Two for the Show

by Jonathan Stone

  And when I think through this absence, this missingness—the missingness of my own father, merely a photo on a table, merely vague imagery to a two-year-old, only an aura—and my lifelong fascination with and commitment to Wallace, it begins circling me. I start to see the possibility, the attraction, the allure, the “magic”—a magic so primal, so simple after all.

  Like that locked trunk of my father’s effects in our attic. The locked trunk that my mother and I had so violently argued over on the eve of my leaving home. I now know exactly what it contains. Nothing. Emptiness. Absence. Missingness. Those are its only contents. It is as false as my dead father’s photo. The trunk that has separated my mother and me would now separate us even more. The trunk that contains only separation.

  And my sperm “contribution”? To help explain to me how and why this girl would grow to look so much like me. Dominique’s maternal loyalty was instinctive. Formed at birth, shall we say. My own loyalty had to be nurtured. Concocted. Cultivated. Grown in a test tube.

  Wallace the Amazing, my father. Amazing once again—and amazing as never before.

  Dominique’s fluent, masterly transfer of the money? No surprise to me at all. The banks use the same encryption systems as the credit card companies that I hack and where I have IT contacts, because the credit card companies are owned by the banks, in fact they are banks, and they hire the same circle of firms to encrypt and encode and protect, and Dominique has her contacts and relationships inside those firms just as I have mine. Call it the oligarchic flaw: there’s only a handful of credit card companies, interfacing with only a handful of banks, and only a handful of information technology firms serving them both. So as a hacker, you don’t need to achieve mastery more than once. Like a club—once you’re in, you’re in.

  And whatever I know how to do at the screen and keyboard, someone out there knows more than me—and someone, in turn, knows more than them. And that someone could easily be Dominique. Cyberspace is the Wild West; most have just arrived here comparatively wide-eyed, but a few of us have been riding out here a long time. We know the topography. We know what’s buried in the sand.

  We are today’s superheroes, Dominique and I. Replacing yesteryear’s bright-tighted superheroes with equal though less showy superpowers and abilities. The power to see into people’s innermost thoughts. The power to see into their pasts.

  Meek, silent, hunched over screens, even arthritic and sclerotic and paralytic in our chairs, we are superheroes with no uniforms, no magic belts, no swelling chests. More like the craven villains of superhero-comics tradition, crouched in the shadows, denizens of the dark.

  Have the villains finally triumphed?

  We are a family . . . yes and no. A family I am not truly a part of. Dominique and Amanda have each other, and yet even here, where I have invested my emotions, my defensive efforts, my fingertip, I am still an outsider. A bystander. Even at the core of this story, at this moment, I still don’t exist. The questionable, indistinct, foggy half standing of the half brother.

  And yet, I am strapped into responsibility. I am a bystander, but I am a participant. Dominique now has her daughter, and the transfer of the money clearly indicates she has a plan. A plan to run? To hide? To start over? And did she know or plan that I’d be with her? Do I fit into the plan? Is that what she is silently assessing, computing, as she drives the three of us straight into the desert, her silence as featureless, as broad and weighty, as the desert itself.

  As for me, I have a plan now too—unformed but unquestioned, vague yet utterly focused. To confront my mother. To know what happened. Or do I want anything to do with her anymore? Do I want to leave it as I have always believed it, inhabit the lie I’ve become accustomed to? I already have the sense of the truth, after all. Its rough edges, its outline. Do I really want any more of it? Let sleeping dogs lie. Let lying dogs sleep.

  Dominique and Amanda; my mother and me. It’s a parallel trick, I realize. A trick repeated across a generation, as Wallace the Amazing repeats them, perfects them, from the stage night after night. Shrewd Paternity 2.0. The upgrade—road-tested, refined. Part of his stage act. Those two words—stage and act—come at me anew with all their force.

  A trick repeated: Sire the child. Make a devil’s pact with each mother—that in exchange for each’s silence, she gets support, security. The illicitness is part of what binds them to him, the fact that no one can know. Does that make the bond more powerful? For my mother? For Dominique? The fact that they’re in on the act? It’s hard to know.

