Two for the Show (26 page)

Being so certain that Amanda was my daughter. The obvious inheritance of my features, my aptitudes, even my gait. All calling out so loudly to the world. Yet Amanda is not my daughter—misconstruing that one too.

Shame, incompetence, frustration, humiliation, swirl around me, grim themes rising up thickly, threatening to smother me. I’d been locked in a room at a computer screen for twenty years. Yes, ironically, doing detective work. But not a real detective. No experience in real life, a lack of human interaction, a lack of common sense, no feel for people or the rhythm of the street or life as it’s actually lived. In fact, the very opposite of a detective. Sheltered, cut off, isolated, and therefore, probably, the least qualified detective in the world. A detective who never detected anything amiss in the myth of his father, the absence of his mother, or in the odd features of his shadowy antagonistic partners.

The strength I felt in Dave Stewartson’s grip. The athleticism in Sandi Stewartson pinning me down. The obsessive physicality, the relentless training that was no doubt a subculture, if not a mandate, of federal operatives like them. (And certainly their law enforcement network had helped direct them, back channel, to the sharpest shadowy “doctors” and “trainers.”) A youth and fitness obsession that would let them continue their other obsession:

Pursuing the Amazing Wallace. Across America, across careers and occupations, across time itself. Were they trying to redeem themselves? They had screwed it up the first time, hiring an impressionable young girl as their insider—never predicting how hard, how fully, she would fall for him. Was this the crazy reach of their obsession? Trying to reorient, upend, time itself? No wonder they had been so brazen and confident standing up in the audience at that night’s performance. Because they looked, they felt, completely, safely new.

The plastic surgery, the workouts, the gym—they had actually tried to cross time in pursuit of their man. My God—
that
was sticking to the case,
that
was dedication. They had false identities, but they were real detectives. I was merely a pale, ghostly, imitation.

And time was, in a sense, collapsing around me as well, becoming newly fluid . . . an unwanted jungle birth revealed for the first time . . . twenty years in front of a computer screen reduced to a blink of stunned rage . . . a plane trip into the fracturing past . . . and the Stewartsons’ surgeries now amplifying that collapse . . .

Ceasing to exist
—quite a trick, Dave and Sandi. Erasing your former life, creating an alternate identity, right down to faces and muscles and rejuvenated vitality. I felt, in my years of behind-the-scenes dutiful silence and shadow, that
I
had ceased to exist. But I was apparently a rank amateur. The Stewartsons, once again, were the pros.

Oddly, obliquely, the Stewartsons had a lesson for me here: When it comes to ceasing to exist, the only way to fully accomplish the job, is to forge a new existence. Wasn’t that now the next step for me?

And inspired perhaps by the thoroughness of Dave and Sandi’s deception, a startling question suddenly occurs to me:

“Did you ever tell Robert . . . about the agents? About who you really were? What you were really doing there?”

She pauses. Shakes her head. “I never said a word.” She looks at me, eyes imploring. “But come on—what’s a naive nineteen-year-old midwestern girl doing in the middle of the South American jungle? It’s ridiculous. It’s transparent. He must have known.”

Yes, agreed. The idea of Wallace not knowing, being fooled, seemed so remote. “Maybe you weren’t fooling him at all. Maybe his eyes were wide open. And if the deception failed, then there was no deception.” And he fell for you, Mother, honestly, fully, naturally.

“Maybe,” she concedes. But clearly doesn’t believe it. Or at least, still doesn’t know.

Like mother, like son.

A legacy of deceit.

The fact that I was actually
conceived
in deceit.

And went on to live a life confined by, defined by, deceit. Practiced a profession of deceit. It’s too much to take in. So I push it away, retreat from it, by pressing on with my detective questions . . .

“Why did they recruit
you
for this? What were they afraid of with this guy?”

“What were they afraid of?” She smiles a little here. She has obviously thought about it. “Well, they weren’t about to tell a nineteen-year-old girl what they were afraid of. They weren’t about to entrust me with that . . .”

