Two for the Show

by Jonathan Stone

  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.

  The first night, as Dave lay stretched out on the couch in front of the television, drifting in and out of sleep, I took a small risk. I flipped through the channels, and stopped, as if by chance, on Wallace’s show. I had to watch anyway, professionally, especially now, and I could do so in another room of the condo, but it was easier to keep an eye on Dave if I could watch him and the show at the same time.

  I watched Dave drifting in and out, glassy-eyed, trying to focus on the screen.

  But he was more attentive and alert than I thought.

  “He is amazing,” Dave whispered at one point. Apparently taken with the performance. “You wonder how he does it,” said Dave. “You really do.”

  The next night, as if purely to be polite, I asked if he’d like to watch Wallace the Amazing again. He nodded that he would.

  On the third night, I tune it in without asking. It seems to have become part of our routine. A routine significantly disrupted by a simple question.

  “You work for him, don’t you?”

  My mind seizes. My blood pulses. “Work for who?”

  “For him. Wallace.”

  “What are you talking about?” I am struggling to remain calm.

  “You didn’t think I was watching that first night. But I was watching, and watching you watching. Watching you watching intensely. Not the watching of a man who had casually been flipping the channels a minute before. Or pretending to casually flip them.

  “You see,” says Dave, “I heard the two of them talking about going to Wallace’s show. Dave and his companion. Going to catch the famous act. That must be where you saw them. And then you followed them to get to me. Why would you risk being so involved? You’re a decent guy, but no humanitarian. For you, there was something more to it. I could sense that. So yes, I think you work for him. You may even be what makes the Amazing amazing.”

  And then I sense something too. I pick up on something, just as my shriveled recovering guest has.

  That his insight is a little too insightful. A little too knowledgeable from him.

  I leap up, run to my computer, slamming my office door behind me, bring up onto the computer screen and look again, more closely now, at the official passport and driver’s license photos of the real Dave Stewartson.

  And the poor, shriveled-up, unrecognizable wraith I have rescued from the bathtub? Who I have nursed back to health?

  I see it’s not him.

  Blowing up the photos to full screen. Letting a retouching program fill in missing pixels for a close-up, hyperrealistic look.

  Goddamn it! It’s not him.

&
nbsp; “Who are you?” he asks once more, calmly, as I emerge furious from the office.

  “No,” I say, grabbing him by the arm, by the shocking skin and bones that my grip closes around, the end of frustration, the edge of violence. “Who are you?”

  He looks at me—blank, unblinking.

  “Archer Wallace,” he says.

  Archer Wallace.

  The real Archer Wallace?

  Wallace the Amazing, indeed.

  (Remembering, of course, that I’m not using, can’t risk using, real names here. Maybe I will ultimately. But not yet.)

  I am reeling.

  Everything changes.

  FIVE

  “That little coincidence that you notice, smile at, half dismiss . . . the person you were just thinking about, calling you out of the blue . . . an unusual word you just said to someone, suddenly there on the page in front of you . . . someone you were just thinking about, suddenly driving by in his new convertible . . . The kind of little coincidence that makes even the practical, the pragmatic, the faithless, wonder for a moment about the inner clockworks of the world . . .”

  I am a half step, a full step, two steps ahead as he tells it. After being for the past week a half step, a full step, two steps behind. It’s so painfully clear how I had assumed amid the shock of it that the shriveled, bare-skulled, shrunken form in the tub was the real Dave Stewartson, but now it is Wallace—the real Archer Wallace—who had been stumbled onto serendipitously or, more likely, discovered by the careful sleuthing of this couple (in which case they are detectives of a sort, with skill sets a mirror of my own), who saw the opportunity to kidnap this hidden Wallace, and then to blackmail Wallace the Amazing with the discovery. To threaten the rich Wallace, the Wallace who stole for some reason (convenience? revenge? to avoid a scandal? to cause one?) the identity of this cut-off, shriveled, strange, isolated, actual Wallace.

  I would now bet there’d been contact beforehand between Wallace the Amazing and the “Stewartsons,” leading up to the night of the performance. Threats, counterthreats, phone calls, e-mails. The inevitable escalation to an extremely public forum—national television. But neither party backing down or giving in.

  That’s what “Dave Stewartson” was doing standing up in the theater. We’re here. We’ll do whatever it takes to get your money, to make you pay. We know you’re a fake. We’re not afraid. We assume your act is fake. But we know you are.

  That’s what Wallace was doing, calling on him. I know you’re here. I’m not afraid. You’ll never get me. You’ll never bring me down.

  And of course, I had completely misread it. It was a standoff. Both parties aware of it. The “Stewartsons” had pulled off the same kind of identity theft—stolen the real Dave Stewartson’s identity (and Sandi’s too, from somewhere) as fluently, as deftly, as Wallace the Amazing had apparently, long ago, stolen this Wallace’s—as if merely to prove to Wallace the Amazing that they knew exactly what he had done and how he had done it and could even duplicate it. As if to show Wallace the Amazing how much they were onto him, how well they understood his tricks.

  Kidnapping. Extortion. The “Stewartsons” risking it because the prize was so big. The mythic Vegas-size success of Wallace the Amazing. His past, current, and future earnings. I knew too well the staggering sum it came to.

  And all the corollary questions—starting to swirl around me like a cold wind gathering into a storm—when, where, how had Wallace the Amazing, my Wallace (or whoever he truly was), taken on this identity, stolen this man’s past?

