Chapter 30

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. Trust me on this. With her lying there dead after our ten years of heart-to-heart talks every week, my first thought was, here’s just something else for me to pick up. The police are asking through the bathroom door, why did I make a batch of strawberry daiquiris before I called them? Because we were out of raspberries. Because, can’t they see, it just does not matter. Time was not of the essence. Think of this as valuable on-the-job training. Think of your life as a sick joke. What do you call a caseworker who hates her job and loses every client? Dead. What do you call the police worker zipping her into a big rubber bag? Dead. What do you call the television anchor on camera in the front yard? Dead. It does not matter. The joke is we all have the same punch line. The agent is holding on line one with what only looks like a whole new future to offer. The man who I work for is shouting over the speakerphone that he’s at a business lunch in some restaurant only he’s calling from his cell phone in the toilet because he doesn’t know how to eat the hearts of palm salad. As if this is really important. Hey, I shout back. Me too. Hiding in the toilet, I mean. There’s a terrible dark joy when the only person who knows all your secrets is finally dead. Your parents. Your doctor. Your therapist. Your caseworker. The sun’s outside the bathroom window trying to show us we’re all being stupid. All you have to do is look around. What they teach you in the church district colony is to desire nothing. Keep a mild and downcast countenance. Preserve a modest posture and demeanor. Speak in a simple and quiet tone. And just look how well their philosophy has turned out. Them dead. Me alive. The caseworker dead. Everybody dead. I rest my case. Here in the bathroom with me are razor blades. Here is iodine to drink. Here are sleeping pills to swallow. You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be. Every time you don’t throw yourself down the stairs, that’s a choice. Every time you don’t crash your car, you reenlist. If I let the agent make me famous that wasn’t going to change anything important. What do you call a Creedish who gets his own talk show? Dead. What do you call the Creedish who goes around in a limousine and eats steak? Dead. Whatever direction I go in, I really don’t have anything to lose. According to my daily planner I should burn zinc in the fireplace to clear the chimney of soot. Outside the bathroom window, the sun is watching police workers with the caseworker zipped inside a rubber bag belted to a gurney they’re wheeling between them down the driveway to an ambulance with the lights not on. For a long time after I found her, I stood over the body drinking my strawberry daiquiri and just looking at her there, blue and facedown. You didn’t have to be Fertility Hollis to see this coming from way back. Her black hair was poking out the red bandanna tied around her head. A little drool had dripped outside the corner of her dead mouth onto a brick. Her whole body looked covered in dead skin. All along, you could’ve guessed this would happen. Someday it would happen to us all. Behaving myself just was not going to work anymore. It was time to make trouble. So I made another blender full of daiquiris and called the police and told them not to hurry, nobody here was going anywhere. Then I called the agent. The truth is there’s always been someone to tell me what to do. The church. The people who I work for. The caseworker. And I can’t stand the idea of being alone. I can’t bear the thought of being free. The agent said to hold on and give my statement to the police. The second I could leave, he’d send a car. A limousine. My black-and-white stickers are all over town still telling people: Give Yourself, Your Life, Just One More Chance. Call Me for Help. Then my phone number. Well, all those desperate people were on their own. The limousine would take me to the airport, the agent said. The airplane would take me to New York. Already a team of people I’d never met, people in New York who knew nothing about me, were writing my autobiography. The agent said the first six chapters would be faxed to me in the limousine so I could commit my childhood to memory before I give any interviews. I told the agent I already knew my childhood. Over the phone he said, “This version’s better.” Version? “We’ll have an even hotter version for the movie.” The agent asks, “So who do you want to be you?” I want to be me. “In the movie, I mean.” I ask him to hold please. Already being famous was turning into less freedom and more of a schedule of decisions and task after task after task. The feeling isn’t so great but it’s familiar. Then the police were at the front door and then they were inside the den with the dead caseworker, taking her picture with a camera from different angles and asking me to put down my drink so they could ask questions about the night before. It’s right then I locked myself in the bathroom and had what the psychology textbooks would call a quickie existential crisis. The man who I work for calls from his restaurant bathroom about his hearts of palm salad, and my day is pretty much complete. Live or die? I come out the bathroom door past the police and go right to the phone. To the man who I work for, I tell him to use his salad fork. Skewer each heart. Tines down. Lift the heart to his mouth and suck out the juice. Then, place it in the breast pocket of his double-breasted, Brooks-Brothered. pin-striped suit jacket. He says, “Got it.” And my job in this house is finished. My one hand is holding the telephone, and with my other I’m motioning for the police to put more rum in the next batch of daiquiris. The agent tells me not to bother with any luggage. New York has a stylist already building a wardrobe of marketable all-cotton sackcloth-style religious sportswear they want me to promote. Luggage reminds me of hotels reminds me of chandeliers reminds me of disasters reminds me of Fertility Hollis. She’s the only thing I’m leaving behind. Only Fertility knows anything about me, even if she doesn’t know much. Maybe she knows my future, but she doesn’t know my past. Now nobody knows my past. Except maybe Adam. Between the two of them, they know more about my life than me. According to my itinerary, the agent says, the car will be here in five minutes. It’s time to keep living. It’s time to reenlist. In the limousine, there should be dark sunglasses. I want to be obviously incognito. I want black leather 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.