And here it is again—the brick wall, the bottomless pool, the sudden amorphous expansion, a lone detective against the shape-shifting and unknowable. The resolutely unsolvable—tantalizing and taunting forever. Reminding the naive, earnest detective of lesson one: the limits of detection. I could even imagine a scenario in which the government itself did not know. Had no full clear record of its investigation or intent. Had lost its original purpose in paperwork, in bureaucracy, as if intentionally, so there could never
be
an answer. It reverberated, didn’t it, with the dark, always lurking, existential risk of all detective work: the unsolved murder, the cold case, the crime still in the files. The fruitless search for motive. The immense, teleological, itch-you-raw theme, of not knowing. Of never knowing.

“So all you have is my guess”—she shrugs—“and my guess is: everything. They were afraid of everything. A government’s paranoia and suspicion. They didn’t know what to be afraid of first. The cult of it. Mind control. He was on friendly terms with local rebel factions. Shared jungle with them. That’s probably why the Feds first got involved. Plus there were drugs coming from that region, some unstudied, uncategorized hallucinogens grown in the jungle flora, then smuggled north. So, a cult, rebels, civil war, drugs. In the eyes of the state, a perfect storm, I guess. All personified, I suppose, in a powerful, charismatic young man outside his country. Outside its laws and institutions. Outside its norms. But what were the specific reasons for pursuing him? The official excuse or version? They wouldn’t tell me. I’ll never know. I only had my little job. Which I obviously blew.”

The government. Drawn to the power. Both believing it and doubting it. Loving it and despising it. It occurred to me: just like a Vegas audience.

The government. Finding the magic riveting. Attention-getting. And wondering, I’ll bet,
How can we use it? How can we profit from it?
Just like Big Eddie.

But the real point being, that was all only her guess. A guess from when she was nineteen. We’d never know for sure.

I look at her. On the one hand, a collaborator, recruited to deceive. And then practiced enough in deceit to deceive her son with a fake father. With a fake past. But then again, pushed into it to begin with. Only nineteen. Barely older than Amanda.

“But this isn’t about Robert,” I say—stumbling, choking a little on the name. On its unfamiliarity. “This is about you and me.”

I am spending the first honest moments with my mother. We both know it. As we both know we are bound by a lie, an enormous, stupefying, silently kept, wildly successful lie. In which we are complicit. For my part, unwittingly until now, but still, implicated, a participant. The amazing lie of the Amazing Wallace.

I am feeling, not fully consciously but in my bones, the profound tie of mother and son. It is inescapable, a golden braid, a reassuring wrap that binds you tight perhaps in support but perhaps a noose, with strands—thousands of strands twisted together inextricably—that you cannot completely escape. It shapes you so profoundly you can’t get perspective enough to see it, but as you grow, you catch glimpses of the connection, of its shape and form that have shaped and formed you so thoroughly. The little perspective you
can
get, is only in realizing it, only comes from experiencing the tie more profoundly.

“When were you going to tell me this? Any of this?”

“I wasn’t going to. Ever. But to pile deceit on deceit after your visit . . . when you were so clearly pained, and hurting, and confused.” Her eyes moisten again, with fresh tears. I picture her once more, crying quietly behind the bathroom door on my unexpected trip home, trying to hide the truth from me.

She shakes her head. She couldn’t bear it. She came to Vegas.

The moist denseness of the Amazonian jungle versus the aridity of the Las Vegas desert. Climatological opposites that stir up, inspire metaphor. The thickness, the intrigue, the teeming life, the rampant biology, versus the simplicity, the sterility, the bright cloudless predictability. Lushness, sap dripping, flora and fauna variegate and profligate and intermingled and indiscriminate, an essence and aroma of fecundity, growth, reproduction, birth, beginnings. Compared with this spare, stark, sand and dust—a place teeming with nothing. With only the barest, sparest elements—sand, rock, wind, air, incidental struggling flora only a reminder of the spareness surrounding it; a reminder of the struggle. Was this a contrast, a natural opposition, that I was exaggerating in my own mind, to bring a theme to it? Certainly I was trying to bring meaning to their time in the Amazon together. Had he learned something there, some secret with which he could fertilize the desert? Was there something genuinely instructive, revealing, in these opposites?

