Timothy was surprised. ‘But I thought—’
‘Yes, I’m sorry, Mr. Van Bender. I’m a doctor. This is a medical procedure. It’s not a get-away plan. I haven’t spent twenty years of my life and millions of my investors’ dollars to help you commit bank fraud.’
‘I’m not doing it to commit fraud,’ Timothy said.
‘Then why are you doing it?’
To get a second chance, Timothy thought. To knock the chess pieces off the board and play again. ‘Because,’ Timothy said, ‘I have no other choice.’
Dr. Ho clasped his hands together on his desk primly. ‘Mr. Van Bender, I agreed to help your wife because she was sick. She was going to die. You …’He gestured to Timothy. ‘You’re fine. There’s nothing physically wrong with you. I can’t simply give you a new identity. That’s not what this is about.’ He thought about it. ‘It’s not right.’
‘It’s not right?’ Timothy asked. ‘It’s not right? Are you out of your mind? Nothing you’ve done in this office is right. Ask my secretary, whose brain you erased, if that was right.’
‘I kept a copy of it,’ Ho said, ‘so that, when the time comes, I can restore her—’
‘That’s great, Doctor. That must be a great comfort to her. That she’s been stored in a computer file somewhere. You’re a real fucking humanitarian.’ Timothy stood up and leaned over his desk. Ho slinked down in his chair. ‘You listen to me, Ho. You and me are in this together. You helped my wife, and that’s great. I appreciate it. But you did it for your own selfish reasons – whatever they are – to show investors you have a business, or to get some cash in the door, or maybe just to make sure everything works right. Maybe you weren’t even sure, and Katherine was your guinea pig. You know what? That’s fine. It did work, and that’s great. But we are accomplices in a crime. Do you understand that, Frankenstein? We stole someone’s body. We erased somebody’s brain. Think about it. That will not look good to your investors. And it will not look good to the police. Should they find out.’
‘Are you threatening me, Mr. Van Bender?’
‘Yes,’ Timothy said, ‘absolutely.’ He bent down and lowered his face to Ho’s. He looked at Ho’s little wire-frame spectacles, pressing the skin of his nose. ‘In fact, let me make it very clear. If you don’t help me, I’m going to take you down with me.’
Timothy kept his face just inches from Ho’s. He stared at the man, at his small, fine features, his smooth skin. He waited.
Ho said, ‘Well I suppose I could help you one more time.’
Timothy agreed to pay Dr. Ho a hundred and fifty thousand dollars by wiring funds into the same Citibank account that Katherine had used a month earlier. Dr. Ho’s instructions to Timothy were similar to the ones the doctor had issued before: Timothy would need to find a ‘vessel’ – a body into which Timothy could be restored after the backup procedure was done. And there was one other complication that Timothy had not considered.
‘You’ll need to commit suicide, of course,’ Ho said to him.
Timothy was surprised by this.
‘It’s the same thing I told your wife. It’s unacceptable to have two extant copies of the same person,’ Ho said. ‘More than the ethical issues it raises, it creates complications. Complications are unacceptable. Ideally, we would terminate one branch as soon as the backup and restore process is completed.’
‘Terminate one branch?’ Timothy asked.
‘Kill you. But I will not participate in your death in any way. That’s up to you.’
‘I see.’
Ho said, ‘I want you to be prepared for how difficult it will be. Because you will still be you. Once you have been backed up, you – Timothy Van Bender – will be living a life independent of the copy you’ve made. Do you understand what I am saying?’
Timothy did. He wondered how he would do it, and if he would be able.
‘But remember,’ Ho said, ‘your backup will be living its own life, independent of your initial branch. That should give you comfort.’
The plan was elegant and beautiful. He could solve all of his problems with one bold action. Was the original Timothy Van Bender suspected of murdering his wife? That problem would be solved, since Timothy Van Bender would commit suicide.
Did the original Timothy Van Bender face a ruined reputation and endless legal problems? Was he being terrorized by a malevolent drug addict? Those problems would be solved, since Timothy Van Bender would vanish from the face of the earth.
