside, the sheet of stamps, the letterhead paper, it all goes inside the envelope, and I'm three cents closer to escaped.

Is the water that comes into theCAMERON house bringing with it dangerous parasites?

The three of us sit around the dining-room table, Adam and Fertility and me, stuffing these envelopes. At ten o'clock, the housemother locks the front door of the house and stops on her walk back to the kitchen to ask if our daughter is doing any better. Have the doctors upgraded her condition? Will she live?

Fertility with rice still in her hair says, "We're not out of the woods, not yet."

Of course, we don't have a daughter.

Us having a daughter was Adam Branson's idea.

Around us is the combination of three or four families, kids and parents talking about cancer and chemotherapy, burns and skin grafts. Staph infections. The housemother asks what we call our little girl.

Adam and Fertility and I look at each other, Fertility with her tongue stuck out to lick an envelope flap. Me looking at Adam is the same as looking at a picture of who I used to be.

All together, we say three different names.

Fertility says, "Amanda."

Adam says, "Patty."

I say, Laura. Only the three names all overlap.

Our daughter.

The housemother looks at me in the burned-up remains of my white tuxedo and asks, why is our little daughter in the hospital for treatment?

All together, we say three different problems.

Fertility says, "Scoliosis."

Adam says, "Polio."

I say, Tuberculosis.

The housemother watches us folding, the yellow in the white, the coupon, the stamps, the letterhead, her eyes coming back to the handcuffs snapped around one of my wrists.

Is the water that comes into the DIXON house bringing with it dangerous parasites?

It was Adam who brought us here. Just for one night, he says. It's safe here. Now that I'm a mass murderer, Adam knows how we can start north in the morning, north until we get to Canada, but for tonight we needed a place to hide. We needed food. We needed to earn a little cash, so he brought us here.

This is after the stadium and after the crowds were tearing to shreds the line of police crowd control. This is right after my sham marriage, when the agent was dead and the police were fighting to keep me alive so they could execute me for murder. The contents of the entire Superdome emptied down onto the field the minute I announced the Colts would win. One half of the handcuffs already clicked around my one wrist, the police were nothing against the running tide of drunks that rolled toward us from the sidelines.

The band was somewhere playing the national anthem.

Out of every direction, people are dropping onto the field from the bottom of the stands. People are running with their hands in fists out across the grass toward us. There are the Arizona Cardinals in their uniforms. There are the Indianapolis Colts still at their bench, slapping ass and giving each other high fives.

The moment the police get to the edge of the wedding platform, I kick the switch and five thousand white doves fly up in a solid wall around me.

The doves drive the police back long enough for the football mob to reach center field.

The police fight back the mob, and I grab the bride's bouquet.

Sitting here stuffing envelopes, I want to tell everybody how I made my great escape. How the crowd control cylinders of tear gas jet-trailed back and forth overhead. How the crowd roar echoed under the dome. How I grabbed the poly-silk white armload of silk flowers from the bride, tears streaming down her face. How I just touched the hair-sprayed bouquet to a burning candle and I had a torch to hold back any attacker.

Holding the torch of gladioli and whipping hot wires of fake honeysuckle out in front of me, I jumped off the wedding platform and fought my way down the football field. The fifty-yard line. The forty- yard line. The thirty. Me in my white tuxedo, I dodged and quarterbacked my way, sprinting and pivoting. The twenty-yard line. To keep from being tackled, I whipped the burning dahlias side-to- side in front of me. The ten-yard line.

Ten thousand tackles are out to sack me.

Some of them drunk, some of them professionals, none of them are jacked on the quality chemicals I'm riding.

Hands grab at my white tails.

Men dive for my legs.

It's the steroids that saved my life.

Then, touchdown.

I cross under the goalpost, still headed for the steel doors that will get me off the field.

My torch is burned down to just some tiny silk trilliums when I toss it back over my shoulder. I jam through the steel double doors and turn the deadbolt from the other side.

With the Super Bowl crowd pounding the locked doors, I'm safe here for a few minutes alone with the catered food and the makeup artist. The agent's dead body is under a white sheet on a gurney next to the buffet. The buffet is mostly just turkey sandwiches and bottled water, fresh fruit. Pasta salad. Wedding cake.

The makeup artist is eating a sandwich. She cocks her head sideways at the dead agent and says, "Good job." She says she always hated him too.

She's wearing the agent's heavy gold Rolex.

The makeup artist says, "You want a sandwich?"

I ask, Is it just turkey or do they have another kind?

The makeup artist hands me a bottle of mineral water and says my tuxedo is on fire in the back.

I ask, Where's the outside?

Take that door over there, the makeup artist says.

The steel doors behind me are buckling in their frame.

Go down the long hall, the makeup artist says.

Turn right at the end.

Go out the door marked Exit.

I say thanks.

She says there's a meat loaf sandwich left if I want it.

The sandwich in my one hand, I go out the door she said, go down the hall, go out the exit.

Outside in the parking lot is a red car, a red car with an automatic transmission, Fertility behind the wheel and Adam sitting next to her.

I get in the backseat and lock the door. To Fertility in the front seat, I tell her to roll up her window. Fertility fiddles with the controls for the radio.

Behind me, the crowd is pouring out the exits, running to surround us.

Their faces are getting close enough for me to feel spit on.

Then out of the sky comes the biggest miracle.

It starts raining.

A rain of white.

Manna from Heaven. I swear.

A rain comes down so slick and heavy the mob is falling, slipping and falling, fallen and sprawled. White bits of rain bounce in the car windows, into the carpet, into our hair.

Adam looks out in wonder at the miracle of this white rain that's helping us get away.

Adam says, "It's a miracle."

The back wheels spin, skid sideways, and then leave black as we escape.

"No," Fertility says and hits the gas, "it's rice."

The blimp circling the stadium says CONGRATULATIONS and HAPPY HONEYMOON.

"I wish they wouldn't do that," Fertility says. "That rice kills birds."

I tell her that rice that kills birds saved our lives.

We were on the street. Then we were on a freeway.

Adam twisted around in the front seat to ask me, "Are you going to eat all that sandwich?"

I say, It's meat loaf.

We needed a ride north, Adam said. He knew about a ride, but it wasn't leaving New Orleans until the next morning. He had almost ten years of doing this, traveling back and forth across the country with no money in secret.

Killing people, I say.

"Delivering people to God," he says.

Fertility says, "Shut up."

