Two for the Show (13 page)

TEN

Of course, I am a fake detective too.
I am just as fake as the two who paid me a visit. A real detective solves things. Puts clues together. Places the puzzle pieces reverently on the table, presses them into place with satisfaction. Constructs a chain of logic as secure and unassailable and reinforced and irrefutable as an actual chain. A real detective seeks and finds justice for victims, defends us at the fraying edges of the social contract, is justice’s own catcher in the rye. A real detective either doesn’t sleep because of an injustice or an unclosed case gnawing at him, or sleeps utterly and soundly in the knowledge that his function is moral and essential. A real detective knows the camaraderie of teamwork, of a common goal, and even the detective who is in style and habit a loner knows the satisfying connection to the common good, to the moral loners before and after him. To something even greater and more vital than camaraderie. To a brotherhood of relevance.

Whereas I am a detective for the sole purpose of entertainment. For the purpose of stagecraft and turning a profit. A vital cog in a powerful and relentless wheel of revenue. I am a detective—but do I share any camaraderie with real detectives? Sure, plenty. Seeker of facts. Seeker of truths. Follower of the trail. A core connection. But then, let’s face it, our paths diverge . . .

I am a detective who gets at little truths quickly, but then hides them in the context of a larger lie. I am a rare and oxymoronic creature—a
criminal
detective. Clearly illegal, in my online reach and methods. Though our only purpose is entertainment. We never use the information I find for anything nefarious; we get rid of it, delete it, electronically shred it afterward. Responsible. But still illegal.

A perfect job for a fake detective is merely
pretending
to look for someone. After finding Wallace at Golden Care, I now have to avoid him—while appearing to be looking for him, since the Stewartsons expect me to locate him. I double back over streets, switch direction, venture into the deepest hidden corners of Las Vegas (ancient, cluttered pawnshops run by big-bearded bikers or yarmulked, trim-bearded Jews; SRO residences stinking of men with stained clothing, broken suitcases, and broken souls; bankrupted half-built developments at the city’s outermost edges, like mankind’s defeated colonization of a far planet), always making sure that the Stewartsons are never far behind. Or just far enough that it appears as if I have no idea they are there. It occurs to me that it is the inverse, the mirror, of when I was first following them and it turned out they knew. I go into gleaming new markets and filthy beat-up convenience stores, wallpaper-peeling motel entrances and soaring skylighted hotel lobbies, am in them just long enough to ask questions, then come out, catching glimpses of the Stewartsons’ car. I want them to see me working, diligently.

But the habitual falseness of my strange occupation—the generalized, overarching lie of it, temporarily exaggerated by my fake investigative movement around the city—is suddenly assailed by the all too real. The actual, the physical, invades the cerebral. Because I’m alone at my computer one minute, and I’m being knocked around my own condominium the next. Roughed up, slapped hard around the ears and the back of the head, shoved hard against my own bare walls. No handcuffs, no duct tape this time—as if to show me they don’t need it. As if to show me their control is just as effective, just as total, without them. This time, it’s pure intimidation—simmering irritation finally unleashed in my little living room. A minute ago, I was alone, but now it is a very lively, crowded scene in here: me, the Stewartsons, their fury, my fear, my careful answers competing with my dumb terror. I’m still shaking off the last blow to the side of my head, the hardest one yet, the one that has me sliding down my own wall, from which I’m looking up at Dave Stewartson. A post-blow grogginess hangs over me; that’s all I can feel or think about, and yet there’s a strange contrary sharpness and alertness inside it, a sharpness and alertness to survival, to reality’s sudden robustness, its new crisp edges and colors and sights and sounds, despite the groggy throb of the blow.

Stewartson bends down to me. “Where
is
he? Fucking albino, knock-kneed, skin and bones, wandering the street. Where the fuck is he?”

I shrug.

Slap!
A reminder slap, meant to jar and stir the memory of the previous blow. It works. “You know! Don’t pretend you don’t! Don’t insult us!”

This is quite a partnership,
I’m thinking. An ironic, detached observation that seems to help me bear the pain.

Also helping me bear the pain, handle the crowded scene is the fact that Debbie, at least, does not seem to be part of it. Her continuing absence from the Stewartsons’ orbit doesn’t guarantee her safety. But she doesn’t seem to be available to them to use as leverage against me. A good sign.

“You’ve checked the hospitals?” I ask innocently, neutrally.

Slap! “We’re not idiots. You know where he is.”

I feel myself drift out a little—now the pain is all I’m aware of. The room throbs, pulses. Consciousness is becoming a challenge.

Why am I doing this to myself? Why am I allowing this? Why am I protecting Archer Wallace? I should stay out of it, make it between the Stewartsons and him. But I
am
involved. Why do I feel I owe this to the real Wallace? It’s ridiculous. But as I’m about to tell them where he is, as I’m about to say “Golden Care,” two simple words—slap! Which only slaps me further into awareness—of fear, of reality, but also of anger, resentment, alertness, and commitment. Their violence backfires. Only draws me closer to my doppelganger, makes me identify with him.

