The girl's plain round mask of a face looks up at me from the foot of the ladder. How to tell if she's alive or a ghost, I don't know. There's too much of her dress for me to see any rise and fall of her chest. The air is too warm for her breathing to show.

Song of Solomon, Chapter Seven, Verse Two:"Thy navel is like a round goblet which wanteth not liquor: thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies."

The Bible collapses sex and food a lot.

Here with Specimen Number 136, little conch shells painted pink to look like rosebuds, and Specimen Number 78, the Bakelite daffodil, I want to be hugged in her cold, dead arms and told that life has no absolute end. My life is not some Funeral Grade bit of compost that will rot tomorrow and be outlived by my name in an obituary.

The feeling in those miles of marble walls with people sealed inside, you get the sense we're in a crowded building dense with thousands of people, but at the same time, we're alone. A year could pass between her asking a question and my answer.

My breath fogs the carved dates that bracket the short life of Trevor Hollis. The epitaph reads:

To the World He Was a Loser, But to Me He Was the World.

Trevor Hollis, do your worst. I dare you, come and seek your revenge.

Her head thrown back, the girl smiles up at me standing above her. Against the gray of everything stone, her red hair blazes, and up at me, she says, "You brought flowers."

My arms shift and some flowers, violas, daisies, dahlias, float down around her.

She catches a hydrangea and says, "Nobody's been here to visit since the funeral."

Song of Solomon, Chapter Seven, Verse Three:"Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins."

Her mouth with its too-thin red-red lips looks cut open with a knife. She says, "Hi. I'm Fertility."

She hands the flower up and holds it in the air as if I'm not impossibly out of her reach, and she asks, "So, how did you know my brother, Trevor?"

Her name was Fertility Hollis. That's her full name, no kidding, and she's what I really want to share about the next day with my caseworker.

It's part of my terms of observation, I have to meet with my caseworker for one hour, once a week. In exchange, I keep getting housing vouchers. The program makes me eligible for subsidized housing. Free government cheese, powdered milk, honey, and butter. Free job placement. These are just a few of the perks you get in the Federal Survivor Retention Program. My dodgy little apartment and surplus cheese. My dodgy little job with all the veal I can smuggle home on the bus. You get just enough to make ends meet.

You don't get anything really choice, you don't get handicapped parking, but once a week for one hour, you get a caseworker. Every Tuesday, mine drives up to the house where I'm working in her plain-colored government pool car with her professional compassion and case history folders and her mileage log for keeping track of the miles between each client visit. This week, she has twenty-four clients. Last week, she had twenty-six.

Every Tuesday she comes to listen.

Every week, I ask her how many survivors are left, nationwide.

She's in the kitchen scarfing daiquiris and tortilla chips. Her shoes are kicked off and her canvas tote bag full of client files is on the kitchen table between us while she takes out a clipboard and flips through the client weekly status forms to put mine on top. She wipes her fingertip down a column of numbers, and says, "One hundred and fifty-seven survivors. Nationwide."

She starts filling in the date and checks her watch for the time to write on my weekly check-in form. She turns her clipboard around for me to read and hands it over for my signature at the bottom. This is to prove she was here. That we talked. We shared. She handed me a pen. We opened our hearts. Hear me, heal me, save me, believe me. It's not her fault if after she leaves I cut my throat.

While I'm signing the form she asks, "Did you know the woman down the street who worked in the big gray-and-tan house?"

No. Yeah. Okay, I know who she's talking about.

"Big woman. Long blond hair in a braid. A real Brunhilde***," the caseworker says. "Well, she checked out two nights ago. She hung herself with an extension cord." The caseworker looks at her fingernails, first with her fingers curled into her palms, then with her fingers spread wide. She goes back into her big tote bag and gets a bottle of bright red fingernail polish. "Well," she says. "Good riddance. I never liked her."

I hand the clipboard back and ask, Anybody else?

"A gardener," she says. She starts shaking the little bottle of bright red with a long white top next to her ear. With her other hand, she flips through the forms to find one. She holds the clipboard up for me to see this week's check-in form for Client Number 134, stamped with the big red word RELEASED. Then the date.