We need some cash, Adam tells us. We need some sleep. Food. And he knew where we could find some. He knew a place where people would have bigger problems than we did.

We only had to lie a little.

"From now on," Adam tells us, "you two have a child."

We do not.

"Your child is deathly ill," Adam says.

Our child is not.

"You're in New Orleans so your child can go to a hospital," Adam says. "That's all you need to say."

Adam says he'll handle the rest. Adam tells Fertility, "Turn here."

He says, "Now turn right here." He says, "Go up two more blocks and turn left." Where he's taking us, we can stay overnight for free. We can get food donated for us to eat. We can do some piecework, collating documents or stuffing envelopes, to earn a little cash. We can get showered. Watch ourselves on television, making our escape on the evening news. Adam tells me I'm too much of a mess to be recognized as an escaped mass murderer who ruined the Super Bowl. Where we're going, he says, people will have their own big problems to worry about.

Fertility says, "Like, how many people do you have to kill to make the jump from serial killer to mass murderer?"

Adam tells us, "Sit tight in the car, and I'll go inside to grease the skids. Just remember, your child is very sick." Then he says, "We're here."

Fertility looks at the house and at Adam and says, "You're the one who's very sick."

Adams says, "I'm your poor child's godfather."

The sign in the front yard says, Ronald McDonald House.

Imagine you live in a house only every day your house is in a different town.

We had three ways out of New Orleans Adam knew about. Adam took Fertility and me to a truck stop on the edge of the city and said to take our pick. The airports were being watched. The train and bus stations were staked out. We couldn't all three of us hitchhike, and Fertility refused to drive all the way to Canada.

"I flat out don't like driving," Fertility says. "Besides, your brother's way to travel is just a lot more fun."

The day after the Ronald McDonald House, we're the three of us standing in the acres of gravel parking lot outside a truck stop cafe when Adam pulls a linoleum knife out of his back pocket and slips the blade open.

"What will it be, people?" he says.

Nothing here is going due north. Adam's been inside talking up all the truck drivers. What we have to choose from is the following, Adam says, pointing at each.

There's a Westbury Estate going west out Highway 10 to Houston.

There's a Plantation Manor headed northeast on Highway 55 to Jackson.

There's a Springhill Castle going northwest to Bossier City on Highway 49, with stops at Alexandria and Pineville, then headed west on Highway 20 to Dallas.

Parked around us on the gravel are prefabricated houses, manufactured houses, trailer houses. These are broken into halves or thirds and hooked to the back of semi trucks. The open side of each modular piece is sealed with a sheet of translucent plastic and inside are the murky shapes of sofas, beds, rolls of rolled-up carpet. Major appliances. Dining-room sets. Easy chairs.

While Adam was chatting with the drivers, finding out where each is headed, Fertility was in the truck stop bathroom dyeing my blond hair black in the sink and washing the tanning bronzer off my face and hands. We stuffed enough envelopes to buy me thrift-store clothes and get a paper bag of fried chicken with paper napkins and coleslaw.

The three of us standing in the parking lot, Adam waves his knife in a circle and says, "Choose. The men who deliver these lovely homes won't be eating their dinner all night."

Most long-haul truck drivers drive at night, Adam tells us. There's less traffic. It's cooler. During the hot, busy day, the drivers pull off the highway and sleep in the sleeper boxes attached to the back of each truck cab.

Fertility asks, "What's the difference what we choose?"

"The difference," Adam says, "is your comfort level."

This is how Adam's been crossing and crisscrossing the country for the past ten years.

A Westbury Estate has a formal dining room and a built-in fireplace in the living room.

The Plantation Manor has walk-in closets and a breakfast nook.

The Springhill Castle has a whirlpool bathtub in the glamour bath. A glamour bath has two sinks and a wall of mirror. The living room and the master bedroom have skylights. The dining nook has a built-in china hutch with leaded-glass doors.

This is depending on which half you get. Again, these are just parts of homes. Broken homes.

Dysfunctional homes.

The half you get might be all bedrooms or just a kitchen and living room and no bedrooms. There might be three bathrooms and nothing else, or you might get no bathroom at all.

None of the lights work. All the plumbing is dry.

No matter how many luxuries you get, something will be missing. No matter how carefully you choose, you'll never be totally happy.

We choose the Springhill Castle, and Adam slices the knife along the bottom edge of the plastic sealing its open side. Adam slices only about two feet, only far enough for his head and shoulders to slip inside.

Stale air from inside the house comes out the slice hot and dry.

With Adam slid inside as far as his waist, his butt and his legs still outside with us, Adam says, "This one has the cornflower-blue interior." His voice coming from inside the wall of translucent plastic, he says, "Here we have the premium furniture package. A modular living room pit group. Built-in microwave in the kitchen. Plexiglas dining-room chandelier."

Adam boosts all of himself inside, then his blond head sticks out the slice in the plastic and grins at us. "California-king-sized beds.

Faux wood-grain countertops. Low-line Euro-style commode and vertical-blind window treatments," he says. "You've made an excellent choice for your starter home."

First Fertility and then me slide through the plastic.

The way the inside of the house, the furniture shapes and the colors, looked blurred and vague from outside, that's how the outside world, the real world, looks out of focus and unreal from inside the plastic. The neon lights of the truck stop are just coming on, dim and smeared outside the plastic. The noise of the highway sounds soft and muffled from inside.

Adam kneels down with a roll of clear strapping tape and seals the slice he made from the inside.

"We won't need this anymore," he says. "When we get where we're going, we'll walk out the front or the back door just like real people."

The wall-to-wall carpet is rolled up against one wall, awaiting the rest of the house before it's installed. The furniture and mattresses stand around covered with dry-cleaning-plastic-thin dust covers. The kitchen cabinets are each taped shut.

Fertility tries the light switch for the dining-room chandelier. Nothing happens.

"Don't use the toilet either," Adam says, "or we'll be living with your business until we move out."

Neon from the truck stop and headlights from the highway flicker through the dining-room French doors while we sit around the maple-veneer table eating our fried chicken.

This part of our broken home has one bedroom, the living room, kitchen, and dining room, and half a bath.

If we get all the way to Dallas, Adam tells us, we can move into a house headed up Interstate 35 to Oklahoma. Then we can catch houses up Interstate 35 to Kansas. Then north on Interstate 135 in Kansas to westbound Interstate 70 to Denver. In Colorado, we'll catch a house going northeast on Interstate 76 until it turns into Interstate 80 in Nebraska.

Nebraska?

