→ Chapter 47
Testing, testing. One, two, three. Testing, testing. One, two, three.
Maybe this is working. I don’t know. If you can even hear me, I don’t know.
But if you can hear me, listen. And if you’re listening, then what you’ve found is the story of everything that went wrong. This is what you’d call the flight recorder of Flight 2039. The black box, people call it, even though it’s orange, and on the inside is a loop of wire that’s the permanent record of all that’s left. What you’ve found is the story of what happened.
→ Chapter 46
The way I live, it’s hard enough to bread a veal cutlet. Some nights it’s different; it’s fish or chicken. But the minute my one hand is covered in raw egg and the other’s holding the meat someone is going to call me in trouble.
This is almost every night of my life now.
Tonight, a girl calls me from inside a pounding dance club. Her only words I can make out are “behind.”
She says, “asshole.”
She says what could be “muffin” or “nothing.” The fact of the matter is you can’t begin to fill in the blanks so I’m in the kitchen, alone and yelling to be heard over the dance mix wherever. She sounds young and worn out, so I ask if she’ll trust me. Is she tired of hurting? I ask if there’s only one way to end her pain, will she do it?
→ Chapter 45
The night before I left home, my big brother told me everything he knew about the outside world.
In the outside world, he said, women had the power to change the color of their hair. And their eyes. And their lips.
We were on the back porch in just the light from the kitchen window. My brother, Adam, was cutting my hair the way he cut wheat, gathering handfuls of it and cutting it with a straight razor at about the halfway point. He’d pinch my chin between his thumb and forefinger and force me to look at him straight on, his brown eyes darting back and forth between each of my sideburns.
→ Chapter 44
Part of my job is to preview the menu for a dinner party tonight. This means taking a bus from the house where I work to another big house, and asking some strange cook what they expect everybody to eat. Who I work for doesn’t like surprises, so part of my job is telling my employers ahead of time if tonight they’ll be asked to eat something difficult like a lobster or an artichoke. If there’s anything threatening on the menu, I have to teach them how to eat it right.
This is what I do for a living.
The house where I clean, the man and woman who live here are never around. That’s just the kind of jobs they have. only details I know about them are from cleaning what they own. All I can figure out is from picking up after them. Cleaning up their little messes, day after day. Rewinding their videotapes: Full Service Anal Escorts The giant breasts of Letha*** Weapons. The adventures of little Sinderella.
→ Chapter 43
According to my daily planner, I’m trying to keep my balance. I’m up at the top of a ladder with my arms full of fake flowers: roses, daisies, delphiniums, stock. I’m trying to keep from falling, my toes curled up tight in my shoes. I’m collecting another polyester bouquet, an obituary from last week all folded up in my shirt pocket.
The man I killed last week is around here somewhere. What’s left of him. The one with the shotgun under his chin, sitting alone in his empty apartment, asking over the phone for me to give him just one good reason not to pull the trigger, I’m sure enough going to find him. Trevor Hollis.
→ Chapter 42
Her name was Fertility Hollis. That’s her full name, no kidding, and she’s what I really want to share about the next day with my caseworker.
It’s part of my terms of observation, I have to meet with my caseworker for one hour, once a week. In exchange, I keep getting housing vouchers. The program makes me eligible for subsidized housing. Free government cheese, powdered milk, honey, and butter. Free job placement. These are just a few of the perks you get in the Federal Survivor Retention Program. My dodgy little apartment and surplus cheese.
→ Chapter 41
Before it’s too late, before we get too close to my plane crash, I need to explain about my name. Tender Branson. It’s not really a name. It’s more of a rank. It’s the same as somebody in another culture naming a child Lieutenant Smith or Bishop Jones. Or Governor Brown. Or Doctor Moore. Sheriff Peterson.
→ Chapter 40
Tonight, the calls come the same as every night. Outside’s a full moon. People are ready to die for their bad grades in school. Their family upsets. Their boyfriend problems. Their dodgy little jobs. This is while I’m trying to butterfly a couple of stolen lamb chops.
People are calling long-distance with the operator asking if I’ll accept the charges for a collect cry for attention from John Doe.
