Survivor

  Behind the desk clerk, Fertility says, there’s a complicated French Baroque clock inside a frou-frou case of gilded lead with seashells and dolphins supporting the clock dial. The time is 3:04 PM

  Fertility told me all this with her eyes closed. Remembering it or making it up, I couldn’t tell.

  I Thessalonians, Chapter Five, Verse Twenty:

  “Despise not prophesyings.”

  The chandelier will blink out at the second it falls so everybody underneath will look up. What happens after that, she can’t say. She always wakes up. The dreams always end there, at the moment the chandelier falls or the plane crashes. Or the train derails. The lightning strikes. The earth quakes.

  She’s started keeping a calendar of upcoming disasters. She shows it to me. I show her the daily planner book the people I work for keep. On tap for next week, she has a bakery explosion, the loose canaries, the gas station fire, the hotel chandelier.

  Fertility says to take my pick. We’ll pack a lunch and make a real day out of it.

  For next week, I have mowing the lawn, twice. Polishing the brass fireplace tool set. Checking the dates on everything in the freezer. Rotating the canned goods in the pantry. Buying the people I work for wedding anniversary gifts to give each other.

  I say, Sure. Whatever she wants.

  This was right after the firemen discovered us doing the Cha-Cha inside the burned-out fifth-floor women’s department without a mark on us. After they took our statements and made us sign insurance forms letting them off the hook, they escorted us down to the street. We’re back outside when I ask Fertility, Why?

  Why doesn’t she call anybody and warn them before a disaster?

  “Because nobody wants bad news,” she says and shrugs. “Trevor told people every time he had a dream, and it just got him in trouble.”

  Nobody wanted to believe in a talent this incredible, she said. They’d accuse Trevor of being a terrorist or an arsonist.

  A pyromaniac, according to the Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

  In another century, they’d have accused him of being a warlock.

  So Trevor killed himself.

  With a little help from yours truly.

  “So that’s why I don’t tell people anymore,” Fertility says. “Maybe if it was an orphanage that was going to burn down, maybe I’d tell, but these people killed my brother, so why should I do them any favors?”

  The way I can save human lives here is to tell Fertility the truth, I killed her brother, but I don’t. We sit at the bus stop not talking until her bus is within sight. She writes me her phone number on a sales receipt she picks up off the ground. This is good for three-hundred-plus dollars if I take it back to the store and work my scam. Fertility says to pick a disaster and give her a call.

  The bus takes her away to wherever, to work, to dinner, to dream.

  According to my daily planner, I’m dusting baseboards. I’m clipping hedges right now. I’m mowing the lawn. I’m detailing the cars. I should be ironing, but I know the caseworker is getting my work done.

  According to the Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, I should go into a store and shoplift. I should go work off some pent-up sexual energy.

  According to Fertility, I should pack a lunch to eat while we watch strangers get killed. I can picture us on a velvet love seat in the hotel lobby, sipping tea Tuesday afternoon in our front-row seat.

  According to the Bible, I should be, I don’t know what.

  According to Creedish church doctrine, I should be dead.

  None of the above really catches my fancy so I just walk around downtown.

  Outside the commercial bakery there’s the smell of bread where in five days Fertility says, boom. In the back of the pet store, the hundreds of canaries flutter from side to side of their stinking crowded cage. Next week, they’ll all be free. Then what? I want to tell them, stay in the cage. There are better things than freedom. There are worse things than living a long bored life in some stranger’s house and then dying and going to canary heaven.

  At the gas station Fertility says will explode, the attendants pump gas, happy enough, not unhappy, young, not knowing that next week they’ll be dead or unemployed depending on who works what shift.

  It gets dark pretty fast.

  Outside the hotel, in through the big plate glass lobby windows, the chandelier looms over victim after victim. A woman with a pug a on a leash. A family: mother, father, three little kids. The clock behind the desk says it’s still a long ways from 3:04 next Tuesday afternoon. It would be safe to stand there for days and days but not for one second too long.

  You could go in past the doormen in their gold braid and tell the manager his chandelier was going to fall.

  Everyone he loves will die.

  Even he will die, someday.

  God will come back to judge us.

  All his sins will a him into Hell.

  You can tell people the truth, but they’ll never believe you until the event.

  Until it’s too late. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble.

  So you just walk home.

  There’s dinner to start. There’s a shirt you need to iron for tomorrow. Shoes to shine. You have dishes to wash. New recipes to master.

  There’s something called Wedding Soup that takes six pounds of bone marrow to make. Organ meats are big this year. The people I work for want to eat right on the cutting edge. Kidneys. Livers. Inflated pig bladders. The intermediate cow stomach stuffed with watercress and fennel, cud-style. They want animals stuffed with the most unlikely other animals, chickens stuffed with rabbit. Carp stuffed with ham. Goose stuffed with salmon.

  There’s so much I need to get home and perfect.

  To bard a steak, you cover it with strips of fat from some other animal to protect it while it cooks. This is what I’m up to when the phone rings.

  Of course, it’s Fertility.

  “You were right about that weird guy,” she says.

  I ask, About what?