Adam looks at me and says, "Yeah. Our old stomping grounds, yours and mine," he says with his mouth full of chewed-up fried chicken.

Why Nebraska?

"To get to Canada," Adam says and looks at Fertility who looks at her food. "We'll follow Interstate 80 to Interstate 29 across the state line in Iowa. Then we just cruise north up 29 through South Dakota and North Dakota, all the way to Canada."

"Right straight to Canada," Fertility says and gives me a smile that looks fake because Fertility never smiles.

When we say good night, Fertility takes the mattress in the bedroom. Adam falls asleep on one length of the blue velvet sectional pit group.

Pillowed in the blue velvet he looks dead in a casket.

For a long time, I lie awake on the other length of the sectional and wonder about the lives I left behind. Fertility's brother, Trevor. The caseworker. The agent. My all-dead family. Almost all dead.

Adam snores, and nearby a diesel truck engine rumbles to life.

I wonder about Canada, if running is going to resolve anything. Lying here in the cornflower-blue darkness, I wonder if running is just another fix to a fix to a fix to a fix to a fix to a problem I can't remember.

The whole house shudders. The chandelier swings. The leaves of the silk ferns in their wicker baskets vibrate. The window treatments sway. Quiet.

Outside the plastic, the world starts moving, sliding by, faster and faster until it's erased.

Until I fall asleep.

Our second day on the road, my teeth feel dull and yellow. My muscles feel less toned. I can't live my life as a brunette. I need some time, just a minute, just thirty seconds, under a spotlight.

No matter how much I try and hide this, bit by bit, I start to fall apart.

We're in Dallas, Texas, considering half a Wilmington Villa with faux tile countertops and a bidet in the master bath. It has no master bedroom, but it has a laundry room with washer/dryer hookups. Of course, it has no water or power or phone. It has almond-colored appliances in the kitchen. There isn't a fireplace, but the dining room has floor-length drapes.

This is after we look at more houses than I can remember. Houses with gas fireplaces. Houses with French Provincial furniture, vast glass-topped coffee tables, and track lighting.

This is with the sunset red and gold on the flat Texas horizon, in a truck stop parking lot outside Dallas proper. I wanted to go with a house that had separate bedrooms for each of us, but no kitchen. Adam wanted the house that had only two bedrooms, a kitchen, but no bathroom.

Our time was almost up. The sun was almost down and the drivers were about to start their all-night drives.

My skin felt cold and rolling with sweat. All of me, even the blond roots of my hair, ached. Right there in the gravel, I just started doing push-ups in the middle of the parking lot. I rolled onto my back and started doing stomach crunches with the intensity of convulsions.

The subcutaneous fat was already building up. My abdominal muscles were disappearing. My pecs were starting to sag. I needed bronzer. I needed to log some time in a sun bed.

Just five minutes, I beg Adam and Fertility. Before we hit the road again, just give me ten minutes in a Wolff tanning bed.

"No can do, little brother," Adam says. "The FBI will be watching every gym and every tanning salon and health food store in the Midwest."

After just two days, I was sick of the crap deep-fried food they serve at truck stops. I wanted celery. I wanted mung beans. I wanted fiber and oat bran and brown rice and diuretics.

"What I told you about," Fertility says, looking at Adam, "it's starting. We need to get him locked up someplace, stat. He's going into Attention Withdrawal Syndrome."

The two of them hustled me into a Maison d'Elegance just as the driver was putting his truck in gear. They pushed me into a back bedroom with just a bare mattress and a giant Mediterranean dresser with a big mirror above it. Outside the bedroom door, I could hear them piling Mediterranean furniture, sofa groups and end tables, lamps made to look like old wine bottles, entertainment centers and bar stools against the outside of the bedroom door.

Texas is speeding past the bedroom window outside. In the twilight, a sign goes by the window saying, Oklahoma City 250 Miles. The whole room shakes. The walls are papered with tiny yellow flowers vibrating so fast they make me travel-sick. Anywhere I go in this bedroom, I can still see myself in the mirror.

My skin is going regular white without the ultraviolet light I need. Maybe it's just my imagination, but one of my caps feels loose. I try not to panic.

I tear off my shirt and study myself for damage. I stand sideways and suck in my stomach. I could really use a preloaded syringe of Durateston right about now. Or Anavar. Or Deca-Durabolin. My new hair color makes me look washed-out. My last eyelid surgery didn't take, and already my eye bags show. My hair plugs feel loose. I turn to study myself in the mirror for any hair growing on my back.

A sign goes by the window saying, Soft Shoulders.

The last of my bronzer is caked in the corners of my eyes and the wrinkles around my mouth and across my forehead.

I try and nap. I pick apart the mattress ticking with my fingernails.

A sign goes by the window saying, Slower Traffic Keep Right.

There's a knock at the door.

"I have a cheeseburger if you want it," Fertility says through the door and all the piled-up furniture.

I don't want a greasy damn fatty damn cheeseburger, I yell back.

"You need to eat sugar and fat and salt until you get back to normal," Fertility says. "This is for your own good."

I need a full body wax, I yell. I need hair mousse.

I'm pounding on the door.

I need two hours in a good weight room. I need to go three hundred stories on a stair climbing machine.

Fertility says, "You just need an intervention. You're going to be fine."

She's killing me.

"We're saving your life."

I'm retaining water. I'm losing definition in my shoulders. My eye bags need concealer. My teeth are shifting. I need my wires tightened. I need my dietitian. Call my orthodontist. My calves are wasting away. I'll give you anything you want. I'll give you money.

Fertility says, "You don't have money."

I'm famous.

'You're wanted for mass murder."

Her and Adam have to get me some diuretics.

"Next time we stop," Fertility says, "I'll get you a skinny double americano."

That's not enough.

"It's more than you'd get in prison."

Let's rethink this, I say. In prison, I'd have weight equipment. I'd have time in the sun. They must have sit-up boards in prison. I could maybe get black-market Winstrol. I say, Just let me out. Just unblock this door.

"Not until you're making sense."

I WANT TO GO TO PRISON!

"In prison, they have the electric chair."

I'll take that risk.

"But they might kill you."

Good enough. I just need to be the center of a lot of attention. Just one more time.

"Oh, you go to prison, and you'll be the center of attention."

I need moisturizer. I need to be photographed. I'm not like regular people, to survive I need to be constantly interviewed. I need to be in my natural habitat, on television. I need to run free, signing books.

"I'm leaving you alone for a while," Fertility says through the door. "You need a time out."

