"I have an agent named Dr. Ambrose," Fertility says, "except he's not a real doctor."

Fertility told me one time that everyone in the world, even garbage haulers and dishwashers, will be signed by an agent someday. Her Dr. Ambrose would find couples with money looking for someone to have their baby. A surrogate mother. Dr. Ambrose calls it the procedure. It's conducted in utero with the birth father in bed with Fertility and his wife waiting outside the door.

"The wife will be in the hallway, knitting or listing baby names," Fertility says, "and the husband will be carefully emptying the teeny-weeny contents of his testicles into me."

The first time she told me about her job, back when I was a nobody doing crisis intervention at home, she told me Fertility Hollis is a stage name. She said her real name was Gwen, but she hated that.

"My being with the birth father is more naturopathic, says Dr. Ambrose. That's his pitch to desperate couples. It isn't adultery. It's holistic."

It wasn't fraud or prostitution, she told me.

"It's in the Bible," Fertility says.

It costs five thousand dollars.

"You know, Genesis Chapter Thirty, Rachel and Bilhah, Leah and Zilpah."

Bilhah didn't use birth control, I want to tell her. Zilpah didn't make five grand, tax-free. They were real slaves. They didn't travel all over the nation getting plugged by would-be fathers hungry for an heir.

Fertility will live with a couple for up to one full week, but every time they conduct the procedure it's another five grand. With some men, this can mean fifteen grand in one night. Plus the couple has to pay her airfare.

"Dr. Ambrose is just a voice on the telephone that arranges the arrangement," Fertility says. "It's not as if he's a real person. The couple pays him and he sends me half the money in cash. There's never a return address. He's such a coward."

I know that feeling.

The Teleprompter says: SLUT.

"All I have to do is not conceive, and I'm a big success."

It's her vocation, she told me, being barren.

The Teleprompter says: HARLOT.

Over the speakers she says it, "I'm sterile."

The Teleprompter says: WHORE.

It's her one marketable job skill. It's her calling.

Here's the job she was born to do.

She pays no taxes. She loves to travel. She lives on the road in rich places, and the hours are flexible. She told me, some nights, she falls asleep during the procedure. With some birth fathers, she dreams of arson, of falling bridges and landslides.

"I don't think I'm doing anything wrong," she says. "I think I'm making lemons into lemonade."

The Teleprompter says: BURN IN THE HOT ETERNAL FIRES OF HELL YOU HEATHEN DEVIL SLATTERN.

Fertility says, "So what do you think?"

The journalist is staring at me so hard she hasn't noticed some hair that's slipped down over her forehead. The director is staring at me. The agent is staring. The journalist gulps. The writers are feeding copy into the Teleprompter.

PRAY TO DIE ADULTEROUS DEVIL WHORE.

All of America is tuned in.

YOU ARE BEYOND FORGIVENESS EVIL DEVIL GIRL.

The agent shakes his head, no.

The Teleprompter screen goes blank for a moment. The writers write. The copy reappears.

YOU ARE BEYOND FORGIVENESS EVIL DEVIL WOMAN.

Says Fertility's voice, "So what do you think?"

HARLOT

The agent points at me, points at the Teleprompter screen, points at me, over and over, fast.

TROLLOP

"You're not going to pass some big judgment on me, are you?"

JEZEBEL

There's just dead air going out to the satellite. Somebody has to say something.

With my numb mouth I read the words on the Teleprompter. With no feeling in my lips, I just say what they tell me to say.

The journalist asks, "Caller number three? Are you still there?"

The director is flashing his fingers at us, five, four, three, two, one. Then he pulls his index finger across his throat.

What else I want people to know before my plane crash is I didn't dream up the idea for the PornFill.

The agent is always pushing paper in front of me and saying, sign this.

He tells me, sign here.

And here.

Here.

And here.

The agent tells me to just initial next to each paragraph. He tells me, don't bother reading this bit, I won't understand.

That's how the PornFill happened.

It was not my idea to take all twenty thousand acres of the Creedish church district and turn it into the repository for this nation's outdated pornography. Magazines. Playing cards. Videocassettes. Compact disks. Worn-out dildos. Punctured blowup dolls. Artificial vaginas. The bulldozers are out there twenty-four hours a day pushing mountains of that around. This is twenty thousand acres. Two-zero- zero-zero-zero acres. Every square foot of Creedish property. Wildlife is displaced. The groundwater is contaminated.

It's being compared to Love Canal, and it's not my fault.

Before the flight recorder tape runs out, people need to know who to blame. It's the agent. The Book of Very Common Prayer.The Peace of Mindtelevision show. The American PornFill Corporation. The Genesis Campaign. The Tender Branson Dashboard Statuette. Even my botched Super Bowl halftime special, the agent brain-stormed them all.

And they all made tons of money.

But what's important is none of them was my idea.

With the PornFill, the agent pitches it to me one day in Dallas or Memphis. My whole life at that point was stadiums and hotel rooms separated by time on airplanes instead of real distance. The whole world was just carpet patterns rushing by under my feet. Low-pile poly-nylon florals or corporate logos on a field of dark blue or gray that won't show cigarette burns or dirt.

The whole world was just public toilets with Fertility in the stall next to mine, whispering:

"There's a cruise ship hitting an iceberg tomorrow night."

Whispering, "At two o'clock p.m., eastern standard time, next Wednesday, the Bolivian gray panther will become extinct."

The agent is saying, a major problem for most Americans is disposing of pornographic material in a safe, private manner. Throughout America, he says, are vast collections of Playboymagazines or Screwmagazines that don't excite anybody anymore. There are warehouses and shelves full of videotaped nobodies with long sideburns or blue eye shadow humping away to bad pirated music. What America needs, he says, is a place to ship this stale smut where it can decompose out of the sight of children and prudes.

