The caseworker sighs and looks down at me reflected with my face wet with tears in her puddle of dirty scrub water on the floor. "Listen," she says, "I've got some real work to do here. Besides, the DSM is lost. I haven't seen it in a couple days."

She scrubs back and forth, saying, "Not that I miss it."

Okay, this has been a tough ten years. Almost all her clients are gone. She's stressed out. Burned out. No, incinerated. Cremated. She sees herself as a failure.

She's suffering from what's called Learned Helplessness.

"Besides," she says, scrubbing hard, here and there at the last spots where the vinyl is still intact, "I can't hold your hand forever. If you're going to kill yourself, I can't stop you, and it's not my fault. According to my records, you're perfectly happy and adjusted. We have the tests. There's empirical evidence to prove it."

The fumes in here make it so I have to sniff back my tears.

She says, "Kill yourself or don't kill yourself, but stop torturing me. I'm trying to move on with my life."

She says, "Every day in America people kill themselves. The problem isn't worse just because you know most of them."

She says, "Don't you think it's time you cut your own meat?"

The rumor was you had to squeeze a frog to death with your bare hand. You had to eat a live earthworm. To prove you could obey just as Abraham did when he tried to kill his son to make God happy, you had to cut off your little finger with an ax.

That was the rumor.

After that, you had to cut off someone else's little finger.

You never saw anybody after they were baptized so you couldn't tell if they still had a little finger. You couldn't ask them if they had had to squeeze the frog.

Right after you were baptized, you got on a truck and left the colony. You'd never see the colony again. The truck was headed out into the wicked outside world where they already had your first work assignment lined up for you. The big outside world with all its wonderful new sins, and the better you did on the tests, the better the job you'd get.

You could figure out what some of the tests were going to be.

The church elders told you right up front if you were too skinny or too fat for how tall you were. They set aside the whole year before your baptism for you to get yourself perfect. You were excused from work at home so you could go to special lessons all day. Bible lessons. Cleaning lessons. Etiquette, fabric care, and you know all the rest. If you were fat you ate to lose weight, and if you were too skinny you just ate.

That whole year before baptism, every tree, every friend, everything you saw had the halo around it of your knowing you'd never see it again.

By what you studied, you knew about most of the tests you'd get.

Beyond that, the rumor was there was more we didn't know would happen.

We knew by rumor that you'd be bare naked for part of the baptism. One church elder would put his hand on you and tell you to cough. Another elder would slide a finger up your anus.

Another church elder would follow along with you and write on a card how well you did.

You didn't know how you were supposed to study for a prostate exam.

We all knew the baptisms took place in the meeting house basement. The daughters went to baptism in the spring with only the church women in attendance. Sons went in the fall with only the men there to tell you to get up on the scale naked and be weighed or ask you to recite a chapter and verse from the Bible.

Job, Chapter Fourteen, Verse Five:"Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months are with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass."

And you had to recite it naked.

Psalm 101, Psalms of David, Verse Two:"I will behave myself wisely in a perfect way ... I will walk within my house with a perfect heart."

You had to know how to make the best dust cloths (soak rags in diluted turpentine, then hang them to dry). You had to figure how deep to set a six-foot-tall gatepost so it could support a five-foot-wide gate. Another church elder would blindfold you and give you cloth samples to feel, and you had to say which was cotton or wool or a poly-cotton blend.

You had to identify houseplants. Stains. Insects. Fix small appliances. Do elegant handwriting for invitations.

We guessed about the tests from what we had to study in school. Other parts came from sons who weren't too bright. Sometimes your father would tell you inside information so you might score a little higher and get a better job assignment instead of a lifetime of misery. Your friends would tell each other, and then everybody would know.

Nobody wanted to embarrass their family. And nobody wanted a lifetime of removing asbestos.

The church elders were going to stand you in one place and you'd have to read a chart at the far end of the meeting hall.

The church elders would give you a needle and thread and time how long you took to sew on a missing button.

We knew about what kind of jobs we were headed for in the wicked outside world from what the elders said to scare or inspire us. To make us work harder, they told us about wonderful jobs in gardens bigger than anything we could picture this side of Heaven. Some jobs were in palaces so enormous you'd forget you were indoors. These gardens were called amusement parks. The palaces, hotels.

