When I go to lift Adam's body, the gun falls out of his jacket pocket. The only sound comes from a few flies buzzing around the rock still clutched with a print of my hand in blood.
What's left of Adam's face is still wrapped in the sticky red magazine, and as I lower first his feet and then his shoulders into the hole I've dug, a yellow taxi is bumping and crawling toward me from the horizon.
The hole is only big enough for Adam to fit curled on his side, and kneeling on the brim, I start pushing in the dirt.
When the clean dirt runs out, I push in faded pornography, obscene books with their spines broken, Traci Lords and John Holmes, Kayla Kleevage and Dick Rambone, vibrators with dead batteries, dog-eared playing cards, expired condoms, brittle and fragile but never used.
I know the feeling.
Condoms ribbed for extra sensitivity.
The last thing I need is sensitivity.
Here are condoms lined with a topical anesthetic for prolonged action. What a paradox. You don't feel a thing, but you can fuck for hours.
This seems to really miss the point.
I want my whole life lined with a topical anesthetic.
The yellow taxi humps across the potholes, getting closer. One person is driving. One person is in the backseat.
Who this is, I don't know, but I can imagine.
I pick up the gun and try to wedge it into my jacket pocket. The barrel tears the pocket lining, and then the whole thing is hidden. If there are bullets inside, I don't know.
The taxi rushes to a stop about shouting distance away.
Fertility gets out and waves. She leans down by the driver's window and the breeze carries her words to me, 'Wait, please. This is going to take a minute.'
Then she comes over with her arms raised out at her sides for balance and her face looking down at every step across the sliding, glossy layers of used magazines. Orgy Boys. Cum Gravers.
'I thought you could use some company about now,' she calls over to me.
I look around for a tissue or a crotchless underwear to wipe the blood off my hands.
Looking up, Fertility says, 'Wow, the way the shadow of that Creedish death monument thing is falling across Adam's grave is so symbolic.'
The three hours I've been burying Adam is the longest I've ever been out of a job. Now Fertility Hollis is here to tell me what to do. My new job is following her.
Fertility turns to gaze around the horizon and says, 'This is so totally The Valley of the Shadow of Death here.' She says, 'You sure picked the right place to smash in your brother's skull. It's so totally Cain and Abel I can't stand it.'
I killed my brother.
I killed her brother.
Adam Branson.
Trevor Hollis.
You can't trust me around anybody's brother with a telephone or a rock.
Fertility puts a hand in her shoulder bag and says, 'You want some Red Ropes licorice?'
I hold out my hands covered with dried blood.
She says, 'I guess not.'
She looks back over her shoulder at the taxi, idling, and she waves. An arm comes out the driver's window and waves back.
To me she says, 'Let me put this in a nutshell. Adam and Trevor both pretty much killed themselves.'
She tells me, Trevor killed himself because his life had no more surprises, no more adventure. He was terminally ill. He was dying of boredom. The only mystery left was death.
Adam wanted to die because he knew the way he'd been trained, he could never be anything but a Creedish. Adam killed off the surviving Creedish because he knew that an old culture of slaves couldn't found a new culture of free men. Like Moses leading the tribes of Israel around in the desert for a generation, Adam wanted me to survive, but not my slave mind-set.
Fertility says, 'You didn't kill my brother.'
Fertility says, 'And you didn't kill your brother, either. What you did was more like what they call assisted suicide.'
Out of her shoulder bag, she takes some flowers, real flowers, a little bunch of fresh roses and carnations. Red roses and white carnations all tied together. 'Check it out,' she says and crouches down to put them on the magazines where Adam is buried.
'Here's another big symbol,' she says, still crouched and looking up at me. 'These flowers will be rotten in a couple hours. Birds will crap on them. The smoke here will make them stink, and tomorrow a bulldozer will probably run over them, but for right now they are so beautiful.'
She's such a thoughtful and endearing character.
'Yeah,' she says, 'I know.'
Fertility gets to her feet and grabs me on a clean part of my arm, a part not crusted with dried blood, and she starts walking me toward the cab.
'We can be jaded and heartless later, when it's not costing me so much money,' she says.
On our way back to the taxi, she says the whole nation is in an uproar over how I wrecked the Super Bowl. No way can we take a plane or bus anywhere. The newspapers are calling me the Antichrist. The Creedish mass murderer. The value of Tender Branson merchandise is through the roof, but for all the wrong reasons. All the world's major religions, the Catholics and Jews and Baptists and whatall, are saying, We told you so.
Before we get to the taxi, I hide my bloody hands in my pockets. The gun sticks to my trigger finger.
Fertility opens a back door of the taxi and gets me inside. Then she goes around and gets in the other side.
She smiles at the driver in the rearview mirror and says, 'Back to Grand Island, I guess.'
The taxi meter says seven hundred eighty dollars.
The driver looks at me in the rearview mirror and says, 'Your mama throw out your favorite jerk-off magazine?' He says, 'This place goes on forever. If you lose something, no way are you going to find it here.'
Fertility whispers, 'Don't let him get to you.'
The driver is a chronic drunk, she whispers. She plans to pay with her charge card because he'll be dead two days from now in an accident. He'll never get the chance to send in the charge.
As the sun comes up to noon, the shadow of the concrete pylon is getting smaller by the minute.
I ask, How is my fish doing?
'Oh, geez,' she says. 'Your fish.'
The taxi is bumping and rolling back toward the outside world.
Nothing should hurt by now, but I don't want to hear this.
'Your fish, I'm really sorry,' Fertility says. 'It just died.'
Fish number six hundred and forty-one.
I ask, Did it feel any pain?
Fertility says, 'I don't think so.'
I ask, Did you forget to feed it?
'No.'
I ask, Then what happened?
Fertility says, 'I don't know. One day it was just dead.'
There was no reason.
It didn't mean anything.
This wasn't any big political gesture.
It just died.
It was just a damn fucking fish is all but it's everything I had. Beloved fish.
And after everything that's happened, this should be easy to hear. Cherished fish.
