Eight

As I drove home, I thought about the girls’ mini intervention. Was I really so bad? I knew that I’d been mopey, but I hadn’t realized that other people had been noticing. I should have realized that my friends would see something, though. After all, I did the same for them.

It had been me and Edie that had finally convinced Sabrina to dump Ralph, the control freak who had become way too possessive of our friend. And Sabrina and I had confronted Edie about her unhappiness with Mitchell long before they broke up. It only made sense that they would gang up on me now.

Sabrina did have a point about my job. I hated it. I’d hated it before I had even started. I was employed by a Mr. Jim T. Boggs, who ran a small pharmaceutical company in town. My official job title was “Pharmaceutical Representative,” but that meant jack squat. Most drug reps actually went out to doctors offices to schmooze the local doctors into buying their product.

Mr. Jim T. Boggs, however, did not seem to think that females qualified to do any schmoozing. Which was actually fine with me, as I hated the thought of having to laugh at people’s stupid jokes while trying to brain wash them into buying my product. Since I was not allowed to visit doctors offices, however, I was left with the unfortunate job of calling to confirm appointments for the other reps and reserving restaurants for drug dinners hosted by the other reps. Basically, I was an overpaid receptionist.

Which, again, would have been fine, except for Mr. Jim T. Boggs. He made it clear to me early on that the only reason he’d hired me was because he was getting flack from potential investors for not having female employees. Mr. Boggs sat around the office all day long barking orders at me, and blowing up at me for no apparent reason. It was really quite unpleasant. The only reason I had not quit long ago was the unbelievable salary. I made more than anyone I knew who didn’t have a string of letters like J.D. or Ph.D. after their name. That and the fact that since I had very little to do, I could sit at my desk and read for most of the day. I was currently about half way through Pride and Prejudice, which I was reading for the fourth time.

The job would have been okay as a short term thing, which it was supposed to have been originally. After four years of it, though, I feared that my brain was turning to mush. At this point, I didn’t even know if I’d be able to do a real job. Besides my novels, I did very little actual thinking.

As far as the lack of a date issue. I had decided long ago that there were very few men who met my standards, and that I was not willing to settle for anyone.

My long term plans, ever since high school, had been to open a used bookstore. I’d even drawn up a business plan during college, where I’d taken a few business classes to help me figure out what was involved. I don’t know when I lost sight of that goal, but somewhere along the line, I’d just fallen into the rut of my current life.

Edie and Sabrina were right. I really did need to do something different. I looked at the bracelet on my arm. Maybe this was just the ticket after all.


As soon as I got home, I remembered that I had no clothes for the morning. Shoot. I’d forgotten in my hung over morning haze that today was supposed to be laundry day. Should I stay up late to get the laundry done, or just give into my desire to head straight to bed? The charms on my bracelet jingled together as I brushed my teeth.

I decided that I was wallowing tonight, and that a person who was wallowing did not have time or energy to do any laundry.

“Bed it is!” I announced to no one in particular. Twelve minutes later, I was curled up under my covers, reading The Picture of Dorian Gray, my night time book. I am always reading at least three books at any given time. My book for work, my book for bed and my book for working out. I knew when I really loved a book if it crossed the boundaries and became a Purse Book – one that went everywhere with me.

After about twenty minutes of reading, I was wiped out. I recalled the guidebook, still sitting on my kitchen table with some guilt. I probably should have forgone the Oscar Wilde for the guidebook, but by now it was too late. My eyes had decided to stop working. I’d have to check it out in the morning.

I turned out the light, and flipped onto my stomach, and was asleep within minutes.


“Wake up you lazy, loutish, ill mannered buffoon!”

I woke with a start as a pillow repeatedly hit my face.

“Wha-! I’m awake, I’m awake! Stop hitting me!”

Fatima stood in the middle of my bed, one of my pillows in her hands with her already tousled hair even more messy. A wide grin split her face. She had obviously been enjoying her one woman pillow fight quite enormously.

“Fatima! What on earth are you doing?” I glanced at my clock, whose alarm had not yet gone off, “It’s not even six o’clock in the morning!”

“I know! That is the problem. It has been almost twenty hours since your week began and you have yet to read the guidebook. How do you expect to make use of this unique opportunity if you don’t even know what you are supposed to be doing?”

I was surprisingly awake considering the hour. Perhaps getting bashed upside the head while a crazy lady screamed at you was a good way to wake up. “Hey, can I hire you to come wake me up every morning? You’re a lot more effective than my alarm clock.” As I said this, my alarm started beeping. “See! I would have hit the snooze button at least three times if you weren’t here.”

