10 A false dichotomy occurs when two ideas are presented as mutually exclusive, but are in fact perfectly compatible. For example: “You can have either peanut butter or you can have chocolate” is a false dichotomy. This is most easily demonstrated by the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Peanut Butter Cups were Colin’s favorite example, because proving chocolate and peanut butter go together was always delicious.
CHAPTER SEVEN:
THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN
Our neighbors once witnessed me take a metal mixing bowl and some household chemicals into the garage. After hearing a loud bang, they called the police, assuming I was attempting to manufacture drugs—a not uncommon activity on the fringes of the San Fernando Valley. What the neighbors didn’t know and my father eventually confirmed for the police was the truth: I was trying to work out the principles of explosive pulse propulsion in spaceflight for a science project. The police laughed, although my father made me spend a month’s allowance to replace the bowl.
The misunderstanding that arose from my experiment with rocketry was in many ways an echo of the consequences of Kuleshov’s experiments with film. His work sparked a revolution in filmmaking because the implication of his results went far beyond the meaning of facial expressions. Kuleshov demonstrated that when you present images together, the audience connects them whether they’re actually related or not. Sergei Eisenstein proved this when he cut old stock footage of British naval maneuvers into “The Battleship Potemkin,” a film he shot entirely on land.
Audiences assumed Eisenstein had shot it on the ocean. When Western diplomats saw this, they sent coded telegrams to their governments, relaying their horrifying discovery that the Soviets had secretly built a new navy. As a result, untold national resources were diverted in response to an escalation that existed only in a scene in a movie in which their own ships stood in for their enemy’s.
Without realizing it, Kuleshov confirmed a long-held belief about the best way to deceive people: Show them things they want to believe. The rest will take care of itself.
Mrs. Fischer had been taking Colin to the shopping mall in Woodland Hills since he was a small boy. It began as a part of Colin’s therapy, meant to help him slowly overcome his fear of new places. “Like putting the frog in the pot of water and boiling it slowly,” his mother used to joke.11
At first, they merely drove into the mall’s parking lot, where they would sit until returning home. After a month, Mrs. Fischer convinced Colin to walk to the front doors and touch them. The automatic glass doors presented a terrifying and impassable barrier for nearly a year, until his mother produced an article from the Internet that satisfied Colin he was in no danger of being chopped in half while crossing the threshold.
Now, the mall offered familiarity and comfort to Colin, as long as he avoided the row of electronics stores along a particular first-floor promenade or the talking snowmen on display during the Christmas season. Colin’s mother knew the drill. With a “Meet us at the west entrance in forty-five minutes,” she dropped Danny off to check out video games and took Colin to find the gym clothes and shoes he suddenly insisted he needed.
They ended up in a second-floor sporting goods shop where the clerks wore striped shirts meant to evoke the uniform of a football referee. Colin knew the exact brand, model number, and color of the shoes he wanted based on reviews on the Internet and an article in Consumer Reports, and so he resisted the clerk’s attempts to sell him a more expensive shoe. “It’s what all the pro hoops players are wearing this year,” the clerk explained to Colin and his mother, as though he were confiding state secrets.
“Oh,” Colin said. On one hand, professional basketball players were presumably experts in shoe dynamics and durability. On the other, they tended to wear the shoe of whichever manufacturer paid the most endorsement money. In the end, Colin fell back on practicality. “I’m not a professional hoops player,” he explained. “I just take gym.”
Defeated, the salesclerk disappeared to the back room to retrieve the requested shoe in Colin’s size, while Mrs. Fischer thumbed through racks of 100 percent cotton T-shirts and shorts. Colin took the time available to him to watch the flow of the traffic through the mall. The walkway was sculpted and landscaped to suggest a narrow canyon. The doors and display windows were even designed to evoke Anasazi cliff dwellings.12
Colin mentally cataloged the different subgroups within the space—speed-walking senior citizens, mothers with toddlers at the indoor play area, bored teens lounging in knots. It reminded him of his high school’s cafeteria and how it, too, used geography to sort its inhabitants into smaller units. Unfortunately, the scuffle between Wayne and Eddie just before the gun went off scrambled those different social groups together, making it nearly impossible to narrow down the origin of the weapon.
