For about three months after I first met the caseworker, I was a dissociative identity disorder because I wouldn't tell the caseworker about my childhood.

Then I was a schizotypal personality disorder because I didn't want to join her weekly therapy group.

Then because she thought it would make a good case study, I had Koro Syndrome, where you're convinced your penis is getting smaller and smaller and when it disappears, you'll die (Fabian, 1991; Tseng etal., 1992).

Then she switched me to have Dhat Syndrome, where you're in crisis over the belief you're losing all your sperm when you have wet dreams or take a leak (Chadda & Ahuja, 1990). This is based on an old Hindu belief that it takes forty drops of blood to create a drop of bone marrow and forty drops of marrow to create a drop of sperm (Akhtar, 1988). She said it was no wonder I was so tired all the time.

Sperm makes me think of sex makes me think of punishment makes me think of death makes me think of Fertility Hollis. We did what the caseworker called Free Association.

Every session we had, she diagnosed me with another problem she thought I might have, and she gave me a book so I could study the symptoms. By the next week, I had whatever the problem was down pat.

One week, pyromaniac. One week, gender identity disorder.

She told me I was an exhibitionist so the next week, I mooned her.

She told me I was attention-deficient so I kept changing the subject. I was claustrophobic so we had to meet outside on the patio.

Walking around downtown, my feet switch to the two slow, three fast, two slow steps of a Cha-Cha. In my head is the same ten songs we listened to all afternoon. I pass up another receipt, as legal tender as a five-dollar bill on the sidewalk, and I Cha-Cha right past it.

The book the caseworker gave me was called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.We called it the DSM for short. She gave me a lot of her old textbooks to read, and inside were color photographs of models getting paid to look happy by holding naked babies overhead or walking hand in hand on a beach at sunset. For pictures of misery, models were getting paid to needle illegal drugs into their arms or slump alone at a table with a drink. It got so the caseworker could throw the DSM on the floor and whatever page it fell open to, that was how I'd try to look for the week.

We were happy enough this way. For a while. She felt she was making progress every week. I had a script to tell me how to act. It wasn't boring, and she gave me too many fake problems for me to stress about anything real. Every Tuesday, the caseworker would give me her diagnosis, and that was my new assignment.

Our first year together, there wasn't enough free time for me to consider suicide.

We did the Stanford-Binet to figure out how old my brain was. We did the Wechsler. We did the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. The Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory. The Beck Depression Inventory.

The caseworker found out everything about me except for the truth.

I just didn't want to be fixed.

Whatever my real problems might be, I didn't want them cured. None of the little secrets inside me wanted to be found and explained away. By myths. By my childhood. By chemistry. My fear was, what would be left? So none of my real grudges and dreads ever came out into the light of day. I didn't want to resolve any angst. I'd never talk about my dead family. Express my grief, she called it. Resolve it. Leave it behind.

The caseworker cured me of a hundred syndromes, none of them real, and then declared me sane. She was so happy and proud.

She sent me out into the light of day, cured. You are healed. Go forth. Walk. A miracle of modern psychology.

Arise.

Dr. Frankenstein and her monster.

It was pretty heady stuff when you're twenty-five years old.

The only side effect is now I tend to steal. My intro to kleptomania felt too good to leave behind. Until tonight.

Walking around downtown today, ten years later, I pick up another receipt. I throw it away. After ten years of stowing away my problems so the caseworker couldn't monkey around with them, all I have to do is dance the Cha-Cha with some girl and even my chronic stealing is gone. My one real psychosis I denied the caseworker is cured by a stranger.

That's all we did was dance. Fertility talked about her brother and how the FBI had his phone tapped so every time she talked to him she could hear the click ... click ... click ... of a government tape recorder in the background. Even before Trevor killed himself, she knew he would. It was in her first dream of the future. Fertility and I danced some more. Then she had to leave. Then she promised, next week, next Wednesday, same time, same place, she'd be there.

Tonight, streetlight to streetlight, I walk the Fox-trot. In my mind, I hear the waltz. The memory of Fertility Hollis is in my arms and resting against my chest. This is how I get home. Upstairs, the phone is already ringing off the hook. Maybe it's schizoids, paranoids, pedophiles.

Been there, I want to tell them. Done that.

