So the other day I once again found myself in Mr Donut, sitting near this girl with a truly great body.
Oh, I'm sorry, did I just say "a truly great body"? I meant "a truly great amount of body odor."
Anyway.
In order to distract myself from the stench, I started rewriting the story I posted a while ago. I finished the rewrite just now, thanks to suggestions from Natalie and Robert.
Uncertainty
It was a chilly morning in January when a banker named Milton became aware that as he walked back to his car after work he would slip on a patch of black ice and break his arm. Milton found this so alarming that he immediately set about convincing himself it was not true.
He succeeded only in putting it out of his mind until he felt the improbable rotation of his body, which was suddenly ponderous and unfamiliar. He did not gasp from the surprise-most people would have, he considered later-or yell from the pain , at least not at first. What he'd wanted to do, he told people-though of course he didn't actually do it, the whole thing happened just like that-was to sigh-he way you sigh when the girl calls you into the dentist's for something unpleasant.
This was the first case of Milton's prescience. For a long time it remained the most ominous. He routinely knew the weather, the identities of phone callers, that So-and-so's wife would get pregnant soon. There did not seem to be a common element in any of it. Occasionally he would obtain something of real value; more often the information was amusing or mildly useful.
Once in a supermarket he had seen a woman pushing a cart with a small child sitting in the basket, its two hands clutching a bottle, which Milton realized it would spill.
"Careful with that," he said, smiling.
The child did not understand him, of course, but was so delighted by the phrase that it flung the bottle to the floor, splattering Milton's shoes with formula.
He took to his gift with good humor, but did not tell anyone about it. One evening, after a few drinks, he had almost mentioned it to a friend.
He had just won a good deal of money on an improbable bet over a football game.
"I don't know how you do it," the friend said ruefully as he wrote out a check.
Milton giggled. "You want to know how I do it?"-but then he knew he would not say anything.
He giggled again. "I'm a lucky sonuvabitch, that's how."
_____________
One thing troubled him.
He often thought of his broken arm, which was still in its cast. What if he had stayed at the office that evening, or invented some pretext to ask a colleague for a lift home, thereby avoiding the walk to his car and the murderous black ice?
Attempts to forestall other predictions had all ended in failure. As often as not he ended up causing the very thing he hoped to prevent. The baby's milk, for instance.
It reminded him of a Greek tragedy. It took that sort of anachronistic credulity to buy into the logic of a prediction causing itself. That had pleased him at first. But he could not ignore the hackneyed, frustrating question: How could it be that one knew the future but could not change it? In this day and age.
He determined to ensure that a prediction failed to come true. I shouldn't be difficult. The next time he "knew" what he himself would do, he would instead do the opposite.
But he had never often had predictions about himself. With this conviction they came even less frequently, and breaking them was inconvenient.
His first opportunity came one morning during the commute to work. His coffee seemed unusually anxious to evacuate his bladder. When the prediction came, he could only chuckle at its deviousness. Half an hour later he pulled into his parking space, and as he hobbled to the restroom he said out loud, "All right-you win." (He did wonder, sometimes, whether these premonitions were communicated to him by a greater intelligence.)
A few weeks later, he found to his delight that he would make a tremendous amount of money for his firm-and himself-by investing in a certain company. He remembered his resolution but decided to conduct his test another time.
There was, after all, plenty of time.
It went on like this for several months, Milton foreseeing only things that he wanted to do-or felt that to avoid, on account of his "experiment," would look too much like obsession. No one would know, of course, but Milton felt the need to be vigilant in this regard. Better not even to start down a road that might lead to eccentricity.
Still, he had begun to feel conspired against, and this feeling worried him. He decided that it would be best, for his peace of mind, to go through with it. Just get it done, come hell or high water, and then forget it.
The only result of this was that he no longer saw things-anything-he could hope to control.
At least the answer to the question of his broken arm: if he had heeded the warning, he would not have received it in the first place. He was after all exactly like those Greek prophets who saw a partial but inescapable future. A future that did not need to reach into the past to force itself into being, because it already had-already would-come about through the free will of men.
_____________
Years passed.
Milton was sometimes shown unhappy affairs-death, heartbreak, sickness, financial ruin, usually of strangers. He knew better than to try to prevent them, but they weighed on him and made him in some ways a soberer man.
Yet being largely spared knowledge of his own future, Milton felt in control of himself. He considered that he had reached a sort of truce with his gift, and he was grateful for it. The truce and the gift.
