Two for the Show (5 page)

Shrunken, white-skulled, dangerously emaciated, curled in the empty bathtub, covered, at least, with a thin blanket, he blinked in the sudden light. His whiteness, the sheer, translucent skin—he obviously hadn’t been in the sun in months, maybe years. Fragile, brittle, a late-stage cancer patient appearance. Skin hanging off bones. My gasp of surprise and his own gasp—a duet of shock and communion. He was doubly chained—to the base of the toilet and the base of the sink—though it looked like he hadn’t muscle enough to even lift the chain, much less break it free from either fixture. Sunken black eyes. Only stray tufts of hair at wild angles on his otherwise bare skull—as if seeking their escape from so inhospitable and alien a surface. He was a living ghost. Barely living at that.

He was hardly recognizable. But he hardly had to be. I had obviously just met the real Dave Stewartson.

Dave Stewartson kept alive so that he could continually provide the details of his life, no doubt, so the big, healthy, suntanned, gym-buffed, new improved Dave and sidekick Sandi could inhabit that life all the more convincingly and continually. Dave Stewartson kept alive for signatures on documents, for easier access to bank accounts, brokerage accounts, retirement savings, for the store of his knowledge. Dave Stewartson kept alive so that there would be no homicide investigation, so it would be at most a missing persons case, if that, because maybe no one had reported him missing. Maybe these scam artists were that artful in choosing a wealthy, cut-off, perfect victim; maybe he was that alone. All this was running through my head as I carefully isolated and snipped one link from each chain with the lock cutter from the tool bag always in the trunk of my car, as I lifted him carefully out of the tub—so strangely lightweight as to be hardly human, hardly a man anymore—as I half led, half carried him out to my car, laid him in the passenger seat like a just-released patient, and slipped out of the motel lot, accelerated away from the shock and the misery, nevertheless having shock and misery secured, strapped in, in the seat beside me.

He said nothing. I said nothing. Weak, head against the headrest, he stared out the window. Though at one point he turned toward me, and in the slant of Vegas night light—thin and un-neon out here, far from the Strip, the stars and moonlight more vivid out here, as if asserting their reality amid the panoptic challenge of thickly manufactured illumination a few miles away—I thought I could see his eyes swimming in tears of gratitude. He was barely alive, and we both knew it, and the recognition of that kept the conversation to a minimum. I spoke as you would to a patient—only the essentials.

“I’m taking you somewhere safe.”

He nodded acknowledgment.

Somewhere safe
—where hardly anyone knows me. Hardly anyone sees me. A few neighbors to nod a friendly hello, my girlfriend, Debbie, that’s it. As I said, I’m a ghost. So it is unextraordinary, hardly merits mention, to bring a second ghost—a real ghost—into what is already a ghost’s residence. He’ll feel right at home.

He sleeps on the single bed in my small immaculate guest bedroom, where no one has ever slept before. Soup. Crackers. A loose-fitting shirt and pajamas from my closet. A little walking—to the john, back—and then a little more walking, around the condo. I see him looking in the mirror. The atrophy of his muscles is as strange, as remarkable to him as to me.

“Here you go, Dave,” I say to him, handing him soup and crackers on the patio.

He looks at me, eyebrows raised, momentarily startled, it seems, confused and amazed, at hearing his name spoken aloud. Maybe surprised that I know him. Maybe just the suddenness of the simple humanity. His identity suddenly returning to him—in so simple a way. They had probably never called him Dave. Would not acknowledge it, had not said it aloud. Maybe they had called him anything and everything else, taunting him with the theft of his identity, working the psychologies of imprisonment and torture, trying to make the lost identity a fact in his mind. But here is his name spoken in a calm, soothing, friendly tone of voice that he has not heard for a long time. He looks at me—examines me—doesn’t know, after all, who I am, what my motives are, what my connection to all this is.

He spoons the soup, nods in gratitude, manages a small smile, while he tentatively swallows a spoonful.

He sets down the spoon. Looks out at the warm desert morning. Closes his eyes in the sunshine, lets the sun wash over him like a bath.

“My life was stolen from me,” he says.

“I know.”

He turns to look at me. Still white, fragile, but piercing eyes. “How
do
you know?”

I don’t answer. I can’t tell him who I am, of course. I feel nothing but sympathy for his aloneness, for his isolation, and I may have saved his life, but I can’t tell him exactly who I am (well, my name, sure, but nothing more) or what I do or how I know.

“Who
are
you?
What
are you?” he asks.

“I can tell you my name. I can’t tell you anything else.”

“Meaning, how you knew I was there,” he says.

“Yes, meaning that.”

“Can you tell me what happens now?”

“What happens now is whatever you want. My suggestion—you go to the police, and put an end to the other Dave Stewartson and his companion.”

He looks at me, smiles a little. “They seem pretty evil to you, don’t they?”

I am stunned.
They don’t to you?
(Is this some kind of Stockholm syndrome, Patty Hearst–ish, identification with the oppressor?)

He takes another sip of soup, savors it.

“Then I’ll go to the police for you.”

“Oh, don’t do that,” he says.

“Why not? Don’t you want your identity back? Your money back? Your life back?”

“If you go to the police, you’ll get drawn in yourself. I’m sure you’ll live to regret it.”