His pitch to me comes after the agent's already run a feasibility study on landfilling paper, plastic, elastic, latex, rubber, leather, steel fasteners, zippers, chrome rings, Velcro, vinyl, petroleum– and water-based lubricants, and nylon.

His idea is to set up collection sites where people can drop off porno, no questions asked. From there, local franchises will ship the porno in the same type of specialized biohazard containers used for sharps and dressings contaminated with infectious disease. The porno will be hauled to the former Creedish church district colony in central Nebraska where it'll be sorted. The three categories will include:

Soft Core.

Hard Core.

And Child.

The first category will be allowed to rot on the surface of the ground. The second category will be bulldozed into the ground. The third will be handled only by uninterested people wearing full-body disposable rip-stop coveralls including 50-mil rubber gloves and boots and breathing through masks, who'll seal the kiddie porn in underground vaults where it can sit out its bazillion-year half-life.

According to the agent, we need to get people panicking about the porno threat.

We're going to push for government action that makes it mandatory to dispose of porno in safe, clean ways. Our ways. The same as used motor oil or asbestos, if people want to get rid of it, they'll have to pay.

We'll show people discarded porno filling the streets, corrupting children, inspiring sex crimes.

We'll charge by the ton to accept the stuff. The local collection franchises will pass the cost on to their customers, plus an extra margin for profit. We make money. The local franchises make money. Joe Blow is free to shop for fresh porno. The porno industry gets rich.

Okay, the agent told me. Richer.

According to the agent, it was all going to be a win, win, win, win situation.

Then it wasn't.

The agent was already drafting the federal law that now requires you to pay a deposit on all pornographic material. The deposit funnels back through the government to pay for the interment of pornographic materials found abandoned. Money from this special porno tax was earmarked for a porno super-fund to clean up illegal dump sites. Some special user tax dollars were going to rehabilitate sex addicts, but not very much.

Before I ever heard word one about the PornFill, the environmental impact statement was already dummied up.

The perc*** tests were faked.

The publicist had faxes going out to church groups day and night, testing the waters. The lobbyists were making a discreet push.

There was the twenty thousand acres of the Creedish church district with its ghosts nobody wanted to buy. And there were the millions of personal stockpiles of pornography that no one wanted. It made sense to everybody except me.

It wasn't a decision I made. I explored some alternatives. I said The Prayer to Create Extra Storage Space.I swallowed 4000 milligrams of chocolate Gamacease prototypes. I thought that might solve the problem for America. I said The Prayer to Recycle Accumulated Newspapers,but this wasn't the same. I said The Prayer to Procrastinate,but the agent just would not let the issue drop.

According to the newspaper one morning, the Sensitive Materials Interment Bill had passed the House and the Senate and the president was signing it into law.

The agent just kept telling me, sign this.

Initial here. And here. And here.

I said the Prayer for Signing Important Documents You Don't Read.

According to Fertility, it was the PornFill that drove my brother Adam out of hiding.

My only part in the project was I signed some papers.

Since then, everybody in America thinks it's my fault they have to pay an extra two-dollar deposit when they buy a skin magazine.

After that, Adam Branson came out of hiding and put a gun to Fertility's bored head to force her to track me down.

As if Fertility couldn't see that coming.

Fertility knew everything.

Fertility said to describe my brother's threat to kill her as well-intentioned.

Later on, when it was my turn to hold the same gun to the pilot's head on this airplane, then I understood how fast these things happen.

Still. I'm the one people hate.

Me, I'm the brother with the Tender Branson National Sensitive Materials Sanitary Landfill named after me.

The last time Fertility saw the new buffed, bulked, tanned, and shaved me in person, she said I was improved beyond recognition. She said, "You need a disaster?"

She said, "Look in a mirror."

Adam was still out hunting me for sport. Adam is the brother Fertility told me to describe as "a saint."

Before this plane goes down or before the flight recorder tape runs out, some other mistakes I want to clean up

include the following:

The Peace of Mindtelevision show

The Tender Branson Dashboard Statuette

The board game Bible Trivia. As if anything God says is trivial.

The secret the agent told me was to have a lot of things in the pipeline. That way, when one failed you always have hope.

So there was:

The Bible Diet

The book Money-Making Secrets of the Bible

The book Sex Secrets of the Bible

The Bible Book of Remodeling Kitchens and Bathrooms

There was the Tender Branson Room Freshener.

There was the Genesis Campaign.

There was the Book of Very Common Prayer,Volume II, but the prayers were getting a little witchy:

For example, The Prayer to Make Someone Love You.

Or, The Prayer to Strike Your Enemy Blind.

All of these are brought to you by the good people of Tender Branson Enterprises. None of them was my idea.

The Genesis Campaign was the most not my idea. I fought the Genesis Campaign tooth and nail. The problem was, there were people asking if I was a virgin. Intelligent people were asking if it wasn't a little demented, my still being a virgin at my age.

People were asking, what was my problem with sex?

What was wrong with me?

The Genesis Campaign was the agent's quick fix. More and more everything in my life was a fix for an earlier fix for an earlier fix until I forget what the original problem was. The problem in this case was you just can't be a middle-aged virgin in America without something being wrong with you. People can't conceive of a virtue in someone else that they can't conceive in themselves. Instead of believing you're stronger, it's so much easier to imagine you're weaker. You're addicted to self-abuse. You're a liar. People are always ready to believe the opposite of what you tell them.

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: