Two for the Show

by Jonathan Stone

  I informed the police captain that I have dealt with these charlatans my whole life. How my purposely scant early biography (part of my persona, part of my act) seems to encourage a steady trickle of these daft souls—some of them con artists and operators, but some who seem to truly believe it of themselves—who periodically come forward, claiming to be me, angling for some part of my fortune and success. I’ve dealt with them all my professional years. This assortment of nuts that I’ve consolidated into one person, one personality, for the purposes of this account.

  But this particular nut must have had access to my home, and access to my personal effects, to my “magic” (which, you presume, isn’t really magic). Someone clearly intent on bringing it all down. This person, it would seem only logical to assume, if he was able to break into my home that night to take Amanda, was probably the same one who had broken in earlier (these nuts are persistent, fixated, monomaniacal) and had taken the manuscript—a manuscript that I was, as you can readily understand, too embarrassed to report stolen. And having read it, he (whoever he actually is) was clearly inspired to execute the deed in reality—to actually kidnap Amanda—turning my fantasy of father/daughter drama, my literary experiment in heightened horror, my speculative staging of an idea for my act, into reality. Using my telling as a template to actually kidnap her, in order to shake me down, just as my manuscript suggests—and then, even signing the police logbook as “Archer Wallace.” A nice little annoying flourish. Touché.

  Turning my own vivid imagination against me. Delivering to the police the evidence of my planning and my complicity. A perfect trap, he must have thought.

  Alerted to the theft (which the police assumed had just occurred), I stopped into the police station to reclaim the manuscript. I’m fortunate to have so many friends on the Las Vegas police force that they would call me immediately. I have informed them—have had to admit, guiltily, sheepishly—that, yes, these pages are mine.

  Embarrassing? Of course. I’m sure the police have read at least some of it. Though likely not much of it, categorizing it right away as private, personal, a magic act prop they do not fully understand, and a story related by an obviously fictional narrator. And in any case, they have not seen this final chapter that you are now reading, which was not yet attached, because it was not yet written—I hadn’t yet gotten to it. But now, obviously—newly motivated to finish—now, finally, I have.

  A confessional document? Yes, of a kind (we’ll get to that shortly)—but here, in the last chapter, the magic is revealed. The story is transformed. Inspiring the oohs and aahs that a Vegas audience, that any audience, wants.

  The first job of a magician is to know his audience, of course, and I know you very well: You feel I am trying to take away Chas’s past. To erase him. Yet another theft of identity from Wallace the Amazing. That would be in my nature, you say. That might even be the deal I struck with Chas, yes? Erasing him once more, in order to give him his old job back.

  But isn’t that what you think simply because you have lived with the earnest, brooding, troubled, pitiable “Chas” for a couple of hundred pages? That’s how magic works. Create a convincing universe, inhabit it, populate it, command it to come alive, make it indubitable. That’s just the practice of magic. Just a signpost of mastery. And the surprise, the real magic, is that Chas never existed. Well, that’s not fair—exists, yes, but only in the pages of this document, this elaborately detailed, but severely angled “explanation” of my act and life.

  You feel I am trying to take him away, don’t you? Delete him with one last trick? Make him disappear from the stage? Cast away his entire existence? But can an existence be so tenuous to begin with, that I can erase it within one document? Erase it by merely altering its final moments, its final breaths? Ask yourself: is an existence that fragile really an existence at all?

  And be practical. Be skeptical. Does it seem at all realistic that I could find this perfectly qualified kid and then so elaborately arrange, with a funeral, with obituaries, with other tricks, his isolation from normal life, in order to serve me for over twenty years, for both of our working lifetimes?

  Or isn’t it far more likely that I have created him as a way to protect myself, by telling my own story under the cover of this poor, made-up, hard-working drone.

  Admit it—hasn’t the whole story strained credulity for you? Lying fathers, lying mothers, a concocted funeral, all the rest of it—but that’s what makes audiences gasp. What makes you pay attention. I always push the edge of the envelope.

