They died together in one mass, holding each other by the hand so tight the FBI had to pry at their dead fingers to take them apart.
The agent is saying: Celebrity Superstar.
It's church doctrine that right now while the caseworker is gone, I should take a knife from the dishes in the sink and hack out my windpipe. I should spill my guts out onto the kitchen floor.
The agent says he'll handle the buzz with The Dawn Williams Shaw and Barbara Walters.
Among the deceased is a manila folder with my own name on it. In it, I write:
Survivor Retention Client Number Eighty-four has lost everyone he ever loved and everything that gave his life meaning. He is tired and sleeps most of the time. He has started drinking and smoking. He has no appetite. He seldom bathes and hasn't shaved in weeks.
Ten years ago, he was the hardworking salt of the earth. All he wanted was to go to Heaven. Sitting here today, everything that he worked for in the world is lost. All his external rules and controls are gone.
There is no Hell. There is no Heaven.
Still, just dawning on him is the idea that now anything is possible.
Now he wants everything.
I shut the folder and slip it back in the pile.
Just between him and me, the agent asks, is there any chance I'm going to off myself soon?
Staring up through my gin and tonic, the sunken faces of everybody from my past are dead in the government pictures under my drink. After moments like this, you're whole life is gravy.
I freshen my drink.
I light another cigarette.
Really, my life no longer has a point. I'm free. This and I stand to inherit twenty thousand acres of central Nebraska.
How this feels is just like ten years ago, when I rode with the police downtown. And once again, I am weak. And minute by minute I'm moving away from salvation and into the future.
Kill myself?
Thanks, I say. No, thanks.
Let's not rush anything here.
What I'm busy telling the police all morning is I left the caseworker still alive and scrubbing the brick around the fireplace in the den. The problem is the flue doesn't open right and smoke comes out the front. The people who I work for burn wet wood. What I tell the police is I'm innocent.
I didn't kill anybody.
According to my daily planner, I was supposed to scrub the brick yesterday.
This is how my day's gone so far.
First the police are hammering me about why did I kill my caseworker. Then the agent's calling to promise me the world. Fertility, Fertility, Fertility is out of the picture. Let's just say I'm not comfortable with how she earns a living. Plus, I'd just as soon not know about all the misery in my future.
So I lock myself in the bathroom to try to collate what's all happened. The downstairs green bathroom.
How my statement to the police goes is first the caseworker was dead facedown on the bricks in front of the fireplace in the den with her black capri pants still on and all bunched up around her ass from the way she's fallen there. Her white shirt's untucked with the sleeves rolled up to each elbow. The room's choking with deadly chlorine gas and the sponge is still squeezed in her dead fish white hand.
Before that, I was climbing in through the basement window we left unlocked so I could come and go without the television people dogging me with their cameras and paper cups of coffee and their professional concern as if they're getting paid enough to really care. As if this doesn't happen with another feature story for them to cover every two days. It does.
So I'm locked in the bathroom and now the police are outside the door to ask if I'm throwing up and say the man who I work for is on the speakerphone yelling at them for directions on how to eat a salad.
The police are asking, did the caseworker and I have a fight?
Look at my daily planner book for yesterday, I tell them. We never had time.
From starting work until eight in the morning, I was supposed to be caulking windows. The planner's open on the kitchen counter next to the speakerphone. I was supposed to be painting trim.
From eight until ten I was scrubbing the oil stains out in the driveway. From ten until lunch was for cutting back the hedges. Lunch until three was for sweeping porches. Three until five was for changing the water in all the flower arrangements. Five to seven was for scrubbing the fireplace brick.
Every last minute of my life has been preordained, and I'm sick and tired of it.
How this feels is I'm just another task in God's daily planner: the Italian Renaissance penciled in for right after the Dark Ages.
To everything there is a season.
For every trend, fad, phase. Turn, turn, turn.
Ecclesiastes, Chapter Three, Verses something through something.
The Information Age is scheduled immediately after the Industrial Revolution. Then the Postmodern Era, then the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Famine. Check. Pestilence. Check. War. Check. Death. Check. And between the big events, the earthquakes and tidal waves, God's got me squeezed in for a cameo appearance. Then maybe in thirty years, or maybe next year, God's daily planner has me finished.
Through the bathroom door, the police are asking me, did I hit her? The caseworker. Did I ever steal her case history files and her DSM? All her files are missing.
She drank, is what I tell them. She took psychotropic drugs. She mixed bleach with ammonia inside closed unventilated areas. I don't know how she spent her free time, but she talked about dating a wide variety of lowlifes.
And she had those files yesterday.
The last thing I said to her was you can't get brick clean without sandblasting it, but she was so sure muriatic acid would do the job. One of her boyfriends swore by it.
When I climbed in through the basement window this morning she was dead on the floor with chlorine gas and muriatic acid all over half the brick wall, and it was still as dirty as ever, only now she was part of the mess.
Between her black capri pants and her little white socks and red canvas shoes, her calf muscles are smooth and white with everything of her that used to be red turned blue, her lips, her cuticles, the rim of each eye.
The truth is I didn't kill the caseworker, but I'm glad someone did.
She was my only connection to the last ten years. She was the last thing holding me onto my past.
The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again.
The truth is you will be.
And the secret is, this will hurt less and less each time until you can't feel a thing.
Trust me on this.
With her lying there dead after our ten years of heart-to-heart talks every week, my first thought was, here's just something else for me to pick up.
The police are asking through the bathroom door, why did I make a batch of strawberry daiquiris before I called them?
Because we were out of raspberries.
Because, can't they see, it just does not matter. Time was not of the essence.
Think of this as valuable on-the-job training. Think of your life as a sick joke.
What do you call a caseworker who hates her job and loses every client?
Dead.
What do you call the police worker zipping her into a big rubber bag?
Dead.
What do you call the television anchor on camera in the front yard?
Dead.
It does not matter. The joke is we all have the same punch line.
The agent is holding on line one with what only looks like a whole new future to offer.
The man who I work for is shouting over the speakerphone that he's at a business lunch in some restaurant only he's calling from his cell phone in the toilet because he doesn't know how to eat the hearts of palm salad. As if this is really important.
Hey, I shout back. Me too.
Hiding in the toilet, I mean.
There's a terrible dark joy when the only person who knows all your secrets is finally dead. Your parents. Your doctor. Your therapist. Your caseworker. The sun's outside the bathroom window trying to show us we're all being stupid. All you have to do is look around.