Divine Misfortune

14

Over the next few weeks, things fell into place for Teri and Phil.

Lucky spent less and less time at the house. His dates with Janet grew more frequent, and he usually slept over at her place four or five times a week. They spent more time with Quick than with their own god. Sometimes they would go days without seeing Lucky at all, with only rumpled Hawaiian shirts in the hamper to tell them he’d popped in for a visit and grabbed a shower and something to eat before heading back to Janet’s place.

When they suggested that Quick use the guest room, he refused. The room was more than just a closet full of Lucky’s clothes and an unused bed. It was the shrine to their god, the sacred space devoted to his appeasement. Even if he didn’t use it for much, it still counted as tribute.

Quick was stuck on the sofa, but he was quiet and a decent cook. And he was considerate enough to leave the house every so often to give them their privacy. Usually, he’d just go for a slither around the block for a few hours or sit in the backyard with a glass of tomato juice and a book. It wasn’t very godlike behavior, but he had long ago abandoned the ways of tribute and favor.

“I’m just trying to get my head together,” he’d explained. “I don’t really need to mess around with that game right now.”

Both mortals knew that Quick was just making excuses, but they saw no need to push things. He was immortal. He had plenty of time to “find himself.” It really was none of their business. They just chalked up the serpent god living in their midst to more tribute for Lucky, and as long as Quick was willing to do the dishes every now and then, they didn’t feel too put out.

Janet and Lucky’s relationship changed from infatuation to genuine affection much faster than either was willing to admit, but Teri noticed. At her lunches with Janet, she’d catch Janet smiling wistfully and wouldn’t have to guess what or who she was thinking about. More and more, the discussions became about something “cute” Lucky did or some romantic gesture or just something funny he’d said. Teri considered putting in a discouraging word, but she didn’t see the point in throwing cold water on it just because it was most probably doomed to an ugly end. Most relationships were, when she really thought about it.

It was hard to be negative, though, when good luck was in their hip pocket. Everything started going right. It wasn’t big or obvious, but it was noticeable. Aside from the twenty to thirty bucks of loose change Phil and Teri found every day, there were other subtle benefits. Any supermarket line they chose was always the fastest. Even the most crowded restaurant just happened to have a table available upon their arrival. They were always the twentieth caller to the radio contest, found things on sale just when they needed them to be, and rarely had to deal with traffic jams. Lucky didn’t fix their lives, but he did remove all those little annoyances that made the bigger problems harder to focus on. Phil took advantage of this to just relax while Teri found she could accomplish so much more.

There were still the quirks of luck. Phil stepped in gum at least once a day, and Teri found that her shower would inexplicably blast her with cold water about once a week. But these were just annoyances, and nothing compared to the frustration that a single bad day could create.

The strangest thing was the animals: the birds, squirrels, stray dogs and cats that appeared around them. Always red. Always speckled. Always with the large blue eyes.

Lucky told them it was nothing to worry about and that the animals would go away eventually. They just needed to give it some time.

But the animals kept coming.

Phil and Teri grew used to seeing them. In the end, they seemed less threatening than the daily gum on Phil’s shoe, so after a while, both mortals stopped really noticing.

And life, blessed by good fortune and serendipity, was good.

Phil had seen the Supervisor walking the office before. He’d nodded to her a few times. And once, he’d even shaken her hand while passing by as introductions were being thrown around. But she was too far above him on the corporate ladder to have any deeper interaction on those few occasions when she descended from the seventh floor. She usually appeared like a phantom from a special elevator, spoke to one of the fourth-floor department heads, and disappeared whence she came. Which was why it was surprising when she took a sharp right down Phil’s row of cubicles. Everyone kept their eyes on their work as she proceeded down the aisle.

He bent over his keyboard and squinted at the screen as if his life depended on it. It was several moments before he realized she had paused by his cubicle.

He glanced from the corner of his eye to be sure, not willing to look away from his work for fear of getting caught slacking off. In his peripheral vision, she was a blurry shadow, the living embodiment of all the nebulous dangers that lurked, barely seen and never spoken of, waiting to devour careless members of lower middle management who revealed just how redundant their positions were.

