Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk
Then since the autopilot will have it trimmed out to fly in a straight line, the glider will begin what the pilot calls a controlled descent.
That kind of a descent, I tell him, would be nice for a change. You just don't know what I've been through this past year.
I've clenched this gun so long I've lost all feeling.
To stand here and try to fix her life is just a big waste of time. People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.
Please don't think I'm here to save lives. To be or not to be, I don't labor the decision.
Call me a sexual predator, but when I think of predators I think of lions, tigers, big cats, sharks. This isn't so much a predator versus prey relationship. This isn't a scavenger, a vulture, or a laughing hyena versus a carcass. This isn't a parasite versus a host.
We're all miserable together.
It's the opposite of a victimless crime.
To calm this girl down, to get her to listen, I tell her the story about my fish. This is fish number six hundred and forty-one in a lifetime of goldfish. My parents bought me the first one to teach me about loving and caring for another living breathing creature of God. Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet that someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground.
People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were too scared of being alone.
Any crying or joy just got in the way of your being useful. Any emotion was decadent. Anticipation or regret was a silly extra. A luxury.
A hotel, he told me, was a big house where a lot of people lived and ate and slept, but no one knew each other. He said that described most families in the outside world.
Most everything else I know is from the messes these people leave behind.
Just ask me how to get bloodstains out of a fur coat.
No, really, go ahead.
Ask me.
The secret is cornmeal and brushing the fur the wrong way. The tricky part is keeping your mouth shut.
After working in these rich houses, I know the best way to get blood out of the trunk of a car is not to ask any questions.
The lie I tell myself is I'm here to gather flowers, fresh ones for inside the house. I steal the fake flowers for sticking out in the garden. The people I work for only look at their garden from inside so I stick the bare dirt full of fake greenery, ferns or needlepoint ivy, then I stick in fake seasonal flowers. The landscaping is beautiful as long as you don't look too close.
The craving inside of me is to be clutched at by some dead girl. To put my ear to her chest and be hearing nothing. Even getting munched on by zombies beats the idea that I'm only flesh and blood, skin and bone. Demon or angel or evil spirit, I just need something to show itself. Ghoulie or ghosty or long-legged beastie, I just want my hand held.
The feeling in those miles of marble walls with people sealed inside, you get the sense we're in a crowded building dense with thousands of people, but at the same time, we're alone. A year could pass between her asking a question and my answer.
professional compassion
You could call me a gentleman's gentleman but you'd be wrong on both counts.
A guy's calling to say he's failing Algebra II.
Just as a point of practice, I say, Kill yourself.
A woman calls and says her kids won't behave.
Without missing a beat, I tell her, Kill yourself.
A man calls to say his car won't start.
Kill yourself.
A woman calls to ask what time the late movie starts.
Kill yourself.
She asks, "Isn't this 555-1327? Is this the Moorehouse CinePlex?"
I say, Kill yourself. Kill yourself. Kill yourself.
Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn't glitter and shine.
The caseworker found out everything about me except for the truth.
I just didn't want to be fixed.
Whatever my real problems might be, I didn't want them cured.
The caseworker is missing. Every ten minutes, I call the caseworker at her office and all I get is her message. Here's the first time in ten years I've called her, and this is all I hear. "Please leave a message at the beep."
I say, that crazy psycho she told me about, well, he called.
All night, I'm phoning her office every ten minutes.
Please leave a message at the beep.
She needs to get me some protection.
And her message machine keeps cutting me off. So I call back.
Please leave a message.
I need an armed, twenty-four-hour police escort.
Please leave a message.
Somebody could be in the hallway, and I need to use the bathroom.
Please leave a message.
The killer she told me about knows who I am. He called. He knows where I live. He has my telephone number.
Please leave a message.
Call me. Call me. Call me.
Please leave a message.
If I turned up suicided in the morning, it was murder.
Please leave a message.
If I end up dead from some murderer holding my head in the oven, it's because she never checks her messages.
Please leave a message.
Listen, I tell her machine. This is for real. This is not a paranoid delusion. She cured me of those, remember?
Please leave a message.
