Fated (19 page)

Read Fated Online

Authors: S. G. Browne

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

BOOK: Fated
4.73Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
She continues to stare at me, licking the window and pressing herself up against the glass, so I turn around and watch Sara with the homeless woman, talking to her, comforting her, getting her to laugh, casting the same spell over her that she seems to cast over everyone she meets. The same spell she has cast over me.
I think about what my existence was like before Sara—mundane and fruitless, filled with frustration and disappointment and with empty, meaningless, noncontact sex. Now my existence is exciting and hopeful, filled with purpose and satisfaction and with emotional, intimate, full-contact bed surfing.
I’ve never experienced anything remotely similar to what I feel for Sara. This wanting to be with her. To see her and taste her and touch her. To inhale her aroma and listen to the symphony of her voice. To engulf my senses in everything Sara.
As I stand and watch her offer the homeless woman more comfort with her words and a warm touch than with the twenty-dollar bill, I think about how I enjoy the simple pleasures being with Sara provides, like the weight of her hand in mine or the way her scent lingers on her pillow or the warmth of her body curled up next to mine. But most of all, I think about how she’s changed my attitude. Made me look forward to my job for the first time in centuries. Influenced me in positive ways I never would have imagined.
I think about how I’m so much happier when I’m with her.
Before I can stop myself, I walk over to Sara, turn her around, and kiss her as if I haven’t seen her in weeks.
Maybe it’s because she can’t stand to see us together. Or maybe she had another emergency. Or maybe she just got tired of being ignored.
When I turn back around, Destiny’s gone.
CHAPTER 27
I used to
think I knew who I was. What I wanted. How I was going to spend the rest of eternity.
Doesn’t everyone?
When you’re human, you only
think
you know how things are going to turn out. But when you’re Fate, you have a pretty good idea of what your own future holds. I get to see my own fate laid out before me in one long Cecil B. DeMille epic. Only without Charlton Heston, who looks nothing like Moses, by the way. Moses was short and pale and balding and had bad teeth. Sharp dresser, though. And he made a mean matzo-ball soup.
Like
The Ten Commandments
, my own epic story was pretty predictable. That is, until Sara came along. Ever since I fell in love, I’ve suddenly lost the last reel of my movie and I have no idea how it’s going to end. Plot points that seemed inevitable have taken an indefinite turn and I find myself wandering along without any idea of where I’m going or what’s going to be waiting for me when I arrive.
I guess that’s to be expected when an upstanding immortal entity decides to start breaking the laws of the universe.
For hundreds of millennia I’ve been a voyeur, watching humans live their lives and make bad decisions and behave in a generally stupid manner. Now here I am getting involved, altering futures, saving people from trash compactors and excessive consumption and hallucinogenic drugs.
I’m on the Oregon coast, watching several college students from the University of Oregon who are hunting for psychedelic mushrooms. It’s strange, but I never imagined I would enjoy spending time with inferior creatures who believe they can find enlightenment in a fungus that grows in cow excrement.
“Dude!” says Brian Tompkins, a twenty-year-old communications major, as he discovers a cache of liberty caps that he holds up to display for his buddies. “Score!”
Brian was a sensible teenager until he arrived in college. Never did drugs and drank only an occasional beer when he knew he wasn’t going to be driving. But the college experience and the new friends he’s made have led him to discover the wonders of hallucinogenic drugs.
While the psychedelic mushrooms aren’t going to kill Brian, and all the pot he’s going to smoke isn’t going to have a negative impact on his 3.75 GPA, the three hits of acid he’s going to take on his personal journey to enlightenment will convince him he has the ability to dematerialize, which he will put to the test by standing in front of an Amtrak train bound for Des Moines.
