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Authors: S. G. Browne

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

Fated (4 page)

BOOK: Fated
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Great. I’ve made myself indispensable.
“Just put a little more energy into your work,” says Jerry, stamping a sheet of paper and placing it in his out-box. “Pay attention to what you’re doing. Care about it more.”
That’s easy for him to say. People pray to him. They curse me.
I thank Jerry for his time; then I get up and tiptoe across the floor to get my shoes.
When I walk back into the reception area, the woman who accosted me earlier about her pancreatic cancer is walking toward me, apparently Jerry’s next appointment. As she passes, she turns and spits in my face.
Behind me, Hostility bursts out laughing.
CHAPTER 4
I’m in Duluth,
Minnesota, eating a glazed Krispy Kreme and watching a forty-four-year-old biology teacher pace back and forth on the rear porch of a house where his seventeen-year-old star biology student lives. The dilemma he’s facing is that his student has told him she’s interested in having him teach her private biology lessons at home. Her parents are out of town for the weekend and here he is, on her back porch at nine in the morning while his wife thinks he’s off fishing. He knows if he knocks on the door, he’ll be heading down a path that could possibly ruin his career and destroy his marriage.
Except his star pupil is so amazingly hot. She has perfect tits and an unbelievable ass and natural blonde hair that smells like honey and eyes that understand him and lips he just wants to suck on and she’s seventeen and he’s never had sex with a seventeen-year-old and she says she wants him to teach her everything he knows about sex.
Everything.
When was the last time anyone said
that
to him?
Certainly not his wife, who hasn’t had sex with him in more than three weeks, and even when they do have sex, it’s perfunctory and passionless. And he wants passion in his life. He needs passion. And this young woman, this nubile student, with her intelligence and her wit and her fair skin and her succulent lips and her soft, husky voice, personifies that passion.
It’s so disappointing.
Searching for his bliss when the key to finding happiness resides inside himself rather than inside a seventeen-year-old girl.
At this point in his life, at this crossroads, he has multiple fates in front of him:
1.
He can turn around and walk away and go back to his dreary, passionless life with his dreary, passionless wife and masturbate every night to questionably legal teen pornography;
2.
He can turn around and walk away and rededicate himself to his wife and to his career and continue along the reasonably happy path he was assigned at birth;
3.
He can knock on the door, have a passionate affair with his gorgeous student, then lose his job, his marriage, and his house before drinking himself into depression and bankruptcy.
I’d like to help. Give him a nudge in the right direction, tell him to take what’s behind Door Number Two, but that would be breaking the rules.
So I just sit there, eating my Krispy Kreme, keeping my suggestions to myself, watching forty-four-year-old high school biology teacher Darren Stafford pace back and forth on the rear porch, trying to figure out what he should do. I’m rooting for him to make the right choice. I really am. But I don’t have much faith in his decision making. Number one, he’s horny. Number two, he’s male. And number three, he’s human.
He knocks on the door.
Next I’m in Compton, California, standing outside a liquor store at seven in the morning and eating another Krispy Kreme as a fifteen-year-old kid is paying a homeless guy to buy him a pint of whiskey and a couple of forties. The kid is about to embark on a path of drugs and alcohol that will lead him in and out of juvenile hall and then prison for the next dozen years for theft and robbery and drunken driving, until eventually he’ll end up with a charge of vehicular manslaughter, which will put him behind bars until he’s thirty-five.
Not the fate he was born with, but I can’t give him a heads-up.
The homeless guy, on the other hand, is unaware that if he refuses the money from the kid, it will improve his self-esteem enough to the point that he’ll stop spending his money on booze. After seeking social assistance, he’ll eventually find his way back to his assigned path, land a job working for McDonald’s, and in ten years he’ll be managing his own franchise.
Instead, he takes the money and goes inside the liquor store.
It’s so disheartening to see the life choices humans make.
A split second later I’m in Reno, Nevada, at the Silver Legacy Casino, drinking a double latte from Starbucks while I watch thirty-two-year-old Mavis Hanson turn her last five hundred dollars into chips at the blackjack table. Mavis has been playing blackjack for the past six hours and is down more than three large but she can’t stop now.
Mavis owes a lot of people a lot of money. But instead of taking on a second job or working harder at her full-time job and trying to get a promotion, she decided to empty out her savings account in an attempt to win enough at the casinos so she can pay off her debts all at once. Now she’s down to her last five hundred dollars. After that’s gone, the only money she’ll have to her name will be Monopoly money.
If she gets up now and walks away from the table, she’ll realize what a big mistake she’s made, but at least she won’t be destitute and she’ll have the courage to go back to work and try to get her affairs in order. But if she gambles the last of her savings away, she won’t make it to her thirty-third birthday.
Unless, of course, Lady Luck intervenes.
“Hey, Fabio,” says Lady Luck as she glides up next to me, shimmering like an Egyptian goddess in a twenty-four-karat-gold sequined dress with spaghetti straps. Her hair is in cornrows with strands of diamonds sparkling in the casino lights.
“Hey, Liza,” I say, putting on my sunglasses to cut down on the glare. “You look like you just got in from Vegas.”
“Monaco, sugar,” she says. “I love the Mediterranean this time of year. But it’s more like a vacation than work, you know?”
I nod in agreement, but I haven’t had a vacation since before the French Revolution.
Lady Luck is an Intangible. A notion. A concept. Vague and abstract. Like Serendipity, Creativity, Chance, and Fame. I think Laughter is an Intangible, while Humor is an Attribute. Not to be confused with the Emotives, who, naturally, are in charge of emotions—Love, Joy, Sadness, Fear, Compassion, Disgust, and all of the other feelings humans experience.
