Two for the Show

by Jonathan Stone

And inspired perhaps by the thoroughness of Dave and Sandi’s deception, a startling question suddenly occurs to me:

  “Did you ever tell Robert . . . about the agents? About who you really were? What you were really doing there?”

  She pauses. Shakes her head. “I never said a word.” She looks at me, eyes imploring. “But come on—what’s a naive nineteen-year-old midwestern girl doing in the middle of the South American jungle? It’s ridiculous. It’s transparent. He must have known.”

  Yes, agreed. The idea of Wallace not knowing, being fooled, seemed so remote. “Maybe you weren’t fooling him at all. Maybe his eyes were wide open. And if the deception failed, then there was no deception.” And he fell for you, Mother, honestly, fully, naturally.

  “Maybe,” she concedes. But clearly doesn’t believe it. Or at least, still doesn’t know.

  Like mother, like son.

  A legacy of deceit.

  The fact that I was actually conceived in deceit.

  And went on to live a life confined by, defined by, deceit. Practiced a profession of deceit. It’s too much to take in. So I push it away, retreat from it, by pressing on with my detective questions . . .

  “Why did they recruit you for this? What were they afraid of with this guy?”

  “What were they afraid of?” She smiles a little here. She has obviously thought about it. “Well, they weren’t about to tell a nineteen-year-old girl what they were afraid of. They weren’t about to entrust me with that . . .”

  And here it is again—the brick wall, the bottomless pool, the sudden amorphous expansion, a lone detective against the shape-shifting and unknowable. The resolutely unsolvable—tantalizing and taunting forever. Reminding the naive, earnest detective of lesson one: the limits of detection. I could even imagine a scenario in which the government itself did not know. Had no full clear record of its investigation or intent. Had lost its original purpose in paperwork, in bureaucracy, as if intentionally, so there could never be an answer. It reverberated, didn’t it, with the dark, always lurking, existential risk of all detective work: the unsolved murder, the cold case, the crime still in the files. The fruitless search for motive. The immense, teleological, itch-you-raw theme, of not knowing. Of never knowing.

  “So all you have is my guess”—she shrugs—“and my guess is: everything. They were afraid of everything. A government’s paranoia and suspicion. They didn’t know what to be afraid of first. The cult of it. Mind control. He was on friendly terms with local rebel factions. Shared jungle with them. That’s probably why the Feds first got involved. Plus there were drugs coming from that region, some unstudied, uncategorized hallucinogens grown in the jungle flora, then smuggled north. So, a cult, rebels, civil war, drugs. In the eyes of the state, a perfect storm, I guess. All personified, I suppose, in a powerful, charismatic young man outside his country. Outside its laws and institutions. Outside its norms. But what were the specific reasons for pursuing him? The official excuse or version? They wouldn’t tell me. I’ll never know. I only had my little job. Which I obviously blew.”

  The government. Drawn to the power. Both believing it and doubting it. Loving it and despising it. It occurred to me: just like a Vegas audience.

  The government. Finding the magic riveting. Attention-getting. And wondering, I’ll bet, How can we use it? How can we profit from it? Just like Big Eddie.

  But the real point being, that was all only her guess. A guess from when she was nineteen. We’d never know for sure.

  I look at her. On the one hand, a collaborator, recruited to deceive. And then practiced enough in deceit to deceive her son with a fake father. With a fake past. But then again, pushed into it to begin with. Only nineteen. Barely older than Amanda.

  “But this isn’t about Robert,” I say—stumbling, choking a little on the name. On its unfamiliarity. “This is about you and me.”

  I am spending the first honest moments with my mother. We both know it. As we both know we are bound by a lie, an enormous, stupefying, silently kept, wildly successful lie. In which we are complicit. For my part, unwittingly until now, but still, implicated, a participant. The amazing lie of the Amazing Wallace.

