Survivor
His two perfect rows of teeth look set in his mouth by a jeweler.
The pills for AIDS look just like the pills for cancer look just like the pills for diabetes. I ask, So these things really aren’t invented?
“Let’s not use that word, ‘invented,’” the agent says. “It makes everything sound so contrived.”
But they aren’t real?
“Of course they’re real,” he says and plucks the first two bottles out of my hands. “They’re copyrighted. We have an inventory of almost fifteen thousand copyrighted names for products that are still in development,” he says. “And that includes you.”
He says, “That’s just my point.”
He’s developing a cure for cancer?
“We’re a total concept marketing slash public relations organization,” he says. “Our job is to create the concept. You patent a drug. You copyright the name. As soon as someone else develops the product they come to us, sometimes by choice, sometimes not.”
I ask him, Why sometimes not?
“The way this works is we copyright every conceivable combination of words, Greek words, Latin, English, what-have-you. We get the legal rights to every conceivable word a pharmaceutical company might use to name a new product. For diabetes alone, we have an inventory of one hundred forty names,” he says. He hands me stapled-together pages from out of his briefcase in his lap.
GlucoCure, I read.
InsulinEase.
PancreAid. Hemazine. Glucodan. Growdenase. I turn to the next page, and bottles slip out of my lap and roll along the car floor with the pills inside rattling.
“If the drug company that ever cures diabetes wants to use any combination of words even vaguely related to the condition, they’ll have to lease that right from us.”
So the pills I have here, I say, these are sugar pills. I twist one bottle open and shake a tablet, dark red and shining, into my palm. I lick it, and it’s candy-coated chocolate. Others are gelatin capsules with powdered sugar inside.
“Mock-ups,” he says. “Prototypes.”
He says, “My point is that every bit of your career with us is already in place, and we’ve been prophesying your arrival for more than fifteen years.”
He says, “I’m telling you this so you can relax.”
But the Creedish church district disaster was only ten years ago.
And I put a pill, an orange Geriamazone, in my mouth.
“We’ve been tracking you,” he says. “As soon as the Creedish survival numbers dipped below one hundred, we started the campaign rolling. The whole media countdown over the last six months, that was our doing. It needed some fine-tuning. It wasn’t anything specific at first, all the copy is pretty much search-and-replace, fill-in-the-blank, universal-change stuff, but it’s all in the can. All we needed was a warm body and the survivor’s name. That’s where you enter the picture.”
From another bottle, I shake out two dozen Inazans and hold them under my tongue until their black candy shells dissolve. Chocolate melts out.
The agent takes out more sheets of printed paper and hands them to me.
Ford Merit, I read.
Mercury Rapture.
Dodge Vignette.
He says, “We have names copyrighted for cars that haven’t been designed, software that’s never been written, miracle dream cures for epidemics still on the horizon, every product we can anticipate.”
My back teeth crunch a sweet overdose of blue Donnadons.
The agent eyes me sitting there and sighs. “Enough with the empty calories, already,” he says. “Our first big job is to modify you so you’ll fit the campaign.” He asks, “Is that your real hair color?”
I pour a million milligrams of Jodazones in my mouth.
“Not to mince words,” the agent says, “but you’re about thirty pounds heavier than we need you to be.”
The bogus pills I can understand. What I don’t understand is how he could begin planning a campaign around something before it happened. No way could he have a campaign planned before the Deliverance.
The agent takes off his glasses and folds them. He sets them inside his briefcase and takes back the printed lists of future miracle products, drugs and cars, and he puts the lists in his briefcase. He tug-of-wars the pill bottles out of my hands, all of them silent and empty.
“The truth is,” he says, “nothing new ever happens.”
He says, “We’ve seen it all.”
He says, “Listen.”
In 1653, he says, the Russian Orthodox church changed a few old rituals. Just some changes in the liturgy. Just words. Language. In Russian, for God’s sake. Some Bishop Nikon introduced the changes as well as the western manners that were becoming popular in Russian court life at the time, and the bishop started excommunicating anyone who rebelled against these changes.
Reaching around in the dark by my feet, he picks up the other pill bottles.
According to the agent, the monks who didn’t want to change the way they worshiped fled to remote monasteries. The Russian authorities hunted and persecuted them. By 1665, small groups of monks began burning themselves to death. These group suicides in northern Europe and western Siberia continued through the 1670s. In 1687, some two thousand seven hundred monks captured a monastery, locked themselves inside, and burned it. In 1688, another fifteen hundred “Old Believers” burned themselves alive in their locked monastery. By the end of the seventeenth century, an estimated twenty thousand monks had killed themselves instead of submitting to the government.
He snaps his briefcase shut and leans forward.
“These Russian monks kept killing themselves until 1897,” he says. “Sound familiar?”
