"I have a place we can stay tonight," she says, "but I have to call ahead."

In the pay phone booth is one of my stickers from a million years before.

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

I call, and a recording tells me my number has been disconnected.

Right back at the recording, I say, No kidding.

Fertility calls the place she thinks we can crash. Into the phone she says, "My name is Fertility Hollis, and I was referred to you by Dr. Webster Ambrose."

It's her evil job.

It's the agent's closed loop of history. Fertility's being omniscient is looking pretty easy. Nothing new ever does happen.

"Yes, I have the address," she says. "I'm sorry about the short notice, but this is my first opening I've had. No," she says, "this is not tax-deductible. No," she says, "this is for all night, but there's a separate charge for each attempt. No," she says, "there's no cash discount."

She says, "We can work out the details in person."

Into the phone she says, "No, you don't have to tip me."

She snaps her fingers at me and mouths the word "pen." Then on the sticker for my crisis hotline she writes an address, repeating the number and street into the phone.

"Fine," she says. "Seven o'clock then. Goodbye." In the sky overhead, it's the same sun watching us make the same mistakes over and over. It's the same blue sky after everything we've been through. Nothing new. No surprises here.

The place she's taking me is the house I used to clean. The couple she's breeding for tonight are my speakerphone employers.

The trip to Fertility's bed is lined with streaked windows and peeling paint. Mildewed tile and rust stains. Everywhere along the way are clogged drains and scuff marks. Sagging curtains and snagged upholstery. All the stations of the cross.

This is after the man and woman I worked for were upstairs with Fertility doing God knows what.

This is after I've crawled in through the basement window Fertility knew would be unlocked. This is after I hid out among the fake flowers in the backyard, each of them stolen from a grave, and after Fertility rang the doorbell at seven sharp.

Dust coats everything in the kitchen. China coated with microwave leftovers fills the sink. The inside of the microwave is crusted with exploded food.

Bred and trained and sold little slave that I am, I go right to work cleaning. Just ask me how to get baked crud out of a microwave.

No, really, go ahead.

Ask me.

The secret is boiling a cup of water in the microwave for a few minutes. This loosens the crud so you can wipe it off.

Ask me how to get bloodstains off your hands.

The trick is to forget how fast these things can happen. Suicides. Accidents. Crimes of passion.

Fertility upstairs doing her job.

Just concentrate on the stain until your memory is completely erased. Practice really does make perfect. If you could call it that.

Ignore how it feels when the only real talent you have is for hiding the truth. You have a God-given knack for committing a terrible sin. You have a natural gift for denial. A blessing.

If you could call it that.

All evening I clean, and still I feel dirty.

Fertility told me the procedure would be over before midnight. They'd leave her in the green bedroom with her feet propped up on pillows. After the couple were asleep in their own room it would be safe for me to sneak upstairs.

The microwave clock says eleven-thirty.

I take my chances, and the trip to Fertility's bed is lined with wilted houseplants and tarnished doorknobs, fly specks and fingerprint smudges of newspaper ink. Drink rings and cigarette burns mar all the furniture. Cobwebs drift in every corner.

It's dark inside the green bedroom and out of the shadows Fertility says, "Shouldn't we be having sex now."

I say, I guess.

She says, "I hope you don't mind sloppy seconds."

I don't. I mean, it's what Adam would've wanted.

She says, "Do you have any rubbers?"

I say, I thought she was barren.

"Sure, I'm sterile," she says, "but I've had unprotected sex with a million guys. I could have some terrible fatal disease."

I say that would only be a problem if I wanted to live a lot longer.

Fertility says, "That's how I feel about my giant credit card debt."

So we have sex.

If you could call it that.

After waiting all my life, I get myself in her just half an inch and it's all over.

"Well," Fertility says, and pushes me away, "I hope that was really empowering for you."

She doesn't give me a second shot at making love.

If you could call it that.

A long time after she falls asleep, I watch her and wonder about her dreaming, if she's dreaming up some terrible new murder or suicide or disaster. And if she's dreaming it about me.

The next morning, Fertility is whispering on the telephone to someone. I wake up, and she's dressed and out of bed asking, "Do you have an eight a.m. flight to Sydney?"

She's saying, "One-way, please. A window seat if you have it. Do you take Visa?"

By the time she notices me watching her, she's hung up and putting on her shoes. She starts to put her daily planner into her tote bag but puts it back down on the dresser.

I ask, where is she going?

"Sydney."

But why?

"No reason."

I say, Tell me.

By now she's started lugging the tote bag toward the bedroom door. "Because I got my surprise," she says. "I got the damn surprise I wanted, and damn it, I don't want it. I don't want this!"

What?

"I'm pregnant."

But how does she know?

"I know everything!" she screams at me. "Well, I knew everything. I didn't know this. I didn't know I was going to have to bring a child into this miserable, boring, terrible world. A child who would inherit my gift for seeing the future and living a life of crushing ennui. A child who would never be surprised. I didn't see this coming."

So now what?

"So I'm going to Sydney, Australia."

But why?

"My mother killed herself. My brother killed himself. You figure it out."

But why Australia?

She's out the bedroom door now and dragging her tote toward the top of the stairs. I'd follow her, but I'm naked.

"Think of this," she yells back at me, "as a very radical abortion procedure."

A man steps out of the master-bedroom doorway dressed in a blue suit I've pressed a thousand times. In a voice I've heard on a thousand speakerphone calls, he asks me, "Are you Dr. Ambrose?"

By the time I've jumped into my clothes, Fertility is down the stairs and out the front door. Through the bedroom window, I watch her cross the lawn to a taxi.

Back out in the hallway, a woman wearing a silk blouse I've hand-washed a thousand times steps up to the man in the blue suit. The two of them frozen in the doorway of the master bedroom, the woman I used to work for shouts, "That's him! Remember? He used to work for us! That's the Antichrist!"

I tuck Fertility's daily planner under my arm and make a run for it. Still running, out the front door, down the street toward the bus stop, it takes me another minute to find today's date in the book, and there's the answer.

At 1:25 this afternoon, Flight 2039, nonstop from here to Sydney, will be hijacked by a maniac and crash somewhere in the Australian outback.

Ladies and gentlemen, as the last person aboard Flight 2039, out here above the huge Australian outback, it's my duty to inform you that our last engine has just flamed out.

Please fasten your seat belts as we begin our terminal descent into oblivion.

The airport is full of FBI agents looking for Tender Branson, Mass Murderer. Tender Branson, False Prophet. Tender Branson, Super Bowl Despoiler. Tender Branson, who abandoned his lovely bride at the altar.