Maybe it's Fertility Hollis wanting to talk about dancing with me today. Ready to give me her second impression of me.

Maybe she'll tell me in secret what's so terrible she does to earn money.

All the way from the elevator doors coming open, I run to answer the phone.

Hello.

The apartment door to the hallway is still open behind me. The fish needs to be fed. The curtains are still open, and it's almost dark outside. Anyone could see in here.

A man on the other end says, "May you be of complete service in your lifetime."

Without a thought I respond, Praise and glory to the Lord for this day through which we labor.

He says, "May our efforts bring all those around us to Heaven."

I ask, Who is this?

And he says, "May you die with all your work complete."

And he hangs up.

There's a way to polish chrome with club soda. To clean the ivory or bone handles on cutlery, rub them with lemon juice and salt. To get the shine off a suit, dampen the cloth with a weak mixture of water and ammonia, then iron with a damp pressing cloth.

The secret for making perfect boeuf Bourguignon is to add some orange peel.

To remove cherry stains, rub them with a ripe tomato and wash as usual.

The key is not to panic.

To make pants keep a sharp crease, turn them inside out and rub a bar of soap on the inside of the crease. Turn them right-side out and iron as usual.

The trick is to keep busy.

Despite the fact the killer called, I'm doing everything as usual.

The secret is to not let your imagination get carried away.

All night long, I'm cleaning. I can't sleep. To clean the oven, I'm baking a pan of ammonia. Another way to put a lasting crease in pants is to dampen your pressing cloth with water and vinegar. I dig today's dirt out from under each fingernail. If I don't open a window, I'm going to suffocate from the smell of baked ammonia.

Here, I have to just spit it out.

The caseworker is missing. Every ten minutes, I call the caseworker at her office and all I get is her message. Here's the first time in ten years I've called her, and this is all I hear. "Please leave a message at the beep."

I say, that crazy psycho she told me about, well, he called.

All night, I'm phoning her office every ten minutes.

Please leave a message at the beep.

She needs to get me some protection.

And her message machine keeps cutting me off. So I call back.

Please leave a message.

I need an armed, twenty-four-hour police escort.

Please leave a message.

Somebody could be in the hallway, and I need to use the bathroom.

Please leave a message.

The killer she told me about knows who I am. He called. He knows where I live. He has my telephone number.

Please leave a message.

Call me. Call me. Call me.

Please leave a message.

If I turn up suicided in the morning, it was murder.

Please leave a message.

If I end up dead from some murderer holding my head in the oven, it's because she never checks her messages.

Please leave a message.

Listen, I tell her machine. This is for real. This is not a paranoid delusion. She cured me of those, remember?

Please leave a message.

This isn't a schizoid fantasy. I'm not hallucinating. Take my word for it.

Please leave a message. Then her message tape runs out.

All night, I'm awake and listening with the refrigerator moved halfway in front of the hall door. I need to use the bathroom but not bad enough to risk my life. People go down the hallway, but nobody stops. Nobody touches my doorknob all night. The phone just rings and rings, and I have to answer it in case it's the caseworker, but it's never her. It's just the regular parade of human misery. Pregnant unweds. Chronic sufferers. Substance abusers. They have to dash off their confessions pretty fast before I hang up. I have to keep the line free.

Every phone call I get fills me with joy and terror since this could be the caseworker or the killer.

Approach or avoidance.

Positive and negative reinforcement for answering the phone.

In the middle of my panic, Fertility calls to say, "Hi, me again. I've been thinking about you all week. I wanted to ask if it's against the rules for us to meet. I'd really like to meet you."

Still listening for footsteps, expecting a shadow to fall across the crack of light under the hallway door, I'm lifting the window shade to see if anyone's on the fire escape. I ask her, what about her friend? Wasn't she supposed to meet him again today?

"Oh, him," Fertility says. "Yes, I saw him today."

And?

"He smells like women's perfume and hair spray," Fertility says. "I don't see what my brother ever saw in him."

The perfume and hair spray were from spraying the roses, but I can't tell her that.

"The other thing is he had chipped red nail polish on his fingernails."

It was red spray paint from me touching up the roses.

"And he's a terrible dancer."

Right now, me getting killed would be redundant.

