Authors: S. G. Browne
Tags: #Humorous, #Romance, #General, #Contemporary, #Fiction
Fated (23 page)
Even if Karma is right and the universe will eventually correct and help my humans find their way back to their original paths, he didn’t mention how long that might take. I don’t know if Destiny will realize I’m the one responsible for increasing her workload, but eventually someone is bound to notice. Humans don’t just change their stars, so to speak, without some sort of cosmic push. And if Jerry finds out I’m the one who did the pushing, there’s a good chance I’ll lose my frequent-flier privileges.
I wonder if I can plead temporary insanity.
I wonder if Jerry will cut me some slack.
I wonder if air travel has improved much since the
Hindenburg
.
Hindenburg
.
I think I need to lie low for a while, though it’s not like I can exactly hide. Damn Jerry’s omnipresence. So instead I decide to head out to Los Angeles. At least there I can take cover in the smog. And the superficial glare from all of the designer clothes, luxury vehicles, and cosmetic enhancements is hard for Jerry to look at ever since his laser eye surgery.
“Will you be gone long?” asks Sara in bed the night before I leave.
“Just a couple of days,” I say.
I can’t tell Sara I’m off to hide from God in the superficiality and pollution of Hollywood, so I tell her I have some clients I have to see on the West Coast.
“I love that you care so much about your clients, Fabio,” she says. “That you work so hard to try to help them. It’s one of my favorite parts about you.”
“What are the other parts?” I ask.
She smiles and raises an eyebrow and disappears below the covers.
And I’ve suddenly forgotten what we were talking about.
I wasn’t lying to Sara when I told her I was going to see someone, though you’d think Truth and Wisdom would live at the top of some hallowed mountain in the Himalayas and require a sherpa and two weeks’ worth of suffering just to reach them. Instead they live on Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills and require a personal fitness trainer and two weeks’ worth of tanning salons just to look like them.
Why they chose to live in Los Angeles, I don’t know. Probably got sucked in by the whole City of Angels crap. But then, I can’t think of another place on the planet that can use more truth and wisdom than Tinseltown.
It’s the epitome of retail therapy. A microcosm of consumer culture, of how the constant pursuit of
more
prevents humans from discovering their true inner nature and from directing their lives to their most optimal fates. Nowhere are there more material distractions and social pressures that influence humans and prevent them from finding their paths than in Hollywood. Some would argue for that distinction to go to Las Vegas, but if you ask me, Vegas is more of an adult theme park than a cultural ecosystem.
more
prevents humans from discovering their true inner nature and from directing their lives to their most optimal fates. Nowhere are there more material distractions and social pressures that influence humans and prevent them from finding their paths than in Hollywood. Some would argue for that distinction to go to Las Vegas, but if you ask me, Vegas is more of an adult theme park than a cultural ecosystem.
I just hope Truth and Wisdom haven’t succumbed to the pressures of the Hollywood lifestyle.
“Fabio!” says Truth, greeting me at the front door of their $12.5 million estate with an automobile courtyard, tennis court, swimming pool, sauna, and a sweeping view of the San Fernando Valley.
Truth releases me from a big bear hug. “It’s great to see you,” he says, all whitened teeth and artificial tan.
So much for keeping it real.
Although it’s been a while since I’ve seen him, his face looks unnaturally smooth. He either got an upgrade on his man suit or else he’s getting Botox injections.
“You look great,” he says, then draws me inside and walks with me down the hall. When he’s not looking, I check to make sure I still have my wallet and keys.
The thing about Truth is that he’s a kleptomaniac.
“So what’s new in the Big Apple?” he asks.
I fill him in on all the gossip that’s fit to spill as I follow him out back, where Wisdom is sitting poolside with a copy of
The Power of Positive Thinking
and a mojito. He doesn’t look much different from Truth, except he has gold hoops through both earlobes.