“Betsy. You are enough to drive a spiritual being bonkers. Get your butt out of bed, girl. You have some reading to do.” Fatima hopped down off my bed and walked out the bedroom door, my pillow still clutched in her hand.

A few minutes later, I joined her at the kitchen table. Two steaming mugs of tea were sitting on the table. “Sit down, sit down.” I sat and she pushed the guidebook in front of me. “Read.”

“Are you just going to sit there?”

“As a matter of fact, I am. You don’t seem to have enough motivation to do this on your own.”

“All right, then.” I grabbed the mug of tea and opened the book.

I skipped the Table of Contents, deciding to go right for the guts of the book. There were several diagrams in the first few pages – the bracelet, the charms, even a diagram of the guidebook itself. There was a five page description of the duties of the Life Choice Guide, which included: number one, delivering the charm bracelet; number two making sure I read the guidebook; and number thirty seven, accepting no form of monetary remuneration for their services. Number fifty four did say they could accept necklaces as a form of gratitude, however. “So all those necklaces you wear…”

“Are gifts of gratitude, yes. These are only the most recent forty or so necklaces. I keep the rest at home in my attic.”

“Just how many people have you guided?”

“Let’s see, I’ve been doing this for about 459 years, and I guide an average of 50 people a year, so that makes… around twenty two thousand nine hundred fifty souls. Give or take a few.”

“Wow!” I exclaimed.

“I know, it isn’t many, but I am still relatively new at this. But we’re getting sidetracked. Keep reading, keep reading!”

After the section on Fatima’s duties came my Rights and Responsibilities Guide, which basically told me I was responsible for what happened to me, and did not actually have the right to complain to anyone. It was a short section.

Finally came the part that I was most interested in: instructions. They read something like this:
1. When a decision avails itself unto you during your allotted time period, your bracelet will make it known.
2. Make a decision at that time.
3. If, at any time in the future, you desire to see what would have happened should you have chosen a different option, simply grasp a charm and repeat these words: “I wish to change my fate.”
4. After you have repeated the verse, your appointed Life Choice Guide will appear within thirty seconds.
5. Simply tell the LCG what choice you desire to alter, and it will be done.

“These instructions are pretty simple.” I noted. “I kind of thought there would be something more to it. Like, ritual dances or candles or something. Chicken blood or dove feathers, at least.”

“No, no, no. We got rid of all of that a long time ago. I mean, it is certainly an option that we do present to some of our clients still, but our analysis of you showed that you would rather take the simple route.”

I pictured drawing Pentagrams on my floor with frog guts. “Thank you. Simple is definitely better.”

I flipped through the next few pages, which included the time constraints – decisions during this one week only, all ten charms to be used by the end of my fiftieth birthday. These were things that I already knew. I was already getting to the end of the book. It looked much thicker than it actually was, because it was printed on really heavy cream paper.

“The rest of the book is mostly testimonials and fine print, which you can finish reading later.”

“Testimonials? Aren’t those, like a marketing tool? Why would you need testimonials?”

“Why, yes they are great marketing devices, as a matter of fact. We used them several years ago when we were toying around with the idea of turning this from a non profit into a marketable commodity.”

“You decided to not go through with that?”

“Well, all of our Test Worlds ended up self-destructing, so that idea got nipped in the bud. That is also part of the reason we made you sign the confidentiality agreement. We can’t just have all of everyone’s existences calling us up and asking us to let them switch around, now can we?”

“I guess not.” I agreed.

“So, good. You’ve read the most important parts. Any questions?”

“A lot, actually.” The guidebook was anything but comprehensive. I wasn’t quite sure why there was such an emphasis placed on reading it.

“That is what I am here for. Ask away.” Fatima sat back with her mug of tea clutched in her hands. I realized that this woman had been around for a long, long time, but I had a hard time picturing her as a great, wise spiritual sage. I decided to stick to the easy questions and not delve into the realm of fate, and screwing around with it.

“First, how do I know when the bracelet is,” I looked back at the guide for the right wording, “’making it known’ that a decision has ‘availed itself unto me’?”

“Simple. It will jingle or it will feel very heavy for a moment.”

“Jingle?” I thought of how jingly my old charm bracelet had been. “Bracelets jingle all the time.”

“Do they? Why don’t you give your wrist a little shake?”

I did just that, and was amazed to find that there was no sound. “So a jingling sound means that the decision I make at that time is altering my fate?”

“It means that the decision you make will lead to the creation of another world where you travel down a different path, yes.”

All this ‘alternate path’ stuff still made my head feel like it had developed a slow leak. “Okay, and my other question is: Do I travel back in time? Do I relive everything from the moment that I first made the decision?”