I hate being mortal.

"Think of this as My Fair Ladyor Pygmalion,only backward."

The next time I wake up, I'm delirious and Fertility is sitting on the edge of my bed, massaging cheap petroleum-based moisturizer into my chest and arms.

"Welcome back," she says. "We almost thought you weren't going to make it."

Where am I?

Fertility looks around. "You're in a Maplewood Chateau with the midrange interior package," she says. "Seamless linoleum in the kitchen, no-wax vinyl floor covering in the two bathrooms. It's got easy-clean patterned vinyl wallboard instead of Sheetrock, and this one is decorated in the blue-and- green Seaside theme."

No, I whisper, where in the world?

Fertility says, "I knew that's what you meant."

A sign goes by the window saying, Detour Ahead.

The room around us is different than I remember. A wallpaper border of dancing elephants goes around next to the ceiling. The bed I'm in has a canopy and white machine-made lace curtains hanging around it and tied back with pink satin ribbons. White louvered shutters flank the windows. The reflection of Fertility and me is framed in a heart-shaped mirror on the wall.

I ask, What happened to the Maison?

"That was two houses ago," Fertility says. "We're in Kansas now. In half a four-bedroom Maplewood Chateau. It's the top of the line in manufactured houses."

So it's really nice?

"Adam says it's the best," she says, smoothing the covers over me. "It comes with color-coordinated bed linens, and there are dishes in the dining-room cabinets that match the mauve of the velvet sofa and love seat in the living room. There's even color-coordinated mauve towels in the bathroom. There's no kitchen though, at least not in this half. But I'm sure wherever it's at, the kitchen is mauve."

I ask, Where's Adam?

"Sleeping."

He wasn't worried about me?

"I told him how this was all going to work out," Fertility says. "Actually, he's very happy."

The bed curtains dance and swing with the movement of the house.

A sign goes by the window saying, Caution.

I hate that Fertility knows everything.

Fertility says, "I know that you hate that I know everything."

I ask if she knows I killed her brother.

As easy as that, the truth comes out. My whole deathbed confession.

"I know you talked to him the night he died," she says, "but Trevor killed himself."

And I wasn't his homosexual lover.

"I knew that, too."

And I was the voice on the crisis hotline she talked dirty to.

"I know."

She rubs a handful of moisturizer between her palms and then smooths it into my shoulders. "Trevor called your fake crisis hotline because he was looking for a surprise. I've been after you for the same thing."

With my eyes closed, I ask if she knows how this will all turn out.

"Long-term or short-term?" she asks.

Both.

"Long-term," she says, "we're all going to die. Then our bodies will rot. No surprise there. Short-term, we're going to live happily ever after."

Really?

"Really," she says. "So don't sweat it."

I look at myself getting older in the heart-shaped mirror.

A sign goes by the window saying, Drive to Stay Alive.

A sign goes by the window saying, Speed Checked by Radar.

A sign goes by the window saying, Lights On for Safety.

Fertility says, "Can you just relax and let things happen?"

I ask, does she mean, like disasters, like pain, like misery? Can I just let all that happen?

"And Joy," she says, "and Serenity, and Happiness, and Contentment." She says all the wings of the Columbia Memorial Mausoleum. "You don't have to control everything," she says. "You can't control everything."

But you can be ready for disaster.

A sign goes by saying, Buckle Up.

"If you worry about disaster all the time, that's what you're going to get," Fertility says.

A sign goes by saying, Watch Out for Falling Rocks.

A sign goes by saying, Dangerous Curves Ahead.

A sign goes by saying, Slippery When Wet.

Outside the window, Nebraska is getting closer by the minute.

The whole world is a disaster waiting to happen.

"I want you to know I won't always be here," Fertility says, "but I'll always find you."

A sign goes by the window saying, Oklahoma 25Miles.

"No matter what happens," Fertility says, "no matter what you do or your brother does, it's the right thing."

She says, "You have to trust me."

I ask, Can I just have some Chap Stick? For my lips. They're chapped.

A sign goes by saying, Yield.

"Okay," she says. "I've forgiven your sins. If it helps you relax a little, I guess I can get you some Chap Stick."

Of course, we lose Fertility at a truck stop outside Denver, Colorado. Even I could see that coming. She sneaks off to get me some Chap Stick while the truck driver is out taking a leak. Adam and me are both asleep until we hear her screaming.

And of course she planned it this way.

In the dark, in the moonlight through the windows, I stumble through the furniture to where Adam has thrown open the two front doors.

We're pulling away from the truck stop, gaining speed as the driver upshifts with Fertility running after us. Her one hand outstretched with the little tube of Chap Stick. Her red hair is flagging out behind her. Her shoes slap the pavement.

Adam is stretching his one hand out to save her. His other hand is gripping the doorframe.

With the shaking of the house, a marble-topped little occasional table falls over and rolls past Adam out the doors. Fertility dodges as the table smashes in the street.

Adam is saying, "Take my hand. You can reach it."

A dining-room chair shakes out of the house and smashes, almost hitting Fertility, and she says, "No."

Her words almost lost in the roar of the truck engine, she says, "Take the Chap Stick."

Adam says, "No. If I can't reach you, we'll jump. We have to stay together."

"No," Fertility says. "Take the Chap Stick, he needs it."

Adam says, "He needs you more."

The windows we left open suck air inside, and the easy-living open floor plan channels this airstream out through the front doors. Embroidered throw pillows blow off the sofa and bounce out the front doors around Adam. They fly at Fertility, hitting her in the face and almost tripping her. Framed decorative art, botanical print reproductions mostly and tasteful racehorse prints, flap off the walls and sail out to explode into shards of glass and wood slivers and art.

The way I feel, I want to help, but I'm weak. I've lost too much attention in the last few days. I can hardly stand. My blood sugar levels are all over the map. I can only watch as Fertility falls behind and Adam risks leaning out farther and farther.

The silk flower arrangements topple and red silk roses, red silk geraniums, and blue iris sail out the door and flutter around Fertility. The symbols of forgetfulness, poppies, land in the road, and she sprints over them. The wind throws mock orange and sweet peas, white and pink, baby's breath and orchids, white and purple, at Fertility's feet.

"Don't jump," Fertility is saying.

She's saying, "I'll find you. I know where you're going."

For one instant, she almost makes it. Fertility almost reaches Adam's hand, but when he makes his grab to pull her inside, their hands miss.

