Authors: S. G. Browne

Tags: #Humorous, #Romance, #General, #Contemporary, #Fiction

Fated (14 page)

BOOK: Fated

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Fortunately for Darren, the age of consent in Minnesota is sixteen, which means he didn’t lose his freedom for banging one of his students. However, had she been an American woodcock, a snowy owl, a boreal chickadee, or a common loon, Darren would have been looking at six months’ probation and over a hundred hours of community service, since Minnesota’s law prohibits sex between humans and birds.

I’m not making this up.

As sexually deviant as human beings are, I’m always amazed at the lengths they’ll go to in order to satisfy their urges. Still, it’s mind-boggling to think that someone can look at a crow or a hummingbird or a red-breasted wren and say, “Mmm, I’d like to get me some of that.”

As far as I know, Darren Stafford isn’t a beak-and-feathers man, but he is a Jim Beam man. Straight up. And right now, he’s almost through his second round of the day, which isn’t even twelve hours old yet.

“What’ll you have?” asks the bartender, a forty-nine-year-old career mixologist who’ll be doing this until he dies of lung cancer before he turns sixty.

“Jim Beam,” I say, sitting down a few stools away from Darren. “Straight up.”

I hate drinking alcohol unchilled or without ice, but I’ve learned I can’t expect humans to flat-out believe me when I tell them I know what’s going to happen to them, so I figure developing a little trust is the best way to get my message across.

Darren Stafford glances down the bar, raises his nearly empty glass to me, then downs the rest of his Jim Beam in a single gulp.

“And whatever he’s drinking,” I say to the bartender.

“Make it a double,” says Darren, as he moves down the bar a couple of stools closer.

I admit, picking Darren Stafford wasn’t a random choice like Amanda. But the next person on my List of Stupid Humans to Help lives in North Dakota, so I popped over to the Land of 10,000 Lakes to see how my favorite disgraced high school biology teacher was doing.

“Tough week,” I say.

“You have no idea,” says Darren.

There’s nothing like buying a drink for a lonely drunk to make him your best friend. Unless, of course, you buy him two or three. The drinks come and Darren spills his story to his new bestest buddy, which is far more skewed a tale in his defense than I could have thought possible. It’s almost like a fairy tale of love and innocence and betrayal, rather than a really stupid decision on his part.

This, coupled with his taking advantage of my generosity by ordering a double and the fact that I can barely choke down my drink without vomiting into my glass, makes me question just how dedicated I am to saving him from his path of drunken despair. Until he suddenly breaks down and starts crying.

“Listen,” I say, putting one arm on his shoulder to offer comfort.

Other than the mortal women I’ve had sex with over the millennia, I avoid touching humans. My humans, anyway. It’s not so much the texture of their bodies as it is the qualities they emanate. It’s like touching flesh glistening with sweat and emitting a foul body odor.

“Listen,” I say, withdrawing my hand and trying to breathe through my mouth. “You don’t have to stay here and do this to yourself. You have a choice.”

I want to add
moron
, but I don’t think that would be constructive criticism.

“Choice?” he says, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “What choice? I’m fucked.”

“No,” I say. “You got fucked and you fucked someone you shouldn’t have, and because you did A you got B, but that doesn’t mean you have to stay fucked.”

He doesn’t believe me. Not until I start to tell him the details of his affair, filling in the blanks he purposely left out and correcting the tale of fantasy he spun.

“How do you know all of this?” he asks, his eyes suddenly filled with suspicion. “You a cop or a lawyer or something?”

“Just a friend,” I say, nearly gagging on the word. “Someone who knows you better than you know yourself.”

“Well, if you know me so well,” he says, slurring his words and sloshing half of his newly refreshed drink over the sides of his glass, “then maybe you can tell me why I slept with that little bitch in the first place.”

I tell him why. Then I tell him what was going through his head the morning he stood on his prize pupil’s back porch. I tell him what he wanted to be when he grew up and all of the bad choices he made along the way that prevented him from realizing his dreams. Then I tell him what’s going to become of him if he doesn’t get out of this bar right now.

“I’m going to be having sex with birds?” he says.

No. But I thought it sounded better than homelessness and crabs. Besides, you can never be too careful. That and I belong to the National Audubon Society.

But I don’t have to worry about Darren Stafford having sex with any loons. And I don’t have to worry about him wallowing in a drunken depression for the next dozen years. After our little chat here today, he’s going to discover he can start over and that there’s life after a massive screwup. Though he will fall in love with a nineteen-year-old science student at the community college where he’ll be teaching.

Some things never change.

“But why would I be having sex with birds?” asks Darren.

I tell him I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with self-flagellation for the mistakes he’s made and the lives he’s ruined.

“Having sex with birds is against the law in Minnesota,” says the bartender, tapping the ashes from his Camel into an ashtray.

“It’s against the law where I come from, too,” I say.

“And where’s that?” asks the bartender, well on his way to developing lung cancer.

“Heaven,” I say, then blink out of existence.

I always loved
It’s a Wonderful Life
.

A few seconds later, before the bartender or Darren has a chance to react, I rematerialize at the bar.

“By the way,” I say to the bartender, “you might want to give up smoking if you want to keep both of your lungs and live to see your grandson play college football at Michigan.”

Then I’m gone again.

I know it’s not a good idea to show off like that, but sometimes I just can’t help myself. Besides, neither one of them is going to mention a thing about me to anyone else. Not even to each other. After today, Darren Stafford is never going to step foot in that bar, or any other bar, for the rest of his life. And the bartender, though still fated to die of lung cancer, will at least make it to see his grandson play starting weak side linebacker for the University of Michigan.

