Two for the Show

by Jonathan Stone

  So it’s symbiotic. As symbiotic as ever. Which makes any assessment or judgment about love and true feeling a mere side consideration. Need is first. As simple as it is transactional. As defiant of any deeper subtext. He needs us. We need him.

  The detective looks at us. “Anything to say for yourselves? In your own defense? To explain yourselves?”

  Yes. I’m her half brother. This is her mother. But that startling revelation wouldn’t change anything. Oh, it would create a little stir. It would be interesting. It would provide context and explanation. But we still kidnapped her. We still demanded ransom. We still stole her away from her life. Remaining undiscovered. Unknown. Ciphers inputting the data to the Amazing machine.

  So we remain silent. Our customary silence, easy to maintain, and the detective, taking us for hardened professionals (yes, but of a certain kind), mildly disappointed but unsurprised, turns away.

  But not before asking me: “What happened to your finger?”

  The missing fingertip.

  Proof forever that I am a kidnapper.

  An extremely masochistic kidnapper.

  A misinformed kidnapper.

  An incompetent kidnapper.

  But a kidnapper just the same.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Eventually, everyone comes to Vegas.

  Everyone wants to see it at least once. Feel it once. Experience it once. Its institutionalized happiness. A city just for the fun of it. For the thrill of it. For the hell of it. See if it’s really different. But most of all, see if it makes them feel any different. If it takes them outside their own personalities, their familiar selves, if only a little bit, if only for a little while. That’s the secret of Vegas. Its unspoken, misunderstood appeal. Not to escape your own life for a little while, or for a little longer, or forever. No—it’s to escape your own self—for a little while, for a little longer, maybe forever.

  That’s the secret of the Vegas vacation. Vacating your usual perceptions. Vacating your habits. Your previous point of view. For a little while, vacating your self.

  And like twenty thousand people who stream in every day from across the country, a woman shows up among them. She is dressed plainly—print dress, flats, hair up, sunglasses up on her head, ready for the sunshine. Tall, thin, wrinkles on her neck and around her eyes, but former beauty still in evidence. Oversize purse. Roller bag. Moving with the crowd through the airport. Taking the bus into town. Dropping her bag at her hotel. But then, not walking along the strip, looking up at the hotels, watching the fountains, like the thousands of others who arrived with her. No, instead, hopping into a cab, and giving the driver directions he’s rarely heard an out-of-town tourist ask for, if ever, in all his years here. A downtown address. The Las Vegas police station.

  “Welcome to Vegas,” I say to my mother, as she stares at me, silently, through the bars. “Everyone should see it once.”

  And while there are bars between us, that’s the least of our prisons, and we both know it. The setting is as metaphoric as it is real, and that is what renders it surreal.

  For a week now, I have imagined flying back there one more time, confronting her, asking—but not asking, of course, demanding to know—what was it exactly between her and Wallace the Amazing, why had she done this, what are the details of this deal with the devil? And if she understood what she was doing, if she understood the damage she had done, how could she do this to her child?

  But of course, she didn’t know. Or didn’t know at the time. At the time she thought it was the right thing. Security for her son, a place, a career, a way to guarantee that he would not be merely an afterthought, an annoying byproduct, of the man she’d had a liaison with. A way to engage the man, make the boy a part of the man’s life. But the man of course had concocted a way to make the boy a part of his life and keep him away from his life. To put him—me—into a permanent half-life. A ghost life.

  She is silent. But the silence feels entirely familiar. Because there has always been silence. We are separated, but that feels familiar too, because we have always been separated. It is a prison, but that also feels familiar, because we have always been imprisoned—by the agreement, by the “arrangement,” the floating, unwritten, unsigned document, the human codicil between her and Wallace, delivered and agreed to amid circumstances still opaque to me.

  “That locked trunk that we fought over when I left for college,” I say to her quietly. “It’s empty, isn’t it? A big argument over the contents, that big padlock on it for all my years growing up, and it’s always been empty.” Nothing in there. Nothing but whatever I chose to imagine, to create a father out of the one who died in an accident. Nothing but a further note of Wallace the Amazing’s psychological mastery.

