Dead, I told him. I see myself dead and rotting. Or ashes, I can see myself burned to ashes.
I had a loaded gun in my pocket, I remember. Just the two of us were standing in the back of a crowded, dark auditorium. I remember it was the night of my first big public appearance.
I see myself dead and in Hell, I said.
I remember I was planning to kill myself that night.
I told the agent, I figured I'd spend my first thousand years of Hell in some entry-level position, but after that I wanted to move into management. Be a real team player. Hell is going to see enormous growth in market share over the next millennium. I wanted to ride the crest.
The agent said that sounded pretty realistic.
We were smoking cigarettes, I remember. Down onstage, some local preacher was doing his opening act. Part of his warm-up was to get the audience hyperventilated. Loud singing does the job. Or chanting. According to the agent, when people shout this way or sing "Amazing Grace" at the top of their lungs, they breathe too much. People's blood should be acid. When they hyperventilate the carbon dioxide level of their blood drops, and their blood become alkaline.
"Respiratory alkalosis," he says.
People get light-headed. People fall down with their ears ringing, their fingers and toes go numb, they get chest pains, they sweat. This is supposed to be rapture. People thrash on the floor with their hands cramped into stiff claws.
This is what passes for ecstasy.
"People in the religion business call it 'lobstering,'" the agent says. "They call it speaking in tongues."
Repetitive motions add to the effect, and the opening act down onstage runs through the usual drills. The audience claps in unison. Long rows of people hold hands and sway together in their delirium. People do that rainbow hands.
Whoever invented this routine, the agent tells me, they pretty much run things in Hell.
I remember the corporate sponsor was SummerTime Old-Fashioned Instant Lemonade.
My cue is when the opening act calls me down onto the stage, my part of the show is putting a spell on everybody.
"A naturalistic trance state," the agent says.
The agent takes a brown bottle out of his blazer pocket. He says, "Take a couple Endorphinols if you feel any emotion coming on."
I tell him to give me a handful.
To get ready for tonight, staffers went and visited local people to give them free tickets to the show. The agent is telling me this for the hundredth time. The staffers ask to use the bathroom during their visit and jot down notes about anything they find in the medicine cabinet. According to the agent, the Reverend Jim Jones did this and it worked miracles for his People's Temple.
Miracles probably isn't the right word.
Up on the pulpit is a list of people I've never met and their life-threatening conditions.
Mrs. Steven Brandon, I just have to call out. Come down and have your failing kidneys touched by God.
Mr. William Doxy, come down and put your crippled heart in God's hands.
Part of my training was how to press my fingers into somebody's eyes hard and fast so the pressure registered on their optic nerve as a flash of white light.
"Divine light," the agent says.
Part of my training was how to press my hands over somebody's ears so hard they heard a buzzing noise I could tell them was the eternal Om.
"Go," the agent says.
I've missed my cue.
Down onstage, the opening preacher is shouting Tender Branson into a microphone. The one, the only, the last survivor, the great Tender Branson.
The agent tells me, "Wait." He plucks the cigarette out of my mouth and pushes me down the aisle. "Now, go," he says.
All the hands reach out into the aisle to touch me. The spotlight's so bright onstage in front of me. In the dark around me are the smiles of a thousand delirious people who think they love me. All I have to do is walk into the spotlight.
This is dying without the control issues.
The gun is heavy and banging my hip in my pants pocket.
This is having a family without being familiar. Having relations without being related.
Onstage, the spotlights are warm.
This is being loved without the risk of loving anyone in return.
I remember this was the perfect moment to die.
It wasn't Heaven, but it was as close as I was ever going to get.
I raised my arms and people cheered. I lowered my arms and people were silent. The script was there on the podium for me to read. The typewritten list told me who out in the dark was suffering from what.
Everybody's blood was alkaline. Everybody's heart was there for the taking. This is how it felt to shoplift. This is how it felt to hear confessions over my crisis hotline. This is how I imagined sex.
With Fertility on my mind, I started to read the script:
We are all the divine products of creation.
We are each of us the fragments that make up something whole and beautiful.
Each time I paused, people would hold their breath.
The gift of life, I read from the script, is precious.
I put my hand on the gun loaded with bullets in my pocket.
The precious gift of life must be preserved no matter now painful and pointless it seemed. Peace, I told them, is a gift so perfect that only God should grant it. I told people, only God's most selfish children would steal God's greatest gift, His only gift greater than life. The gift of death.
This lesson is to the murderer, I said. This is to the suicide. This is to the abortionist. This is to the suffering and sick.
Only God has the right to surprise His children with death.
I had no idea what I was saying until it was too late. And maybe it was a coincidence, or maybe the agent knew what I had in mind when I'd asked him to get me some bullets and a gun, but what happened is the script really screwed up my whole plan. There was no way I could read this and then kill myself. It would just look so stupid.
So I never did kill myself.
The rest of the evening went as planned. People went home feeling saved, and I told myself I'd kill myself some other time. The moment was all wrong. I procrastinated, and timing was everything.
Besides.
Eternity was going to seem like forever.
With the crowds of smiling people smiling at me in the dark, me who spent my life cleaning bathrooms and mowing the lawn, I told myself, why rush anything?
I'd backslid before, I'd backslide again. Practice makes perfect.
If you could call it that.
I figured, a few more sins would help round out my resume.
This is the upside of already being eternally damned.
I figured, Hell could wait.
Before this plane goes down, before the flight recorder tape runs out, one of the things I want to apologize for is the Book of Very Common Prayer.
People need to know the Book of Very Common Prayerwas not my idea. Yes, it sold two hundred million copies, worldwide. It did. Yes, I let them put my name on it, but the book was the agent's brainchild. Before that the book was the idea of some nobody on the writing team. Some copywriter trying to break into the big time, I forget.
What's important is the book was not my idea.
What happened is one day, the agent comes up to me with that dancing light in his brown eyes that means a deal. According to my publicist, I'm booked solid. This is after we did that line of Bibles I was autographing in bookstores. We had a million plus feet of guaranteed shelf space in bookstores, and I was on tour.
"Don't expect a book tour to be something fun," the agent tells me.
The thing about book signings, the agent says, is they're exactly the same as the last day of high school when everyone wants you to write in their high school annual, only a book tour can go on for the rest of your life.
According to my itinerary, I'm in a Denver warehouse signing stock when the agent pitches me on his idea for a weeny book of meditations people can use in their everyday lives. He sees this as a paperback of little prose poems. Fifty pages, tops. Little tributes to the environment, children, safe stuff. Mothers. Pandas. Topics that step on nobody's toes. Common problems. We put my name on the spine, say I wrote it, run the product up a flagpole.