Besides, the attendance figures were down at my personal appearances, this looked to be the beginning of the end. My People magazine cover was already three months behind me.
And there's no such thing as Celebrity Outplacement.
You don't see faded movie stars or whoever going back to community college for retraining. The only field left to me was doing the game show circuit, and I'm not that smart.
I'd peaked, and timing-wise, this looked like another good window to do my suicide, and I almost did. The pills were in my hand. That's how close I came. I was planning to overdose on meta-testos-terone.
Then the agent calls on the telephone, loud, real loud, the way it sounds when a million screaming Christians are screaming your name in Kansas City, that's the kind of excitement that's in his voice.
Over the phone in my hotel room the agent tells me about the best booking of my career. It's next week. It's a thirty-second slot between a tennis shoe commercial and a national taco restaurant spot, prime time during sweeps week.
It amazes me to think those pills were almost in my mouth.
This is just so not boring anymore.
Network television, a million billion people watching, this would be the prime moment, my last chance to pull a gun and shoot myself with a decent audience share.
This would be such a totally not-ignored martyrdom.
"One catch," the agent tells me over the phone. He's shouting, "The catch is I told them you'd do a miracle."
A miracle.
"Nothing too big. You don't have to part the Red Sea or anything," he says. "Turning water into wine would be enough, but remember, no miracle and they won't run the spot."
Enter Fertility Hollis back into my life in Spokane, Washington, where I'm eating pie and coffee, incognito in a Shari's restaurant, when she comes in the front door and heads straight for my table. You can't call Fertility Hollis anybody's fairy godmother, but you might be surprised where she turns up.
But most times you wouldn't.
Fertility with her old-colored gray eyes as bored as the ocean.
Fertility with her every exhale an exhausted sigh.
She's the blase eye of the hurricane that's the world around her.
Fertility with her arms and face hanging slack as some jaded survivor, some immortal, an Egyptian vampire after watching the million years of television repeats we call history, she slumps into the seat across from me being glad since I needed her for a miracle anyway.
This is back when I could still give my entourage the slip. I wasn't a nobody yet, but I was on the cusp. Thanks to my media slump. My publicity doldrums.
The way Fertility slouches with her elbows on the table and her face propped in her hands, her bored-colored red hair hanging limp in her face, you'd guess she's just arrived from some planet with not as much gravity as Earth. As if just being here, as skinny as she is she weighs eight hundred pounds.
How she's dressed is just separates, slacks and a top, shoes, dragging a canvas tote bag. The air-conditioning is working, and you can smell her fabric softener, sweet and fake.
How she looks is watered-down.
How she looks is disappearing.
How she looks is erased.
"Don't stress," she says. "This is just me not wearing any makeup. I'm here on an assignment."
Her job.
"Right," she says. "My evil job."
I ask, How's my fish?
She says, "Fine."
No way could meeting her here be a coincidence. She has to be following me.
"What you forget is I know everything," Fertility says. She asks, "What time is it?"
I tell her, One fifty-three in the afternoon.
"In eleven minutes the waitress will bring you another piece of pie. Lemon meringue, this time. Later, only about sixty people will show up for your appearance tonight. Then, tomorrow morning, something called the Walker River Bridge will collapse in Shreveport. Wherever that is."
I say she's guessing.
"And," she says and smirks, "you need a miracle. You need a miracle, bad."
Maybe I do, I say. These days, who doesn't need a miracle? How does she know so much?
"The same way I know," she says and nods toward the other side of the dining room, "that waitress over there has cancer. I know the pie you're eating will upset your stomach. Some movie theater in China will burn in a couple minutes, give or take what time it is in Asia. Right now in Finland, a skier is triggering an avalanche that will bury a dozen people."
Fertility waves and the waitress with cancer is coming over.
Fertility leans across the table and says, "I know all this because I know everything."
The waitress is young and with hair and teeth and everything, meaning nothing about her looks wrong or sick, and Fertility orders a chicken stir-fry with vegetables and sesame seeds. She asks, does it come with rice?
Spokane is still outside the windows. The buildings. The Spokane River. The sun we all have to share. A parking lot. Cigarette butts.
I ask, so why didn't she warn the waitress?
"How would you react if a stranger told you that kind of news? It would just wreck her day," Fertility says. "And all her personal drama would just hold up my order."
It's cherry pie I'm eating that's going to upset my stomach. The power of suggestion.
"All you have to do is pay attention to the patterns," Fertility says. "After you see all the patterns, you can extrapolate the future."
According to Fertility Hollis, there is no chaos.
There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns.
If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself.
What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. What we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish.
There is no free will.
There are no variables.
"There is only the inevitable," Fertility says. "There's only one future. You don't have a choice."
The bad news is we don't have any control.
The good news is you can't make any mistakes.
The waitress across the dining room looks young and pretty and doomed.
"I pay attention to the patterns," Fertility says.
She says she can't not pay attention.
"They're in my dreams more and more every night," she says. "Everything. It's the same as reading a history book about the future, every night."
So she knows everything.
"So I know you need a miracle to go on television with."
What I need is a good prediction.
"That's why I'm here," she says and takes a fat daily planner book out of her tote bag. "Give me a time window. Give me a date for your prediction."
I tell her, Any time during the week after next.
"How about a multiple-car accident," she says, reading from her book.
I ask, How many cars?
"Sixteen cars," she says. "Ten dead. Eight injured."
Does she have anything flashier?
"How about a casino fire in Las Vegas," she says. "Topless showgirls in big feather headdresses on fire, stuff like that."
Any dead?
"No. Minor injuries. A lot of smoke damage, though." .
Something bigger.
"A tanning salon explosion."