“Either you found him and aren’t telling us or you haven’t found him and aren’t holding up your end of the deal.” Stewartson shakes his head mournfully, ominously—making clear this deserves another slap, either way.

Jesus. This treatment, and they didn’t even
know
if I knew anything.

“Find him!” commands Stewartson. His face contorted with rage. “We’re cutting you in. So no more bullshit!”

Nice partner. Nice partnership. Clearly they see their offer of partnership as providing certain physical privileges to them.

Okay. Okay. I’ll find him.

And I realize:

They’re telling the fake detective to get real.

An hour later, as I recover from the shock and insult and challenging conditions of my partnership, as I down aspirin for the headache, soak my head in cold water to regain my equilibrium, I have the sense—despite or
because of
their violence—that the Stewartsons, correctly or not, must really feel they need me. They would hardly tolerate my “bullshit,” as Dave called it, if they thought they didn’t. Which tells me they understand, intuitively if not explicitly, what I can do at the keyboard. That I am, for them, a kind of maestro there. Their violence would only go so far—was only a stage show of its own. For now, anyway.

And once again, the maestro sits back down to the keyboard. Picking up where I left off, before the rude interruption—back to hacking databases, doing the research, packaging and providing it as always to my employer, nothing amiss, nothing out of order. Because through all this, I still have to deliver the goods to the Amazing Wallace each night—even though I know now, he doesn’t seem to
need
my goods. But if I give up the preparation of the show, he’ll question my absence. He already suspects my life has intersected with the extortionists—he sent Armondy and Hammer my way, after all—and he doesn’t know, has no
way
to know, how much involvement I have with the Stewartsons, how much I’ve learned about his past, where my loyalties lie. And even if I had a secure way to communicate with him on this, whatever I would say, he wouldn’t know if it was the truth or only a cover-up. He wouldn’t know where my loyalties lie, for a very good reason. Because
I
don’t know. I wish I could just observe. Do what I have done my whole life—stand aside, lean in from the sideline, see what happens, watch the action, watch it play out. But I am under the lights on this. I am onstage. And there is no curtain, no stage wings, no exit.

The Amazing Wallace stole the real Wallace’s identity. But he has made the identity worth something, which is why the real Wallace is coming after it, retribution in the form of extortion. So neither one is innocent. Both are criminals—one long established, the other waiting eagerly in the wings. And I need to take a side, place my bet and play the odds. Welcome to Vegas.

The discovery of my professional twin creates an opportunity I never had before. I’ve had to work every day of my adult life for Wallace the Amazing. Researching the information, digging out the facts. I had to be utterly reliable, always there. But now that I know he doesn’t depend solely on me, I can do what I couldn’t before: I can look into what I have begun to suspect—if she’ll cover for me.

“I need to talk to you, Dominique.” Standing once again at her door. Here in person, to emphasize the importance of the request.

“Why?”

“I need a favor.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Not a big favor. I need you to do your work for Wallace, just like you always do.”

“Not much of a favor there.”

“But I need you to submit it twice.”

“Twice.”

“Once from yourself. And once from me.”

“You mean, alter it a little, when it comes from you.”

“Exactly. I need to go somewhere. Just for a day or two. Will you do it?”

She must recognize the need from her own life, after all. Recognize the professional imprisonment, the same urge and lust for freedom. And I know in asking, as she must know too, that I will owe her one for this. That the next favor will be hers to ask.

And how can I trust that she won’t simply tell him? She is his at-least-occasional bedmate, his lover, after all. And she was clearly as surprised and confused to discover my existence as I was to discover hers. So I know she could take this opportunity to make herself numero uno with Wallace the Amazing, even more essential to him, more powerful, unchallenged, supreme. But I had felt her disappointment at the revelation. Her anger at him. Her mental regrouping. There was a bond between us. A bond of profession. A bond of years. And if she is like me, she won’t tell him she knows about me, any more than I would tell him I know about her. She’ll keep the knowledge to herself, harbor it for some later more useful deployment—why reveal it for no reason? And this is where a detective has to go with his instincts. Instincts are part of the job. For a fake detective like me, just as much as for a real one.

There is one more bond between us, of course. One more bond to bring up here. A bond I don’t yet fully understand, but the same detective instincts are whispering its significance.

“Dominique, I have to tell you, when I saw that photo of your parents . . . My parents are both dead too. Don’t you see? He
chose
us for that. For our vulnerability. For our isolation. For our instant loyalty.” I look at her. “Please . . . cover for me.”