  I am feeling, not fully consciously but in my bones, the profound tie of mother and son. It is inescapable, a golden braid, a reassuring wrap that binds you tight perhaps in support but perhaps a noose, with strands—thousands of strands twisted together inextricably—that you cannot completely escape. It shapes you so profoundly you can’t get perspective enough to see it, but as you grow, you catch glimpses of the connection, of its shape and form that have shaped and formed you so thoroughly. The little perspective you can get, is only in realizing it, only comes from experiencing the tie more profoundly.

  “When were you going to tell me this? Any of this?”

  “I wasn’t going to. Ever. But to pile deceit on deceit after your visit . . . when you were so clearly pained, and hurting, and confused.” Her eyes moisten again, with fresh tears. I picture her once more, crying quietly behind the bathroom door on my unexpected trip home, trying to hide the truth from me.

  She shakes her head. She couldn’t bear it. She came to Vegas.

  The moist denseness of the Amazonian jungle versus the aridity of the Las Vegas desert. Climatological opposites that stir up, inspire metaphor. The thickness, the intrigue, the teeming life, the rampant biology, versus the simplicity, the sterility, the bright cloudless predictability. Lushness, sap dripping, flora and fauna variegate and profligate and intermingled and indiscriminate, an essence and aroma of fecundity, growth, reproduction, birth, beginnings. Compared with this spare, stark, sand and dust—a place teeming with nothing. With only the barest, sparest elements—sand, rock, wind, air, incidental struggling flora only a reminder of the spareness surrounding it; a reminder of the struggle. Was this a contrast, a natural opposition, that I was exaggerating in my own mind, to bring a theme to it? Certainly I was trying to bring meaning to their time in the Amazon together. Had he learned something there, some secret with which he could fertilize the desert? Was there something genuinely instructive, revealing, in these opposites?

  I have a little flash of insight: they are the two extreme settings of religious experience. The jungle, where man confronts the primitive, the untamed. And the desert, where prophets seek, confront, reckon with God. Seeking nature, inhabiting Eden, looking for the heart and richness of life. Versus seeking God, reckoning with the eternal, with the meaning of life. Cults set themselves up in both. From the tribes of Abraham to those of Joseph Smith, the desert is a holy place. From ancient times, the birth and cradle of civilization. The jungle has hosted the rise of the species—and the desert has been its place of reckoning.

  And another little observation: a corollary of my “religious” insight. Another embarrassing little commonality of mother and son: Her relationship with Wallace centered on worship. On idolatry. On being swept up. On believing. Just like her naive, foolish son’s has. Like mother, like son—once again. We had both experienced, a generation apart, our own bit of religious conversion, being “born again” to a knowing almighty.

  And wasn’t it, in a way, another stage show? Like Wallace’s Vegas act, like my mother’s funeral, like my deposit of semen, another show? This show staged amateurishly by two hopeful, naive producers working for the government, and starring a young and even more naive midwestern girl. The stage show of my mother’s love for my father. And just like Wallace’s act, a scam.

  And where exactly did the show go wrong? The plan for my mother to supply information (just like me, an information purveyor—once again, like mother like son, another unsuspected repetition, another echo). Information for a paranoid/nervous, dutiful/anxious government; information to protect their citizenry, information they collect and store but cannot sift or analyze; information for its own sake; information simply so that they have it.

  I realize with a sin
king feeling the precise moment it probably went wrong—with me. It went wrong at the moment my mother got pregnant. A simple, overly cooperative and dutiful midwestern girl, suddenly had connection, had meaning to her life. It was no longer an exercise. No longer a game. Her loyalty inevitably shifted at some level, from her shadowy employers to the charismatic father of her child. In effect, I was the reason that the Stewartsons had failed in their mission.

  Irony? Inevitability? Circularity? Connection? Any and all of the above?

  And the prospect of a child both tied them to each other and pulled them apart, drove a wedge between them. She could sense his fear that it would slow him down, hold him back, compromise his extraordinary, singular life. So did they make some kind of arrangement, reach some dark understanding?

  An inauspicious beginning for any kid.

  For this kid.

  Abruptly my mother stands.

