Authors: S. G. Browne
Tags: #Humorous, #Romance, #General, #Contemporary, #Fiction
Fated (13 page)
And just like that, I feel better about everything.
When I first realized what I’d done, that I’d interfered in the fates of several humans, I wondered how I could fix it, how I could put them back on the paths they’d been on before I got in the way. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that putting everything back the way it was isn’t possible. And I wouldn’t want to put it back even if I could.
For my entire existence I’ve known what was coming next. For myself and for my humans. Now, all of a sudden, my world is filled with uncertainty. With the unknown. With excitement. There’s something about the not knowing what’s going to happen that I find thrilling. With me. With Sara. With the three humans I’ve helped to choose a better path.
And I’m thinking, Could I get away with it if I did it again?
I mean, Jerry didn’t exactly become an omniscient being by taking shop classes and falling asleep during physics. So there’s a good chance he’ll catch on eventually. Unless he’s so distracted that I could fly under the radar. Which is possible. Jerry’s very busy these days and has a tendency to let things slide. Except when the things involve Destiny or Fate or one of the Revelations. So I have to be careful if I’m going to meddle in the lives of my simpleton charges.
I realize I’ll be breaking the first rule, but if I just give them suggestions, subtle hints, a gentle nudge in the right direction, then it’s not like I’m exceeding the parameters of their preassigned fates. I’m just helping to set them back on their original paths. I’m just helping them to optimize their futures. And if I can help some of them by pointing them in the right direction, by crafting their fates in spite of the messes they’ve made of their lives, maybe I can help myself. Maybe I can rediscover why I used to enjoy this job in the first place.
For the first time in five hundred years, I feel like I’m relevant again.
CHAPTER 19
The last time
I felt like I mattered was during the waning decades of the Renaissance. True, Destiny had the lion’s share of those responsible for the rebirth of human achievement—Cervantes, da Vinci, Shakespeare. But instead of being fed to the lions like so many of my clients during Rome’s prosperity, those on my list during the Renaissance—Dante, Botticelli, Raphael—at least played a part in changing human existence for the better.
I felt like I mattered was during the waning decades of the Renaissance. True, Destiny had the lion’s share of those responsible for the rebirth of human achievement—Cervantes, da Vinci, Shakespeare. But instead of being fed to the lions like so many of my clients during Rome’s prosperity, those on my list during the Renaissance—Dante, Botticelli, Raphael—at least played a part in changing human existence for the better.
Ever since then, things have gone gradually downhill.
Sure, great thinkers and scientists and painters like Nietzsche and Edison and van Gogh came along after that, but they weren’t on my path. No. I got stuck with missionaries and dictators and presidents who spread religion and waged war and dropped nuclear bombs. Not to mention I had to endure the fates of the tens of millions of humans who were directly or indirectly killed by their actions.
So when I discover that I’ve made a difference in the fates of twenty-first-century humans, even if it’s just sending a drug addict to a French monastery or a dysfunctional married couple to a future of bondage and discipline, I almost feel like I’ve found a new lease on the inevitable. As if I have the opportunity to reinvent myself.
A new and improved Fate.
Benefactor of mankind.
Or at least of human train wrecks.
My first official attempt at altering the fate of a human is Amanda Drake, a forty-five-year-old crystal meth addict who lives in London’s East End. She’s been on crank off and on for most of her adult life and done prison time for shoplifting, forgery, petty theft, and impersonating a member of the royal family. She’s also spent an accumulated three years in drug rehab.
I picked Amanda Drake for several reasons.
One, she’s on today’s schedule.
Two, she needs help.
And three, I closed my eyes and pointed to her name on my list.
The last thing I want to do is create any kind of a pattern, help too many humans in any one demographic or geographic category. So I figure randomly choosing someone is the smartest thing for me to do. Though I don’t know if intelligence is much of a factor in my decision-making process.
Amanda’s original assigned path had her working as a waitress and never getting married and dying alone in a convalescent hospital at the age of sixty-eight. Not the most fulfilling of fates, but better than the one she’s managed to create for herself.