Almost miss. Adam opens his hand, and inside is the tube of Chap Stick.

And Fertility has fallen back into the dark and the past behind us.

Fertility is gone. We must be going sixty miles an hour by now, and Adam turns and throws the tube at me so hard it ricochets off two walls. Adam snarls, "I hope you're happy now. I hope your lips recover."

The dining-room china cabinet comes open and dishes, salad plates, soup tureens, dinner plates, stemware, and cups bounce and roll out the front doors. All this smashes in the street. All this leaves a wide trail behind us sparkling in the moonlight.

Nobody is running behind us, and Adam wrestles a console color television with surround sound and near-digital picture quality toward the door. With a shout he shoves it off the front porch. Then he shoves a velvet love seat off the porch. Then the spinet piano. Everything explodes when it hits the road.

Then he looks at me.

Stupid, weak, desperate me, I'm groveling on the floor trying to find the Chap Stick.

His teeth bared, his hair hanging in his face, Adam says, "I should throw you out that door."

Then a sign goes by saying, Nebraska 98 miles.

And a smile, slow and creepy, cuts across Adam's face. He staggers to the open front doors, and with the night wind howling around him he shouts.

"Fertility Hollis!" he shouts.

"Thank you!" he shouts.

Into the darkness behind us, all the darkness and scraps and glass and wreckage behind us, Adam shouts, "I won't forget everything you told me must happen!"

The night before we get home, I tell my big brother everything I can remember about the Creedish church district.

In the church district, we raised everything we ate. The wheat and eggs and the sheep and cattle. I remember we tended perfect orchards and caught sparkling rainbow trout in the river.

We're on the back porch of a Casa Castile going sixty miles an hour through the Nebraska night down Interstate 80. A Casa Castile has cut-glass sconces on every wall and gold-plated fixtures in the bathroom, but no power or water. Everything is beautiful but none of it works.

"No electricity and no running water," Adam says. "It's just like when we were kids."

We're sitting on the back porch with our legs hanging over the edge and the pavement rushing under. The stinking diesel exhaust from the truck eddies around us.

In the Creedish church district, I tell Adam, people lived simple, fulfilling lives. We were a steadfast and proud people. Our air and water were clean. Our days were useful. Our nights were absolute. That's what I remember.

That's why I don't want to go back.

Nothing will be there except the Tender Branson Sensitive Materials Sanitary Landfill. How it will look, the stored-up years of pornography from all over the country sent here to rot, I don't want to see firsthand. The agent showed me the receipts. Tons of smut, dump trucks and hoppers full, garbage trucks and boxcars full of smut, were arriving there every month, where bulldozers spread it three feet deep across all twenty thousand acres.

I don't want to see that. I don't want Adam to see that, but Adam still has his gun, and I don't have Fertility here to tell me if it's loaded or not. Besides, I'm pretty used to getting told what to do. Where to go. How to act.

My new job is to follow Adam.

So we're going back to the church district. In Grand Island, we'll steal a car, Adam says. We'll get to the valley just around sunrise, Adam predicts. It's just a matter of hours. We'll be getting home on a Sunday morning.

Both of us looking out into the dark behind us and everything we've lost so far, Adam says, "What else do you remember?"

Everything in the church district was always clean. The roads were always in good repair. The summers were long and mild with rain every ten days. I remember the winters were peaceful and serene. I remember sorting seed we picked from marigolds and sunflowers. I remember splitting wood.

Adam asks, "Do you remember my wife?"

Not really.

"She wasn't much to remember," Adam says. The gun's in his hands on his lap or I wouldn't be sitting here. "She was a Biddy Gleason. We should've been very happy together."

Until someone called the government and started the investigation.

"We should've bred a dozen children and made money hand over fist," Adam said.

Until the county sheriff was there asking about documentation for every child.

"We should've gotten old on that farm with every year just like the year before it."

Until the FBI launched its investigation.

"We should both have been church elders some day," Adam says.

Until the Deliverance.

"Until the Deliverance."

I remember life was calm and peaceful in the district valley. The cows and chickens all running free. The laundry hanging outside to dry. The smell of hay in the barn. Apple pies cooling on every windowsill. I remember it was a perfect way of life.

Adam looks at me and shakes his head.

He says, "That's how stupid you are."

How Adam looks in the dark is how I'd look if none of this chaos had ever happened to me. Adam is what Fertility would call a control group of me. If I'd never been baptized and sent into the outside world, if I'd never been famous and blown out of proportion, that would be me with Adam's simple blue eyes and clean blond hair. My shoulders would be squared and regular-sized. My manicured hands with clear polish on the nails would be his strong hands. My chapped lips would be like his. My back would be straight. My heart would be his heart.

Adam looks out into the dark and says, "I destroyed them."

The Creedish survivors.

"No," Adam says. "All of them. The entire district colony. I called the police. I left the valley one night and walked until I found a telephone."

There were birds in every Creedish tree, I remember. And we caught crawdads by tying a lump of bacon fat to a string and dropping it into the creek. When we pulled it out, the fat would be covered with crawdads.

"I must have pressed zero on the telephone," Adam says, "but I asked for the sheriff. I told someone who answered that only one out of every twenty Creedish children had a valid birth certificate. I told him the Creedish hid their children from the government."

The horses, I remember. We had teams of horses to plow with and pull buggies. And we called them by their color because it was a sin to give an animal a name.

"I told them the Creedish abused their children and didn't pay taxes on most of their income," Adam says. "I told them the Creedish were lazy and shiftless. I told them, to Creedish parents, their children were their income. Their children were chattel."

The icicles hanging on houses, I remember. The pumpkins. The harvest bonfires.

"I started the investigation," Adam says.

The singing in church, I remember. The quilting. The barn raisings.

"I left the colony that night and never went back," Adam says.

Being cherished and cared for, I remember.

"We never had any horses. The couple chickens and pigs we had were just for show," Adam says. "You were always in school. You just remember what they taught you Creedish life was like a hundred years ago. Hell, a century ago everybody had horses."

Being happy and belonging, I remember.

Adam says, "There were no black Creedish. The Creedish elders were a pack of racist, sexist white slavers."

I remember feeling safe.

Adam says, "Everything you remember is wrong."

Being valued and loved, I remember.

"You remember a lie," Adam says. "You were bred and trained and sold."

And he wasn't.

No, Adam Branson was a firstborn son. Three minutes, that made all the difference. He would own everything. The barns and chickens and lambs. The peace and security. He would inherit the future, and I would be a labor missionary, mowing the lawn and mowing the lawn, work without end.