  “Your bond’s been paid.” She smiles. “Your mother has come to the police station and bailed you out.” Like it’s a shoplifting charge or a speeding ticket or disorderly conduct or underage drinking in the park. “You’re free to leave.” Looking. “With me, or without me.”

  She had waited to tell me—left me behind bars long enough to tell me the story. Maybe she felt safer that way. Felt that I might leap for her and strangle her if there was no barrier between us. Or now maybe she is willing to remove the bars, and willing for me to strangle her, because she has at last told the story—her version of it, anyway—and at least now I know.

  To put a true sense of release into my release.

  She reiterates her offer. It has about it the gently warning tone of one last chance. “I can tell them everything—bring him down.” She alone has the power to do it, I realize. But toward what end? What would it achieve now? Getting even . . . why? . . . for what? We have shared loss. And perhaps because of that, my fury has subsided.

  The guards materialize as if on cue. Buttons are pushed. Locks are clicked. Steel shifts, adjusts audibly.

  “You’re free to go,” says one of the guards.

  Free to go? Oh, I wouldn’t say that.

  And though she has made the joke about a mother coming to bail out her son, I know, by the weight of the charges, that my release has little to do with my mother’s sudden, near-magical materialization, and everything to do with Wallace’s local influence. His contacts. His popularity. His persuasiveness. He has somehow managed to get any kidnapping charges dismissed. Perhaps by convincing the police that we must have been victims of the Stewartsons. That the e-mail and threats all came from them. That we—whoever we were—were merely being used. Perhaps he pointed the police to the Internet, where they found no criminal record from either of us—in fact little record at all—yet a long trail of criminal behavior and shifting identity and identity theft from these “Stewartsons.” They were the real culprits and masterminds; we were clearly pawns. He must have convinced them of something along these lines, because as I walk past Dominique’s holding cell—I’ve been so absorbed by my mother’s presence, by her story, I haven’t even thought about Dominique—I see her cell is already empty.

  He needs us back at our posts—and he knows we will go there, that we have no choice, that this is the unspoken, implicit cell-block deal we have struck with him for our release. This is Las Vegas, and he is an entertainer. And periodically, in certain cultural places, at certain cultural times, entertainment trumps law. Entertainment trumps everything.

  We are destined—Dominique and I—to continue sharing his life.

  Sharing his world.

  Sharing his magic.

  Delivering it daily, nightly.

  Sharing, as it turns out, his pain and loss as well.

  Because Amanda is gone.

  Disappeared, of her own volition. Sightings occasionally. A trail of her movement, enough to indicate that she is on her own, and that Dominique and I have nothing to do with, are no longer responsible for, her absence. But no communication. Nothing definitive. Elusive. Somewhere out there. Starting over.

  A new name? A new identity? (That’s all I can assume, since I could never find her with all my online intelligence.)

  Reimagining herself. Remaking herself.

  Just like her dad.

  Was she somewhere, somehow, still in Vegas?

  Or anywhere but?

  That clever fifteen-year-old. Brave, self-possessed, quick witted. Whom I had grown in just days, in just hours, to love and admire.

  An absence, a punishment, the three of us are fated to share. Her father, her half brother, her biological mother.

  Amanda, gone.

  I see her still, striding out across the desert away from me, just as her dad strode out across the desert away from Eddie’s thugs. Yes. Same blood. Same DNA. Same step, same stride, nonchalant yet purposeful. An eerie behavioral echo. Like father, like daughter.

  I stride too. Out of lockup. Out into the dry desert air, the breeze steady, low, a hum, as if dutifully sweeping away the recent past.

  But it cannot so easily sweep away mine.

  Because my mother is beside me—and I don’t quite know what to do with her, as she doesn’t quite know what to do with me. There is an anxious, tentative, ill-defined sensation hanging between us. Here in the desert—mythic land of whole civilizations’ beginnings and endings, of fresh starts and inviolate finalities, is this a start for us, or an end? Is our destiny before us, or pushing us from behind?

  Like mother, like son.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The lights drop low. The audience hushes. There is a pause of silence—eerie, anticipatory.

