Two for the Show

by Jonathan Stone

  They were settling in, I saw. Stewartson and his babe, Sandi. Curtains drawn. In the low light, something in the angles of their faces, their noses and cheeks, catches me. Their features project a kind of unnerving strength and aggressiveness, which they both seem to share. An assertive tightness around their mouths, eyes puffy and bulging. Like some subtle deformity portending criminality—a predictive trait discovered by university researchers. Weird and undefined in the muted light.

  I wasn’t so concerned with my own safety. I wasn’t even that concerned with Wallace’s. They needed him—he was what made their blackmail work—so what could they really do to him, beyond terrify him or pretend they didn’t care what happened to him. No, my big concern (as Sandi duct-taped me to the chair, working silently, expressionlessly, clearly with plenty of practice) was how I was going to do my job. How was I going to give Wallace the next show’s information? What would he do if I couldn’t get it to him? Suddenly cancel the show? Say it was a sudden illness? A family emergency? (In a way, yes, a family emergency.) My computers, in the next room, showed nothing—I was always careful, even in the house alone, not to leave revealing screens or information up there if I wasn’t sitting there—but I still could not figure out how or when I was going to be able to send him what he needed.

  “You’ve got a lot in common, you two, don’t you?” said Stewartson, checking the duct tape on Wallace and on me. “Both under the radar, both pretty much alone. Have you discovered that about each other, your brotherly bond?”

  If Wallace didn’t get the information he needed, he would know there was something wrong. The absence of communication was really the only way for me to signal that something was wrong, and after twenty years, it would be a strong message. He would realize, I hoped, that he now had to rescue me, as I had rescued him. The Wallace that I no longer knew, no longer trusted—now, for the first time, I really needed him.

  With both of us tied up tight, my doppelganger brother and me, the Stewartsons did a little reconnaissance around the condo. Stewartson soon confronted the locked door to my office. He returned, looked inquisitively at me. “You lock a door in your own condominium?” Ripping the piece of tape off my mouth—the sudden sharp sting on both cheeks made my eyes water—he waited for an answer.

  “There’s lots of valuable computer equipment in there. I’ve been robbed before.”

  “And a locked office door is going to discourage a thief? You kidding? It’s going to do just the opposite.” He pressed the same strip of duct tape back over my mouth.

  He went out to my garage, returned a minute later, crossed the living room with an armful of the tools from the bag in my car’s trunk, and in a moment I heard some pounding, scraping, a sharp sound of wood cracking, and then silence—obviously while he looked around inside the office after breaking open the door. He didn’t bother to ask me where the key was, or demand that I open the office for him. Maybe he figured I’d try something, or find some way to stall. Maybe it was less risky to leave me tied up. Maybe the destruction was mostly to make a point.

  He returned to eye me. “That is a lot of computer equipment.”

  “I’m a consultant.”

  “What kind of consulting?”

  “Information consulting.”

  “What kinds of clients?”

  Only one. “You name it,” I said. “I’ll work for anyone.”

  “See, I don’t think that’s true,” said Stewartson, sitting down again, settling into a spot on the beige couch this time. “The way I see it, I stood up at that Wallace the Amazing show, and suddenly you’re trailing us, and then you take Archer Wallace from us, suddenly willing to be involved, to take a risk. I’m seeing a little cause and effect here. I think maybe you and the Amazing Wallace are connected. Connected through those computers, I’d venture to say.”

  A professional. An artist of the criminal kind. No dummy. “Like I say, turns out you hardly exist. I doubt that’s an accident. So here’s a guy who doesn’t exist, except for his impressive roomful of computers. And the nice condo, the food in the fridge, it comes from somewhere. So I wonder what it means, if you can’t get to those computers of yours,” he said, as if with an offhand curiosity, a mere comment in passing, but looking at me closely, to gauge my reaction.

