Chapter 22

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. Even there. 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.”