The dark Nebraska night and the road slipping by fast and warm around us. With one good push, I say to myself, I could put Adam Branson out of my life for good.

"There was hardly anything we ate that we didn't buy from the outside world," Adam says. "I inherited a farm for raising and selling my children."

Adam says, "We didn't even recycle."

So that's why he called the sheriff?

"I don't expect you to understand," Adam says. "You're still the eight-year-old sitting in school, sitting in church, believing everything you're told. You remember pictures in books. They planned how you'd live your whole life. You're still asleep."

And Adam Branson is awake?

"I woke up the night I made that telephone call. That night I did something that couldn't be undone," Adam says.

And now everybody's dead.

"Everybody except you and me."

And the only thing left for me to do is kill myself.

"That's just what you've been trained to do," Adam says. "That would be the ultimate act of a slave."

So what's left I can do to make my life any different?

"The only way you'll ever find your own identity is to do the one thing the Creedish elders trained you most not to do," Adam says. "Commit the one biggest transgression. The ultimate sin. Turn your back on church doctrine," Adam says.

"Even the garden of Eden was just a big fancy cage," Adam says. 'You'll be a slave the rest of your life unless you bite the apple."

I've eaten the entire apple. I've done everything. I've gone on television and denounced the church. I've blasphemed in front of millions of people. I've lied and shoplifted and killed, if you count Trevor Hollis. I've defiled my body with drugs. I've destroyed the Creedish church district valley. I've labored every Sunday for the past ten years.

Adam says, "You're still a virgin."

With one good jump, I tell myself, I could solve all my problems forever.

"You know, the horizontal bop. Hide the salami. The hot thing. The big O. Getting lucky. Going all the way. Hitting a home run. Scoring big-time. Laying pipe. Plowing a field. Stuffing the muff. Doing the big dirty," Adam says.

"Quit trying to fix your life. Deal with your one big issue," Adam says.

"Little brother," Adam says, "we need to get you laid."

The Creedish church district is twenty thousand, five hundred and sixty acres, almost the entire valley at the headlands of the Flemming River, west-northwest of Grand Island, Nebraska. From Grand Island, it's a four-hour car trip. Driving south from Sioux Falls, it's a nine-hour trip.

That much of what I know is true.

The way Adam explained everything else, I still wonder about. Adam said the first step most cultures take to making you a slave is to castrate you. Eunuchs, they're called. Just short of that, some cultures make it so you don't enjoy sex so much. They cut off parts. Parts of the clitoris, Adam calls it. Or the foreskin. Then the sensitive parts of you, the parts that you'd enjoy the most, you feel less and less with those parts.

That's the whole idea, Adam says.

We drive west the rest of the night, away from where the sun will come up, trying to outrace it, trying not to see what it's going to show us when we get home.

On the dashboard of the car is glued a six-inch plastic statue of a man in Creedish church costume, the baggy pants, the wool coat, the hat. His eyes are glow-in-the-dark plastic. His hands are together in prayer, raised so high and out so far in front he looks about to take a swan dive off the passenger side of the dashboard.

Fertility told Adam to look for a green late-model Chevy somewhere within two blocks of the truck stop outside Grand Island. She said the keys would be left in it, and the tank would be full of gas. After we left the Casa Castile, it took us about five minutes to find the car.

Looking at the dashboard statuette in front of him, Adam says, "What the hell is that supposed to be?"

It's supposed to be me.

"It doesn't look a thing like you."

It's supposed to look really pious.

"It looks like a devil," Adam says.

I drive.

Adam talks.

Adam says, the cultures that don't castrate you to make you a slave, they castrate your mind. They make sex so filthy and evil and dangerous that no matter how good you know it would feel to have sexual relations, you won't.

That's how most religions in the outside world do, Adam says. That's how the Creedish did it.

This isn't anything I want to hear, but when I go to turn on the radio, all the tuning buttons are preset to religious stations. Choir music. Gospel preachers telling me I'm bad and wrong. One station I come across is a familiar voice, the Tender Branson Radio Ministry. Here's one of a thousand canned radio shows I taped in a studio I don't remember where.

The abuse of the Creedish elders was unspeakable, I'm saying on the radio.

Adam says, "Do you remember what they did to you?"

From the radio I'm saying, The abuse was never-ending.

"When you were a kid, I mean," Adam says.

Outside, the sun was catching up, making shapes out of the total darkness.

On the radio, I'm saying, The complete way our minds were controlled we never had a chance. None of us in the outside world would ever want sex. We'd never betray the church. We'd spend our entire lives at work.

"And if you never have sex," Adam's saying, "you never gain a sense of power. You never gain a voice or an identity of your own. Sex is the act that separates us from our parents. Children from adults. It's by having sex that adolescents first rebel."

And if you never have sex, Adam tells me, you never grow beyond everything else your parents taught you. If you never break the rule against sex, you won't break any other rule.

On the radio, I say, It's hard for someone in the outside world to imagine how completely trained we were.

"The Vietnam War didn't cause the mess of the 1960s," Adam says. "Drugs didn't cause it. Well, only one drug did. It was the birth control pill. For the first time in history, everybody could have all the sex they wanted. Everybody could have that kind of power."

Throughout history the most powerful rulers have been sex maniacs. And he asks, does their sex appetite come from having power, or does their will for power come from their sex appetite? "And if you don't crave sex," he says, "will you crave power?" No, he says.

"And instead of electing decent, boring, sexually repressed officials," he says, "maybe we should find the horniest candidates and maybe they can get some good work done."

A sign goes by saying, Tender Branson Sensitive Materials Sanitary Landfill, 10 miles.

Adam says, "Do you see what I'm getting at?"

Home is just ten minutes away.

Adam says, "You must remember what happened."

Nothing happened.

On the radio, I say, It's impossible to describe how terrible the abuse was.

More and more along the sides of the road are bits of smut magazines blown off uncovered trucks. Fading full-frontal nude shots of beautiful women wrap themselves around each tree trunk. Rain- soaked men with long purple erections hang limp in the branches. The black boxes of video movies lie in the gravel along the road. A punctured woman made of pink vinyl lies in the weeds with the wind waving her hair and hands after us as we drive past.

"Sex is not a fearsome and terrible thing," Adam says.

On the radio I say, It's best if I just put the past behind me and move on with my life.

Up ahead, there's a point where the trees lining the road stop, and there's nothing beyond them. The sun is up and overtaking us, and ahead in the distance is nothing but a wasteland.

