I coughed.

I hope this doesn’t take too long. The interior of the garage was already getting hazy from my car’s exhaust. What a way to spend Christmas Eve, huh? Well Merry Fucking Christmas to me. Everyone in my life is gone, so why am I hanging around?

I closed my eyes. It’s about right for my life to have the last thing I see is a smoke filled garage. To top things off I have indigestion. I shouldn’t have had that last pizza. I had them just cut it in half. So all I had was two slices. Ha ha.

This should end soon.

The engine shut off. I opened my eyes to see someone’s arm reaching through the car window and grabbing the keys. What the hell? I have all the house doors locked.

“Let’s get this garage door opened. Man, the air is getting thick in here.” I looked in the review mirror to see some guy dressed in a trench coat and wearing a fedora and sunglasses.

I stuck my head out the window. “Hey! You! Who the hell are you and what are you doing in here?”

Trying to wave some of the gas fumes out of the garage, the guy approached the car window. “The name is Mr. Claus. And I’m just doing my job.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Claus?”

Mr. Claus grinned. “Yeah yeah. I get a lot of ribbing about that. Especially this time of year. I’m with the Adjustment Bureau. We need to talk. Get out of your car and let’s go inside. Maybe have a brewski. I’m on duty but the boss is distracted right now. Come on. Get out of the car.”

I just stared at this weirdo in my garage. “Why should I? I think you’re dangerous.”

He shuffled his feet impatiently. “Hey bucko. I just saved your life. Let’s have a chat.”

Looking out my car window, I asked, “Why did you do that? You should mind your own business.”

Looking impatient, Mr. Claus said, “Get out of the car and let’s go inside. We both need to sit down for this.” He gestured towards the house door. He chuckled. “Don’t worry. If I was going to kill you, I wouldn’t have saved you.”

That made sense actually. So I opened the car door and stepped out. Mr. Claus opened a small spiral notebook and consulted it.

“Okay, Tony. Let’s get this show on the road. I’ll follow you.”

He followed me into my house. He walked into the kitchen and pointed at my fridge “Mind if I get a brew?”

With a gesture, I said, “Help yourself.” I sat down at my small kitchen table and waited for him to join me.

He opened the beer can as he sat down and chuckled. “I suppose you’re wondering why I called this meeting. Quite frankly, it’s to save me a lot of work. When someone, through free will, breaks out of the plan it causes us in the Adjustment Bureau holy hell. There’s a ton of adjusting we have to do.”

I waved my hands in front of him. “Whoa whoa mister. Just what the hell is the Adjustment Bureau? I’ve never heard of you? Are you Homeland Security or what?”

Mr. Claus laughed. “You might say we’re an extra-government agency. We… well we keep things running smoothly. We nudge people. Now free will is the boss’ Prime Directive. But you saw how well Captain Kirk honored the Prime Directive. Our boss is far more restrictive.”

“Horseshit.”

Chuckling, Mr. Claus said, “I admit it’s hard to believe. We’re normally not this open, but you’re a special case.”

I folded my arms. “Oh really? How so?”

Mr. Claus’ face clouded and he pointed towards my garage. “Because you were about to fuck everything up, that’s why! You have no idea how much we’ve been poking and prodding you to keep you steered in the right direction and then you pull a stunt like this!”

I glared at him. “Well, sorry!” Why am I sorry? This guy’s a lunatic.

Claus sighed and took a slug of his beer. “It’s my bloody damn fault anyway.” He took off his hat and shades and tossed them on the table. He rubbed his face with his hand. “It’s my damn stupid fault. And now I have to clean it up.”

“You’re not making any sense! I need you to leave my house,” I shouted.

He pointed at me and leaned forward. “Sit down and shut up. I can’t leave until I have completed my repair.”

“Well, hurry the hell up and leave.”

“I’ll be delighted. Look, I fucked up when you were eighteen. I was supposed to nudge you into making your decision to transition to being a woman. That was the plan set for you since birth. With very little nudging, you could have been moved to your destiny. But I got distracted.”