There’s not much I can do once a disease has taken hold of someone. It’s not like I can reverse the damage that’s done or prevent it from evolving. But I can tell them they can fight it. That they don’t have to believe all of the statistics and the percentages and the odds against them surviving longer than what the specialists tell them. I can give them hope. Which, admittedly, isn’t exactly my strong suit.

Hopelessness. Failure. Despair. These are the instruments of my trade, have been for longer than I care to remember. I’ve grown used to them. Comfortable with them. They’ve become as much a part of my daily existence as eating and breathing and noncontact sex. They’re part of my routine. They’re part of my lifestyle. They’re part of my nature.

I realize I’ve been a lot like my humans—stuck in a rut and used to doing things in such a way that I couldn’t see any other way of doing them. And that really bothers me, on a level that goes beyond disgust and self-loathing.

I’m like my humans. We’re the same. They’re a reflection of me. I’m a reflection of them. And that’s a bigger dose of reality than I’m prepared to handle right now.

CHAPTER 21

Over the next
couple of weeks I traverse the globe, from Bogotá to Budapest to Bali, helping men and women and children fated to futures of mediocrity and oppression and bad haircuts. Go ahead—scoff if you want. But you have no idea the impact a bad haircut can have on a person’s future.

I don’t have to appear in the flesh to help most of them, and I don’t pull a repeat of materializing out of thin air like I did with Amanda Drake or Darren Stafford. Not a good idea to have too many humans talking about a guardian angel appearing before them. Before you know it, my picture’s all over the papers and airwaves and I’m being booked for interviews on
Larry King
and
Oprah
, which would really piss off Jerry. Oprah has
never
invited him on her show.

On a couple of occasions, however, I’m forced to interact with my humans as one of their own, offering words of encouragement or friendly suggestions or sometimes a smack on the back of the head. That one didn’t go over real well with the abusive husband in Munich. Which would explain why I had to call up Ingenuity again to repair my face.

I’m still getting the hang of this.

When you’ve spent the better part of the last few hundred years growing jaded and bitter toward inferior creatures who excel at making asses of themselves on a regular basis, changing your attitude toward them isn’t something that happens overnight. But I’m trying to work with my humans, teach them how to get their lives back on track so that they’re happier, which in turn makes me happier. I feel like I’m beginning to understand them a little better, though I’m still behind the learning curve when it comes to Sara. I’m not any closer to understanding her destiny than I was before. If anything, I feel like I’m farther from finding the answers. It’s as if by getting closer to her, I’ve lost the ability to see clearly.

“Good morning,” says Sara, lying on her side, staring at me from her pillow.

It’s Sunday morning and we’re in Sara’s bedroom, which, while laid out exactly like mine, is much warmer and more inviting.

Deep red walls.

Earth-tone bedding.

No mirrored ceiling.

“Do you know that you never wake up with a shadow?” she says.

“What?” I ask, thinking this is the beginning of some kind of philosophical discussion about archetypes and Jungian psychology.

“A shadow,” she says. “Facial hair continues to grow overnight on men, so even if they shave at night they wake up with a shadow.” Sara brushes her fingers against my face. “Your skin’s as smooth as when you went to sleep.”

That’s another problem with dating a mortal woman. She notices things about me that no one’s ever supposed to notice. Like the fact that I don’t have any body odor.

Or that I never have to clip my fingernails.

Or that I don’t need to shave.

“I had laser hair removal,” I say, because it’s the only answer I can come up with.

“That’s too bad,” she says. “I like an occasional scruffy look.”

Note to self: Have Ingenuity install some facial hair follicles.

“So what did you want to be when you were a little boy?” asks Sara, tracing a finger across my chest.

“Me?” I say.

“No,” says Sara. “The other guy I’m sleeping with.”

“Why do you want to know what I was like when I was a little boy?” I ask.

“Just curious,” she says, her long, delicate finger working its way toward my navel. If I had ever been a little boy, what she’s doing would make me forget all about climbing trees and playing stick-ball. Then her finger starts tracing another part of my anatomy.

“I wanted to determine the fates of all human beings on the planet,” I blurt out.

“Really?” she says, her hand sliding back up past my waist as she places her chin on my chest and looks at me. “Isn’t that kind of ambitious for a little boy?”

I just shrug. There’s no need to tell her that Ambition is a woman.

“Well, then,” she says, throwing one leg across my hips and climbing on top of me, her lips against my ear. “If you’re so interested in people’s fates, why don’t you start with mine?”

Half an hour later, we’re at the kitchen table wearing bathrobes, drinking coffee, and eating cold leftover pasta from Nick’s. Sara eats like this all the time. Never cooks. Doesn’t even bother to heat leftovers in the oven but eats them right out of the box or container—Chinese food, pasta, omelettes. Even soup. As it turns out, she doesn’t own any dishes, which explains why I’m eating spaghetti marinara with meatballs out of a travel coffee mug from Starbucks.

“So what did
you
want to be when you grew up?” I ask.

I’m still trying to understand Sara, hoping she’ll reveal something that will shed some light on her destiny. Give me a glimpse into her future.

“When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a Gypsy.”

“A Gypsy?” I say, not really sure how that helps me.

“I wanted to roam the countryside performing for people,” she says. “I wanted to entertain them and make them laugh and sell them bottles of water they thought were magic potion.”

“So you wanted to make fools of people,” I say.

“Then I wanted to be a nun,” she says.

BOOK: Fated

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