From this vantage point, Colin had an excellent view of the entrance to a large department store. In spite of the high-quality people-watching opportunities it offered, he disliked this particular store. Cosmetics and perfumes were positioned near the front, forcing Colin to walk through a fog of fragrances every time he entered or left.
A slender, blonde female form stood at the cosmetics counter, her back turned. Colin considered the shape of her back, and for a moment he perked up in hope that it might be Melissa. Then the girl turned to show her mother the melon-colored lipstick she’d just applied, and Colin sank. The girl was not Melissa, but Sandy Ryan.
“Colin?” his mother asked. It took him a moment to realize she had finished buying the shoes and gym clothes and was ready to go. In spite of his mother’s insistence that it be used efficiently and that there was never enough of it, Colin was increasingly convinced that time was entirely subjective.13
They headed out just as Sandy and her mother exited the department store with a bag of cosmetics. A brief and unwelcome exchange of pleasantries seemed inevitable. Sandy’s mother and Mrs. Fischer had known each for many years. Colin knew the only way to avert social catastrophe would be for the two women not to see each other, and lacking a readily available distraction, that seemed an unlikely outcome. Accepting this, he prepared for the ensuing awkwardness by opening the bag containing his new shoes and staring at them as if they were bugs under a very large magnifying glass.
“Susan Fischer!” Sandy’s mother squeaked.
“Allison Ryan,” Mrs. Fischer replied.
“Terrible what happened at school, isn’t it?”
“Oh, don’t get me started…”
Sandy shifted from foot to foot, looking around as though she had no idea her mother was engaged in this conversation. She blushed, obviously EMBARRASSED. Colin surmised this was motivated at least in part by a well-documented need for teenagers—especially girls—to pretend their parents and their parents’ friends don’t exist as social animals. However, it was impossible to be sure. Colin reached for his Notebook.
As he flipped to a blank page and glanced up, Colin made direct but unintentional eye contact with Sandy. The sensation was alarming and physically uncomfortable, like all the blood in his limbs was draining from him at once. Colin looked away, nonetheless aware that Sandy’s adolescent awkwardness had blossomed into outright HOSTILITY.
It hadn’t always been this way. Once, when they were young children, Colin and Sandy were almost friends. They went to preschool together. Their mothers drove them back and forth each day, each in turn. One afternoon, Sandy’s mother was caught in traffic, and Mrs. Fischer helpfully brought Sandy home to play with Colin. Colin invited Sandy to his room, where he announced they would complete the suspension bridge he had been building entirely out of Legos. Colin’s mother was thrilled.
All was quiet for an hour. Mrs. Fischer had just begun to entertain visions of a budding friendship and regular playdates, when a piercing scream shattered the peace that had settled on the house. She pounded up the stairs and threw open the door to find Sandy asleep on Colin’s bed, lying in a puddle of her own urine. The scream had come from Colin, whose carefully
ordered space had been violated in a most horrifying way. The carpool ended shortly thereafter.
“Whoever it was, I hope they find him,” Sandy’s mother said. “I hope they try him as an adult, put him in a dark hole, and throw away the key.”
“Why does there have to be a key?” Mrs. Fischer agreed.
“Actually,” Colin said with a frown. “I’d like to go back and try the compression tops. I think I’d find the pressure on my long nerves calming.” He studiously avoided looking at Sandy. It was as if he and his mother were the only people in the mall.
Mrs. Fischer sighed heavily, then offered Mrs. Ryan a wan smile. “Gotta calm those nerves,” she said.
“I hear you,” Mrs. Ryan agreed conspiratorially. “But I prefer wine.”
“Later, Allison,” Mrs. Fischer said with a smile, turning with Colin back toward the athletic store.