  Her silent downward glance confirms the trunk’s emptiness. An emptiness real and metaphoric. What were you thinking? I want to scream. But I know what she was thinking. And she knows I know.

  “Say the word, and I will bring him down,” she says to me now, looking up, eyes narrowed, her prey vivid in her mind. “I can do it. DNA shows that he is your father, that I am your mother, and I will tell the world how he abandoned us. Another celebrity with a buried past. By itself, it’s nothing of course. People magazine stuff. But this celebrity has baggage he can’t shrug off and discard. A past the world won’t be able to brush off and ignore. His whole identity, swiped wholesale from someone else. A complete fake, onstage and off. A young woman, seduced and abandoned as almost a child herself. Say the word, Charles, and I can bring him down for you.”

  I look at her. I don’t say the word. I shrug—unsure, undecided, defeated. I have the sense she knows I won’t “say the word.” That whatever my rage, resentment, fantasies of revenge, sense of justice, she knows it isn’t in my personality to say the word.

  And then her posture of action, of force, of “say the word,” melts away in front of me; her eyes are suddenly soaking, and tears roll silently, plentifully down her cheeks. I instantly remember her weeping from behind the bathroom door. Grief, regret, suppressed and subverted—hiding no more.

  My mother’s small, rounded shoulders heave. Her head hangs, her tears flow, a pained whimper, the burden of all the silent years sluicing through her body. I can’t reach for her, the bars are between us, and it occurs to me that’s exactly what permits her to cry. Experiencing it alone. Safely separated from my sympathy or recrimination. All the suppressed feeling triggered by my presence, but taking responsibility for it alone. I made a mistake. I’m so sorry. I’ve ruined so much for us. I’ve hidden the truth for a lifetime. Two lifetimes—my own, and my only son’s. All the things that could be said, but don’t have to be said, they are so obvious to us both.

  And then—absently wiping her eyes, straightening her spine, drawing a breath—she alters the picture a little, in a way that my imaginings, my scenarios, had not factored in. A way that displaces the midwestern matron, the quiet, safe, exceedingly private, shy woman who raised me. She drops the last (I hope the last, I assume the last) in these two weeks’ series of bombshells, which have pockmarked and torn up the road ahead of me to where its route, even its direction, is unrecognizable.

  “I was with him in the jungle,” she says. Looks at me, gauges my reaction, lets me absorb it for a moment, prepare myself a little for the unexpected, dense path down which she is heading, before she continues. Smiling. “You were conceived in a hammock. Born on the banks of the Amazon. The only white child for a thousand miles.”

  The demure midwestern widow. There is turning out to be much more to her. My sense of being ambushed, my resentment and anger at being kept in the dark, is tempered by my sense of discovery—my innate, professional, detective curiosity.

  She pauses for a moment. Furrows her brow. Thinking, it seems, how to express the next thought. And when she does, I see it is, and she means it as, a summation of Wallace’s life, his philosophy, and his appeal for a c
onventional, impressionable young girl.

  “He followed no rules.” She smiles wistfully. “Saw no boundaries.”

  In the abstract, it sounds ridiculously romantic. Overstated. Except of course, the evidence is overwhelming. The case was consistent over years, over decades, over an entire lifetime. No rules. No boundaries. So he made his own. No rules. No boundaries. It was succinct. It was explanatory.

  Yet he had forced me to live by the strictest set of rules. A tight little box. Organized into a life of unvarying routine, predictability, strictly enforced by my occupation. My only escapes imaginary, temporary, not real.

  “What’s his real name?”

  She smiles softly. “Robert.”

  She said it so sweetly, so quietly, so full of ineffable and long-suppressed connection and emotion, it made the moment all the more painful.

  Real name: Edward Lambent Corder. The name from my painstaking research, now blinking its warning pixels in my anxious imagination.