Then he was invited to attend a conference in London. His flight had just begun its long journey across the Atlantic Ocean when he discovered that a woman he had been seeing for several months would soon be driving home from a cocktail party. What soon meant was unclear-tonight. She would be just slightly drunk, but drunk enough. There would be a ring, she would fumble for her phone-always at the bottom of a full purse (he had chastised her for it how many times?). At this time of year that would be enough.
The fact that it would be ice-again-seemed to mean something. Maybe a second chance. It was only seven, too early to be leaving a cocktail party. Did she have any reason to go home so soon?
Not that he knew.
A second chance.
He was already holding the in-flight phone. But how did it work? He read the directions too quickly and had to read them a second time, then a third. In an instant, the dryness of the cabin air became oppressive and he broke out in a deep sweat.
There were reasons people left cocktail parties early. The arrival of an ex-boyfriend. Diarrhea. Parents' heart attacks or strokes. And the ring from his call would certainly be the one to cause her death.
But if he did not call, she would still be at the party-there was no reason for her not to be-and he would have pointlessly missed the chance to stop her.
It was familiar, self-defeating logic. Nonlogic. Either she had left the party or she was still there-it had nothing to do with whether he called. There was no conspiracy of fate, no escape from responsibility; he could still make the right choice. Yet for no reason but pointless coincidence he would make the wrong one.
Minutes passed. He sweat, vacillated, several times began the laborious process of making the call, then abruptly hung up. The idea of determining the moment of her death was too heavy.
He knew at the same time that if he only called, in spite of everything, he might still be able to prevent it. With a rush of adrenaline he would pick up the phone. But if he called . . . .
This continued until long after she was dead.
_____________
Shortly after the funeral, he began to know his own future again. He accepted the knowledge with little question now. The more he complied with it, the more he knew, until it was sometimes difficult to differentiate between the predictions and his own thoughts.
The predictions became increasingly passive and self-referential. One day he awoke knowing that he would not leave bed that day, even to call in sick to work.
"Why not just get out of bed? Go to work, stop this ridiculousness," he imagined friends saying to him.
"I can't," he would have responded.
"Yes you can," they'd say.
"You're right-I can," he would have confessed. "I could get up right now and get on with me life. But I won't."
"Why not!" he imagined them crying. Then he would have rolled over and pushed his face into the pillow. When he turned back, not long afterward, they would have left, shaking their heads in disgust.
But for the most part he managed to hold himself together. Both his personal and professional lives suffered, but it was assumed this was due to grief over the woman. It was seen as a little unbecoming-they had, after all, only been going out only for a few months at the time of the accident-but then, some people had always been deeply affected by death. If Milton was one of them, would could you say? Besides, he still did good work.
_____________
One clear chill morning many months later, he was eating breakfast in a cafe when his gaze fell upon a very attractive woman, significantly younger than he was. She was sitting directly in his line of sight and he allowed himself to admire her surreptitiously for a moment.
Her eyes flicked up. They were not immediately accusing, just curious-but he jerked his head aside like a teenage boy.
He realized that he would look again at the woman, and this time he would stare at her shamelessly, with no regard for her discomfort. Not because of desire, but because he knew what would happen if he kept looking-and because he knew that he would keep looking in spite of that.
Because the circularity and arbitrariness were too horrifying to look away from, he kept looking until the woman stood up abruptly and walked out of the cafe.
Milton waited until he heard the sound-an enormous but surprisingly complicated sound, a messy out-of-place sound-of an I-beam, dislodged from its crane harness by a sudden, improbably perfect gust of wind, falling seven stories onto a city sidewalk, onto trunks of cars and street lights and more people than would seem probable.
Milton stayed in the cafe for an hour, watching the sirens and the news vans all speeding toward the accident; then dozens of policemen who, after all that, had nothing to do but wander around speaking to one another in morbidly jaded tones and telling passers-by there's nothing to see here.
Then he went home and climbed to the roof of his apartment block. The deceptively empty blue sky reeled crazily above him. He sat on the low wall surrounding flat roof, but did not look down; the invisible currents and eddies of air comprised by the sky gently pushed his clothing to and fro.
He knew he would remain sitting here for a very long time, until that sky sent him down as well. How long would he wait?
Hours passed, and finally the sun began to set. "What am I waiting for?" he asked himself.
He got down off the wall and returned to his apartment.