  My employer for my lifetime. My twenty-year partner. Not who he said he was. I am reeling, sorting it through, sick to my stomach, dizzy.

  The Wallace at my breakfast table continues explaining. Explains that the Stewartsons (or whoever they actually are) had assured him that they would split the extorted proceeds, the Vegas “winnings” with him. His trust in them was irremediably eroded, of course, when he ended up chained to the bathroom fixtures for safekeeping. (But I am already alert to other possibilities in that fixed-to-the-fixture treatment beyond a simple brute double-cross of their partner. That, for instance, such treatment might have arisen when the Stewartsons saw Archer Wallace getting ideas of his own. Or realizing, for instance, that he didn’t need their partnership to get even with Wallace the Amazing. I presume the professional-seeming Stewartsons had not chained him up for no reason.)

  Which is all why the real Wallace has gladly stayed here, quietly recovering.

  And why this real Wallace didn’t react, stayed silent, when I referred to him as “Dave.” He wasn’t about to risk giving up such a safe place in which to recover.

  So the “real” Dave Stewartson is no longer at my breakfast table. He has disappeared, becoming instead the absent symbol for the cruel potential, the threat, of “Dave” and “Sandi.”

  “I see how upset you are,” Archer says, “how confused and alarmed, to discover I’m Archer Wallace. But I had to tell you, to really know if I was right about you—that you work for Wallace the Amazing, that you’re involved with him.”

  I cannot answer him.

  “I know you can’t answer me—and that’s just confirmation. I have to assume you’re part of how he does what he does. But he was performing other tricks, ugly tricks, before he met you, believe me . . .”

  Before he met you. History, the past, all being remade . . .

  Yes, it was showmanship, that tense televised moment between “Wallace” and “Dave” that I had witnessed, confused and anxious. But not the TV showmanship I had thought. It was the showmanship of each of them for each of them, mano a mano, each showing the other how far he’ll go, demonstrating his fearlessness, his power—the con artist Dave Stewartson (whoever he really is) versus the con artist Wallace the Amazing (whoever he really is). A show for two that millions of others stood by innocently watching, misunderstanding. Including me.

  And of course, the biggest question about Wallace, my Wallace, is why? Why take on the identity of the real Wallace? For money? Probably. Inevitably. I had little doubt that would turn out to be part of the equation. The bottom line is always the bottom line. But was there something more? Was it the appeal, or necessity, of wearing a new identity, of starting over? Did the new identity provide some kind of protection? And I have to ask, as it occurs to me, was it to protect himself from me? To protect against this unknown kid he had just hired, to whom he was entrusting his secrets and his life? And I realize it wouldn’t be all that surprising if he had built in a means of escape. If he constructed a disguise that he could slip out of—sneak offstage—at a moment’s notice, knowing the need might someday arise. An always-ready position of retreat. Should anything happen to “Wallace the Amazing.” Or to this strange, exclusive, utterly dependent relationship between Wallace the Amazing and me.

  And if that faded, pale official photo of Dave Stewartson on the Internet is indeed the real Dave Stewartson, then these “Stewartsons” (whoever they really are) are not grudgingly dragging him around. They have efficiently taken care of him, somehow silenced him (with threats? some form of capture or imprisonment? something worse?) and the only way to escape a similar fate might be to reconstruct it, find out what that fate was. These are professionals, and this is their big play, and they are not going to let it—or Archer Wallace, their trump card, their leverage, their proof of the Amazing Wallace’s criminal past—slip away so easily.

  My choices now: to stay here, wait for them to inevitably find me, and try to defend myself? Or to take the real Wallace, stuff him and a bag or two into my car, and stay perpetually, permanently, ahead of them? Hobson’s choice—meaning not much choice at all. And whichever I choose, of course, I must continue, at least in the short term, to deliver the data, do my job, for Wallace the Amazing.

  I no longer trust blindly in him. I no longer know who he is. Part of me wants to deliver him a load of misinformation, let
him bumble and stumble around onstage, to the confusion, then hoots and derision, of the audience.

  Who is he? The only solid thing in my life, the rock, the center, the organizing principle, has now gone liquid, amorphous. A con artist—a potentially ruthless and heartless one, to steal an identity wholesale, and who knows what else he stole along with it. And I can’t just call him up and ask. Or wait backstage for him and demand an explanation. Because I can’t—still can’t—violate our rules. Because whatever else he may or may not have done, he hasn’t violated our agreement. So how can I? And maybe he has an explanation. One that I’ll even believe.

  As the shock wears off, the reality sets in, and its attendant risks. If the Stewartsons—by all indications, pretty competent, if entirely unscrupulous researchers—figure out who I am, what I do, what my role is for Wallace, if they figure out how cut off I am, they won’t be able to resist the opportunity. To get rid of me. “Handle” me in whatever unthinkable way they handled the original Dave. In my isolation, I am such an easy mark. My aloneness—it can work for me. It can work against me.

  But my anxiety is getting ahead of itself. One thing at a time. They only know by now, presumably, that their Wallace has disappeared. They don’t know me. Not yet. How much they learn, how quickly they learn it, will depend on their detective work, which is too early to judge, and no other investigation, after all—by journalists, fans, professional debunkers—has discovered me yet. (This is different, of course. A physical trail. And these are, whatever else they may be, professional criminals. A different skill set. Different methods. Different breed.)

  But they might realize—or reasonably assume—that I know they’re after the real Wallace, based on my rescue of their charge, their quarry, their missing prize. If they even figure out it’s me—or someone like me—behind it. If they even discover there’s a “me” at all.