The plan required him to choose a ‘vessel.’ He needed to choose someone young, of course. He needed to choose someone healthy. He needed to choose someone who, if not wealthy, could rapidly become wealthy, without raising any suspicions. He needed someone, in short, who could assume the enjoyable aspects of Timothy Van Bender’s life, but none of the burdens. There really was only one choice.
‘Hey, Kid,’ Timothy said into his cell phone, as he and Tricia drove home from Dr. Ho’s office. ‘I’m just checking in. I know Friday’s your last day in the office.’
The Kid’s voice sounded far away. ‘Yeah, Friday, right. I want to say that I’m sorry about the way things are ending. I hope there are no hard feelings.’
‘Absolutely not,’ Timothy said. ‘In fact, I was thinking: maybe next week, after you’ve had a chance to unwind a little, we can all get together for drinks. You know, me, you, and Tricia. Sort of like old times. How does that sound?’
The Kid sounded surprised. ‘That sounds great.’
‘Good,’ Timothy said. ‘All right Kid, I’ll see you tomorrow in the office.’
All that remained was the money.
It was well and good to come back as the Kid, unencumbered by murder indictments or fraud charges or a gimpy knee, but it wouldn’t be fun to live off eighty grand a year in a four-plex behind the Safeway.
The Kid would need cash, at least a few million dollars’ worth – enough to allow Timothy to enjoy the lifestyle to which he was accustomed.
The next day at work, Timothy shut the door to his office and called his lawyer, Frank Arnheim.
‘Frank,’ Timothy said, ‘I have a legal question for you. Let’s say I knew I was going to die, and I wanted to leave liquid assets to someone and avoid probate. What’s the fastest way to do that?’
‘You care about taxes?’
‘No.’
‘You have two options,’ Frank said. ‘A revocable living trust is one. That’ll take you some time to set up. It’s faster to just go to a bank and open a Payable On Death account. You name the beneficiary when you establish the account. Then, when you die, the beneficiary just walks into the bank with a death certificate and some form of identification, and the money is his.’ Frank paused. ‘Why? You planning on going somewhere?’
‘No,’ Timothy said.
‘You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?’
‘No,’ Timothy said.
He set up the POD account at Union Bank that afternoon and within an hour began the process of liquidating his assets and transferring cash into the account. He sold his stock portfolio, which was about six million dollars, and then liquidated his IRA (another four hundred thousand). There was not enough time to take out a second mortgage on the Palo Alto house – a process that would have taken several weeks to close – or to move money from the Van Bender trusts into the POD account. Those assets would need to pass through probate, which was unfortunate, because there they would be slowed by the inevitable lawsuits that would hit Timothy’s estate after his suicide. But Timothy figured that, after taxes, the Kid would wind up with an immediate windfall of about four million dollars, which would be a good start, and which Timothy could live comfortably off for the year or two it would take for the rest of his assets to pass into Tricia’s hands.
He couldn’t marry Tricia, because there was no final proof of Katherine’s death. Without a death certificate, the best he could do was change his will, and to leave the remaining assets to his former secretary. That process took exactl
y one hour on Friday afternoon. They drove to the office of Jack Decker, Esq., the Van Bender family lawyer in San Jose, drew up a new will document, and had it notarized and witnessed by two of the law firm’s secretaries.
When they left the office, Tricia hugged him and said, ‘Soon this will all be over.’
The entire process of transferring Timothy Van Bender’s wealth to his new vessel took seventy-two hours.
44
Timothy Van Bender scheduled his own death for the evening of Wednesday, September 29.
He would asphyxiate himself in his Palo Alto garage by running a garden hose from his BMW tailpipe into the car.
It was important that Tricia and the Kid – both beneficiaries of his death – not be present during the suicide. It was important also that they have an iron-clad alibi, and that they be somewhere far away from Timothy’s garage when he died.