  With the curtains drawn against any sense of day or night and the cheap kitchen wall clock invisible from the living room, you lose all track of time. With your elbows and knees and ankles pinned into place by duct tape and plastic ties, your muscles have no choice but to give in, relax into the resistance of your vertical bed, your upright home. The duct tape tight around your wrists and ankles, the forced immobility—both factors constrict your normal blood flow, creating a lethargy paradoxical to the situation. I find myself drifting in and out, moments of an exhausted semi-sleep. Seconds? Minutes? I see that Archer Wallace, next to me, is at moments sleeping upright too. Time collapses. Time deforms. Expands and contracts. Like waiting for a delayed flight in a featureless airport lounge. Sitting for hours in a bland bureaucratic hallway. The purgatories of modernity—and this is one more new form. Sandi and Dave drift in and out of the living room only occasionally. I hear them cobble together meals from my thinly stocked refrigerator; they peel the tape off my mouth, stuff a few bites of sandwich into me, pour a little juice down my throat, then do the same with Archer Wallace. I wonder if the goal here is to return him to his previous state of abject fear and docility, and take me along for the ride. They say little to each other, nothing to us.

  And in this drifting, this drifting of unknown intention toward unknown outcome, I can’t help but notice that this imprisonment in my own home, oddly, isn’t so different from my regular working life. In quality, in texture, yes—the terror, the lack of control. But in actuality, in what is literally happening—and not happening—it’s much the same. I am strapped in a chair, immobilized, silent, for hours on end. What’s any different about that? Only that there are no computer screens in front of me. Only that my confusion, terror, anticipation, and dread are what’s in front of me. But when I quell those, when I let those dull and die down, it’s not so different at all.

  And then, finally, Sandi turns on my big living room television. And suddenly the four of us—two of us bound—are watching a Vegas channel to which I subscribe. As if we are simply another strange Vegas family, no stranger than most.

  Care to guess what show we are gathered around?

  Though I try to hide it, to act nonchalant, only half-interested, I’ve never been more anxious to see a Wallace performance.

  “You seem a little nervous,” says Dave Stewartson, archly, smug. “Why would that be?”

  I don’t answer. I watch the screen. I had expected that Wallace would cancel. That he would alter the act, do some different tricks. That he would perform a different kind of show.

  But Wallace the Amazing came onstage as confidently as ever. Made his graceful small talk. Took questions. Went into his mild trance, as always. I could sense that something was different about him, though, and of course it was. He would have to come up with some tactics, conjure up something, some misdirection, some other kind of magic. I felt hollowed-out, defeated. At last, I had failed him.

  He began to call on members of the audience, and called out specifics. The names of their dogs. The colors of their curtains. Their first girlfriends. Their latest girlfriends. Weaving them into narratives. Showing relationships between audience members, where they had no idea there were any.

  In short, doing the same show as always.

  The Stewartsons were more than mildly disappointed. Sandi looked at Dave with an annoyed I-told-you-so expression. Dave must have revealed his hunches about me and promised her fireworks, and yet there was nothing. The anger was simmering in Dave; you could see it. I had the sense he would take it out on me.

  As for me, I was in shock. A state of awe. Watching him, listening to h
im—everything about the show the same, everything about it profoundly different—I felt a shift in the universe, an almost physical realignment. A sudden new understanding of the unique, wildly ambitious kid who’d grown into the man on television in front of me, who knew how different he was, knew he deserved more, so saw it and seized it, compelled by something akin to a sense of mission, perhaps, to escape that backwater southern town. I realized that he had humored me all these years, hired me only to confirm and support his abilities, so that he could fact-check himself. I was the safety net beneath his high-wire act of mentalism, and tonight he simply walked the high wire without the net, because in a pinch, in a tight spot like tonight, if he had to, he could do it.

