seats and tinted windows. I tell the agent, I want crowds at the airport chanting my name. I want more blender drinks. I want a personal fitness trainer. I want to lose fifteen pounds. I want my hair to be thicker. I want my nose to look smaller. Capped teeth. A cleft chin. High cheekbones. I want a manicure, and I want a tan.
I try to remember everything else Fertility doesn't like about I look.
It's somewhere above Nebraska I remember I left my fish behind.
And it must be hungry.
It's part of Creedish tradition that even labor missionaries had something, a cat, a dog, a fish, to care for. Most times it was a fish. Just something to need you home at night. Something to keep you from living alone.
The fish is something to make me settle in one place. According to church colony doctrine, it's why men marry women and why women have children. It's something to live your life around.
It's crazy, but you invest all your emotion in just this one tiny goldfish, even after six hundred and forty goldfish, and you can't just let the little thing starve to death.
I tell the flight attendant, I've got to go back, while she's fighting against my one hand that's holding her by the elbow.
An airplane is just so many rows of people sitting and all going in the same direction a long ways off the ground. Going to New York's a lot the way I imagine going to Heaven would be.
It's too late, the flight attendant says. Sir. This is a nonstop. Sir. Maybe after we land, she says, maybe I could call someone. Sir.
But there isn't anybody.
Nobody will understand.
Not the apartment manager.
Not the police.
The flight attendant yanks her elbow away. She gives me a look and moves up the aisle.
Everyone else I could call is dead.
So I call the only person who can help. I call the last person I want to talk to, and she picks up on the first ring.
An operator asks if she'd accept the charges, and somewhere hundreds of miles behind me Fertility said yes.
I said hi, and she said hi. She doesn't sound at all surprised.
She asked, 'Why weren't you at Trevor's crypt today? We had a date.'
I forgot, I say. My whole life is about forgetting. It's my most valuable job skill.
It's my fish, I say. It's going to die if nobody feeds it. Maybe this doesn't sound important to her, but that fish means the whole world to me. Right now, that fish is the only thing I care about, and Fertility needs to go there and feed it, or better yet, take it home to live with her.
'Yeah,' she says. 'Sure. Your fish.'
Yes. And it needs to be fed every day. There's the kind of food it likes best next to the fish bowl on my fridge, and I give her the address.
She says, 'Enjoy going off to become a big international spiritual leader.'
We're talking from farther and farther away as the plane takes me east. The sample chapters of my autobiography are on the seat next to me, and they're a complete shock.
I ask, how did she know?
She says, 'I know a lot more than you give me credit for.'
Like what for instance? I ask, what else does she know?
Fertility says, 'What are you afraid I might know?'
The flight attendant goes on the other side of a curtain and says, 'He's worried about a goldfish.' Some women behind the curtain laugh and one says, 'Is he retarded?'
As much to the flight crew as to Fertility I say, It just so happens that I'm the last survivor of an almost extinct religious cult.
Fertility says, 'How nice for you.'
I say, And I can't ever see her again.
'Yeah, yeah, yeah.'
I say, People want me in New York by tomorrow. They're planning something big.
And Fertility says, 'Of course they are.'
I say, I'm sorry I won't ever get to dance with her anymore.
And Fertility says, 'Yes, you will.'
Since she knows so much, I ask her, what's the name of my fish?
'Number six forty-one.'
And miracle of miracles, she's right.
'Don't even try keeping a secret,' she says. 'With all the dreams I've been having every night, not much surprises me.'
After just the first fifty flights of stairs, my breath won't stay inside me long enough to do any good. My feet fly out behind me. My heart is jumping against the ribs it's behind inside my chest. The insides of my mouth and tongue are thick and stuck together with dried-up spit.
Where I'm at is one of those stair climbing machines the agent has installed. You climb and climb forever and never get off the ground. You're trapped in your hotel room. It's the mystical sweat lodge experience of our time, the only sort of Indian vision quest we can schedule into our daily planner.
Our StairMaster to Heaven.
Around the sixtieth floor, sweat is stretching my shirt down to my knees. The lining of my lungs feels the way a ladder looks in nylon stockings, stretched, snagged, a tear. In my lungs. A rupture. The way a tire looks before a blowout, that's how my lungs feel. The way it smells when your electric heater or hair dryer burns off a layer of dust, that's how hot my ears feel.
Why I'm doing this is because the agent says there's thirty pounds too much of me for him to make famous.
If your body is a temple, you can pile up too much deferred maintenance. If your body is a temple, mine was a real fixer-upper.
Somehow, I should've seen this coming.
The same way every generation reinvents Christ, the agent's giving me the same makeover. The agent says nobody is going to worship anybody with my role of flab around his middle. These days, people aren't going to fill stadiums to get preached at by somebody who isn't beautiful.
This is why I'm going nowhere at the rate of seven hundred calories an hour.
Around the eightieth floor, my bladder feels nested between the top of my legs. When you pull plastic wrap off something in the microwave and the steam sunburns your fingers in an instant, my breath is that hot.
You're going up and up and up and not getting anywhere. It's the illusion of progress. What you want to think is your salvation.
What people forget is a journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too.
It's not as if the great coyote spirit comes to you, but around the eighty-first floor, these random thoughts from out of the ozone just catch in your head. Silly things the agent told you, now they add up. The way you feel when you're scrubbing with pure ammonia fumes and right then while you're scrubbing chicken skin off the barbecue grill, every stupid thing in the world, decaffeinated coffee, alcohol, free beer, StairMasters, makes perfect sense, not because you're any smarter, but because the smart part of your brain's on vacation. It's that kind of faux wisdom. That kind of Chinese food enlightenment where you know that ten minutes after your head clears, you'll forget it all.
Those clear plastic bags you get a single serving of honey-roasted peanuts in on a plane instead of a real meal, that's how small my lungs feel. After eighty-five floors, the air feels that thin. Your arms pumping, your feet jam down on every next step. At this point, your every thought is so profound.
The way bubbles form in a pan of water before it comes to a boil, these new insights just appear.
Around the ninetieth floor, every thought is an epiphany.
Paradigms are dissolving right and left.
Everything ordinary turns into a powerful metaphor.
