by Delaney, JP
Nothing she’s said makes you believe that Tim ever did anything to frighten you.
Unless you were having an affair, you think. Being unfaithful would change everything. Because one thing you definitely know about Tim is that he demands absolute loyalty.
“Was I…” you begin, then stop, unsure how to put this.
“What?” Lisa says quietly, and you get the sense that, somehow, she knows what you’re trying to ask.
“Was our marriage in any difficulty? Anything specific, I mean?”
“You mean, did Tim have any reason to kill you?” she says baldly.
Even though it’s exactly what you mean, hearing the words spoken out loud makes it sound so much worse.
After a moment she shrugs. “As you can imagine, I asked myself that question a thousand times after you disappeared. Because there’s one thing I am sure of. Whatever happened that night, it wasn’t a surfing accident.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You and I grew up in the ocean. Sure, you were a risk taker—you might have gone out in bad weather, particularly if the waves were breaking well. But you’d have taken the right board. You’d have taken the gun.”
For a second you have to think what she means. Then it comes to you. The elephant gun. The biggest, heaviest board, originally designed for paddleboarding but used by experienced surfers for stability in the largest waves. Your gun was still in the garage at the beach house.
“What board did I take?”
“Supposedly, your regular shortie—at least, that’s what was missing from your garage. To anyone who didn’t know you, or who didn’t really know surfing, that would have made sense—it was the board you used most often. It just wasn’t right for those conditions.”
“Did you tell the police?”
“Of course. They said it didn’t prove anything. Surfers experiment with different boards sometimes. They seemed disappointed that was all I had.”
“Well, they’re right. About it not being conclusive, I mean.”
“I know you,” Lisa insists. “I know the way you surf.” Her eyes fill with tears again. “You know, I didn’t expect meeting you to be like this. I figured I’d be sitting down with some kind of doll. Something that might look like you, sound like you, that might even parrot things you’d said. I never expected to meet—to meet—”
“To meet your sister,” you finish.
She nods, swallowing hard. Then she reaches out and puts her hand on yours.
“And that’s why I’m saying, please be careful,” she says softly. “Whatever happened to you before, don’t assume it couldn’t happen again.”
FIFTEEN
Tim studied DO AS YOU PLEASE (FEEL FREE!) for several minutes, walking around to inspect it from every angle. He was always a hard person to read—you never knew what he was thinking until his thoughts burst over you in a cascade of invective or, more rarely, praise.
“This is fucking genius,” he said at last.
We nodded. We thought so, too.
“It’s her best yet,” he added. “It’s totally awesome.”
“I really like the way she’s standing,” someone said. “She’s got so much attitude.”
We all ignored him. The statue’s attitude was completely missing the point.
“Where is she?” Tim demanded, looking around eagerly. “Where’s Abbie?”
We shrugged. We didn’t know.
He pulled out a phone and dialed. “Hey you,” he said, and we were struck by the tenderness in his tone. “Yes, I’m by it now. You look amazing, by the way. No, nobody has yet. Shall I…?”
He reached out and, gently, squeezed the sculpture’s right shoulder. His fingers left small dimples in the flesh-colored putty.
“Are you sure?” he said, still into the phone. “It seems a shame to.”
Whatever Abbie said, it must have reassured him, because he reached out and squeezed the sculpture’s other shoulder too, harder this time.
“Amazing,” he said again. Then he walked away, still on the phone, so he could talk to her privately.
A few of us followed his lead, laying our hands on the sculpture and squeezing. But despite the instruction in the piece’s title, we held back. A few indentations from the tips of our fingers, a very slight deformation of an arm or elbow, was the most we felt entitled to do.
* * *
—
So how did it happen, then, that DO AS YOU PLEASE (FEEL FREE!) got so thoroughly trashed over the days and weeks that followed? For one thing, it became apparent that people felt less restrained in their remolding when they were alone, or in small groups of two or three. It was less than a day before the first finger marks began to appear in the sculpture’s breasts. The soft modeling putty recorded each one—with a little fingerprint powder, someone joked, Tim could easily identify who among us had been groping his girlfriend. Some clown left a big five-fingered handprint across the left buttock, as clear as the fossil outline of a leaf. But that, too, was soon obliterated by other fingerprints and indentations, sly squeezings and strokes and pinches that left the once smooth surface pocked and pitted as if by cellulite. Someone used the sharp point of a pencil to gouge a long, wavy incision down the back of the right calf that, had it been the real Abbie and not simply her likeness, would have required a trip to the ER. (We knew it was a pencil because he, or possibly she, left it impaled in Abbie’s right foot.) The nipples, perhaps not surprisingly, came in for a lot of attention, and were soon twisted off altogether—one lay discarded nearby, carefully placed on a table, as if the person who’d done it thought maybe it could be repaired. The right breast bulged from the impression of so many kneading fingers that it, too, fell off in the end. On first seeing the piece, some of us had called to mind votive statues, their bronze surfaces worn smooth by prayers and kisses, but it soon became clear that this was something altogether more savage, like those gruesome medieval depictions of martyrs fingering their open wounds. Pretty soon the statue resembled a carcass on which wolves had feasted, a slow-motion explosion of modeling putty and body parts.