“Destiny? That doesn’t sound like free will to me.” How did he know I wanted to become a woman?

He waved off my comment. “Free will up to a point. There’s an event coming up that when that time comes, you’ll be in the perfect position to execute the desired action. Now don’t get a big head or anything. You’re just going to be in the right place at the right time with very little nudging. There are five other candidates but they all required a lot of nudging.”

I wasn’t really buying it, but I was intrigued. “Why not just do this whatever yourself? And keep me out of it?”

Mr. Claus took another slug of his beer. “Can’t. Against the boss’ rules. No direct involvement. There are ethics involved and well, it just gets messy. Anyway, getting back to you. Instead of transitioning on your own, you had to prove what a man you were instead and joined the Army. Dude, you have no idea what I had to do to keep you out of harm’s way. After two years enlistment, your path was still largely good. Of course you were unhappy still. Then, despite my nudging you went and got married. Huge disaster. You almost went off the list of being the prime candidate. Finally you got divorced. Thankfully no kids. You can thank my skillful nudging for that. Anyway, you continued to be miserable, which leads us to this nonsense tonight. I’m supposed to be at a Christmas party tonight.”

“Sorry.”

“I have to fix my fuck up. We’ve done the math and if you had transitioned like you were supposed to, you would have met the man of your dreams, gotten married and be happy. Nudging you to your destination would have been a cinch. Hitting this event correctly is tremendously important. I’m not supposed to tell you, but if you miss the event, and I’m serious here, millions of people will die and heads will roll at the Adjustment Bureau. Trust me. And one of them would be mine.”

I shrugged. “So what do we do?”

Mr. Claus grinned. “I’m glad you said ‘we’. Because the mission is so important, the Big Guy has authorized me to offer you a deal. We’ve done these deals before, but trust me, it’s very rare. And we need your free will.”

Getting a headache, I asked, “What kind of deal? I thought you only made deals with the devil.”

Mr. Claus laughed. “That’s a sucker’s game. What we want to do is run the clock back to your eighteenth birthday, I nudge you to transition, you return to your true path and we hit our event and catastrophe avoided. But you have to agree to it.”

“How can we turn the clock back?” I couldn’t believe I was actually asking such a stupid question.

Mr. Claus chuckled. “Hey, it’s the Big Guy. He can do anything. So, do you want to do a reset? The caveat is that everything and I mean everything you’ve done for the past ten years is erased. It’s a true reset.” He looked at his watch. “I need your answer in the next thirty seconds or we miss the window.”

Oh my God. I don’t believe this clown for a second but… but… A reset on my life? I get to live as a woman? I get to be happy? Holy shit. What an offer!

“You have fifteen seconds.”

“Yes! Yes!” I exclaimed. How could I resist?

Mr. Claus released a heavy sigh of relief. “Done. You won’t remember this conversation. Enjoy your Christmas gift.”

The woman’s scream scared the crap out of me. I turned and was horrified to see a little girl trip and was about to fall into the path of a truck. I grabbed the girl and pulled her back. I managed to get splashed with dirty water from the street as it had been raining earlier in the day.

The woman, who I assumed was the girl’s mother, took the child from me and began kissing her and crying.

She looked at me with traumatized eyes. “Oh thank you, miss! Thank you for saving my baby!”

Shaken myself, I said, “You’re very welcome.”

Doug, my boyfriend touched my arm. “Wow, Terry. Such lightning quick reactions! Talk about being at the right place at the right time. It was like providence!”

I shook my head. “Let’s not read anything into it other than just dumb luck.”

I looked up the street and by a lamp post, I saw a man in a trench coat, sunglasses and a hat looking at me. He smiled and quickly walked away.

That little girl I saved years ago became a hotshot lawyer. She defended a doctor who had developed a cure for a serious outbreak that the medical profession tried to keep him from releasing. They say he saved millions of lives.

And Doug and I married and we’re very happy.

2024-10-12 21:41:48 -0400