You have Samson in the Old Testament, the agent says. You have the Jewish soldiers who killed themselves in the Masada. You have seppuku among the Japanese. Sati among the Hindu. Endura among the Cathari during the twelfth century in southern France. He ticked off group after group on his fingertips. There were the Stoics. There were the Epicureans. There were the tribes of Guiana Indians who killed themselves so they could be reborn as white men.
“Closer to here and now, the People’s Temple mass suicide of 1978 left nine hundred twelve dead.”
The Branch Davidian disaster of 1993 left seventy-six dead.
The Order of the Solar Temple mass suicide and murder in 1994 killed fifty-three people.
The Heaven’s Gate suicide in 1997 killed thirty-nine.
“The Creedish church thing was just a blip in the culture,” he says. “It was just one more predictable mass suicide in a world filled with splinter groups that limp along until they’re confronted.
Maybe their leader is about to die, as was the case with the Heaven’s Gate group, or they’re challenged by the government, like what happened around the Russian monks or the People’s Temple or the Creedish church district.”
He says, “Actually, it’s awfully boring stuff. Anticipating the future based on the past. We might as well be an insurance company; nevertheless, it’s our job to make cult suicide look fresh and exciting every time around.”
After knowing Fertility, I wonder if I’m the last person in the world who ever gets caught by surprise. Fertility with her dreams of disaster and this guy with his clean shave and his closed loop of history, they’re two peas trapped in the same boring pod.
“Reality means you live until you die,” the agent says. “The real truth is nobody wants reality.”
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 Super Bowl. All those disasters I predicted, the lives I saved.
You know the old saying: It’s not whatyou know.
It’s whoyou know.
People think it’s so simple to be me and go up in front of people in a stadium and lead them in prayer and then be seat-belted on a jet headed for the next stadium within the hour, all the time preserving a vibrant, healthy facade. No, but these people will still call you crazy for hijacking a plane. People don’t know the first thing about vibrant dynamic healthy vibrancy.
Let them even try to find enough of me to autopsy. It’s nobody’s business if my liver function is impaired. Or if maybe my spleen and gallbladder are enormous from the effects of human growth hormone. As if they themselves wouldn’t inject anything sucked from the pituitary glands of dead cadavers if they thought they could look as good as I did on television.
The risk of being famous is you have to take levothyroxine sodium to stay thin. Yes, you have your central nervous system to worry about. There’s the insomnia. Your metabolism ramps up. Your heart pounds. You sweat. You’re nervous all the time, but you look terrific.
Just remember, your heart is only beating so you can be a regular dinner guest at the White House.
Your central nervous system is just so you can address the UN General Assembly.
Amphetamines are the most American drug. You get so much done. You look terrific, and your middle name is Accomplishment.
“Your whole body,” the agent is yelling, “is just how you model your designer line of sportswear!”
Your thyroid shuts down natural production of thyroxine.
But you still look terrific. And you are, you’re the American Dream. You are the constant-growth economy.
According to the agent, the people out there looking for a leader, they want vibrant. They want massive. They want dynamic. Nobody wants a little skinny god. They want a thirty-inch drop between your chest and waist sizes. Big pecs. Long legs. Cleft chin. Big calves.
They want more than human.
They want larger than life size.
Nobody wants just anatomically correct.
People want anatomical enhancement. Surgically augmented. New and improved. Silicone-implanted. Collagen-injected.
Just for the record, after my first three-month cycle of Deca-Durabolin I couldn’t reach down far enough to tie my shoes; my arms were that big. Not a problem, the agent says, and he hires someone to tie all my shoes for me.
After I cycled some Russian-made Metahapoctehosich for seventeen weeks all my hair fell out, and the agent bought me a wig.
‘You have to meet me halfway on this,” the agent tells me. “Nobody wants to worship a God who ties his own shoes.”
Nobody wants to worship you if you have the same problems, the same bad breath and messy hair and hangnails, as a regular person. You have to be everything regular people aren’t. Where they fail, you have to go all the way. Be what people are too afraid to be. Become whom they admire.
People shopping for a messiah want quality. Nobody is going to follow a loser. When it comes to choosing a savior, they won’t settle for just a human being.
“For you, a wig is better,” the agent said. “It’s got the level of consistent perfection we can trust. Getting out of helicopters, the wash of the prop, every minute in public, you can’t control how real hair is going to look.”
How the agent explained his plan to me was, we weren’t targeting the smartest people in the world, just the most.
He said, “Think of yourself from now on as a diet cola.”
He said, “Think of those young people out in the world struggling with outdated religions or with no religions, think of those people as your target market.”
People are looking for how to put everything together. They need a unified field theory that combines glamour and holiness, fashion and spirituality. People need to reconcile being good and being good-looking.
After day after day of no solid food, limited sleep, climbing thousands of stairs, and the agent yelling his ideas to me over and over, this all made perfect sense.
