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next couple of months.
    “So what is all this about, anyway?” asks Gluttony. “You angling for one of our jobs?”
    I shake my head. As much as I enjoy their company, Sloth and Gluttony aren’t exactly inspiring.
    “I don’t know,” I say. “I guess I’m just looking for something more.”
    “I know what you mean,” says Gluttony, eyeing the other half of my egg-salad sandwich. “You gonna finish that?”
    I leave Gluttony and Sloth at the deli—Gluttony because he’s still hungry and Sloth because he’s fallen asleep in his chair—then find a secluded alley to go invisible in before I head toward Union Square, my radar picking up men and women and children fated for hardships and failures and addictions.
    Although I can’t exactly turn off my Fate Radar, I can dial it down or tune out certain frequencies, so I dial everything down other than failures, since hardly any human ever manages to reach his or her full potential. That way, they all blend together into a kind of background static. White noise. Like an electric fan or highway traffic or the ocean surf. It can be very soothing. How else would I get to sleep at night?
    Imagine trying to fall asleep or compose a letter or meditate while millions of conversations fly through the air around you. It’s hard enough to concentrate, let alone have an original thought. It took me a couple of millennia just to get used to it. And that was before humans stopped dying at a reasonable age.
    Of course, not every human emits a signal I can pick up.
    As I head uptown through Gramercy Park, invisible to everyone yet assaulted by their endless array of fates, I occasionally come across blank areas in the fabric of my universe. It’s kind of like swimming through a cold ocean or a lake and encountering a warm spot that makes you realize just how cold the water really is.
    These warm places are destiny spots. The energy given off by those on the Path of Destiny.
    Most of the time I ignore these pockets of nothing.
    These warm embraces of air.
    These reminders of my limitations.
    But every now and then I stop and follow one around, trying to understand its structure, to figure out what it is about this person that makes him different. That makes him blessed. That makes him destined rather than fated.
    Or, in this case, her.
    A warm embrace of air in the shape of a woman is leaving an outdoor table at Pete’s Tavern. She looks familiar but at first I can’t place her. With over five and a half billion of my own humans to keep track of, it’s not surprising I can’t remember a woman who’s on the Path of Destiny. You’d think I would have broken down by now and bought a BlackBerry or something, but I’m old-school. Like to keep everything in my head. Still, every now and then I forget someone’s name. Like the time I called Napoleon “Short Stack.” Talk about an awkward moment.
    While I’m trying to figure out where I know this woman from, she says something to the waiter as she leaves and I recognize her voice, and I realize she’s the new tenant at my apartment building, who was on the roof when Destiny and I were having noncontact sex.
    I follow my new neighbor, drawn to her for a reason I can’t explain. It’s not just my curiosity, my wanting to know what makes her different from the humans on my path. There’s something else, the same something I felt on the roof when I first heard her voice, something I can’t quite put my finger on.
    So I trail her for several blocks, studying the way she moves, the way she walks, trying to understand what it is about her that I find so compelling. Then I notice the way everyone else on the sidewalk smiles as she passes by. She’s not smiling at them and she’s not saying anything to elicit a reaction; she’s just talking on her cell phone. And it’s not just men who smile at her because she’s hot and they want to get into her pants—women notice her, too. I wonder if I’m just imagining things, if I’m