Two for the Show

by Jonathan Stone

  The discovery of my professional twin creates an opportunity I never had before. I’ve had to work every day of my adult life for Wallace the Amazing. Researching the information, digging out the facts. I had to be utterly reliable, always there. But now that I know he doesn’t depend solely on me, I can do what I couldn’t before: I can look into what I have begun to suspect—if she’ll cover for me.

  “I need to talk to you, Dominique.” Standing once again at her door. Here in person, to emphasize the importance of the request.

  “Why?”

  “I need a favor.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Not a big favor. I need you to do your work for Wallace, just like you always do.”

  “Not much of a favor there.”

  “But I need you to submit it twice.”

  “Twice.”

  “Once from yourself. And once from me.”

  “You mean, alter it a little, when it comes from you.”

  “Exactly. I need to go somewhere. Just for a day or two. Will you do it?”

  She must recognize the need from her own life, after all. Recognize the professional imprisonment, the same urge and lust for freedom. And I know in asking, as she must know too, that I will owe her one for this. That the next favor will be hers to ask.

  And how can I trust that she won’t simply tell him? She is his at-least-occasional bedmate, his lover, after all. And she was clearly as surprised and confused to discover my existence as I was to discover hers. So I know she could take this opportunity to make herself numero uno with Wallace the Amazing, even more essential to him, more powerful, unchallenged, supreme. But I had felt her disappointment at the revelation. Her anger at him. Her mental regrouping. There was a bond between us. A bond of profession. A bond of years. And if she is like me, she won’t tell him she knows about me, any more than I would tell him I know about her. She’ll keep the knowledge to herself, harbor it for some later more useful deployment—why reveal it for no reason? And this is where a detective has to go with his instincts. Instincts are part of the job. For a fake detective like me, just as much as for a real one.

  There is one more bond between us, of course. One more bond to bring up here. A bond I don’t yet fully understand, but the same detective instincts are whispering its significance.

  “Dominique, I have to tell you, when I saw that photo of your parents . . . My parents are both dead too. Don’t you see? He chose us for that. For our vulnerability. For our isolation. For our instant loyalty.” I look at her. “Please . . . cover for me.”

  I smile once more at her. A smile without flirtation or charm. A smile of need, of desperation, of seriousness. A smile that says only, I need this, Dominique.

  “I’ll do it,” she says flatly. No indication of curiosity or resentment or anticipation. Nothing more in her response than simple agreement. And maybe the acknowledgment of our bond. Yes, she’ll do it.

  ELEVEN

  There is magic, and there is magic. There is a stage show—which upends and disrupts your expectations while at the same time fulfilling them—and there is a magic that makes a stage show seem trifling, a magic that can surround and immerse you, that can make you rethink everything, that can turn your mind and memories inside out, that digs into, scratches at, the deepest chambers of your understandings. That attacks your hard wiring. One might argue that’s going beyond the realm and province of what we call “magic,” but as you’ll see, we’re only talking degree.

  I had sworn I was never going back. I had sworn I would never set foot again in that godforsaken patch of undifferentiated, dusty, arid, rural plain—not properly midwestern, not properly southern, unassigned and unidentified, with little geographic or regional belonging, and not even defined topographically. The place where the little that I knew and loved had died, where every tie had dissolved, where nothing held me, and there was no reason to return and every reason to turn my back.

  I flew in late at night. (Strange to think it’s been only a short, few hours’ flight away all these years and yet has seemed so distant in my imagination—like an unexplored galaxy, light years away.) Rented a car. Checked into a motel. Tossed and turned and stared up into the blackness above the bed for a few restless hours. The blackness hung outside the thin motel window as well, a remarkable blackness and silence, after the bright, noisy ceaseless, nightless, timeless rhythms of Las Vegas.