  The fury courses through me. A fury at my father. Like some Oedipal drama in the Vegas desert, the full brunt of my fury delayed, amplified, by my blindness to events.

  But of course, the fury is trumped—redoubled—by my realization about my mother. She had lied to me. My whole visit was a lie. She pretended not to know I was alive, to be shocked to see me at her door, to have been as fooled as I was. Yet clearly, she had been acting. She must have known of my existence, it had been some arrangement she had agreed to, and she was always ready with her stage performance, should I for some reason show up on her doorstep, should I somehow discover that she was still alive. What kind of mother makes a pact to not see her child? To send him away? Because she thinks it’s better for him, that he’ll have a richer more rewarding life? Or because the father made a persuasive, powerful case. Backed up with money, in the form of my monthly salary. Making good on his promise to her. Or because somehow, she had no choice?

  I thought again about her fake funeral. Colored now, more believable now, because she knew. Had maybe even helped stage it. Of course she had. Why hadn’t that occurred to me before? How could it have really been pulled off without her complicity? A funeral as fake, as staged for me alone, as my masturbating into a container. A similar veil of holiness, of purpose, of sanctimony and import, all the better to fool me. And where was my mother during her funeral—watching from a distance? No wonder it was all friends of hers that I never even knew. Hired friends, actors, who spoke to me in passing about how close they were to her, what a fine lady she had been. And in my distance from her current life, and in my distress, they knew I would accept it. And I did.

  She was the master magician’s dutiful stage assistant. Willingly sawed in half. Smiling from the confines of her box. From more than a thousand miles away, she was still his stage assistant. Why?

  I had spent my adulthood without a father or a mother. And now, in days, I suddenly had both, and yet I was without either, as profoundly alone as ever. More alone with them than without them.

  My mother, alive. My father, alive. Both rejecting me, and both believing in me and supporting me. What a strange and twisted family spin.

  And when I had left from my emotional visit to my mother, my emotional reunion, did she call Wallace immediately? Tell him who had just been to see her? Warn him that I had been there, and knew of his elaborate lie to me? Reassure him that she had revealed nothing? That she was keeping the “pact,” whatever it was composed of, whatever the agreement. In which case, he would know I knew, would clearly assume I was on the side of the kidnappers, seeking revenge, or would know at least that he couldn’t trust me, wouldn’t yet know how I felt, what stir and mix of emotions would have been unleashed in me by the discovery.

  Or did she not say a word to Wallace after my surprise visit? Did she keep her mouth shut, seeing I still had no idea about who my father was, still ascribing fatherhood to the vague hero in the faded photo by the wing chair? (Did she always keep the photo there, just in case of my visit? Or was the photo to remind her of her pact? Of her commitment to deceit?)

  Her weeping behind the bathroom door. Expertly faked to make the emotions of the visit even more convincing? Or a leaking out of authentic feeling, a sudden spill of regret, trying to hide it from me—hide her true emotions, hide the true story, to keep her pact with Wallace?

  My mother, who went from victim t
o accomplice so instantly.

  Who went from angel to corrupt succubus, she-devil of deception.

  And here is Dominique—fucked by Wallace, to give him Amanda.

  And here is my mother—fucked by Wallace, to give him me. I can imagine her trying to explain it to me: “We were just kids, Chas. I didn’t know what to do. I had no money. And he did. He proposed this solution.”

  The simple, stunning parallel occurred to me:

  Here, for years, I’d thought I was a father.

  And it turned out that I was, instead, a son.

  The son of a father I never suspected.

  A father and a mother, both suddenly alive—and I couldn’t decide which I was angrier at.

  What am I doing in this car? I might be here only practically and legally: to meet the needs and terms for executing the funds transfer at this next bank, because I am still the guardian. Dominique taking me with her—is it intuitive, or planned? Out of authentic choice, or merely legal need? And what is my role after that? I don’t know what Dominique has in mind yet. And things are happening fast.