The stamp is something left over from an inpatient hospital program. In some other program RELEASED used to mean a client was set free. Now it means a client is dead. Nobody wanted to special-order a stamp that said DEAD. The caseworker told me this a few years ago when the suicides started back up again. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. This is how things get recycled.

"This guy drank some kind of herbicide," she says. Her hands twist the bottle between them. They twist. They twist until her knuckles look white. She says, "These people will do anything to make me look incompetent."

She knocks the bottle on the edge of the table and tries to twist it open again. "Here," she says and hands it across the table to me. "Open this for me, will you?"

I open the bottle, no problem, and hand it back.

"So did you know these two?" she says.

Well, no. I didn't know them. I knew who they were, but I don't remember them from before. I didn't know them from growing up, but over the past few years I'd seen them around the neighborhood. They still wore the old regulation church clothes. The man wore the suspenders, the baggy pants, the long-sleeved shirt with the collar buttoned on even the hottest day of summer. The woman wore the blah-colored smock of a dress I remember church women had to wear. On her head, she still wore the bonnet. The man always wore the wide-brimmed hat, straw in summer, black felt in winter.

Yeah. Okay. I saw them around. They were hard to miss.

"When you saw them," the caseworker says as she's sliding the little paintbrush, red on red, down the length of each nail, "were you upset? Did seeing people from your old church ever make you sad? Did you cry? Seeing people the way they used to dress when you were part of the church, did it maybe make you angry?"

The speakerphone rings.

"Does it make you remember your parents?"

The speakerphone rings.

"Does it make you angry about what happened to your family?"

The speakerphone rings.

"Do you ever remember what it was like before the suicides?"

The speakerphone rings.

The caseworker says, "Are you going to answer that?"

In a minute. First I have to check my daily planner. I hold the fat book up for her to see the list of everything I'm supposed to get done today. The people I work for try to call and trip me up. God forbid I should be inside to answer the phone if right this minute I'm supposed to be outside cleaning the pool.

The speakerphone rings.

According to my daily planner book, I'm supposed to be steaming the drapes in the blue guest room. Whatever that means.

The caseworker's crunching tortilla chips so I wave at her to quiet down.

The speakerphone rings, and I answer it.

The speakerphone yells, "What can you tell us about tonight's banquet?"

Relax, I say. It's a no-brainer. Salmon with no bones. Some kind of bite-sized carrots. Braised endive.

"What's that?"

It's a burned leaf, I say. You eat it with the little fork farthest to the left. Tines down. You already know braised endive. I know you know braised endive. You had it last year at a Christmas party. You love braised endive. Eat just three bites, I tell the speakerphone. I promise you'll love it.

The speakerphone asks, "Could you get the stains out of the fireplace mantel?"

According to my daily planner book, I'm not supposed to do that task until tomorrow.

"Oh," the speakerphone says. "We forgot."

Yeah. Right. You forgot.

Sleazes.

You could call me a gentleman's gentleman but you'd be wrong on both counts.

"Anything else we should know about?"

It's Mother's Day.

"Oh, shit. Fuck. Damn!" the speakerphone says. "Have you gone ahead and sent something? Are we covered?"

Of course. I sent each of their mothers a beautiful flower arrangement, and the florist will bill their account.

"What did you say in the card?"

I said:

To My Dearest Mother Whom I Cherish and Always Remember. A Loving Son/Daughter Has Never Had a Mother Who Loved Him/Her More. With My Deepest Love. Then the applicable signature.

Then P.S.: a dried flower is just as lovely as a fresh one.

"Sounds good. That should hold them for another year," the speakerphone says. "Remember to water all the plants in the sun-porch. It's written in the planner book."

Then they hang up. They never have to remind me to do anything. They just have to have the last word.

No sweat off my back.

The caseworker is fanning her fresh red nails back and forth in front of her mouth and blowing them dry. Between long exhales, she asks, "Your family?"

She blows her nails.

She asks, "Your own mother?"

She blows her nails.

"Do you remember your mother?"

She blows her nails.

"Do you think she felt anything?"

She blows her nails.

"I mean, when she killed herself?"

Matthew, Chapter Twenty-four, Verse Thirteen:"But he that shall endure to the end, the same shall be saved."

According to my daily planner, I should be cleaning the air conditioner filter. I should be dusting the green living room. There's the brass doorknobs to polish. There's all the old newspapers to recycle.