  So you can imagine the magic—upon waking up to a clean, calm morning light, dressing quickly, running my head under the cold water in the sink, getting into the rental car—of arriving in, driving through, my old neighborhood, all of it smaller looking, more beaten-down looking, but otherwise unchanged. As if somewhat miniaturized for my convenience, in order to take it in at once.

  And perhaps you can imagine the magic as I go up the walk of our old house to our front door . . . the chipped paving stones unchanged, the deep edge of grass still there, memories cascading, a liquid rich wave of memory moistening, fertilizing, the dusty ground around me. Remembering my childhood thoughts and associations on this exact path, from this exact view. Both observing as if from a distance the thoughts of a child, but also thoroughly inhabiting those thoughts, occupying them, because that child is me.

  But you certainly cannot imagine the magic of my ringing the bell, hoping and praying for a sympathetic and understanding young owner, and the door being opened by my mother.

  My mother.

  Standing at the screen door, as always, as if about to call me in for dinner. My long-dead mother. My own expression of utter dizzying confusion and shock and incomprehension is mirrored perfectly in her own. We have never been more powerfully mother and son, never more connected, than at that moment.

  I catch her as she collapses into the ladder-back front hall chair, my own rubbery legs about to buckle too . . .

  Staring at each other . . . beyond language, beyond the bounds of any emotion we have experienced or even imagined before . . .

  “Charles . . . my God . . .” Barely a whisper, as if from beyond the grave.

  We simply, mutely, stare some more.

  At each other.

  And into the cruel, generous, unknowable universe beyond us.

  “It’s a profound sense of connection. That’s the only way I can describe it, and that description is inadequate. That deep sense of awe that you feel occasionally, at a birth or a death close to you, in certain fleeting moments of motherhood or fatherhood, a sudden link to the well and flow of human feeling, to the primal chain, to the basis of humanity that we pay little attention to, that we are detuned from . . . But I pay attention, I am in tune with it . . .”

  Sitting on an old unchanged kitchen chair, at the old unchanged breakfast table in the old unchanged kitchen, through the fog of my own confused ecstasy, my wide scatter of feeling, through her stumbling half stutters of her own utter incomprehension, I begin to understand. To process the fake obituary of my accidental roadside death, sent to her, which she shows me now . . .

  I see again her memorial service—the respectful, dutiful smattering of bridge friends and local clerks and acquaintances I’d never met, because they didn’t exist as bridge friends and clerks and acquaintances, because they’d all been hired for the occasion. The dour solicitous clergyman, saying all the appropriate, explanatory things about the illness she had kept hidden from even her closest friends. The orderly instructions she had left, so orderly and precise because she had not written them, because she’d been away, on a trip with her friends, her actual friends, all safely out of the way along with her, to allow her funeral to proceed. And then she’d gotten the news of my accident, my demise—nothing left, tragic—and subsequently received the ashes, on the mantel now . . .

  And already I am seeing how the trick was done, and all its attendant ingeniousness. Her death serving as an impetus, a sudden and powerful motivation, to accept Wallace’s o
ffer, to drop out of school, start to earn some income, hit the road with him, leaving little time to brood about her, and little point in returning home. Dead of a cancer she never said a word about. Dying alone, never revealing it, never burdening anyone with it, as was her apparent wish. Would I ever have bothered to search my trusted Internet further, my trusted repository of truth? Where I would have found a fake obituary, and nothing more?

  (And the fact that she would not have told me about her sickness—that would be my mother, classic, 100 percent. Not wanting me to worry, to go on with my all-important college classes, leading toward a career that would allow me to flee our backwater, that would be my ticket out. I knew that was what she wanted for me—escape to something better, to a career that I was committed to, one where I felt important, essential. In Wallace’s offer, I knew I had found that. I knew she would be proud.)

