The agent is saying: Caesars Palace.
It was then that everybody in the world started calling the Creedish the Old Testament Death Cult.
The cigarette smoke chokes past the point where my throat would close it out and sits thick in my chest. The caseworker folders document the stragglers. Survivor Retention Client Number Sixty-three, Biddy Patterson, age approximately twenty-nine, killed herself by ingesting cleaning solvent three days after the colony district incident.
Survivor Retention Client Tender Smithson, age forty-five, killed himself by stepping out of a window of the building where he worked as a janitor.
The agent is saying: my own 1-976 salvation hotline.
The smoke hot and dense inside me feels the way I would if I had a soul.
The agent is saying: my own infomercial.
The people black and swollen with their giving up. Long rows of people the FBI carried dead out of the meeting house, they lie there black with the cyanide in their last communion. These are the people who whatever they imagined was coming down the road, they'd rather die than meet it.
They died together in one mass, holding each other by the hand so tight the FBI had to pry at their dead fingers to take them apart.
The agent is saying: Celebrity Superstar.
It's church doctrine that right now while the caseworker is gone, I should take a knife from the dishes in the sink and hack out my windpipe. I should spill my guts out onto the kitchen floor.
The agent says he'll handle the buzz with
Among the deceased is a manila folder with my own name on it. In it, I write:
Survivor Retention Client Number Eighty-four has lost everyone he ever loved and everything that gave his life meaning. He is tired and sleeps most of the time. He has started drinking and smoking. He has no appetite. He seldom bathes and hasn't shaved in weeks.
Ten years ago, he was the hardworking salt of the earth. All he wanted was to go to Heaven. Sitting here today, everything that he worked for in the world is lost. All his external rules and controls are gone.
There is no Hell. There is no Heaven.
Still, just dawning on him is the idea that now anything is possible.
Now he wants everything.
I shut the folder and slip it back in the pile.
Just between him and me, the agent asks, is there any chance I'm going to off myself soon?
Staring up through my gin and tonic, the sunken faces of everybody from my past are dead in the government pictures under my drink. After moments like this, you're whole life is gravy.
I freshen my drink.
I light another cigarette.
Really, my life no longer has a point. I'm free. This and I stand to inherit twenty thousand acres of central Nebraska.
How this feels is just like ten years ago, when I rode with the police downtown. And once again, I am weak. And minute by minute I'm moving away from salvation and into the future.
Kill myself?
Thanks, I say. No, thanks.
Let's not rush anything here.
What I'm busy telling the police all morning is I left the caseworker still alive and scrubbing the brick around the fireplace in the den. The problem is the flue doesn't open right and smoke comes out the front. The people who I work for burn wet wood. What I tell the police is I'm innocent.
I didn't kill anybody.
According to my daily planner, I was supposed to scrub the brick yesterday.
This is how my day's gone so far.
First the police are hammering me about why did I kill my caseworker. Then the agent's calling to promise me the world. Fertility, Fertility, Fertility is out of the picture. Let's just say I'm not comfortable with how she earns a living. Plus, I'd just as soon not know about all the misery in my future.
So I lock myself in the bathroom to try to collate what's all happened. The downstairs green bathroom.
How my statement to the police goes is first the caseworker was dead facedown on the bricks in front of the fireplace in the den with her black capri pants still on and all bunched up around her ass from the way she's fallen there. Her white shirt's untucked with the sleeves rolled up to each elbow. The room's choking with deadly chlorine gas and the sponge is still squeezed in her dead fish white hand.
Before that, I was climbing in through the basement window we left unlocked so I could come and go without the television people dogging me with their cameras and paper cups of coffee and their professional concern as if they're getting paid enough to really care. As if this doesn't happen with another feature story for them to cover every two days. It does.
So I'm locked in the bathroom and now the police are outside the door to ask if I'm throwing up and say the man who I work for is on the speakerphone yelling at them for directions on how to eat a salad.
The police are asking, did the caseworker and I have a fight?
Look at my daily planner book for yesterday, I tell them. We never had time.
From starting work until eight in the morning, I was supposed to be caulking windows. The planner's open on the kitchen counter next to the speakerphone. I was supposed to be painting trim.
From eight until ten I was scrubbing the oil stains out in the driveway. From ten until lunch was for cutting back the hedges. Lunch until three was for sweeping porches. Three until five was for changing the water in all the flower arrangements. Five to seven was for scrubbing the fireplace brick.
Every last minute of my life has been preordained, and I'm sick and tired of it.
How this feels is I'm just another task in God's daily planner: the Italian Renaissance penciled in for right after the Dark Ages.
To everything there is a season.
For every trend, fad, phase. Turn, turn, turn.
Ecclesiastes, Chapter Three, Verses something through something.
The Information Age is scheduled immediately after the Industrial Revolution. Then the Postmodern Era, then the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Famine. Check. Pestilence. Check. War. Check. Death. Check. And between the big events, the earthquakes and tidal waves, God's got me squeezed in for a cameo appearance. Then maybe in thirty years, or maybe next year, God's daily planner has me finished.
Through the bathroom door, the police are asking me, did I hit her? The caseworker. Did I ever steal her case history files and her DSM? All her files are missing.
She drank, is what I tell them. She took psychotropic drugs. She mixed bleach with ammonia inside closed unventilated areas. I don't know how she spent her free time, but she talked about dating a wide variety of lowlifes.
And she had those files yesterday.
The last thing I said to her was you can't get brick clean without sandblasting it, but she was so sure muriatic acid would do the job. One of her boyfriends swore by it.
When I climbed in through the basement window this morning she was dead on the floor with chlorine gas and muriatic acid all over half the brick wall, and it was still as dirty as ever, only now she was part of the mess.
Between her black capri pants and her little white socks and red canvas shoes, her calf muscles are smooth and white with everything of her that used to be red turned blue, her lips, her cuticles, the rim of each eye.
The truth is I didn't kill the caseworker, but I'm glad someone did.
She was my only connection to the last ten years. She was the last thing holding me onto my past.
The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again.
The truth is you will be.
And the secret is, this will hurt less and less each time until you can't feel a thing.
