The Inevitability of Fate

The Inevitability of Fate

by Scott Speck

1.

In the candlelight of the tent, my tarot reader glowed upon her throne. Beneath her tattered red turban, one eye bored into mine, while the other appeared lifeless, hazed over long ago with a cataract. She seemed a strange kind of paradox - her manner imperious, her wrinkled appearance almost hag-like.

I was here on the insistence of my friend Linda, who had visited Madame Toussant the previous weekend at the Renaissance Faire. She claimed Madame was the real deal, that she would provide valuable insights and some much-needed direction in my life. I was skeptical, of course, despite my sordid history of romantic quasi-relationships, none of them worth mending.

Madame turned over the next card, one festooned with two nude lovers. The candles flickered in a draft, altering the shadows and accentuating her severe features – high, sharp cheekbones and a thick unibrow interspersed with wild, curly filaments.

“I see a change in your career. Something beyond your control. You must prepare yourself.”

A gust of wind rattled the colorfully draped tent. As she flipped the next card, I wondered at her nails, severely bitten back to the cuticles. Where were the long, black-painted, claw-like nails I had envisioned for this seer of the future?

As for her warning of a sudden career shift, the whole metro region was in an upheaval of corporate downsizing, so her prediction sounded quite… predictable. Besides, I felt safe at Paragon. We had contracts for the next year, and they’d valued me as an employee for the past ten years.

The new card showed a long-haired woman with haunting green eyes. She stood smiling inside a lush forest, and she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Her large, round eyes gazed into mine, as if inviting me to join her. Another gust shook the tent, and a cold draft moved past. Madame closed her eyes as if contemplating something. In the silence, I looked down at the cards again, and…

The forest trees on the card were now black and leafless, their branches menacing, as if about to close around the woman. And her eyes – they’d been green, I'd sworn – but now they were pinched tightly shut. A shiver ran through me, and I felt a sudden urge to leave, to flee Madame's presence.

“A woman you once loved - you still have deep feelings for her. Please, you must reach out to her very soon. She is in great distress.”

I asked her to describe the woman, to explain what was troubling her, but she only stared unblinking at me. Next was a card showing a tangled mass of naked bodies, both men and women - a depiction of a mass sex orgy. I remember having seen tarot cards before, and none of them were this explicit!

“You’re very close with your… your… brother,” she said, in a deep, gravelly voice. “You love him above all else.”

She raised her brow, and I nodded. With no wedding band on my finger, it was a reasonable guess, I supposed. Madame turned over the next card. She turned to stone, then cleared her throat.

“He has been happily married for many years, but that will soon end.”

A pit formed in my stomach. Weren’t psychics supposed to make people feel better about their futures? Also, why bring in my brother, or that woman from my past? Still, Jeremy losing his marriage was the last thing in the world I wanted. It would devastate him, and I already knew I wasn’t helping.

“What’s going to happen?” I asked. “Divorce?”

This was the focus of my angst. The possibility had been fermenting in my mind for months. Add to that a nightmare I’d recently had, where I sat with my brother as he wept over his wife, now lost to him forever.

Rain began to strike the tent. I tried to swallow, but the parched flesh of my mouth stuck together. She flipped the final card, and I couldn’t bear to look. These ghoulish images unnerved me – bloodied men hanging from a tree, writhing orgies, a man tied to a post and impaled with bloody daggers. Instead, I focused my gaze on a wet reflection of the cards in her one clear eye.

“It’s because of you,” she said. Her glare shot up to mine, her eyes accusing. She pointed one trembling finger at me.

“He will lose his wife because of you.”

I felt stabbed by an icy blade. I forced my gaze to the table, to the card she had just revealed. On it, a half-man, half-wolf tore at a woman’s throat. Then I saw it. The woman’s image was literally moving on the card…

2.

I was soaking wet and freezing on the drive home. Rain had poured the whole way back to my car, and I’d needed a half hour to find my small, gray sedan in a sea of larger vehicles, all crowded together on a muddy, rutted parking lot the size of a farmer’s field. Why hadn’t I worn a raincoat or brought along an umbrella? I should’ve asked the fortune teller that, too.

At home, I stripped off my drenched clothing and took a long, hot shower. I put on my pajamas and robe, poured a triple Jaimeson over ice, and relaxed near the front window of my cozy flat, high up on the fifteenth floor of the Belvedere. It was dusk, the sky a somber, muddled gray, the city below with its glowing baubles of traffic lights and neon signs vanishing off into the mist.

