I look around for a tissue or a crotchless underwear to wipe the blood off my hands.

Looking up, Fertility says, "Wow, the way the shadow of that Creedish death monument thing is falling across Adam's grave is so symbolic."

The three hours I've been burying Adam is the longest I've ever been out of a job. Now Fertility Hollis is here to tell me what to do. My new job is following her.

Fertility turns to gaze around the horizon and says, "This is so totally The Valley of the Shadow of Death here." She says, "You sure picked the right place to smash in your brother's skull. It's so totally Cain and Abel I can't stand it."

I killed my brother.

I killed her brother.

Adam Branson.

Trevor Hollis.

You can't trust me around anybody's brother with a telephone or a rock.

Fertility puts a hand in her shoulder bag and says, "You want some Red Ropes licorice?"

I hold out my hands covered with dried blood.

She says, "I guess not."

She looks back over her shoulder at the taxi, idling, and she waves. An arm comes out the driver's window and waves back.

To me she says, "Let me put this in a nutshell. Adam and Trevor both pretty much killed themselves."

She tells me, Trevor killed himself because his life had no more surprises, no more adventure. He was terminally ill. He was dying of boredom. The only mystery left was death.

Adam wanted to die because he knew the way he'd been trained, he could never be anything but a Creedish. Adam killed off the surviving Creedish because he knew that an old culture of slaves couldn't found a new culture of free men. Like Moses leading the tribes of Israel around in the desert for a generation, Adam wanted me to survive, but not my slave mind-set.

Fertility says, "You didn't kill my brother."

Fertility says, "And you didn't kill your brother, either. What you did was more like what they call assisted suicide."

Out of her shoulder bag, she takes some flowers, real flowers, a little bunch of fresh roses and carnations. Red roses and white carnations all tied together. "Check it out," she says and crouches down to put them on the magazines where Adam is buried.

"Here's another big symbol," she says, still crouched and looking up at me. "These flowers will be rotten in a couple hours. Birds will crap on them. The smoke here will make them stink, and tomorrow a bulldozer will probably run over them, but for right now they are so beautiful."

She's such a thoughtful and endearing character.

"Yeah," she says, "I know."

Fertility gets to her feet and grabs me on a clean part of my arm, a part not crusted with dried blood, and she starts walking me toward the cab.

"We can be jaded and heartless later, when it's not costing me so much money," she says.

On our way back to the taxi, she says the whole nation is in an uproar over how I wrecked the Super Bowl. No way can we take a plane or bus anywhere. The newspapers are calling me the Antichrist. The Creedish mass murderer. The value of Tender Branson merchandise is through the roof, but for all the wrong reasons. All the world's major religions, the Catholics and Jews and Baptists and whatall, are saying, We told you so.

Before we get to the taxi, I hide my bloody hands in my pockets. The gun sticks to my trigger finger.

Fertility opens a back door of the taxi and gets me inside. Then she goes around and gets in the other side.

She smiles at the driver in the rearview mirror and says, "Back to Grand Island, I guess."

The taxi meter says seven hundred eighty dollars.

The driver looks at me in the rearview mirror and says, "Your mama throw out your favorite jerk-off magazine?" He says, "This place goes on forever. If you lose something, no way are you going to find it here."

Fertility whispers, "Don't let him get to you."

The driver is a chronic drunk, she whispers. She plans to pay with her charge card because he'll be dead two days from now in an accident. He'll never get the chance to send in the charge.

As the sun comes up to noon, the shadow of the concrete pylon is getting smaller by the minute.

I ask, How is my fish doing?

"Oh, geez," she says. "Your fish."

The taxi is bumping and rolling back toward the outside world.

Nothing should hurt by now, but I don't want to hear this.

"Your fish, I'm really sorry," Fertility says. "It just died."

Fish number six hundred and forty-one.

I ask, Did it feel any pain?

Fertility says, "I don't think so."

I ask, Did you forget to feed it?

"No."

I ask, Then what happened?

Fertility says, "I don't know. One day it was just dead."

There was no reason.

It didn't mean anything.

This wasn't any big political gesture.

It just died.

It was just a damn fucking fish is all but it's everything I had. Beloved fish.

And after everything that's happened, this should be easy to hear. Cherished fish.

But sitting there in the back of the cab, the gun in my hand, my hands in my pockets, I start to cry.

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.

In Denver, we had a little girl with polio so we could stay at another Ronald McDonald House and eat and not feel the world going by underneath us while we slept at night. In Ronald McDonald's House, we had to share a room, but it would have two beds.

Out of Denver, we caught a Topsail Estate Manor headed for Cheyenne. We were just drifting. This wasn't costing us any money.

We caught half a Sutton Place Townhome headed for we didn't know where, and we ended up in Billings, Montana.

We started playing house roulette.

We didn't wander into the truck stop diners to ask around about which house was headed where. Fertility and me, we just cut our way inside and sealed the way shut behind us.

We rode three days and nights sealed in half a Flamingo Lodge and only woke up when they were setting it on a foundation in Hamilton, Montana. We stepped out the back door just as the happy family who bought it was coming in the front.

All we had with us was Fertility's tote bag and Adam's gun.

We were lost in the desert.

Out of Missoula, Montana, we caught one-third of a Craftsman Manor going west on Interstate 90.

A sign went by saying, Spokane 300 miles.

Past Spokane, a sign went by saying, Seattle 200 miles.

In Seattle, we had a little boy with a hole in his heart.

In Tacoma, we had a little girl with no feeling in her arms and legs.

We told people the doctors didn't know what was wrong.

People told us to expect a miracle.

People with their real kids dead or dying of cancer told us God was good and kind.

We lived together as if we were married, but we almost never talked.

Headed south on Interstate 5 through Portland, Oregon, we rode inside half a Holly Hills Estate.

Before we feel ready, we're home home, back in the city where we met, standing on a curb. Our last house is just pulling away and we let it.

I still haven't told Fertility that Adam's last wish was she and I would have sex together.

As if she doesn't already know.

She knows. All those night I was passed out, it was all Adam talked to Fertility about. She and I have to have sex. To set me free and give me power. To prove to Fertility that sex could be more than just a wealthy middle-aged marketing consultant squirting his DNA into her.

But now there isn't any place either of us live here, not anymore. Her apartment and my apartment have both been rented out to other people, Fertility knows that.