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.

In her dream, there’s a rattle of lead crystal thingamabobs, then a spray of plaster dust. Some bracket will pop the head off a rusted bolt. In Fertility’s dream, the bolt head lands, plop, on the carpet next to an old man with luggage. He picks it up and turns it over in his palm, looking at the rust and the shining steel inside the stress fracture.
A woman pulling her luggage on wheels stops next to the man and asks if he’s waiting in line.
The old man says, “No.”
The woman says, “Thank you.”
A clerk at the desk hits a bell and says, “Front please!”
A bellhop steps forward.
At that moment the chandelier falls.
That’s how exact Fertility’s dreams get, and in each dream she looks for another detail. The woman is wearing a red suit, jacket and skirt with a Christian Dior gold chain belt. The old man has blue eyes. His hand holding the bolt head has a gold wedding band. The bellhop has a pierced ear, but he’s got the earring out.
Behind the desk clerk, Fertility says, there’s a complicated French Baroque clock inside a frou-frou case of gilded lead with seashells and dolphins supporting the clock dial. The time is 3:04 p.m.
Fertility told me all this with her eyes closed. Remembering it or making it up, I couldn’t tell.
I Thessalonians, Chapter Five, Verse Twenty:"Despise not prophesyings.”
The chandelier will blink out at the second it falls so everybody underneath will look up. What happens after that, she can’t say. She always wakes up. The dreams always end there, at the moment the chandelier falls or the plane crashes. Or the train derails. The lightning strikes. The earth quakes.
She’s started keeping a calendar of upcoming disasters. She shows it to me. I show her the daily planner book the people I work for keep. On tap for next week, she has a bakery explosion, the loose canaries, the gas station fire, the hotel chandelier.
Fertility says to take my pick. We’ll pack a lunch and make a real day out of it.
For next week, I have mowing the lawn, twice. Polishing the brass fireplace tool set. Checking the dates on everything in the freezer. Rotating the canned goods in the pantry. Buying the people I work for wedding anniversary gifts to give each other.
I say, Sure. Whatever she wants.
This was right after the firemen discovered us doing the Cha-Cha inside the burned-out fifth-floor women’s department without a mark on us. After they took our statements and made us sign insurance forms letting them off the hook, they escorted us down to the street. We’re back outside when I ask Fertility, Why?
Why doesn’t she call anybody and warn them before a disaster?
“Because nobody wants bad news,” she says and shrugs. “Trevor told people every time he had a dream, and it just got him in trouble.”
Nobody wanted to believe in a talent this incredible, she said. They’d accuse Trevor of being a terrorist or an arsonist.
A pyromaniac, according to the Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
In another century, they’d have accused him of being a warlock.
So Trevor killed himself.
With a little help from yours truly.
“So that’s why I don’t tell people anymore,” Fertility says. “Maybe if it was an orphanage that was going to burn down, maybe I’d tell, but these people killed my brother, so why should I do them any favors?”
The way I can save human lives here is to tell Fertility the truth, I killed her brother, but I don’t. We sit at the bus stop not talking until her bus is within sight. She writes me her phone number on a sales receipt she picks up off the ground. This is good for three-hundred-plus dollars if I take it back to the store and work my scam. Fertility says to pick a disaster and give her a call. The bus takes her away to wherever, to work, to dinner, to dream.
According to my daily planner, I’m dusting baseboards. I’m clipping hedges right now. I’m mowing the lawn. I’m detailing the cars. I should be ironing, but I know the caseworker is getting my work done.
According to the Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, I should go into a store and shoplift. I should go work off some pent-up sexual energy.
According to Fertility, I should pack a lunch to eat while we watch strangers get killed. I can picture us on a velvet love seat in the hotel lobby, sipping tea Tuesday afternoon in our front-row seat.
According to the Bible, I should be, I don’t know what.
According to Creedish church doctrine, I should be dead.
