Escaping Providence

It has been long night for Keith Samuels. It is only going to get longer from here.

The details of his life are trite and tragic. Most details are when you get right down to it. We’d spare you them, but it just might help you understand why the universe tapped good old Keith. And us? Put us out of your mind. Ours is another story for another time.

Keith was nothing special for most of his life, in an age when being unique pushed one from the herd. We all know what happens to those who veer from the herd, don’t we? A predator does their species a favor and makes a quick meal of the outsider... we are getting ahead of ourselves, aren’t we?

A mediocre student all throughout school, he never managed to excel or fail at anything in particular. He was good enough to graduate high school, but possessed neither the grades nor the inclination to attempt college. Had he, he would have been slightly better off financially, but he would have died in a car accident in June of '73 while swerving away from a woodchuck. Of course he didn't and the woodchuck never got the chance. That avenue of Fate was closed off to him.

A month after he graduated, he married his high school sweetheart Anne (she herself a bastion of banality). Seven and a half months later, she bore Keith his only daughter, Marie Lynn Samuels. Don’t get too attached, she is neither too long for this world or this tale.

Of course, Keith was happy, as his kind tends to be once they have rutted and spawned. A wife, a child, a house, a job at his father’s construction company, what more could a man of his time want in life? Here, our painfully normal protagonist shows an unexpected mutation in his serially replicated life. He chose to join the army and serve his country proudly. He was not drafted, like so many of his former classmates turned co-workers. He chose to serve for honor.

He put in a few good years. Unfortunately for him, fortunately for us, he didn’t see much action. Our Keith is not a fighter. Owing to some first aid courses he took at a YMCA back home, he largely helped patch up wounded soldiers. He kept a great many alive that rightly should have been meat for the beast. Again, he was happy. He followed orders, he served his country, and he had a wife and daughter happily waiting for him at home. What more could a man want in life?

Anne and Marie were killed. It was a car wreck caused by a drunk driver who sobered up moments before his head became closer friends with the windshield than with his body. The woodchuck had nothing to do with this. Ultimately, their deaths are nothing of consequence, merely a means to an end. Two more grains of sand through the reaper’s hourglass, if you will. Really, it was quite necessary to achieve our goals. Don't fret over the drunk driver, killing and being killed were his destiny and it would have been a bus full of children the next day had we not intervened. News traveled infamously slowly to the soldiers in the war, so Keith didn’t know they had died when he came back from the war. He did not, as you may expect, take this information well.

Here, our dear friend Keith deviated far more from his societal programming and closer to our realm. Rather than grieving, toiling for his father, remarrying in due time, having another child, inheriting the construction company after his father’s heart attack at 83, retiring at 60 and eventually dying in his sleep as was his Fate, he rewrote his page in the Book of Life with one broad pen stroke. He disappeared from his town, his old life, everything he knew. He thought no one could find him. He expected to start a new life in the city. However that was never to be.

He quickly ran out of money and motivation, and who can blame him on the latter count? Becoming a derelict was a seamless transition. He wandered the streets of the city for years, surviving winters through some very fundamental tenacity to life. By all accounts, this is pretty near where his story should end. Eventually his grip on this mortal coil should weaken, undoubtedly during some blizzard, and he should end up nothing more than another dash in the city’s mortality rate. Should, but doesn’t, because this is where we directly intervened.

“Greetings, Keith. You’re late.”

He looks confused, more so than usual. Perhaps he has forgotten his own name. We certainly wouldn’t put it past him; it has been almost a decade since anyone, including himself, called him such.

“What’d you call me?” he asks in a shaky timbre. How he survived on the streets sounding like that, even we do not know. Moreover, he looks like he spent the night in a dumpster. Ironic, because last night was one of the few nights he made it to the shelter and didn’t have to sleep among other discarded items. “We called you Keith, as that is your name. Keith Samuels.”

“That ain’t my name! Ain’t been my name for years! I ain’t go no name!” he shouts at us, far too loudly. We do try to keep these things quiet and simple, but we see that it is not going to be quite so easy this time. Perhaps a little food will soothe him enough that we can speak intelligently.

“So you don’t have a name? Now that we will have to fix. Are you hungry, No-Man? Come with me. I’m sure we can find a few lotuses for you...”

Once inside the small diner, Keith became a great deal more docile. While at first we must have seemed like Death coming for him, now we seemed a lot more like an old friend paying a welcomed visit. An old friend who ordered him a cheeseburger with everything - hold the onions - and a strawberry milkshake. The same thing his father used to order him as a boy. Now that seemed like another life...

“...Keith, are you listening?”

We knew that he wasn’t, of course. We knew what he was thinking. We knew nearly everything about him. We even knew how he escaped the lot in life he was given, but that isn’t very important at the moment. We knew that he was getting nostalgic over our choice of meal for him. Still, the extent to which he was attached to his past surprised us. We were not prepared for that.