The Plan, then, was this. On Wednesday evening, Timothy would invite the Kid over for dinner. He would spike the Kid’s drink with valium – the strategy that had proven successful with Tricia weeks earlier. When the Kid passed out, Timothy and Tricia would drive the Kid to Dr. Ho’s office. There, Ho would perform the backup procedure, digitizing the contents of Timothy’s brain, and then restore it into the Kid.
Next, the Kid – now inhabited by Timothy – would drive, with Tricia, to SFO airport, where they would board the red-eye to New York, which departed at 10 p.m. The process of buying tickets, showing IDs, and boarding the plane would establish Tricia and the Kid’s alibi. In the meantime, at exactly ten o’clock, as the flight was taking off, Timothy Van Bender – the original Timothy Van Bender – would end his life in the dark garage of his 1930s Tudor.
The only problem with the Plan, Timothy knew, would be the final few minutes. Would he be able to drive back to his house and end his own life? He would, after all, still be Timothy Van Bender, still the same man, in the same aging body, with the same will to live. The other Timothy Van Bender, his backup, would be checking into a flight at SFO with Tricia. Wouldn’t he want to go along?
But the more he thought about it, the more he believed he could do it. It was simply a question of will. And one thing he had was will – not smarts, just a blind confidence in his own ability to get out of any mess. Yes, he could do it. He had done harder things than that. Besides, with a little Scotch and a few valiums, how hard could it be?
45
On Tuesday evening – the night before he was to die – Timothy Van Bender made love to his wife.
It would be the last time he would do so using his old body. In less than a day, he would become the Kid – a twenty-something MBA hotshot with his whole life ahead of him, with sturdy knees and a full head of hair, with low cholesterol and high testosterone. Timothy felt like a boy the night before Christmas, when the promise of the next day’s gifts seemed infinite, so much sweeter than the gifts themselves ever proved to be.
They made love differently. In the weeks since Katherine had returned as Tricia, their love-making was passionate and frenzied, and he devoured her new body, wanted to have it, to grab onto her and not let go. It was the passion of a man who didn’t want to lose his wife again.
But that evening, during their final night together, it was different. Their lovemaking was slow and lingering, as if each of them wanted to remember what it felt like, his old body, with the graying chest hair and soft stomach; and she kissed each part of him, slowly and thoughtfully, and he lay back and tried to be still, to record it somewhere in his mind – so he would always have it, no matter who he was.
Afterwards, she lay quietly on his chest, listening to his heart. ‘I’m going to miss this Timothy Van Bender,’ she said. And it sounded strange, that the twenty-three-year-old Tricia was wistful in a way that only comes from age.
‘We’ll still be together,’ he said.
‘I wonder what it will be like. I’ll feel silly, being with such a young man. Like those ridiculous women you read about, the old Hollywood stars that date young boys.’
‘You sound like an old lady. Look at you. You’re only twenty-three.’
She held up her arm, stared at her skin. ‘I suppose. Sometimes I forget.’
He said, ‘Everything’s going to be fine.’ How many times in his life had he said that, without believing it? But tonight it was important to believe it, to keep going forward, to execute the Plan. It was important that he believe, too.
They lay together, silent. She nuzzled her head under his chin. He smelled Katherine’s mint shampoo, and even though it smelled foreign on Tricia’s scalp, it brought back a rush of familiar memories: of summers on the veranda at the Circus Club; of sweaty kisses at mid-court, after a tennis match; of dancing on the club’s ballroom floor.
She asked: ‘Do you remember our first date? In New York?’
‘Our first date?’ he said. He tried to recall it. ‘How can I forget? The way we walked through Midtown, and we were so overcome by passion that we couldn’t wait, and so we made love in the Port Authority restroom? I remember how that homeless man kept trying to barge into the stall, to shoot up, but we just ignored him …’
She pretended to slap him on the cheek, but her fingertips stopped midway, and it turned into a caress. ‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘You’re terrible.’
He smiled. More gently: ‘What about our first date?’
‘We went to a museum. It was the Met, I think.’
