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.

What happened was a policeman came to the front door of the house where I worked back then. Ten years ago, I was twenty-three years old, and this was still my first posting because I still worked really hard. I didn’t know any better. The yards around the house were always wet dark green and clipped so smooth they rolled out soft and perfect as a green mink coat. Nothing inside the house ever looked depreciated. When you’re twenty-three, you think you can keep up this level of performance forever.
A ways back from the policeman at the front door were two more police and the caseworker standing in the driveway by a police car.
You can’t understand how good my work felt up to the moment I opened that door. My whole life growing up, I’d been working toward this, toward baptism and getting placed in a job cleaning houses in the wicked outside world.
When the people I worked for had sent the church a donation for my first month’s work, I was beaming. I really believed I was helping create Heaven on Earth.
No matter how people stared at me, I wore the mandatory church costume everywhere, the hat, the baggy trousers with no pockets. The long-sleeved white shirt. No matter how hot it got, I wore the brown coat if I went out in public, no matter what silly things people said to me.
“How come you can wear shirts with buttons?” somebody at the hardware store would want to know.
Because I’m not Amish.
“Do you have to wear special secret undergarments?”
I think they were talking about Mormons.
“Isn’t it against your religion to live outside your colony?”
That sounds more like the Mennonites.
“I’ve never met a Hutterite before.”
You still haven’t.
It felt good to stand out from the world, just mysterious and pious. You weren’t a lantern under any basket. You stood out righteous as a sore thumb. You were the one holy man to keep God from crushing all of the Sodom and Gomorrah seething around you in the Valley Plaza Shopping Center.
You were everyone’s savior, whether they knew it or not. On a sweltering day in your heavy blah-colored wool, you were a martyr burning at the stake.
It felt even more wonderful to meet someone dressed the same as you. The brown pants or the brown dress, we all wore the same lumpy brown potato shoes. The two of you would come together in a quiet little pocket of conversation. There were so few things we were allowed to say to each other in the outside world. You could only say three or four things so you wanted to start slow and not hurry a word. Shopping was the only reason you were allowed out in public, and this was only if you were trusted with money.
If you met someone from the church district colony, you could say:
May you die*** in complete service in your lifetime.
You could say:
Praise and glory to the Lord for this day through which we labor.
You could say:
May our efforts bring all those around us to Heaven.
And you could say:
May you die with all your work complete.
That was the limit.
You’d see someone else looking righteous and hot in their church district costume, and you’d run through this little handful of conversation in your head. The two of you would rush together and you weren’t allowed to touch. No hugging. No handshaking. You would say one approved bit. She would say one. The two of you would go back and forth until each of you had said two lines. You kept your heads bowed, and you each went back to your task.
Those were just the smallest parts of the smallest part of all the rules you had to remember. Growing up inside the church district colony, half your studies were about church doctrine and rules. Half were about service. Service included gardening, etiquette, fabric care, cleaning, carpentry, sewing, animals, arithmetic, getting out stains, and tolerance.
Rules for the outside world included you had to write weekly letters of confession back to the elders in the church district. You had to refrain from eating candy. Drinking and smoking were forbidden. Present a clean and orderly appearance at all times. You could not indulge in broadcast forms of entertainment. You could not participate in sexual relations.
Luke, Chapter Twenty, Verse Thirty-five:"But they which shall be accounted worthy ... neither marry, nor are given in marriage.”
Elders of the Creedish church made celibacy sound as easy as choosing not to play baseball.
Just say no.
The other rules just went on and on. God forbid you should ever dance. Or eat refined sugar. Or sing. But the most important rule to remember was always:
If the members of the church district colony felt summoned by God, rejoice. When the apocalypse was imminent, celebrate, and all Creedish must deliver themselves unto God, amen.
And you had to follow.
It didn’t matter how far away. It didn’t matter how long you’d been working outside the district colony. Since listening to broadcast communication was a no-no, it might take years for all church members to find out about the Deliverance. Church doctrine named it that. The Deliverance. The flight to Egypt. The flight out of Egypt. People are all the time running from one place to another in the Bible.
You might not find out for years, but the moment you found out, you had to find a gun, drink some poison, drown, hang, slash, or jump.
You had to deliver yourself to Heaven.
This is why there were three police and the caseworker here to collect me.
The policeman said, “This isn’t going to be easy for you to hear,” and I knew I’d been left behind.
It was the apocalypse, the Deliverance, and despite all my work and all the money I’d earned toward our plan, Heaven on Earth just wasn’t going to happen.
Before I could think, the caseworker stepped forward and said, “We know what you’ve been programmed to do at this point. We’re prepared to hold you for observation to prevent that.”