The hour is almost up, and what I never got to talk about was Fertility Hollis. How we met at the mausoleum. We walked around for an hour, and she told me about different twentieth-century art. movements and how they depicted Jesus crucified. In the oldest wing of the mausoleum, the wing called Contentment, Jesus is gaunt and romantic with a woman's huge wet eyes and long eyelashes. In the wing built in the 1930s, Jesus is a Social Realist with huge superhero muscles. In the forties, in the Serenity wing, Jesus becomes an abstract assembly of planes and cubes. The fifties Jesus is polished fruitwood, a Danish Modern skeleton. The sixties Jesus is pegged together out of driftwood.

There's no seventies wing, and in the eighties wing, there's no Jesus, just the same secular green polished marble and brass you'd find in a department store.

Fertility talked about art and we wandered through Contentment, Serenity, Peace, Joy, Salvation, Rapture, and Enchantment.

She told me her name was Fertility Hollis.

I told her to call me Tender Branson. That's as close as I have to a real name name.

Every week from now on, she's going to visit her brother's crypt. That's where she promised to be next Wednesday.

The caseworker asks, "It's been ten years. Why don't you ever want to open up and share any feelings about your dead family?"

I'm sorry, I tell her, but I really need to get back to work. I tell her our hour is up.

Before it's too late, before we get too close to my plane crash, I need to explain about my name. Tender Branson. It's not really a name. It's more of a rank. It's the same as somebody in another culture naming a child Lieutenant Smith or Bishop Jones. Or Governor Brown. Or Doctor Moore. Sheriff Peterson.

The only names in Creedish culture were family names. The family name came from the husband. A family name was the way to claim property. The family name was a label.

My family name is Branson.

My rank is Tender Branson. It's the lowest rank.

The caseworker asked one time if the family name wasn't a kind of endorsement or a curse when sons and daughters were contracted for work in the outside world.

Since the suicides, people in the outside world have the same lurid picture of Creedish culture that my brother, Adam, had of them.

In the outside world, my brother told me, people were as reckless as animals and fornicated with strangers on the street.

These days, people in the outside world will ask me if certain family names brought higher prices. Did some family names bring lower labor contract prices?

These people usually go on to ask if some Creedish fathers would impregnate their daughters to increase cash flow. They'll ask if the Creedish children who weren't allowed to marry were castrated, meaning was I. They'll ask if Creedish sons masturbated or went with farm animals or sodomized each other, meaning do I.

Did I. Was I.

Strangers will ask me to my face if I'm a virgin.

I don't know. I forget. Or the entire issue is none of your business.

For the record, my brother Adam Branson was my older brother by three minutes and thirty seconds, but by Creedish standards it could've been years.

Since Creedish doctrine didn't recognize a second-place finisher.

In every family, the firstborn son was named Adam, and it was Adam Branson who would inherit our land in the church district colony.

All sons after Adam were named Tender. In the Branson family that makes me one of at least eight Tender Bransons my parents released to be labor missionaries.

All daughters, the first through the last, were named Biddy.

Tenders are workers who tend.

Biddies do your bidding.

It's a good guess that both words are slang, nicknames for longer traditional names, but I don't know what.

I know that if the church elders chose a Biddy Branson to marry the Adam of another family, her first name, really her rank, changed to Author.

When she married Adam Maxton, Biddy Branson would become Author Maxton.

The parents of that Adam Maxton were also called Adam and Author Maxton, until their just-married son and his wife had a child. After that, you addressed both members of the older couple as Elder Maxton.

Most couples, by the time her firstborn son had his first child, the female Elder Maxton would be dead from having child after child after child.

Almost all the church elders were men. A man could become a church elder by the time he was thirty- five if he was quick enough.

It wasn't complicated.

It was nothing compared to the outside world and its ranking system of parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, all of them with their own first names.

In Creedish culture, your name told everybody just where you belonged. Tender or Biddy. Adam or Author. Or Elder. Your name told you just how your life would go.

People ask if I'm ever mad that I lost the right to own property and raise a family just because my brother was three and a half minutes ahead of me. And I've learned to tell them yes. That's what people in the outside world want to hear. But it's not true. I've never been mad.