If she really wants to help me, I tell her and I hand her a toothbrush, then she needs to start scrubbing.
She puts down her drink and takes the toothbrush. She rubs back and forth over an inch of grout on the tiled wall beside her. She stops and looks, scrubs some more. She takes another look.
'Oh my gosh,' she says. 'This is working. Look how clean it gets underneath.' With her feet still soaking in a few inches of bath water, the caseworker moves around to reach the wall better and scrubs some more. 'God, I forgot how good it feels to get something accomplished.'
She doesn't notice, but I've stopped. I sit back on my heels and watch her really attack the mildew.
'Listen to me,' she says, scrubbing in different directions to follow the grout around each little blue tile.
'None of this might be true,' she says, 'but it's for your own good. Things could be getting a tiny bit dangerous for you.'
She isn't supposed to tell me, but some of the survivor suicides are looking a little suspect. Most of the suicides look fine. The majority are just normal run-of-the-mill everyday garden-variety suicides, she says, but in between are a few strange cases. In one case, a right-handed man shot himself with his left hand. In another case, a woman hung herself with a bathrobe tie, but one of her arms was dislocated and both her wrists were bruised.
'These weren't the only cases,' the caseworker says, still scrubbing. 'But there's a pattern.'
At first, nobody in the program paid much attention, she says. Suicides are just suicides, especially in this population. Client suicides come in clusters. Stampedes. One or two will trigger as many as twenty. Lemmings.
The yellow legal pad on her lap slips to the floor, and she says, 'Suicide is very contagious.'
The pattern of these new false suicides shows they're more likely to occur when a cluster of natural suicides has ended.
I ask, what does she mean, false suicides?
I sneak her martini, and it has a weird mouthwash taste.
'Murders,' the caseworker says. 'Someone is maybe killing survivors and making it look like suicide.'
When a cluster of real suicides dwindles out, the murders appear to happen to get the ball rolling again. After two or three murders that look like suicide, then suicide looks very fresh and attractive again and another dozen survivors get caught up in the trend and check out.
'It's easy to imagine a killer, just one person or a hit squad of church members out to make sure you all get to Heaven together,' the caseworker says. 'It sounds silly and paranoid, but it makes perfect sense.'
The Deliverance.
So why is she asking me all these questions?
'Because fewer and fewer survivors are killing themselves these days,' she says. 'The natural trend of normal suicides is winding down. Whoever's doing this is going to kill again to get the suicide rate back up. The pattern of murders is spread all over the country,' she says. She scrubs with her toothbrush. She dips it in the jar of ammonia. With her cigarette smoking in her one hand, she scrubs more. She says, 'Except for the time they happen, there's no real pattern. It's men. It's women. Young. Old. You need to be careful because you could be next.'
The only new person I've met in months is Fertility Hollis.
I ask the caseworker, her being a woman and all, How do women want a man to look? What does she look for in a sex partner?
She's leaving behind a crooked trail of clean white grout.
'The other thing to remember,' the caseworker says, 'is this might all have a natural explanation. It might be that nobody's going to kill you. You might have absolutely nothing at all to be terrified about.'
Part of my job is gardening, so I spray everything with twice the recommended strength of poison, weeds and real plants alike. Then I straighten the beds of artificial salvia and hollyhocks. The look I'm after this season is a fake cottage garden. Last year, I did artificial French parterres. Before that was a Japanese garden of all plastic plants. All I have to do is yank all the flowers. Sort them, and stick them all back in the ground in a new pattern. Maintenance is a snap. Dull flowers get a little touch-up with red or yellow spray paint.
A shot of clear lacquer or hair spray stops silk flowers from fraying at the edge.
The fake yarrow and plastic nasturtiums need the dust hosed off them. The plastic roses wired onto the poisoned dead skeletons of the original rose bushes need a shot of smell.
Some kind of blue-colored birds are walking around the lawn as if they're looking for a lost contact lens.
For the roses, I empty the poison out of the sprayer and fill it with three gallons of water and half a bottle of Eternity by Calvin Klein. I spray the fake Shasta daisies with watered-down vanilla from the kitchen. The artificial asters get White Shoulders. For most of the other plants, I use aerosol cans of floral room freshener. The artificial lemon thyme I spray with Lemon Pledge furniture polish.
Part of my strategy for courting Fertility Hollis is to look ugly on purpose, and my getting dirty is a start. Looking a little rough around the edges. Still, it's hard to get dirty gardening when you never really touch the ground, but my clothes smell from the poison, and my nose is a little sunburned. With the wire stem of a plastic calla*** lily, I chop up a handful of the hard dead soil, and I rub it in my hair. I wedge the dirt in under my fingernails.
God forbid I should try and look good for Fertility. The worst strategy I could pursue is self-improvement. It would be a big mistake to dress up, make my best effort, comb my hair, maybe even borrow some swell clothes from the man I work for, something all-cotton and pastel shirtwise, brush my teeth, put on what they call deodorant and walk into the Columbia Memorial Mausoleum for my big second date still looking ugly, but showing signs I really tried to look good.
So here I am. This is as good as it gets. Take it or leave it.
As if I don't care what she thinks.
Looking good is not part of the big plan. My plan is to look like untapped potential. The look I'm going for is natural. Real. The look
I'm after is, raw material. Not desperate and needy, but ripe with potential. Not hungry. Sure, I want to look like I'm worth the effort. Washed but not ironed. Clean but not polished. Confident but humble.
Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn't glitter and shine.
Here's passive aggression in action.
My idea is to make ugly work in my favor. Establish a low baseline for contrast with my later on. Before and After. The frog and the prince.
It's two on Wednesday afternoon. According to my daily planner, I'm rotating the oriental rug in the pink drawing room so it won't get a wear pattern. You have to move all the furniture to another room, including the piano. Roll the rug. Roll the carpet pad. Vacuum. Mop the floor. The rug is twelve feet by sixteen feet. Then turn the pad and unroll it. Turn and unroll the carpet. Drag all the furniture back.
According to my daily planner book, this shouldn't take me more than half an hour.
Instead, I just fluff the traffic patterns in the carpet and untie the strand of fringe the people I work for tied in a knot. I tie another strand on the opposite end of the rug so the whole thing looks rotated. I move all the furniture a little and put ice in the little divots left in the carpet. As the ice melts, the matted divots will fluff back up.
I scuff the shine off my shoes. At the makeup mirror of the woman I work for, I put her mascara up inside each nostril until my nose hair looks thick and full. Then I catch a bus.
Another part of the Survivor Retention Program is you get a free bus pass every month. Stamped on the back of the pass it says: Property of the Department of Human Resources.
Non transferable.
The whole way to the mausoleum, I'm telling myself I don't give a shit if Fertility shows up or not.
A lot of half-gone church district prayers recite themselves in my mind. My head is just a mishmash of old prayers and responses.