Emotives can get a bit theatrical and don’t tend to exhibit a lot of reason, plus they can be rather single-minded, so you can’t expect a lot of stimulating conversation. Intangibles are more fun to hang out with. I think it’s because they don’t take themselves so seriously and appreciate a wider range of subjects. But they tend to be fickle.
I seldom see Lady Luck for more than a few minutes because she can’t seem to stay in one place for any length of time. She’s like a honeybee, buzzing from human to human, pollinating them with luck before buzzing off.
The thing about Lady Luck is that she has ADD.
She blows a kiss at a defeated-looking elderly gentleman sitting at a dollar slot machine. Two seconds later, he wins a thousand bucks and starts laughing.
That rule about not getting involved? It applies only to Fate and Destiny and Death. After all, you can’t be an Intangible or an Emotive or one of the Deadly Sins without having some kind of an impact. But it all comes down to what humans do with their luck or their fear or their jealousy that determines their eventual outcome.
That’s what I am. An Eventual. Same for Destiny, Death, and Karma. There are also the Lesser Sins like Gossip and Prejudice, all of the Contrary Virtues, the Heavenly Virtues, and, of course, the Subversives—War, Hysteria, Conspiracy, and Paranoia, among others. You don’t really want to plan a team-building weekend and invite any of the Subversives.
“So what brings you to the biggest little city in Nevada?” asks Lady Luck.
I nod toward Mavis Hanson, who has just busted while hitting on twelve.
“Poor thing,” says Lady Luck. “She’s had a run of real bad luck, hasn’t she?”
“It doesn’t look good,” I say.
“You’re telling me,” she says, motioning toward the bar, where Death is sitting with his shock of white hair watching ESPN and sipping on a Shirley Temple.
I hadn’t noticed Dennis before, though it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d been sitting there all along and hadn’t bothered to come over and say hi. We haven’t spoken in more than five hundred years, ever since Dennis refused to help Columbus shuffle off this mortal coil before the Italian explorer could make a wrong turn and “discover” the New World. It would have made my job a lot easier and slowed the population growth if European colonialism into the Americas could have been delayed, but no, Dennis wouldn’t bend the rules and intervene just that once. And after all I’d done for him during the Black Death.
When humans die, they need an escort to the afterlife. Someone to show them the way and explain how Bingo Night works. Sometimes, the soul or the spirit of the human doesn’t want to go, so the soul has to be extracted from the body. Which can get a little messy.
The thing about Death is that he’s necrophobic.
The whole image of him in the hooded black cloak, carrying around the scythe and causing people to die just by touching them with a single bony finger? Propaganda. After all, how intimidating would Death be if everyone portrayed him as wearing baby blue mortician exam gloves and a neoprene particle mask with optional air freshener?
At least he finally ditched the anticontamination suit.
We see each other now and again. It’s kind of hard not to cross paths when you’re Fate and Death. But we used to be inseparable.
We partied together while Rome burned, sacked and pillaged with the Vikings, learned how to make our own mead during the Crusades, and rode shotgun with Genghis Khan. Those were good times. Now it’s strictly business. But at least we manage to keep it professional.
Dennis looks over at us, raises his glass to Lady Luck with a smile, then gives me the finger.
“Honestly,” says Lady Luck, lightly brushing the arm of a woman at another slot machine who starts to scream when she hits the progressive jackpot. “When are you two going to stop acting like boys and put the past behind you?”
“It’s not that easy,” I say.
“Whatever,” she says, blowing on the deck of cards at the blackjack table as the dealer shuffles them. “At least stop hanging around like vultures, waiting for these poor, innocent, hard-luck people to screw up.”
On the overhead speakers in the blackjack lounge, Frank Sinatra starts to sing “Luck Be a Lady.”
“They’re playing my song,” she says, tapping Mavis on the shoulder moments before she gets dealt a blackjack.
Then Lady Luck’s off, flitting from table to table, brushing against men and women, stroking their hair, whispering in their ears, delivering her pollen, making everyone happy.
Sure, she’s having fun. But at what cost? For most of the desperate gamblers, it’s a temporary respite from their financial burdens. They’ll walk out of here today with more money than they imagined, but it won’t last. Tomorrow, the luck will be gone. Then what? Will they have learned their lesson? Or will they come back again, thinking they’ve learned how to beat the system, only to have their hopes and dreams crushed another day?
Sometimes, Lady Luck can do more harm than good.
But at least in the case of Mavis Hanson, it appears as though she’s going to make it to her thirty-third birthday after all. When I glance up from the blackjack table, Dennis is gone, his half-finished Shirley Temple sitting on the bar.
CHAPTER 5
A few days
later, I’m having lunch in the East Village at a local deli with Sloth and Gluttony, comparing field notes. Gluttony just got back from a deep-fried-Twinkie-eating contest in Memphis, while Sloth spent the weekend with a group of students at MIT who just bought a new Xbox.
“They never cracked a textbook, man,” says Sloth, slouched in his chair with his feet on the table. “Just ordered pizza and drank beer and played video games for, like, thirty-six hours straight. The only time they left the dorm room was to go take a leak. It was beautiful, man.”
The thing about Sloth is that he’s narcoleptic.
He also watches too much television, never exercises, hasn’t washed his hair since Woodstock, and always wears the same Sex Pistols T-shirt.
“What kind of pizza?” asks Gluttony around a mouthful of pastrami and rye.
“I don’t know,” says Sloth. “Pepperoni and sausage. Canadian bacon. What does it matter?”
“Pizza matters, dude,” says Gluttony. “Pizza always matters.”
The thing about Gluttony is that he’s lactose intolerant.
At six feet tall and over three hundred and fifty pounds, Gluttony is never more than fifteen minutes from his next meal. His favorite wardrobe is a Hawaiian shirt and baggy sweats. His favorite food is everything.
BOOK: Fated
6.15Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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