Fated (2 page)

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Authors: S. G. Browne

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

BOOK: Fated
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Programmed to need and want and buy.
MP3 players. Xboxes. PlayStation 3s.
TiVo. Surround sound. High-definition flat-screen TVs.
A thousand cable channels with movies and music and pay-per-view.
Distracted by their desires, overwhelmed with their needs and wants, they’ll never remain on their assigned paths. Their optimal futures. Their most beneficial fates.
That’s me. Capital F. Little a-t-e.
I set my humans off on their paths at birth, assigning fates that range from career criminals to CEOs of oil companies—which really aren’t all that different, when you think about it. But no matter how promising a fate I assign to someone—movie studio executive, second-string NFL quarterback, governor of California—the majority of them invariably screw it up.
It’s human nature to underachieve. To not live up to one’s full potential. Granted, there aren’t a lot of delusions of grandeur with fate. You don’t get awarded a Nobel Peace Prize or become Stephen King. And when someone’s future involves mental illness, drug addiction, or a career in politics, I can’t really expect any pleasant surprises. Once I’ve assigned a fate, that’s it. That’s the best I can hope for. But that doesn’t mean things can’t go wrong.
Within each human’s preassigned fate, there are significant moments of decision that will determine if and how they stay on their path. Choices that influence the way they go about living their lives.
With integrity.
With compassion.
With greed.
Every one of these choices one of my humans makes requires a reassessment of his or her future. A reassignment of his or her fate. And at every choice, I get to watch the vast majority of them make the wrong decision.
As I sit on a bench between Foot Locker and Aeropostale, eating my Hot Dog on a Stick and drinking my Orange Julius, I peruse the assortment of my mistake-prone humans and their inevitable failures.
There’s a nineteen-year-old jock with a cell phone and a Game-Stop bag who could have a successful career as a utility infielder for the Philadelphia Phillies. Instead, he’ll be fat, bald, unemployed, and masturbating three times a day to
Juggs
magazine when he’s thirty-two.
The twenty-one-year-old Asian evangelical Christian proselytizing to shoppers outside of Bebe will find the man of her dreams when she’s thirty, but will be filing for divorce and having sex with men half her age when she’s forty-five.
And the eleven-year-old kid with the short hair and angelic face devouring a chocolate glazed from Dunkin’ Donuts has the potential to be a wonderful father, but instead he’ll be thinking about molesting his five-year-old daughter when he’s twenty-nine.
It’s times like this I wish Death and I had a better relationship.
Sure, the eleven-year-old is just a kid, but at least I could save his daughter the lifelong trauma and therapy if I could get Death to help me out, but that would be interfering, which is a definite no-no. Not to mention the cosmic ramifications of preventing the birth of his daughter. Plus, Death and I aren’t talking, so there you go.
Instead I just sit on the bench and eat my Hot Dog on a Stick and watch the endless parade of future sexual miscreants.
Not every human being has some kind of sexual hang-up or disorder or desire waiting to be realized. But most Americans do. This probably has something to do with the fact that the United States demonizes sex and represses sexual energy. Personally, I prefer the Italian and French. To them, sex is just a part of their culture.
Speaking of sex . . .
Down the mall about halfway between me and Macy’s, beyond the T-Mobile kiosk and a steady flow of future-challenged Americans, a plume of red hair is making its way toward me. I’m hoping it’s not who I think it is, but then the crowd magically parts and beneath the red hair is the beatific, smiling face of Destiny.
Perfect. This is just what I need to cheer me up. The immortal personification of all that I’m not. All that I covet. All that I’m denied.
Think loathing.
Think resentment.
Think malignant tumor.
“How’s your wiener?” Destiny asks, sitting down and eyeing my Hot Dog on a Stick.
The thing about Destiny is that she’s a nymphomaniac.
She’s wearing a red tank top, a red leather miniskirt, a pair of red go-go boots, and a perpetual smile. She’s always in a good mood. Why wouldn’t she be? It’s not like
she
has to spend eternity dealing with child molesters and chronic consumers and more than five and a half billion other screwups, who can’t seem to get their shit together.
Contrary to what most humans think, destiny and fate are not the same. Destiny can’t be forced on someone. If they’re forced into their circumstances, then that’s their fate. And fate has a morbid association with the inevitable, with something ominous that is going to happen.
His fate was sealed.
A fatal disease.
A fate worse than death.
I mean, come on. How much worse can it get than one-upping Death on the dystopian scale?
Destiny, on the other hand, is divinatory in nature and implies a favorable outcome, which generally carries a much more positive connotation.
Destiny smiled upon him.
She was destined for greatness.
It was her destiny.
“Can I have a taste of your meat?” Destiny asks, projecting such passion and beauty that I just want to smash the rest of my unfinished corn dog in her face.
Fate predetermines and orders the course of a person’s life. But even though my humans make decisions along their paths that can have an adverse impact on their futures, they don’t get a say in their reassigned fates. You don’t get any choice with me. I’m not into collaboration.
Think solitaire.
Think autoerotic.
Think Henry David Thoreau.
And even if I wanted to help, even if I wanted to offer some guidance or make a suggestion or give a subtle hint, I can’t. The whole “free will” manifesto. Humans have to be allowed to make their choices and live with the consequences.
Think of my humans as disobedient children who don’t get a say in the severity of their punishment.
But with Destiny, her humans are more involved in the process, for without a subject’s willful participation, there is no destining. Her humans choose their destiny by choosing different life paths. They can still make mistakes, but we’re talking two Oscars instead of three. Maybe a Pulitzer instead of a Nobel Peace Prize.