He remembered now: the young Katherine, still attending Smith College, confident and beautiful, striding through the marble-floored exhibition, holding his hand …
‘We were looking at a painting. By Ducreux. It was the portrait of the Count of Bougainville.’
Even before she completed the sentence, he had a sinking feeling. This was not a wife’s loving reminiscence. This was a lawyer’s opening argument.
She continued: ‘Except I called it Bow-Gan-Villa. I had never heard the proper French pronunciation. Remember?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you laughed and corrected me loudly, in front of all those people. And you said: “That sounds like a great Italian restaurant. We should go there.”’ She mimicked his voice, made it sound deep and stupid, like a loutish football player.
She paused, turned to him in the bed. She was waiting for him to say something, but he wasn’t sure what to offer. So instead he said, softly, ‘Yes.’
‘That hurt my feelings. I still remember it, to this day. It was really symbolic, I think. I mean, I probably should have known.’
And even though he understood exactly where the conversation was leading, and even though he didn’t want to go there, he could not think of a reasonable way to stop it. He said: ‘Known what?’
‘That you weren’t a nice man. But I was too young. And not at all confident in myself, you know? If that day in the museum had happened later – if we’d dated when I was forty instead of twenty – I probably would have just walked away, right then and there, and never given you a second thought.’
It was typical Katherine, to inject melodrama into what had been a gentle, quiet evening. But she was right. Back then, he had not been a nice man. ‘Katherine … I don’t know what to say.’
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing to say. I’m not mad.’ She added: ‘Anymore.’
‘It happened twenty years ago. I was young, too. I’m not the same person I was. Things are different now.’
‘Are they?’
He laughed. It was an involuntary reflex, because her question seemed preposterous. The evidence was lying in bed with them. His wife was inhabiting his secretary’s body. He was about to transfer his mind into yet another body. His career was in ruins. He was under suspicion of capital murder.
‘Yes, I’d say things are pretty different now.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t mean this.’ She gestured at Tricia’s – now her own – body. ‘I mean …’ She paused, turned away from him. She repositioned herself in bed, sat up, and turned to him. Tricia�
�s gorgeous twenty-three-year-old’s breasts were inches from him, and her posture – arm extended, body turned slightly – highlighted her smooth, well-defined abdomen. But despite this, Timothy felt nothing sexual. He felt – he realized – cowed. It was a feeling he often had when Katherine went on the attack. And the best strategy was to let the blows rain down, to absorb them. They would pass. And besides, as usual, he deserved them.
She continued: ‘I mean, now we have a second chance. Now we get to do it all over again. But will anything be different?’
‘Everything will be different.’
‘How can it be, if we’re the same people we were?’
‘But we’re not,’ he said. ‘We’re not the same people.’ He thought about it. More gently now: ‘I’m not the same person. I mean, it’s been twenty years, for godsakes. You think I haven’t learned anything in twenty years? You think I’m the same person I was? I’m not. I’ve learned, Katherine.’
‘Tricia.’
‘Katherine,’ he insisted. ‘I’ve learned. I’ve changed.’
‘We’ll see.’
She stared at him for a long moment, as if searching for physical evidence that he had, in fact, changed. Then she called off the search and lay down on the bed. She repeated to the ceiling: ‘We’ll see.’
She reached over to the nightstand lamp and turned off the light. They lay in darkness, neither speaking.
Finally, he said into the darkness: ‘I’m sorry for every mean thing I ever said to you, Katherine. I’m sorry for every time I hurt you.’ Which was, in fact, true.
He waited for a reply. None came.
So he tried one more tack. ‘I love you,’ he said.
To this, she did reply. ‘I love you too, Timothy. I always will love you. Remember that.’
Which was comforting enough. So he fell asleep.
46
On Wednesday night, the Kid came over for dinner.
It surprised Timothy that he had agreed to come. He thought the Kid’s lawyer would warn him to stay away from Timothy, or that he would be suspicious of his motives, or even that the Kid hated him too much to spend an entire evening at the Van Bender house.
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