Two for the Show (27 page)

He needs us back at our posts—and he knows we will go there, that we have no choice, that this is the unspoken, implicit cell-block deal we have struck with him for our release. This is Las Vegas, and he is an entertainer. And periodically, in certain cultural places, at certain cultural times, entertainment trumps law. Entertainment trumps everything.

We are destined—Dominique and I—to continue sharing his life.

Sharing his world.

Sharing his magic.

Delivering it daily, nightly.

Sharing, as it turns out, his pain and loss as well.

Because Amanda is gone.

Disappeared, of her own volition. Sightings occasionally. A trail of her movement, enough to indicate that she is on her own, and that Dominique and I have nothing to do with, are no longer responsible for, her absence. But no communication. Nothing definitive. Elusive. Somewhere out there. Starting over.

A new name? A new identity? (That’s all I can assume, since I could never find her with all my online intelligence.)

Reimagining herself. Remaking herself.

Just like her dad.

Was she somewhere, somehow, still in Vegas?

Or anywhere but?

That clever fifteen-year-old. Brave, self-possessed, quick witted. Whom I had grown in just days, in just hours, to love and admire.

An absence, a punishment, the three of us are fated to share. Her father, her half brother, her biological mother.

Amanda, gone.

I see her still, striding out across the desert away from me, just as her dad strode out across the desert away from Eddie’s thugs. Yes. Same blood. Same DNA. Same step, same stride, nonchalant yet purposeful. An eerie behavioral echo. Like father, like daughter.

I stride too. Out of lockup. Out into the dry desert air, the breeze steady, low, a hum, as if dutifully sweeping away the recent past.

But it cannot so easily sweep away mine.

Because my mother is beside me—and I don’t quite know what to do with her, as she doesn’t quite know what to do with me. There is an anxious, tentative, ill-defined sensation hanging between us. Here in the desert—mythic land of whole civilizations’ beginnings and endings, of fresh starts and inviolate finalities, is this a start for us, or an end? Is our destiny before us, or pushing us from behind?

Like mother, like son.

TWENTY-TWO

The lights drop low.
The audience hushes. There is a pause of silence—eerie, anticipatory.

“Connection. It is all connection. More than we know. More than we understand. And as you all know from the news reports of the kidnappers’ capture, I have been the beneficiary of those connections.”

Going to his knees. Crouching as if in worship of a god, this man who is his own god, so it is more startling, more moving, more convincing, more compelling, than any tent show, this god-man going to his knees in recognition if not of God than of some higher force at least. And yet this god-fearing audience accepts it. Doesn’t question it. Going to his knees in gratitude, prayerfully.

“You know from the news reports, my daughter’s been found. You all had a role in bringing her back to me. My daughter is okay, thank God. I have my family back. We are back together, and we can go on. Thanks to all of you.”

The audience erupts. Chaos. A happy bedlam. A rush of affection, of bonding, of love, chaotic and massive and inimitable, idealized and immense and unique and unprecedented and lofty and transformational.

A useful lie. Let the world think Amanda is recovering quietly, privately, at home. No visitors, please. A bit of magic so easy for a magician to manage. A bit of absence so simple for a lord of identities—present and absent—to master. Let the dream continue. Who’s ever going to know?

I have circled Debbie’s house for hours. No lights. No car. No sign. And I can tell without even looking in the windows, without ever letting myself in to see, that it is empty. She is gone. It was too much for her, too strange, too frightening, too confusing, too dark, too troubled, too wrong. So she has backed away. Has silently (yet loudly, the painful fact pounding and pulsing in my ears) disappeared. I was once the ghostly one, unknown, unknowable. Now she is the ghost. As if to turn the tables on me, show me how it feels. An uncanny echo of Amanda receding across the landscape, a repetition humming in my soul, she has “deserted” me. And I am clearly not invited to turn to my array of detective tricks to find her. And what would be the point? Her silence is deafening. Her message is clear.

The camera goes close on Wallace the Amazing, and I can see the considerable mist in his eyes. I have watched him for more than twenty years now, and I could not say if those tears were real or not. Probably he couldn’t either. And anyway, what does “real tears” mean exactly? This is Vegas.

I deliver the next night’s digital packet.

It’s a family business.

TWENTY-THREE

The lights drop low.
The audience hushes. There is a pause of silence—eerie, anticipatory.

I step onto the stage one more time, to conclude the magic act that you—faithful, or skeptical, but rapt audience member—have been so closely observing.

The Vegas act in which I have conjured up a secret assistant, and his past, and his story.

You feel a little dizzy? Well, that’s a sign of good magic. An engaging show always makes heads spin a little.