Think of Destiny’s humans as honor roll students who get to choose whatever college they want to attend.
I should have read the fine print on my job description.
“How about letting me suck on your straw?” asks Destiny.
“I’m busy,” I say. “Why don’t you go bother Diligence or Charity?”
“Oh, come on, Faaaaabio,” she says. “I’m just having some fun.”
Whenever Destiny calls me by my pseudonym, she always draws out the first syllable as if to mock me.
Not all of us have pseudonyms. Destiny prefers her given name, while Death has adopted the name Dennis. Most of the Seven Deadly Sins have noms de plume because no one really wants to be called Anger or Envy or Greed. All of the Seven Heavenly Virtues have embraced their formal names, except for Temperance, who prefers everyone just call him Tim.
“So when did you get back?” asks Destiny, twirling her hair with a coquettish flair and looking at me with big bedroom eyes. While she’s not as big a slut as Lust, she definitely has her moments.
“I don’t know,” I say, finishing off my Hot Dog on a Stick and sucking down the last of my Orange Julius until I’m slurping the bottom of the cup. “Couple days ago.”
Most of us call New York City home, though we’re not there year-round. With more than six and a half billion people on the planet, we have to be fairly ubiquitous.
“Anyone else around?” I ask.
“Remorse and Hope,” she says. “A few of the Deadlies, of course. And I hear Prejudice is trying to put together a poker game but he isn’t having much luck.”
The thing about Prejudice is that he has Tourette’s syndrome.
Destiny and I sit on the bench for a few minutes in silence, watching the mall zombies stagger past, their primitive brains thinking about threesomes and iPods and Cinnabons.
“Interested in some noncontact sex?” asks Destiny.
Destiny may engender intense feelings of loathing and envy in me, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to watch her peel off her red miniskirt.
“Sure,” I say. “Your place or mine?”
CHAPTER 2
I’m in my
white boxers on my back next to a bouquet of blue hydrangeas while Destiny straddles me wearing nothing but a bright red cotton thong. The only thing that would make this more patriotic would be Jimi Hendrix playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
The cool thing about noncontact sex between immortals is that you can be invisible on your shared rooftop garden in broad daylight and no one can see what you’re doing. And right now, Destiny’s red cotton thong is grinding away in the air while she looks down at me and licks her lips.
Although we can see each other when we’re invisible, humans can’t see us unless we choose to make our presence known. Or when one of us comes into physical contact with another immortal. Which doesn’t happen in public more than a few times each century, and most of those involve Lust and at least one other Deadly Sin, though Prudence has let his guard down more than once.
Rule #5: Never materialize in front of humans.
The last time two immortals came into contact with each other in public was back in 1918 in Chicago, when Anger and Envy got into a bar fight over the Red Sox beating the Cubs in the World Series. Envy is a Cubs fan and Anger . . . Well, let’s just say he knows how to push Envy’s buttons.
I wasn’t there, but apparently it was quite a brawl. Recorded history doesn’t mention the incident, but it was pretty much the final straw that led to the 18th Amendment and fourteen years of Prohibition.
We’re supposed to be facilitators, not instigators. We’re to have no significant impact on the lives of humans but just play our part in their various paths and emotional arcs. Every now and then one of us screws up, either directly or indirectly, with varying degrees of catastrophic results. That’s why entities get stripped of their powers. It’s very embarrassing. Just ask Peace.
We’re not always invisible. Just when we choose to be. One of the perks of being immortal. That and the accommodations.
I live in a two-bedroom, twentieth-floor apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with parquet floors, panoramic windows with views of the East River, a full-service twenty-four-hour doorman and concierge service, a health club, and a rooftop garden.
The place runs $3,990 a month, but I get it for nothing. Not a bad perk for being Fate. Except when you compare it to Destiny’s prewar SoHo loft with Hudson River views, wood floors, central air-conditioning, marble bath, and over four thousand square feet. She won’t tell me how much it costs, but I did a search and found out it runs for $12,000.
I guess I shouldn’t complain. Dennis lives on the Lower East Side in a studio basement apartment with barred windows, concrete walls, and a view of the adjacent alley. But then, where else would you expect Death to live?
Destiny moves over me, her red hair pulled back in a bun, her perfect breasts and nipples barely more than an inch from my mouth. It’s difficult to maintain my resolve, but I hate her so much that I don’t want to give her the satisfaction of any pleasure that’s not self-administered.
Plus the building superintendent is on the roof with us, showing the garden and the view to a prospective tenant. I can’t see them, but I can hear them on the other side of the azaleas and rosebushes, discussing proper roof etiquette. Which I’m currently not observing.
The super’s voice is nasally and high-pitched and he’s going to be homeless in twenty years, picking his nose and yelling at people from a bench in Central Park.
The woman’s voice is warm and mellifluous, a tenor saxophone on a deserted New Orleans night. But I can’t read her. Which means she’s on the Path of Destiny, born to accomplish something more significant than the majority of the human race. But even though I can’t read her, there’s something about her I find compelling. Something in her voice that draws me to her. Something I can’t place but that is nonetheless distracting. And I’m distracted in a way that has softened my mood, so to speak. This isn’t lost on Destiny.
In a flash of nimbleness and alacrity that only a female can pull off, Destiny’s thong and my boxers are in the hydrangeas and her naked body is hovering tantalizingly above mine. She doesn’t have a follicle of hair on her flesh.
The thing about Destiny is that she waxes.

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