  I had expected to hear “Edward,” of course. My question had been intended only as confirmation—not to probe whether my mother was finally being truthful, or still respecting some pact, or hiding in some further weave of secrecy. But suddenly, all those questions were opened. And the element of testing her that was hidden in my question, was front and center in her unexpected answer. Was she lying? (Why now?) Or was my Internet research somehow wrong? (Planted there expressly for me?) Or—and this only occurred to me at the moment, from the tonality of her answer—does she not know?

  In the next moment, the human trumped the analytic; motherhood triumphed. Because she must have seen my face fall a little, must have seen the falter, the stutter in my expression, the moment of disappointment, the involuntary blink.

  “Not Edward,” she says with a knowing smile, clearly aware of what I’d been thinking, what I had found in my Internet searching. “Robert.”

  In that simple moment, proving herself in a way that required no more research from me. That let me finally shut off the computer.

  And in that same moment I realize something fundamental about identity. Something simple and profound and undetective-like. It doesn’t matter what his name is. It only matters who HE is. Who he is to her. And to me.

  “Robert,” I repeat. A little crumb, an edge, a tincture of actuality.

  She waits a beat. Looks around at the holding cell behind me, as if aware of it for the first time. As if aware of the world for the first time.

  “The connection was all the more surprising and profound for both of us, considering how the deck was stacked against us to begin with.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I wasn’t just an innocent midwestern girl. Though I was certainly supposed to appear exactly that way to him.”

  I feel my heart accelerate. My stomach feeling queasy.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I had been hired to become his girlfriend. Recruited by the US government.” With irony, with bitterness, muted but not extinguished by the years. “Summoned by my country.”

  I am simply looking at her, while she continues, explaining . . .

  “To be on the inside. Become his lover. Report back . . .”

  “Report back to who?”

  “To the two federal agents who hired me. A man and a woman.”

  No question which man and woman that might be. My heart beats a little faster, the detective’s thrill at the puzzle pieces—intractable, impossible shapes—finally shifting toward one another. But there is a problem of course. A problem of time. My mother was young then . . . she’s now sixty . . .

  “Federal agents?”

  “Very young, good looking, both of them. Newbies. Confident. Freshly recruited themselves to blend in as college kids traveling the Amazon, so not much older than me. Bent on getting their man.” And even as she continues, I am getting an inkling. Las Vegas. City of new beginnings. I feel a first, mild itch of comprehension. Online photos that don’t match the databases. The puzzle starts to take shape. Only more so. Only deeper. “But they made a serious mistake, didn’t they,” my mother says, “a serious miscalculation, when they convinced an impressionable, beautiful nineteen-year-old to go to bed with him. To appear as if she had fallen under his sway. The problem being, I did fall under his sway. He was . . . so . . .” And here she searches the cell, the bars, the ceiling, for the word, and can’t find it, and settles with a shrug for an inadequate substitute. “So everything, I guess, to a nineteen-year-old girl. They feared him, those two agents. But the fear they felt, that was part of his allure for me. I became his girlfriend, all right, just as they hoped, and then so much more than that. His muse. His confidante. His companion. But it was my deceit at first, Charles. I deceived him . . . I was the first deceiver.”

  Perhaps the first deceiver. But not the last. Now I understood why Vegas for the Stewartsons. Why here. And by extension, why me. Vegas. Gambling, prostitution, entertainment . . . and plastic surgery. Radical treatments. The latest techniques. Whatever, however much, you want. Pushing the envelope. The clinics will do anything. Combining it with vitamins, pharmaceuticals, the latest unapproved unlicensed breakthroughs in extending youth and strength. Ground zero for the shadowy, quasi-scientific, anti-aging industry.

  The strange animal vigor of the Stewartsons. That odd, pasted-on, eternal look of theirs. The strange, eerie, indefinable angularity I saw in their faces. Taut skin, bulging eyes. Their appearance struck me only as odd, vaguely disconcerting. Part and parcel of their sense of menace and threat.