To make us study even harder, they told us about jobs where you'd spend years pumping cesspools, burning offal, spraying poisons. Removing asbestos. There were jobs so terrible, they told us we'd be glad to run up and meet death halfway.

There were jobs so boring, you'd find ways to cripple yourself so you couldn't work.

So you memorized every minute of your last year in the church district colony.

Ecclesiastes, Chapter Ten, Verse Eighteen:"By much slothfulness the building decayeth; and through idleness of the hands the house droppeth through."Lamentations, Chapter Five, Verse Five:"Our necks are under persecution: we labour, and have no rest."

To keep bacon from curling, chill it a few minutes in the freezer before frying.

Rub the top of your meat loaf with an ice cube, and the loaf won't crack while it bakes.

To keep lace crisp, iron it between sheets of waxed paper.

We were kept busy learning. We had a million facts to remember. We memorized half the Old Testament.

We thought all this teaching was to make us smart.

What it did was make us stupid.

With all the little facts we learned, we never had the time to think. None of us ever considered what life would be like cleaning up after a stranger every day. Washing dishes all day. Feeding a stranger's children. Mowing a lawn. All day. Painting houses. Year after year. Ironing bedsheets.

Forever and ever.

Work without end.

We were all of us so excited about passing tests, we never looked beyond the night of the baptism.

We were all so worried about our worst fears, squeezing frogs, eating worms, poisons, asbestos, we never considered how boring life would be even if we succeeded and got a good job.

Washing dishes, forever.

Polishing silver, forever.

Mowing the lawn.

Repeat.

The night before the baptism, my brother Adam took me out on the back porch of our family's house and gave me a haircut. Every other family in the church district colony with a seventeen-year-old son was giving him the exact same haircut.

In the wicked outside world, they call this product standardization.

My brother told me not to smile, but to stand straight up and down and answer any questions in a clear voice.

In the outside world, they call this marketing.

My mother was putting my clothes together in a bag for me to take with me. We were all of us pretending to sleep that night.

In the wicked outside world, my brother told me, there were sins the church didn't know enough to forbid. I couldn't wait.

The next night was our baptism, and we did everything we'd expected. Then nothing else. Just when you were ready to hack off your little finger and the finger of the son next to you, nothing happened. After you'd been poked and felt and weighed and questioned about the Bible and housework, then they told you to get dressed.

You took your bag with your extra clothes inside, and you walked from the meeting house into a truck that was idling outside.

The truck drove out into the wicked outside world, into the night, and nobody you knew would ever see you again.

You never found out how high you scored.

Even if you knew you'd done well, that good feeling didn't last very long.

There was already a work assignment waiting for you.

God forbid you should ever get bored and want more.

It was church doctrine that the rest of your life would be the same work. The same being alone. Nothing would change. Every day. This was success. Here was the prize.

Mowing the lawn.

And mowing the lawn.

And mowing the lawn.

Repeat.

Joke.

On the bus on the way to our third date, Fertility and I are sitting in front of some guy when we overhear the temperature is eighty, ninety degrees, too hot for June anywhere, and the bus windows are open, with the smell of traffic making me a little sick. The vinyl seats are hot the way touching anything will feel in Hell, hot. The bus is Fertility's idea for going downtown. On a date, she told me. Downtown. It's the afternoon so only people without jobs or with night jobs or crazy people with Tourette's Syndrome are going anywhere.

Here's the date she has to take me on since she won't sleep with me and won't even kiss me, no way, no day.

Who's sitting behind us I can't imagine. He was nobody to notice, just a guy in a shirt. Blond hair. If you pressed me, I'd have to say ugly. I don't remember. The bus comes by the mausoleum every fifteen minutes, and we just got on. We met at Crypt 678, the same as every time.

I do remember the joke. It's an old joke. Houses of the city are going by outside the bus, behind cars parked along the curb and between fences to mark the property lines, and the joker leans his head between Fertility and me and whispers, "What's harder than getting a camel through the eye of a needle?"