Back when the church district colony first decreed the Deliverance, there were around fifteen hundred church district members scattered all over the country in job postings. A week later, there would be six hundred. A year later, four hundred.
Since then, even a couple of caseworkers have killed themselves.
The government found me and most of the other survivors by our letters of confession we sent back to the church district colony every month. We didn’t know we were writing and sending our wages to church elders who were already dead and in Heaven. We couldn’t know that caseworkers were reading our tally every month of how many times we swore or had unpure thoughts. Now there was nothing I could tell the caseworker that she didn’t already know.
Ten years have passed, and you never see surviving church members together. The survivors who see each other now, there’s nothing left between us except embarrassment and disgust. We’ve failed in our ultimate sacrament. Our shame is for ourselves. Our disgust is for each other. The survivors who still wear church costume do it to brag about their pain. Sackcloth and ashes. They couldn’t save themselves. They were weak. The rules are all gone, and it doesn’t matter. We’re all going overnight express delivery straight to Hell.
And I was weak.
So I took the trip downtown in the back of a police car, and sitting beside me, the caseworker said, “You were the innocent victim of a terrible oppressive cult, but we’re here to help you get back on your feet.”
The minutes were already taking me farther and farther away from what I should’ve done.
The caseworker said, “I understand you have a problem with masturbation. Would you like to talk about it?”
Every minute made it harder to do what I’d promised at my baptism. Shoot, cut, choke, bleed, or jump.
The world was passing by so fast outside the car my eyes went goofy.
The caseworker said, “Your life has been a miserable nightmare up to now, but you’re going to be okay. Are you hearing me? Be patient, and you’ll be just fine.”
This was almost ten years ago, and I’m still waiting.
The easy thing to do was give her the benefit of the doubt.
Jump ahead ten years, and not much has changed. Ten years of therapy, and I’m still in about the same place. This probably isn’t something we should celebrate.
We’re still together. Today’s our weekly session number five hundred and something, and today we’re in the blue guest bathroom. This is different from the green, white, yellow, or lavender guest bathrooms. This is how much money these people make. The caseworker’s sitting on the edge of the bathtub with her bare feet soaking in a few inches of warm water. Her shoes are on the closed lid of the toilet with her martini glass of grenadine, crushed ice, superfine sugar, and white rum. After every couple of questions she leans over with the ballpoint pen still in her hand and pinches the stem of the glass, holding the pen and glass crossed chop-stick style.
Her latest boyfriend is out of the picture, she told me.
God forbid she should offer to help clean.
She takes a drink. She puts the glass back while I answer. She writes on the yellow legal pad rested on her knees, asks another question, takes another drink. Her face looks paved under a layer of makeup.
Larry, Barry, Jerry, Terry, Gary, all her lost boyfriends run together. She says her lists of lost clients and lost boyfriends are running neck and neck.
This week, she says, we’ve hit a new low, one hundred and thirty-two survivors, nationwide, but the suicide rate is leveling off.
According to my daily planner, I’m scrubbing the grout between the six-sided little blue tiles on the floor. This is more than a trillion miles of grout. Laid end to end, just the grout in this bathroom would stretch to the moon and back, ten times, and all of it’s shitty with black mildew. The ammonia I dip a toothbrush in and scrub with, the way it smells mixed with her cigarette smoke, makes me tired and my heart pound.
And maybe I’m a little out of my head. The ammonia. The smoke. Fertility Hollis keeps calling me at home. I don’t dare answer the phone, but I know for sure it’s her.
“Have any strangers approached you, lately?” the caseworker asks.
She asks, “Have you gotten any phone calls you’d describe as threatening?”
The way the caseworker keeps asking me stuff with half her mouth clamped around her cigarette looks the way a dog would sit there drinking a pink martini and snarling at you. A cigarette, a sip, a question; breathing, drinking, and asking, she demonstrates all the basic applications for the human mouth.
She never used to smoke but more and more she tells me she can’t stand the idea of living to a ripe old age.
“Maybe if just one little part of my life was working out,” she tells a new cigarette in her hand before she lights up. Then something invisible somewhere starts to beep and beep and beep until she presses on her watch to stop it. She twists to reach her tote bag on the floor beside the toilet and gets a plastic bottle.
“Imipramine,” she says. “Sorry I can’t offer you one.”
Early on, the retention program tried to baby-sit all the survivors by giving them medication, Xanax, Prozac, Valium, imipramine. The plan crashed because too many clients tried to hoard their weekly prescriptions for three weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, depending on their body weight, and then downed their stash with a scotch chaser.
Even if the medication didn’t work for the clients, it’s been great for the caseworkers.