  “That guy, Trevor’s boyfriend,” she says. “He really needs somebody. I took him out on a date like you wanted, and one of those cult people was on the bus with us. They had to be twin brothers. They looked that much alike.”

  I say, maybe she’s wrong. Most of those cult people are dead. They were crazy and stupid and almost all of them are dead. It’s in the newspaper. Everything they believed in turned out to be wrong.

  “The guy on the bus asked if they were related, and Trevor’s boyfriend said no.”

  Then they weren’t related, I say. You’d have to recognize your own brother.

  Fertility says, “That’s the sad part. He did recognize the guy. He even said a name, Brad or Tim or something.”

  Adam.

  I say, So how is that sad?

  “Because it was such an obvious, pathetic denial,” she says. “It’s so obvious he’s trying to pass as a normal happy person. It was so sad I even gave him my phone number. I felt sorry for him. I mean I want to help him embrace his past. Besides,” Fertility says, “I have a feeling he’s headed for some terrible shit.”

  Like what shit, I ask. What does she mean, shit?

  “Misery,” she says. “It’s still pretty vague. Disasters. Pain. Mass murder. Don’t ask me how I know. It’s a long story.”

  Her dreams. The gas station, the canaries, the hotel chandelier, and now me.

  “Listen,” she says. “We still need to talk about us getting together, but not right now.”

  Why?

  “My evil job is getting a little thick right now, so if somebody called Dr. Ambrose calls to ask if you know Gwen, say you don’t know me. Tell him we never met, okay?”

  Gwen?

  I ask, Who’s Dr. Ambrose?

  “That’s just his name,” Fertility says. Gwen says. “He’s not a real doctor, I don’t think. He’s more like my booking agent. This isn’t what I want to be doing, but I work on contract for him.”r />
  I ask, what is it she does on contract?

  “It’s nothing not legal. I have it all under control. Pretty much.”

  What?

  And she tells me, and the alarms and sirens start going off.

  How I’m feeling is smaller and smaller.

  The alarms and flashing lights and sirens are all around me.

  How I’m feeling is less and less.

  ∨ Survivor ∧

  Chapter 5

  Here in the cockpit of Flight 2039, the first of the four engines has just flamed out. Where we’re at right here is the beginning of the end.

  Part of her doing suicide intervention is my caseworker has to mix me another gin and tonic. This is while I’m talking long-distance on the telephone. A producer for The Dawn Williams Show is holding on line two. All the lines are blinking blinking. Somebody from Barbara Walters is holding on line three. Top priority is my getting somebody to handle the buzz. The breakfast dishes are piled up in the sink not washing themselves.

  Top priority is my hooking up with a good agent.

  Upstairs, the beds are still unmade.

  The garden needs to be repainted.

  Over the telephone, this one top agent is stressing about what if I’m not the sole survivor. This has to be the case is what I’m saying. The caseworker wouldn’t be dropping by for a breakfast gin and tonic if there hadn’t been another suicide last night. Right here on the kitchen table I have spread out in front of me all the other case history folders.

  The government’s whole Survivor Retention Program is what you’d call a washout.

  It’s the caseworker mixing me gin and tonics who needs some suicide intervention.

  Just to make sure I don’t go south on her, the caseworker is eyeing me. Just to keep her out of my way, I have her slicing a lime. Get me some cigarettes. Mix me a fresh drink, I say, or I’ll kill myself. I swear. I’ll go in the bathroom and hack all my veins open with a razor.

  The caseworker brings my new gin and tonic back to where we’re sitting at the kitchen table and asks if I want to help identify some bodies. This is supposed to help me achieve closure. After all, she says, they are my people, my flesh and blood. My kith and kin.

  She’s fanning the same ten-year-old government photos out on the table. Staring up at me are hundreds of dead people laid out shoulder to shoulder in rows on the ground. Their skin is all bruised black from the cyanide. They’re bloated so much the dark homemade clothes on them are tight. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

  The whole recycling process should be that quick and easy, but it’s not. The bodies lying there stiff and rank. This is the caseworker trying to jump-start my emotions. I’m repressing my grief, she says.

  Would I like to wade in and what you’d call ID these dead people?

  If there is a killer out there, she says, I can help her find the person who should be pictured here dead but isn’t.

  Thanks, I say. No, thanks. Without even looking, I know Adam Branson won’t be dead in any of her pictures.

  As the caseworker goes to sit down, I ask would she mind closing the curtains.

  There’s a van from a network affiliate outside shooting video for a satellite feed through the kitchen window. The dirty breakfast dishes piled up in the foreground, that’s not how I want to look on the news tonight. The dirty dishes in the sink, me and the caseworker sitting at the kitchen table with the telephone and all her manila folders spread out on the yellow-and-white-check tablecloth, gin and tonics in hand at ten AM.

  The voice-over of the newscaster will be saying how the sole survivor of America’s latest death cult, the Creedish, is on suicide watch following the tragic string of suicides that one by one have claimed the lives of the remaining cult survivors.

  Then, cut to commercial.

  The caseworker goes through her last client folders. Brannon, deceased. Walker, deceased. Phillips, deceased. Everybody, deceased. Everybody except me.