This isn't a schizoid fantasy. I'm not hallucinating. Take my word for it.
Please leave a message. Then her message tape runs out.
All night, I'm awake and listening with the refrigerator moved halfway in front of the hall door. I need to use the bathroom but not bad enough to risk my life. People go down the hallway, but nobody stops. Nobody touches my doorknob all night. The phone just rings and rings, and I have to answer it in case it's the caseworker, but it's never her. It's just the regular parade of human misery. Pregnant unweds. Chronic sufferers. Substance abusers. They have to dash off their confessions pretty fast before I hang up. I have to keep the line free.
Every phone call I get fills me with joy and terror since this could be the caseworker or the killer.
Approach or avoidance.
Positive and negative reinforcement for answering the phone.
In the middle of my panic, Fertility calls to say, "Hi, me again. I've been thinking about you all week. I wanted to ask if it's against the rules for us to meet. I'd really like to meet you."
Still listening for footsteps, expecting a shadow to fall across the crack of light under the hallway door, I'm lifting the window shade to see if anyone's on the fire escape. I ask her, what about her friend? Wasn't she supposed to meet him again today?
"Oh, him," Fertility says. "Yes, I saw him today."
And?
"He smells like women's perfume and hair spray," Fertility says. "I don't see what my brother ever saw in him."
The perfume and hair spray were from spraying the roses, but I can't tell her that.
"The other thing is he had chipped red nail polish on his fingernails."
It was red spray paint from me touching up the roses.
"And he's a terrible dancer."
Right now, me getting killed would be redundant.
"And his teeth are weird, not rotten, but crooked and little."
You could stab a knife right through my heart and you'd be too late.
"And he has these gross little monkey hands."
Right now, getting killed would be a breath of spring.
"That's supposed to mean he has a little wiener dick."
If Fertility keeps talking, my caseworker will have one less client in the morning.
"And he's not obese," Fertility says, "he's not a whale, but he's too fat for me."
In case there's a sniper outside, I open the blinds and stand my gross obese body in the window. Please, anybody with a rifle and a scope. Shoot me right here. Right in my big fat heart. Right in my little wiener.
"He's not anything like you," Fertility says.
Oh, I think she'd be surprised how much we're alike.
"You're so mysterious."
I ask, if she could change any one thing about this guy at the mausoleum, what would it be?
"Just so he'd quit pestering me," she says, "I'd kill him."
Well, she's not alone there. Be my guest. Take a number, and stand in line.
The caseworker does most of her breathing through a cigarette. The fumes must be nothing to her.
We thought all this teaching was to make us smart.
What it did was make us stupid.
With all the little facts we learned, we never had the time to think.
God forbid you should ever get bored and want more.
Because I have to do something, make some noise, shout, scream, cry, swear, howl, I laugh. It's all just different ways to vent.
When you read between the lines, it says, Good riddance.
Artificial men and women are posed in the windows wearing clothes. Smiling. Laughing. Pretending to have a good time. I know just how they feel.
This is less of a date than I thought. Clothes on racks, hanging on hangers. Salespeople walk around dressed really well and asking if they can help. None of this is anything I haven't seen before.
I ask, does she want to dance, here?
"Wait a minute," Fertility says. "Just wait."
What happens first is the smell of smoke.
"Back here," Fertility says, and leads me into the forest of long dresses for sale.
Then what happens is bells start ringing, and people head for the escalators, stepping down from the way they would ordinary stairs since the escalators are stopped. People are walking down the up escalator, and this looks as wrong as breaking a law. A saleslady empties out her register into a zippered bag, and looks across the floors at some people by the elevators, standing, looking up at the elevator numbers, holding big glossy shopping bags with handles and stuff folded inside.
The bells are still ringing. The smoke is thick enough for us to watch it roll across the lights in the ceiling.
"Don't use the elevators," the saleslady shouts. "When it's a fire, the elevators don't work. You'll have to use the stairs."
She rushes over to them through the maze of clothes on racks, the zippered bag tucked in her arm, quarterback-style, and she herds them through a door marked EXIT.