So I nudge Brian from his path, from his approaching death, by whispering in his ear that eating mushrooms and dropping acid instill in male humans an intense desire to have oral sex with venomous snakes.
That seems to do the trick. He drops the mushrooms and runs off screaming and will eschew drugs as a means of enlightenment, instead choosing to take the path of spiritual transcendence by studying Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen philosophies. Maybe not as adventurous as his prior path, but entirely less fatal.
I pick up the mushrooms abandoned by Brian Tompkins and pocket them to prevent his friend from tempting him. As Oscar Wilde said, the only sure way to get rid of temptation is to give in to it. And humans are nothing if not easily tempted, even when there exists the possibility they might end up getting a blow job from a viper.
Speaking of snakes . . .
“That’s not fair,” says Temptation, appearing moments after I pocket the mushrooms, a sultry pout on her lips. “He might change his mind.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” I say.
While not inclined to wear fuck-me pumps like Destiny or parade around in lingerie like Lust, Temptation manages to exude more sexuality by revealing less. Just enough cleavage and a glimpse of an undergarment beneath the virgin white sundress that hides her figure, while at the same time hinting at the curves and wonders beneath the cotton fabric. But unlike the in-your-face sexuality of Lust and Destiny, Temptation never actually lets you get past first base. She’s more of a cock tease.
Temptation is the one responsible for the “original sin” fiasco involving Adam and Eve, who have been depicted throughout history as the ones responsible for the seed of future evil choices and the effects of those choices for the entire human race. Talk about a guilt trip. No wonder they stopped doing interviews and took their kids out of public school. As far as I’m concerned, they were set up, though Eve did have a thing for apples and serpents.
“I wasn’t going to make him do anything he didn’t want to do,” she says.
“I bet.”
“Really,” she says. “All I wanted to do was show him how to recognize which mushrooms are poisonous.”
The thing about Temptation is that she’s a pathological liar.
“So why don’t you put them back?” she says, moving in closer, her fingers nearly brushing my hand, her hips sliding past mine, the scent of cinnamon rolls wafting off her. “For me?”
The aroma of cinnamon rolls is almost overwhelming, but I know it’s just a ruse. She doesn’t really smell like a freshly heated Cinnabon. That’s just my favorite scent. And she knows it. For someone else, she might smell like jasmine. For another person, lavender. For another person, bacon. It’s amazing what she can get someone to do just by enticing them with aromas.
But as much as I would really love a cinnamon roll right now, I can’t give in to her.
“I can’t,” I say.
“Please?” says Temptation, whispering in my ear, her scent engulfing my nostrils, enticing both my culinary and sexual appetites. I try to think about baseball, but it just doesn’t work for me ever since Fraud ruined the game with steroids and human growth hormones.
Before I realize what I’m doing, I’m reaching into my front pocket for the mushrooms.
“You won’t be sorry,” says Temptation.
She’s right. I won’t. But Brian Tompkins will.
Before I can give in to the intoxicating aroma of cinnamon rolls, I get called away for another meeting with Jerry.
CHAPTER 28
“Jerry will see
you now.”
I get up from my chair and take the long walk down the hall to Jerry’s office door. While I keep trying to tell myself this is a routine meeting and that the timing is just coincidental, I can smell Destiny all over this. Her odor. Her sunscreen. Her hair spray. And I know when I walk through that door, I’m in big trouble.
Think Three Mile Island.
Think Chernobyl.
Think
Ishtar
.
At least the heated emotion I encountered from the human souls on my last visit is gone. Part of that has to do with the fact that Hostility is in North Korea, joining forces with Anger and Arrogance to see what they can stir up. Plus I’m impersonating Indifference, so everyone pretty much ignores me.
When I walk into Jerry’s office, he’s on the computer, typing so fast his fingers are a blur of white light. “Have a seat,” he says, not looking up.