A sign goes by saying, Welcome to the Tender Branson Sensitive Materials Sanitary Landfill.

And we're home.

Beyond the sign, the valley stretches out to the horizon, bare, littered, and gray except for the bright yellow of a few bulldozers parked and silent because it's Sunday.

There's not a tree.

There's not a bird.

The only landmark is at the center of the valley, a towering concrete pylon, just a square gray column of concrete rises from the spot where the Creedish meeting house stood with everyone dead inside. Ten years ago. Spreading out on the ground all around us are pictures of men with women, women with women, men with men, men and women with animals and appliances.

Adam doesn't say a word.

From the radio I say, My life is full of joy and love now.

From the radio I say, I look forward to marrying the woman chosen for me as part of the Genesis Campaign.

From the radio I say, With the help of my followers I will stem the sex craving that has taken control of the world.

The road is long and rutted from the rim of the valley toward the concrete pylon at the center. Along both sides as we drive, dildos and magazines and latex vaginas and French ticklers cling together in smoldering heaps, and the smoke from those heaps drifts in a choking haze of dirty white across the road.

Up ahead, the pylon is larger and larger, sometimes lost behind the smoke of burning pornography, only to reappear, looming.

From the radio I say, My whole life is for sale at a bookstore near you.

From the radio I say, With God's help, I will turn the world away from ever wanting sex.

Adam turns off the radio.

Adam says, "I left the valley the night I found out what the elders did to you, to tenders and biddies."

The smoke settles over the road. It comes into the car and our lungs, acrid and burning our eyes.

With tears running down each cheek I say, They didn't do anything.

Adam coughs, "Admit it."

The pylon reappears, closer.

There's nothing to admit.

The smoke obscures everything.

Then Adam says it. Adam says, "They made you watch."

I can't see anything, but I just keep driving.

"The night my wife had our first child," Adam says with the smoke leaving his tears traced down his face in black, "the elders took all the tenders and biddies in the district and made them watch. My wife screamed just the way they told her. She screamed, and the elders preached and wailed how the wages of sex was death. She screamed, and they made childbirth as painful as they could. She screamed, and the baby died. Our child. She screamed and then she died."

The first two victims of the Deliverance.

It was that night Adam walked out of the Creedish church district and made his phone call.

"The elders made you watch every time anyone in the church district had a child," Adam says.

We're only going twenty or thirty miles an hour, but somewhere lost in the smoke just ahead is the giant concrete pylon of the church memorial.

I can't say anything, but I just keep breathing.

"So of course you'd never want sex. You'd never want sex because every time our mother had another child," Adam says, "they made you sit there and watch. Because sex to you is just pain and sin and your mother stretched out there screaming."

And then he's said it.

The smoke is so thick I can't even see Adam.

He says, "By now, sex must look like nothing but torture to you."

He just spits it out that way.

Truth, The Fragrance.

And at that instant the smoke clears.

And we crash head-on into the concrete wall.

In the beginning there's nothing but dust. A fine white talcum powder hangs in the car, mixed with smoke.

The dust and smoke swirl in the air.

The only sound is the car engine dripping something, oil, antifreeze, gasoline.

Until Adam starts screaming.

The dust is from the air bags protecting us at our moment of impact. The air bags are collapsed slack and empty back onto the dashboard now, and as the dust settles, Adam is screaming and clutching his face. The blood coming from between his fingers is black against the talcum white coat.

In one hand, Adam holds the statuette smeared with blood, more of a devil now than ever.

With his other hand, Adam grabs at the ground beside him and drags an open magazine across his mutilated face. The magazine shows a man and woman copulating, and from under it Adam says, "When you find a rock. Bring it down on my face when I tell you."

I can't.

"I won't let you kill me," Adam says.

I don't trust him.

"You'll be giving me a better life. It's in your power," Adam says from under the magazine. "If you want to save my life, do this for me first."

Adam says, "If you don't, the minute you go for help, I'll crawl away and hide, and I'll die out here."

I weigh the rock in my hand.

I ask, will he tell me when to stop?

"I'll tell you when I've had enough."

Does he promise?

"I promise."

I lift the rock so its shadow falls across the people having sex on Adam's face.

And I bring it down.

The rock sinks in so far.

"Again!" Adam says. "Harder."

And I bring the rock down.

And the rock sinks in farther.

"Again!"

And I bring it down.

"Again!"

And I bring the rock down.

Blood soaks up through the pages, up to turn the fucking couple red and then purple.

"Again!" Adam says, his words distorted, his mouth and nose not the same shape anymore.

And I bring the rock down on the couple's arms and their legs and their faces.

"Again."

And I bring the rock down until the rock is sticky red with blood, until the magazine is collapsed in the center. Until my hands are sticky red.

Then I stop.

I ask, Adam?

I go to lift the magazine, but it tears. It's so sodden.

Adam's hand holding the statuette goes slack and the bloody statuette rolls into the grave I dug to find something solid.

I ask, Adam?

The wind carries smoke over us both.

A huge shadow is spreading toward us from the base of the pylon. One minute it's just touching Adam. The next minute, the shadow has him covered.

Ladies and gentlemen, here on Flight 2039, our third engine has just flamed out.

We have just one engine left before we begin our terminal descent.

The cold shadow of the Creedish church monument falls over me all morning as I bury Adam Branson. Under the layers of obscenity, under the Hungry Butt Holes, under the Ravishing She- Males, I dig with my hands into the churchyard dirt. Bigger stones carved with willows and skulls are buried all around me. The epitaphs on them are about what you'd imagine.

Gone but Not Forgotten.

In Heaven with their mistakes may they dwell.

Beloved Father.

Cherished Mother.

Confused Family.

May whatever God they find grant them forgiveness and peace.

Ineffectual Caseworker.

Obnoxious Agent.

Misguided Brother.

Maybe it's the Botox botulinum toxin injected into me or the drug interactions or the lack of sleep or the long-term effects of Attention Withdrawal Syndrome, but I don't feel a thing. The insides of my mouth taste bitter. I press my lymph nodes in my neck, but I only feel contempt.

Maybe after everybody dying around me, I've just developed a skill for losing people. A natural talent. A blessing.

The same as Fertility's being barren is the perfect job skill for her being a surrogate mother, maybe I've developed a useful lack of feeling.

The same way you might look at your leg cut off at the knee and not feel anything at first, maybe this is just shock.

