Larry, Barry, Jerry, Terry, Gary, all her lost boyfriends run together. She says her lists of lost clients and lost boyfriends are running neck and neck.
This week, she says, we've hit a new low, one hundred and thirty-two survivors, nationwide, but the suicide rate is leveling off.
According to my daily planner, I'm scrubbing the grout between the six-sided little blue tiles on the floor. This is more than a trillion miles of grout. Laid end to end, just the grout in this bathroom would stretch to the moon and back, ten times, and all of it's shitty with black mildew. The ammonia I dip a toothbrush in and scrub with, the way it smells mixed with her cigarette smoke, makes me tired and my heart pound.
And maybe I'm a little out of my head. The ammonia. The smoke. Fertility Hollis keeps calling me at home. I don't dare answer the phone, but I know for sure it's her.
"Have any strangers approached you, lately?" the caseworker asks.
She asks, "Have you gotten any phone calls you'd describe as threatening?"
The way the caseworker keeps asking me stuff with half her mouth clamped around her cigarette looks the way a dog would sit there drinking a pink martini and snarling at you. A cigarette, a sip, a question; breathing, drinking, and asking, she demonstrates all the basic applications for the human mouth.
She never used to smoke but more and more she tells me she can't stand the idea of living to a ripe old age.
"Maybe if just one little part of my life was working out," she tells a new cigarette in her hand before she lights up. Then something invisible somewhere starts to beep and beep and beep until she presses on her watch to stop it. She twists to reach her tote bag on the floor beside the toilet and gets a plastic bottle.
"Imipramine," she says. "Sorry I can't offer you one."
Early on, the retention program tried to baby-sit all the survivors by giving them medication, Xanax, Prozac, Valium, imipramine. The plan crashed because too many clients tried to hoard their weekly prescriptions for three weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, depending on their body weight, and then downed their stash with a scotch chaser.
Even if the medication didn't work for the clients, it's been great for the caseworkers.
"Have you noticed anyone following you," the caseworker asks, "anyone with a gun or a knife, at night or when you walk home from your bus stop?"
I scrub the cracks between the tiles from black to brown to white and ask, why is she asking me these things?
"No reason," she says.
No, I say, I'm not threatened.
"I tried to call you on the phone this week, and there was never any answer," she says. "What's up?"
I tell her nothing's up.
The real truth I'm not answering the phone is I don't want to talk to Fertility Hollis until I can see her in person. Over the phone, she sounded so turned on sexwise I can't risk it. Here I am competing with myself. I don't want her falling in love with me as a voice on the phone while at the same time she's trying to ditch me as a real person. It's best if she never talks to me on the phone ever again. The living, breathing creepy geeky ugly me can't stand up to her fantasy, so I have a plan, a terrible plan, to make her hate me and at the same time fall in love with me. The plan is to unseduce her. Unattract her.
"When you're not in your apartment," the caseworker asks, "does anyone else have access to the food you eat?"
Tomorrow is my next afternoon with Fertility Hollis at the mortuary, if she shows up. Then the first part of my plan will get off the ground.
The caseworker asks, "Have you gotten any threatening or unexplained mail?"
She asks, "Are you even listening to me?"
I ask, so what's with all these questions? I say I'm going to drink this bottle of ammonia if she won't tell me what's going on.
The caseworker checks her watch. She taps the point of her pen on her tablet, and makes me wait for her to take a puff on her cigarette and blow out the smoke.
If she really wants to help me, I tell her and I hand her a toothbrush, then she needs to start scrubbing.
She puts down her drink and takes the toothbrush. She rubs back and forth over an inch of grout on the tiled wall beside her. She stops and looks, scrubs some more. She takes another look.
"Oh my gosh," she says. "This is working. Look how clean it gets underneath." With her feet still soaking in a few inches of bath water, the caseworker moves around to reach the wall better and scrubs some more. "God, I forgot how good it feels to get something accomplished."
She doesn't notice, but I've stopped. I sit back on my heels and watch her really attack the mildew.
"Listen to me," she says, scrubbing in different directions to follow the grout around each little blue tile.
"None of this might be true," she says, "but it's for your own good. Things could be getting a tiny bit dangerous for you."
She isn't supposed to tell me, but some of the survivor suicides are looking a little suspect. Most of the suicides look fine. The majority are just normal run-of-the-mill everyday garden-variety suicides, she says, but in between are a few strange cases. In one case, a right-handed man shot himself with his left hand. In another case, a woman hung herself with a bathrobe tie, but one of her arms was dislocated and both her wrists were bruised.
"These weren't the only cases," the caseworker says, still scrubbing. "But there's a pattern."
At first, nobody in the program paid much attention, she says. Suicides are just suicides, especially in this population. Client suicides come in clusters. Stampedes. One or two will trigger as many as twenty. Lemmings.
The yellow legal pad on her lap slips to the floor, and she says, "Suicide is very contagious."
The pattern of these new false suicides shows they're more likely to occur when a cluster of natural suicides has ended.
I ask, what does she mean, false suicides?
I sneak her martini, and it has a weird mouthwash taste.
"Murders," the caseworker says. "Someone is maybe killing survivors and making it look like suicide."
When a cluster of real suicides dwindles out, the murders appear to happen to get the ball rolling again. After two or three murders that look like suicide, then suicide looks very fresh and attractive again and another dozen survivors get caught up in the trend and check out.
"It's easy to imagine a killer, just one person or a hit squad of church members out to make sure you all get to Heaven together," the caseworker says. "It sounds silly and paranoid, but it makes perfect sense."
The Deliverance.
So why is she asking me all these questions?
"Because fewer and fewer survivors are killing themselves these days," she says. "The natural trend of normal suicides is winding down. Whoever's doing this is going to kill again to get the suicide rate back up. The pattern of murders is spread all over the country," she says. She scrubs with her toothbrush. She dips it in the jar of ammonia. With her cigarette smoking in her one hand, she scrubs more. She says, "Except for the time they happen, there's no real pattern. It's men. It's women. Young. Old. You need to be careful because you could be next."
The only new person I've met in months is Fertility Hollis.
I ask the caseworker, her being a woman and all, How do women want a man to look? What does she look for in a sex partner?
She's leaving behind a crooked trail of clean white grout.
"The other thing to remember," the caseworker says, "is this might all have a natural explanation. It might be that nobody's going to kill you. You might have absolutely nothing at all to be terrified about."