Two for the Show (23 page)

And whatever I know how to do at the screen and keyboard, someone out there knows more than me—and someone, in turn, knows more than them. And that someone could easily be Dominique. Cyberspace is the Wild West; most have just arrived here comparatively wide-eyed, but a few of us have been riding out here a long time. We know the topography. We know what’s buried in the sand.

We are today’s superheroes, Dominique and I. Replacing yesteryear’s bright-tighted superheroes with equal though less showy superpowers and abilities. The power to see into people’s innermost thoughts. The power to see into their pasts.

Meek, silent, hunched over screens, even arthritic and sclerotic and paralytic in our chairs, we are superheroes with no uniforms, no magic belts, no swelling chests. More like the craven villains of superhero-comics tradition, crouched in the shadows, denizens of the dark.

Have the villains finally triumphed?

We are a family
. . . yes and no. A family I am not truly a part of. Dominique and Amanda have each other, and yet even here, where I have invested my emotions, my defensive efforts, my fingertip, I am still an outsider. A bystander. Even at the core of this story, at this moment, I still don’t exist. The questionable, indistinct, foggy half standing of the half brother.

And yet, I am strapped into responsibility. I am a bystander, but I am a participant. Dominique now has her daughter, and the transfer of the money clearly indicates she has a plan. A plan to run? To hide? To start over? And did she know or plan that I’d be with her? Do I fit into the plan? Is that what she is silently assessing, computing, as she drives the three of us straight into the desert, her silence as featureless, as broad and weighty, as the desert itself.

As for me, I have a plan now too—unformed but unquestioned, vague yet utterly focused. To confront my mother. To know what happened. Or do I want anything to do with her anymore? Do I want to leave it as I have always believed it, inhabit the lie I’ve become accustomed to? I already have the sense of the truth, after all. Its rough edges, its outline. Do I really want any more of it? Let sleeping dogs lie. Let lying dogs sleep.

Dominique and Amanda; my mother and me. It’s a parallel trick, I realize. A trick repeated across a generation, as Wallace the Amazing repeats them, perfects them, from the stage night after night. Shrewd Paternity 2.0. The upgrade—road-tested, refined. Part of his stage act. Those two words—
stage
and
act
—come at me anew with all their force.

A trick repeated: Sire the child. Make a devil’s pact with each mother—that in exchange for each’s silence, she gets support, security. The illicitness is part of what binds them to him, the fact that no one can know. Does that make the bond more powerful? For my mother? For Dominique? The fact that they’re in on the act? It’s hard to know.

The fury courses through me. A fury at my father. Like some Oedipal drama in the Vegas desert, the full brunt of my fury delayed, amplified, by my blindness to events.

But of course, the fury is trumped—redoubled—by my realization about my mother. She had lied to me. My whole visit was a lie. She pretended not to know I was alive, to be shocked to see me at her door, to have been as fooled as I was. Yet clearly, she had been acting. She must have known of my existence, it had been some arrangement she had agreed to, and she was always ready with her stage performance, should I for some reason show up on her doorstep, should I somehow discover that she was still alive. What kind of mother makes a pact to not see her child? To send him away? Because she thinks it’s better for him, that he’ll have a richer more rewarding life? Or because the father made a persuasive, powerful case. Backed up with money, in the form of my monthly salary. Making good on his promise to her. Or because somehow, she had no choice?

I thought again about her fake funeral. Colored now, more believable now, because she knew. Had maybe even helped stage it. Of course she had. Why hadn’t that occurred to me before? How could it have really been pulled off without her complicity? A funeral as fake, as staged for me alone, as my masturbating into a container. A similar veil of holiness, of purpose, of sanctimony and import, all the better to fool me. And where was my mother during her funeral—watching from a distance? No wonder it was all friends of hers that I never even knew. Hired friends, actors, who spoke to me in passing about how close they were to her, what a fine lady she had been. And in my distance from her current life, and in my distress, they knew I would accept it. And I did.

She was the master magician’s dutiful stage assistant. Willingly sawed in half. Smiling from the confines of her box. From more than a thousand miles away, she was still his stage assistant. Why?

I had spent my adulthood without a father or a mother. And now, in days, I suddenly had both, and yet I was without either, as profoundly alone as ever. More alone with them than without them.

My mother, alive. My father, alive. Both rejecting me, and both believing in me and supporting me. What a strange and twisted family spin.

And when I had left from my emotional visit to my mother, my emotional reunion, did she call Wallace immediately? Tell him who had just been to see her? Warn him that I had been there, and knew of his elaborate lie to me? Reassure him that she had revealed nothing? That she was keeping the “pact,” whatever it was composed of, whatever the agreement. In which case, he would know I knew, would clearly assume I was on the side of the kidnappers, seeking revenge, or would know at least that he couldn’t trust me, wouldn’t yet know how I felt, what stir and mix of emotions would have been unleashed in me by the discovery.

