The agent closes his eyes and presses his open palm to his forehead. 'The truth is the Creedish church was nothing special,' he says. 'It was founded by a splinter group of Millerites in 1860 during the Great Awakening, during a period when in California alone, splinter religions founded more than fifty Utopian communities.'
He opens one eye and points a finger at me. 'You have something, a pet, a bird or a fish.'
I ask how he knows this, about my fish.
'It's not necessarily true, but it's probable,' he says. 'The Creedish granted their labor missionaries what was known as Mascot Privilege, the right to own a pet, in 1939. It was the year a Creedish biddy stole an infant from the family where she worked. Having a pet was supposed to sublimate your need to nurture a dependent.'
A biddy stole somebody's baby.
'In Birmingham, Alabama,' he says. 'Of course, she killed herself the minute she was found.'
I ask what else does he know.
'You have a problem with masturbation.'
That's easy, I say. He read that in my Survivor Retention record.
'No,' he says. 'Lucky for us, all the client records for your caseworker are missing. Anything we say about you will be uncontested. And before I forget, we took six years off your life. If anyone asks, you're twenty- seven.'
So how does he know so much about my, you know, about me?
'Your masturbation?'
My crimes of Onan.
'It seems that all you labor missionaries had a problem with masturbation.'
If he only knew. Somewhere in my lost case history folder are the records of my being an exhibitionist, a bipolar syndrome, a myso-phobic, a shoplifter, etc. Somewhere in the night behind us, the caseworker is taking my secrets to her grave. Somewhere half the world behind me is my brother.
Since he's such an expert, I ask the agent if there are ever murders of people who were supposed to kill themselves but just didn't. In these other religions, did anyone ever go around killing the survivors?
'With the People's Temple there was an unexplained handful of survivors murdered,' he says. 'And the Order of the Solar Temple. It was the Canadian government's trouble with the Solar Temple that prompted our government's Survivor Retention Program. With the Solar Temple, little groups of French and Canadian followers kept killing themselves and killing each other for years after the original disaster. They called the killings 'Departures.''
He says, 'Members of the Temple Solaire burned themselves alive with gasoline and propane explosions they thought would blast them to eternal life on the star Sirius,' and he points into the night sky. 'Compared to that, the Creedish mess was infinitely tame.'
I ask, has he anticipated anything about a surviving church member hunting down and killing any leftover Creedish?
'A surviving church member, other than you?' the agent asks.
Yes.
'Killing people, you say?'
Yes.
Looking out the car at the New York lights going by, the agent says, 'A killer Creedish? Oh heavens, I hope not.'
Looking out at the same lights behind tinted glass, at the star Sirius, looking past my own reflection with chocolate smeared around my mouth, I say, yeah. Me too.
'Our whole campaign is based on the fact that you're the last survivor,' he says. 'If there's another Creedish alive in the world, you're wasting my time. The entire campaign is down the tubes. If you're not the only living Creedish in the world, you're worthless to us.'
He opens his briefcase a crack and takes out a brown bottle. 'Here,' he says, 'take a couple Serenadons. These are the best anti-anxiety treatment ever invented.'
They just don't exist yet.
'Just pretend,' he says, 'for the placebo effect.' And he shakes two into my hand.
People are going to say it's the steroids that made me go crazy.
The Durateston 250.
The Mifepristone abortion pills from France.
The Plenastril from Switzerland.
The Masterone from Portugal.
These are the real steroids, not just the copyrighted names of future drugs. These are the injectables, the tablets, the transdermal patches.
People will be so sure the steroids made me into this, this crazy plane hijacker flying around the world until I kill myself. As if people know anything about being a celebrated famous celebrity spiritual leader. As if any one of those people isn't already looking around for a new guru to make sense out of their risk-free boredom of a lifestyle while they watch the news on television and pass judgment on me. People are all looking for that, a hand to hold. Reassurance. The promise that everything will be all right. That's all they wanted from me. Stressed, desperate, celebrated me. ***Underpressure me. None of these people know the first thing about being a big, glamorous, big, charismatic, big role model.
It's stair climbing around floor number one hundred and thirty you start raving, ranting, speaking in tongues.
Not that any one person except maybe Fertility knows the kind of day-in and day-out effort it took to be me at this point.
Imagine how you'd feel if your whole life turned into a job you couldn't stand.
No, everybody thinks their whole life should be at least as much fun as masturbation.
I'd like to see these people even try to live out of hotel rooms and find low-fat room service and do a halfway convincing job of faking a deep inner peace and at-oneness with God.
When you get famous, dinner isn't food anymore; it's twenty ounces of protein, ten ounces of carbohydrates, salt-free, fat-free, sugar-free fuel. This is a meal every two hours, six times a day. Eating isn't about eating anymore. It's about protein assimilation.
It's about cellular rejuvenation cream. Washing is about exfoliation. What used to be breathing is respiration.
I'd be the first to congratulate anybody if they could do a better job of faking flawless beauty and delivering vague inspiring messages:
Calm down. Everyone, breathe deep. Life is good. Be just and kind. Be the love.
As if.
At most events, those deep inner messages and beliefs went from the writing team to me in the last thirty seconds before I went onstage. That's what the silent opening prayer was all about. It gives me a minute to look down on the podium and read over my script.
Five minutes go by. Ten minutes. The 400 milligrams of Deca-Durabolin and testosterone cypionate you just spiked backstage is still a round little bolus in the skin on your ass. The fifteen thousand paying faithful are kneeling right there in front of you with their heads bowed. The way an ambulance screams down a quiet street, that's how those chemicals feel going into your bloodstream.
The liturgical robes I started wearing onstage are because with enough Equipoise in your system, half the time you're packing wood.
Fifteen minutes go by with all those people on their knees.
Whenever you're ready, you just say it, the magic word.
Amen.
And it's showtime.
'You are children of peace in a universe of everlasting life and a limitless abundance of love and well-being, blah, blah, blah. Go in peace.'
Where the writing team comes up with this copy, I don't know.
Let's not even mention the miracles I performed on national television. My little halftime miracle during the
