of little gilt ballroom chairs hurried past them and collected under a statue of that Greek moon goddess, Diana. The gold brocade curtains hung crooked across each window. They were the last passengers aboard the SS
The steam was still up because the pink chandeliers—'Just like regular chandeliers,' Fertility says, 'but on an ocean liner they hang rigid as icicles'—the chandeliers in the Versailles Ballroom sparkled, and the public address system still filled the ship with a crackling music, one after another of elevator waltzes melting into each other as Trevor and Fertility turned, turned, turned.
As Fertility and I turn, turn, and step in place, then slide toe to toe across the mausoleum floor.
Below decks, the Caribbean was rising in the Trianon Dining Room, floating the edges of a hundred linen tablecloths.
The ship was drifting with all engines dead.
The warm blue water was spread out flat to the horizon in every direction.
Under even a little water, the checkerboard floor of mahogany and walnut parquet looked lost and out of reach. Here was one last look at the continent of Atlantis, with salt water rising around the statues and the marble pillars as Trevor and Fertility waltzed past the legend of a lost civilization, gold-painted carvings and carved French palace tables. Sea level rose diagonal against life-sized paintings of queens wearing crowns as the ship tilted and vases spilled flowers: roses and orchids and stalks of ginger into the water where bottles of champagne bobbed and Trevor and Fertility splashed past.
The metal skeleton of the ship, the bulkheads behind the lining of paneling and tapestries, shuddered and groaned.
I ask, was she going to drown herself?
'Don't be stupid,' Fertility says with her head against my chest, breathing the poison smell all over me. 'Trevor was never wrong. That was his whole problem.'
Never wrong about what?
Trevor Hollis had dreams, she told me. He'd dream a plane was going to crash. Trevor would tell the airline, and no one would believe him. Then the plane would crash and the FBI would bring him in for questioning. It was always easier to believe he was a terrorist than a psychic. The dreams got so he couldn't sleep. He didn't dare read a newspaper or watch television or he'd see the report of some two hundred people dying in a plane crash he knew would happen, but couldn't stop.
He couldn't save anybody.
'Our mom killed herself because she had the same kind of dreams,' Fertility says. 'Suicide is an old family tradition for us.'
Still dancing, I tell myself, At least we have something in common.
'He knew the ship was only going to sink about halfway. Some valve or something was going to fail and water would fill the engine rooms and some of the big public rooms on the lower decks,' Fertility says. 'He knew from his dreams that we'd have hours with the whole ship to ourselves. We'd have all that food and wine. Then someone would come along to rescue us.'
Still dancing, I ask, Is that why he killed himself?
The music is my only answer for a minute.
'You can't imagine how beautiful it all was, the flooded ballrooms with pianos under water and all the needlepoint furniture floating around,' Fertility says against my chest. 'It was my nicest memory, ever.'
We dance past statues of saints in somebody else's religion. To me they're just rock shaped into glorified nobodies.
'The Atlantic water was so clear. It was pouring down the grand staircase,' she says. 'We just took off our shoes and kept dancing.'
Still dancing, counting one to three, I ask, does she have the same kind of dreams?
'A little bit,' she says. 'Not very much. More and more all the time. More than I want to.'
I ask, so is she going to kill herself the same as her brother?
'No,' Fertility says. She lifts her head and smiles at me.
We dance, one, two, three.
She says, 'No way would I shoot myself. I'd probably take pills.'
At home is my stash of government-issue antidepressants, hypnodes, mood equalizers, sedatives, MAO inhibitors in the candy dish beside my goldfish on my fridge.
We dance, one, two, three.
She says, 'Just kidding.'
We dance.
She puts her head back on my chest and says, 'It all depends on how terrible my dreams get.'
It's that night I start answering the phone again. This is after I'm so horny I have to go downtown and hunt for something to steal. This isn't so much for the cash as to get off. It's okay. The caseworker says it's okay. It's a sexual release, she tells me. It's perfectly natural. You find what you want. You stalk it. You grab it and make it your own. After you've had it, you throw it away.
It was the caseworker who got me started shoplifting in the first place.
The caseworker called me a textbook example of kleptomania. She cited studies. My stealing, she said, was to prevent anybody from stealing my penis (Fenichel, 1945). Stealing was an impulse I couldn't control (Goldman, 1991). I stole because off a mood disorder (McElroy et al., 1991). It didn't matter what: shoes, masking tape, a tennis racket.
The only trouble is now even stealing doesn't give me the old feeling of wow.
Maybe this is because I've met Fertility.
Or maybe I've met Fertility because I'm getting bored with my sex life of crime.
Lately, I'm not even shoplifting, not in the classic, formal sense. Instead of stealing merchandise, I'll walk around downtown until I find a cash register receipt someone's just dropped.
You take the receipt into the store it's from. You pretend to shop until you find an item on the receipt. You take the item around the store for a while, then you use the receipt to return the item for cash. Of course this works best in big stores. It works best with itemized receipts. Don't use receipts that are old or dirty. Don't use the same receipt twice. Try to vary the stores you scam.
This is to real shoplifting what masturbation is to sex.
And of course, stores know all about this scam.
Other good scams include shopping with a big cup of soda you can drop small items into. Another way is to buy a cheap can of paint, then loosen the lid and drop something expensive inside. The metal of the can blocks the x-rays from the security system.
This afternoon, instead of finding a receipt, I just walk around trying to figure out the next part of my plan to grab Fertility and make her my own. Have her. Throw her away, maybe. I have to take advantage of her terrible dreams. Our dancing together has to be a tool I can use.
Fertility and I danced most of the afternoon. As the music changed, she taught me the basic Cha-Cha, the Cha-Cha crossover step, and the female under-arm Cha-Cha turn. She showed me the basic Fox-trot.
She told me what she did for a living was terrible. It was worse than anything I could imagine.
And when I asked, What?
She laughed.
Walking around downtown, I find a register receipt for a color television. This should feel like I've found a winning lottery ticket, but I put the receipt in a trash can.
Maybe what I liked most about dancing is the rules. In the world where anything goes, here are solid arbitrary rules. The Fox-trot is two slow steps and two fast. The Cha-Cha is two slow and three fast. The choreography, the discipline, isn't up for debate.
These are good old-fashioned rules. How to dance the Box Step isn't going to change every week.
To the caseworker, when we started together ten years ago I wasn't a crook. Originally, I was an obsessive-compulsive disorder. She'd just got her degree and still had all her textbooks to prove it. Obsessive- compulsives, she told me, would either check on things or clean them (Rachman & Hodgson, 1980). According to her, I was the second kind.
Really, I just liked to clean, but all my life I've been trained to obey. All I did was try and make her lousy