“Call me sometime,” Mrs. Ryan said. “We should get the kids together.”
“Ugh,” Sandy said behind them. It was the closest she and Colin had come to a real conversation since they were four years old. They moved in different circles now, even if the bed-wetting incident didn’t hang over them every time they met. It occurred to Colin that any social map he might have constructed as a toddler in preschool would look very different from the one he imagined now. Indeed, the labels, connections, and groups he identified—his whole taxonomy—might be entirely mutable. The insight reinforced Colin’s conviction that he needed an efficient, physical method of tracking it all.
“Mom,” he said, “could we stop by the arts and crafts store on the way out?”
A few minutes later, Mrs. Fischer and Colin exited the mall. Danny slouched against an exterior wall adjoining the parking lot, talking to a pair of boys who appeared to be his own age. Colin did not know their names. “I thought I said meet us inside the west entrance,” Mrs. Fischer said. By thought, Colin knew his mother meant did, although he wasn’t certain she was recalling her own instructions accurately.
“You said at,” Danny protested as he loped over. “Here I am.”
Mrs. Fischer wasn’t used to back talk, and her suddenly narrowed, suspicious eyes indicated she was in no mood to get comfortable with it now. Colin once described this oft-used expression to Marie, who agreed it didn’t correspond neatly to any of the ones on Colin’s cheat sheet. They decided to dub it MOM FACE. The name had stuck.
“Danny is right,” Colin piped up, breaking the standoff. “At the west entrance could technically mean either inside or outside the doors.”
Colin’s mother laughed. Danny turned his head away, inexplicably ANNOYED. “Stop helping,” he said, and trudged off toward the car.
Hefting his bags of art supplies and athletic shoes, Colin followed. He puzzled over the meaning of Danny’s request. After all, Colin hadn’t been trying to help anyone—he was just pointing out the facts. Who the truth helped and how much was irrelevant.
Colin disappeared immediately into his room, shoes and shirts under one arm, art supplies under the other. He had concluded that building an effective social map of West Valley High wasn’t just a matter of comfort and survival, but was critical to determining the actual owner of the gun that so explosively disrupted Melissa’s birthday party.
From his laptop, Colin accessed the high school’s website and printed out a class list, circling the names of students he thought were most relevant and interesting to the case. Nearly all of them had their own pages on social-networking sites, so Colin found their profile pictures and printed them out in turn. With the stack of photos before him, Colin tacked each one carefully to the cork board above his desk.
One photo was missing from the group: Wayne Connelly.
Wayne Connelly seems to have no online presence. There are no photos and no dedicated social-networking pages. It is as if Wayne does not exist. Is this by design or simply an inconvenient coincidence? Perhaps some combination? The absence of references to Wayne on other students’ pages indicates social isolation, or vast conspiracy. Investigate.
Colin leafed through his eighth-grade yearbook, looking for a physical photo of Wayne, but was stymied once more. Evidently, Wayne had been absent on photo day that year or he had skillfully avoided the photographer. With a thoughtful frown, Colin took a black triangle of paper and labeled it WAYNE CONNELLY. It would have to do.
With color-coded sticky tabs purchased at the art supplies store, Colin categorized the various students by their social, academic, geographic, and socioeconomic cliques. Lengths of colored yarn indicated connections between individuals and groups, further broken down by relationship type: friendship, romance, rivalry. Colin did this all in conscious imitation of the boards used by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to track links between the members of Mafia families and other criminal conspiracies. He found the process almost as useful as the product—physical manipulation of real objects, even when they represented ideas or abstractions, helped Colin to think about them.
Colin regarded the final product with a frown. Its precision was marred by the paper triangle standing in for Wayne. The lack of a photo in arguably the most important spot stood out in the field of smiling profile photos. Colin worried the visual effect could bias his analysis and so made a note to find a more suitable representation.
As Colin crawled into bed, he saw that he had positioned his social map next to his photograph of Basil Rathbone. It gave the effect of Holmes himself pondering the mystery. Colin found this comforting and wondered what the Great Detective might say about it all. He was certain that Holmes would have solved the whole thing by now.