  And suddenly, more clearly.

  “I’m taking her away,” says Dominique. “I have the money. I have my daughter. I have the excuse I have waited for, for years. He will think the money went to the kidnappers, and to you, his disloyal, disgruntled employee, disgruntled enough to kidnap his daughter—the daughter you thought was your own—disgruntled enough to team with professionals, to out-scam a scam artist.”

  It’s perfect for her, I realize. A perfect cover. A perfect getaway.

  “He’s never really cared about Amanda. He only cares how it looks, only cares about appearances. And I can’t take the pain of watching from afar any more.”

  A pain I thoroughly understand.

  “Why are you telling me?” I ask her. “Why are you revealing all this to me?”

  “Because I know you won’t derail it at this point. And I want you to know. You at least deserve to know. Because no one knows the feelings, the frustrations, the motivations, as well as you. You deserve at least that much.”

  It is an ingenious plan. With one major flaw. A flaw that, with her inexperience of actual motherhood, she seems to have overlooked.

  What about Amanda? What about what she wants?

  I glance in the mirror to the backseat. Amanda is pretending to look out the window, but I know she has been listening—listening closely—her eyes narrowed with focus and attention.

  “Amanda is going with me. She has to. I’m her mother.” As if Dominique could read my thoughts.

  Yes, she is her mother. But this wasn’t about Amanda’s interests, and it should have been. It is clearly about Dominique.

  And for some combination of reasons unclear to me at that moment—a surfacing resentment at being left out of the equation, a new (half) brotherly sense of protectiveness, or just some antagonistic impulse toward the neatness of her plan—I say aloud, so Amanda can hear: “She’s going to try to escape you as soon as she can. She doesn’t care about DNA or justice. She knows Shangri-la and her sister, Alison, and the father and mother who raised her. She has a life, and you are not part of it.” Nor am I. “You can take the money. But you can’t take Amanda. At some level, you must know that.”

  I think of Shangri-la. Its pink sandstone turrets. Her sheltered, protected, comfortable, and envied life there. The house wins. A truism of Vegas. The house always wins.

  “I guess it’s all a question of whether Amanda wants to continue living a lie,” I say, “or to finally discover the truth, and to see, along with me, how that feels.”

  Dominique is silent.

  Amanda, listening, is silent too.

  We pull in quickly to the second bank—Western Loan and Trust—the transfer point of the funds, in another strip mall baking in the Nevada desert, maybe fifteen or twenty miles northwest of the First Desert branch, and I am still vague on exactly why I’m here. I sense it has to do with Dominique’s sleek, slippery, hasty, and presumably untraceable movement of funds—but her purpose and my presence, beyond my “guardianship,” become clearer as we turn into the bright, sun-drenched, largely empty lot.

  “While I make this transfer, I can give you your cut. There’s ten million total. What do you think your cut should be?”

  Suddenly, I get it. Give me my money, my share, and we walk away from one another. We can each start over. Give me my money, so that she and Amanda can get away from me. Sever all ties. No attachment. No regret. No second thoughts. No guilt.

  “I want to be fair,” she says. “Name your figure. But you have about fifteen seconds. We can’t be hanging around here. We have to keep moving. If you can’t come up with a reasonable figure, I’ll come up with it for you.”

  For me, it has nothing to do with the money. And Dominique knows it. And that’s what makes this so insulting, so painful.

  “I’m assuming your original deal was five million. That’s what the Stewartsons would have offered you, fifty-fifty, knowing they’d never share a dime of it with you. They could afford to be fair, since it was only in the abstract. Whereas I am going in there to get you actual money. To transfer to you, in seconds, no shenanigans, straight up. Name your price.”

  What would you say? One million—10 percent, like a commission, a finder’s fee? Two million? It’s all fair, because none of it’s fair, because it’s not what I want.

  What I want is in the backseat. And has nothing to do with money. Love, affection, connection, family. Precisely the things that money can’t buy.

