Authors: S. G. Browne
Tags: #Humorous, #Romance, #General, #Contemporary, #Fiction
Fated (35 page)
Not to mention I haven’t been able to find a job. Part of that is probably because I tend to come off as a know-it-all during my interviews. But when you’ve been around as long as I have, it’s kind of hard not to tell people that you know more than they do.
This being mortal is a lot harder than it looked. I don’t know how these humans manage to do it. It’s one hurdle and obstacle and disappointment after another. It was so much easier when I could pretty much do whatever I wanted.
Of course, that’s what got me into this mess in the first place.
So the New Year comes and goes and I keep trying. I go to interviews. I learn to bathe regularly. I get a wig and a fake mustache so I can stalk Sara without her recognizing me.
The day after I surprise Sara at her work with a dozen roses, two NYPD officers show up and arrest me on charges of harassment. As they’re taking me out in handcuffs, I complain about the fact that it’s not fair and how stalking women used to be such a normal part of my existence.
While I’m in jail, I discover I can’t count on Justice to come bail me out. Since my company cell phone was confiscated, I can’t remember the phone numbers for Karma or Lady Luck or even Dennis, because I had them all on speed dial. The only number I know by heart is Sara’s, and I don’t think she’s in the mood to hear from me. But I call her anyway, just in case. She hangs up before I can get out any more than, “Hi, Sara. It’s Fabio. . . .”
So much for my one phone call.
During the hearing, all of the gifts I sent to Sara are presented as evidence against me, along with the pictures of what I did to her bathroom and the letters I wrote describing all of the intimate details I know about her. It doesn’t take long for the judge to issue an order of protection against me, stipulating that I’m not to attempt to contact Sara in any manner for a period of one year.
And I’m wondering how things can get any worse.
When I get back to my apartment, I discover that as result of my order of protection, I’ve been evicted. There’s a notice on my door. I have until the end of January to vacate the premises. If I don’t, formal eviction proceedings will commence.
So I have to find another place to live. I don’t see why that should be such a big problem. Besides, I couldn’t afford the $3,990 a month, considering I’m not earning an income. And with my Mileage Plus Visa already maxed out, it’s probably a good idea for me to find someplace cheaper anyway. Problem is, it turns out it’s kind of tough to get a landlord to rent to you when you’re unemployed, carry $10,000 in credit card debt, and have an order of protection on your record.
Being human is so complicated.
For the rest of January I spend most of my time looking for a place to live and for some kind of employment, both without any success. I even apply for a job as a guidance counselor, figuring that might be right up my alley, but apparently you need a master’s degree for that, and on my résumé, Jerry fabricated only a BA in liberal arts.
What the hell am I supposed to do with that?
Because of the order of protection and the consequences I’d face if I broke the terms of it, I keep an eye out for Sara wherever I go. I don’t want her to think I’m stalking her, but Manhattan is an island. It’s tough not to bump into someone in New York even if you’re not legally supposed to be within two hundred yards of them. Turns out I don’t have to worry about running into Sara in the building because she’s moved out until I’m gone.
Still, I think about her every day. Every minute. Every second. Which makes it kind of difficult to focus on myself. How am I supposed to enjoy being human if the only good thing about my mortality will call 911 if I send her a Valentine’s card?
So I ache and I pine and I get evicted from my $3,990-a-month apartment with parquet floors and views of the East River and a full-service twenty-four-hour doorman and concierge service and a health club and a rooftop garden. I sold as many of my belongings as I could just so I could afford to eat. The rest of my stuff I leave in my apartment. It’s not like I could take it with me. Besides, most of it reminds me of Sara.
With no place to go, I head over to the East Village to see if Sloth and Gluttony can put me up. I call on Lady Luck in her Chelsea flat. I knock on Dennis’s Lower East Side basement apartment door. I even hit up Failure in his dumpy Battery Park City studio.
Nobody’s home. Nobody answers. Nobody offers me a helping hand.
So here I am, on the last day of January, with the sun going down, and no place to go.