The music team was busy writing hymns even before I was under contract. The writing team was putting my autobiography to bed. The media team was doing press releases, merchandise licensing agreements, the skating shows: The Creedish Death Tragedy on Ice, the satellite hookups, tanning appointments. The image team has creative control on appearance. The writing team has control of every word that comes out of my mouth.
To cover the acne I got from cycling Laurabolin, I started wearing makeup. To cure the acne, someone on the support team got me a prescription for Retin-A.
For the hair loss, the support team was spritzing me with Rogaine.
Everything we did to fix me had side effects we had to fix.Then the fixes had side effects to fix and so on and so on.
Imagine a Cinderella story where the hero looks in the mirror and who’s looking back is a total stranger. Every word he says is written for him by a team of professionals. Everything he wears is chosen or designed by a team of designers.
Every minute of every day is planned by his publicist.
Maybe now you’re starting to get a picture.
Plus your hero is spiking drugs you can only buy in Sweden or Mexico so he can’t see down past his own jutting-out chest. He’s tanned and shaved and wigged and scheduled because people in Tucson, people in Seattle, or Chicago or Baton Rouge, don’t want an avatar with a hairy back.
It’s around floor number two hundred that you reach the highest state.
You’re gone anaerobic, you’re burning muscle instead of fat, but your mind is crystal-clear.
The truth is that all this was just part of the suicide process. Because tanning and steroids are only a problem if you plan to live a long time.
Because the only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn’t it just lie there and rot?
And if Christ had died from a barbiturate overdose, alone on the bathroom floor, would He be in Heaven?
This wasn’t a question of whether or not I was going to kill myself. This, this effort, this money and time, the writing team, the drugs, the diet, the agent, the flights of stairs going up to nowhere, all this was so I could off myself with everyone’s full attention.
This one time, the agent asked me where I saw myself in five years.
Dead, I told him. I see myself dead and rotting. Or ashes, I can see myself burned to ashes.
I had a loaded gun in my pocket, I remember. Just the two of us were standing in the back of a crowded, dark auditorium. I remember it was the night of my first big public appearance.
I see myself dead and in Hell, I said.
I remember I was planning to kill myself that night.
I told the agent, I figured I’d spend my first thousand years of Hell in some entry-level position, but after that I wanted to move into management. Be a real team player. Hell is going to see enormous growth in market share over the next millennium. I wanted to ride the crest.
The agent said that sounded pretty realistic.
We were smoking cigarettes, I remember. Down onstage, some local preacher was doing his opening act. Part of his warm-up was to get the audience hyperventilated. Loud singing does the job. Or chanting. According to the agent, when people shout this way or sing “Amazing Grace” at the top of their lungs, they breathe too much. People’s blood should be acid. When they hyperventilate the carbon dioxide level of their blood drops, and their blood become alkaline.
“Respiratory alkalosis,” he says.
People get light-headed. People fall down with their ears ringing, their fingers and toes go numb, they get chest pains, they sweat. This is supposed to be rapture. People thrash on the floor with their hands cramped into stiff claws.
This is what passes for ecstasy.
“People in the religion business call it ‘lobstering,’” the agent says. “They call it speaking in tongues.”
Repetitive motions add to the effect, and the opening act down onstage runs through the usual drills. The audience claps in unison. Long rows of people hold hands and sway together in their delirium. People do that rainbow hands.
Whoever invented this routine, the agent tells me, they pretty much run things in Hell.
I remember the corporate sponsor was SummerTime Old-Fashioned Instant Lemonade.
My cue is when the opening act calls me down onto the stage, my part of the show is putting a spell on everybody.
“A naturalistic trance state,” the agent says.
The agent takes a brown bottle out of his blazer pocket. He says, “Take a couple Endorphinols if you feel any emotion coming on.”
I tell him to give me a handful.
To get ready for tonight, staffers went and visited local people to give them free tickets to the show. The agent is telling me this for the hundredth time. The staffers ask to use the bathroom during their visit and jot down notes about anything they find in the medicine cabinet. According to the agent, the Reverend Jim Jones did this and it worked miracles for his People’s Temple.
Miracles probably isn’t the right word.
Up on the pulpit is a list of people I’ve never met and their life-threatening conditions.
Mrs. Steven Brandon, I just have to call out. Come down and have your failing kidneys touched by God.
Mr. William Doxy, come down and put your crippled heart in God’s hands.
Part of my training was how to press my fingers into somebody’s eyes hard and fast so the pressure registered on their optic nerve as a flash of white light.
“Divine light,” the agent says.
Part of my training was how to press my hands over somebody’s ears so hard they heard a buzzing noise I could tell them was the eternal Om.
“Go,” the agent says.
I’ve missed my cue.
Down onstage, the opening preacher is shouting Tender Branson into a microphone. The one, the only, the last survivor, the great Tender Branson.
The agent tells me, “Wait.” He plucks the cigarette out of my mouth and pushes me down the aisle. “Now, go,” he says.
