“He’s drunk,” Karen said. She thought back to her last assignment and how the ghost had wanted to taste alcohol, but he never seemed to become intoxicated no matter how much he consumed.
“Yes. For five years now,” Fate nodded.
“How did he do that?”
“That’s what happens when someone drinks too much alcohol,” Fate explained in a patronizing tone as she swatted Karen lightly on the shoulder.
“That’s not what I meant,” Karen replied, more curious about the situation than angry with Fate over her remark. “Scott – my last assignment – he never got drunk. Why is this man intoxicated? Do some ghosts have a higher tolerance for alcohol?”
“It’s not the alcohol that he’s drinking now that’s making him inebriated. Trevor was drunk when he died,” Fate explained.
“Will he ever sober up?”
“That’s not your concern. Your job is to move him into the next life.”
“How do I do that? He can’t think straight.”
“Well, that could be an advantage!’ Fate said with a smile and vanished like a balloon collapsing when punctured, and the suddenness of Fate’s exit made Karen jump backwards.
“I hate it when she does that,” Trevor slurred without looking up.
“Me, too,” Karen agreed as she moved towards the ghost.
“I hate that bitch,” he continued in the same depressed, garbled tone. He was still looking down and off to the side. Karen studied the pavement that was holding Trevor’s attention, and realized that the image captivating Trevor was in his mind.
“You know her?” Karen asked, wondering if he actually knew Fate or if she just reminded him of someone else.
“Everyone runs into that bitch sooner or later,” Trevor responded quietly. Karen took one more step forward, and her shoes filled the space where his eyes had been focused on the ground. He blinked a few times before craning his neck to look up into her face. “You’re not like her, though,” he said after studying Karen’s face. “She makes people do things they don’t want to do.” The wind picked up down the alley, and Karen coughed when she caught another strong fragrance of rotting trash.
“You don’t think people have a choice?”
“I have a choice. That’s why I’m still here.” For a drunk who could barely speak, he was making a remarkable amount of sense.
“How do you know Fate? Have you known her for a long time?”
“Slow down." His hands flopped in the air in an attempt to instruct her to speak more slowly. “Too many questions makes a man dizzy.”
“How do you know her?” Karen asked, carefully pronouncing each word.
“She comes by here every week and tries to get me to take a walk.” His head flopped down to one side and bobbed a few times before coming to rest on his shoulder.
“She does?”
“Do I look like I’m lying?” he deadpanned with his chin against his chest. His head leaned to one side and barely moved when he spoke.
“No,” Karen replied. “In fact, you appear to be quite honest, unlike her. I don’t trust her either.”
“You’re a very smart lady.”
Karen looked him over. He had a few cuts and bruises on his head and there was a large bloodstain in his hair near the part.
“What happened to you?”
“I died in an accident.”
Karen felt both relief and concern at his statement. She was relieved that he knew he was dead, but she wondered about the circumstances surrounding the accident.
“It was her fault,” he continued. Karen’s mind raced. If Fate caused this accident, what could have motivated her to take a life? Was it some sort of retaliation? What could Fate be planning for her? Then she realized that it was possible that Trevor could be talking about something else, so she decided to ask for clarification.
“The accident?”
“Yes. Everything. I’m done listening to her.”
“What did she tell you to do?” Karen asked, speaking slowly.
“She never told me to do anything. She never does. She makes people do stuff. It’s like people are her puppets.” Karen immediately felt a sense of camaraderie with Trevor. Despite his inebriation, he understood her experience with Fate.
“Yes,” Karen said, “she does. She’s been trying to bully me, also.”
“Don’t let her be the boss of you. I think she may be the devil.”
“She won’t boss me around. At least not for long. I’m working on it,” Karen assured him. “Have you met her husband?”
“What husband?”
“She’s married to Fortune.”
“No!”
“Yes.” Karen’s eyes widened to demonstrate her sincerity.
“I didn’t know that,” he said as he sloppily stroked his chin. “But I wouldn’t be familiar with Fortune. I was never very fortunate. I never won anything. I was always losing things, like my car keys and jobs. In fact, I lost a lot of things, including my life, as you can see.”
