Two for the Show (16 page)

“You need a sweater?” I ask her. “Let me know if you’re cold. I’ll get something for you.”

“No, I’m fine. But thanks.” Then looking up at me, quizzically. Gauging me for a moment—judging my capacity for sympathy, for humanness, for her own safety—before asking what she’s clearly been wondering. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

It startles me a little, of course. But she doesn’t know me. She couldn’t. I’ve spent my life carefully out of her sight. I shake my head no.

“You’re not, like, some distant uncle or something, who I’ve never met?”

Jesus. Her power of intuition. I shake my head no.

“And this is just business, right? Get money from my dad, leave us alone after that?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“And you’re not gonna hurt my sister or my mom? They’re out of the picture now, right?”

“Right.” Adding, “There’s no reason for anyone to get hurt.”

“But sometimes things go wrong in kidnappings,” she informs me. “You always read about that. People panic. Somebody tries something stupid. Stuff can go wrong.”

“Your dad just has to follow the directions.”

She looks tentatively up at me. “You’ve got a nice smile.” Smiling a little herself. “Whoever you are.”

And do I have the nerve to hurt her, if need be? Fortunately, the question is moot. My partners will be more than glad to do her any injury, if that’s what’s called for to get their money. The question is, how far will I go to avoid that, to defend her?

The answer is, far.

Only days before, I was held. And now, she is. Which gives me even more empathy, even more identification with my victim, probably a dangerous thing. Probably a very dangerous thing.

I don’t tell her all I have done on her behalf. That I have been there, at the protective periphery, for all her birthday celebrations, her preschool and elementary school graduations, that I have looked in on the privilege, observed from just outside the candy shop’s plate glass window.

And with her now so close, so real at last, cloaking her own fear admirably in quiet bravery, but her eyes betraying it—eyes on mine questioningly, and my eyes on hers—the motivating, propulsive rage that pushed me so forcefully into Shangri-la is diffusing, softening, confusing me. I don’t know if I am going to rob them or protect them, Amanda and her family. To finally and fully bring them down, or to make sure nothing happens to them. Am I going to see our plan through, or foil it in the end? I honestly don’t know. Because I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t have any values, because who I was, all my values, were in the job I was doing, the circumscribed life I was living, and suddenly both are irreversibly disrupted. I’m displaced, and I have nothing to fill the vacuum.

“You’re sure I don’t know you from somewhere?” she asks again, quietly, when no one else is near us. Not playful. Direct. Puzzled. Deadly serious.

If you don’t know who you are, then you don’t know what you are doing or about to do. A precise, ingenious, quick biographer of other lives, I’ve been set utterly adrift in my own.

And then, I hear Amanda praying. The daughter of the Amazing, who knows there is nothing out there, praying. They have grown up going to church, Wallace and Sasha taking the girls fairly diligently. Vegas churches—how anomalous, how absurd—and yet they are huge, their congregations loyal and dutiful, as if to bask in the absurdity, establish a beachhead in it.

Or does Wallace, from his years onstage, simply recognize the childish human need for belief, belief in some kind of beyond, for all the human comforts it supplies, the human needs it answers, the human ego it assuages—a confirmation of our species’ special place in the universe? He would hardly deny that to his daughters for the sake, and rigorousness, of grim reality. He coddles them in expensive luxuries and comforts; why should he deny them this essentially free one? They can grow, they can decide on their own at some point when they are older. As he looks out on his audience—delighted in the magic, awed by his connection to the beyond, shaken and shivering in the naked demonstration of its power—he looks out nightly on the sheer heft and force of this need to believe. Its sheer muscle and bulk, if not its monstrousness. He makes his handsome living on this need; he is hardly one to deny its force and size and power.

Amanda, my daughter, is praying.

Silently, I join her.

Prayer? Me? Sure, why not? If only for the sense of connection. In sympathy, in unity, with my sweet, frightened daughter.

THIRTEEN

But I am, of course,
doing much more than praying. You know me by now. I am working diligently at the opposite end of the belief/faith spectrum—at the end where it is all facts and data. As soon as I left my mother’s house, I had opened my laptop and started.