“Did you know that’s the exact meal my father used to order for me?” he sobbed. He made the transition from nearly crazed drifter to sentimental old man in record time, just as predicted. We could see the tears starting to slither down his filthy cheek, only to be absorbed into his tangled beard.

“Yes, we knew that. We know a lot about you, as we were trying to tell you.”

“But how do you know?” we heard him start to get nervous again, and couldn’t risk losing him so late in the game. To settle him, we slid his plate closer to him, a temptation we knew he wouldn’t refuse.

“This, my dear friend, is not about us. It is about you. You had a Destiny. After Anne and Marie died, you were supposed to continue your completely average life. You chose not to. What you do not seem to understand, Mr. Samuels, is that you were not given a choice in the matter. You slipped out of the Book of Life, changed the path you were on. Now we are here because of it. You have a new Destiny. Only this time, you are being given a choice, though not much of one.”

Keith was noisily chewing his hamburger, the contents spilling out from all sides. He was warm, he had food, someone was talking to him, what more could a man want? Suddenly, it occurred to him that we had been speaking to him and something very important was being said.

“Before you even open your mouth and ask how we know, resign yourself to the fact that it is not your place to have that knowledge yet. Depending on your choice, you may be given that knowledge at a later date.”

A pall of finality came over Keith as he asked, “What are my choices?”

“You can live this life outside of Fate, freeze to death in the dumpster behind this very diner in a little under a month. You can accept the destiny you now are being offered. Or we could just kill you now and save you the trouble of deciding. And no, no one here will know we’ve killed. You will choke to death on your cheeseburger before anyone can help you.”

Already looking as though rigor mortis had set in, Keith said there mutely as the words sank in. He knew that our words were the truth. He could freeze, he could choke, or he could...

“...accept the destiny you are being handed, yes.”

Our finishing his thought aloud frightened him, though it really shouldn’t have since we had shown we knew everything else about him. We could see that his brain quickly ruled out the idea of death by freezing or asphyxiation. He had seen a homeless man freeze to death when he was little. It looked painful to him. He imagined that choking to death would be even worse, though faster.

Quietly and patiently, like a man who had just read his own obituary, he begged, “What is my destiny?”

“To live forever, more or less. You’ll never age, you’ll never again feel pain.”

“What about my life?!” he demanded.

“What life? You sleep in other people’s refuse. You have no friends, you turned your back on them when you left town. You have no family anymore. Aside from Anne and Marie, of whom you are painfully aware, your father died a few years ago of a heart attack at 83. Your mother fell soon after, the some say of a broken heart, which is technically true as she suffered a heart attack. You have nothing left to live for here. So live to rid the world of evil. You were a soldier once, and you were more than happy to follow the orders of your betters. Be a soldier again, but this time you can suffer no wound and you will know that those who cause pain in the world will be punished. You have a choice before you. Immortality and honor, or mortality and bathing in a men’s room. Which will it be?”

Keith couldn’t imagine living forever. In his relatively short life, he had seen his wife and daughter pass away forever while he was in a foreign land. He had held soldiers as their wounds took them. He had lost everything in his life. He could not bear the thought of going on eternally this way.

“No, I reject your offer! I’d rather die in a dumpster alone than live forever in torment!” he proclaimed dramatically as he walked out of the diner.

We hastily paid for his meal with a hundred dollar bill, leaving the change. We knew he would react this way, of course. Just as well, we knew that nothing we could say would change him in the least. Once resolved, some people never change. As he saw us following after him, he began to bolt, only to fall down.

“The die has been cast. We’d wish you luck, but nothing like luck exists. Please, at least take our cloak to keep you warm.”

This he accepted gratefully. He certainly could use some warmth, ever since his blanket was stolen at the YMCA. He pulled the cloak tight over his shoulders and felt the chill of the winter night quickly fall away. He began smiling in spite of himself until the upturned corners of his mouth fell in fear. The black threads of the cloak began penetrating his skin with the speed of bullets. No blood from the wounds could reach the ground for the cloak absorbed it. The cloak began destroying all within him that was mortal and weak. The threads pulled out his hair so that they could invade him from all angles. His skin blanched to a glowing paleness. The irises of his eyes expanded until nothing could be seen but two obsidian marbles. We have always enjoyed the fierce beauty of the conversion of another Reafian, like watching as a tornado uproots the landscape. Before the cloak claimed his brain and memory, the weakest and most mortal part of anyone, we had one final message for the man who was Keith Samuels.

“Goethe once said ‘Tis better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.’ How could he know that Hell isn’t a place, it is a lack of one, and it serves Heaven. You will soon know all of this, or rather, Reafian will. You’ll have honor, you’ll have eternal life, what more could a man want? You didn’t really think you could escape us, did you?”