Rick, a middle-aged tax accountant with a wife and four kids from the suburbs in Orange County California, hovered above the roadside alongside the archangel Samael, both immaterial. Unseen by any mortal soul, let alone the smartphone-distracted ghouls in the SUVs. “You told me,” Rick sputtered, “you were showing me a world where I was successful? Where all of my dreams came true?” Samael looked up toward the skies as if peering at cellphone screens himself, looking up a saucy video on the 5G signal. “This is that timeline. Where you have everything you’ve wanted.”
They looked towards the asphalt, at the incredibly fancy luxury car smashed into the railing that festooned the side of the road. At that much better-dressed version of Rick, half-conscious, head in the middle of the steering wheel, making the car-horn blare for all to hear. For anyone paying attention to hear, but it seemed as though only the two spirits had any attentions to pay anything.
“This is the reality where you’re a millionaire, Rick, famous across the hemispheres. Lauded in statehouses and great auditoria. Your name plastered across tee-shirts and posters and television boxes.” Samael paused to think a moment. “Ah, not your real name, Eldrick, but that nickname your father foisted upon you when he was trying to make you a golf prodigy. Via the beatings.”
“Tiger?” Rick asked, all a distant memory now, back before their neighbors called those cops on the horrors his father rained upon him, trying to make Rick not a human being, but a machine of athletic precision. Maybe not a robot, more like an animal. “It is the world where no one noticed or stepped in to save you from him. No CPS mandate, no counseling, just the fortune and fame.”
The cop cars began to converge around the crash site. “You’ll love this part, Rick,” said Samael, “it’s where you awake in an opiate haze and tell the patrolmen you were just on the line with the president, to try and intimidate them into not arresting you. Their President’s so corrupt and this you is so famous, the police have to consider whether you really were, for a moment.”
“Was I?”
“Ah heavens no, that petty bigot hates you because you’re half-black. But you’re famous, so he poses with you for photos. Well, not you, ah, you know, not with Eldrick, he poses with Tiger Woods.”
“Is this what fame does?” “In my studies? Yes. Makes one a philandering lying junkie jack-ass.”
“What kind of angel are you, Samael?” Rick asked. “Oh, you know, an accuser. A prosecutor, the opponent who argues for the other side at court. In the Hebrew tongue, the ha-satan. In American English, a devil’s advocate? Do you still wish to be this successful version of yourself, Eldrick?”
“No one should want to be Tiger Woods,” the man sadly muttered. “Indeed, let’s get you back to your beloved wife and kids, yes?” And then they disappeared, like clouds after the thunderstorm.
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