All the hands reach out into the aisle to touch me. The spotlight’s so bright onstage in front of me. In the dark around me are the smiles of a thousand delirious people who think they love me. All I have to do is walk into the spotlight.
This is dying without the control issues.
The gun is heavy and banging my hip in my pants pocket.
This is having a family without being familiar. Having relations without being related.
Onstage, the spotlights are warm.
This is being loved without the risk of loving anyone in return.
I remember this was the perfect moment to die.
It wasn’t Heaven, but it was as close as I was ever going to get.
I raised my arms and people cheered. I lowered my arms and people were silent. The script was there on the podium for me to read. The typewritten list told me who out in the dark was suffering from what.
Everybody’s blood was alkaline. Everybody’s heart was there for the taking. This is how it felt to shoplift. This is how it felt to hear confessions over my crisis hotline. This is how I imagined sex.
With Fertility on my mind, I started to read the script:
We are all the divine products of creation.
We are each of us the fragments that make up something whole and beautiful.
Each time I paused, people would hold their breath.
The gift of life, I read from the script, is precious.
I put my hand on the gun loaded with bullets in my pocket.
The precious gift of life must be preserved no matter now painful and pointless it seemed. Peace, I told them, is a gift so perfect that only God should grant it. I told people, only God’s most selfish children would steal God’s greatest gift, His only gift greater than life. The gift of death.
This lesson is to the murderer, I said. This is to the suicide. This is to the abortionist. This is to the suffering and sick.
Only God has the right to surprise His children with death.
I had no idea what I was saying until it was too late. And maybe it was a coincidence, or maybe the agent knew what I had in mind when I’d asked him to get me some bullets and a gun, but what happened is the script really screwed up my whole plan. There was no way I could read this and then kill myself. It would just look so stupid.
So I never did kill myself.
The rest of the evening went as planned. People went home feeling saved, and I told myself I’d kill myself some other time. The moment was all wrong. I procrastinated, and timing was everything.
Besides.
Eternity was going to seem like forever.
With the crowds of smiling people smiling at me in the dark, me who spent my life cleaning bathrooms and mowing the lawn, I told myself, why rush anything?
I’d backslid before, I’d backslide again. Practice makes perfect.
If you could call it that.
I figured, a few more sins would help round out my resume.
This is the upside of already being eternally damned.
I figured, Hell could wait.
Before this plane goes down, before the flight recorder tape runs out, one of the things I want to apologize for is the Book of Very Common Prayer.
People need to know the Book of Very Common Prayerwas not my idea. Yes, it sold two hundred million copies, worldwide. It did. Yes, I let them put my name on it, but the book was the agent’s brainchild. Before that the book was the idea of some nobody on the writing team. Some copywriter trying to break into the big time, I forget.
What’s important is the book was not my idea.
What happened is one day, the agent comes up to me with that dancing light in his brown eyes that means a deal. According to my publicist, I’m booked solid. This is after we did that line of Bibles I was autographing in bookstores. We had a million plus feet of guaranteed shelf space in bookstores, and I was on tour.
“Don’t expect a book tour to be something fun,” the agent tells me.
The thing about book signings, the agent says, is they’re exactly the same as the last day of high school when everyone wants you to write in their high school annual, only a book tour can go on for the rest of your life.
According to my itinerary, I’m in a Denver warehouse signing stock when the agent pitches me on his idea for a weeny book of meditations people can use in their everyday lives. He sees this as a paperback of little prose poems. Fifty pages, tops. Little tributes to the environment, children, safe stuff. Mothers. Pandas. Topics that step on nobody’s toes. Common problems. We put my name on the spine, say I wrote it, run the product up a flagpole.
What else people need to know is I never saw the finished book until after the second press run, after it had sold more than fifty thousand copies. Already people weren’t not just a little pissed off, but all the fuss only upped sales.
What happened is one day I’m in the green room waiting to co-host some daytime television project. This is way fast forward, after the autographed Bible book tour. The idea here is if I co-host and enough people tune in, I’ll spin off with a vehicle of my own. So I’m in the green room trading toenail secrets with somebody, the actress Wendi Daniels or somebody, and she asks me to sign her copy of the book. The Book of Very Common Prayer.This is the first time I ever see a copy, I swear. On a stack of my own autographed Bibles, I swear.
According to Wendi Daniels, I can smooth out the swelling under my eyes by rubbing in a dab of hemorrhoid cream.
Then she hands it to me, the Book of Very Common Prayer,and my name is just so right there on the spine. Me, me, me. There I am.
There inside are the prayers people think I wrote:
The Prayer to Delay Orgasm
The Prayer to Lose Weight
The feeling, the way it feels when laboratory product-testing animals are ground up to make hot dogs, that’s how hurt I felt.
The Prayer to Stop Smoking
Our most Holy Father,
Take from me the choice You have given.