"And his teeth are weird, not rotten, but crooked and little."

You could stab a knife right through my heart and you'd be too late.

"And he has these gross little monkey hands."

Right now, getting killed would be a breath of spring.

"That's supposed to mean he has a little wiener dick."

If Fertility keeps talking, my caseworker will have one less client in the morning.

"And he's not obese," Fertility says, "he's not a whale, but he's too fat for me."

In case there's a sniper outside, I open the blinds and stand my gross obese body in the window. Please, anybody with a rifle and a scope. Shoot me right here. Right in my big fat heart. Right in my little wiener.

"He's not anything like you," Fertility says.

Oh, I think she'd be surprised how much we're alike.

"You're so mysterious."

I ask, if she could change any one thing about this guy at the mausoleum, what would it be?

"Just so he'd quit pestering me," she says, "I'd kill him."

Well, she's not alone there. Be my guest. Take a number, and stand in line.

"Forget about him," she says, and her voice is sinking deeper in her throat. "I called because I want to get you off. Tell me what you want me to do. Make me do something terrible."

Opportunity knocks.

Here's the next part of my big plan.

This is something I'll go to Hell for, but I tell her, That guy you don't like, I want you to go screw his brains out and then tell me what it was like.

She says, "No way. No day."

Then I'm hanging up.

She says, "Wait. What if I call you and lie? I could just make the whole thing up. You wouldn't know."

No, I say, I'd know. I could tell.

"No way am I going to sleep with that geek."

What if she just kissed him?

Fertility says, "No."

What if she just took him out on a date? They could just go out for the afternoon. Get him out of the mortuary and he might look better. Take him on a picnic. Do something fun.

Fertility says, "Then will you get together with me?"

Definitely.

The sun wakes me up where I'm crouched next to the stove with a butcher knife in my fist. The way I feel, the idea of getting killed isn't so bad. My back hurts. My eyes feel cut open with a razor. I get dressed, and I go to work.

I sit in the back of the bus so no one can sit behind me with a knife, a poison dart, a piano-wire garrote.

At the house where I work, the regular caseworker's car is in the driveway. On the lawn are some normal red-looking birds walking around in the grass. The sky is blue-colored the way you'd expect. Nothing looks out of the ordinary.

In the house, the caseworker is on all fours scrubbing the kitchen tile with bleach and ammonia so strong it makes the air around her go all wavy with toxins that bring tears to my eyes.

"I hope you don't mind," she says, still scrubbing. "This was in your daily planner for you to do today. I came over early."

Bleach plus ammonia equals deadly chlorine gas.

The tears rolling down my cheeks, I ask, did she get my messages?

The caseworker does most of her breathing through a cigarette. The fumes must be nothing to her.

"No, I called in sick," she says. "This cleaning things is just so fulfilling. There's some coffee and homemade muffins I just baked. Why don't you just relax?"

I ask, doesn't she want to hear all about my problems? Take some notes? The killer called me last night. I was awake all night. He's picked me out to kill me. God forbid she should stop scrubbing the floor and get up and call the police for my sake.

"Don't worry," she says. She dips her scrub brush in her bucket of cleaning water. "The suicide rate took a big jump last night. That's why I couldn't face the office this morning."

The way she's scrubbing the floor, it will never come clean again. Once you scrub the clear gloss coat off a vinyl floor with an oxidizer like bleach, you're fucked. When she's done, the floor will be so porous, everything will stain. God forbid I should try and tell her this. She thinks she's doing a great job.

I ask, So how does the high suicide rate keep me alive?

"Don't you get it? We lost eleven more clients last night. Nine the night before. Twelve the night before that. We're looking at a landslide here," she says.

So?

"With numbers like that every night, if there is a killer, he doesn't need to kill anybody."

She starts singing. Maybe the deadly chlorine gas is having its effect. Her scrubbing does a little soft- shoe dance to go with her song. She says, "This won't sound appropriate, but congratulations."

I'm the last Creedish.

"You're almost the last survivor."

I ask how many others.

"In this town, one," she says. "Nationwide, only five."

Let's play like old times, I say. I tell her, Let's us get out the old Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disordersand pick out a new way for me to go crazy. Let's do it. Just for old times' sake. Get the book.