It is a mysterious, oblique, strange statement from him. But of course, he’s right. I can’t go to the police. I can’t risk exposing myself, or how I make my living, or any of it. But how could he know that? Or does he only suspect it, from the manner in which I retrieved him. From the spare, carefully impersonal surroundings of my home. An educated guess on his part—an incisive one. Amid the carnal wreckage, his mind is sharp.

Of course, my indecision, my confusion about what to do with him, shares a space in my mind with the fear of fake Dave and wife/companion managing to find us—coming after us, knowing that we’re going to expose them—ready to take pretty substantial action, knowing what’s at stake for them.

When Debbie shows up that night, I open the door and tell her she can’t come in.

She’s been away on a TV shoot in Minneapolis and then St. Louis, and amid my ministering to the real Dave, and still attending to my daily data duties to Wallace, I’ve lost track of her trip a little, and suddenly here she is.

And as I am saying it to her, attempting to explain without explaining, she is looking at the sickly, shriveled, pale, clean-skulled, skin-and-bones figure behind me, who has wandered into the living room despite my explicit directions to stay out of view. She looks back at me—horrified, mystified, confused—a look that indicates she has no idea who he is but, more significantly than that, who
I
am.

“Debbie, I should have called. I got preoccupied here. I’m asking you to understand . . .”

But she has apparently reached her limit. And this moment of my “unwelcoming” her in, and the sight of the strange creature behind me, unleashes a flood of reaction that has obviously been dammed up for months. The flow of outrage and confusion and hurt is so out of character to her customary warmth and calm.

“Understand?!” She is again looking past me to Dave, squinting at him, trying to process what she sees in any reasonable or feasible way. “You can’t tell me anything about your business. I accept that. Like an idiot, I accept that. Your odd hours—I accept that. And now, this . . . person . . . is in your home, the home we practically share, share in the most significant and physical way, and I am not allowed in! And you won’t tell me why. You don’t trust me enough to tell me why.”

“I do trust you. I would trust you. But this is information that would be dangerous for anyone to have. I wouldn’t even trust myself with it. It would be wrong for me—”

“Don’t color it, don’t spin it.” She cuts me off. “You don’t trust me.” She looks at me, with finality, with a change in her. “Well, I don’t trust you.” She looks up at the condominium, at the door, at the entrance, as if taking it all in one last time, readying to say good-bye, as if wondering what she is even doing here, what she was ever doing here in the first place. “No one could have been more understanding, Chas. No one else would have gone along for so long. You had a good thing.
We
had a good thing. And you blew it.” Her eyes are wet. “You blew it for both of us.”

“Debbie . . .”

But she is already down the porch steps.

“You’ll know it soon enough,” she calls back behind her.

I know it already.

My doppelganger.

I lie in bed, unable to sleep, staring up at the ceiling, obsessively thinking of him lying a few feet from me, in the next room. My doppelganger. Cut off, isolated, unknown by the world, a world unaware, unseeing. I can’t hide it from myself. It was like seeing myself, a truer, stripped-down, abandoned version of myself, lying there in the tub. A metaphor of my aloneness. Should I have left him there? For one part of me, the appropriate action was to leave him, to not touch anything, to have no one know I was there. The other part of me, though, couldn’t leave him, had no choice but to take him. It was like rescuing myself. But rescuing myself entails action, and action creates visibility, and visibility creates consequences. It produces evidence, it leaves a trail, it risks traceability. I lie there thinking about that precipice—that fine edge between action and inaction, that line between subject and object, between observer and observed—that I have traversed today. That fine edge that can cut you, slice you deep.

To find someone chained to a tub in a motel. It is shocking, and yet it is Vegas. It is the expected perverseness of Vegas, and the half-expected perverseness of a desert motel. It is a tableau of utter foreignness, yet has the shock of recognition, as if a vision toward which my whole life has been leading. The naked, withered form chained in the bathtub. Unknown, alone. Mine to pass by—to close the door quietly, to leave to whatever crime is underway. Or mine to save.

So much sympathy for my withered doppelganger. Is my own soul that withered, that isolated? My own tetherless, transient motel soul?

There in the dark, my mind churns: the vision of Debbie turning away, looking across the desert at the familiar emptiness—literal and metaphoric—ahead of her once again. The same desert that I look across now, from my bedroom window, the same vision of emptiness. That’s the thing about Vegas—once you’re beyond the lights and noise and panoply of merry distractions—there’s the communion of the desert. The measureless sameness of scrub and sand that you all look out on, equally. Lying there, I watch her walk out into that desert again, over and over.

Vegas is so simple—Manichaean, elemental. Blinding bright light, surrounded by unforgiving blackness. Noise and sound, surrounded by high silence.

After a few days, Dave gains a little weight. Dave puts on a little muscle. Dave’s hair begins to grow back in. I am nursing him back to health.

“What do you want to do? What do you want to do with your freedom? Go after them, or start over? Those, it seems, are the only two choices, and I’ll support you either way.”

He looks at me. “I have a third choice,” he says.

“What’s that?”

“To stay here.” He smiles.

“That’s not a choice,” I say.

He nods. He knows.

Of course, my work goes on during all this. I must work without Dave—shriveled, slowly recovering Dave—knowing what I’m doing. Though I’m tempted to share the secret of it with him—that’s how special his status is. My computers are in my office, their contents accessible only by passwords and codes, so I have no worry about Dave looking around.