The Supervisor didn’t say anything. She just stood there.

He slowed his typing and turned his head. She wasn’t nearly as terrifying as he’d assumed, but he’d never looked at her directly before. She was a short, stout woman. Her plain gray suit was wrinkle-free, and her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She didn’t smile, but she wasn’t frowning either. She was inscrutable.

“Phillip Robinson.” It wasn’t a question, but there was a pleasant lilt in her voice, even if her face remained uncommitted. “I’d like you to come with me.”

He suppressed a gulp.

She gave him just enough time to save his work before turning and marching away. He ran after her. Elliot shot him a questioning, vaguely frightened glance, and Phil shrugged. She led him to the special elevator. It wasn’t different from any other elevator, but it still filled him with dread.

He didn’t ask what this was about, and she didn’t say. He watched the floor numbers light up until the elevator reached seven. Not all the way to nine, but closer than he’d been before.

“This way, please.”

He ended up in an office. A secretary guarded the door, but she made no attempt to stop them from entering. The office was more like a small apartment with all the amenities of an art deco living space. Not to Phil’s tastes, but impressive if only because he knew how others valued something like this.

The Supervisor vanished without another word. She closed the double doors behind her and left him to his fate.

A heavyset man sat behind the large desk. He was big, but not fat, brimming with physical power. His haircut probably cost more than Phil made in a month. Phil didn’t know who he was, but he assumed this was someone important.

The man stood, spread his arms wide, and offered a boisterous greeting. “Phil, so good of you to make it! Welcome, welcome!”

Phil ventured closer with visions of the giant desk rolling over and crushing him beneath it. He decided to invoke the first rule of corporate survival. Humor the boss.

“Hello”-he read the nameplate on the desk-“Mr. Rosenquist.”

“Oh, please. Why so formal? Call me Van.” Rosenquist smiled, revealing perfectly white teeth. Everything about the man, from his tan to his trimmed mustache and square jaw, was a model of the subjective perfection that so many spent thousands of dollars achieving.

Rosenquist began the journey around his desk. By the time he rounded the second corner, a nameless dread had fallen on Phil. He didn’t expect the boss to pounce and devour him, but his gut reaction was much the same as if he had. These were dangerous territories for an employee of his position, and not everyone who ventured into these lands made it out intact.

The boss seized Phil’s sweaty hand and squeezed.

“Can I interest you in a cup of coffee? Great stuff here. Imported. I think it might even be from a country we have a trade embargo with, but I don’t ask. Plausible deniability.”

Phil drank coffee only in the morning, and that he liked strong and black. Anything else didn’t interest him. But Rosenquist was already pouring the cup from an hourglass-shaped carafe. He handed it to Phil, who held the mug in both hands, unsure of what to do with it.

“Smell that,” said Van. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

Phil went through the act of inhaling the aroma. He found it unpleasant, but he kept that to himself.

“I suppose you’re wondering why I called you up here.”

“Yes, sir… Van.”

Rosenquist poured a cup of his own, sniffed it, then set it down on his desk. “The truth of the matter is that you’re doing a hell of a job for us down there, Phil.” He slapped Phil’s shoulder. “Just one hell of a job.”

Phil braced himself for the next part. The”… but we’re making layoffs” part or the”… but corporate restructuring renders you redundant” part.

“We could use a man like you on the seventh floor.”

“Me?” Phil tried not to sound too surprised.

“Yes, you. We have a new position opening soon. Executive vice president in charge of complicated government paperwork. Not the final job title, but that’s the gist of it. And you’ve made the short list of candidates.”

“Me?” This time he utterly failed to hide his disbelief.

Rosenquist chuckled. “It’s not guaranteed at this stage, you understand. We’re feeling out some others. But I don’t think there’s any harm in telling you that you’re the front-runner at this point.”

“But why me?”

“Why not you? Can I be honest? Sure I can. You look like the kind of man who appreciates honesty. Am I right?”

Phil nodded. As if he could answer no to the question.

“If you get this position, it really won’t be much different than what you’re doing now. But our lawyers tell us that we need someone in a more official position. Legal reasons. Don’t ask me to explain it. So we sent down a memo asking for each department to send us possible candidates based on paperwork error ratios.”