→ Chapter 39
About ten years ago I had my first one-on-one session with my caseworker, who’s a real person with a name and an office but I don’t want to get her in trouble. She has her own set of problems. She has a degree in social work. She’s thirty-five years old and can’t keep a boyfriend. Ten years ago she was twenty-five and just out of college and she was swamped with collecting the clients assigned to her as part of the federal government’s brand-new Survivor Retention Program.
→ Chapter 38
Part of my job is gardening, so I spray everything with twice the recommended strength of poison, weeds and real plants alike. Then I straighten the beds of artificial salvia and hollyhocks. The look I’m after this season is a fake cottage garden. Last year, I did artificial French parterres. Before that was a Japanese garden of all plastic plants. All I have to do is yank all the flowers. Sort them, and stick them all back in the ground in a new pattern. Maintenance is a snap. Dull flowers get a little touch-up with red or yellow spray paint.
→ Chapter 37
It’s that night I start answering the phone again. This is after I’m so horny I have to go downtown and hunt for something to steal. This isn’t so much for the cash as to get off. It’s okay. The caseworker says it’s okay. It’s a sexual release, she tells me. It’s perfectly natural. You find what you want. You stalk it. You grab it and make it your own. After you’ve had it, you throw it away.
→ Chapter 36
There’s a way to polish chrome with club soda. To clean the ivory or bone handles on cutlery, rub them with lemon juice and salt. To get the shine off a suit, dampen the cloth with a weak mixture of water and ammonia, then iron with a damp pressing cloth.
→ Chapter 35
The sun wakes me up where I’m crouched next to the stove with a butcher knife in my fist. The way I feel, the idea of getting killed isn’t so bad. My back hurts. My eyes feel cut open with a razor. I get dressed, and I go to work.
I sit in the back of the bus so no one can sit behind me with a knife, a poison dart, a piano-wire garrote.
→ Chapter 34
The rumor was you had to squeeze a frog to death with your bare hand. You had to eat a live earthworm. To prove you could obey just as Abraham did when he tried to kill his son to make God happy, you had to cut off your little finger with an ax.
→ Chapter 33
On the bus on the way to our third date, Fertility and I are sitting in front of some guy when we overhear the temperature is eighty, ninety degrees, too hot for June anywhere, and the bus windows are open, with the smell of traffic making me a little sick. The vinyl seats are hot the way touching anything will feel in Hell, hot. The bus is Fertility’s idea for going downtown. On a date, she told me. Downtown. It’s the afternoon so only people without jobs or with night jobs or crazy people with Tourette’s Syndrome are going anywhere.
→ Chapter 32
There’s a gas station going to explode next week. There’s a pet store where all the canaries, their whole inventory of hundreds of canaries, will escape. Fertility has previewed all this in dream after dream. There’s a hotel where a water pipe is leaking right this moment. For weeks, the water has been dripping inside the walls, dissolving plaster, rotting wood, rusting metal, and at 3:04 next Tuesday afternoon, the mammoth crystal chandelier in the middle of the lobby ceiling will drop.
→ Chapter 31
Part of her doing suicide intervention is my caseworker has to mix me another gin and tonic. This is while I’m talking long-distance on the telephone. A producer for The Dawn Williams Show is holding on line two. All the lines are blinking blinking. Somebody from Barbara Walters is holding on line three. Top priority is my getting somebody to handle the buzz. The breakfast dishes are piled up in the sink not washing themselves.
→ 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.
→ 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.
→ Chapter 28
After just the first fifty flights of stairs, my breath won’t stay inside me long enough to do any good. My feet fly out behind me. My heart is jumping against the ribs it’s behind inside my chest. The insides of my mouth and tongue are thick and stuck together with dried-up spit.
Where I’m at is one of those stair climbing machines the agent has installed. You climb and climb forever and never get off the ground. You’re trapped in your hotel room. It’s the mystical sweat lodge experience of our time, the only sort of Indian vision quest we can schedule into our daily planner.
→ Chapter 27
It’s in the car coming from the airport the agent shows me his cure for cancer. It’s called ChemoSolv. It’s supposed to dissolve a tumor, he says and opens his briefcase to take out a brown prescription bottle with dark capsules inside.
This is jumping back a little ways to before I met the stair climbing machine, to my first face-to-face with the agent the night he picks me up at the airport in New York. Before he tells me I’m too fat to be famous yet. Before I’m a product being launched. It’s dark outside when my plane first lands in New York. Nothing’s too spectacular. It’s night, with the same moon as we have back home, and the agent’s just a regular man standing where I get off the plane, wearing glasses with his brown hair parted on one side.