The Power of Positive Thinking
and a mojito. He doesn’t look much different from Truth, except he has gold hoops through both earlobes.
“Well, if you ask me, you look great,” Truth says to me, then turns to Wisdom. “Isn’t that the truth? Doesn’t he look great?”
Without looking up, Wisdom says, “Expressions of praise are nothing more than the reflection of your own perceptions. They have nothing to do with truth.”
The thing about Wisdom is that he has an inferiority complex.
“Can we play nice for today,” asks Truth, “in honor of our guest?”
“I always play nice,” says Wisdom, putting down his book and getting up from his lounge chair to give me a hug. “Can I get you a mojito, Fabio?”
We spend the next couple of hours getting drunk on white rum and mint leaves and reliving old times, though to be honest, there’s a lot more getting drunk than sharing of memories, since most of the humans on my path don’t deal too much in truth and wisdom. Once we’re good and hammered, Truth suggests we head down to the Formosa Café.
An unimpressive red-and-ebony Chinese-themed Hollywood watering hole in a run-down section of Hollywood, the Formosa offers a full dinner menu, though most of the people in the dimly lit café are here for cocktails, sitting at the bar or in the red leather booths beneath the black-and-white autographed photographs of stars who dined here in the past: James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Paul Newman, Jack Benny, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando. You half expect one of them to come strolling through the door at any moment.
“A lot of the people who come here are regulars,” says Truth, sipping his martini between Wisdom and me at the bar as he palms an ashtray. “But you still get a good mix of new couples and first dates, which makes for an entertaining evening.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, trying not to notice that the woman sitting on my left is thinking about taking a role in a porn film where she has sex with a Great Dane.
“He does this every time,” says Wisdom. “It’s childish, if you ask me.”
“I don’t hear you complaining about the results,” says Truth.
Wisdom just responds by taking another sip of his mojito.
“This couple behind us,” says Truth.
I glance over my shoulder and see a man and a woman in their early thirties, both dressed in white, sitting at a booth sharing a bottle of cabernet. They’re not married, but it’s in their future, followed by an ugly divorce.
Maybe coming to Los Angeles wasn’t such a good idea after all.
“They’re celebrating two years of nonmarital bliss,” says Truth, slipping an empty shot glass into his coat pocket. “She’s hoping he’s going to propose tonight, which he actually plans on doing. Except there’s one little problem.”
Truth holds his right hand up like a shadow puppet of a bunny rabbit, points its ears at the couple over his shoulder, then opens and closes his other three fingers as if mouthing silent words. Two seconds later, the man sitting behind us says, “I slept with your sister.”
I’m not sure who’s more surprised at his admission—him or his girlfriend.
“What?” she says.
He looks around as if trying to figure out what happened. Obviously, this isn’t a confession he intended to make. But he makes it again.
“I slept with your sister,” he says.
He probably wasn’t expecting to have a full glass of red wine thrown in his face either; otherwise he wouldn’t have worn all white.
“But we had sex only three times,” he says, following his sobbing girlfriend out of the booth, past the bar, and out the front doors.
No sooner have they vacated the booth than Truth and Wisdom have claimed it for us.
“Never fails,” says Truth, leaning back into the soft red vinyl.
A busboy comes by with a towel to wipe up the wine and remove the bottle and glasses.
“You did that just to get a booth?” I ask, sitting down.
“Well, that’s not the only reason,” says Truth, sliding the salt and pepper shakers off the table and into his man purse. “I mean, come on, the guy had to come clean sooner or later. Might as well be at a time when it benefits us. Am I right?”
Wisdom pretends not to care, though he looks much happier in the booth than on a bar stool.
“But you changed their fates,” I say.
They’re not going to get married now, which means they won’t get divorced. Instead, the boyfriend will attempt a futile reconciliation before sleeping with the sister again, knocking her up, then splitting and moving to Aspen to become a ski instructor, while the girlfriend will end up in a series of relationships that don’t end up much better than this one.