Far from being annoyed by the artwork’s disintegration, Tim seemed fascinated. He came to inspect it at least twice a day, pointing out the latest changes, however small, to whoever happened to be in there. He took no part in the remolding himself, or none we ever saw, but it was as if his fascination egged us on. The sculpture lost both hands—vanished, presumed stolen—and its head began to loll drunkenly. Many people simply tugged a small lump of putty from one part of the body, rolled it into a cylinder between their palms, and stuck it back on somewhere else, so eventually it looked as if the statue were covered with short, fat worms. And finally there was a kind of tipping point, a moment when DO AS YOU PLEASE (FEEL FREE!) no longer even resembled a human form, but simply became a big block of malleable graffiti. What had once been the shoulder was fashioned into a rough approximation of a grimacing second head. Someone broke off part of the arm and used it to make a crude penis that jutted for a while from the statue’s crotch—until that, too, fell off, and lay with all the other handfuls and scrapings of Newplast trodden into the floor like lumps of chewed gum. And then the head itself was gone, ripped off and torn in two, as if the unknown perpetrator had tried to peer inside it. Like a Greek Aphrodite, someone said pretentiously of the malformed torso that remained, but we all knew this was quite different from those graceful effigies.
Next morning, the sculpture—what was left of it—had disappeared. Abbie had even cleaned up after it. The meeting room was spotless.
We felt slightly ashamed, the way you might feel after a night that had involved tequila, a night when you hadn’t behaved quite as well as you should. Some people even went so far as to suggest that, if there was another opportunity, they’d do things differently. Like, maybe take turns to act as security guards. A roster could be d
rawn up, CCTV installed.
But most of us felt that was missing the point. There wouldn’t be another time. What had happened to the sculpture had happened. That was the whole purpose of it.
A few days later our office walls were taken over by a display of photographs. Giant black-and-white prints, three feet square, starkly lit, taken at twenty-four-hour intervals, documenting the gradual disintegration of DO AS YOU PLEASE (FEEL FREE!). Abbie had come in each night to photograph our handiwork.
We were pleased there was a record of the project. We hadn’t liked to think of it just vanishing into the ether. But now that we studied it in time lapse, as it were, frozen mercilessly in those big, stark photographs, we could see just how quickly the sculpture had been reduced from graceful humanity to primordial sludge. It made us uneasy to think about it.
Those pictures, digital copies of which were sent—by Abbie? Or one of us?—to several art blogs and Instagram feeds, eventually found their way onto the Chronicle’s website, and from there to several Bay Area TV stations. As a result, Abbie became quite well known for a time, a minor local celebrity. The news stations’ angle was that what we’d done to the sculpture showed tech workers in a bad light; that we’d been creepy and destructive, like the antisocial nerds we were. We thought that was unfair. We were hardly vandals. Anyone would have reacted to the installation, and its deliberately provocative title, the way we did.
Luckily for us, Tim didn’t think it reflected badly on the company at all. He was immensely proud, particularly when Abbie started getting interviews and profiles. He even had one of her black-and-whites, the first one in the series, hung in his office, opposite the Muhammad Ali quote. And Katrina Gooding, the PR consultant, placed pieces in several tech blogs about how visionary and radical Tim was, to have thought of employing an artist-in-residence in the first place.
41
After Lisa leaves, you stay in the café, thinking. You’re pleased with how your conversation went, given what she’d previously said to the TV station. But then, you of all people know how those reporters can get someone to say whatever they want.
But you still have a sense—an intuition, if you like—that your sister was holding something back, not quite telling you everything.
Does she know your secret? Is she another one who’s afraid you’ll pass whatever she tells you straight back to Tim?
Before Lisa left, she asked if you remembered the Twilight Zone episode where a small-time thief wakes up in the afterlife. He finds himself living in a beautiful apartment, he never loses at the casino, and he’s surrounded by beautiful women. Eventually he becomes bored and tells his guide he’d like a break from being in heaven—he likes the idea of visiting the other place. To which his guide retorts, “What gave you the idea you were in heaven? This is the other place.”
“Or, to put it another way,” Lisa concluded, “be careful what you wish for.” And she’d given you a look you couldn’t decipher.
Even now, you can’t puzzle out what she meant.
You really have no choice, you realize. However unsavory the guy in the phone shop might be, you need to know what’s on that iPad.
* * *
—
When you get there, Nerdy Nathan’s leaning against the counter, doing something to the insides of a phone. Seeing you, he grins and pushes it to one side. Then he comes out from behind the counter and turns the sign on the back of the shop door to CLOSED, flipping the dead bolt for good measure.
“Come in the back,” he says.
He leads you to a tiny storeroom piled high with boxes. There’s a workbench, almost hidden by tangles of leads and bits of equipment, with a laptop open on it. You can feel the excitement radiating off him. Or is that just your own nerves?