Karen quickly realized that Trevor wouldn’t be a good source of information on Fortune. No matter. Trevor seemed to have some insight on Fate, and that could be extremely useful. He might also know some bit of key information to help Karen escape her contract.
“Fortune is very kind,” Karen said. She thought back to his dreamy eyes and nearly started giggling. “I don’t know how they wound up together.”
“Yeah,” he agreed with an uncoordinated nod of his head. “She’s horrible. Always getting bossy and trying to make me get up and walk. What’s with all the walking?” Karen noticed that he was sitting in a puddle and she wondered if it was his own ghostly excrement.
“How long have you been here?” she asked as she squatted down to his level. She cringed slightly when she caught a whiff of his scent. Ghostly waste may be transparent, but the fragrance is full bodied.
“Couple of years.”
“Do you ever get up?”
“Why should I? I don’t need the exercise anymore.” Alley ghosts, Karen decided, were a bit like alley cats: shrewd and able to persist despite the influence of other forces that attempted to remove them.
“Good point,” she agreed. “I just thought you might like a change of scenery.”
“I need to stay here.”
“Why?”
“This is where it happened — where I died. My girlfriend will look for me here when it’s her time. We were very close.”
Karen nodded.
“She was beautiful and sweet and kind,” he paused for a moment and rolled his head slowly over to the other side. He squinted as he peered over at Karen. “I suppose I was lucky in one thing: she loved me. She was the only thing I had, and she was wonderful.”
Karen thought for a moment. How would he know if his girlfriend had or hadn’t moved on in the past few years? He’d been in one place. Sure she was devoted to him at the time he died, but if he hadn’t been anywhere else since then he couldn’t know what she was doing. She might not be waiting at all.
“Was she in the car with you when you died?”
“No.”
“Were you alone?”
“What’s with all the questions?”
“I’m — I’m just curious,” Karen said and then hesitated. “Fate seems pretty interested in you. I was wondering why.”
“She seems pretty interested in you, also. She brought you here, didn’t she?”
“Were you this sharp when you were sober?” Karen asked with a laugh.
“A drunk man is never the best judge of his own wit or aptitude,” he said, and Karen laughed harder at this remark.
“She wants me to do her dirty work,” Karen explained. Given Trevor’s keen intellect, she decided it would be useless to attempt deceiving him. “She wants me to get you to take a walk.”
“I figured it was something like that.” He laughed the disjointed, shrill giggle of the inebriated.
“Do you know why she wants you to go for a walk?”
“No,” he said as he waved both hands rapidly in front of his face. “Don’t care.” He dropped his hands back into his lap and then fumbled around searching inside his bag of bottles.
“Maybe we can outsmart her,” Karen suggested.
“How?” He paused in his search to wait for her response.
“What if you just took five steps to the corner?” she said. “Then you would have taken a walk, but you wouldn’t really be going anywhere, and I would also have convinced you to move. So, technically, we would have given her what she wanted from both of us without actually giving in to whatever she really wants.”
Trevor tapped his index finger against his temple as he pondered this suggestion. Then he folded his arms in front of his chest and scrunched up his face.
“Your girlfriend would still know where to find you. In fact, she’d have to walk right by you if she came down the alley looking for you.”
Trevor clawed at the brick wall as he attempted to pull himself up. It took a long time, and Karen wondered if he would be able to stand after sitting for five years. She watched his bent skeleton slowly unfold and straighten. He took one step, still holding onto the brick wall and turned his head to smile at Karen. She felt guilty for attempting to make him move and wondered if a few steps would be all it took for Trevor to move on. He was shrewd, but at the same time he appeared so helpless. All he wanted was to meet up with his girlfriend again. The thought of two lovers reuniting after death brought to mind her bad experience with Fate. Karen felt sick as she thought about the librarian Betsy and her lover Jonathan entering hell because Karen had coaxed them into proceeding into the afterlife.
