And, whether in the metaphysical version or narrow legalistic version of “identity,” can you steal someone’s identity completely? Is anyone that disconnected, that severed from life, from their present and their past, that someone else can come in and scoop it up?
Well, yes.
Me, for instance. I’m cut off from life. No one would know if someone took over my life; they’d only be filling a void, after all. Someone could do it to me. In a way, someone has done it to me. Wallace the Amazing, my employer. Reducing and virtually eliminating—carefully, professionally—my presence in the world. Giving me, at the same time, in exchange, a unique and lucrative way to earn a living. But I’m a cipher. A professional ghost. For good, sensible reasons, I have little identity of my own.
To me, identity theft is exactly the reverse of what people think it is. In the kinds of scams and frauds I was crediting to the fake “Dave,” you’re stripped of everything but your identity. That’s all you have left, after your credit cards and your possessions and everything else is gone. Your identity is the one thing they can’t make off with.
But it turns out, of course, you’re not very comfortable with just your identity. You feel naked, exposed. It’s everything but your identity that you’ve lost, but you feel your most vulnerable when reduced to, relying on, identity only.
I recognized for the first time—explicitly, acutely—my fear that I would be cut off from life. My fear that my one attachment, my umbilical cord, would be severed. My identity was so tenuous, so connected to Wallace’s.
Could someone do it to me?
Very soon, the world’s most unconventional detective—the geeky Internet gumshoe—is fulfilling the world’s most conventional detective role. I am tailing them—“Dave Stewartson” and “Sandi,” his “wife,” if that’s what she is. And even though they are looking alertly, I’d say professionally, behind them, around them, walking into and out of Vegas hotels and restaurants and even shops and an all-night supermarket—in one door and out another—it’s easy to follow them. Because I am invisible. No one knows me. I don’t exist. A great advantage in tailing someone.
I follow them, never getting too close. Keeping them too far ahead of me to see them in much detail—or for them to see me very clearly either. But I’m close enough to observe them spending money with vigor and determination and élan, enamored of its power, which suggests to me it’s new, which suggests to me it’s not theirs. Which leads me to suspect that Dave Stewartson—the real Dave Stewartson—is rich, confirming the inadequacy of my original research, or indicating that it was cleverly, purposefully misdirected. The real Dave Stewartson, it seems, was an excellent find. And the more I observe, the more I sense that these are scam artists—but not killers. They would not kill the real Dave Stewartson, I don’t think.
I was pleased to see them turning, looking behind them. It confirmed their duplicity. Something was clearly up. I followed their rented red Mustang, distinctive enough to pick out from a quarter mile back in Vegas Strip traffic—why, I could drop the tail, stop for a snack or a restroom, and find their car again fifteen minutes later. I waited in the supermarket lot while they brought out enough bags of groceries to indicate an open-ended stay. I waited in the drugstore lot, while they brought out a bagful of over-the-counter medications. I accompanied them—unbeknownst, well behind them, like a porter or guard they’re not even aware is in their employ, always in the next throng of people—into the lobby of their hotel, the preening, pompous Bellagio, its famous fountains like colorful arteries and veins of a massive soulless beast, ceaselessly nourishing its soaring pretension. It took no great detective work to realize that the bags of canned groceries and the fancy hotel room did not necessarily go neatly together. Which is perhaps why they had shifted the groceries to other bags, so the hotel staff would not see them bringing so many groceries in.
It was easiest to tail them in the casinos, where they played some high-stakes hands of poker and blackjack, enjoyed some elaborate meals accompanied by top-shelf liquor, left generous tips. One place I couldn’t accompany them was to their high-roller suite. But that told me something useful too. That they were spending money like there was no tomorrow. (In celebration, or in anticipation?) That night, a call girl went up to their suite about an hour and a half after them. I was pleased to see that—it gave my imagination something to occupy it. They were clearly intent on enjoying the fruits of Vegas while they were here. I was close enough at one point to hear a clerk ask them, quite reasonably amid all the conventioneers filling the lobby around us, if they were here for “business or pleasure?” Their backs were to me, but I could see them glance at each other—clearly unsure how to answer. The pleasure was apparent. What exactly was the business?
I waited. Vegas stakeouts are easy. Hotel lobbies, casinos, are truly all night, truly without time, so there are no dead hours, and there is action, movement, to occupy your time and your attention, to keep you awake, and you are neither noticeable nor alone while you wait. In Vegas, in fact, it’s practically a legitimate occupation to sit observing in a busy hotel lobby. Your presence, your amused observation, isn’t questioned in the least.
I’m glad I waited. At two in the morning, an hour after the hooker’s exit, “Dave” and “Sandi” came down lugging the groceries, got into their red Mustang rental, and headed out, with their careful, curious entourage—me—a cautious distance behind them.