Assume control of my will and habits.
Wrest from me power over my own behavior.
May it be Your decision how I act.
May it be by Your hands, my every failing.
Then if I still smoke, may I accept that my smoking is
Your will.
Amen.
The Prayer to Remove Mildew Stains The Prayer to Prevent Hair Loss
God of ultimate stewardship,
Shepherd of thine flock,
As You would succor the least of Your charges,
As You would rescue the most lost of Your lambs,
Restore to me the full measure of my glory.
Preserve in me the remainder of my youth.
All of Creation is Yours to provide.
All of Creation is Yours to withhold.
God of limitless bounty,
Consider my suffering.
Amen.
The Prayer to Induce Erection
The Prayer to Maintain an Erection
The Prayer to Silence Barking Dogs
The Prayer to Silence Car Alarms
The way all this felt, I looked terrible on television. My spin-off television show, well, I had to kiss that goodbye. One minute after we were off the air, I was being all over the telephone long-distance to the agent in New York. Everything on my end of the conversation was furious.
All he cared about was the money.
“What’s a prayer?” he says. “It’s an incantation,” he says, and he’s yelling back at me over the phone. “It’s a way for people to focus their energy around a specific need. People need to get clear on a single intention and accomplish it.”
The Prayer to Prevent Parking Tickets
The Prayer to Stop Plumbing Leaks
“People pray to solve problems, and these are the honest-to-God problems that people worry about,” the agent’s still yelling at me.
The Prayer for Increased Vaginal Sensitivity
“A prayer is how the squeaky wheel gets greased,” he says. That’s how made out of cheese his heart is. “You pray to make your needs known.”
The Prayer Against Drivetrain Noise
The Prayer for a Parking Space
Oh, divine and merciful God,
History is without equal for how much I will adore
You, when You give me today, a place to park.
For You are the provider.
And You are the source.
From You all good is delivered.
Within You all is found.
In Your care will I find respite. With Your
guidance, will I find peace.
To stop, to rest, to idle, to park.
These are Yours to give me. This is what I ask.
Amen.
Seeing how I’m just about to die here, people need to know that my personal intention all along has been to serve the glory of God. Pretty much. Not that you can find this in our mission statement, but that’s my general overall plan. I want to at least make an effort. This new book just looked so not at all pious. So not even a little devout.
The Prayer Against Excessive Underarm Wetness
The Prayer for a Second Interview
The Prayer to Locate a Lost Contact Lens
Still, even Fertility says I’m way off base about the book. Fertility wanted a second volume.
It’s Fertility who says, some stadiums when I’m up front praising God, I’m the same as people wearing clothes printed with Mickey Mouse or Coca-Cola. I mean, it’s so easy. It’s not even a real choice. You can’t go wrong. Fertility says, praising God is just such a safe thing to do. You don’t even have to give it any thought.
“Be fruitful and multiply,” Fertility says to me. “Praise God. There’s no real risk. This is just our default setting.”
What saved the Book of Very Common Prayerwas, people were using every prayer. Some people were pissed off, mostly religious people who resented the competition, but by this point our cash now was down. Our total revenues were leveling off. It was market saturation. People had the prayers committed to memory. People were stuck in traffic reciting the Prayer to Make Traffic Move.Men were reciting the Prayer to Delay Orgasm,and it worked at least as well as multiplication tables. My best option seemed to be to just keep my mouth shut and smile.
Besides, the attendance figures were down at my personal appearances, this looked to be the beginning of the end. My Peoplemagazine cover was already three months behind me.
And there’s no such thing as Celebrity Outplacement.
You don’t see faded movie stars or whoever going back to community college for retraining. The only field left to me was doing the game show circuit, and I’m not that smart.
I’d peaked, and timing-wise, this looked like another good window to do my suicide, and I almost did. The pills were in my hand. That’s how close I came. I was planning to overdose on meta-testos-terone.
Then the agent calls on the telephone, loud, real loud, the way it sounds when a million screaming Christians are screaming your name in Kansas City, that’s the kind of excitement that’s in his voice.
Over the phone in my hotel room the agent tells me about the best booking of my career. It’s next week. It’s a thirty-second slot between a tennis shoe commercial and a national taco restaurant spot, prime time during sweeps week.
It amazes me to think those pills were almost in my mouth.
This is just so not boring anymore.
Network television, a million billion people watching, this would be the prime moment, my last chance to pull a gun and shoot myself with a decent audience share.
This would be such a totally not-ignored martyrdom.
“One catch,” the agent tells me over the phone. He’s shouting, “The catch is I told them you’d do a miracle.”
A miracle.
“Nothing too big. You don’t have to part the Red Sea or anything,” he says. “Turning water into wine would be enough, but remember, no miracle and they won’t run the spot.”