→ Chapter 26
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.
→ Chapter 25
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.
→ Chapter 24
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 Prayer was 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.
→ 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.
→ 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.
→ Chapter 21
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.
→ Chapter 20
What else I want people to know before my plane crash is I didn’t dream up the idea for the PornFill.
The agent is always pushing paper in front of me and saying, sign this.
He tells me, sign here.
And here.
Here.
And here.
→ Chapter 19
Before this plane goes down or before the flight recorder tape runs out, some other mistakes I want to clean up
include the following:
The Peace of Mind television show
The Tender Branson Dashboard Statuette
The board game Bible Trivia. As if anything God says is trivial.
→ Chapter 18
People are always asking me if I can operate a toaster. Do I know what a lawn mower does?
Do I know what hair conditioner is for?
People don’t want for me to act too worldly. They’re looking for me to have a kind of Garden of Eden, pre-apple innocence. A kind of baby Jesus naivete. People ask, do I know how a television works?
No, I don’t, but most people don’t.
The truth is I wasn’t a rocket scientist to begin with, and every day I’m losing ground. I’m not stupid, but I’m getting there. You can’t live in the outside world all your adult life and not get the hang of things. I know how to work a can opener.
→ Chapter 17
From the toilet stalls on either side of my stall come moans and breathing. Sex or bowel movements, I can’t tell the difference. The stall I’m in has a hole in the partitions on each side of me, but I can’t look.
If Fertility is here yet, I don’t know.
If Fertility is here and sitting next to me, quiet until we’re alone, I’ll beg for my big miracle.
Next to the hole on my right is written, Here I sit all downhearted, tried to shit and only farted.
Next to that is written, Story of my life.
Next to the hole on my left is written, Show hard for hand job.
Next to that is written, Kiss my ass.
Next to that is written, With pleasure.
→ Chapter 16
At eleven o’clock the next morning, the agent is still alive.
The agent’s alive at eleven-ten and at eleven-fifteen.
The agent’s alive at eleven-thirty and eleven forty-five.
At eleven-fifty, the events coordinator chauffeurs me from the hotel to the stadium.
With everyone always around us, the coordinators and reps and managers, I can’t ask the agent if he’s brought a bottle of Truth, The Fragrance, and when he plans to sniff it next. I can’t just tell him not to sniff any cologne today. That it’s poison. That the brother I don’t have and that I’ve never seen has got into the agent’s luggage and set a trap. Every time I see the agent, every time he disappears into the bathroom or I have to turn my back for a minute, it could be the last time I see him.
→ Chapter 15
To do the job right, you take one sheet of the goldenrod paper and fold it around a sheet of the white paper. Slip a coupon inside the folded papers. Hold a sheet of merchandise stamps alongside the folded papers. Then fold a sheet of the letterhead paper around all of it, and stuff this into an envelope.
Stick the corresponding address label on the envelope, and you’ve earned three cents.
Do this thirty-three times, and you’ve earned almost a dollar.
Where we’re at tonight is Adam Branson’s idea.
The letter I’m folding starts:
→ Chapter 14
Imagine you live in a house only every day your house is in a different town.
We had three ways out of New Orleans Adam knew about. Adam took Fertility and me to a truck stop on the edge of the city and said to take our pick. The airports were being watched. The train and bus stations were staked out. We couldn’t all three of us hitchhike, and Fertility refused to drive all the way to Canada.
→ Chapter 13
Our second day on the road, my teeth feel dull and yellow. My muscles feel less toned. I can’t live my life as a brunette. I need some time, just a minute, just thirty seconds, under a spotlight.
No matter how much I try and hide this, bit by bit, I start to fall apart.
We’re in Dallas, Texas, considering half a Wilmington Villa with faux tile countertops and a bidet in the master bath. It has no master bedroom, but it has a laundry room with washer/dryer hookups. Of course, it has no water or power or phone. It has almond-colored appliances in the kitchen. There isn’t a fireplace, but the dining room has floor-length drapes.
→ Chapter 12
The next time I wake up, I’m delirious and Fertility is sitting on the edge of my bed, massaging cheap petroleum-based moisturizer into my chest and arms.