These jokes are all over. No matter how not funny they are, you can't not hear them.

Neither Fertility or me says anything back.

And the joker whispers, "Buying life insurance to cover a Creedish church member."

The truth is, nobody laughs at these jokes except me, and I only laugh so I'll fit in. I laugh so I won't not fit in. The main thing I worry about in public is maybe people can tell I'm a survivor. The church costume I got rid of years ago. God forbid I should look like one of those stupid crazy people in the Midwest who all killed themselves because they thought their God was calling them home.

My mother, my father, my brother Adam, my sisters, my other brothers, they're all dead and in the ground getting laughed at, but I'm alive. I still have to live in this world and get along with people.

So I laugh.

Because I have to do something, make some noise, shout, scream, cry, swear, howl, I laugh. It's all just different ways to vent.

These jokes are everywhere this morning, and you have to do something not to start crying all the time. Nobody laughs harder than me.

The joker whispers, "Why did the Creedish cross the road?"

Maybe he's not even talking to Fertility and me.

"Because he couldn't get any cars to hit him."

Behind everybody is the roar of the bus, pushed down the street by its engine in the back, putting out stink-colored smoke.

Today, all the jokes are because of the newspaper. From where I sit, I can see the headline below the fold on the front pages of five people hiding behind today's morning edition. It says:

"Cult Survivors Dwindle"

The article says how the curtain is almost closed on the tragedy of the Creedish church mass suicide ten years ago. The article says how the last surviving members of the Creedish church, the cult based in central Nebraska that committed mass suicide rather than face an FBI investigation and national attention, well, the newspaper says only six church members are known to still exist. They don't name names, but I must be one of the last half-dozen.

The rest of the story jumps to page A9, but you get the gist. When you read between the lines, it says, Good riddance.

They don't write anything about suspect deaths where it looked like murder. There's nothing about how a killer is maybe stalking those last six church survivors.

Behind me, the joker whispers, "What do you call a Creedish with blond hair?"

In my head I tell him, Dead. I've heard all these jokes.

"What do you call a Creedish with red hair?"

Dead.

"With brown hair?"

Dead.

The guy whispers, "What's the difference between a Creedish and a corpse?"

Just a matter of hours.

The guy whispers, "What did the Creedish yell when the hearse drove by?"

Taxi!

The guy whispers, "How can you pick out a Creedish on a crowded bus?"

Someone pulls the cord for the next stop and rings the bell.

And Fertility twists around to say, "Shut up." She goes loud enough to bring people out from behind their newspapers, she says, "You're joking about suicide, about people that people loved that are dead. So just shut up."

It's really loud she says this. How bright her eyes are, gray but looking silver, it makes me wonder if Fertility isn't Creedish or if she's still peeved about her brother being dead. She's being such an overreaction.

The bus pulls to the curb right then, and the joker gets up in the aisle and starts out. The same as in church, we're sitting in the bench seats with the aisle down the middle of the bus. The guy waiting in line to get off, his pants are the baggy brown wool only a survivor would wear in this heat. The church costume suspenders crisscross his back. The brown wool jacket is folded over his arm. He shuffles up the aisle of the bus, he stops a minute while other people get off, and he turns and just touches the brim of his straw hat. He's familiar from somewhere, but it's been so long. His smell is sweat and wool and straw of a farm.

Where I know him from I can't remember. His voice, I remember. His voice, just his voice, over my shoulder, into my telephone.

May you die with all your work done.

His face is the face I see in the mirror.

Not even thinking, I say his name out loud.

Adam. Adam Branson.

The joker says, "Do I know you from somewhere?"

But I say, No.

The line moves a few steps, taking him farther away, and tie says, "Didn't we grow up together?"

And I say, No.

Standing at the door of the bus, he shouts, "Aren't you my brother?"

And I shout, No.

And he's gone.

Luke, Chapter Twenty-two, Verse Thirty-four:" ... thou shalt thrice deny that thou knowest me."

The bus starts back into traffic.

The only way to describe the guy is ugly. Geeky. A tad overweight. A loser. Pathetic at best. A victim. My big brother by three minutes. A Creedish.