Enter Fertility Hollis back into my life in Spokane, Washington, where I’m eating pie and coffee, incognito in a Shari’s restaurant, when she comes in the front door and heads straight for my table. You can’t call Fertility Hollis anybody’s fairy godmother, but you might be surprised where she turns up.
But most times you wouldn’t.
Fertility with her old-colored gray eyes as bored as the ocean.
Fertility with her every exhale an exhausted sigh.
She’s the blase eye of the hurricane that’s the world around her.
Fertility with her arms and face hanging slack as some jaded survivor, some immortal, an Egyptian vampire after watching the million years of television repeats we call history, she slumps into the seat across from me being glad since I needed her for a miracle anyway.
This is back when I could still give my entourage the slip. I wasn’t a nobody yet, but I was on the cusp. Thanks to my media slump. My publicity doldrums.
The way Fertility slouches with her elbows on the table and her face propped in her hands, her bored-colored red hair hanging limp in her face, you’d guess she’s just arrived from some planet with not as much gravity as Earth. As if just being here, as skinny as she is she weighs eight hundred pounds.
How she’s dressed is just separates, slacks and a top, shoes, dragging a canvas tote bag. The air-conditioning is working, and you can smell her fabric softener, sweet and fake.
How she looks is watered-down.
How she looks is disappearing.
How she looks is erased.
“Don’t stress,” she says. “This is just me not wearing any makeup. I’m here on an assignment.”
Her job.
“Right,” she says. “My evil job.”
I ask, How’s my fish?
She says, “Fine.”
No way could meeting her here be a coincidence. She has to be following me.
“What you forget is I know everything,” Fertility says. She asks, “What time is it?”
I tell her, One fifty-three in the afternoon.
“In eleven minutes the waitress will bring you another piece of pie. Lemon meringue, this time. Later, only about sixty people will show up for your appearance tonight. Then, tomorrow morning, something called the Walker River Bridge will collapse in Shreveport. Wherever that is.”
I say she’s guessing.
“And,” she says and smirks, “you need a miracle. You need a miracle, bad.”
Maybe I do, I say. These days, who doesn’t need a miracle? How does she know so much?
“The same way I know,” she says and nods toward the other side of the dining room, “that waitress over there has cancer. I know the pie you’re eating will upset your stomach. Some movie theater in China will burn in a couple minutes, give or take what time it is in Asia. Right now in Finland, a skier is triggering an avalanche that will bury a dozen people.”
Fertility waves and the waitress with cancer is coming over.
Fertility leans across the table and says, “I know all this because I know everything.”
The waitress is young and with hair and teeth and everything, meaning nothing about her looks wrong or sick, and Fertility orders a chicken stir-fry with vegetables and sesame seeds. She asks, does it come with rice?
Spokane is still outside the windows. The buildings. The Spokane River. The sun we all have to share. A parking lot. Cigarette butts.
I ask, so why didn’t she warn the waitress?
“How would you react if a stranger told you that kind of news? It would just wreck her day,” Fertility says. “And all her personal drama would just hold up my order.”
It’s cherry pie I’m eating that’s going to upset my stomach. The power of suggestion.
“All you have to do is pay attention to the patterns,” Fertility says. “After you see all the patterns, you can extrapolate the future.”
According to Fertility Hollis, there is no chaos.
There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns.
If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself.
What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher. What we can’t understand we call nonsense. What we can’t read we call gibberish.
There is no free will.
There are no variables.
“There is only the inevitable,” Fertility says. “There’s only one future. You don’t have a choice.”
The bad news is we don’t have any control.
The good news is you can’t make any mistakes.
The waitress across the dining room looks young and pretty and doomed.
“I pay attention to the patterns,” Fertility says.
She says she can’t not pay attention.
“They’re in my dreams more and more every night,” she says. “Everything. It’s the same as reading a history book about the future, every night.”
So she knows everything.
“So I know you need a miracle to go on television with.”
What I need is a good prediction.
“That’s why I’m here,” she says and takes a fat daily planner book out of her tote bag. “Give me a time window. Give me a date for your prediction.”
I tell her, Any time during the week after next.
“How about a multiple-car accident,” she says, reading from her book.
I ask, How many cars?
“Sixteen cars,” she says. “Ten dead. Eight injured.”
Does she have anything flashier?
“How about a casino fire in Las Vegas,” she says. “Topless showgirls in big feather headdresses on fire, stuff like that.”
Any dead?
“No. Minor injuries. A lot of smoke damage, though.” .
Something bigger.
“A tanning salon explosion.”
Something dazzling.
“Rabies in a national park.”
Boring.
“Subway collision.”
She’s putting me to sleep.
“A fur activist strapped with bombs in Paris.”
Skip it.
“Oil tanker capsizes.”
Who cares about that stuff?
“Movie star miscarries.”
Great, I say. My public will think I’m a real monster when that comes true.
Fertility pages around in her daily planner.