“There’ll be a port,” he says impatiently. “Somewhere I can plug into.”
“On my hip. But I want the iPad first.”
“It’s still scanning. I can show you what I’ve got, though. I printed it out. I knew you’d be back.” He takes some sheets of paper from a shelf. “It’s part of someone’s internet history. It’s garbled, but it makes pretty interesting reading.”
You hold out your hand for it, but he shakes his head. “Uh-uh. When you’re hooked up.”
“Get on with it, then.” You give him a hostile stare.
You could help him by undoing your jeans, but you don’t want to make this easy for him. You want him to feel awkward, to realize what a violation it is. You look on with what you hope is a withering expression as he pushes down your waistband.
“That’s nice,” he says, oblivious, studying the neat row of ports. “Options. We’ll go for FireWire.”
You hear the click as he plugs in a cable. Then he turns back to his laptop.
“The printout,” you remind him. Distractedly, he puts the pages in your hand.
“Incredible,” he breathes, tracing the numbers and code you can see flickering across the screen with his finger. You ignore him and look at the first page.
And what you see there brings you up short.
42
€€˜ ˜ ˜
WWW.Undertheradar.com How to go off grid and disappear completely 0===== €€
˜ XÿŒ 0
STEP ONE Plan carefully. About a month before you intend to disappear, show signs of depression. Ask your doctor for medication and remove the correct number of pills from the bottle each day.
€˜ 0€
STEP TWO Delete your computer history. Remove your laptop hard drive and boil it, then smash it with a hammer. Finally, run a degausser (electromagnetic wand) over it to obliterate information that may give you away (such as visiting this web page). €Üàšª# _ e g ¼ À ðE
STEP THREE Erase all information from your cellphone, then leave it on public transport. Someone will take it and start using it, creating a false trail which will help frustrate those looking for you later.
ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ
Ë
STEP FOUR Purchase a vehicle for cash. Provide a false name. Remove all tracking devices (toll passes with RFID chips, satnav, OnStar car system, etc.)
Root
STEP FIVE Practice your new lifestyle. Get food to go. Never order from chain restaurants. Change your eating habits, e.g. if you are a vegetarian, consider eating meat. Use alcohol wipes on glasses and cutlery to avoid leaving fingerprints/DNA which can be read with an easily purchased BPac machine. Use a sleeping bag in (non-chain) motels. Always pay cash.
ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ
STEP SIX Reduce social media activity. Create a new, offline-only identity. (Do not make the common mistake of trying to obtain false papers in the name of a dead person)
X0X0X0~~STEP SEVEN. Accumulate large amounts of cash. Getting into debt with a loan shark or drug dealer is a risky but effective ploy. They will come looking for you after your disappearance, which can help divert attention.
%%%%%0x0
STEP EIGHT Tell people close to you you’re worried about being followed. Alternatively, tell them you’ve started hiking in remote locations. (Hiking is preferable to drowning as fewer bodies are recovered from hiking accidents.) Tell no one what you plan to do, not even those you trust the most.
#&
Purchase a baseball cap with LED lights under the flap. This will make your face a blur to infrared CCTV cameras when traveling.
#&
#&
Entry
%%%%%0xx0
STEP NINE Create a corporation under a name not connected to you. This will be a legal entity able to lease an apartment, pay bills, run a checking account etc. Use the corporation account rather than your personal account to pay whoever set it up for you.
Entr%%
#&
STEP TEN Ditch all your credit cards, personal possessions etc. Then leave.
You stare at the pages. Whatever you’d been expecting, it certainly hadn’t been this.
Not an affair, after all. Not a suicide. A secret of a totally different kind.
You ran away.
True, not all the details match—the Web page specifically said not to fake being drowned, for example, and the iPad clearly hadn’t been hit with a hammer or boiled. But you must have decided your well-known love of surfing made the ocean more believable than a hiking accident. As for the iPad, perhaps you meant to take it with you. All the other details, such as the pills, are too close to be a coincidence.
You’re still alive.
The thought is shocking. Everything Tim believes—everything he’s done, from raising Danny on his own to reconstructing you—has been built on a monstrous deception. A lie, perpetrated on him by the woman he loved. The woman who always said she loved him in return.
Ironically, by finding the information that finally clears Tim of your murder, you’ve discovered something that will completely destroy him.
But—why? That’s what you still can’t get your head around. You had a good life, an adoring husband. Okay, so he preferred you with braids and didn’t like it when you faked an orgasm. Hardly reasons to fake your own death.
And if you had stopped loving Tim for whatever reason, it would have been a shame—but there would always have been the option of divorce. This was a man who gave you a beach house as a wedding gift. You could have separated and both still been ridiculously wealthy.
Most of all, though, you can’t understand how you could ever have abandoned Danny. No mother, surely, would walk out on her child like that—especially not a child as heart-achingly vulnerable as him.
People do, an internal voice reminds you. It happens.