  Wallace the Amazing, most amazingly, it seemed, was psychic. Or whatever more scientific, accurate, or sophisticated terminology than “psychic” existed for his brand and degree of prescient abilities. I felt, finally, at last, after all these years, what thousands, millions, felt in the presence of Wallace the Amazing, witnessing his show—felt at last that shift in my understanding, that shift in the universe. The recognition of, if not a world beyond, at least some separate dimension to this one. I finally accepted the notion of a capacity beyond myself. This was, I realized, a moment of religious conversion. A moment of religious experience. I was born again—or born, anyway—into something primal, substantial. I knew it, was gratified to know it and feel it authentically and thoroughly. If only briefly.

  The weight of evidence still said no. The science said no. But something was nevertheless revealed. Until I realized the truth—and the realization hit me hard. No psychic ability. No sixth sense or paranormal fluency. Somewhere, squirreled away, holed up somewhere in circumstances and conditions that would be immediately recognizable to me right down to every mundane detail—bank of computer screens, empty closets, refrigerator full of takeout leftovers—there was someone else just like me. Someone else delivering the information to him as well, maybe so he could cross-check it, check us against each other to make sure we were both doing our work and neither of us was getting sloppy or slipshod or suddenly pulling a fast one on him. But mostly, mainly, it was to protect him from, to handle, a situation just like this. To let the show go on. Somewhere, there was someone, for all these years, all this time—someone else cut off, isolated, in Wallace’s employ—someone just like me.

  Yes, Wallace the Amazing was amazing.

  And I realized the corollary. That he was covered. He didn’t need to rescue me. Arguably couldn’t risk rescuing me, couldn’t risk the connection between us being known or seen.

  I am on my own.

  Alone, with the fragile, unstable, real Archer Wallace.

  Meaning, I am alone.

  “So what do you do for him?” Stewartson asked me, proffering a wedge of orange teasingly in front of me, then taking it back, biting into it himself. Still annoyed at my evident superfluousness, my apparent lack of immediate value or connection to the show—but still curious.

  I still wasn’t going to tell them, because that would have meant the end of it. The end of the act. The end of everything. Wallace the Amazing had been my surrogate family. For now, at least, I had to protect him. For now, I knew no other way, no other choice. Whatever his real name, his real identity, turned out to be.

  But now I also knew he could go on without me. That he would go on without me. That he already had. So what harm was there in telling the Stewartsons what I did for him? Maybe there were more of us “detectives,” more of us suppliers—three, four, a dozen, all unknown to one another. Maybe he added more of us as he grew more successful.

  I was angry, hurt by what was now a series of lies—his name, his past, the actual size and nature of the staff that surrounded him—piling up, and who knew how high the pile would grow? The pile of lies atop which I looked out now, my perspective skewed, angled, false, the lies still shifting beneath me. Who he implied he was versus who he actually was. My bedrock understanding that I was his lifeline—and then, suddenly, I wasn’t. I was angry, hurt, but of course, he had never explicitly said or promised otherwise.

  So why not join the Stewartsons? Help them pull off the blackmail? God knows I could be helpful to them. No one knew him like I did—his whereabouts, his inclinations, his judgments, his relationships, his very thoughts. Why not get even for his misrepresentation? There was every reason to save myself from the infliction of pain, the torture, that undoubtedly would ensue if I continued to resist the Stewartsons’ questions. Why continue to be loyal? Jesus, what was my crazy loyalty about?

  Soon enough, I understand why we are still tied up. Why the Stewartsons are settling in. Because my condo provides a perfect way for them to keep an eye on both Archer and me, as well as a useful, serendipitous base of operations. My grabbing Archer, holing up here—it now looks practically like an invitation to them.

  They e-mail Wallace the Amazing. I have never e-mailed him, of course; it is too direct, too easily traceable. But for them, it is simple. They send a short, pointed piece of fan mail to his website. They sign the e-mail “Dave Stewartson.” You know, that strange fan from a few nights ago? That will get his attention. An e-mail, a communication, he’s undoubtedly been watching for anyway.

  It does get his attention. He writes back as cryptically but purposefully. You can see the purpose, the focus, the anger, the comprehension, arcing behind his response to one more rabid fan.