  And why had the master magician risked staging the whole funeral? Why had he not found a simpler way of informing me of her “death?” A somber phone call from someone after the “fact,” apologizing that they couldn’t find me. A “note” found in her drawer, explicitly stating she wanted no funeral, no memorial, which would be in keeping with her personality. Why not a simpler ruse? Because he is a master—of human psychology as well. Because he sensed that I would have to see it for myself. To inhabit the fantasy with eyes and ears and sights and sounds if I were to be satisfied. So he had to do it the riskier way, the full staging—because despite the risks, I would be less risky that way. More accepting. More somber and docile. More fully convinced.

  Or was it, at some level, just to see whether such a stunt could be executed, could be pulled off?

  And what kind, what level of magician would attempt such a trick? . . .

  Who would such a magician be? . . .

  In my subsequent moods of nostalgia and longing and loneliness, when I would check the Internet for her, I’d read her single obituary again, and see nothing else about her, of course. But there wouldn’t be anything about a quiet, self-effacing midwestern woman on the Internet anyway, only some old photos from before.

  And of course, it would never have occurred to me to look for my own obituary. The one she had just shown me. Would I find it now on the Internet too, there to assure and convince any of my old acquaintances of my status or whereabouts—or lack thereof—should they get curious? But mostly, of course, to convince her. It was a parallel stunt pulled on both of us, an elegantly parallel deception. Like mother, like son. I was sure now, though, that when I searched the Internet for myself, there I would be—or wouldn’t be. Only the obit. With no other presence, of course, because of my professional, thorough job of erasing any other presence, anything about me. Christ, I was doing the patrol job of assuring my own electronic death. Safeguarding the deception myself!

  What kind of magician would periodically check, to make sure that nothing newer about my mother or me appeared? Would know how I trusted the Internet, how it was my alternative reality, my only reality as far as my past, because the demands of my job precluded any physical return. What magician might that be?

  All those thoughts surfaced, disordered, hellish, in the minutes and hours that followed. But for now, it was something bigger, more stunning and remarkable: a past brought back from oblivion. Inhabiting it like it was yesterday.

  The irony did not escape me. Twenty years spent peeking and poking into other people’s pasts. And yet never peeking or poking into my own.

  The flood of my unalloyed joy. The rushing current of my fury. For her, the miracle of seeing her son after so many years—years she’d thought I was in the ground. And for me: years I had lived duped. Replaying the ease with which it was done. How he had preyed, so ingeniously, so specifically, on an only child with a single parent, a parent who kept to herself, a private person, nearly a shut-in. A kid who had already retreated into the alternate world of computers, of hackers, a kid who lived at the keyboard and nowhere else. A kid withdrawn from the world. Perfect prey. When he approached me in that off-campus coffee shop, he already knew all of it.

  My joy and fury rising together, contrary forces, pressing against each other so hard they leave me paralyzed, forces pushing isometrically against each other to leave me stunned and frozen.

  Twenty years, and no change. The house, the yard, the furniture, the views, all as it had been. And did this say that twenty years had been stolen? Or that twenty years hadn’t passed at all? (Like a prisoner who walks back out into the world, and nothing is changed, and everything is changed. It all looks the same; it all looks different.)

  “I can’t . . . I can’t believe . . .” she manages in a whisper, emerging from her own shock and paralysis, sitting up straight in that ladder-back chair in the dark front hall—the same chair where I piled minerals I’d collected and tossed my sweatshirt and set down the Matchbox cars I’d been playing with in the dirt outside. “All these years, as if in a flash . . .” She blinks her eyes as if seeing it, literally experiencing it that way, and confused by the idea. “Just a flash.” She keeps her hand pressed over her heart. As if to test, to continually reassure, that it is beating, that this is real.

  I say nothing. I’m still too stunned by events. I never doubted her death. But here she was. Still here. As if waiting for this moment.

  We can do little more than look at each other. Stare mutely in disbelief, and slow, creeping, fundamental comprehension.

