Skillful Death

by Ike Hamill

  People have tried this approach before. It never works. We’ll get some professed psychic who has a plan to get his test televised. They show up at the office with a video crew in tow and they always have very complex requirements for the testing. My goal is simple. I want to prove that they’re fakes as quickly and quietly as possible. I get enough hacks. I don’t need every fortune-hunter showing up at the door.

  Even if there’s video of the entire test, nobody will want to air it. It’s like all the TV networks have decided not to show video of scientific tests. They’ll put on a million series about people who hunt ghosts, but TV is allergic to double-blind studies. If that is Ted’s plan, then he hasn’t done his homework. Nobody has ever gotten much exposure from being tested for our prize.

  I sip my coffee, trying to finish it before it gets so cold that the fake creamer balls up. Ted is finally settled. It looks like he might be drifting back into dreamland. He’s not out for five minutes before his phone makes that sound again. Supposedly, Ted is dropping right back into a dream. It seems unlikely, given how restless he was just seconds ago, but I lean forward and stare at the screen like a teenager watching porn. I don’t know what I’m looking for—his fingers moving in his sleep maybe?

  Another email pops up on my laptop. The subject is “Dream email” and the body says, “Shoddy=longer staple than mungo.”

  Time for a polygraph.

  I pull out a suitcase from my closet. It holds the machine and straps and accessories. Then I go to fetch Ted. I shake him awake and drag him back into the chair in front of my desk. I have him hooked up to the sensors while his eyes are still blinking away sleep.

  “What are we doing?”

  “We’re going to do a polygraph. You’re familiar?”

  “They don’t work,” he says.

  “The results are not dependable, especially when the test is executed by an under-trained operator. I’m a highly trained operator, with hundreds of hours of experience, and an impeccable track record. What’s your name?”

  I set my baseline with an endless stream of questions. The machine records the audio and readings, and I type notes into the log, annotating each question and answer. Gradually, I start to mix in questions about the dream emails. His answers about the emails look pretty clean. To my eye, there’s no deception regarding them. This means he didn’t use a computer or other technology to send the emails to me while he was awake.

  “Did you communicate the facts I told you to another party so they could send me those emails?” I ask.

  “No,” he says. I stare at the log for several seconds, not believing the results. He should be lying, but the readings say he’s not.

  “Who sent me those emails?”

  “Me,” he says. A tiny blip shows, but no more than when he told me his name. A lot of people show this same bump in their readings when you ask them about their identity or agency. I think of it as a tiny schism between id and ego.

  “Did you send me those emails from your dream?” I ask.

  “Yes,” he says, but this time there’s a jump. He’s lying.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Ted.” Bump.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Ted.” Bump.

  “Last name?”

  “Jointer,” he says. No bump.

  “Full name?”

  “Ted Jointer.” Bump.

  “Who sent me those emails?”

  “Me.” Bump.

  “Did someone else send them?”

  “No,” he says. No bump.

  What the hell? He’s not sure who he is, or whether he sent the emails, but he’s damn sure that nobody else did. This is starting to feel like a logic puzzle, like the ones I’m always listening to on podcasts. My brain starts to spin up a chart comparing his answers to all the possible scenarios. Down the left side, I’m thinking of the list of questions about his identity and the activities of the night. Across the top, I imagine all the scams and weirdos I’ve experienced through the years: sleight of hand, master liars, implanted wireless communications devices, schizophrenia, eidetic memorizers, and just plain crazies. On my spreadsheet, there’s only one column with any checkmarks. It’s the “just plain crazy” one. How else can I explain the night’s events compared to this man’s answers?

  I explained the facts I wanted emailed, they showed up in my inbox, and this guy never touched a computer and never left my sight. How can he tell the lie detector that he didn’t communicate the facts to anyone else and still pass the test?

  But wait, did he never leave my sight? I did send him into the bathroom.

  “Go back in the other room for a minute,” I say to Ted.

  He sighs, rolls his eyes, and then begins plucking the sensors and straps from his body. I have to help him unbuckle the chest strap and then he goes back to the sleeping closet.

  I sit back and pull my little laptop to my lap. The building’s security cameras are only accessible from one of the machines down on the desk in the lobby. To get into those, you have to know the password that they change on a monthly basis. None of the guards are allowed to write down the password and leave it in the desk. The manager thinks that writing down a password will compromise its integrity, so he makes the guards memorize it. One of the guards, Jessie, can’t remember shit. He always emails the password to himself. Like I said, I’m no computer expert, but I know how to capture unencrypted port twenty-five traffic. Within a few minutes I’ve scoured the logs, come up with the latest password, and remotely logged in to the primary security computer. The lobby’s video feeds flicker across my screen as I review the day’s recordings.