“Welcome back,” she says. “We almost thought you weren’t going to make it.”
Where am I?
Fertility looks around. “You’re in a Maplewood Chateau with the midrange interior package,” she says. “Seamless linoleum in the kitchen, no-wax vinyl floor covering in the two bathrooms. It’s got easy-clean patterned vinyl wallboard instead of Sheetrock, and this one is decorated in the blue-and-green Seaside theme.”
→ Chapter 11
Of course, we lose Fertility at a truck stop outside Denver, Colorado. Even I could see that coming. She sneaks off to get me some Chap Stick while the truck driver is out taking a leak. Adam and me are both asleep until we hear her screaming.
And of course she planned it this way.
→ Chapter 10
The night before we get home, I tell my big brother everything I can remember about the Creedish church district.
In the church district, we raised everything we ate. The wheat and eggs and the sheep and cattle. I remember we tended perfect orchards and caught sparkling rainbow trout in the river.
We’re on the back porch of a Casa Castile going sixty miles an hour through the Nebraska night down Interstate 80. A Casa Castile has cut-glass sconces on every wall and gold-plated fixtures in the bathroom, but no power or water. Everything is beautiful but none of it works.
→ Chapter 9
The Creedish church district is twenty thousand, five hundred and sixty acres, almost the entire valley at the headlands of the Flemming River, west-northwest of Grand Island, Nebraska. From Grand Island, it’s a four-hour car trip. Driving south from Sioux Falls, it’s a nine-hour trip.
That much of what I know is true.
The way Adam explained everything else, I still wonder about. Adam said the first step most cultures take to making you a slave is to castrate you. Eunuchs, they’re called. Just short of that, some cultures make it so you don’t enjoy sex so much. They cut off parts. Parts of the clitoris, Adam calls it. Or the foreskin. Then the sensitive parts of you, the parts that you’d enjoy the most, you feel less and less with those parts.
→ Chapter 8
In the beginning there’s nothing but dust. A fine white talcum powder hangs in the car, mixed with smoke.
The dust and smoke swirl in the air.
The only sound is the car engine dripping something, oil, antifreeze, gasoline.
Until Adam starts screaming.
The dust is from the air bags protecting us at our moment of impact. The air bags are collapsed slack and empty back onto the dashboard now, and as the dust settles, Adam is screaming and clutching his face. The blood coming from between his fingers is black against the talcum white coat.
→ Chapter 7
The cold shadow of the Creedish church monument falls over me all morning as I bury Adam Branson. Under the layers of obscenity, under the Hungry Butt Holes, under the Ravishing She-Males, I dig with my hands into the churchyard dirt. Bigger stones carved with willows and skulls are buried all around me. The epitaphs on them are about what you’d imagine.
→ Chapter 6
In Grand Island, we had a little son crippled with lupus so we could stay a couple days in the Ronald McDonald House there.
After that, we caught a ride in half a Parkwood Mansion headed west. This was nothing but four bedrooms, and we slept apart with two of them empty between us.
→ Chapter 5
The trip to Fertility’s bed is lined with streaked windows and peeling paint. Mildewed tile and rust stains. Everywhere along the way are clogged drains and scuff marks. Sagging curtains and snagged upholstery. All the stations of the cross.
This is after the man and woman I worked for were upstairs with Fertility doing God knows what.
→ Chapter 4
The next morning, Fertility is whispering on the telephone to someone. I wake up, and she’s dressed and out of bed asking, “Do you have an eight a.m. flight to Sydney?”
She’s saying, “One-way, please. A window seat if you have it. Do you take Visa?”
→ Chapter 3
The airport is full of FBI agents looking for Tender Branson, Mass Murderer. Tender Branson, False Prophet. Tender Branson, Super Bowl Despoiler. Tender Branson, who abandoned his lovely bride at the altar.
→ Chapter 2
Somewhere en route to Port Vila in the New Hebrides, for my last meal I serve dinner the way I’ve always dreamed.
→ Chapter 1
And so here is my confession. Testing, testing, one, two, three.
And according to Fertility, if I could only figure out how I could escape. I could escape being up here. I could escape the crash. I could escape being Tender Branson. I could escape the police. I could escape my past, my whole twisted, burning, miserable, snarled story of my life so far.