  Over the next few minutes, the next few hours, as we head arm-in-arm into the kitchen and she makes us mint tea and tuna sandwiches and we sit together at the little kitchen table with the morning light flooding in rich and full around us as if it too is a stunned witness to this turn of events, it is hard for me to get past the fury. It is hard to get past the sense of loss. The sense of insult. How he took over—cold guardian, father figure—and handed me a tainted ticket to the world.

  “I know who did this to us,” I tell her quietly. “I’m starting to see how it was done to us . . .”

  She looks at me horrified. “Did this to us? What do you mean?”

  And I realize that it has not even occurred to her that what happened to us was purposeful. She assumes, I can see, it was a series of accidents, miscommunications, official mistakes, bad luck, in a life that has known its share of them. Of course she thinks that—this sweet, simple, private midwestern mom, after all. A plan, a purpose, is incomprehensible.

  I am about to explain it, to tell her who it was, who was behind it all, to tell her more about Wallace the Amazing than she would ever guess from television. About his success and the cold calculations and manipulations that make his success possible—and that she and I have apparently been part of it, pawns in it. But is there anything to be gained by doing that right now? By sharing it with her? By bringing so much darkness into her reunion with her son? At some point, maybe. But not right now.

  (And proof of the rightness of holding my tongue? That in those next few hours, I can hear my mother—ever private, ever reserved—weeping behind the bathroom door for several minutes, before composing herself, coming back out.)

  In my confusion, my stunned fury, one thing is clear. I will help Archer Wallace. The real Wallace. Duped like me. I will help him. We will finish off Wallace the Amazing. I am his creation, his mechanical monster. So I’m the perfect creature to turn on him.

  His little trick, his deft little turn, twisting my life like a picture card (a jack, a knave) around his practiced magician’s fingers. It makes everything around me feel like a stage set. Makes the past that surrounds me here in the hallway, the kitchen, the dark little house, feel unreal, since it had been scrubbed away, ceased to exist for me until a few moments ago.

  Everything has happened. Everything has changed. Nothing has happened. Nothing has changed. Despite the unvarying geography, the utterly predictable house and porch and shutters and fence and side chairs and breakfast table and a thousand other
visual and physical markers and assurances, there is this enormous sense of dislocation of time and place.

  Wrinkled, curled in on herself, as if patiently preparing for life’s last lap, quietly resigned to her final years on earth, my mother is suddenly brought alive. The years peel off; a new light in her eyes lifts her, enlivens her, animates a much younger being.

  I return to what is relevant. To what is simple and primary, here and now.

  “I . . . I didn’t know, Mom.” Half-formed, abject, apologetic. “I had no idea . . .”

  “Of course not,” she says, her own words forgiving, her voice so familiar, speaking to me quietly across the decades. “How could you? How could anyone even imagine?” Looking at me closely, like a specimen. And then beginning, intuitively, to rebuild our bond. “But now we have to deal with it, Charles.” Blinking, as if to clarify the blurry thought for herself, clarify the necessary action. “We have to go forward. Repair what we can. We’ll always share the loss. Now we have to share whatever can be salvaged, whatever can be gained . . .”

  We are not mother and son, we are instead survivors of a primordial disaster, of a shifting of planets, a teleological tsunami.

  I am looking back over the years, past the wrinkles to the eyes I know but have never looked at so closely. It feels invasive. I turn away.

  And then, she’s trying to rein it in for us, to normalize it, as if we are just a mother and son reunited in an old farmhouse on a dusty nameless American plain—exactly what we are. “Your jobs, your friends, your life . . . I want to hear it all,” she says with a warm smile. Settling back in her familiar kitchen chair. Feeling, it seems, with a crazy, impulsive optimism, that we can simply catch up on twenty years. That we can happily, merrily fill in the blanks over tea and tuna sandwiches. She looks at me, a look filled with a mother’s essential pride, admiration, joy, at an adult child’s mere presence. “Having you suddenly here in the kitchen again, Charles. My kitchen. Our kitchen. It’s . . . it’s . . .” She searches for a word. “It’s like magic.”