“They keep track of how many mistakes we make?”

“Oh, it’s all monitored somewhere. The list was sent up to us, and it was quite a long list. We trimmed it to the top ten candidates via a selection of PER reports and seniority indexing. It was still a fairly long list. Then a computer error ate most of the data and only four were left. So it looks as if you had a stroke of luck there.”

Phil smiled. Lucky had come through again.

“It’s not glamorous. You’ll move out of your cubicle, but your office won’t be much better. You’ll be an executive in pay only. Can you accept that?”

“Same job,” paraphrased Phil, “more money.”

“A lot more money,” added Rosenquist.

“I can live with that.”

The intercom buzzed. The boss had a short exchange with his secretary. “I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me a moment, Phil. Have to put out some fires. Make yourself comfortable. I’ll be right back.”

Phil put his coffee down and walked to the window. The equally tall building across the way obscured the view, but if he stood close enough to the glass, he could almost see the street below.

Movement on the outside caught his attention. A red pigeon with black dots perched on the ledge. The bird stared back with its bright blue eyes and pecked the window twice. Hard enough to leave a long crack in the glass. He was worried it might break through and dive-bomb his eye. Instead, it flew away.

He backed away but kept watching for it to return. It didn’t, and after a minute, he was comfortable enough to take his eyes off the glass. Though he kept it in his peripheral vision.

He reached for a mug, but since his attention was split, he ended up knocking it off the desk. He scrambled to pick it up, but the coffee had all spilled out on the carpet. He found some paper towels in the wet bar and tried dabbing up the spill with only mild success.

“Son of a…”

There wasn’t enough in the carafe to refill the mug all the way. Phil took the half-filled beverage. That way, his boss still had a full cup and Phil would have less to drink. He congratulated himself on his cleverness when Rosenquist returned.

“Van, I’m sorry, but I spilled some coffee on-”

“Don’t worry about that. Housekeeping will take care of it.” Rosenquist slapped Phil between the shoulder blades hard enough to put a permanent bend in his spine. “You’re an executive now.”

“I have the job?”

“Practically.” He picked up his mug and waited for Phil to do the same. He obliged, and they tapped them together.

Rosenquist took a hearty gulp of his beverage while Phil took a sip. It wasn’t very good, but right now, it tasted like nectar from Olympus.

“Now it’ll take a few days to get everything in order,” explained Rosenquist. “All the normal bureaucratic hoop-jumping. But I am confident in saying, unofficially, welcome to the seventh floor.”

“Thank you, Van.”

The boss seized Phil in another painful handshake. He caught Phil glancing over his shoulder at the window.

“Something wrong?” asked Rosenquist.

“No,” said Phil. “Everything’s great.”

“Good to hear it.” He glanced down at his cup. “Hey, didn’t I give you the red mug?”

“I don’t know, Van. Did you?”

Rosenquist’s smile fell. “Did you switch mugs?”

“I might have. I wasn’t really paying attention when I refilled-”

Rosenquist poured his coffee on the floor and peered into the cup.

“Something wrong, Van?”

The boss threw his mug aside. Beads of sweat poured down Rosenquist’s face. He released Phil and grabbed his chest.

“Van, just stay calm. I’ll get a doctor.”

Rosenquist lurched forward. Phil moved to catch the toppling executive. Rosenquist was heavier than Phil expected and they ended up on the floor together, the boss on top. Phil had trouble breathing, and it wasn’t just the weight bearing down on him. The pair of hands wrapped around his throat had something to do with it, too. Phil gasped for a few strangled gulps of air as he stared into Rosenquist’s bloodshot, twitching eyes.

Rosenquist’s body went stiff as he sucked in one last strained breath. He collapsed. Phil rolled Rosenquist to one side and caught his breath. Rosenquist wasn’t breathing, and his face was frozen into a ghastly rictus. Phil had never seen a rictus before, but he was pretty sure this qualified.

The next few minutes were a blur. He remembered alerting the secretary, who called the paramedics. They arrived quickly, but by then it was obviously too late. Phil sat in a chair in the lobby, trying to figure out what had happened.

