Chapter 29

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.”