“Stop!” Karen shouted as she nudged Trevor back to where he was sitting. He felt sticky and airy, like cotton candy, but he yielded to the pressure from her hands. “What if she wants this? What if a few steps is all it takes for Fate to get what she wants from you?” Karen didn’t think it was really true, but the thought was already running through her mind that Trevor may not be headed towards an afterlife of bliss. He was drunk, after all. There was no telling what he had done when he was alive. He didn’t seem like the sort of person who wanted to hurt others, but he may have accidentally done so. Something was causing him to drink to excess, whether it was because he had no self-control or because he felt regret over an event in his past.
“She can’t win,” Trevor said as he slipped downward with his back against the coarse brick wall. He settled into the same position he had been in for years and began searching the bag of bottles.
“I know why she wants you to go for a walk,” Karen said. “She wants you to move into the next life instead of staying here.” Karen had known this all along, but she had decided that Trevor needed to know it, also.
“Well, I’m pretty stubborn,” he slurred with determination.
“I don’t want to be manipulated by Fate, and I do want to help you. I understand what she wants, but what I don’t know is why you were drunk when you died,” Karen said gently. “Maybe if we talk about why you were drinking, it would help us figure out how to win against Fate.” She really just wanted a clue on the direction his soul was headed. If he was headed towards a positive end, she would help him to move on. But if the ending was unpleasant, Karen didn’t yet know what she would do. She also didn’t know what Fate would do to her if she refused to complete the assignment.
“I drink for personal reasons.”
“Most people do,” Karen said. “Especially when they drink to excess. Were you a heavy drinker before you died?”
“Yes,” he said with one of his slow uncoordinated nods. “I drank a lot that night right before I died.
“What about other nights?”
“Yes!”
“And days?”
“Yes!”
“Were you sober at all?” Karen asked cautiously.
“Yes!” he exclaimed a third time, and Karen fought back a giggle before attempting to continue the conversation on a serious note.
“Can you recall what you did when you were drunk?”
“Only what I remember.”
“Trevor,” Karen began after taking a deep breath, “do you remember ever hurting anyone?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“My ex-wife. But she did have it coming. She was a bitch, too.”
Karen felt the tears of panic coming and she turned away. She refused to allow herself to do the dirty part of the job. It didn’t matter what anyone had done — escorting people into hell was no job for a human being. It was unfair of Fate to have put her in this position.
“What?” Trevor asked with a mixture of concern and impatience.
“It — it makes me think that Fate wants you to take a walk to hurt you because you’ve hurt someone else,” Karen explained.
“So, she’s like karma?” He asked the question in a very casual tone, but Karen felt it was significant. She turned around and rapidly dried her eyes with her fingers.
“Is she?” Karen asked. Her mind turned over the possibility that the answer could be so simple.
“I just asked you!”
“I don’t know, but I’ve never thought about it before and it makes sense,” Karen said as she wiped her nose with her sleeve.
“You said she wanted to hurt me,” Trevor continued. “But I think she wants to hurt everyone.”
“I don’t think she does,” Karen replied after some thought.
“How do you know?”
“Because I’ve seen her do good things,” Karen replied. “I don’t understand it at all. But I do know that I’m not going to make you take a walk today.”
“Nobody makes me do anything anymore. That’s why I’m staying here and staying drunk. I can’t hurt anyone and no one can hurt me.” There was a sudden popping noise and Fate appeared next to them. It was the first time Karen had heard her arrival.
“Good for you!” Fate responded to Trevor and turned to Karen. “What about you?”
“I’m not doing your dirty work,” Karen said firmly.
“Oh, yes, you are. You only think you’re not.” Fate grabbed Karen by the arm and pulled her down the alley and around the corner. Her grip was incredibly firm for a woman with a small bone structure. Karen tried to look over her shoulder at Trevor, but Fate moved quickly and the pain in Karen’s neck kept her from turning it to look backwards.”
“It’s for the best,” Fate said with enthusiasm. “Pillar of salt, and all.” Karen wondered how Fate could move so quickly in those black patent leather pumps.
“I don’t care what you do to me,” Karen said with determination when they had stopped moving. “I will not send that man to hell.”
“I’ve told you before: you don’t send anyone anywhere. Their voyages were already booked and these people packed their own bags with the events of their lives. Your job is to get them on the boat.”