When I pop in on her unannounced, Amanda is consuming a breakfast of pseudoephedrine, muriatic acid, brake cleaner, acetone, lye, and denatured alcohol. Personally, I would have ordered the waffles and bacon.
Amanda lives in a two-bedroom apartment on top of a dry cleaner’s and shares the space with a young, drug-free, unmarried couple who told her last night she has to move out. She also recently lost her job at the dry cleaner’s downstairs when the owner caught her huffing dry-cleaning solvents.
Without a job or a place to live, Amanda will end up on the streets begging for money and eventually turning to prostitution in order to support her drug habit. She’ll lose weight, develop kidney problems, get raped more than once, and discover that no matter how low she gets, there’s always another ladder leading down.
In less than five years, Amanda Drake will be dead.
Why couldn’t I have picked someone a little easier to start out with? Like a cat fetishist or a compulsive eater or a submissive coprophilliac? Some human with just one major issue instead of a woman with enough problems to fill an entire week’s worth of
Jerry Springer
?
Jerry Springer
?
Honestly, I don’t understand how human beings ended up like this. They’re the only creatures on the planet who think they’re supposed to be happy. They worry about money and their future and their legacy. They worry about war and disease and death. They worry about sex and love and relationships. But mostly they worry about why they’re not happy.
After more than five thousand years of advanced civilization, it still boggles my mind.
So here sits Amanda Drake, borderline anorexic with scabs on her face, a victim of her own misery, a woman who could have chosen to make her life better but instead chose to allow it to fall apart, year by year, until she finally reached the point where Dennis is waiting just around the proverbial corner.
As I sit and watch her pack up what few possessions she still owns into a worn and dirty canvas knapsack, its shoulder strap held together with safety pins, I begin to wonder what I’m doing here. This woman can’t be helped. And even if she could, does she deserve to be? She’s had every opportunity to fix her life on her own, without my help. What she needs, instead, is to be put out of her misery.
But as much as I’d like to help her, I’m not the one for that job. She’ll have to wait until Dennis comes calling in five years. In the meantime, I have a plethora of other disheartened, disenchanted, and discontented humans to practice my newfound benevolence on. So I pull out my list and close my eyes and wave my index finger in the air to select another human.
Before I can make my selection and dematerialize out of there, Amanda lets out a sound that makes me stop. I hesitate a moment, my back turned to her, hoping what I thought I heard wasn’t what I thought I heard. But then Amanda lets out another sob.
I turn around and find Amanda on her knees, doubled over the half-packed knapsack, her hands covering her face, her body shaking with the force of her sobs.
Damn it. And I was so close to making a clean getaway.
I’ve never been much of a comforting presence and I’ve never known what to say to a crying woman, so I start thinking positive thoughts to try to get Amanda to stop. But she just keeps sobbing, reaching the point where sound is no longer escaping her lips and saliva has started to drip from her mouth.
Sometimes humans really gross me out.
So I start speaking out loud.
“Hey, it’s okay. You don’t have to cry.
“Come on, Amanda. Things will get better.
“Jesus, will you put a cork in it, already?”
I keep thinking maybe something will get through to her like it did to George Baer back in the condo. Instead, I seem to be making things worse.
Finally, faced with no other options and getting frustrated, I look around to make sure we’re alone; then I materialize and say the two words that always seem to get the desired result.
“Shut up!”
It works. Amanda shuts up. The crying stops. The drooling continues, but you can’t expect miracles.
“What . . . ?” she says, looking at me, her eyes filled first with confusion, then terror. “What . . . ?”
“I said, shut up.”
She closes her mouth, her lips still trembling, tears glistening on her cheeks and spittle running down her chin.
“That’s better,” I say.
I’m sure she thinks I’m here to hurt her or rape her or commit some atrocity, so I need to proceed with caution. Make sure I don’t say anything that might alarm her. Just give her a subtle nudge in the right direction.
