People are all the time running from one place to another in the Bible.
You might not find out for years, but the moment you found out, you had to find a gun, drink some poison, drown, hang, slash, or jump.
You had to deliver yourself to Heaven.
This is why there were three police and the caseworker here to collect me.
The policeman said, 'This isn't going to be easy for you to hear,' and I knew I'd been left behind.
It was the apocalypse, the Deliverance, and despite all my work and all the money I'd earned toward our plan, Heaven on Earth just wasn't going to happen.
Before I could think, the caseworker stepped forward and said, 'We know what you've been programmed to do at this point. We're prepared to hold you for observation to prevent that.'
Back when the church district colony first decreed the Deliverance, there were around fifteen hundred church district members scattered all over the country in job postings. A week later, there would be six hundred. A year later, four hundred.
Since then, even a couple of caseworkers have killed themselves.
The government found me and most of the other survivors by our letters of confession we sent back to the church district colony every month. We didn't know we were writing and sending our wages to church elders who were already dead and in Heaven. We couldn't know that caseworkers were reading our tally every month of how many times we swore or had unpure thoughts. Now there was nothing I could tell the caseworker that she didn't already know.
Ten years have passed, and you never see surviving church members together. The survivors who see each other now, there's nothing left between us except embarrassment and disgust. We've failed in our ultimate sacrament. Our shame is for ourselves. Our disgust is for each other. The survivors who still wear church costume do it to brag about their pain. Sackcloth and ashes. They couldn't save themselves. They were weak. The rules are all gone, and it doesn't matter. We're all going overnight express delivery straight to Hell.
And I was weak.
So I took the trip downtown in the back of a police car, and sitting beside me, the caseworker said, 'You were the innocent victim of a terrible oppressive cult, but we're here to help you get back on your feet.'
The minutes were already taking me farther and farther away from what I should've done.
The caseworker said, 'I understand you have a problem with masturbation. Would you like to talk about it?'
Every minute made it harder to do what I'd promised at my baptism. Shoot, cut, choke, bleed, or jump.
The world was passing by so fast outside the car my eyes went goofy.
The caseworker said, 'Your life has been a miserable nightmare up to now, but you're going to be okay. Are you hearing me? Be patient, and you'll be just fine.'
This was almost ten years ago, and I'm still waiting.
The easy thing to do was give her the benefit of the doubt.
Jump ahead ten years, and not much has changed. Ten years of therapy, and I'm still in about the same place. This probably isn't something we should celebrate.
We're still together. Today's our weekly session number five hundred and something, and today we're in the blue guest bathroom. This is different from the green, white, yellow, or lavender guest bathrooms. This is how much money these people make. The caseworker's sitting on the edge of the bathtub with her bare feet soaking in a few inches of warm water. Her shoes are on the closed lid of the toilet with her martini glass of grenadine, crushed ice, superfine sugar, and white rum. After every couple of questions she leans over with the ballpoint pen still in her hand and pinches the stem of the glass, holding the pen and glass crossed chop-stick style.
Her latest boyfriend is out of the picture, she told me.
God forbid she should offer to help clean.
She takes a drink. She puts the glass back while I answer. She writes on the yellow legal pad rested on her knees, asks another question, takes another drink. Her face looks paved under a layer of makeup.
Larry, Barry, Jerry, Terry, Gary, all her lost boyfriends run together. She says her lists of lost clients and lost boyfriends are running neck and neck.
This week, she says, we've hit a new low, one hundred and thirty-two survivors, nationwide, but the suicide rate is leveling off.
According to my daily planner, I'm scrubbing the grout between the six-sided little blue tiles on the floor. This is more than a trillion miles of grout. Laid end to end, just the grout in this bathroom would stretch to the moon and back, ten times, and all of it's shitty with black mildew. The ammonia I dip a toothbrush in and scrub with, the way it smells mixed with her cigarette smoke, makes me tired and my heart pound.
And maybe I'm a little out of my head. The ammonia. The smoke. Fertility Hollis keeps calling me at home. I don't dare answer the phone, but I know for sure it's her.
'Have any strangers approached you, lately?' the caseworker asks.
She asks, 'Have you gotten any phone calls you'd describe as threatening?'
The way the caseworker keeps asking me stuff with half her mouth clamped around her cigarette looks the way a dog would sit there drinking a pink martini and snarling at you. A cigarette, a sip, a question; breathing, drinking, and asking, she demonstrates all the basic applications for the human mouth.
She never used to smoke but more and more she tells me she can't stand the idea of living to a ripe old age.
'Maybe if just one little part of my life was working out,' she tells a new cigarette in her hand before she lights up. Then something invisible somewhere starts to beep and beep and beep until she presses on her watch to stop it. She twists to reach her tote bag on the floor beside the toilet and gets a plastic bottle.
'Imipramine,' she says. 'Sorry I can't offer you one.'
Early on, the retention program tried to baby-sit all the survivors by giving them medication, Xanax, Prozac, Valium, imipramine. The plan crashed because too many clients tried to hoard their weekly prescriptions for three weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, depending on their body weight, and then downed their stash with a scotch chaser.
Even if the medication didn't work for the clients, it's been great for the caseworkers.
'Have you noticed anyone following you,' the caseworker asks, 'anyone with a gun or a knife, at night or when you walk home from your bus stop?'
I scrub the cracks between the tiles from black to brown to white and ask, why is she asking me these things?
'No reason,' she says.
No, I say, I'm not threatened.
'I tried to call you on the phone this week, and there was never any answer,' she says. 'What's up?'
I tell her nothing's up.
The real truth I'm not answering the phone is I don't want to talk to Fertility Hollis until I can see her in person. Over the phone, she sounded so turned on sexwise I can't risk it. Here I am competing with myself. I don't want her falling in love with me as a voice on the phone while at the same time she's trying to ditch me as a real person. It's best if she never talks to me on the phone ever again. The living, breathing creepy geeky ugly me can't stand up to her fantasy, so I have a plan, a terrible plan, to make her hate me and at the same time fall in love with me. The plan is to unseduce her. Unattract her.
'When you're not in your apartment,' the caseworker asks, 'does anyone else have access to the food you eat?'
Tomorrow is my next afternoon with Fertility Hollis at the mortuary, if she shows up. Then the first part of my plan will get off the ground.
The caseworker asks, 'Have you gotten any threatening or unexplained mail?'
She asks, 'Are you even listening to me?'
I ask, so what's with all these questions? I say I'm going to drink this bottle of ammonia if she won't tell me what's going on.
The caseworker checks her watch. She taps the point of her pen on her tablet, and makes me wait for her to take a puff on her cigarette and blow out the smoke.