I don’t know what I expected.
I guess I expected my friends to still be my friends. I guess I expected to be able to depend on the relationships I’ve had all of these millennia. I guess I expected someone would help me to figure out what I’m supposed to do.
And I realize I’m more like my humans than I ever imagined I’d be.
I’m in charge of my own fate now. My own future. I know that perhaps more than anyone else in the universe. And so far, I’m doing a piss-poor job of making my life better.
I’m jobless, homeless, and friendless. And to top it all off, in less than six weeks of mortality, I’ve managed to acquire a criminal record.
I’m not sure what my optimal fate is supposed to be, since I obviously can’t see it anymore, but I think I’m beginning to understand why humans have such a difficult time staying on their paths. With so many obstacles and distractions to deal with, maybe they need their iPods and their BMWs and their DKNY to keep themselves sane.
For the first time in a month I laugh. Not a chuckle or a guffaw or a little burst of staccato laughter, but full-blown, gale-force laughter that sounds forced but isn’t. The kind that turns people’s heads and makes them wonder if the man in the knee-length black overcoat with the disheveled hair and the two days’ worth of whiskers is in complete control of his mental faculties.
I’m kind of wondering that myself.
As I wander back through Lower Manhattan and into Midtown, carrying the extent of my personal belongings on my back in a North Face hiking pack, my laughter echoes along beside me, billowing out of my mouth in white bursts of breath. The sun has set and another midwinter Manhattan evening has come, filling the streets with shadows and sodium lights, in and out of which move men and women and children who are all trying to avoid the laughing lunatic marching along the sidewalk.
Occasionally, I stop on a street corner and shout out to anyone who will listen that I used to be Fate. That I used to be immortal. That I used to be in charge of their lives. No one listens. No one cares. No one believes me. Why would they? After all, I’m not Fate anymore. I’m just Fabio. Fabio Delucci. A human with a fake name, a false past, no friends, and a Central Park address.
After grabbing a cup of coffee and a couple of items off the dollar menu from McDonald’s, I wander into Central Park, past the zoo and the Mall, then find a nice little out-of-the-way patch of dry, sheltered, grassy ground in the Ramble and unroll my sleeping bag. There I sit and drink my coffee and eat my double cheese-burger and fries and wonder what I’m going to do. Where I’m going to go. How I allowed myself to get into this mess.
I don’t know what I imagined would happen when I lost my immortality, but this isn’t exactly what I had in mind.
CHAPTER 51
The morning after
my first night sleeping outside, I’m sitting on a bench in Central Park, wondering if it’s considered stalking if I’m homeless and living here and Sara just happens to come jogging past, when I’m approached by a homeless woman pulling a two-wheeled cart and wearing about five layers of clothing and a pink knitted beanie. At first I figure she’s going to ask me for money, until she sits down next to me and says, “You’re a new one, aren’t you?”
my first night sleeping outside, I’m sitting on a bench in Central Park, wondering if it’s considered stalking if I’m homeless and living here and Sara just happens to come jogging past, when I’m approached by a homeless woman pulling a two-wheeled cart and wearing about five layers of clothing and a pink knitted beanie. At first I figure she’s going to ask me for money, until she sits down next to me and says, “You’re a new one, aren’t you?”
I’m not sure if she’s talking about my being homeless or mortal, but I guess it doesn’t really matter. “How can you tell?”
“I can always tell the new ones,” she says, nodding.
I look at her in her layers of clothing and her wiry hair sticking out of her pink knitted beanie and I wonder how long she’s been on the streets.
“You been sleeping in the park?” she asks.
“Just last night,” I say. “I didn’t sleep much.”
She nods. “Hard to sleep in the park. And it’s not always safe. You should go someplace safer.”
I sit there, waiting for her to tell me where this someplace might be, like the Plaza or the Four Seasons or the Trump Tower, but she just sits there, smiling and nodding, rocking back and forth to the beat of her own personal drummer.