I have a little flash of insight: they are the two extreme settings of religious experience. The jungle, where man confronts the primitive, the untamed. And the desert, where prophets seek, confront, reckon with God. Seeking nature, inhabiting Eden, looking for the heart and richness of life. Versus seeking God, reckoning with the eternal, with the meaning of life. Cults set themselves up in both. From the tribes of Abraham to those of Joseph Smith, the desert is a holy place. From ancient times, the birth and cradle of civilization. The jungle has hosted the rise of the species—and the desert has been its place of reckoning.

And another little observation: a corollary of my “religious” insight. Another embarrassing little commonality of mother and son: Her relationship with Wallace centered on worship. On idolatry. On being swept up. On believing. Just like her naive, foolish son’s has. Like mother, like son—once again. We had both experienced, a generation apart, our own bit of religious conversion, being “born again” to a knowing almighty.

And wasn’t it, in a way, another stage show? Like Wallace’s Vegas act, like my mother’s funeral, like my deposit of semen, another show? This show staged amateurishly by two hopeful, naive producers working for the government, and starring a young and even more naive midwestern girl. The stage show of my mother’s love for my father. And just like Wallace’s act, a scam.

And where exactly did the show go wrong? The plan for my mother to supply
information
(just like me, an information purveyor—once again, like mother like son, another unsuspected repetition, another echo). Information for a paranoid/nervous, dutiful/anxious government; information to protect their citizenry, information they collect and store but cannot sift or analyze; information for its own sake; information simply so that they have it.

I realize with a sinking feeling the precise moment it probably went wrong—with
me
. It went wrong at the moment my mother got pregnant. A simple, overly cooperative and dutiful midwestern girl, suddenly had connection, had meaning to her life. It was no longer an exercise. No longer a game. Her loyalty inevitably shifted at some level, from her shadowy employers to the charismatic father of her child. In effect,
I
was the reason that the Stewartsons had failed in their mission.

Irony? Inevitability? Circularity? Connection? Any and all of the above?

And the prospect of a child both tied them to each other and pulled them apart, drove a wedge between them. She could sense his fear that it would slow him down, hold him back, compromise his extraordinary, singular life. So did they make some kind of arrangement, reach some dark understanding?

An inauspicious beginning for any kid.

For this kid.

Abruptly my mother stands.

“Your bond’s been paid.” She smiles. “Your mother has come to the police station and bailed you out.” Like it’s a shoplifting charge or a speeding ticket or disorderly conduct or underage drinking in the park. “You’re free to leave.” Looking. “With me, or without me.”

She had waited to tell me—left me behind bars long enough to tell me the story. Maybe she felt safer that way. Felt that I might leap for her and strangle her if there was no barrier between us. Or now maybe she is willing to remove the bars, and willing for me to strangle her, because she has at last told the story—her version of it, anyway—and at least now I know.

To put a true sense of release into my release.

She reiterates her offer. It has about it the gently warning tone of one last chance. “I can tell them everything—bring him down.” She alone has the power to do it, I realize. But toward what end? What would it achieve now? Getting even . . . why? . . . for what? We have shared loss. And perhaps because of that, my fury has subsided.

The guards materialize as if on cue. Buttons are pushed. Locks are clicked. Steel shifts, adjusts audibly.

“You’re free to go,” says one of the guards.

Free to go? Oh, I wouldn’t say that.

And though she has made the joke about a mother coming to bail out her son, I know, by the weight of the charges, that my release has little to do with my mother’s sudden, near-magical materialization, and everything to do with Wallace’s local influence. His contacts. His popularity. His persuasiveness. He has somehow managed to get any kidnapping charges dismissed. Perhaps by convincing the police that we must have been victims of the Stewartsons. That the e-mail and threats all came from them. That we—whoever we were—were merely being used. Perhaps he pointed the police to the Internet, where they found no criminal record from either of us—in fact little record at all—yet a long trail of criminal behavior and shifting identity and identity theft from these “Stewartsons.” They were the real culprits and masterminds; we were clearly pawns. He must have convinced them of something along these lines, because as I walk past Dominique’s holding cell—I’ve been so absorbed by my mother’s presence, by her story, I haven’t even thought about Dominique—I see her cell is already empty.