  The girl last night, the only other remaining survivor of the Creedish church district, she ate dirt. There’s even a name for it. They call it geophagy. This was popular among the Africans brought to America as slaves. Popular probably isn’t the right word.

  She knelt down in the backyard of the house where she’d served for eleven years, and she spooned the dirt out of a rose bed and right into her mouth. This is all in the caseworker’s report. Then something called an esophageal rupture happened, then peritonitis, then around sunrise she was dead.

  The girl before that one died with her head in the oven. The boy before her cut his throat. This is exactly what the church taught. One day the wickedness of the kings of the world would destroy us, oh sorrow, and armies of the world would march upon us, wailing, and the purest children of God would have to deliver themselves unto the Lord by their own hand. The Deliverance.

  Yea, and everybody not delivered unto the Lord among the first leavings should follow behind as soon as possible.

  So for the past ten years, one after another, men and women, maids and gardeners and factory workers all over the country, have been giving themselves up.

  Despite the Survivor Retention Program.

  Except for me.

  I ask the caseworker, would she mind making the beds? If I have to make one more hospital corner, I swear, I’ll stick my head in the food processor. If she agrees, I promise to be alive when she gets back.

  Upstairs she goes. I say, Thanks.

  After the caseworker told me about everybody in the Creedish district colony being dead and all, the first thing I did was start smoking. The smartest thing I’ve ever done is start smoking. When the caseworker dropped by to say rise and shine, and the only other surviving Creedish went south last night, then I sat myself in the kitchen and upped my suicide process with a good stiff drink.

  It’s church doctrine that says I have to kill myself. They don’t say it has to be a hurry-hurry instant quick death.

  The newspaper’s still out on the doorstep. The breakfast dishes, unwashed. The people I work for, they’ve gone off to escape the spotlight. This is after years of my rewinding their rental porn and presoaking their stains. He’s a banker.

  She’s a banker. They have cars. They own this lovely house. They own me to make the beds and mow the lawn. The truth be told, they probably left so they wouldn’t come home one night and find me suicided on the kitchen floor.

  Their four telephone lines are still holding. The Dawn Williams Show. Barbara Walters. The agent is saying to get a hand mirror and practice looking sincere and innocent.

  One of the manila folders has my name on the tab. The top sheet inside the folder is all the basics about the documented persons who survived the Creedish colony disaster. The agent is saying: product endorsements.

  The agent is saying: my own religious program. It’s documented in the folder how for more than two hundred years, Americans had considered the Creedish the most pious, the most hardworking, decent, sensible people left on Earth.

  The agent is saying: a million-dollar advance for my life story in hardcover.

  The background sheet says how ten years ago a local sheriff served the elders of the Creedish church district with a search warrant. There were charges of child abuse. It was some crazy anonymous allegation that families in the church district were having children and having children and having children. And none of these children were documented, no birth certificates, no social security numbers, nothing. All of these births occurred within the church district. All of these children had attended church district schools. None of these children would ever be allowed to marry or raise children. When they turned seventeen, they were all baptized as adult church members and then sent off into the world.

  This has all become what you would call public knowledge. The agent is saying: my own exercise video. The agent is saying: an exclusive for the cover of People magazine.

  Somebody leaked these crazy rumors to some child welfare peon, and the next thing is the sheriff and two c
arloads of deputies are being dispatched to the Creedish church district in Bolster County, Nebraska, to count heads and make sure everything is official. It was the sheriff who called in the FBI.

  The agent on the phone is saying: talk show circuit. The FBI learned how children sent out into the world were considered labor missionaries by the Creedish. It was the government investigation that called it white slavery. The television people called it the Child Slave Cult.

  These kids would be placed when they turned seventeen by Creedish overseers in the outside world who found them jobs as manual labor or domestic help on a cash-pay basis. Temp jobs that could last for years.

  It was the newspapers who called it the Church of Slave Labor.

  The church district would pocket the cash, and the outside world got an army of clean, honest little Christian maids and gardeners and dishwashers and housepainters who’d been raised to believe the only way they could earn a soul is if they worked to death for nothing more than room and board.

  The agent is saying to me: syndicated newspaper column.

  When the FBI moved in to make arrests, they found the entire population of the district colony shut up in the meeting house. Maybe the same person who leaked this crazy story about child slaves as a cash crop, it could be this same person had let the colony know the government was about to invade. Every farm going into Bolster County was deserted. It would come out later that every cow, every pig, chicken, pigeon, cat, and ass was dead. Even goldfish in fishbowls were poisoned. Every Creedish perfect little farm with its white farmhouse and red barn was silent as the National Guard drove past. Every field of potatoes was silent and empty under blue sky and a few clouds.

  The agent is saying: my very own Christmas Special.

  According to the background report, here with the manila folders, the kitchen table, the caseworker making beds upstairs, the heat of the lighter as I light another cigarette, this practice of sending labor missionaries had gone on for more than a hundred years. The Creedish had just gotten richer and bought more land and had more children. More children had disappeared out of the valley every year. Girls were shipped out in the spring and boys in the fall.