“Have you noticed anyone following you,” the caseworker asks, “anyone with a gun or a knife, at night or when you walk home from your bus stop?”
I scrub the cracks between the tiles from black to brown to white and ask, why is she asking me these things?
“No reason,” she says.
No, I say, I’m not threatened.
“I tried to call you on the phone this week, and there was never any answer,” she says. “What’s up?”
I tell her nothing’s up.
The real truth I’m not answering the phone is I don’t want to talk to Fertility Hollis until I can see her in person. Over the phone, she sounded so turned on sexwise I can’t risk it. Here I am competing with myself. I don’t want her falling in love with me as a voice on the phone while at the same time she’s trying to ditch me as a real person. It’s best if she never talks to me on the phone ever again. The living, breathing creepy geeky ugly me can’t stand up to her fantasy, so I have a plan, a terrible plan, to make her hate me and at the same time fall in love with me. The plan is to unseduce her. Unattract her.
“When you’re not in your apartment,” the caseworker asks, “does anyone else have access to the food you eat?”
Tomorrow is my next afternoon with Fertility Hollis at the mortuary, if she shows up. Then the first part of my plan will get off the ground.
The caseworker asks, “Have you gotten any threatening or unexplained mail?”
She asks, “Are you even listening to me?”
I ask, so what’s with all these questions? I say I’m going to drink this bottle of ammonia if she won’t tell me what’s going on.
The caseworker checks her watch. She taps the point of her pen on her tablet, and makes me wait for her to take a puff on her cigarette and blow out the smoke.
If she really wants to help me, I tell her and I hand her a toothbrush, then she needs to start scrubbing.
She puts down her drink and takes the toothbrush. She rubs back and forth over an inch of grout on the tiled wall beside her. She stops and looks, scrubs some more. She takes another look.
“Oh my gosh,” she says. “This is working. Look how clean it gets underneath.” With her feet still soaking in a few inches of bath water, the caseworker moves around to reach the wall better and scrubs some more. “God, I forgot how good it feels to get something accomplished.”
She doesn’t notice, but I’ve stopped. I sit back on my heels and watch her really attack the mildew.
“Listen to me,” she says, scrubbing in different directions to follow the grout around each little blue tile.
“None of this might be true,” she says, “but it’s for your own good. Things could be getting a tiny bit dangerous for you.”
She isn’t supposed to tell me, but some of the survivor suicides are looking a little suspect. Most of the suicides look fine. The majority are just normal run-of-the-mill everyday garden-variety suicides, she says, but in between are a few strange cases. In one case, a right-handed man shot himself with his left hand. In another case, a woman hung herself with a bathrobe tie, but one of her arms was dislocated and both her wrists were bruised.
“These weren’t the only cases,” the caseworker says, still scrubbing. “But there’s a pattern.”
At first, nobody in the program paid much attention, she says. Suicides are just suicides, especially in this population. Client suicides come in clusters. Stampedes. One or two will trigger as many as twenty. Lemmings.
The yellow legal pad on her lap slips to the floor, and she says, “Suicide is very contagious.”
The pattern of these new false suicides shows they’re more likely to occur when a cluster of natural suicides has ended.
I ask, what does she mean, false suicides?
I sneak her martini, and it has a weird mouthwash taste.
“Murders,” the caseworker says. “Someone is maybe killing survivors and making it look like suicide.”
When a cluster of real suicides dwindles out, the murders appear to happen to get the ball rolling again. After two or three murders that look like suicide, then suicide looks very fresh and attractive again and another dozen survivors get caught up in the trend and check out.
“It’s easy to imagine a killer, just one person or a hit squad of church members out to make sure you all get to Heaven together,” the caseworker says. “It sounds silly and paranoid, but it makes perfect sense.”
The Deliverance.
So why is she asking me all these questions?
“Because fewer and fewer survivors are killing themselves these days,” she says. “The natural trend of normal suicides is winding down. Whoever’s doing this is going to kill again to get the suicide rate back up. The pattern of murders is spread all over the country,” she says. She scrubs with her toothbrush. She dips it in the jar of ammonia. With her cigarette smoking in her one hand, she scrubs more. She says, “Except for the time they happen, there’s no real pattern. It’s men. It’s women. Young. Old. You need to be careful because you could be next.”
The only new person I’ve met in months is Fertility Hollis.
I ask the caseworker, her being a woman and all, How do women want a man to look? What does she look for in a sex partner?
She’s leaving behind a crooked trail of clean white grout.
“The other thing to remember,” the caseworker says, “is this might all have a natural explanation. It might be that nobody’s going to kill you. You might have absolutely nothing at all to be terrified about.”