Then it's just Fertility and me, and the lights flicker and go out. In the dark, the smoke and the feel of satin all around us, the rub of cut velvet, the cold of silk, the smooth of polished cotton, the bells ringing, all the dresses, the scratch of wool, the cold of Fertility's hand on mine, she says, "Don't worry."
The little green signs shine at us across the dark, saying EXIT.
The bells ringing.
"Just stay calm," Fertility says.
The bells ringing.
"Any minute now," Fertility says.
Bright orange flashes in the dark on the other side of the floor, breaking everything into strange shapes of orange against black. The dresses and pants between here and there are hanging black shapes of people with arms and legs that burst into flame.
The shapes of a thousand people burning and collapsing head toward us. The bells are ringing so loud you feel it, and only Fertility's cold hand is keeping me here.
"It's any second now," she says.
The heat's close enough to feel. The smoke's thick enough to taste. Not twenty feet away, the scarecrow shapes of women made by clothes on hangers start smoldering and slump to the floor. Breathing gets hard, and my eyes won't stay open.
And the bells ring.
My clothes feel ironed hot and dry against me.
The fire is that close.
Fertility says, "Isn't this great? Don't you just love it?"
I put my hand up and it makes a shadow of cool between my face and the rack of rayon burning next to us.
This is the way to tell about fabric content. Pull a few threads off a garment, and hold them over a flame. If they don't burn, it's wool. If they burn slowly, it's cotton. If they torch the way the slacks next to us are blazing, the fabric is synthetic. Polyester. Rayon. Nylon.
Fertility says, "It's right now."
Then it's cold before I can think why. It's wet. Water pours down. The orange light flickers, lower, lower, gone. The smoke washes out of the air.
One by one, spotlights blink on to show what's left in huge shadows of black and white. The ringing bells stop. The recorded Cha-Cha music comes back on.
"I saw this all happen in a dream," Fertility says. "We were never in any real danger."
This is the same as her and Trevor on the ocean liner that only sank halfway.
"Next week," Fertility says, "there's a commercial bakery that's going to explode. You want to go watch? I see at least three or four people getting killed."
My hair, her hair, my clothes, her clothes, there isn't a smudge or burn on us.
Daniel, Chapter Three, Verse Twenty-seven:
". . . the fire had no power, nor was an hair of their head singed, neither were their coats changed, nor the smell of fire had passed on them."
Been there, I'm thinking. Done that.
"Hurry," she says. "Some firemen will be coming up here in a few minutes." She takes my hands in hers and says, "Let's not let this Cha-Cha go to waste."
One, two, cha cha cha. We dance, three, four, cha cha cha.
The wreckage, the burned arms and legs of the clothes tangled on the floor around us, the ceiling hanging down, the water still falling, everything soaking wet, we dance, one, two, cha cha cha.
And that's just how they find us.
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.
In the back of their 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.
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.
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.
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.
The smoke hot and dense inside me feels the way I would if I had a soul.
Really, my life no longer has a point. I'm free.
The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again.
The truth is you will be.
The police are asking through the bathroom door, why did I make a batch of strawberry daiquiris before I called them?
Because we were out of raspberries.
Because, can't they see, it just does not matter. Time was not of the essence.
Think of this as valuable on-the-job training. Think of your life as a sick joke.
What do you call a caseworker who hates her job and loses every client?
Dead.
What do you call the police worker zipping her into a big rubber bag?
Dead.
What do you call the television anchor on camera in the front yard?
Dead.
It does not matter. The joke is we all have the same punch line.
The sun's outside the bathroom window trying to show us we're all being stupid. All you have to do is look around.
Every breath is a choice.
Every minute is a choice.
To be or not to be.
Then I called the agent. The truth is there's always been someone to tell me what to do. The church. The people who I work for. The caseworker. And I can't stand the idea of being alone. I can't bear the thought of being free.
It's time to keep living.
It's time to reenlist.
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.
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.
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're that tree falling in the forest that nobody gives a rat's ass about.
And I realize I'm stuck with my body, and already it's falling apart.
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.
"The truth is," he says, "nothing new ever happens."