I smile once more at her. A smile without flirtation or charm. A smile of need, of desperation, of seriousness. A smile that says only,
I need this, Dominique
.

“I’ll do it,” she says flatly. No indication of curiosity or resentment or anticipation. Nothing more in her response than simple agreement. And maybe the acknowledgment of our bond. Yes, she’ll do it.

ELEVEN

There is magic, and there is magic.
There is a stage show—which upends and disrupts your expectations while at the same time fulfilling them—and there is a magic that makes a stage show seem trifling, a magic that can surround and immerse you, that can make you rethink everything, that can turn your mind and memories inside out, that digs into, scratches at, the deepest chambers of your understandings. That attacks your hard wiring. One might argue that’s going beyond the realm and province of what we call “magic,” but as you’ll see, we’re only talking degree.

I had sworn I was never going back. I had sworn I would never set foot again in that godforsaken patch of undifferentiated, dusty, arid, rural plain—not properly midwestern, not properly southern, unassigned and unidentified, with little geographic or regional belonging, and not even defined topographically. The place where the little that I knew and loved had died, where every tie had dissolved, where nothing held me, and there was no reason to return and every reason to turn my back.

I flew in late at night. (Strange to think it’s been only a short, few hours’ flight away all these years and yet has seemed so distant in my imagination—like an unexplored galaxy, light years away.) Rented a car. Checked into a motel. Tossed and turned and stared up into the blackness above the bed for a few restless hours. The blackness hung outside the thin motel window as well, a remarkable blackness and silence, after the bright, noisy ceaseless, nightless, timeless rhythms of Las Vegas.

So you can imagine the magic—upon waking up to a clean, calm morning light, dressing quickly, running my head under the cold water in the sink, getting into the rental car—of arriving in, driving through, my old neighborhood, all of it smaller looking, more beaten-down looking, but otherwise unchanged. As if somewhat miniaturized for my convenience, in order to take it in at once.

And perhaps you can imagine the magic as I go up the walk of our old house to our front door . . . the chipped paving stones unchanged, the deep edge of grass still there, memories cascading, a liquid rich wave of memory moistening, fertilizing, the dusty ground around me. Remembering my childhood thoughts and associations on this exact path, from this exact view. Both observing as if from a distance the thoughts of a child, but also thoroughly inhabiting those thoughts, occupying them, because that child is me.

But you certainly cannot imagine the magic of my ringing the bell, hoping and praying for a sympathetic and understanding young owner, and the door being opened by my mother.

My mother.

Standing at the screen door, as always, as if about to call me in for dinner. My long-dead mother. My own expression of utter dizzying confusion and shock and incomprehension is mirrored perfectly in her own. We have never been more powerfully mother and son, never more connected, than at that moment.

I catch her as she collapses into the ladder-back front hall chair, my own rubbery legs about to buckle too . . .

Staring at each other . . . beyond language, beyond the bounds of any emotion we have experienced or even imagined before . . .

“Charles . . . my God . . .” Barely a whisper, as if from beyond the grave.

We simply, mutely, stare some more.

At each other.

And into the cruel, generous, unknowable universe beyond us.

“It’s a profound sense of connection. That’s the only way I can describe it, and that description is inadequate. That deep sense of awe that you feel occasionally, at a birth or a death close to you, in certain fleeting moments of motherhood or fatherhood, a sudden link to the well and flow of human feeling, to the primal chain, to the basis of humanity that we pay little attention to, that we are detuned from . . . But I pay attention, I am in tune with it . . .”

Sitting on an old unchanged kitchen chair, at the old unchanged breakfast table in the old unchanged kitchen, through the fog of my own confused ecstasy, my wide scatter of feeling, through her stumbling half stutters of her own utter incomprehension, I begin to understand. To process the fake obituary of my accidental roadside death, sent to her, which she shows me now . . .

I see again her memorial service—the respectful, dutiful smattering of bridge friends and local clerks and acquaintances I’d never met, because they didn’t exist as bridge friends and clerks and acquaintances, because they’d all been hired for the occasion. The dour solicitous clergyman, saying all the appropriate, explanatory things about the illness she had kept hidden from even her closest friends. The orderly instructions she had left, so orderly and precise because she had not written them, because she’d been away, on a trip with her friends, her
actual
friends, all safely out of the way along with her, to allow her funeral to proceed. And then she’d gotten the news of my accident, my demise—nothing left, tragic—and subsequently received the ashes, on the mantel now . . .

And already I am seeing how the trick was done, and all its attendant ingeniousness. Her death serving as an impetus, a sudden and powerful motivation, to accept Wallace’s offer, to drop out of school, start to earn some income, hit the road with him, leaving little time to brood about her, and little point in returning home. Dead of a cancer she never said a word about. Dying alone, never revealing it, never burdening anyone with it, as was her apparent wish. Would I ever have bothered to search my trusted Internet further, my trusted repository of truth? Where I would have found a fake obituary, and nothing more?