I knew he was scrubbed from the Internet. Part of my job was to scrub him. To maintain the aura of mystery, to endlessly rewrite and reconfigure his past, to leave it in vague mists of southernness and poverty and a mysterious extrasensory gift. Part of my job was to keep him that way, but he had done a pretty creditable job of it before I even arrived on the scene. A quick look revealed how well he’d done. Tens of thousands of pages referencing the Wallace of today. But little to nothing of a verifiable past. Compared with audience members, whom I could trace back carefully, methodically, step-by-step, his life began fully formed at thirty, as if he had sprung whole from the soil one night. But that absence, that emptiness, made all the more apparent that there were answers, there was truth, hidden back there. And, ironically,
I
had finished the job, completed it, as only a professional could, as he knew only I could. And now that I desperately wanted to know more, to discover the truth, the truth had been expertly disposed of, erased, stolen away from me.
By
me. Writing the biography of no biography. Letting any observer’s imagination write it his or her own way.

Now I had to somehow resurrect it.

At this stage, a real detective shuts down his computer, steps away, and goes and looks, cruises the neighborhood, searches door-to-door, chats casually with the kids hanging out, asks questions, finds old relationships, slouches low in the driver’s seat in a car across the street. All of which I was willing to do, but couldn’t, of course, because I needed to continue to deliver the data to Wallace the Amazing, without interruption, now more than ever, so that he would not suspect me of being involved in taking Amanda. Could I learn anything in a day or two? Ask the favor of Dominique again? But it wouldn’t be a quick, focused errand with a specific destination, like seeing my mother. It would require time—days, a week, poking around, getting familiar, exploring.

If I was going to learn anything, wouldn’t I have to go back to the South, figure out who he really was, where he came from, find his roots and the roots of this overwhelming and total and perfect theft? A theft so complete and overwhelming and perfect that all trace of it had apparently disappeared. Had been reconfigured and remade, truth and actuality buried deeply and shunted aside. It meant I had my work cut out for me. Who had he touched; who knew who he really was?

But I can dust for digital fingerprints. As if discovering the latent fingerprint on the LED screen, finding a faint track in the digital dirt, stumbling onto the missing person’s sock, or a slipper, in the thick digital underbrush. I was the right person to bury it all—and I’m the right person to unearth it. So it is that my fleet expert fingers pick up the first traces, the faint whiff, of Wallace the Amazing before he was Amazing or Wallace. Returning to those archived newspaper articles about Archer Wallace, mining the smallest details of the reporting, winding out from them in several directions—archived school records, birth records, drivers’ licenses, tax records, all the techniques I have perfected over twenty years. Once I have the scent, my sensitive Internet nose can follow it into far corners, opening the dusty, digital attic trunk, unpacking the old albums, peeling it all back, laying out the startling biography, until I am staring at it, spread out in front of me, in amazement.

Ready?

Oh, I doubt it.

Born: Edward Lambent Corder. Grade school: Oklahoma. Junior high: Texas. High school: Arkansas. Father a roustabout, field hand, and drunk. Rented shacks, plywood floors, outhouses, dinner brawls. Which accounts for scant to nonexistent school records, rental receipts, bank statements. Living on America’s margins, and yet there could be no truer or deeper American. His myth gets to have it both ways.

And then, South America. Tanker stowaway. He chose the only place more difficult to track him than the rural United States. Primitive, recordless South America.

And there, at a certain point, the record ceases. Disappears. Stops like tracks in the middle of the desert. There most would leave it. Most.

I dig further. I don’t give up. I scrape away the sand and dust from the digital artifacts. I stand at the end of the track, the terminus, the end of the line, look out around me, search for movement, any movement on the horizon.

And eventually, I stumble across it—something so unpredictable, so out of the ordinary and odd, it’s as if it’s planted there for me. Something too, that is extraordinarily strange to have found its way onto the Internet, into technology’s orbit at all. A trail of clues have led me to old journals, uploaded now as artifacts and mementos, of college kids backpacking through Peru and Bolivia—one of them not too stoned to remember a few names, to make a few coherent notes.

The name that the college kid jots down is extraordinarily weird. Dos Sequiantos Nas Tas Tasa. With the help of the Internet, I translate crudely from the Indian dialect: Dizzy Blue Fish.

