Survivor

  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 Mind television 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 th
ink 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 Disorders shows 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 mixed; 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 la
bor 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.