What shall we do with him, the Watcher intones with a shake of the head. What shall we do with him.
I do not know, says another, but we have to do something. Anything, really.
Shall we teach him a lesson, asks yet another. Something to stick with him. Or in him.
Something obvious, the first replies.
No, something that befits his occupation. Something… ambiguous.
Or, says the first, both.

My first stroke of what I like to call bad luck comes as I am driving under an overpass. While driving to work, merrily minding my own business, traffic slows to a crawl. I curse the sudden deceleration and my decision to go in late. Frustrated, I turn up the radio loud enough that I am unable to hear the metal rending above me as guardrails disintegrate. A large chunk of granite has come loose from its moorings, has separated from its flatbed fellows, and has inexplicably and inexorably bounded tip over tail from truck to tailgate to pavement and finally come to rest on the hood of my car. I am miraculously unharmed, as my car is idling in the centre lane. My car is the exact opposite, completely totaled, the hood crumpled, the engine burst at its seams, the fenders scattered across the freeway.

At first I am under the impression that I have been hit with a meteor and that I will immediately become famous. I am under this impression until it resolves that meteors are not made of granite, and were they made of granite, would almost certainly not be in the form of a fractured human face. When I find out at the precinct that they believe the head is part of a pre-fabricated statue of Eris, I am equal parts amusement and disbelief.

I do become famous, for at least one news cycle, until it becomes apparent that the particular statue of Eris which cut tragically short my Corolla’s legendary Japanese lifespan has been stolen from a museum. Suddenly my car becomes a symbol of the destructive power of human greed and imported automobiles. It becomes a target upon which to drop all manner of vitriol. I become rather embarrassed of the incident.

This seems a story one might tell to ones grandchildren. A close brush with death. An unexpected hood ornament. Such a story might be passed down from generation to generation, were I not the last of a long line.

My second bit of bad luck seems to have doomed me to be the last of that long line forever. In my haste to create for myself a career impervious to downturns in the economy, it seems I have forgotten to beget for myself any seed. My forest is barren of seedlings. I am a lone patch of oak, soon to be felled. I come home that day, much too calm for my own good, enceinte with mortality, determined to have Stella, my girlfriend, enceinte with my escape from that mortality. My Darwinian instinct to further my own bloodline finally rises to the surface, escaping the educated urban trappings that have kept a foot on its head for so long. My genes long to be set free to propagate into the world.

I have forgotten ever wanting a child. I have also forgotten that I was quite a jackass. I come home to an empty house, the furniture removed, picture-sized unsullied bits of wall revealing their nakedness, Stella gone, and only a refrigerator remaining. It is stocked with beer, none of which I trust. She has not left a note. She has simply not left anything all. Everything that can easily be removes has, it seems, been easily removed.

I call my friends to find out where Stella is, but they won’t tell me a thing. They seem less my friends than ever, and I recall that they are all Stella’s friends, that I don’t have any friends. I begin to remember I dislike most of these people; the ones I can stand are inert to the point of coma. They tell me things like, Oh, she finally left you. She’s been thinking about this for years. They say, Yes, well, what did you expect, working those hours? Ben, the most honest of the circle of emotional butchers, is more direct. You’re sterile, he says. You can’t get it up. And you’re a bit of a self-important moron, too. No wonder she left. I am not pleased to find out that Stella has passed that bit of misinformation around like a golden football.

Later on that night I find out that I am most certainly not sterile, that I most certainly can get it up, but I do not have a video camera handy and do not think these now former friends of mine would appreciate that particular gesture. I lay on the hardwood floor where a spectacular rug once bode its time looking expensive and collecting depreciative stains. I don’t undress or shower or cover myself with anything. My clothes are gone, the showerhead is gone, the lightbulbs are gone. The sunset is particularly spectacular, as if to counterbalance my life with its ostentatious colours. I am not impressed. As I fall asleep, it ocurrs to me that there is another day just around the corner though this does nothing to comfort me.

Do you think he has it yet, a Watcher asks.
No, another replies. No way he’s got it. Keep at him.
Let him recover for a day, the first Watcher says in his infinite wisdom. Then we can hit him when he tries to get back up.
Not particular sporting, another Watcher snorts.
When, the first says, have we ever been sporting.

Tags: fiction