(And the fact that she would not have told me about her sickness—
that
would be my mother, classic, 100 percent. Not wanting me to worry, to go on with my all-important college classes, leading toward a career that would allow me to flee our backwater, that would be my ticket out. I knew that was what she wanted for me—escape to something better, to a career that I was committed to, one where I felt important, essential. In Wallace’s offer, I knew I had found that. I knew she would be proud.)

And why had the master magician risked staging the whole funeral? Why had he not found a simpler way of informing me of her “death?” A somber phone call from someone after the “fact,” apologizing that they couldn’t find me. A “note” found in her drawer, explicitly stating she wanted no funeral, no memorial, which would be in keeping with her personality. Why not a simpler ruse? Because he
is
a master—of human psychology as well. Because he sensed that I would have to see it for myself. To inhabit the fantasy with eyes and ears and sights and sounds if I were to be satisfied. So he had to do it the riskier way, the full staging—because despite the risks,
I
would be less risky that way. More accepting. More somber and docile. More fully convinced.

Or was it, at some level, just to see whether such a stunt could be executed, could be pulled off?

And what kind, what level of magician would attempt such a trick? . . .

Who would such a magician be? . . .

In my subsequent moods of nostalgia and longing and loneliness, when I would check the Internet for her, I’d read her single obituary again, and see nothing else about her, of course. But there wouldn’t
be
anything about a quiet, self-effacing midwestern woman on the Internet anyway, only some old photos from before.

And of course, it would never have occurred to me to look for my
own
obituary. The one she had just shown me. Would I find it now on the Internet too, there to assure and convince any of my old acquaintances of my status or whereabouts—or lack thereof—should they get curious? But mostly, of course, to convince
her
. It was a parallel stunt pulled on both of us, an elegantly parallel deception. Like mother, like son. I was sure now, though, that when I searched the Internet for myself, there I would be—or wouldn’t be. Only the obit. With no other presence, of course, because of my professional, thorough job of erasing any other presence, anything about me. Christ, I was doing the patrol job of assuring my own electronic death. Safeguarding the deception myself!

What kind of magician would periodically check, to make sure that nothing newer about my mother or me appeared? Would know how I trusted the Internet, how it was my alternative reality, my only reality as far as my past, because the demands of my job precluded any physical return. What magician might that be?

All those thoughts surfaced, disordered, hellish, in the minutes and hours that followed. But for now, it was something bigger, more stunning and remarkable: a past brought back from oblivion. Inhabiting it like it was yesterday.

The irony did not escape me. Twenty years spent peeking and poking into other people’s pasts. And yet never peeking or poking into my own.

The flood of my unalloyed joy. The rushing current of my fury. For her, the miracle of seeing her son after so many years—years she’d thought I was in the ground. And for me: years I had lived duped. Replaying the ease with which it was done. How he had preyed, so ingeniously, so specifically, on an only child with a single parent, a parent who kept to herself, a private person, nearly a shut-in. A kid who had already retreated into the alternate world of computers, of hackers, a kid who lived at the keyboard and nowhere else. A kid withdrawn from the world. Perfect prey. When he approached me in that off-campus coffee shop, he already knew all of it.

My joy and fury rising together, contrary forces, pressing against each other so hard they leave me paralyzed, forces pushing isometrically against each other to leave me stunned and frozen.

Twenty years, and no change. The house, the yard, the furniture, the views, all as it had been. And did this say that twenty years had been stolen? Or that twenty years hadn’t passed at all? (Like a prisoner who walks back out into the world, and nothing is changed, and everything is changed. It all looks the same; it all looks different.)

“I can’t . . . I can’t believe . . .” she manages in a whisper, emerging from her own shock and paralysis, sitting up straight in that ladder-back chair in the dark front hall—the same chair where I piled minerals I’d collected and tossed my sweatshirt and set down the Matchbox cars I’d been playing with in the dirt outside. “All these years, as if in a flash . . .” She blinks her eyes as if seeing it, literally experiencing it that way, and confused by the idea. “Just a flash.” She keeps her hand pressed over her heart. As if to test, to continually reassure, that it is beating, that this is real.

I say nothing. I’m still too stunned by events. I never doubted her death. But here she was. Still here. As if waiting for this moment.

We can do little more than look at each other. Stare mutely in disbelief, and slow, creeping, fundamental comprehension.

Over the next few minutes, the next few hours, as we head arm-in-arm into the kitchen and she makes us mint tea and tuna sandwiches and we sit together at the little kitchen table with the morning light flooding in rich and full around us as if it too is a stunned witness to this turn of events, it is hard for me to get past the fury. It is hard to get past the sense of loss. The sense of insult. How he took over—cold guardian, father figure—and handed me a tainted ticket to the world.