  I am so naive—so disconnected, so closed off in my online existence—it had never even occurred to me. And in fairness, I always saw them only glancingly at first—tracking them from far behind, ambushed by them in my condo at night and Debbie’s apartment at night as well, shades always cautiously drawn, tied up in darkness after a disorienting blow to the head, light purposely low, and then dark motel rooms and hideout, also kept cautiously dark. Never a single full-on, well-lit view, as I thought about it, until the bank meetings. As our furtive existence had worked so well for hiding my own fingertip, it had worked for hiding the freshness of their identities.

  It went back to the very beginning, didn’t it? No wonder I’d been confused by the online photos of the original Dave and the fake Dave. No wonder my original research was so flawed, why the data was so contradictory, made no sense. Because “Dave” and “Sandi” were different. Different, even, from their own previous selves. Had new, different faces. Photo cross-referencing doesn’t work, with new, different faces. That indefinable, floating otherness emanating from their hands, in their eyes. You idiot—it was an otherness.

  And simply assuming that the shriveled-up ghost I rescued from the motel bathroom was the real Dave—living with him, nursing him back to health—until he turned out to be Archer Wallace. Showing me once more, proving again, how wrong I could be. How fallible, how vulnerable, are my own assumptions and perceptions.

  Being so certain that Amanda was my daughter. The obvious inheritance of my features, my aptitudes, even my gait. All calling out so loudly to the world. Yet Amanda is not my daughter—misconstruing that one too.

  Shame, incompetence, frustration, humiliation, swirl around me, grim themes rising up thickly, threatening to smother me. I’d been locked in a room at a computer screen for twenty years. Yes, ironically, doing detective work. But not a real detective. No experience in real life, a lack of human interaction, a lack of common sense, no feel for people or the rhythm of the street or life as it’s actually lived. In fact, the very opposite of a detective. Sheltered, cut off, isolated, and therefore, probably, the least qualified detective in the world. A detective who never detected anything amiss in the myth of his father, the absence of his mother, or in the odd features of his shadowy antagonistic partners.

  The strength I felt in Dave Stewartson’s grip. The athleticism in Sandi Stewar
tson pinning me down. The obsessive physicality, the relentless training that was no doubt a subculture, if not a mandate, of federal operatives like them. (And certainly their law enforcement network had helped direct them, back channel, to the sharpest shadowy “doctors” and “trainers.”) A youth and fitness obsession that would let them continue their other obsession:

  Pursuing the Amazing Wallace. Across America, across careers and occupations, across time itself. Were they trying to redeem themselves? They had screwed it up the first time, hiring an impressionable young girl as their insider—never predicting how hard, how fully, she would fall for him. Was this the crazy reach of their obsession? Trying to reorient, upend, time itself? No wonder they had been so brazen and confident standing up in the audience at that night’s performance. Because they looked, they felt, completely, safely new.

  The plastic surgery, the workouts, the gym—they had actually tried to cross time in pursuit of their man. My God—that was sticking to the case, that was dedication. They had false identities, but they were real detectives. I was merely a pale, ghostly, imitation.

  And time was, in a sense, collapsing around me as well, becoming newly fluid . . . an unwanted jungle birth revealed for the first time . . . twenty years in front of a computer screen reduced to a blink of stunned rage . . . a plane trip into the fracturing past . . . and the Stewartsons’ surgeries now amplifying that collapse . . .

  Ceasing to exist—quite a trick, Dave and Sandi. Erasing your former life, creating an alternate identity, right down to faces and muscles and rejuvenated vitality. I felt, in my years of behind-the-scenes dutiful silence and shadow, that I had ceased to exist. But I was apparently a rank amateur. The Stewartsons, once again, were the pros.

  Oddly, obliquely, the Stewartsons had a lesson for me here: When it comes to ceasing to exist, the only way to fully accomplish the job, is to forge a new existence. Wasn’t that now the next step for me?