“Now listen to me, you pathetic waste of Jerry’s talents,” I say. “If you don’t get your shit together, you’re going to be dead inside of five years.”
Okay. Maybe not so subtle, but at least I made my point.
“Dead?” she says.
“Yes, that’s right. Dead. D-E-A-D. Dead. Is that what you want?”
She shakes her head vigorously from side to side.
While I’m sure she’s telling the truth, that she doesn’t want to die, I still don’t see her making it to her fiftieth birthday. Instead, because of my sudden appearance and announcement of her impending death, she’s going to end up snorting so much crystal meth that her pipes will get permanently cleaned inside of a year.
Apparently, this helping people is trickier than I thought.
“Look,” I say. “I know you’re probably sincere about not wanting to die, but I’m just not buying it. So let’s try this again. Do you want to die?”
She suddenly starts crying again.
“What?” I ask.
She lets out a couple of sobs, then wipes her runny nose with the sleeve of one arm. “Are y-y-you . . . g-gonna . . . k-k-kill m-m-me?”
“Do I look like Death?” I say. “Is my hair white? Do I have colored contacts? Am I wearing mortician’s gloves?”
She shakes her head, even though she’s not sure about the colored contacts.
“So no, I’m not here to kill you,” I say. “I’m here to save your sorry ass.”
Her sobs taper off, turning into sniffles. When she looks up, there’s something like bewilderment in her eyes. “You’re here to save me?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
Honestly, humans can be so difficult to deal with sometimes. They’re worse than baboons. Harder to toilet train, too.
“Are you from the clinic?” she asks.
Clinic? What clinic?
“No, I’m not from the clinic.”
“Did Mrs. Devon send you?”
Again with the questions. “Look,” I say, “will you just shut up? You’re making this a lot more work than it needs to be.”
“But I don’t understand,” she says.
“What’s there to understand?” I say. “You need to stop doing drugs. You need to get a job. And you need to put your life back together. It’s pretty simple, really.”
“But I don’t know how,” she says, the tears starting to flow again. “I’ve made so many mistakes. . . .”
I wonder if Jerry had this much trouble trying to convince Noah to build his ark.
So I stand there and I think, trying to figure out what I can do to convince Amanda that things aren’t as hopeless as she thinks they are, that she can fix her life.
And then it comes to me.
“Everyone makes mistakes,” I say, walking over and crouching down in front of her. “That’s just part of being human. But you have everything you need inside of you to fix it.”
Sara’s words coming out of my mouth.
“Really?” she says, staring up at me. For the first time since I showed up, her face actually expresses something that looks like hope.
“Really,” I say. “You’ve just forgotten how to find it. But it’s there.”
Before I know it, I’m reaching over and brushing away her tears with my thumb.
And then it happens. Her fate changes. I see her clean and sober, working part-time at a clothing store near Piccadilly Circus and volunteering at a women’s shelter. I even see the potential for romance. A slight improvement over her assigned fate, but nothing I’m worried about. After all, she’s still going to die before she turns seventy.
“Who are you?” she asks.
“I’m your guardian angel,” I say, standing up. “So don’t piss me off.”
And with that, I vanish into thin air.
CHAPTER 20
I’m at a
bar in Duluth, Minnesota. Not exactly my first choice for a great place to hang out, but this is where Darren Stafford spends most of his time since he lost his job teaching high school biology—not to mention his home, his wife, his self-respect, and the paternity suit brought against him by his star seventeen-year-old biology student. So even though his two teenage sons are nearly out of high school, he’ll still be paying child support for the next eighteen years.
bar in Duluth, Minnesota. Not exactly my first choice for a great place to hang out, but this is where Darren Stafford spends most of his time since he lost his job teaching high school biology—not to mention his home, his wife, his self-respect, and the paternity suit brought against him by his star seventeen-year-old biology student. So even though his two teenage sons are nearly out of high school, he’ll still be paying child support for the next eighteen years.
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