As the whiskey warmed my innards, I thought back on the past decade of my life, littered with so many fleeting, failed relationships, all of them hastily contrived, all with unsuitable women. My therapist told me I purposely created emotional turmoil to keep my loneliness at bay, but the resulting stress became even worse. So for the past month, ever since Beth dumped me, I'd followed his advice and not seen anyone. And I missed Beth. A lot, in fact.

3.

On my drive to work on Monday morning, traffic was lighter than usual. Some folks were probably sleeping in after a Sunday evening Halloween. Still, the tall, black column of smoke visible from the highway left me wondering. This fire was big, and the further I drove, the larger and more menacing it became.

Still, I kept the radio off and listened to an audiobook, a gothic haunted house novel that was entertaining, though quite formulaic in the genre. Once off the interstate, I had to pull over every other minute as another group of firetrucks went screaming past, all sirens and wildly flashing lights. And by the time I turned onto Dawson, the main drag that led into the industrial park where I worked, the column filled nearly a third of my field of view. Dawson continued upward, at a gentle slope, the hill ending at a long curve with a wide shoulder on its edge. From here, I’d have a view of the whole valley below, including whatever was burning down.

As I climbed out of his car, three more firetrucks and an ambulance rounded the bend and began their descent into the valley. I watched them speed around the corner on my walk to the edge of the shoulder. Then I reached the guard rail, turned around, and looked down.

The entire two-acre headquarters of Paragon Engineering, USA, was burning. Fifty-foot-tall flames leapt from the whole structure, and a column of billowing, tar-black smoke into an otherwise clear morning sky. The fire’s roar was loud from here, half a mile away, and a sudden explosion rocked the north end of the structure. It birthed a mushroom of fire and smoke that merged with the towering smoke cloud, the scene below a chaos of flashing lights, hoses, and shouting firemen.

Watching my livelihood burn down, right before my eyes, sent me into a panic attack. My heart raced and my whole body broke out into a sweat. What about my bills, my lease? Then I recalled the tarot reading, and the old woman’s first grim prediction…

4.

Out of work and in a state of financial and existential panic, I went on a bender, drinking and sleeping around for the next couple weeks, and I forgot to send my rent payment. Jeremy kept checking up on me every day or two, and though I hid the worst from him, I knew he was worried about me. Then, early on a Sunday morning, Jeremy and his wife Lucy showed up at my door. I was hungover and still in my pajamas. They strode right past me, into my living room, and, then and there, staged an intervention.

They’d been watching me drown in my own life, existing in a state of perpetual anxiety and strife. First was my endless series of tumultuous relationships. Second was my drinking, which was spiraling out of control. Third, I was out of a job and had no way to pay rent at my upscale apartment.

Lucy led the charge, saying I needed the stability of family and that I should move in with them for a while. I could rely on their solid emotional support, without needing to seek it through a series of brief, shallow relationships, and they’d let me live with them rent free until I found another job.

I saw the wisdom in their advice, and I was also deeply grateful that they cared for me and loved me so much. Jeremy and I had always been close, and Lucy and I got along great. In the end, persuaded by their arguments, I packed up my things the following day, broke my lease, and moved across town, into their finished basement, already outfitted as a self-contained apartment from when Lucy’s aging parents had lived there a few years ago.

5.

Life with Jeremy and Lucy went well, and I settled in and began looking for a new job, just like the other 470 former employees at Paragon. I kept in touch with some of them, including my supervisors, who offered to provide great references for me. One night I got a call from Linda, the work friend who had urged me to do the tarot reading with Madame Toussant. After I told her about Madame’s first prediction, one that had come true the very next morning, she was silent on the line for a while.

“That’s really creepy,” she said, at last, and I heard her take a drag from a cigarette and sigh out a worried breath. “The things she told me were all kind of upbeat, and one is about to come true within a few weeks.”

When I asked her about her own predictions, she described two of them – how she’d soon be an aunt, and how a dashing new gentleman was due on the scene any day now.

“There’s no way she knew my sis was pregnant, and her reading made me feel some relief, since her previous pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. As to the new guy, who knows. But what about the second thing she told you? Some woman you’re in love with getting into trouble?”

I told her about Beth, and how she’d broken it off when I got drunk at a party at her best friend’s house.

“During the couple months we were going out, she could really get depressed. She told me she saw a therapist once a month, but she got sick of her meds and stopped taking them.”

Linda sounded worried about her after I explained all of it.

“You’re not believing what that psychic said, are you? That it’s Beth, in some kind of mental trouble? Come on, Linda, me losing my job like that was a weird coincidence, but you’re not thinking –”

“I think you should find out if she’s okay. Like I said – that psychic is the real deal. I think she meant what she said.”

