The Fate Intercessor

I was carrying bread when I died. Day-old rye, half price, in a paper bag that had gone soft on the bottom from the wet. Of everything that happened that night, that’s the part that still bothers me.

It had been snowing since noon, the heavy kind off the lake that doesn’t blow around so much as just come down and keep coming. I’d clocked out of the warehouse at four, spent six hours after that driving packages to people who couldn’t be bothered to go to the store, and parked the van at the depot at ten past ten. The bus on Fillmore had quit running an hour earlier, so I was walking the last stretch home with my collar up and my hands jammed in pockets that had stopped holding any heat sometime around the second winter I’d owned the coat.

I wasn’t thinking about anything big. I was thinking that the pill organizer on the kitchen counter, the one with the days of the week on the lids, needed refilling on Sunday, and that the pharmacy closed at six on Sundays, so it would have to be Saturday. I was thinking about how much the rye cost versus how much the good bread cost. That kind of thing.

The streetlight over me went out.

It didn’t flicker or buzz first. One second there was a cone of yellow light with snow slanting through it, and the next there was just dark, as if somebody had pinched the bulb out.

I stopped walking. I remember looking up at it, stupidly, like it might explain itself. The whole block had gone quiet in the way it does when the snow is thick enough to eat sound. No engines. No TV through a window. Behind me, though, so faint I thought I’d imagined it, something was coming up the street too fast for the ice.

I had time to turn around. I’ll give it that. I had time to see the headlights, and to think, very clearly, oh, come on.

Then nothing.

***

“You can sit up, if you want. Nobody’s going to make you.”

I was already sitting. That was the first strange thing. I couldn’t remember doing it. I was just sitting on a floor in a dark so thorough that I couldn’t see my own hands, until I held them up close to my face and they came slowly out of it like photographs in a tray.

The floor was warm. Not the way a heated floor is warm. It was warm the way a person is. I pressed my palm flat to check, and the floor pressed back, a slow push against my skin and then a release.

I took my hand away fast.

“It does that,” the voice said. “Ignore it. It’s only curious.”

There was a man standing about ten feet off. I’m saying man because that’s the shape of him: two arms, two legs, something gray and loose over his shoulders. I could see him fine. The trouble started when I tried to look at his face. It was like reading a sign from the window of a moving bus. I’d catch the outline of a jaw and then the jaw would be somebody else’s, and when I blinked, I couldn’t have described a single feature if you’d paid me.

“Don’t bother,” he said. “It doesn’t stick. It doesn’t stick for anyone.”

“Who are you?”

“People have called me a lot of things. Guide. Warden. Clerk, when they’re angry at me.” He tipped his head, and I got the sense that it was a gesture, rather than a thing I’d actually seen. “The last few just said Intercessor. Use that, if you need something.”

“The last few what?”

He let that go by like he hadn’t heard it.

Out past him, a long way off, the dark had a surface to it. It rose and sank. It took me a while to understand what the rhythm reminded me of, and when I did, I wished I hadn’t. A heartbeat. The whole room was doing it, slow and heavy and enormous.

“I’m dead,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

He waited for me to say more. I didn’t have it. I’d always thought that, if it came to this, I’d feel something large. Instead I felt the way I did at the end of a double, when the body is still upright out of habit and the mind has already gone home.

“There was a car,” I said.

“There was. The driver didn’t see you. If it helps, it was fast.”

“It didn’t feel fast.”

“No,” the Intercessor said. “It never does.”

I scrubbed my face with both hands. They were mine. I knew them: the cracked knuckles, the scar on the left thumb from a box cutter I’d been careless with at nineteen. That was somehow a relief.

“What’s my name?” I said.

I hadn’t planned to ask. It just came out, the way you reach for the light switch in your own hallway without thinking, and my hand closed on bare wall.

I knew I’d had one. I knew people had said it. A foreman, in a tone like a slammed drawer. And a woman at a kitchen table, saying it quietly, like she was trying not to wake anyone. Short. A hard sound at the front. I could feel the outline of it in my mouth the way you feel a gap where a tooth was.

There was nothing there.

“It might come back,” the Intercessor said. “Most of what you were is still around, down in the foundation. But nobody gets to leave with all of it. That’s part of the price of the door.”

“What door?”