A shaman.

Young Eddy Corder—apprenticing to a shaman? Living for months outside his jungle hut, sleeping on the jungle floor? But that’s what I’m able to piece together from one of the journals:
There’s this strange kid here from Arkansas I think, been hanging out here forever, talks dialect with the tribe, wears a shaman necklace, gets invited to sleep in the headman’s hut—spooky stuff.
A shaman can be a medicine man, a pharmacologist, a hypnotist, a mystic and reader of signs, a semiologist, a sage and a counselor. But most of all, isn’t a shaman a showman? Isn’t he a native tribe’s ancient, traditional version of the Amazing Wallace, astounding with his interior knowledge, his command of the unknown and unseen?

(And thinking about those college kids, and about the Amazing
Wallace’s previous, less layered, more innocent identity, I get a pic
ture—the detective’s vague, amorphous intuition, like my own shamanistic vision floating up from my unconscious—of a young couple traveling through South America at the same time and coming into the orbit of Dizzy Blue Fish and his American apprentice. The presence of both the young Eddy Corder, and this young, attractive couple—all of them with previous names, all in South America together. Possible? Significant? Mere coincidence? Useless speculation?)

What I find on the Internet knits myth and reality, a peculiar and unique fabric of the deep jungle. But I can’t help thinking of the shaman, and the shamanism, in the context of what the Amazing Wallace does now. Because the shaman is both showman and authentic healer. The shaman’s stunts might be fake—techniques for, a mastery of, group hallucinations? Is that all he has accomplished? But practicing authentic healing arts too. Using ancient ingredients that have made their way into our most effective and powerful modern medicines. The ingredients we have turned to, to study at the molecular level, to reassemble, imitate, duplicate in the lab.

That’s why my cynicism, my lack of belief, my rational self, hits its greatest challenge in the idea of shamanism. One side of me thinks it is merely sorcerers’ tricks and techniques—of misdirection, stagecraft, group hallucination, perfected over centuries—from which they derive their power. But another side of me looks at the record of healing, the adoption by western science of many of its ingredients and treatments. It leaves me split, and baffled. Does this, after all, add to the myth of my employer? Or does it detract from it, begin to unravel it, begin to reveal the truth behind it? The tribal shaman is in some ways the inverse of Wallace the Amazing—poor, primitive, naked, with none of Wallace’s wealth and sophistication and comfort and modernity (or my technology). And yet they are brother practitioners, engaged in the same sciences and disciplines, as much as I can understand them at least. You would think that the timeless, changeless Amazon jungle and ever-morphing Las Vegas (famous for dynamiting buildings, throwing new billion-dollar projects up like joyously tossed newborns, altering its face, updating its appeal) would have nothing to do with each other. You would think an ancient tribe, fixed in time and place, untouched by modernity, and a modern tribe of extreme transience, devoid of tradition, each generation freshly made, would have no connection. And yet they are expressions, mirrors, of each other. And in that there was, I hoped, a detective’s clue—not a conventional clue, to breaking an individual case, but a broader clue, to understanding human impulses, and needs, and maybe even a little of mankind, and maybe a little of myself.

What has Wallace the Amazing taken from the jungle and brought to the desert? And what are the Stewartsons actually after?

Once you have the thinnest thread, you can follow it. You are like a child in the woods, following a piece of string—diligent, preoccupied, focused.

So I’m eventually able to piece together his travels. The point being, there were numerous stops first. By all indications, with other shamans.
Questos Ayee Terracoatl. Bonduto Pen Losoviostandododoah
. “The Mud Man Who Sings.” “The Stooping Triple Ghost.” Brief stops, compared with the months he eventually spent with Dizzy Blue Fish. Which tells me these others, these initial shamans, weren’t satisfactory. That they were false in some way, cons and scams that ultimately had the curtain lifted, that ultimately revealed their powerlessness.

Which tells me he was looking for some level of authenticity. For something deeper. He was—as only a young, brilliant, dispossessed youth can be—a searcher after truth. Ironic, that the search for truth had led him to tricks, to a complex, compelling scam. A dark notion floats above me, half-formed: Is that irony, that paradox, part and parcel of the truth he found?