Finally, she gets up and starts to walk away, hauling her cart packed with her belongings, then stops and turns back to me. “Come on,” she says. “I don’t have all day.”
After a moment’s hesitation, I get up and follow along at her side as we walk through the park toward Fifth Avenue.
“Would you believe me if I told you I used to be immortal?” I say.
She looks at me and smiles with a nod. “We all used to be.”
Mona is her name, short for Ramona, and she takes me to the Neighborhood Coalition for Shelter on East 77th—a drop-in center seventeen blocks from my old apartment, where I get a hot meal and a warm shower and assistance finding a safe place for me to sleep.
It’s also where I catch my first cold.
I’m not sure if I caught it when Mona gave me a hug or when Paul, the homeless guy sitting next to me at the dining table, sneezed all over my meat loaf and mashed potatoes or when I slept on a mattress-cot in a nonventilated shelter with a hundred other homeless people, half of them coughing all night long. But when I wake up two days later, I have this strange feeling in the back of my throat. Like there’s something coating it. When I sit up, my head feels like it’s full of sand. Then my nose starts to tingle and before I know it, I’m sneezing and spraying saliva and snot all over myself.
Apparently, all I have is a common cold, but to me it feels like I’m dying. I can’t breathe. My head feels like it’s filled with concrete that’s hardening and splitting my skull. And my throat is so sore I can’t eat.
The volunteers at the coalition provide medical care for me, which involves pumping me full of fluids and making me take this disgusting-tasting syrup. But the fact that they would even take an interest in me, that they would bother to feed and clothe and shelter and provide medical care for someone they’d just met, fills me with gratitude. With hope. And I wonder if this is how my humans felt after I helped them.
Maybe this is what being human is all about. Connecting with others. Providing a sense of fellowship. Sharing in the experience of existing rather than hoarding your success or struggling alone.
Maybe we all have something to contribute.
So a couple of days later, when I finally begin to feel like I’m not going to die, I decide to start helping my humans again. Even though I’m no longer Fate, I still think of them as mine. But instead of helping the serial shoppers and the consumer addicts and the credit card junkies who populate the malls and shopping centers and department stores, I focus on the homeless who share the shelter and the streets with me. Besides, I got kicked out of Macy’s before I could even make it to housewares.
True, I can’t see their paths. I can’t see what decisions they’ve made to get here or what choices they’ll make tomorrow. I can’t see their mistakes or transgressions or behavioral patterns. But I realize that doesn’t matter. I don’t need to know someone’s past in order to make them feel better about their future.
I don’t need to know why someone’s hungry in order to get them some food.
I don’t need to know why someone’s cold in order to make them warm.
I don’t need to know why someone’s depressed in order to give them hope.
So I tell the young homeless man who sleeps on the cot next to mine that things will turn around if he just believes in himself.
I help a middle-aged woman I meet in Tompkins Square Park who hasn’t eaten in two days to get a hot meal.
I give my gloves to a homeless kid panhandling in the snow outside of McDonald’s on Broadway.
Over the next week I offer support and guidance and suggestions to my humans, but I can’t tell what effect I’m having on them. It’s weird not knowing where my humans have been or where they’re going, not knowing if I’ve actually helped them to find their way to a better path, but the more I help them, the better I feel about myself. The more I help them, the more it feels like I’m doing something right, like I’m finding my own optimal path. The more it feels like I’m relevant again.
And I’m thinking that maybe this mortality thing isn’t going to be so bad.
Then one day, while I’m sitting on a bench at the Bethesda Terrace, eating a hot dog and watching a street magician perform tricks for money, wondering if I could earn a living reading people’s fortunes, Destiny sits down next to me.
“I’ve always loved this spot,” she says. “Remember how we used to have noncontact sex in the fountain?”
I’ve suddenly lost my appetite.
Destiny is wearing red sunglasses, a red silk sweater, red tights, and red midcalf boots, while I’m wearing a wool ski cap, a sweat-shirt, a rain slicker, used khakis, long underwear, two pairs of socks, and sneakers.
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