Fatima was starting to look a little less flighty, which was quite surprising to me. “No, actually, you don’t.”

I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. “I don’t relive it…so, what happens?”

“I’ve been told that it is like remembering a dream, and then realizing that the dream is truth and what you thought was truth becomes dream.”

“Your memory just changes like that?”

“Just like that. It is quite hard to describe, and I’ve never experienced it myself, of course.”

“Your decisions don’t send alternate universes spiraling out into existence?”

“My spiritual energy is in a constant state of flux. I can be here and in another world at the same time. In fact, I have to be. Introducing my full existence into yours would disrupt the balance and cause something of an energy avalanche. The results would be quite disastrous. Since I am here and everywhere all at once, decisions I make cannot disrupt the flow of my energy.”

“Disrupt the flow of your energy? Is that what I do when I make a decision? Are you telling me that bits of my soul break off into these other existences?”

“Every decision you make leads you farther down your particular life path. It only makes sense that you leave part of yourself behind when you choose to go in one direction. With each decision you make, you grow a little weaker, in terms of your spiritual energy. Eventually, the energy runs out, and you will die.”

This was definitely going much further into the Land of the Metaphysical much to early in the day. I needed to put a stop to it. “Okay. Listen, thanks, Fatima, but I’ve got to get going here. If I don’t hurry, I’ll be late for work.”

Fatima quickly changed back into the spacy woman I’d first met, “All right, dear. Just remember, I’m only a call away.” With that she just disappeared.

A glance at the clock told me that I’d have to forgo my morning Yoga session. I hurried back into my bedroom, and flung open my closet. Crap. I hadn’t done laundry. And I really did not have anything fit to wear for work. Mr. Boggs would not let me get by calling today Casual Monday. He nearly burst a vessel the time I did that on a Friday.

I started running through the options in my head. I could call Sabrina to ask her if I could borrow something, but I doubted she kept anything among her size 4 clothes that would fit my size 10. Edie’s clothes were all too short. I could run to the mall quickly, if any stores were open yet....

Suddenly, I noticed my bracelet flashing in the light. The bracelet! It had jingled last night while I was brushing my teeth. At the time I had thought that it was because I was moving my hand around, but I realized that that was when I had decided to go to bed instead of doing any laundry. This was as good an excuse as any to see if Fatima was just some mysterious crackpot with good special effects.

“I wish to change my fate.” I said, almost laughing at how ridiculous I sounded.

With a puff of silvery smoke, Fatima appeared on my sweater shelf.

“Hello again! That didn’t take very long, now did it?” She commented, climbing down from the shelf. “Tell me, dear, what would you like to change?”

“Well, last night I decided that sleep was more important to me than clean laundry. Now I realize that I have nothing to wear. I’d like to go back and choose to do my laundry instead of going to bed when I did.”

“Sounds simple enough,” Fatima said. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them. “Okay. Done.”

“That was it?” I asked, yawning.

“That was it. Tell me, do you feel any different?”

I actually did feel very tired all of a sudden. And, when I started to think more, I began to remember sorting my whites and colors. I remembered folding everything and putting it away. I yawned again, then went over to my dresser and opened the drawer.

“It’s all clean!” I exclaimed.

“Of course it is, dear. You just did your laundry last night. Now tell me, did anything else occur last night?”

I felt something click in my brain and suddenly everything came rushing back to me. “Yes! I read the guidebook last night. I was waiting for my laundry to get done, and there was nothing on television, so I decided to read the guide book with my spare time.”

“Well that was a very good use of your time, I commend you for it.”

“But this morning! You woke me up with that pillow attack, and made me read the book.”

“Did I really? Are you quite certain?”

When I looked back at the events of the morning, the site of Fatima standing on my bed with the pillow in her hand, the mugs of tea, reading the guidebook – all of it seemed like a dream.

“How fantastic!”

“Now, if you’ll just give me the first of your charms there, sweetie, I’ll be on my way.”

I reached down and un-clasped one of the charms, which had taken on a dull, tarnished look, and handed it to her.

“Thank you very much! Stay in touch, Betsy dear.” Fatima disappeared in a puff of smoke.

I sat on the edge of my bed, amazed with what had just occurred. I looked at my alarm clock, and saw that it was forty minutes earlier than it had been the last time I’d looked. I had apparently gained back the time that I had used up reading the guidebook.

My bracelet jingled as I tried to decide whether to go ahead and do my yoga or to get an extra half hour of sleep. The jingling was a little unnerving to me. I knew that it indicated that whatever choice I made, there would be a part of me making the opposite choice. That was just too much for me to handle at that moment. I decided that a few more minutes of shut-eye would do me good, so I went back to sleep.