And throughout I have called myself Wallace the Amazing because, as you remember (perhaps with this little bit of prompting), I hadn’t yet decided—and still haven’t—what readership, what audience, this account will have. Whether for public consumption, or a private, personal record, meant only for distant posterity. (Remember now? I’m sure you do. When I wrote, as if nonchalantly,
I don’t know, let’s call him Wallace the Amazing.
Weren’t you a little suspicious right there? Didn’t something seem a little off?)

And the unenviable, tormented Chas? Did he seem real to you? Did all this seem like exactly the document “he” promised? I hope so. I assume so.

But now the show is over, and it is time to pull the curtain closed. (Or open?) Time to head offstage. (Or onstage, for my final bow?)

Time to let you come forward in the emptying theater. To inspect the proscenium, glance into the wings, catch a glimpse “behind the scenes” before you too exit.

Time now, not just to read, but to
ponder
this entire document, left (unwisely, impulsively) in the possession of the Las Vegas police. (Meaning, of course, the entire document up to these words, up to but not including this last chapter that you’re now reading, which has obviously come later.)

The manuscript dropped off, I’m told, by a bent-over, ghostly looking specimen, barely noticed, a mere shell of personhood, emaciated, hauntingly pale, but eyes alive, leaving it at the front desk, exiting without a word, never announcing himself, they said. But the desk sergeant remembers the wraith smiling wryly at the sign-in log and carefully signing it—mysteriously, defiantly, and I would argue insanely—with the name Archer Wallace.

I informed the police captain that I have dealt with these charlatans my whole life. How my purposely scant early biography (part of my persona, part of my act) seems to encourage a steady trickle of these daft souls—some of them con artists and operators, but some who seem to truly believe it of themselves—who periodically come forward, claiming to be me, angling for some part of my fortune and success. I’ve dealt with them all my professional years. This assortment of nuts that I’ve consolidated into one person, one personality, for the purposes of this account.

But this particular nut must have had access to my home, and access to my personal effects, to my “magic” (which, you presume, isn’t really magic). Someone clearly intent on bringing it all down. This person, it would seem only logical to assume, if he was able to break into my home that night to take Amanda, was probably the same one who had broken in earlier (these nuts are persistent, fixated, monomaniacal) and had taken the manuscript—a manuscript that I was, as you can readily understand, too embarrassed to report stolen. And having read it, he (whoever he actually is) was clearly inspired to execute the deed in reality—to actually kidnap Amanda—turning my fantasy of father/daughter drama, my literary experiment in heightened horror, my speculative staging of an idea for my act, into reality. Using my telling as a template to actually kidnap her, in order to shake me down, just as my manuscript suggests—and then, even signing the police logbook as “Archer Wallace.” A nice little annoying flourish. Touché.

Turning my own vivid imagination against me. Delivering to the police the evidence of my planning and my complicity. A perfect trap, he must have thought.

Alerted to the theft (which the police assumed had just occurred), I stopped into the police station to reclaim the manuscript. I’m fortunate to have so many friends on the Las Vegas police force that they would call me immediately. I have informed them—have had to admit, guiltily, sheepishly—that, yes, these pages are mine.

Embarrassing? Of course. I’m sure the police have read at least some of it. Though likely not much of it, categorizing it right away as private, personal, a magic act prop they do not fully understand, and a story related by an obviously fictional narrator. And in any case, they have not seen this final chapter that you are now reading, which was not yet attached, because it was not yet written—I hadn’t yet gotten to it. But now, obviously—newly motivated to finish—now, finally, I have.

A confessional document? Yes, of a kind (we’ll get to that shortly)—but here, in the last chapter, the magic is revealed. The story is transformed. Inspiring the oohs and aahs that a Vegas audience, that any audience, wants.

The first job of a magician is to know his audience, of course, and I know you very well: You feel I am trying to take away Chas’s past. To erase him. Yet another theft of identity from Wallace the Amazing. That would be in my nature, you say. That might even be the deal I struck with Chas, yes? Erasing him once more, in order to give him his old job back.

But isn’t that what you think simply because you have lived with the earnest, brooding, troubled, pitiable “Chas” for a couple of hundred pages? That’s how magic works. Create a convincing universe, inhabit it, populate it,
command
it to come alive, make it indubitable. That’s just the practice of magic. Just a signpost of mastery. And the surprise, the real magic, is that Chas never existed. Well, that’s not fair—exists, yes, but only in the pages of this document, this elaborately detailed, but severely angled “explanation” of my act and life.

You feel I am trying to take him away, don’t you? Delete him with one last trick? Make him disappear from the stage? Cast away his entire existence? But can an existence be so tenuous to begin with, that I can erase it within one document? Erase it by merely altering its final moments, its final breaths? Ask yourself: is an existence that fragile really an existence at all?

And be practical. Be skeptical. Does it seem at all realistic that I could find this perfectly qualified kid and then so elaborately arrange, with a funeral, with obituaries, with other tricks, his isolation from normal life, in order to serve me for over twenty years, for both of our working lifetimes?

