prompt: light, title: how we sleep at night in "the next big thing" flash fiction

The vast majority of history’s greatest monsters were born into fortune and fame, but we mustn’t draw too many conclusions from that, lest we fall into a survivorship bias fallacy. Concentrating only on those monsters who had the resources to act on abhorrent impulse could lead to incorrect assumptions. What of the psychopaths born into subsistence-farming without the means to wreak havoc? Did the concept of royalty destroy the royal’s ability to see others’ humanity or did it just enable those royals born randomly atrocious? Hard to say, especially with Caesars still listening.

According to Frank the Yeti, his busking co-worker Jack claimed to not simply be a middle-aged African-American with an uncanny Michael Jackson impression, rather the original, having been replaced via cloning so he could live a normal life. Again, per Jack and per Frank, Jack attempted to reclaim his identity upon learning the doppelganger had gone mad, allegedly abusing children, while using his name and behind the shield of his fame. Problem was, the money-men who once helped him create his replacement were making so much more off the broken copy they wouldn’t admit the truth and Jack was left impersonating himself on The Walk of Fame to simply eat.

The lightening skin and the facial deformations were all part of clone degradation that warped its mind, again according to Jack, while the investors went so far as have their fake do an episode of “The Simpsons” about an escaped mental patient believing himself Michael as proactive defense.

I asked Frank, when he told me, if he really believed his friend’s story? If it was not more likely that “Jack” was someone who just kind of looked and sounded like the famous singer, driven to madness when he could not accept that a famous hero was actually a monster, taking his image unto his own as a coping mechanism? “My best friend’s a Kabbalistic sorceress, Mike,” Frank just shrugged, “forgive me if I’ve given up on Occam’s Razor splitting hairs.” It certainly seems like the later in life you acquire wealth or fame, the less it ruins you, the less it turns you into a murderous king or a deranged billionaire convinced of his own genius because his father paid folks to tell him he was a genius, but I wonder on the exceptions. If a child thrust into fame by some combination of talent and abuse could be driven mad even worse than a Musk or a Trump, by some little lingering mote of normalcy within the mind’s deepest shadowland. Maybe that is why former child-stars often turn out to be the most screwed-up of us all. Still, it’d be nice to somehow ignore all reality, to believe our man-made gods on Earth aren’t often the worst devils outside of Hell. In a space as suffused with darkened enchantments as the City of Angels, you’ll convince yourself of it, so you won’t question why you’re working so goddamned hard to be just like those awful bastards.