You're not just self-controlled.
You were castrated as a child.
The Genesis Campaign was a very iffy media event.
The quick fix was the agent decided to get me married.
The agent tells me this, riding in the limo one day.
Riding with us, the personal trainer tells me that tiny insulin needles are best because they don't snag against the inside of the vein. The publicist is there too, and she and the agent look out the tinted windows while the trainer sharpens a needle against the scratch pad of a matchbook and shoots me up with 50 milligrams of Laurabolin.
This doesn't not hurt, using insulin needles.
The thing about sex, the agent tells me, is no matter how much you crave it, you can forget. Back when he was a teenager, the agent developed an allergy to milk. He used to love milk, but he couldn't drink it. Years later, they developed lactose-free milk he can drink, but now he hates the taste of milk.
When he quit drinking alcohol because of a kidney problem, he thought he'd go crazy. Now he never thinks about having a drink.
To keep me from wrinkling the skin on my face, the team dermatologist has injected most of the muscles around my mouth and eyes with Botox, the botulinum toxin, to paralyze these muscles for the next six months.
With the peripheral paresthesia side effects of all my drug interactions, I can hardly feel my hands and feet. With the Botox injections, I can barely move my face. I can talk and smile, but only in a very limited way.
This is in the limo going to the plane going to the next stadium, God knows where. According to the agent, Seattle is just the general geographic area around the Kingdome. Detroit is the people who live around the Silverdome. We're never going to Houston, we're going to the Astrodome. The Superdome. The Mile High Stadium. RFK Stadium. Jack Murphy Stadium. Jacobs Field. Shea Stadium. Wrigley Field. All of these places have towns, but that doesn't matter.
The events coordinator is riding with us also, and gives me a list of names, applicants, women who want to marry me, and the agent gives me a list of questions to memorize. At the top of the page, the first question is:
"What woman in the Old Testament did God turn into a condiment?"
The events coordinator is planning a big romantic wedding on the fifty-yard line during Super Bowl halftime. The wedding colors will depend on which teams make it to the Super Bowl. The religion will depend on the bidding war, a very hush-hush bidding war going on for me to convert to Catholic or Jewish or Protestant now that the Creedish church is belly-up.
The second question on the list is:
"What woman in the Old Testament was eaten by dogs?"
The other option the agent is considering is that we avoid the middle man and found our own major religion. Establish our own brand recognition. Sell direct to the customer.
The third question on the list is:
"Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?"
In the limo, the six or seven of us sit facing each other on two bench seats with our knees mixed together between us.
According to the publicist, the wedding is set. A committee has already chosen a good nondenominational bride so my asking the questions will be a fake. The committee is in the limo with us. People are mixing drinks at the wet bar and passing them to each other. The bride is going to be the woman just hired as assistant .events coordinator. She's in the limo with us, sitting in the seat across from me, and she leans forward.
Hi, she says. And she's sure we'll be very happy together.
The agent says, we need a big miracle to do at the wedding.
The publicist says, the biggest.
The agent says I need to come up with the biggest miracle of my career.
With Fertility pissed at me, with my brother still at large, with the Laurabolin needled into my bloodstream, the dating game scheme for choosing a sacred vessel, the Genesis Project, the complete stranger here to marry and deflower me, and the pressure for me to commit suicide, I don't know what.
The undersecretary to the media coordinator says we're out of vodka. He's in the limo with us. We're out of white wine, too. We have loads of tonic water.
Everybody looks at me.
No matter how much I do, they still want more, better, faster, different, newer, bigger. Fertility was right.
And now the agent's telling me I need the biggest miracle of my career. He says, "You need to get to completion on this."
Amen, I tell him. No kidding.
People are always asking me if I can operate a toaster. Do I know what a lawn mower does?
Do I know what hair conditioner is for?
People don't want for me to act too worldly. They're looking for me to have a kind of Garden of Eden, pre-apple innocence. A kind of baby Jesus naivete. People ask, do I know how a television works?
No, I don't, but most people don't.
The truth is I wasn't a rocket scientist to begin with, and every day I'm losing ground. I'm not stupid, but I'm getting there. You can't live in the outside world all your adult life and not get the hang of things. I know how to work a can opener.
The hardest part of my being a famous celebrated celebrity religious leader is having to live down to people's expectations.
People ask, do I know what a hair dryer is for?
According to the agent, the secret to staying on top is to be non-threatening. Be nothing. Be a blank space people can fill in. Be a mirror. I'm the religious version of a lottery winner. America is full of rich and famous people, but I'm supposed to be that rare combination: celebrated and stupid, famous and humble, innocent and rich. You just live your humble life, people think, your Joan of Arc everyday life, your Virgin Mary life washing dishes, and one day your number will come up.
People ask, do I know what a chiropractor is?
People think sainthood is just something that happens to you. The whole process should be that easy. As if you can be Lana Turner at Schwab's drugstore when you're discovered. Maybe in the eleventh century you could be that passive. Nowadays there's laser resurfacing to remove those fine lines around your mouth before you tape your Christmas television special. Now we have chemical peels. Dermabrasion. Joan of Arc had it easy.
Nowadays, people are asking, do I know about checking accounts?
People ask all the time why I'm not married. Do I have impure thoughts? Do I believe in God? Do I touch myself?
Do I know what a paper shredder does?
I don't know. I don't know. I have my doubts. I won't tell. And I have the agent to tell me all about paper shredders.
Around this part of the story, a copy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disordersshows up in the mail. Some clerk on the incoming mail team directs it to an assistant media interface director who hands it off to a low-level publicist who routes it to the daytime scheduler who slips it onto my breakfast tray in the hotel suite. Alongside my morning's 430 grams of complex carbohydrates and 600 grams of egg albumin protein, here's the dead caseworker's missing DSM.
The mail comes in ten sacks at a time. I have my own zip code.
Help me. Heal me. Save me. Feed me, the letters say.
Messiah. Savior. Leader, they call me.
Heretic. Blasphemer. Antichrist. Devil, they call me.
So I'm sitting up in bed with my breakfast tray across my lap, and I'm reading the manual. There's no return address on the package it came in, but inside the cover is the signature of the caseworker. It's weird how the name outlives the person, the signifier outlasts the signified, the symbol the symbolized. The same as the name carved into stone on each crypt at the Columbia Memorial Mausoleum, only the caseworker's name is left.
We feel so superior to the dead.