  Doesn’t it all feel suspiciously biblical? Progeny and offspring, loyalty, disloyalty, half brothers and half sisters and tangled relationships, and at their center a dominant, domineering male figure, godlike. Omniscient, as it turns out. Set in the desert. All a story? All meant to bring down this false god?

  But if biblical in themes, the opposite in scope. Just a strange, sordid, sorrowful little tale of heartland America. Unwanted teenage pregnancy. Dad shirking his fatherly duties to seek his fortune. Mom wanting to secure a better life for her out-of-wedlock child. They strike a deal. I’ll keep your son a secret, as long as you stand by him, she says. How American—to strike a deal.

  And now you must be the detective. You must say whether I have conjured this entirely. Made up this life, this career, recorded it safely from the angled point of view of a tormented employee, in order to have it both ways, and this is the important point—to tell my tale, reveal the secrets of Wallace the Amazing, and yet protect those secrets for a little while longer. In order, yes, to ultimately finish off this false prophet, this larger-than-reality personality, this Amazing Wallace—but only when the right time comes. Meaning, a time of my choosing. When I want. To amaze you one final time, and then escape, exit in a flutter of curtain and cape.

  You must conclude your investigation. (You see? Staying with my manuscript’s “detective” theme.) You must make the judgment.

  It’s a simple question, in the end. (Meaning, simple to pose. Not simple to answer.)

  Have I created the detective?

  Or has the detective—dutifully writing this himself—“created” me?

  (Revealed me, “conjured” me, brought me fully and believably to life?)

  Or, as you probably suspect, are both my “creations?” The unknown detective and the celebrated mentalist? Are we really one and the same? Two figures carrying forward the same story? Certainly it fits with the theme of identity, doesn’t it? Its fluidity, its mutability, its unpredictability. Is the creation of “Chas” alongside me, a way I can safely reveal my own stage tricks and techniques—as well as my own loneliness and isolation, my own thoughts, my own actual past, that “Chas” has so diligently unearthed?

  Or—even simpler—is this document just a way to tell the story of my son? The son who for practical and professional reasons I cannot be close to? Who I cannot spend even a moment with? Who I cannot risk revealing? Who I cannot speak to directly, who I can never hug or even touch? So telling his story like this is the best I can do. Is the only way to be close to him. The only way to show him that I know who he is, that I understand his suffering, that I thoroughly comprehend his life. That I have understood it, and shared in it, and absorbed it, more than he knows.

  So is this document a way to record the truth, to create a record, that nevertheless admits nothing? That lets the show continue.

  Until I say it stops. Not someone else. My decision. Me.

  (And do you hear in my tone just now anger and arrogance? Or confidence and clarity, an unwavering sense of mission and self?)

  And however much you may now feel upended or ambushed in your view of this account—however unmoored you now feel in comprehending what you’ve read—you can certainly understand (you’ve noticed throughout, I hope) how I inhabit this strange space, dance on this strange edge between the seen and the unseen. Between the worldly and comprehensible, and the otherworldly
and inexplicable. It’s not a place anyone else inhabits, so I must inhabit and negotiate it alone, and that is why I both hide and reveal myself here, in this document, continuing to balance on that edge, poised between the knowable and the unknowable. Between what is comprehensible in ordinary life, and what is not—which, after all, is part of ordinary life as well.

  The clues were there for you, after all, right from the opening curtain (to which we now return, full circle, to create an artful, reverberating ending):

  It’s the strangest job you’ve ever heard of. Remember? My opening line? My compelling entrance?

  Yes, the strangest job you’ve never heard of. Because it doesn’t exist.

  Because the act of revelation—of a long tortuous look behind the curtain—is only a further act of magic, to convince and persuade you.

  And credit card purchase records, Internet research, old-fashioned detective work—that’s how you would do such a nightly trick of telepathy. How anyone could do it. Anyone smart enough, skilled enough, careful enough. Logical explanation, for you who seem to insist on logic. Ye of little faith . . .

  It’s how you would do it . . .

  If you were not a shaman.

  If you did not have years of training, from jungle to desert.

  If you were not a mind reader.