He says, "We've seen it all."
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.
"You are the children of peace in a universe of everlasting life and a limitless abundance of love and well-being, blah, blah, blah. Go in peace."
we weren't targeting the smartest people in the world, just the most.
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 the back of a crowded, dark auditorium. I remember it was the night of my first big public appearnace.
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.
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.
This is being loved without the risk of loving anyone in return.
She's the blasé eye of the hurricane that's the world around her.
Spokane is still outside the windows. The buildings. The Spokane River. The sun we all have to share. A parking lot. Cigarette butts.
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.
The waitress across the dining room looks young and pretty and doomed.
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.
Don't ask me when because I don't remember, but somewhere along the way I keep forgetting to commit suicide.
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.
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?'"
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Adam says, "I'm your poor child's godfather."
The sign in the front yard says, Ronald McDonald House.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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 Lady or Pygmalion, only backward."
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 25 Miles.
"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."
Everything is beautiful but none of it works.
"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 press my lymph nodes in my neck, but I only feel contempt.
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.
Fertlity 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 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.
"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."
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.
But sitting there in the back of the cab, the gun in my hand, my hands in my pockets, I start to cry.
In the sky overhead, it's the same sun watching us make the same mistakes over and over. It's the same blue sky after everything we've been through. Nothing new. No surprises here.
Security has us surrounded when the urn comes open. The mortal remains of Trevor Hollis going everywhere. Ashes to ashes. Into everybody's eyes. Dust to dust. Into their lungs. Trevor's ashes spread in a cloud around us. Adam's gun thuds on the carpet.
Before Fertility, before the security team, before the plane can leave the jetway, I grab the gun. I grab Fertility. Okay, okay, okay, okay, we'll do this her way, I say with the gun against her head.
I walk us backward toward the gate.
I yell, Nobody make a move.
I stop to let the ticket agent tear her ticket, then I nod toward the open urn and the mess of Trevor all over the carpet.
Could somebody maybe scoop that stuff up and hand it to this woman here, I say. It's her brother.
The security team is all crouched with their guns aimed at my forehead while a ticket agent gets most of Trevor back into the urn and hands it back to Fertility.
"Thanks," Fertility says. "This is so embarrassing."
Somewhere en route to Port Vila in the New Hebrides, for my last meal I serve dinner the way I've always dreamed.
Anybody caught buttering their bread before breaking it, I promise to shoot them.
Anybody who drinks their beverage with food still in their mouth will also be shot.
Anybody caught spooning toward themself will be shot.
Anybody caught without a napkin in their lap--
Anybody caught using their fingers to move their food--
Anybody who begins eating before everybody is served--
Anybody who blows on food to cool it--
Anybody who talks with food in their mouth--
Anybody who drinks white wine holding their glass by the bowl or drinks red wine holding their glass by the stem--
You will each get a bullet in the head.
We are 30,000 feet above the earth, going 455 miles per hour. We're at a pinnacle of human achievement, and we are going to eat this meal as civilized human beings.
Testing, testing, one to three.
One more time, you're listening to the flight recorder of Flight 2039.
And at this altitude, listen, and at this speed, with the plane empty, this is my story. And my story won't get bashed into a zillion bloody shreds and then burned with a thousand tons of burning jet. And after the plane wrecks, people will hunt down the flight recorder. And my story will survive.
And I will live on, forever.
And if I could figure out what Fertility meant, I could save myself, but I can't. I'm stupid.
Testing, testing, one, two, three.
So here is my confession.
Here is my prayer.
My story. My incantation.
Hear me. See me. Remember me.
Beloved Fuck-up.
Botched Messiah.
Would-be Lover. Delivered to God.
I'm trapped here, in a nosedive, in my life, in the cockpit of a jet-liner with the flat yellow of the Australian outback coming up fast.
And there's so many things I want to change but can't.
It's all done. It's all just a story now.
Here's the life and death of Tender Branson, and I can just walk away from it.
And the sky is blue and righteous in every direction.
The sun is total and burning and just right there, and today is a beautiful day.
Testing, testing, one, two--