Then Colin eased into sleep, dreaming of fog and night and gaslit streets.
The next morning, Colin stood on the blacktop of West Valley High in his new compression tops, slowly dribbling a basketball and thinking about lines.
He felt the lines on the basketball under his fingers as he rhythmically bounced it—two circles bounding the sphere like an equator and international date line, two ellipses covering the tiny planet’s north and south poles. On the blacktop itself, lines demarcated the borders of the half-court basketball arena. They had been repainted several times, the paint fading from endless hours of sun, rain, and teenage feet, but the new never quite aligned with the old. The imprecision of it bothered Colin greatly, as though the lines were merely suggestions and not hard boundaries, so he tried instead to concentrate on the soothing metronome of the bouncing basketball.
“Hey Colin, isn’t it a little early for Halloween?”
Cooper and Eddie stood before him. Cooper had asked the question with a grin Colin couldn’t place. Colin was about to agree that indeed, October 31 was nearly two months away, when he realized Cooper was actually referring to the orange-and-black colors of Colin’s T-shirt. His question was therefore rhetorical, the recognition of which would have made Marie proud. She had drilled Colin for hours in the difficult art of distinguishing literal statements (“You look nice today”) from metaphorical, idiomatic ones (“You make a better door than a window”). This seemed to qualify.
“These are the school colors of the California Institute of Technology,” Colin explained. “I got this when I went with my father to an alumni event.”
Cooper and Eddie shrugged. Obviously, neither was familiar with the athletic history of Caltech.14 However, since Cooper wore a USC Trojans jersey and Eddie a Notre Dame tank top, they could understand adorning oneself in a parent’s school colors.
“So anyway,” Cooper continued, “we saw you hit those baskets yesterday.”
As far as Colin knew, these last two sentences represented the most Cooper had ever spoken to him at one time in years. Did this mean they had developed a rapport? Colin hoped so. Cooper was friends with most of the participants in yesterday’s brawl and was therefore a potentially valuable source of information for the investigation.
“Thank you, Cooper,” Colin replied. “Could I ask you a few questions about—”
“The thin
g is,” Eddie said, abruptly cutting Colin off, “we were wondering if you’d play for us. Three on three.”
“Play what for you?” Colin had never been asked a question like this before.
Cooper laughed. “Basketball, short—dude. We want you to play on our team.”
Dude was an all-purpose slang term that often denoted affection, a decided promotion from the insensitive and pejorative shortbus. Colin absorbed the change.
It certainly sounded as though the boys were inviting him into their social circle. This was exciting because it meant they might be willing to talk to him about The Case of the Birthday Cake and the Gun.
“Yeah, whattaya say?” Eddie pressed.
“Then you can ask whatever you want,” Cooper added.
“I’ll be back shortly,” Colin said.
He marched past three different games of three-on-three half-court basketball and noted with apprehension the fouling, trash-talking, and roughhousing that accompanied the play. Colin scanned the area for Mr. Turrentine but didn’t see him anywhere.
“Fischer,” Mr. Turrentine said, standing beside him. He seemed to come out of nowhere, but it occurred to Colin that Mr. Turrentine might have been there the whole time. Colin wondered idly how a man as old as Mr. Turrentine could move so quietly, but more immediate concerns needed to be addressed.
“Mr. Turrentine?”
“Yes, Fischer.”
“Does basketball involve a lot of physical contact?”
Mr. Turrentine fixed his gaze on Colin for what felt like a very long time, during which Colin tried to be polite and maintain eye contact. The intense stare reminded Colin of one of his favorite mystery stories: The Thirty-Nine Steps,15 by John Buchan. Buchan described the story’s villain as having “eyes hooded like a hawk’s.” Colin had always thought that statement a hyperbolic one, but Mr. Turrentine’s strangely hooded eyes indeed suggested an observant bird of prey.
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