I tiptoe across the floor in my socks, trying not to look down. When you’re suspended above the heavens in a big glass box, acrophobia takes on a whole new meaning.
Jerry finishes up what he’s doing and looks me up and down.
“That’s a different look for you,” he says, noting my drab, nondescript appearance.
“I’m traveling incognito,” I say, trying to pretend I don’t know why I’m here.
Probably wasn’t a good idea to flaunt my relationship with Sara in public.
“What have you been up to, Fabio?” he says.
“Nothing much,” I say, forcing a smile. “Just the usual.”
“The usual,” says Jerry, still not smiling. “Is that so?”
I nod, continuing to feign ignorance. It’s pointless, of course. Even if Destiny hadn’t ratted me out, this is the so-called supreme being we’re talking about.
Sometimes I really hate the fact that Jerry’s so fucking omniscient.
Jerry eyes me knowingly, then leans back in his chair and puts his Birkenstocks up on his desk, crossing his ankles. “How’s Earth treating you these days?”
“Good,” I say, after clearing my throat. “Can’t complain.”
“Really?” says Jerry. “That’s not like you. You always complain.”
“Just taking your advice,” I say. “Doing my job better. Caring about it more.”
“Is that so?” he says, juggling a couple of galaxies in one hand while text-messaging on his cell phone with the other. The show-off. “From what I can tell, it seems to me like you’re caring a little too much.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, putting on my best facade of innocence.
For a few moments he just stares at me—you know, the way God does when he knows you’re not telling the truth? So I’m about to give up and confess, tell him it’s true, that I’ve fallen in love with a mortal woman who’s on the Path of Destiny, when Jerry turns his flat-screen computer monitor toward me and says, “According to the latest data I’ve received, it appears that over the past quarter, your clients have a seventy-nine percent success rate.”
I stare at the charts on the monitor, too stunned to give an immediate reply. This isn’t what I expected to be confronted with when I got called in to see Jerry, so the rebuttals I’d rehearsed won’t work. That and I can’t believe the numbers. Seventy-nine percent.
“Wow,” I say, trying not to smile while wearing the same look of surprise I wore when Caligula’s guards came to assassinate him. Like he didn’t see that one coming.
“That’s a lot of accurate life-path decision making for a bunch of recently evolved mammals,” says Jerry. “Especially considering your previous benchmark was sixty-eight percent. And that was during the Age of Reason.”
In addition to the belief that humankind possesses the ability to understand the universe, Voltaire and Descartes and the other great thinkers during the Age of Reason professed the concept of rational will, which postulated that humans make their own choices and therefore do not have a fate thrust upon them.
Voltaire and Descartes were pompous idiots.
“I must have had a lucky run,” I say, flashing the smile I bought from Humility.
“Lucky, my ass,” says Jerry, removing his feet from his desk and leaning forward on his palms so fast that my smile dissolves in an instant.
Fucking Humility. I’m going to ask for a refund.
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” I say.
“Don’t bullshit me,” says Jerry. “I’m the Creator, for Christ’s sake. It’s not like I was born in the last ice age.”
Good point.
“There’s only one explanation for a fate-conversion success rate this high,” says Jerry. “You’re breaking rule number one. And you should know better than to get involved with humans. The others have an excuse, like Courage or Jealousy or Pride. . . .”
“He’s gay, you know,” I say.
“Really?” says Jerry. “Well, that explains a lot. But that doesn’t excuse you from getting involved in the lives of humans. You have to think about the consequences of your actions, Fabio. You’re Fate, God damn it.”
I just nod. There’s really not much you can say when Jerry takes his own name in vain.
“Now, I don’t want to have to call you in here again for this,” says Jerry. “Otherwise, I’m going to have to take some punitive actions. Are we clear?”

Other books

The Odds Get Even by Natale Ghent
Secrets and Lies by H.M. Ward
(Un)wise by Melissa Haag
Dark Ararat by Brian Stableford
Playing Hard to Master by Sparrow Beckett
7 Steps to Midnight by Richard Matheson
The Figure In the Shadows by John Bellairs, Mercer Mayer
The Custom of the Army by Diana Gabaldon