A heart attack at that particular moment in time seemed unfortunate. A lousy bit of luck. He wondered, several times, if this would hurt his chance for promotion. Then he felt guilty that he was thinking like that while a man had just died.

He kept wondering. Was it luck?

Or was it Lucky?

Phil left work early so he could beat Teri home. He found Lucky sitting on the sofa, watching television. It seemed as if that was all Lucky did with his free time. Phil had come to realize that gods, for all their awesome power, were deprived of the one thing that made life worth living.

A time limit.

Silently, Phil turned off the TV and sat across from Lucky.

“I was watching that,” said Lucky.

Phil took a moment to compose his thoughts. He didn’t have long before Teri walked through that door.

“My boss died today.”

“Sorry to hear that, buddy.”

Phil held up his hand, and a surprised expression crossed Lucky’s face.

“Did you kill him?”

Lucky sat up. “Excuse me?”

“I’m not judging,” said Phil. “I just need to know. Did you kill him?”

“I don’t kill people.”

Phil sucked in a long breath.

“You can tell me the truth.”

Lucky tossed out a chuckle, but when Phil didn’t join in, the god frowned.

“I’m only going to say this once more, buddy.” Lucky removed his sunglasses and looked Phil in the eye. “I. Don’t. Kill. People.” He reached for the remote. “It’s not my thing.”

He turned on the television. Phil rose and pushed the OFF button on the set.

“I’m not saying you killed him intentionally. But maybe you got him by accident.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Been a long time since I killed anybody by accident.” He laughed as if telling a joke, but Phil couldn’t tell.

“All right, all right. Something obviously has you on edge, Phil. Sit and we’ll get this straightened out.”

Phil did most of the talking. He described the incident at the office in rapid detail, partly because he wanted to get this sorted before Teri walked through the door, partly because his mind was racing. He mentioned the spotted red animals that kept popping up. Not everywhere, all the time. Not always in obvious ways. But still there, still haunting him from the corner of his eye.

“Is that it?” asked Lucky in his usual offhand manner. This once, it came off as dismissive. “This is all perfectly normal, Phil. Happens all the time. It’s called central cog syndrome. You’re still adjusting to the benefits of divine favor. And right now, you’re starting to feel like the whole universe revolves around you.”

Phil didn’t like the sound of that, and it must have shown on his face.

“Don’t sweat it,” said Lucky. “Your ego isn’t getting out of control. You’re just trying to figure things out. Now, I might have no small influence on the way your life is going, but I’m not all-powerful. You and me, we’re just a couple of guys in the grand scheme of things. We don’t rule the universe. Things are going to happen. Good things and bad things that have absolutely nothing to do with either of us.”

Phil’s doubts softened.

“You’ve had people die in your life before I moved in, right?” asked Lucky.

Phil nodded.

“And you’ve had weird luck before, too, right?”

He nodded again.

“So there you have it.”

“But what about the animals?”

“That might have something to do with me.” Phil thought he noticed a guilty glint in Lucky’s eyes, but he couldn’t be sure as Lucky had put his sunglasses back on. “But I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.”

Teri came through the door.

“Hi.” She gave him a hug and noticed his distant response. “Something wrong?”

“One of my bosses died.”

“Oh, that’s horrible.” She hugged him tighter. “Want to talk about it?”

His head resting on her shoulder, he studied Lucky, who was back to watching television. He didn’t think Lucky was telling him everything, but he didn’t want to press it. If Lucky was right, if this was all in Phil’s imagination, then sharing his concerns with Teri would just get her worked up again. She’d finally gotten comfortable with this arrangement.

Lucky had a point. It was absurd to believe that everything around him had something to do with a grand cosmic conspiracy. Had he really gone that far around the bend that the lives and deaths of others seemed only to be omens meant for his own interpretation?

Thinking about it made him feel a bit embarrassed.

Teri came as a much-needed distraction from his thoughts. “Are you sure everything is okay?” she asked.

“It’s fine. Just a weird day.” He forced a smile. “But I’m sure it’s nothing.”