  If you could not conjure worlds, shape perceptions, as I have shaped yours . . .

  If you still clung to previous identities—like Edward, or Robert—identities that were merely intermediate, part of the tale, but are now irrelevant, small, conventional, meaningless way stations when only one identity has come to matter.

  That of . . .

  Wallace the Amazing

  TWENTY-FOUR

  That is the trick I’m offering to Wallace the Amazing.

  That is the escape.

  That is the compromise.

  And I will convince the white-haired, withered, real Archer Wallace to drop off this document at the Las Vegas police station—which he will do gladly, eagerly, since it will expose and reveal Wallace the Amazing at last. Archer Wallace, who a landscaping crew heard screaming for help, finding him chained to a radiator in an unoccupied house whose yard they maintain.

  He will be dropping it off, of course, without this final chapter.

  And without the previous chapter.

  Which I will deliver separately, at the same time, to Wallace the Amazing. The chapter you just read, the chapter that erases my existence, the one that imputes all powers to him, the one that proposes it is all merely one more ingeniously disguised, well-executed performance of his own.

  I will deliver it to him, as I deliver him everything. Once more doing the work for him, behind the scenes, delivering the materials he needs to maintain the illusion, to “do the show.”

  Is it blackmail? Yes, since the document—except for that last chapter—will already be at the police station. Hopefully, he’ll have little choice but to add that chapter to it, to go with my proposed version of events. And why not—that chapter will solve the “problem” of my confession. Will erase it. The police will easily believe that the document was stolen from his desk in Shangri-la. That it was one more “trick” he was working on.

  (After all, didn’t you? For a moment, anyway? Magic needs to be magical only for an instant. It’s the opposite of a “trick”—it’s the brief moment when you think it’s not a trick. When you experience the impossible, the irrational, and momentarily believe it.)

  The truth as blackmail. An odd concept, in a way—the truth as a lever of criminality. But a long, illustrious history, after all. Do what I want, or I’ll reveal the truth. Since time immemorial, the truth has been unwelcome.

  Simply blackmail? One final instance of blackmail in a story filled with it? The longest blackmail note in the world?

  But I hope he doesn’t see it as blackmail.

  I hope he sees it for what it really is: A plea.

  To let me go.

  To release me.

  To let me start my own life, out of the shadows.

  To release me from my servitude, by erasing my existence the rest of the way, leaving his magic and his myth intact.

  Will he let me? Will he do it?

  Or is this effort too little, too late?

  Is it too transparent? Too Vegas? Too much of a trick?

  Will he do it for his son?

  Knowing in his heart, I am certain, why I want it, why I need it:

  To search for Amanda. My sister. His daughter.

  And to find Debbie.

  Debbie, who is outside all of this mess. Debbie, who represents the future. Who is my chance to go forward. To connect truly, authentically, to rejoin the wider world, and no longer be tied only to the weighty, twisted bonds of the past.

  I’ll find them. I’ll find them both.

  Because I am—because I can finally be—a detective.

  Will he do it?

  Will it work?

  One more trick from him?

  One last trick from me?

  One last moment of our strange dance of antagonism and collaboration, of love and hate?

  Will he accept this solution?

  Will he let me go?

  We shall see.

  Yours truly,

  Charles “Chas” Stanton

  About the Author

  Photograph courtesy of the author

  Jonathan Stone writes his books on the commuter train between his home in Connecticut and his advertising job in midtown Manhattan, where he has honed his writing skills by creating smart and classic campaigns for high-level brands such as Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, and Mitsubishi. Stone’s first mystery-thriller series, the Julian Palmer books, won critical acclaim and was hailed as “stunning” and “risk-taking” in starred reviews by Publishers Weekly. He earned glowing praise for his novel The Cold Truth from the New York Times, who called it “bone-chilling.” He is also the recipient of a Claymore Award for best unpublished crime novel and a graduate of Yale University, where he was a Scholar of the House in fiction writing. He is also the author of The Teller, Moving Day, The Heat of Lies, Breakthrough, and Parting Shot.