Or isn’t it far more likely that I have created him as a way to protect myself, by telling my own story under the cover of this poor, made-up, hard-working drone.

Admit it—hasn’t the whole story strained credulity for you? Lying fathers, lying mothers, a concocted funeral, all the rest of it—but that’s what makes audiences gasp. What makes you pay attention. I always push the edge of the envelope.

Doesn’t it all feel suspiciously biblical? Progeny and offspring, loyalty, disloyalty, half brothers and half sisters and tangled relationships, and at their center a dominant, domineering male figure, godlike. Omniscient, as it turns out. Set in the desert. All a story? All meant to bring down this false god?

But if biblical in themes, the opposite in scope. Just a strange, sordid, sorrowful little tale of heartland America. Unwanted teenage pregnancy. Dad shirking his fatherly duties to seek his fortune. Mom wanting to secure a better life for her out-of-wedlock child. They strike a deal.
I’ll keep your son a secret, as long as you stand by him,
she says. How American—to strike a deal.

And now
you
must be the detective. You must say whether I have conjured this entirely. Made up this life, this career, recorded it safely from the angled point of view of a tormented employee, in order to
have it both ways
, and this is the important point—to tell my tale, reveal the secrets of Wallace the Amazing, and yet protect those secrets for a little while longer. In order, yes, to ultimately finish off this false prophet, this larger-than-reality personality, this Amazing Wallace—but only when the right time comes. Meaning, a time of
my
choosing. When
I
want. To amaze you one final time, and then escape, exit in a flutter of curtain and cape.

You must conclude your investigation. (You see? Staying with my manuscript’s “detective” theme.) You must make the judgment.

It’s a simple question, in the end. (Meaning, simple to pose. Not simple to answer.)

Have I created the detective?

Or has the detective—dutifully writing this himself—“created” me?

(Revealed me, “conjured” me, brought me fully and believably to life?)

Or, as you probably suspect, are both my “creations?” The unknown detective and the celebrated mentalist? Are we really one and the same? Two figures carrying forward the same story? Certainly it fits with the theme of identity, doesn’t it? Its fluidity, its mutability, its unpredictability. Is the creation of “Chas” alongside me, a way I can safely reveal my own stage tricks and techniques—as well as my own loneliness and isolation, my own thoughts, my own actual past, that “Chas” has so diligently unearthed?

Or—even simpler—is this document just a way to tell the story of my son? The son who for practical and professional reasons I cannot be close to? Who I cannot spend even a moment with? Who I cannot risk revealing? Who I cannot speak to directly, who I can never hug or even touch? So telling his story like this is the best I can do. Is the only way to be close to him. The only way to show him that I know who he is, that I understand his suffering, that I thoroughly comprehend his life. That I have understood it, and shared in it, and absorbed it, more than he knows.

So is this document a way to record the truth, to create a record, that nevertheless admits nothing? That lets the show continue.

Until
I
say it stops. Not someone else.
My
decision.
Me.

(And do you hear in my tone just now anger and arrogance? Or confidence and clarity, an unwavering sense of mission and self?)

And however much you may now feel upended or ambushed in your view of this account—however unmoored you now feel in comprehending what you’ve read—you can certainly understand (you’ve noticed throughout, I hope) how I inhabit this strange space, dance on this strange edge between the seen and the unseen. Between the worldly and comprehensible, and the otherworldly and inexplicable. It’s not a place anyone else inhabits, so I must inhabit and negotiate it alone, and that is why I both hide and reveal myself here, in this document, continuing to balance on that edge, poised between the knowable and the unknowable. Between what is comprehensible in ordinary life, and what is not—which, after all, is part of ordinary life as well.

The clues were there for you, after all, right from the opening curtain (to which we now return, full circle, to create an artful, reverberating ending):

It’s the strangest job you’ve ever heard of
. Remember? My opening line? My compelling entrance?

Yes, the strangest job you’ve never heard of.
Because it doesn’t exist.

Because the act of revelation—of a long tortuous look behind the curtain—is only a further act of magic, to convince and persuade you.

And credit card purchase records, Internet research, old-fash
ioned detective work—that’s how you
would
do such a nightly trick of telepathy. How anyone
could
do it. Anyone smart enough, skilled enough, careful enough. Logical explanation, for you who seem to insist on logic. Ye of little faith . . .

It’s how you
would
do it . . .

If you were
not
a shaman.

If you did not have years of training, from jungle to desert.

If you were not a mind reader.

If you could not conjure worlds, shape perceptions, as I have shaped yours . . .

If you still clung to previous identities—like Edward, or Robert—identities that were merely intermediate, part of the tale, but are now irrelevant, small, conventional, meaningless way stations when only one identity has come to matter.

That of . . .

Wallace the Amazing