That night, I had a terrible nightmare. In it, I was back in the fortune teller’s tent, and the old woman showed me a vision through a crystal ball. Through the curved sphere of polished glass, I could see a warped, refracted image of a woman lying in bed, two empty pill bottles on the sheet beside her. It was Beth…

I woke with a start, got dressed, and sped off in my car at 3:00 AM, bound for Beth’s apartment. As I neared the three-story building where she lived, I saw flashing blue and red lights playing across the scene. I rounded a corner and parked near the entrance to her building.

My blood ran cold as I watched two paramedics wheel out a gurney – a blanket pulled completely over whoever lay there, dead. There, on the lawn, I saw Beth’s roommate Cindy. She was in her robe and sobbing uncontrollably to the police.

I was already too late…

6.

Two months later, it was halfway through the fourth quarter, the score Penn State 30, Texas 28. Jeremy and I had drunken our way through half a case of Heineken. It was New Year’s Eve, after all, and my Pennsylvania alma mater was poised to win their first national title in twenty years. The coffee table had become a wasteland of empty green bottles, tortilla chip bits, and spatters of Mexican salsa.

During a commercial break, I saw Lucy walk quickly past the doorway several times. With each passing, her footsteps grew louder, until she finally called out to Jeremy to the kitchen.

“Hang on, Hon. It’s third and goal! Be there in a minute!”

A few seconds later, she appeared in the doorway, hands on her hips. “Now, Jeremy,” and her glare gave us both pause.

Jeremy sighed, set his half-drunk bottle on the table, and left the room, and I heard them arguing in the kitchen. The crowd noise obscured much of it, so I turned down the volume to hear better. Lucy had been in a touchy mood, and I was worried about her, and about them.

“He got drunk at Mom’s on Thanksgiving. Oh, and he came on to my cousin? Then we didn’t do midnight mass for Christmas this year. And tonight, we backed out on the Henry’s and left them in the lurch!”

“Honey, you know how much this means to him. It’s a national championship, for Chrissake, and I didn’t want him here alone. You know how he gets.”

“You just want to sit around and get drunk together, like two teenagers. And what about me? I made two casseroles!”

“I’m sorry, Babe. Really, I’ll make it up to you. Just come watch with us. Let’s all ring in the new year with a victory.” Jeremy knew he was on thin ice. I could tell by the softening of his voice, his slight rise in pitch.

“I am not watching a goddamn game. And don’t ask me again.”

She stomped from the room, and a bedroom door slammed. I turned the volume back up. Penn State had scored, and it was now 37 to 28, but it didn’t really matter. Not the score, not this game, not even a national title.

Jeremy came back in, trying his best to pretend nothing was wrong. When he saw the score, he turned to me, poised for our traditional high-five. But I kept my hands on my lap.

“What’s going on, Bro?” I asked. “Why didn’t you go to the New Year’s party? Lucy mentioned it days ago, but when you didn’t say anything about it today, I figured it fell through.”

“It’s no problem,” Jeremy said, then grabbed his beer and took a long pull. “This is your alma mater, Bro! National title on the line! Go Lions!”

That night, after the game, I lay in bed, my head spinning from drinking, my heart pounding as I thought, over and over, of the fortune teller’s grim prediction about my brother’s marriage. I couldn’t risk it. Their marriage was too precious for me to drive a wedge between them. So I got up, packed some things, wrote a note explaining that I was going to a cheap motel until I found my own place, and left it on the kitchen counter.

7.

My phone’s ringer woke me at 10 AM on New Year’s day. My head pounded as I rolled over in my motel bed to answer it.

“What the hell did you do?” a woman’s voice shouted, and I realized it was Lucy. “You left in your car and drove falling down drunk to a motel? Did you wreck on the way?”

And so I was honest with her. I told her about the fortune teller, the three predictions, and how two of them had already come to pass. And that I was terrified I was ruining their marriage and would thus be the cause of Jeremy losing her. Now and then she tried to interrupt, but I bulldozed over her protests. When I finished, my voice broke and I began to cry. Over the phone, I heard only the sound of her driving.

“Where are you?” she finally asked. “I’m bringing you home.”

“But I can’t –”

“Thomas, tell me where you are! Goddamn you – listen to common sense for once? You need to see your therapist, like, today! Don’t argue with me again, or so help me –”

Suddenly, over the phone, I heard the blare of car horns, the screeching of tires, and an all-consuming crunch of metal on metal.

Then silence…