The chain motel where they finally stopped (chain motel—I would soon become aware of the appropriateness of that term) is about ten miles from the Strip, in what some call the real Vegas, the working man’s Vegas. The Vegas that was here before and, part of me suspects, will be all that is here at some point, again.
Here, I’d be too obvious following them in, so I watched from outside the tiny motel lobby’s (fortunately) big plate glass window, looking in past the classic pink-and-blue neon VACANCY sign. The “Stewartsons” didn’t stop at the registration desk. They headed down the narrow hallway, and I slipped quickly, silently along the motel’s side lot in the dark, watching for a light to go on in one of the rooms.
There. A light pops on. I move quickly, carefully, closer to the window. In time to see them turn the television on—a confirming shift of light through the window—though they never actually watch it, I notice.
I see Dave and Sandi unpacking some groceries, putting them on the counter, talking back and forth with one another, each going into the bathroom briefly, emerging a minute later. This is as close as I dare to get for now.
They aren’t in the motel room for long. Dave looks around it one last time, checking, before closing the door. He turns off the light but leaves the television on.
From the dark side lot, I watch them get back into the red Mustang and pull away. And for the first time in twenty-four hours, I don’t follow the Stewartsons.
Maybe it takes someone steeped in scam to recognize it. Or maybe with the clues—the “Dave” at the show, the free spending, the extra motel room—anyone would. But I know what they’ve done. It’s simple. First they took a guy’s Social Security number and credit cards, like any and every two-bit ID thief. But then it turned into something bigger, better—a much better thing than they had first thought. Because it turned out the guy was rich. Endlessly rich. And the guy was alone. And when they saw how much money he had and how alone he was, they took the next step after taking his Social Security number and credit cards—to keep a good thing going, they took him. They were already pretending to be him. They were already reestablishing purchase patterns. Perhaps they had already become him, assumed his identity entirely. It wasn’t such a very big step.
I know exactly how they did it, of course. How they found out all they did about him. Because I do the same thing. I work the same way. I utilize the same data, the same channels of information.
I’m just like them.
And I understand how alone the victim can
be. How cut off and isolated. How he could have lived that way for years perhaps, could have adjusted to it, made his peace with it. Because I do that too. I’ve accepted that too. No one knows I exist. I can never be too close to anyone else; no one else can be too close to me.
I’m just like him.
So I identify with both of them, the perpetrators and the victim; I recognize them both.
And how do they know so much about him? How can they know these little details if they have erased him, buried him, if he is gone?
Because he is not erased or buried. He is not gone. He is being kept. He is alive. And no one is better suited to find him, to rescue him, to draw him out of his predicament and his loneliness, than the one person who knows what has happened and the one person who most profoundly empathizes, identifies. It is in effect, after all, rescuing myself. My doppelganger. My instant, automatic friend.
I don’t know exactly what I will find in that motel room, but I will find something—or someone. I had watched the Stewartsons head down the road, melt into the horizon, and although the prudent thing would have been to follow them, wait till they were ensconced at a restaurant or blackjack table before racing back, I had the sense they would not return too quickly. And though I operate professionally on evidence, none of us can afford to ignore the evidence of one’s gut instinct.
My need to preserve my invisibility means I have some reconnaissance, some extra steps to take, during the next few hours. I watch and wait as the motel shift changes. As the early morning manager comes on, as he chats with the desk clerk for a few minutes and circles the property once distractedly, while the relieved clerk leaves for more congenial environs. I watch as the migrant busboys and dishwashers and janitors stumble in exhausted from their late shifts to their long-term rental, shower one after another, and collapse into exhausted sleep. So that in just a couple of hours, I can map out fairly completely what rooms are occupied with whom, what rooms have me in their sight line, what rooms don’t. I know it well enough to be fairly certain I won’t even be seen, and certainly not thought about, when the desk clerk takes a bathroom break and I stride into the lobby and down the hall to the door of Room 103 with my universal keycard, the same one housekeeping and motel management use. (From the laptop in my car, I had gotten the name of the motel’s key maker through its purchase records, and the correct serial number and activation codes from the manufacturing company—then after fishing an old key out of the motel trash and networking my laptop to a portable keycard magnetizer that I bought online a couple of years ago, I activated the card pretty much the same way the desk clerk does it.) Press into the slot. Pull up. Blinking green light. It works . . .
I push open the door to Room 103.
At first blush, nothing unusual, nothing amiss. But what’s amiss is that there is nothing amiss. Beds still made. A closed suitcase on the end of one bed. A motel room occupied, but not occupied. I poke around in the cheap bureau drawers, slide open the flimsy closet door—nothing. I am about to leave, disappointed, mystified, when I open the bathroom door wider, only as a final, unthinking gesture before I go.
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.
Two for the Show Page 4