  I find what I’m looking for. Ted arrives, leaves, arrives, leaves, arrives, leaves, arrives. He goes in and out of the lobby again and again. Each time, he only stays a couple of minutes. The guard watches him log in and out of the guest register. It’s an office building. Stranger things have happened than a guy who makes several trips back and forth to his destination. It might have tripped the guard’s curiosity, but not enough to actually do anything.

  I watch the videos three times before I notice the trick. On his third trip, Ted arrives twice. He enters the lobby, signs in, and goes to the elevators. A couple of minutes later, instead of leaving, he arrives again, signs in, and goes to the elevators. Either he found another way out, or there are two Teds in the building at that point. I’m betting on the latter.

  When I enter the little room with the bed, Ted is sitting on the edge of the bed tying his shoelaces.

  “Giving up?” I ask.

  He doesn’t answer.

  “You ready for another round of polygraph?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “But I have more questions.”

  He shrugs and slips an arm into his dress shirt.

  “Who’s older?” I ask.

  That question stops him.

  “What?” he asks.

  “Who’s older? You or your brother?”

  “I don’t have a brother.”

  “You do,” I say. “A twin, in fact.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “I’m not. You might be, but I’m not,” I tell him. He has a twin, I’m positive, but he might be unaware of that fact.

  He shakes his head slowly and raises a hand to rub his temples.

  “You’ve looked me up on some genealogy site or something?” he asks. When I don’t respond, he continues. “That information is old. My brother died when we were eight. He died shortly after we were orphaned.”

  “Care to say that when you’re hooked up to my machine?”

  “You seriously think I would lie about my brother’s death? I don’t care to have this conversation any longer. Do you know how hard it is to lose your entire immediate family when you’re only eight years old? When our mom died, we only had each other. Mom’s cousins swooped in and dragged us hours away from everything we knew to live in Pennsylvania. Then, as if that wasn’t hard enough, my brother—the other half of my
soul—died too. Can you even fathom how difficult that was? I would never lie about that.”

  He stands up, red eyes rimmed with shiny tears, and storms out of my office.

  After the door locks behind him, I pick up the laptop and switch the video over to the live feed from the lobby. I watch Ted—or Ted’s brother, more likely—leave the building to go back to what he believes is his life. If you put a gun to my head, I would have to say that Ted and his brother actually think they are one person. I wonder how that happened. Was the loss of their mom so difficult that they just collapsed into one personality? The cousins must know. I wonder what they think about the brothers Ted. Really interesting stuff.

  ♣ ♢ ♡ ♠

  I’m excited when Ted walks through the door a week later. I never get excited about cases. I usually take them in stride, but I’ve thought about Ted a lot. I still have the audio recording of the polygraph session and I’ve listened to it at least five times. It all makes sense with the backstory I’ve invented. Ted and his brother combined their lives into one. They share everything: a job, a house, a bed, and a car. Only one of them lives it at a time. Who knows what the other one is doing. Occasionally, they come together and share information. They probably think of it as talking to themselves. I picture Ted in the bathroom down the hall from my office, looking in the mirror and reminding himself of the facts he’s supposed to dream email. While he’s talking, his other half—his twin brother—is memorizing the facts. Ted goes home and the other Ted comes into my office to take his place. It could be all wrong, but it’s the explanation I believe.

  Ted sits down while I pick up my laptop. I’m going to have to break into the lobby’s security cameras again so I can see if his brother is around. Normally I wouldn’t breach the security during work hours, but my safety might be in jeopardy.

  “You’ll remember, I said I didn’t want any money. I just want help making this stuff stop.”

  “What stuff? The emails? Are you still dream emailing?” I ask.

  “That’s the least of it,” he says. “Other things I’m doing in dreams are happening in real life.”

  “Like?”

  “Dangerous stuff.”

  “I’m not the police. I’m not going to run off to the authorities unless you killed someone. You didn’t kill anyone, did you?”

  “No! No. For Christ’s sake, of course not. Nobody died, the house was empty. Even the cat got out okay. I’m glad. I really like cats, and I would have been mortified if the cat died. Anyway, I dreamed that I burned the house where I grew up. The dream was so vivid that when I woke up the next day, I searched for the house online. I found this.” He reaches to his pocket and pulls out a folded sheet of paper. Printed front and back, it’s a news story about the house with a photo of its burned remains.

