Chuck Palahniuk - Survivor

The agent takes off his glasses and folds them. He sets them inside his briefcase and takes back the printed lists of future miracle products, drugs and cars, and he puts the lists in his briefcase. He tug- of-wars the pill bottles out of my hands, all of them silent and empty.

"The truth is," he says, "nothing new ever happens."

He says, "We've seen it all."

He says, "Listen."

In 1653, he says, the Russian Orthodox church changed a few old rituals. Just some changes in the liturgy. Just words. Language. In Russian, for God's sake. Some Bishop Nikon introduced the changes as well as the western manners that were becoming popular in Russian court life at the time, and the bishop started excommunicating anyone who rebelled against these changes.

Reaching around in the dark by my feet, he picks up the other pill bottles.

According to the agent, the monks who didn't want to change the way they worshiped fled to remote monasteries. The Russian authorities hunted and persecuted them. By 1665, small groups of monks began burning themselves to death. These group suicides in northern Europe and western Siberia continued through the 1670s. In 1687, some two thousand seven hundred monks captured a monastery, locked themselves inside, and burned it. In 1688, another fifteen hundred "Old Believers" burned themselves alive in their locked monastery. By the end of the seventeenth century, an estimated twenty thousand monks had killed themselves instead of submitting to the government.

He snaps his briefcase shut and leans forward.

"These Russian monks kept killing themselves until 1897," he says. "Sound familiar?"

You have Samson in the Old Testament, the agent says. You have the Jewish soldiers who killed themselves in the Masada. You have seppuku among the Japanese. Sati among the Hindu. Endura among the Cathari during the twelfth century in southern France. He ticked off group after group on his fingertips. There were the Stoics. There were the Epicureans. There were the tribes of Guiana Indians who killed themselves so they could be reborn as white men.

"Closer to here and now, the People's Temple mass suicide of 1978 left nine hundred twelve dead."

The Branch Davidian disaster of 1993 left seventy-six dead.

The Order of the Solar Temple mass suicide and murder in 1994 killed fifty-three people.

The Heaven's Gate suicide in 1997 killed thirty-nine.

"The Creedish church thing was just a blip in the culture," he says. "It was just one more predictable mass suicide in a world filled with splinter groups that limp along until they're confronted.

Maybe their leader is about to die, as was the case with the Heaven's Gate group, or they're challenged by the government, like what happened around the Russian monks or the People's Temple or the Creedish church district."

He says, "Actually, it's awfully boring stuff. Anticipating the future based on the past. We might as well be an insurance company; nevertheless, it's our job to make cult suicide look fresh and exciting every time around."

After knowing Fertility, I wonder if I'm the last person in the world who ever gets caught by surprise. Fertility with her dreams of disaster and this guy with his clean shave and his closed loop of history, they're two peas trapped in the same boring pod.

"Reality means you live until you die," the agent says. "The real truth is nobody wants reality."

The agent closes his eyes and presses his open palm to his forehead. "The truth is the Creedish church was nothing special," he says. "It was founded by a splinter group of Millerites in 1860 during the Great Awakening, during a period when in California alone, splinter religions founded more than fifty Utopian communities."

He opens one eye and points a finger at me. "You have something, a pet, a bird or a fish."

I ask how he knows this, about my fish.

"It's not necessarily true, but it's probable," he says. "The Creedish granted their labor missionaries what was known as Mascot Privilege, the right to own a pet, in 1939. It was the year a Creedish biddy stole an infant from the family where she worked. Having a pet was supposed to sublimate your need to nurture a dependent."

A biddy stole somebody's baby.

"In Birmingham, Alabama," he says. "Of course, she killed herself the minute she was found."

I ask what else does he know.

"You have a problem with masturbation."

That's easy, I say. He read that in my Survivor Retention record.

"No," he says. "Lucky for us, all the client records for your caseworker are missing. Anything we say about you will be uncontested. And before I forget, we took six years off your life. If anyone asks, you're twenty-seven."

So how does he know so much about my, you know, about me?

"Your masturbation?"

My crimes of Onan.

"It seems that all you labor missionaries had a problem with masturbation."

If he only knew. Somewhere in my lost case history folder are the records of my being an exhibitionist, a bipolar syndrome, a myso-phobic, a shoplifter, etc. Somewhere in the night behind us, the caseworker is taking my secrets to her grave. Somewhere half the world behind me is my brother.

Since he's such an expert, I ask the agent if there are ever murders of people who were supposed to kill themselves but just didn't. In these other religions, did anyone ever go around killing the survivors?

"With the People's Temple there was an unexplained handful of survivors murdered," he says. "And the Order of the Solar Temple. It was the Canadian government's trouble with the Solar Temple that prompted our government's Survivor Retention Program. With the Solar Temple, little groups of French and Canadian followers kept killing themselves and killing each other for years after the original disaster. They called the killings 'Departures.'"

He says, "Members of the Temple Solaire burned themselves alive with gasoline and propane explosions they thought would blast them to eternal life on the star Sirius," and he points into the night sky. "Compared to that, the Creedish mess was infinitely tame."

I ask, has he anticipated anything about a surviving church member hunting down and killing any leftover Creedish?

"A surviving church member, other than you?" the agent asks.

Yes.

"Killing people, you say?"

Yes.

Looking out the car at the New York lights going by, the agent says, "A killer Creedish? Oh heavens, I hope not."

Looking out at the same lights behind tinted glass, at the star Sirius, looking past my own reflection with chocolate smeared around my mouth, I say, yeah. Me too.

"Our whole campaign is based on the fact that you're the last survivor," he says. "If there's another Creedish alive in the world, you're wasting my time. The entire campaign is down the tubes. If you're not the only living Creedish in the world, you're worthless to us."

He opens his briefcase a crack and takes out a brown bottle. "Here," he says, "take a couple Serenadons. These are the best anti-anxiety treatment ever invented."

They just don't exist yet.

"Just pretend," he says, "for the placebo effect." And he shakes two into my hand.

People are going to say it's the steroids that made me go crazy.

The Durateston 250.

The Mifepristone abortion pills from France.

The Plenastril from Switzerland.

The Masterone from Portugal.

These are the real steroids, not just the copyrighted names of future drugs. These are the injectables, the tablets, the transdermal patches.

People will be so sure the steroids made me into this, this crazy plane hijacker flying around the world until I kill myself. As if people know anything about being a celebrated famous celebrity spiritual leader. As if any one of those people isn't already looking around for a new guru to make sense out of their risk-free boredom of a lifestyle while they watch the news on television and pass judgment on me. People are all looking for that, a hand to hold. Reassurance. The promise that everything will be all right. That's all they wanted from me. Stressed, desperate, celebrated me. ***Underpressure me. None of these people know the first thing about being a big, glamorous, big, charismatic, big role model.