“The one I’m here to offer.” He took a step closer and I caught a smell off him, wet wool and cold metal, an old coat left on a radiator. “You’re thirty-four. You worked two jobs and died with a bag of marked-down bread. I’m not saying that to be unkind. It’s what’s on the sheet.”

“Then why are you talking to me?”

“Because there’s work.”

***

He explained it like a man who’d given the same speech so many times that he’d stopped hearing it.

Some people’s lives go wrong. Not unlucky, wrong, like a thread got yanked in the wrong direction somewhere before they were born and the whole cloth has been puckering around it ever since. Their fates are crooked. Somebody has to straighten them out.

“That somebody’s me.”

“That somebody’s you.”

“I just go and fix people.”

“You go into people,” he said. “You wake up in their bodies. You get their memories, their families, their problems, and you do what needs doing. When it’s finished, you come back here. And you’re paid.”

“In what?”

He held out one hand, palm up, and something drifted up out of the dark to hover over it. A sliver, about the size of a guitar pick, pale as frosted glass, with a light moving around inside it like a slow breath on a cold window.

“Fragments of Life,” he said. “You earn them by finishing jobs. Not everything’s worth the same, and what you earn can be docked. They’re the only thing that spends here.”

“And what do they buy?”

“Your life back.” The sliver sank into the dark again. “At sixty, a hundred. Fifty, two-fifty. Forty, five hundred. Thirty is eight hundred. Twenty costs a thousand.”

“And thirty-four?”

“Call it seven hundred.” He paused. “I wouldn’t count too hard, if I were you.”

I looked at him, or at the place where his face should have been.

“Okay. What’s the catch?”

“You think there’s one.”

“There’s always one.”

He made a noise that was almost a laugh. And that was the moment I caught something in his voice I’d missed before, a grain in it, a way of landing on the ends of words. It sounded like me. Like a recording of me, the way your own voice always sounds wrong coming back, thinner and more tired than you hear it in your head. I opened my mouth to say so, and the voice slid sideways into somebody else’s, and I couldn’t have told you what I’d noticed.

“A few,” he said. “Every job leaves a piece of the person behind in you. A Memory. Sometimes it’s a skill, sometimes just a feeling. You can carry it into the next job, if you’re careful with it.”

“And?”

“And what you do in there counts. Cruel things, cowardly things, they leave a stain. A couple, you’ll live with. Too many and the job fails. For good.”

“What does a failed job do to me?”

“Nothing.” He said it softly. “That’s what it means.”

The walls kept up their slow beat. I found I’d stopped breathing, and started again.

“There’s another one,” I said.

“There is.” He was quiet a second. “The more jobs you do, the less of you you’ll remember. It isn’t a punishment. It’s wear. A mind can hold only so many lives before the first one rubs through.”

“So I could earn it all back and not remember what I was getting back to.”

“You could.”

“That’s a hell of a deal.”

“You’ve taken worse. You sold fourteen hours a day for rent.”

I laughed, and it came out of me cracked and a little too loud, and he seemed as surprised as I was.

I thought about the snow. About the pill organizer with the days of the week on the lids. About a woman I couldn’t see, whose face I’d have given anything to put together, sitting at a table with a light left on over the stove.

“And if I say no?”

“Then you stay here. With the floor.”

The floor gave a slow, warm pulse under my hand, almost friendly, the way a dog leans on your leg. I decided right there that I didn’t like it at all.

“Where do I start?” I said.

“A boy named Rian.” Behind him, a door I hadn’t noticed was standing open: a tall rectangle of flat gray morning, and coming through it the sound of a school hallway, lockers slamming, a bell, and under that, a group of boys laughing. It wasn’t the good kind. “Seventeen. Poor. People are hurting him, and everyone’s decided that’s just how it goes for him.”

“So I stop them.”

“You change his fate. Don’t mix the two up. They aren’t the same job.”

I got to my feet. My legs held. I took a step toward the light and stopped.

“One thing,” I said. “The streetlight. It went out before the car came. I’m sure of it.”

For the first time since I’d woken up, he said nothing.

It wasn’t long. Two seconds, maybe three. But the whole room slowed down with him, the walls, the floor, all of it, like everything in there was waiting to hear what he’d say.

“Lights fail in the cold,” he said. “Go on. He’s waiting.”

I looked back once. And for the length of a blink there was a face on him, a long jaw, tired eyes, a hand raised in something that wasn’t quite a wave. A scar ran across the base of the left thumb.

Then it was gone, like it had never been there. The door took me.