Authors: S. G. Browne

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

Fated (29 page)

BOOK: Fated

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Dead.

The schizophrenic street musician who played the banjo outside Madison Square Garden.

Dead.

The obsessive bag lady who collected gum wrappers and lived in Central Park.

Dead.

Career losers and part-time sociopaths. Sexual deviants and corporate whores. Drug addicts and compulsive consumers.

All dead.

More than a dozen of my humans, some set on the path of Destiny, others still struggling along the path of me, and none of them managed to see their next birthday.

The universe corrects, my ass.

I don’t know what made me think Karma knew what he was talking about. I should have known better than to listen to someone who cheated on his final exams and ditched Cosmic Theory on a regular basis.

This isn’t how I envisioned my own fate playing out. Stripped of my powers. Responsible for the deaths of nearly two dozen humans. Wandering the streets of Manhattan freezing my man suit off. To make matters worse, the gray Manhattan sky finally decides to make good on its threat and it starts to rain.

It’s times like this I wish I’d selected more functional accessories when I ordered my new man suit. Like waterproof skin or self-drying hair. Six-pack abs and self-waxing genitals aren’t much help when you don’t have an umbrella.

I need a drink.

I’m still more than twenty blocks from home and the closest bar is Iggy’s—a laid-back dive bar on the Upper East Side that always smells like stale beer. When I walk in through the narrow vaginal canal of an entrance, one of the walls is lined with brick while the other wall is lined with the bar. Beyond that, Iggy’s opens up into a room with tables and chairs and a karaoke machine.

While the inside isn’t much to look at, Iggy’s is one of the hottest karaoke spots in Manhattan most every night of the week. But just past noon, the only music is Johnny Cash coming out of the jukebox singing “God’s Gonna Cut You Down.”

And I’m thinking maybe I should go someplace else.

Plus the only other patrons sitting at the bar are Ego, Boredom, and Guilt.

“Fabio!” says Ego. “You look like you gained some weight.”

Boredom gives a halfhearted nod and a yawn before tipping back his Budweiser, while Guilt just smiles at me sheepishly, then pounds the rest of his Scotch.

Why couldn’t I have found Humor, Laughter, and Cheer?

I order and down a Jack and Coke while Ego prattles on about his recent exploits. I finish another while Boredom drones on about how there’s nothing to do in the twenty-first century. Then I pound a double during Guilt’s rambling confession about his affair with Deception.

On the jukebox, the Clash is singing “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”

The longer I sit there listening to Boredom and Ego and Guilt and the more doubles I drink, the more I begin to wonder if my wandering into Iggy’s was just an accident. The more I wonder if there’s some sort of cosmic correlation going on here.

For years I’d lost interest in my job. Become apathetic. Grown bored. Then when I began helping my humans, my ego took over and I became convinced of my own greatness. Enamored with the wonder of Me. Now, I’m overcome with guilt at the way things have turned out. At all of the death I’ve caused.

This can’t just be a coincidence.

“What the hell is this?” I say, turning to the three of them, the words coming out in a sloppy slur of saliva and whiskey.

They all three look at me as if waiting for the punch line.

“What’s what?” says Ego.

“What are you doing here?” I say, shouting.

I realize I’ve probably had one too many double Jack and Cokes.

“We’re just drinking,” says Boredom.

“Yeah,” says Guilt. “We’re just drinking. That’s all.”

“No,” I say with a shake of my head, waving my drink in the air. “You’re not just drinking. You’re here for a reason.”

“Are you talking about me?” says Ego.

Boredom just shrugs and lazily drinks his beer, while Guilt looks like he definitely has something to hide.

“You,” I say, pointing my glass at Guilt and spilling my drink. “I know what you’re trying to do. I know what this is all about.”

Guilt looks around, his expression filled with panic.

“Jerry sent you, didn’t he?” I say. “He sent you here to spy on me. To teach me a lesson.”

I realize I’m shouting. And slurring. And that the bartender and the other mortals who have wandered into the bar are starting to stare.

“Are you sure this isn’t about me?” asks Ego.

I don’t answer him. All I can see are the humans watching me. And I can’t help but wonder if by just being here I’m affecting their futures. If I haven’t already altered their fates. If they’re all going to die because of me.

Guilt is swearing up and down that he didn’t mean to do it, whatever it was, but I ignore him as I stumble out of the bar and onto Second Avenue, into a steady December rain, and bump into a woman struggling with her umbrella. She curses me and I scream and run away, wondering if I just killed her.

I stumble along in the opposite direction of my apartment, afraid to see Sara, afraid I’ll somehow manage to kill her, too. I know she’s on the Path of Destiny and that theoretically I can’t affect her, but if I can send my own humans onto Destiny’s path, what’s to say it can’t work both ways?

I realize that’s not likely and that I’m probably overreacting, but when you’ve been drinking double Jack and Cokes all afternoon with Boredom, Ego, and Guilt because everyone you’ve tried to help keeps prematurely dying, you tend to believe in your own inevitability.

As I wander aimlessly through the East Side toward Lower Manhattan, I encounter men and women in the rain whom I’m afraid to come near. To brush past. To make eye contact with. I’m afraid if I do, I’ll condemn them to their deaths.

At the corner of First and East 67th, I cross the street and almost get hit by a cab and I wonder if the driver has just collected his last fare.

I stagger past a homeless man urinating underneath the Queensboro Bridge on-ramp and I wonder if he’ll develop a fatal bladder infection.