Or did she not say a word to Wallace after my surprise visit? Did she keep her mouth shut, seeing I still had no idea about who my father was, still ascribing fatherhood to the vague hero in the faded photo by the wing chair? (Did she always keep the photo there, just in case of my visit? Or was the photo to remind her of her pact? Of her commitment to deceit?)

Her weeping behind the bathroom door. Expertly faked to make the emotions of the visit even more convincing? Or a leaking out of authentic feeling, a sudden spill of regret, trying to hide it from me—hide her true emotions, hide the true story, to keep her pact with Wallace?

My mother, who went from victim to accomplice so instantly.

Who went from angel to corrupt succubus, she-devil of deception.

And here is Dominique—fucked by Wallace, to give him Amanda.

And here is my mother—fucked by Wallace, to give him me. I can imagine her trying to explain it to me: “We were just kids, Chas. I didn’t know what to do. I had no money. And he did. He proposed this solution.”

The simple, stunning parallel occurred to me:

Here, for years, I’d thought I was a father.

And it turned out that I was, instead, a son.

The son of a father I never suspected.

A father and a mother, both suddenly alive—and I couldn’t decide which I was angrier at.

What am I doing in this car? I might be here only practically and legally: to meet the needs and terms for executing the funds transfer at this next bank, because I am still the guardian. Dominique taking me with her—is it intuitive, or planned? Out of authentic choice, or merely legal need? And what is my role after that? I don’t know what Dominique has in mind yet. And things are happening fast.

And suddenly, more clearly.

“I’m taking her away,” says Dominique. “I have the money. I have my daughter. I have the excuse I have waited for, for years. He will think the money went to the kidnappers, and to you, his disloyal, disgruntled employee, disgruntled enough to kidnap his daughter—the daughter you thought was your own—disgruntled enough to team with professionals, to out-scam a scam artist.”

It’s perfect for her, I realize. A perfect cover. A perfect getaway.

“He’s never really cared about Amanda. He only cares how it looks, only cares about appearances. And I can’t take the pain of watching from afar any more.”

A pain I thoroughly understand.

“Why are you telling me?” I ask her. “Why are you revealing all this to me?”

“Because I know you won’t derail it at this point. And I want you to know. You at least deserve to know. Because no one knows the feelings, the frustrations, the motivations, as well as you. You deserve at least that much.”

It is an ingenious plan. With one major flaw. A flaw that, with her inexperience of actual motherhood, she seems to have overlooked.

What about Amanda? What about what
she
wants?

I glance in the mirror to the backseat. Amanda is pretending to look out the window, but I know she has been listening—listening closely—her eyes narrowed with focus and attention.

“Amanda is going with me. She has to. I’m her mother.” As if Dominique could read my thoughts.

Yes, she is her mother. But this wasn’t about Amanda’s interests, and it should have been. It is clearly about Dominique.

And for some combination of reasons unclear to me at that moment—a surfacing resentment at being left out of the equation, a new (half) brotherly sense of protectiveness, or just some antagonistic impulse toward the neatness of her plan—I say aloud, so Amanda can hear: “She’s going to try to escape you as soon as she can. She doesn’t care about DNA or justice. She knows Shangri-la and her sister, Alison, and the father and mother who raised her. She has a life, and you are not part of it.” Nor am I. “You can take the money. But you can’t take Amanda. At some level, you must know that.”

I think of Shangri-la. Its pink sandstone turrets. Her sheltered, protected, comfortable, and envied life there.
The house wins.
A truism of Vegas.
The house always wins.

“I guess it’s all a question of whether Amanda wants to continue living a lie,” I say, “or to finally discover the truth, and to see, along with me, how that feels.”

Dominique is silent.

Amanda, listening, is silent too.

We pull in quickly to the second bank—Western Loan and Trust—the transfer point of the funds, in another strip mall baking in the Nevada desert, maybe fifteen or twenty miles northwest of the First Desert branch, and I am still vague on exactly why I’m here. I sense it has to do with Dominique’s sleek, slippery, hasty, and presumably untraceable movement of funds—but her purpose and my presence, beyond my “guardianship,” become clearer as we turn into the bright, sun-drenched, largely empty lot.

“While I make this transfer, I can give you your cut. There’s ten million total. What do you think your cut should be?”

Suddenly, I get it. Give me my money, my share, and we walk away from one another. We can each start over. Give me my money, so that she and Amanda can get away from me. Sever all ties. No attachment. No regret. No second thoughts. No guilt.

“I want to be fair,” she says. “Name your figure. But you have about fifteen seconds. We can’t be hanging around here. We have to keep moving. If you can’t come up with a reasonable figure, I’ll come up with it for you.”

For me, it has nothing to do with the money. And Dominique knows it. And that’s what makes this so insulting, so painful.