  She looks at me impatiently. I remain silent.

  She gets out of the car. “Then I’ll decide,” she says irritably, frustrated, barely audibly, under her breath.

  She opens Amanda’s door, and opens mine. It looks as if indeed we are needed again for paperwork. This slick and slippery and fluent transfer of funds still requires Amanda. And me, apparently. Or else she just wants to keep an eye on us. Doesn’t want me grabbing Amanda and making off with her. Disappearing cleverly into the little strip mall, or sprinting desperately out into the surrounding desert. Amanda and I follow her in from the hot sun into the cool lobby, air-conditioning whirring with white noise—an insolent, mocking whisper.

  We sit down in a small office with another bank officer, this one an overweight, slow-moving woman with a sweet smile. “We have the paperwork all set for you, Ms. Nuland.” (New land. Terra incognito. Good one, Dominique.) “Thanks for calling ahead to arrange this, makes it so much easier, for you and for us. You just begin with these signatures here.”

  And watching Dominique and the bank officer hunch over the paperwork, I am not even vaguely aware of any other presence, until I see shadows crossing the desk . . .

  Sandi leans toward me. Wiggles her pinky finger at me. Says nothing.

  So she did see it.

  The tip-off.

  The tip of the iceberg.

  Dave is leaning in now too, on the other side of me, whispering in my ear: “We checked the transfer. The money cleared. So your loyalty to Amanda, Chas, your fingertip, your self-sacrifice—we thought it wouldn’t matter. But just to be sure, we doubled around after exiting First Desert. Saw you get in the car with the ‘trust officer.’ And the way you got in, Chas. Clearly you knew her. A prior acquaintanceship, a relationship of some sort. Meaning, you were possibly in on it with her somehow. So we followed you. Thinking maybe it was just your chance for a fresh start. With your daughter, or kid sister, or whatever the hell she is to you. A partial DNA match, after all.”

  So they accessed the same lab results that Dominique did. Probably an easy hack for them.

  “Your excuse, your opportunity, to take Amanda. So go ahead, we figured. Let the authorities come after you. But when we saw you pulling into this bank branch, then we knew. Nothing so purely idealistic. Cash. Wired funds. A trick that was one trick
ahead of us.”

  Tailing us. Old-fashioned detective work. The other kind. The simple kind. As I said: sometimes simpler is better.

  Stewartson stands up from his whispering to me.

  Amanda, Dominique, the plump bank officer, looking on.

  Waiting for the result of all the whispering.

  No one knowing exactly what would happen now.

  The bank officer’s voice quavers, as she stares up at Stewartson, hovering over her. “Maybe I shouldn’t finalize that transfer,” she offers, preemptively cooperative, as in, Please spare me.

  “Maybe not,” Stewartson says.

  NINETEEN

  “Now this is a cozy little grouping, isn’t it?” The Stewartsons are looking at us, and at their handiwork. They’ve secured my wrists to Dominique’s with plastic police ties, faced us away from each other, our four wrists bound together behind us. They’ve shoved us down into a kneeling position. Amanda crouches next to us, untouched, but confused, bewildered—terrified of the Stewartsons and their brutality, but unsure what to do, who to turn to, who to trust, what her connection is to her new mother and new half brother on their knees a couple of hundred yards into the off-road scrub and empty desert. Once Dominique and I were on our knees, I saw Amanda take a tentative step toward Sandi—and saw Sandi push her away. “I’m glad we could organize this family reunion. We should charge a little family-counseling fee. A finder’s fee for bringing you together. Ten million or so? But oh, I guess you don’t have it.” He is slipping the extra police ties into his pockets, double-checking to see that he has all three of our cell phones. “I guess you can’t get at it right now, because of your financial mismanagement. Because you were a little too smart, and moved the money too far ahead of you. And when Wallace’s consigliere here”—gesturing to Dominique—“doesn’t show up with his daughter, Wallace will have the Vegas police out in force to retrieve you.”