“Geez, it’s summer,” she says. “We don’t have a lot of choices in disasters.”
I tell her to keep looking.
“Next week, Ho Ho the giant panda the National Zoo is trying to breed will pick up a venereal disease from a visiting panda.”
No way am I going to say that on television.
“How about a tuberculosis outbreak?”
Yawn.
“Freeway sniper?”
Yawn.
“Shark attack?”
She must really be scraping the bottom of the barrel.
“A broken racehorse leg?”
“A slashed painting in the Louvre?”
“A ruptured prime minister?”
“A fallen meteorite?”
“Infected frozen turkeys?”
“A forest fire?”
No, I tell her.
Too sad.
Too artsy.
Too political.
Too esoteric.
Too gross.
No appeal.
“A lava flow?” Fertility asks.
Too slow. No real drama. Mostly just property damage.
The problem is disaster movies have everybody expecting too much from nature.
The waitress brings the chicken stir-fry and my lemon meringue pie and fills our coffee cups. Then she smiles and goes off to die.
Fertility pages back and forth in her book.
In my guts, the cherry pie is putting up a fight. Spokane is outside. The air conditioning is inside. Nothing even looks like a pattern.
Fertility Hollis says, “How about killer bees?” I ask, Where? “Arriving in Dallas, Texas.” When?
“Next Sunday morning, at ten past eight.” A few? A swarm? How many? “Zillions.” I tell her, Perfect.
Fertility lets out a sigh and digs into her chicken stir-fry. “Shit,” she says, “That’s the one I knew you’d pick all along.”
So a zillion killer bees buzz into Dallas, Texas, at ten past eight on Sunday morning, right on schedule. This is despite the fact I only had a crummy fifteen percent market share of the television audience for my spot.
The next week, the network slots me for a full minute, and some heavy hitters, the drug companies, the car makers, the oil and tobacco conglomerates, are lining up as definite maybe sponsors if I can come up with an even bigger miracle.
For all the wrong reasons, the insurance companies are very interested.
Between now and next week, I’m on the road making weeknight appearances in Florida. It’s the Jacksonville-Tampa-Orlando-Miami circuit. It’s the Tender Branson Miracle Crusade. One night each.
My Miracle Minute, that’s what the agent and the network want to call it, well it takes about zero effort to produce. Someone points a camera at you with your hair combed and a tie around your neck, and you look somber and talk straight into the lens:
The Ipswich Point Lighthouse will topple tomorrow.
Next week, the Mannington Glacier in Alaska will collapse and capsize a cruise ship that’s sightseeing too close.
The week after that, mice carrying a deadly virus will turn up in Chicago, Tacoma, and Green Bay.
This is exactly the same as being a television newscaster, only before the fact.
The way I see the process happening is I’ll get Fertility to give me a couple dozen predictions at a time, and I’ll just tape a season’s worth of Miracle Minutes. With a year in the can, I’ll be free to make personal appearances, endorse products, sign books. Maybe do some consulting. Do cameo walk-ons in movies and television.
Don’t ask me when because I don’t remember, but somewhere along the way I keep forgetting to commit suicide.
If the publicist ever put killing myself on my schedule I’d be dead. Seven p.m., Thursday, drink drain cleaner. No problem. But what with the killer bees and the demands on my time, I keep stressing about what if I can’t find Fertility again. This, and my entourage is with me every step of the way. The team’s always dogging me, the publicist, the schedulers, the personal fitness trainer, the orthodontist, the dermatologist, the dietician.
The killer bees got less accomplished than you’d expect. They didn’t kill anybody, but they got a lot of attention. Now I needed an encore.
A collapsing stadium. A mining cave-in.
A train derailment.
The only moment I’m ever alone is when I go sit on the toilet, and even then I’m surrounded.
Fertility is nowhere.
In almost every public men’s room, there’s a hole chipped in the wall between one toilet stall and the next. This is chipped through solid wood an inch thick by somebody with just their fingernails. This is done over days or months at a time. You see these holes scratched through marble, through steel. As if someone in prison is trying to escape. The hole is only big enough to look though, or talk. Or put a finger through or a tongue or a penis, and escape just that little bit at a time.
What people call these openings is “glory holes.”
It’s the same as where you’d find a vein of gold.
Where you’d find glory.
I’m on a toilet in the Miami airport, and right at my elbow there’s the hole in the stall wall, and all around the hole are messages left by men who sat here before me.
John M was here 3/14/64.
Carl B was here Jan. 8, 1976.
Epitaphs.
Some of them are scratched here fresh. Some are covered up but scratched so deep they’re still readable under decades of paint.
Here are the shadows left behind by a thousand moments, a thousand moods, of needs traced here on the wall by men who are gone. Here is the record of their being here. Their visit. Their passing. Here’s what the caseworker would call a primary source document.
A history of the unacceptable.
Be here tonight for a free blow job. Saturday, June 18, 1973.