A diplomat from Syria makes eye contact with me out in front of the United Nations Headquarters and I wonder if I’ve just started an international incident.

I don’t know how Dennis deals with this on a daily basis.

And then it hits me. All of these deaths. Dennis must know something about them. He might even be responsible for them. After all, he is Death.

I wonder if he’s in town.

I wonder if he’s been talking to Destiny.

I wonder if he’s getting back at me for the past five hundred years.

The logical part of me—that quiet voice of reason that’s been bound and gagged—is trying to tell me I should just go back to my apartment or find someplace to get dry and sleep off my drunk so I can contemplate these ideas with a clear head. Instead, I find myself stumbling through the East Village into the Lower East Side—where I fall down the stairs and arrive at Death’s door.

I sit up and lean against the door. Although the fall didn’t hurt, I’ve managed to damage my man suit on the way down. There’s a tear in my left forearm that looks like it’s going to need to be repaired. Of course, it doesn’t really matter much, considering I can no longer transport. But my warranty doesn’t cover Damage Under the Influence.

Sitting there in the rain, feeling sorry for myself, with my back against Dennis’s windowless basement apartment door and my legs splayed out in front of me, I reach up and knock backward with my right hand.

“Open up,” I say. “Open up or I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow . . .”

And then I vomit into my lap.

Just before I pass out, the front door opens and I fall backward inside.

CHAPTER 42

I wake up
on my back on a full-size bed covered with a down comforter and a trio of feather pillows. The duvet is black satin and the pillowcases are three-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton. Plum colored. To match the bed skirt.

“Welcome back from the dead,” says Dennis. “Start early today, did we?”

Dennis is in the kitchenette, brewing up the best coffee I’ve ever smelled. I forgot how much of a gourmet coffee snob he is.

I glance down and realize I’m wearing a pair of Dennis’s black silk pajamas.

“Where are my clothes?” I ask.

“In the garbage,” says Dennis, walking over and handing me a hot, steaming mug of bitter delight. “Drink this. You’ll feel better.”

I take a sip of coffee and the whiskey in my brain screams out in protest.

“How long have I been here?” I ask.

“About an hour,” says Dennis, who pours himself a cup of coffee and sits down in a purple wing-back chair beneath a floor lamp with a red shade.

I glance around the studio apartment, where there is no collection of skulls on the built-in shelves, and the walls aren’t painted black. There are no moldering rugs and no creepy organ music emanating from the Bose surround-sound speakers.

Instead, the shelves are filled with the teachings of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, along with books on quantum physics, collections of poetry, and everything ever written by Mark Twain. The walls are painted a soft sage green and the floors are covered by area rugs with accents of red and violet. Billie Holiday’s rendition of “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” flows from the speakers.

“So,” says Dennis. “How’s your day been?”

“Full of surprises,” I say. “A regular red-letter day. I understand
you’ve
been busy.”

“No more than usual.”

“Is that so?” I say, my meaning implicit in the tone of my voice. Or maybe it’s the way I’m glaring at him.

“Something on your mind?”

“Oh, as if you didn’t know,” I say. “As if you didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“What are you talking about?”

So I tell him.

About Darren Stafford and Cliff Brooks and all of the other humans on my path whom I killed. About my meeting with Jerry. About the time I got drunk and bet Samuel Adams he didn’t have the guts to stand up to the British.

Well, he didn’t.

“But it’s not like you didn’t know all of this already,” I say.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asks.

“Come on, Dennis,” I say. “Don’t play games with me. I know you’re responsible for all of their deaths.”

“Me?” he says. “What makes you think I’m responsible?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Mr. Reaper,” I say. “Maybe because it’s your
job
.”

“Hey, I’m not the one who decided to start altering the fates of his humans.”

“Yeah,” I say. “But you didn’t have to kill all of them.”

“I didn’t kill anyone,” says Dennis.

“Oh, right,” I say. “Like I’m going to believe that one.”

“Listen,” says Dennis, leaning forward. “They were all dead before I got there.”

“So you admit you know about them.”

“Of course I know about them,” says Dennis. “I’m the one who reported them to Jerry.”

“You reported them?” I say. “Why did you report them?”

“Because none of these people were supposed to die.”

“Really?” I say, the sarcasm dripping. “So that’s why I had to fly coach to get home.”

“No,” says Dennis. “When someone is about to die, unless I’m getting a massage or a manicure, I arrive at the moment just before their deaths. But with all of these humans you mentioned, I didn’t know about them until the
instant
of their deaths. By the time I showed up, they were already turning cold and starting to stiffen. And you know how much I hate rigor mortis.”

Sometimes, during rigor mortis, muscles of the dead can contract in ways that make the limbs move, even though the body is dead. This really freaks Dennis out.

“I don’t understand,” I say, my head swimming with whiskey and caffeine. “How could you not know about them?”

“I don’t know,” says Dennis. “Why don’t you tell me? You’re the one who decided to play Jerry.”

None of this makes any sense. But then, I have been fucking with the universe.

“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” I say. “I was just trying to help.”

“Yeah, well, you helped them all to an early death,” says Dennis. “None of these humans were in my day planner. I didn’t have Cliff Brooks scheduled for another thirty-seven years.”

“So you didn’t have anything to do with the deaths of my humans?” I say.

“No,” says Dennis. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“Oh,” I say, taking a large sip of my coffee.

BOOK: Fated

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