None of the above really catches my fancy so I just walk around downtown. Outside the commercial bakery there’s the smell of bread where in five days Fertility says, boom. In the back of the pet store, the hundreds of canaries flutter from side to side of their stinking crowded cage. Next week, they’ll all be free. Then what? I want to tell them, stay in the cage. There are better things than freedom. There are worse things than living a long bored life in some stranger’s house and then dying and going to canary heaven.
At the gas station Fertility says will explode, the attendants pump gas, happy enough, not unhappy, young, not knowing that next week they’ll be dead or unemployed depending on who works what shift.
It gets dark pretty fast.
Outside the hotel, in through the big plate glass lobby windows, the chandelier looms over victim after victim. A woman with a pug a on a leash. A family: mother, father, three little kids. The clock behind the desk says it’s still a long ways from 3:04 next Tuesday afternoon. It would be safe to stand there for days and days but not for one second too long.
You could go in past the doormen in their gold braid and tell the manager his chandelier was going to fall.
Everyone he loves will die.
Even he will die, someday.
God will come back to judge us.
All his sins will a him into Hell.
You can tell people the truth, but they’ll never believe you until the event. Until it’s too late. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble.
So you just walk home.
There’s dinner to start. There’s a shirt you need to iron for tomorrow. Shoes to shine. You have dishes to wash. New recipes to master.
There’s something called Wedding Soup that takes six pounds of bone marrow to make. Organ meats are big this year. The people I work for want to eat right on the cutting edge. Kidneys. Livers. Inflated pig bladders. The intermediate cow stomach stuffed with watercress and fennel, cud-style. They want animals stuffed with the most unlikely other animals, chickens stuffed with rabbit. Carp stuffed with ham. Goose stuffed with salmon.
There’s so much I need to get home and perfect.
To bard a steak, you cover it with strips of fat from some other animal to protect it while it cooks. This is what I’m up to when the phone rings.
Of course, it’s Fertility.
“You were right about that weird guy,” she says.
I ask, About what?
“That guy, Trevor’s boyfriend,” she says. “He really needs somebody. I took him out on a date like you wanted, and one of those cult people was on the bus with us. They had to be twin brothers. They looked that much alike.”
I say, maybe she’s wrong. Most of those cult people are dead. They were crazy and stupid and almost all of them are dead. It’s in the newspaper. Everything they believed in turned out to be wrong.
“The guy on the bus asked if they were related, and Trevor’s boyfriend said no.”
Then they weren’t related, I say. You’d have to recognize your own brother.
Fertility says, “That’s the sad part. He did recognize the guy. He even said a name, Brad or Tim or something.”
Adam.
I say, So how is that sad?
“Because it was such an obvious, pathetic denial,” she says. “It’s so obvious he’s trying to pass as a normal happy person. It was so sad I even gave him my phone number. I felt sorry for him. I mean I want to help him embrace his past. Besides,” Fertility says, “I have a feeling he’s headed for some terrible shit.”
Like what shit, I ask. What does she mean, shit?
“Misery,” she says. “It’s still pretty vague. Disasters. Pain. Mass murder. Don’t ask me how I know. It’s a long story.”
Her dreams. The gas station, the canaries, the hotel chandelier, and now me.
“Listen,” she says. “We still need to talk about us getting together, but not right now.”
Why?
“My evil job is getting a little thick right now, so if somebody called Dr. Ambrose calls to ask if you know Gwen, say you don’t know me. Tell him we never met, okay?”
Gwen?
I ask, Who’s Dr. Ambrose?
“That’s just his name,” Fertility says. Gwen says. “He’s not a real doctor, I don’t think. He’s more like my booking agent. This isn’t what I want to be doing, but I work on contract for him.”
I ask, what is it she does on contract?
“It’s nothing not legal. I have it all under control. Pretty much.”
What?
And she tells me, and the alarms and sirens start going off.
How I’m feeling is smaller and smaller.
The alarms and flashing lights and sirens are all around me.
How I’m feeling is less and less.

Here in the cockpit of Flight 2039, the first of the four engines has just flamed out. Where we’re at right here is the beginning of the end.