All this is scratched in the wall.
Here are words without pictures. Sex without names. Pictures without words. Scratched here is a naked woman with her long legs spread wide, her round staring breasts, her long flowing hair and no face.
Squirting huge teardrops toward her hairy vagina is a severed penis as big as a man.
Heaven, the words say, is an all-you-can-eat pussy buffet.
Heaven is getting fucked up the ass.
Go to Hell faggot.
Been there.
Go suck shit.
Done that.
These are only a few of the voices around me when a real voice, a woman’s voice, whispers, “You need another disaster, don’t you?”
The voice is coming through the hole, but when I look, all you can see are two lipsticked lips. Red lips, white teeth, a flash of wet tongue says, “I knew you’d be here. I know everything.”
Fertility.
At the hole now is a plain gray-colored eye made big with blue shadow and eyeliner and blinking lashes heavy with mascara. The pupil pulses large and then small. Then the mouth appears to say, “Don’t sweat it. Your plane will be delayed for another couple hours.”
On the wall next to the mouth it says, I suck and swallow.
Next to that it says, I only want to love her if she’d just give me the chance.
There’s a poem that starts, Warm inside you is the love … The rest of the poem is washed down the wall and erased by ejaculate.
The mouth says, “I’m here on an assignment.”
It must be her evil job.
“It’s my evil job,” she says. “It’s the heat.”
It’s not something we talk about.
She says, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Congratulations, I whisper. About the killer bees, I mean.
Scratched on the wall is, What do you call a Creedish girl who goes down?
Dead.
What do you call a Creedish fag who takes dick up the ass?
The mouth says, “You need another disaster, don’t you?”
More like fifteen or twenty, I whisper.
“No,” the mouth says. “You’re turning out just like every guy I’ve ever trusted,” she says. “You’re greedy.”
I just want to save people.
“You’re a greedy pig.”
I want to save people from disasters.
“You’re just a dog doing a trick.”
This is only so I can kill myself.
“I don’t want you dead.”
Why?
“Why what?”
Why does she want me alive? Is it because she likes me?
“No,” the mouth says. “I don’t hate you, but I need you.”
But she doesn’t not like me?
The mouth says, “Do you have any idea how boring it is to be me? To know everything? To see everything coming from a million miles away? It’s getting unbearable. And it’s not just me.”
The mouth says, “We’re all bored.”
The wall says, I fucked Sandy Moore.
All around that, ten others have scratched, Me too.
Someone else has scratched, Has anybody here not fucked Sandy Moore?
Next to that is scratched, I haven’t.
Next to that is scratched, Faggot.
“We all watch the same television programs,” the mouth says. “We all hear the same things on the radio, we all repeat the same talk to each other. There are no surprises left. There’s just more of the same. Reruns.”
Inside the hole, the red lips say, “We all grew up with the same television shows. It’s like we all have the same artificial memory implants. We remember almost none of our real childhoods, but we remember everything that happened to sitcom families. We have the same basic goals. We all have the same fears.”
The lips say, “The future is not bright.”
“Pretty soon, we’ll all have the same thoughts at the same time. We’ll be in perfect unison. Synchronized. United. Equal. Exact. The way ants are. Insectile. Sheep.”
Everything is so derivative.
A reference to a reference to a reference.
“The big question people ask isn’t ‘What’s the nature of existence?’” the mouth says. “The big question people ask is ‘What’s that from?’”
I listened at the hole the way I listened to people confess over the telephone, the way I listened at crypts for signs of life. I asked, so why does she need me?
“Because you grew up in a different world,” the mouth says.
“Because if anybody is going to surprise me, it’s going to be you. You’re not part of the mass culture, not yet. You’re my only hope of seeing anything new. You’re the magic prince that can break this spell of boredom. This trance of day-after-day sameness. Eventhere. Done that. You’re a control group of one.”
But no, I whisper, I’m not all that different.
“Yes, you are,” the mouth says. “And your staying different is my only hope.”
So give me some predictions.
“No.”
Why not?
“Because I’ll never see you again. The world of people will eat you up, and I’ll lose you. From now on, I’ll give you one prediction each week.”
How?
“This way,” the mouth says. “Just like right now. And don’t worry. I’ll find you.”
According to my itinerary, I’m in a dark television studio on a brown sofa, a 60/40 poly-wool blend by the feel of it, a broadloom weave, treated to resist stains and fading at the center of a dozen stage lights. My hair styled by. My clothes designed by. My jewelry provided by.
My autobiography says I’ve never been more joyful and fulfilled in my joy of living life every day to its fullest. The press releases say I’m taping a new television program, a half hour every late night when I’ll take calls from people needing advice. I’ll offer new perspectives. According to the press releases, every so often the show will include a new prediction. A disaster, an earthquake, tidal wave, rain of locusts could be headed your way, so you’d better tune in, just in case.