Someone pulls the cord for the next stop and rings the bell.

And Fertility twists around to say, "Shut up." She goes loud enough to bring people out from behind their newspapers, she says, "You're joking about suicide, about people that people loved that are dead. So just shut up."

It's really loud she says this. How bright her eyes are, gray but looking silver, it makes me wonder if Fertility isn't Creedish or if she's still peeved about her brother being dead. She's being such an overreaction.

The bus pulls to the curb right then, and the joker gets up in the aisle and starts out. The same as in church, we're sitting in the bench seats with the aisle down the middle of the bus. The guy waiting in line to get off, his pants are the baggy brown wool only a survivor would wear in this heat. The church costume suspenders crisscross his back. The brown wool jacket is folded over his arm. He shuffles up the aisle of the bus, he stops a minute while other people get off, and he turns and just touches the brim of his straw hat. He's familiar from somewhere, but it's been so long. His smell is sweat and wool and straw of a farm.

Where I know him from I can't remember. His voice, I remember. His voice, just his voice, over my shoulder, into my telephone.

May you die with all your work done.

His face is the face I see in the mirror.

Not even thinking, I say his name out loud.

Adam. Adam Branson.

The joker says, "Do I know you from somewhere?"

But I say, No.

The line moves a few steps, taking him farther away, and tie says, "Didn't we grow up together?"

And I say, No.

Standing at the door of the bus, he shouts, "Aren't you my brother?"

And I shout, No.

And he's gone.

Luke, Chapter Twenty-two, Verse Thirty-four:" ... thou shalt thrice deny that thou knowest me."

The bus starts back into traffic.

The only way to describe the guy is ugly. Geeky. A tad overweight. A loser. Pathetic at best. A victim. My big brother by three minutes. A Creedish.

According to her body language, the psychology textbooks would say Fertility is pissed off at me for laughing. Her legs are crossed at the knee and ankle. She looks out the window as if where we're at is any different.

According to my daily planner, right now I should be waxing the dining-room floor. There's the gutters to clean. There's a stain to clean up in the driveway where I work. I should be peeling the white asparagus for dinner tonight.

I shouldn't be out on a date with a lovely and angry Fertility Hollis even if I killed her brother and she has the secret hots for my voice on the phone at night but can't stand me in person.

The truth is, it doesn't matter what I should do. What any survivor should do. According to everything we grew up believing, we're corrupt and evil and unclean.

The air moving along downtown in the bus with us is hot and dense, mixed in with bright sunlight and burning gasoline. Flowers move by, planted in the ground, roses that should have a smell, red, yellow, orange all the way open but without effect. The lanes of traffic move along relentless as a conveyor belt.

Everything we can do is wrong as long as we're still alive.

The feeling is you have no control. The feeling is that we're being delivered.

It's not like we're traveling. We're being processed. It's more like we're just waiting. It's just a matter of time.

There's nothing I can do right, and my brother's out there to kill me.

The buildings of downtown start to pile up along the sidewalk. The traffic gets slow. Fertility lifts her arm to pull the cord, ding, and the bus stops to let us out in front of a department store. Artificial men and women are posed in the windows wearing clothes. Smiling. Laughing. Pretending to have a good time. I know just how they feel.

The clothes I'm wearing are just pants and a plaid shirt, but they belong to the man who I work for. All morning, I was upstairs trying on different combinations of clothes and going downstairs to where the caseworker was vacuuming lampshades to ask her what she thought.

There's a big clock above the doors into the store, and Fertility looks up. She says to me, "Hurry. We have to be there by two o'clock."

She takes my hand in her amazing cold hand, cold and dry even in the heat, and we push in through the doors, into the air conditioning and first floor with piles of what's there to buy on tables and inside glass cases, locked.

"We have to be on the fifth floor," Fertility says, her hand tight around mine and pulling. We charge up the escalators. Second floor, Men's. Third floor, Children's. Fourth floor, Junior Miss. Fifth floor, Women's.

That kind of recorded music comes out the vents in the ceiling. It's a Cha-Cha. Two slow steps and three fast. There's a crossover step and a women's under-arm turn. Fertility taught me.

This is less of a date than I thought. Clothes on racks, hanging on hangers. Salespeople walk around dressed really well and asking if they can help. None of this is anything I haven't seen before.

I ask, does she want to dance, here?

"Wait a minute," Fertility says. "Just wait."

What happens first is the smell of smoke.

"Back here," Fertility says, and leads me into the forest of long dresses for sale.

Then what happens is bells start ringing, and people head for the escalators, stepping down them the way they would ordinary stairs since the escalators are stopped. People are walking down the up escalator, and this looks as wrong as breaking a law. A saleslady empties out her register into a zippered bag, and looks across the floor at some people by the elevators, standing, looking up at the elevator numbers, holding big glossy shopping bags with handles and stuff folded inside.

The bells are still ringing. The smoke is thick enough for us to watch it roll across the lights in the ceiling.

"Don't use the elevators," the saleslady shouts. "When it's a fire, the elevators don't work. You'll have to use the stairs."

She rushes over to them through the maze of clothes on racks, the zippered bag tucked in her arm, quarterback-style, and she herds them through a door marked EXIT.

Then it's just Fertility and me, and the lights flicker and go out.

In the dark, the smoke and the feel of satin all around us, the rub of cut velvet, the cold of silk, the smooth of polished cotton, the bells ringing, all the dresses, the scratch of wool, the cold of Fertility's hand on mine, she says, "Don't worry."

The little green signs shine at us across the dark, saying EXIT.

The bells ringing.

"Just stay calm," Fertility says.

The bells ringing.

"Any minute now," Fertility says.

Bright orange flashes in the dark on the other side of the floor, breaking everything into strange shapes of orange against black. The dresses and pants between here and there are hanging black shapes of people with arms and legs that burst into flame.

The shapes of a thousand people burning and collapsing head toward us. The bells are ringing so loud you feel it, and only Fertility's cold hand is keeping me here.

"It's any second now," she says.

The heat's close enough to feel. The smoke's thick enough to taste. Not twenty feet away, the scarecrow shapes of women made by clothes on hangers start smoldering and slump to the floor. Breathing gets hard, and my eyes won't stay open.

And the bells ring.

My clothes feel ironed hot and dry against me.

The fire is that close.

Fertility says, "Isn't this great? Don't you just love it?"

I put my hand up and it makes a shadow of cool between my face and the rack of rayon burning next to us.

This is the way to tell about fabric content. Pull a few threads off a garment, and hold them over a flame. If they don't burn, it's wool. If they burn slowly, it's cotton. If they torch the way the slacks next to us are blazing, the fabric is synthetic. Polyester. Rayon. Nylon.