"Yes." I said.
"Jesus Bill." She said, shaking her head. "You ARE depraved. Anita? I can't believe this. I simply can not believe it. The high school chicks are bad enough, but Anita?"
I shrugged. "It seemed like a harmless thing at the time."
"No wonder you used to spend so much time over there. Christ! How long were you doing her?"
"Do you remember the night that I offered to talk her into letting me babysit her kids instead of you?" I asked.
Her eyes widened. "Yeah."
"That was the first time. I went over to her house later that night and I seduced her. Well actually I led her to believe that she was seducing me. She had a little thing for teenaged boys you see, something I didn't realize my first trip through but that I'd realized as an adult. I took advantage of the situation."
"God." Tracy muttered.
"After that it became an ongoing thing. I never realized I was doing any harm. I just thought I was having fun."
"Fun?" Tracy asked. "With Anita? That's fuckin' gross!"
"Not really." I said. "She's quite good in bed. In fact, of all the sex I had in both of my lives, I have to say that she is physically the best at it."
"I'd rather not hear about that." Tracy said, making a sour face. "Are you still doing her?"
"No." I said. "I came to some hard realizations over the past month. One of them was that Anita had deviated off of her path and thought she was in love with me. She did not go out with the man she was supposed to marry when he asked her the first time because she thought she was in a long-term relationship with me."
"Christ." Tracy commented. "You really do know how to fuck up people's lives, don't you?"
"I offer no excuses except selfishness and stupidity." I said. "It seems that I figured that since I was a teenager there were no consequences to sexual relationships like there are when you're an adult. I was wrong. Very wrong. As soon as I realized all of this I broke off the relationship with Anita, hoping that would put her back on the path she was supposed to be on. After all, Mike, Beirut, Nina, and now you, all of you tried hard to resume your previous pattern. Why not Anita?"
"But she hasn't?"
I shook my head. "No." I said. "She hasn't. In fact she's getting out of control now. She keeps calling the house and asking Mom if I can come over to do some chore for her. And I keep making excuses why I can't. It's already plain that Mom has some suspicions. I don't know how much longer she's going to be able to keep ignoring them. In truth, I don't know WHAT to do about Anita but I've got to do something.
"But the point of this whole Anita discussion was to make you feel better. You see, Anita is living proof that you CAN deviate from your path. If Anita can do it, then so can you."
Tracy finished off the last of her current beer. She immediately reached in and pulled out two more. She opened them up and handed one to me. I took it even though I still had a quarter of a bottle in my hand.
"I must say," Tracy told me. "That what you said today does make me feel better."
"It does?" I asked.
She nodded. "Fate." She said. "Is trying to get me. That's true and that's something I'm going to have to accept. But if I'm to believe you than I'm already supposed to be dead, twice now. I'm living on borrowed time anyway. I'm inclined to believe that, like you said on the phone to me, certain pre-conditions need to be met for that fate to come true. It seems that if I avoid putting myself into the situation of a drunk driver and a car, than maybe, just maybe, I'll be safe. Did you ever take a philosophy class when you were in college, you know, before?"
"Yes I did." I told her. "Philosophy 1A. A general education elective."
"I'm taking it now." She told me. "I like it. They go into a lot of the stuff that I think about when I get stoned. One of those things is the nature of fate and the consequences of meddling with it."
"Really?" I said, interested. If they'd explained that in my philosophy class nearly fifteen years in my past, I certainly didn't remember it now.
"One of the things they talk about is the ramifications of changing fate. As you've pointed out, fate will try to re-align itself if you do that. The question is whether the re-alignment effort will be nodal or cascading."
"Nodal or cascading?" I asked.
"Yes." Tracy nodded. "I'm hoping we're not dealing with cascading here. In cascading you would have started to stress the system starting on the night that I did not get into that car. That would be graduation night. If that is the case then my continued existence will begin to build up that stress until it is almost inevitable that a corrective action will occur. In other words, my continuing to live will be unacceptable to fate and it will not stop until it gets me, one way or the other. If that is what we're dealing with, than I might as well make out my will. I could lock myself in my room forever and still I would die."
"That's pretty depressing." I said softly.
"I know." Tracy told me. "But from all you've said to me today, I'm inclined to believe that we're dealing with nodal here."
"Nodal." I nodded, waiting for her to explain.
"In nodal, the stress on the system would have started on the night you TOLD me about the accident; at the point that you first took action to assist in my thwarting of fate. The stress would have begun to build that night and would have reached its peak on graduation night, the night I was SUPPOSED to have died. I think I might have chosen wisely when I simply stayed home that night instead of going out anywhere. When I think about it now, there was no real reason for me to do that. I wasn't with the people you'd named and logically, I should have been safe as long as I didn't actually engage in the circumstances you described. But instinctively I knew NOT to go out anywhere. I think that fate was on the prowl for me that night and might have bagged me no matter what I did, as long as I got into a car with someone. Do you follow me?"
"Yes." I said, "I do."
"So what you have here is the stress peak on that day. As more and more days go by, the stress on the system caused by my survival decreases as humanity accepts my presence here. There will of course be further attempts to right the wrong in the system. When I nearly got into that car with Darren, that was an attempt to do that. But thanks to your warning, it didn't happen. Fate was thwarted again. The fact that all of those factors needed to come together leads me to believe that the strength of these attempts will weaken over time, eventually allowing me to live a normal life; do you understand?"
"You're saying," I paraphrased, "That the longer you survive, the more likely you are to continue to survive."
"Right." She said. "Now with Mike and Nina, the stress is not related to any one particular event as it was with me. It is simply a lifestyle. If you asked Mike in his previous life, where he was thrown out of the Air Force for smoking pot, you would have found that he'd smoked pot throughout his entire career there and he'd simply had his number come up when they drug tested him. This is a broad event, not a specific one. And with Nina, she simply was responding to a lifestyle also. There would be no specific event to lock her into it. With both of them, the stress would have started the instant you changed things for them. With Mike it would have been when you talked him into firefighting as a career, with Nina it would have been the first day you talked to her in the cafeteria. For both of them the peak probably came early because of the lack of a specific event. Both of them gave into the peak and drifted back into their previous lifestyle.
"You managed to pull Mike out of it because there were no lethal consequences to his actions. Fate will continue to be stressed by this for a while and will continue to pull at him. But as time goes by and he establishes himself in this reality, it will be weaker and weaker with each passing day. If you can get him through this year, he might be all right. But I would keep an eye on him. The pull will still be strong."