But I hope not.

I don't want it to wear off.

I pray not to feel anything ever again.

Because if it wears off, this is all going to hurt so much. This is going to hurt for the rest of my life.

You won't learn this in any charm school, but to keep dogs from digging up something you've buried, sprinkle the grave with ammonia. To keep away ants, sprinkle borax.

For roaches, use alum.

Peppermint oil will keep away rats.

To bleach away bloodstains from under your fingernails, sink your fingertips into half a lemon and wiggle them around. Rinse them under warm water.

The wreck of the car is burned down to just the seats smoldering. Just this ribbon of black smoke flutters out across the valley.

When I go to lift Adam's body, the gun falls out of his jacket pocket. The only sound comes from a few flies buzzing around the rock still clutched with a print of my hand in blood.

What's left of Adam's face is still wrapped in the sticky red magazine, and as I lower first his feet and then his shoulders into the hole I've dug, a yellow taxi is bumping and crawling toward me from the horizon.

The hole is only big enough for Adam to fit curled on his side, and kneeling on the brim, I start pushing in the dirt.

When the clean dirt runs out, I push in faded pornography, obscene books with their spines broken, Traci Lords and John Holmes, Kayla Kleevage and Dick Rambone, vibrators with dead batteries, dog-eared playing cards, expired condoms, brittle and fragile but never used.

I know the feeling.

Condoms ribbed for extra sensitivity.

The last thing I need is sensitivity.

Here are condoms lined with a topical anesthetic for prolonged action. What a paradox. You don't feel a thing, but you can fuck for hours.

This seems to really miss the point.

I want my whole life lined with a topical anesthetic.

The yellow taxi humps across the potholes, getting closer. One person is driving. One person is in the backseat.

Who this is, I don't know, but I can imagine.

I pick up the gun and try to wedge it into my jacket pocket. The barrel tears the pocket lining, and then the whole thing is hidden. If there are bullets inside, I don't know.

The taxi rushes to a stop about shouting distance away.

Fertility gets out and waves. She leans down by the driver's window and the breeze carries her words to me, "Wait, please. This is going to take a minute."

Then she comes over with her arms raised out at her sides for balance and her face looking down at every step across the sliding, glossy layers of used magazines. Orgy Boys. Cum Gravers.

"I thought you could use some company about now," she calls over to me.

I look around for a tissue or a crotchless underwear to wipe the blood off my hands.

Looking up, Fertility says, "Wow, the way the shadow of that Creedish death monument thing is falling across Adam's grave is so symbolic."

The three hours I've been burying Adam is the longest I've ever been out of a job. Now Fertility Hollis is here to tell me what to do. My new job is following her.

Fertility turns to gaze around the horizon and says, "This is so totally The Valley of the Shadow of Death here." She says, "You sure picked the right place to smash in your brother's skull. It's so totally Cain and Abel I can't stand it."

I killed my brother.

I killed her brother.

Adam Branson.

Trevor Hollis.

You can't trust me around anybody's brother with a telephone or a rock.

Fertility puts a hand in her shoulder bag and says, "You want some Red Ropes licorice?"

I hold out my hands covered with dried blood.

She says, "I guess not."

She looks back over her shoulder at the taxi, idling, and she waves. An arm comes out the driver's window and waves back.

To me she says, "Let me put this in a nutshell. Adam and Trevor both pretty much killed themselves."

She tells me, Trevor killed himself because his life had no more surprises, no more adventure. He was terminally ill. He was dying of boredom. The only mystery left was death.

Adam wanted to die because he knew the way he'd been trained, he could never be anything but a Creedish. Adam killed off the surviving Creedish because he knew that an old culture of slaves couldn't found a new culture of free men. Like Moses leading the tribes of Israel around in the desert for a generation, Adam wanted me to survive, but not my slave mind-set.

Fertility says, "You didn't kill my brother."

Fertility says, "And you didn't kill your brother, either. What you did was more like what they call assisted suicide."

Out of her shoulder bag, she takes some flowers, real flowers, a little bunch of fresh roses and carnations. Red roses and white carnations all tied together. "Check it out," she says and crouches down to put them on the magazines where Adam is buried.

"Here's another big symbol," she says, still crouched and looking up at me. "These flowers will be rotten in a couple hours. Birds will crap on them. The smoke here will make them stink, and tomorrow a bulldozer will probably run over them, but for right now they are so beautiful."

She's such a thoughtful and endearing character.

"Yeah," she says, "I know."

Fertility gets to her feet and grabs me on a clean part of my arm, a part not crusted with dried blood, and she starts walking me toward the cab.

"We can be jaded and heartless later, when it's not costing me so much money," she says.

On our way back to the taxi, she says the whole nation is in an uproar over how I wrecked the Super Bowl. No way can we take a plane or bus anywhere. The newspapers are calling me the Antichrist. The Creedish mass murderer. The value of Tender Branson merchandise is through the roof, but for all the wrong reasons. All the world's major religions, the Catholics and Jews and Baptists and whatall, are saying, We told you so.

Before we get to the taxi, I hide my bloody hands in my pockets. The gun sticks to my trigger finger.

Fertility opens a back door of the taxi and gets me inside. Then she goes around and gets in the other side.

She smiles at the driver in the rearview mirror and says, "Back to Grand Island, I guess."

The taxi meter says seven hundred eighty dollars.

The driver looks at me in the rearview mirror and says, "Your mama throw out your favorite jerk-off magazine?" He says, "This place goes on forever. If you lose something, no way are you going to find it here."

Fertility whispers, "Don't let him get to you."

The driver is a chronic drunk, she whispers. She plans to pay with her charge card because he'll be dead two days from now in an accident. He'll never get the chance to send in the charge.

As the sun comes up to noon, the shadow of the concrete pylon is getting smaller by the minute.

I ask, How is my fish doing?

"Oh, geez," she says. "Your fish."

The taxi is bumping and rolling back toward the outside world.

Nothing should hurt by now, but I don't want to hear this.

"Your fish, I'm really sorry," Fertility says. "It just died."

Fish number six hundred and forty-one.

I ask, Did it feel any pain?

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

I ask, Did you forget to feed it?

"No."

I ask, Then what happened?

Fertility says, "I don't know. One day it was just dead."

There was no reason.

It didn't mean anything.

This wasn't any big political gesture.

It just died.

It was just a damn fucking fish is all but it's everything I had. Beloved fish.

And after everything that's happened, this should be easy to hear. Cherished fish.