  “Connection. It is all connection. More than we know. More than we understand. And as you all know from the news reports of the kidnappers’ capture, I have been the beneficiary of those connections.”

  Going to his knees. Crouching as if in worship of a god, this man who is his own god, so it is more startling, more moving, more convincing, more compelling, than any tent show, this god-man going to his knees in recognition if not of God than of some higher force at least. And yet this god-fearing audience accepts it. Doesn’t question it. Going to his knees in gratitude, prayerfully.

  “You know from the news reports, my daughter’s been found. You all had a role in bringing her back to me. My daughter is okay, thank God. I have my family back. We are back together, and we can go on. Thanks to all of you.”

  The audience erupts. Chaos. A happy bedlam. A rush of affection, of bonding, of love, chaotic and massive and inimitable, idealized and immense and unique and unprecedented and lofty and transformational.

  A useful lie. Let the world think Amanda is recovering quietly, privately, at home. No visitors, please. A bit of magic so easy for a magician to manage. A bit of absence so simple for a lord of identities—present and absent—to master. Let the dream continue. Who’s ever going to know?

  I have circled Debbie’s house for hours. No lights. No car. No sign. And I can tell without even looking in the windows, without ever letting myself in to see, that it is empty. She is gone. It was too much for her, too strange, too frightening, too confusing, too dark, too troubled, too wrong. So she has backed away. Has silently (yet loudly, the painful fact pounding and pulsing in my ears) disappeared. I was once the ghostly one, unknown, unknowable. Now she is the ghost. As if to turn the tables on me, show me how it feels. An uncanny echo of Amanda receding across the landscape, a repetition humming in my soul, she has “deserted” me. And I am clearly not invited to turn to my array of detective tricks to find her. And what would be the point? Her silence is deafening. Her message is clear.

  The camera goes close on Wallace the Amazing, and I can see the considerable mist in his eyes. I have watched him for more than twenty years now, and I could not say if those tears were real or not. Probably he couldn’t either. And anyway, what does “real tears” mean e
xactly? This is Vegas.

  I deliver the next night’s digital packet.

  It’s a family business.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The lights drop low. The audience hushes. There is a pause of silence—eerie, anticipatory.

  I step onto the stage one more time, to conclude the magic act that you—faithful, or skeptical, but rapt audience member—have been so closely observing.

  The Vegas act in which I have conjured up a secret assistant, and his past, and his story.

  You feel a little dizzy? Well, that’s a sign of good magic. An engaging show always makes heads spin a little.

  And throughout I have called myself Wallace the Amazing because, as you remember (perhaps with this little bit of prompting), I hadn’t yet decided—and still haven’t—what readership, what audience, this account will have. Whether for public consumption, or a private, personal record, meant only for distant posterity. (Remember now? I’m sure you do. When I wrote, as if nonchalantly, I don’t know, let’s call him Wallace the Amazing. Weren’t you a little suspicious right there? Didn’t something seem a little off?)

  And the unenviable, tormented Chas? Did he seem real to you? Did all this seem like exactly the document “he” promised? I hope so. I assume so.

  But now the show is over, and it is time to pull the curtain closed. (Or open?) Time to head offstage. (Or onstage, for my final bow?)

  Time to let you come forward in the emptying theater. To inspect the proscenium, glance into the wings, catch a glimpse “behind the scenes” before you too exit.

  Time now, not just to read, but to ponder this entire document, left (unwisely, impulsively) in the possession of the Las Vegas police. (Meaning, of course, the entire document up to these words, up to but not including this last chapter that you’re now reading, which has obviously come later.)

  The manuscript dropped off, I’m told, by a bent-over, ghostly looking specimen, barely noticed, a mere shell of personhood, emaciated, hauntingly pale, but eyes alive, leaving it at the front desk, exiting without a word, never announcing himself, they said. But the desk sergeant remembers the wraith smiling wryly at the sign-in log and carefully signing it—mysteriously, defiantly, and I would argue insanely—with the name Archer Wallace.