To be or not to be.

Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you reenlist.

If I let the agent make me famous that wasn't going to change anything important.

What do you call a Creedish who gets his own talk show?

Dead.

What do you call the Creedish who goes around in a limousine and eats steak?

Dead.

Whatever direction I go in, I really don't have anything to lose.

According to my daily planner I should burn zinc in the fireplace to clear the chimney of soot.

Outside the bathroom window, the sun is watching police workers with the caseworker zipped inside a rubber bag belted to a gurney they're wheeling between them down the driveway to an ambulance with the lights not on.

For a long time after I found her, I stood over the body drinking my strawberry daiquiri and just looking at her there, blue and facedown. You didn't have to be Fertility Hollis to see this coming from way back. Her black hair was poking out the red bandanna tied around her head. A little drool had dripped outside the corner of her dead mouth onto a brick. Her whole body looked covered in dead skin.

All along, you could've guessed this would happen. Someday it would happen to us all.

Behaving myself just was not going to work anymore. It was time to make trouble.

So I made another blender full of daiquiris and called the police and told them not to hurry, nobody here was going anywhere.

Then I called the agent. The truth is there's always been someone to tell me what to do. The church. The people who I work for. The caseworker. And I can't stand the idea of being alone. I can't bear the thought of being free.

The agent said to hold on and give my statement to the police. The second I could leave, he'd send a car. A limousine.

My black-and-white stickers are all over town still telling people:

Give Yourself, Your Life, Just One More Chance. Call Me for Help. Then my phone number.

Well, all those desperate people were on their own.

The limousine would take me to the airport, the agent said. The airplane would take me to New York. Already a team of people I'd never met, people in New York who knew nothing about me, were writing my autobiography. The agent said the first six chapters would be faxed to me in the limousine so I could commit my childhood to memory before I give any interviews.

I told the agent I already knew my childhood.

Over the phone he said, "This version's better."

Version?

"We'll have an even hotter version for the movie." The agent asks, "So who do you want to be you?"

I want to be me.

"In the movie, I mean."

I ask him to hold please. Already being famous was turning into less freedom and more of a schedule of decisions and task after task after task. The feeling isn't so great but it's familiar.

Then the police were at the front door and then they were inside the den with the dead caseworker, taking her picture with a camera from different angles and asking me to put down my drink so they could ask questions about the night before.

It's right then I locked myself in the bathroom and had what the psychology textbooks would call a quickie existential crisis.

The man who I work for calls from his restaurant bathroom about his hearts of palm salad, and my day is pretty much complete.

Live or die?

I come out the bathroom door past the police and go right to the phone. To the man who I work for, I tell him to use his salad fork. Skewer each heart. Tines down. Lift the heart to his mouth and suck out the juice. Then, place it in the breast pocket of his double-breasted, Brooks-Brothered. pin-striped suit jacket.

He says, "Got it." And my job in this house is finished.

My one hand is holding the telephone, and with my other I'm motioning for the police to put more rum in the next batch of daiquiris.

The agent tells me not to bother with any luggage. New York has a stylist already building a wardrobe of marketable all-cotton sackcloth-style religious sportswear they want me to promote.

Luggage reminds me of hotels reminds me of chandeliers reminds me of disasters reminds me of Fertility Hollis. She's the only thing I'm leaving behind. Only Fertility knows anything about me, even if she doesn't know much. Maybe she knows my future, but she doesn't know my past. Now nobody knows my past.

Except maybe Adam.

Between the two of them, they know more about my life than me.

According to my itinerary, the agent says, the car will be here in five minutes.

It's time to keep living.

It's time to reenlist.

In the limousine, there should be dark sunglasses. I want to be obviously incognito. I want black leather seats and tinted windows. I tell the agent, I want crowds at the airport chanting my name. I want more blender drinks. I want a personal fitness trainer. I want to lose fifteen pounds. I want my hair to be thicker. I want my nose to look smaller. Capped teeth. A cleft chin. High cheekbones. I want a manicure, and I want a tan.

I try to remember everything else Fertility doesn't like about I look.

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.

It's crazy, but you invest all your emotion in just this one tiny goldfish, even after six hundred and forty goldfish, and you can't just let the little thing starve to death.

I tell the flight attendant, I've got to go back, while she's fighting against my one hand that's holding her by the elbow.

An airplane is just so many rows of people sitting and all going in the same direction a long ways off the ground. Going to New York's a lot the way I imagine going to Heaven would be.

It's too late, the flight attendant says. Sir. This is a nonstop. Sir. Maybe after we land, she says, maybe I could call someone. Sir.

But there isn't anybody.

Nobody will understand.

Not the apartment manager.

Not the police.

The flight attendant yanks her elbow away. She gives me a look and moves up the aisle.

Everyone else I could call is dead.

So I call the only person who can help. I call the last person I want to talk to, and she picks up on the first ring.

An operator asks if she'd accept the charges, and somewhere hundreds of miles behind me Fertility said yes.

I said hi, and she said hi. She doesn't sound at all surprised.

She asked, "Why weren't you at Trevor's crypt today? We had a date."

I forgot, I say. My whole life is about forgetting. It's my most valuable job skill.

It's my fish, I say. It's going to die if nobody feeds it. Maybe this doesn't sound important to her, but that fish means the whole world to me. Right now, that fish is the only thing I care about, and Fertility needs to go there and feed it, or better yet, take it home to live with her.

"Yeah," she says. "Sure. Your fish."

Yes. And it needs to be fed every day. There's the kind of food it likes best next to the fish bowl on my fridge, and I give her the address.

She says, "Enjoy going off to become a big international spiritual leader."

We're talking from farther and farther away as the plane takes me east. The sample chapters of my autobiography are on the seat next to me, and they're a complete shock.

I ask, how did she know?

She says, "I know a lot more than you give me credit for."