Survivor

'No, I called in sick,' she says. 'This cleaning things is just so fulfilling. There's some coffee and homemade muffins I just baked. Why don't you just relax?'

I ask, doesn't she want to hear all about my problems? Take some notes? The killer called me last night. I was awake all night. He's picked me out to kill me. God forbid she should stop scrubbing the floor and get up and call the police for my sake.

'Don't worry,' she says. She dips her scrub brush in her bucket of cleaning water. 'The suicide rate took a big jump last night. That's why I couldn't face the office this morning.'

The way she's scrubbing the floor, it will never come clean again. Once you scrub the clear gloss coat off a vinyl floor with an oxidizer like bleach, you're fucked. When she's done, the floor will be so porous, everything will stain. God forbid I should try and tell her this. She thinks she's doing a great job.

I ask, So how does the high suicide rate keep me alive?

'Don't you get it? We lost eleven more clients last night. Nine the night before. Twelve the night before that. We're looking at a landslide here,' she says.

So?

'With numbers like that every night, if there is a killer, he doesn't need to kill anybody.'

She starts singing. Maybe the deadly chlorine gas is having its effect. Her scrubbing does a little soft-shoe dance to go with her song. She says, 'This won't sound appropriate, but congratulations.'

I'm the last Creedish.

'You're almost the last survivor.'

I ask how many others.

'In this town, one,' she says. 'Nationwide, only five.'

Let's play like old times, I say. I tell her, Let's us get out the old Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and pick out a new way for me to go crazy. Let's do it. Just for old times' sake. Get the book.

The caseworker sighs and looks down at me reflected with my face wet with tears in her puddle of dirty scrub water on the floor. 'Listen,' she says, 'I've got some real work to do here. Besides, the DSM is lost. I haven't seen it in a couple days.'

She scrubs back and forth, saying, 'Not that I miss it.'

Okay, this has been a tough ten years. Almost all her clients are gone. She's stressed out. Burned out. No, incinerated. Cremated. She sees herself as a failure.

She's suffering from what's called Learned Helplessness.

'Besides,' she says, scrubbing hard, here and there at the last spots where the vinyl is still intact, 'I can't hold your hand forever. If you're going to kill yourself, I can't stop you, and it's not my fault. According to my records, you're perfectly happy and adjusted. We have the tests. There's empirical evidence to prove it.'

The fumes in here make it so I have to sniff back my tears.

She says, 'Kill yourself or don't kill yourself, but stop torturing me. I'm trying to move on with my life.'

She says, 'Every day in America people kill themselves. The problem isn't worse just because you know most of them.'

She says, 'Don't you think it's time you cut your own meat?'

The rumor was you had to squeeze a frog to death with your bare hand. You had to eat a live earthworm. To prove you could obey just as Abraham did when he tried to kill his son to make God happy, you had to cut off your little finger with an ax.

That was the rumor.

After that, you had to cut off someone else's little finger.

You never saw anybody after they were baptized so you couldn't tell if they still had a little finger. You couldn't ask them if they had had to squeeze the frog.

Right after you were baptized, you got on a truck and left the colony. You'd never see the colony again. The truck was headed out into the wicked outside world where they already had your first work assignment lined up for you. The big outside world with all its wonderful new sins, and the better you did on the tests, the better the job you'd get.

You could figure out what some of the tests were going to be.

The church elders told you right up front if you were too skinny or too fat for how tall you were. They set aside the whole year before your baptism for you to get yourself perfect. You were excused from work at home so you could go to special lessons all day. Bible lessons. Cleaning lessons. Etiquette, fabric care, and you know all the rest. If you were fat you ate to lose weight, and if you were too skinny you just ate.

That whole year before baptism, every tree, every friend, everything you saw had the halo around it of your knowing you'd never see it again.

By what you studied, you knew about most of the tests you'd get.

Beyond that, the rumor was there was more we didn't know would happen.

We knew by rumor that you'd be bare naked for part of the baptism. One church elder would put his hand on you and tell you to cough. Another elder would slide a finger up your anus.

Another church elder would follow along with you and write on a card how well you did.

You didn't know how you were supposed to study for a prostate exam.

We all knew the baptisms took place in the meeting house basement. The daughters went to baptism in the spring with only the church women in attendance. Sons went in the fall with only the men there to tell you to get up on the scale naked and be weighed or ask you to recite a chapter and verse from the Bible.

Job, Chapter Fourteen, Verse Five:'Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months are with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass.'

And you had to recite it naked.

Psalm 101, Psalms of David, Verse Two:'I will behave myself wisely in a perfect way ... I will walk within my house with a perfect heart.'

You had to know how to make the best dust cloths (soak rags in diluted turpentine, then hang them to dry). You had to figure how deep to set a six-foot-tall gatepost so it could support a five-foot-wide gate. Another church elder would blindfold you and give you cloth samples to feel, and you had to say which was cotton or wool or a poly-cotton blend.

You had to identify houseplants. Stains. Insects. Fix small appliances. Do elegant handwriting for invitations.

We guessed about the tests from what we had to study in school. Other parts came from sons who weren't too bright. Sometimes your father would tell you inside information so you might score a little higher and get a better job assignment instead of a lifetime of misery. Your friends would tell each other, and then everybody would know.

Nobody wanted to embarrass their family. And nobody wanted a lifetime of removing asbestos.

The church elders were going to stand you in one place and you'd have to read a chart at the far end of the meeting hall.

The church elders would give you a needle and thread and time how long you took to sew on a missing button.

We knew about what kind of jobs we were headed for in the wicked outside world from what the elders said to scare or inspire us. To make us work harder, they told us about wonderful jobs in gardens bigger than anything we could picture this side of Heaven. Some jobs were in palaces so enormous you'd forget you were indoors. These gardens were called amusement parks. The palaces, hotels.

To make us study even harder, they told us about jobs where you'd spend years pumping cesspools, burning offal, spraying poisons. Removing asbestos. There were jobs so terrible, they told us we'd be glad to run up and meet death halfway.

There were jobs so boring, you'd find ways to cripple yourself so you couldn't work.

So you memorized every minute of your last year in the church district colony.

Ecclesiastes, Chapter Ten, Verse Eighteen:'By much slothfulness the building decayeth; and through idleness of the hands the house droppeth through.'Lamentations, Chapter Five, Verse Five:'Our necks are under persecution: we labour, and have no rest.'

To keep bacon from curling, chill it a few minutes in the freezer before frying.