It’s all I can do to sit still and not go after the doomed couple, but I can’t risk taking that chance. Maybe if I were with Sloth and Gluttony, but Truth and Wisdom are pretty much in Jerry’s back pocket.
“Sorry about that,” says Truth. “But nothing good would have come from that relationship anyway. Better they know the truth now rather than keeping it hidden.”
“Oh, so now you’re waxing wise,” says Wisdom. “How quaint.”
“I was just making a point,” says Truth. “Why does this always have to be about you?”
“I’m just saying that you might want to think about sticking to what you know,” says Wisdom. “And to be quite honest, I have my doubts about that.”
“Are you questioning me?” asks Truth.
Their incessant banter fades into the background as I look around at the other patrons in the Formosa, leaning against the bar or huddling in the red leather booths beneath the watchful eyes of dead movie stars—their fates blending together in discordant disillusion, in a cacophony of failure.
Undiscovered.
Unrequited.
Unemployed.
These are not bad people. Except for the sexual predator at the end of the bar who’s posing as a director and slipping some GHB into the cosmopolitan of the would-be starlet he’s scamming.
I should really put Dennis back on my speed dial.
But the rest of these humans, these helpless mortals, are just trying to find a way to be happy, and most of them are struggling to make that happen. While a lot of it has to do with the unreasonable societal expectations placed on them, most of it has to do with the hand they were dealt. With the path they were born on. With me.
I turn back to Wisdom and Truth, who are still engaged in their never-ending discussion about who is the more important of the two. Like it matters. There is no wisdom in the needless suffering of my humans. And the truth is, I’d rather spend my time helping them than hanging out with a couple of petty, manipulative immortals.
“So you’re actually saying you believe Plato was a moron?” says Wisdom.
“I don’t believe anything,” says Truth. “I know it.”
I excuse myself and pretend to go to the bathroom, then sneak out the back door into the warm Los Angeles night, where the traffic of Santa Monica Boulevard drones past, heading west into Beverly Hills and east toward Hollywood. Although the traffic is relatively loud and heavy, it can’t drown out the memories of the ghosts that haunt this town.
Just a few miles from the Formosa, twenty-three-year-old River Phoenix collapsed and died outside the Viper Room from an overdose of heroin and cocaine. A mile away on Sunset Boulevard, John Belushi died from the same lethal combination when he was thirty-three. And around the corner, F. Scott Fitzgerald finally succumbed to complications brought on by alcoholism and smoking at the age of forty-four.
Three of my favorite celebrities of the twentieth century, and all of them ended their paths with me within a mile of one another.
There was a time when I would have found a coincidence like that amusing. Now it fills me with an overwhelming sense of failure. I could have saved all three of them, enjoyed their continued contributions to film and literature, helped them to live longer, more fulfilling lives. Instead, I stood by and watched them self-destruct.
Across the street attempting to hail a cab is the woman whose fiancé slept with her sister multiple times. The present and future disappointment of a partner lurks behind his jilted lover, attempting to talk her out of leaving, apologizing with a sincerity that smacks of desperation. I should just let them go, let them make their mistakes and move on. Except I can see a future where they’d be good together. Where they would be happy. Where they would enjoy a partnership of love and respect.
Every human being has a choice.
They can choose happiness or they can choose misery. They can choose forgiveness or they can choose resentment. They can choose love or they can choose anger.
There are no absolutes. Every situation requires a choice. And every human chooses how he or she wants to react. But too many times, humans choose to be miserable. Too many times, they choose not to forgive. Too many times, they choose anger.
I know Jerry told me to stop interfering, but I’ve walked through a door that has closed and locked behind me. I can’t ignore my choice-challenged humans any longer.
CHAPTER 33
The Westfield Mall on Market Street in San Francisco is an upscale nine-floor urban shopping center, home to a collection of 170 fashionable stores and boutiques that cater to the trendy and stylish consumer.
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