Chapter 23

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.”