  We’re with Archer. He says hello.

  says the Stewartsons’ e-mail. Innocent, but telegraphic.

  Who’s Archer?

  says the e-mail back. In its entirety. Implication: I’m not admitting to any understanding of what you’re talking about or even who you are. Implication: I’m not giving this bull crap the time of day. Implication: Come and get me. Go ahead. Just try.

  Who’s Archer? Is that a message to them or to me? Everything tempts me to abandon Wallace, or whoever he is. Everything tempts me to, but for whatever crazy reason I remain a dutiful employee.

  Hands and legs bound, mouths taped, we are side by side in the dark, Archer and I. (He is no longer who I originally thought—the invisible, absent Dave Stewartson—and yet, in his disconnection and isolation, he is still my doppelganger.) We are held identically captive, literally composing each other’s shadow in the light from the blaring television, in case there was ever any doubt. We look at each other, eyes to eyes, incommunicative, merely factual, the rest of our means of expression—oral and facial—taped over. It’s a late-night blizzard of infomercials: abdominal machines, weight loss programs, miracle face creams, vitamin regimens, all of it cast out broadly like an electronic fishing net across America. I watch the screen’s color, blinking and flashing in the face of Archer Wallace—cragged, white, a recipient over whom the messages wash like the light, a distant blur, not for him. The blasting of the television is hardly intended to entertain us. It is, I’m sure, to mask the antics in my master bedroom, where the athletic Dave and Sandi are unwinding, amped up by the excitement of their criminal escapade, by recovering their Archer Wallace prize, by making e-mail contact—acknowledgment, a response—and thus being a step closer to hitting the jackpot. But the TV’s blare doesn’t mask the bedroom noise.

  I am still thinking about my misplaced loyalty. The bedroom noise is an irritant—but it’s about to be a blessing, and a signal, I realize in a moment.

  Connection, connection. We are more connected than we know.

  And he is right. Because here she is.

  Tiptoeing in the front door as if merely coming in late from work, as if being careful not to wake me asleep on the couch in front of the television.

  Debbie.

  My Debbie, now standing over Archer and me.

  Debbie—as if drawn to me, from somewhere out of the desert, in my hour of need.

  Debbie, who still has her keys to my condo, of course, and could lurk outside, waiting for the pe
rfect moment to enter, which doesn’t come any more perfect than the current animated primal bedroom antics.

  She stands for a moment, taking in the two of us tied here. A vindication at least of her decision to help. I presume that she was watching the house, trying to decide whether to come in, to forgive, to try again with me, when she saw a couple breaking in. Or else she was just swinging by, uncommitted, curious, unsure what she would feel or do as she passed, and saw the unfamiliar car, and all the drawn shades, and managed somewhere, given this house she knows so well, to peek in to see what was going on. But either way, waiting cautiously, until the right moment to enter, to assess, to help.

  And as she stands over me, looking at me tied up and taped, we both listen to, can’t help but hear, the spirited grunting and groaning in the next room. Even here, amid the extreme tension of the moment, or maybe because of it, an unmistakable sexual charge passes between us. For a short moment, here in the television’s shadow, there is no mistaking the rush of desire mixing with the flood of my gratitude. It’s bound only by the ropes and tape, obvious in my eyes above my taped mouth.

  Quickly, silently, catlike, she moves to the kitchen, returns with a serrated knife from my hardly used butcher-block set, slices through the tape on my wrists. I seize the knife from her, cut down and through the tape on my ankles, and go to work on Archer Wallace. Though we can’t discuss it, can’t risk making a sound, it is obvious that we are listening for either Dave or his girlfriend to climax; we know we have until then.

  I look at Debbie; I look at Archer; I look around the living room. I realize I might be seeing my own home, my safe house and sanctuary, for the last time. I can’t return here; they’d know where to find me. Debbie, the real Archer Wallace, my home—a triumvirate of meaning for me, a triumvirate of my connection to the world, and in seconds I am taking in all three and facing some fundamental shift that I can’t yet define.