  “It burned while you slept?”

  Ted, at least I think it’s Ted, nods.

  “And you think you did it?”

  “It’s not the only thing that happened. If you read the story, they talk about how the fire started in the attached shed. The fire department brought in their arson unit. It all fits my dream exactly.”

  “I’ve seen more outlandish coincidences. What else happened?”

  “Stolen car, brick through a window, vandalism. Everything I’ve dreamed in past couple of nights has actually happened. I’m afraid to even look the stuff up anymore.”

  “It’s your brother, Ted,” I say.

  “How? Risen from the grave? Do you need to see a death certificate?”

  “Do you need to see video of him?”

  “Ridiculous,” he says, shaking his head and covering his eyes with his hand.

  You can read a lot from someone’s body language. Just look at what Ted’s doing now—he’s shielding himself from seeing the truth, and shaking away the knowledge. He’s about two seconds from sticking his fingers in his ears and singing “la la la” to block out the information. I used to know a guy who would take a sip of coffee whenever he was covering for a lie. He would talk for two minutes straight with that coffee cup hovering an inch away from his lips if he had a big line of bullshit to sell.

  “What was your brother’s name?” I ask.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he says.

  Oh, my god. He’s actually doing it! He has his hands on either side of his head and he’s smoothing his hair, inching his hands back. I think he’s actually going to cover up his ears so he doesn’t have to hear me.

  “What was his name?”

  “Leslie,” he blurts.

  “How did Leslie die?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” He squeezes his eyes shut and bows his head, cupping his face in his hands.

  “How did he die?”

  “Cancer,” he says.

  “Same as your mom?”

  “Yes, she died of cancer too.” He sobs after he answers and hitches sniffling breaths in through his nose.

  “What kind of cancer?”

  He circles a hand towards his abdomen, but doesn’t look up from his crying.

  “And Leslie’s cancer?”

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  Jesus. How does this guy manage to make his way through a single day of his life and still be so blind to the lies he’s told himself? Or maybe they’re the lies that Leslie told him. Either way, this guy is an engineer. How can he abandon logic so easily?

  “Your cousins must have been devastated. They lose one of you boys so soon after taking you in? They must have felt a tremendous amount of guilt to not be able to keep you both alive.”

  His sobs deepen as he cries into his hands.

  “And how unusual for identical twins. One of you dies and the other is fine? Did you have no cancer at all, or did you just survive it? Seems unfair that either one of you survived after your mom died.”

  “I know,” he says.

  “So which was it? Did you have cancer or not?”

  “No,” he says.

  “Just your mom and your brother. Weird. Where’s he buried?”

  “Next to her.”

  “And your brother was named after your dad?”

  “No,” he says. “I was.”

  Oops, a misstep. And my theory was going so well. Good thing I have a nimble mind. I have another theory brewing right away. “So, who was your brother named after?”

  “Actually, he was named after Mom. They thought it was clever because Leslie can be for boys too.”

  “So their headstones must read the same then? Unless they had different middle names?”

  “Family headstone. Why are you so curious about this?” His sobbing slows as he tries to figure out where I’m going with all these questions.

  “No reason. Just killing time. Making conversation.”

  “I have a legitimate problem,” he says. “You’re just killing time.”

  “You do have a problem. I’m just waiting for you to figure out what I already know.”

  “About my dead brother.”

  “Yes. About Leslie, who you and your brother conspired to kill.”

  “I knew it was a mistake to come here,” he says, pushing himself to his feet.

  “And yet you did. You can’t leave. I’ll be on the phone with the authorities before you make it to the lobby. They’ll be interested to know who’s behind this, if they’re not already on your trail.” I shake the document in front of me. It’s the printout of the story about the arson.

  “You said you wouldn’t go to the police unless I killed someone.”

  “I guess I lied. Now sit back down,” I say, using my most commanding tone. For a second I think he’s going to bolt, but then he slumps back into the chair. “You use the restroom on a schedule?”

  “What?”

  “Do you use the restroom on a schedule? Are you on a strict schedule about when you eat, go to the bathroom, sleep?”

  “Yes, I suppose. I’m a normal person. I fall into patterns.”

  “And you talk to your
self a lot?”

  “No more than anyone else, but yes, I’m sure I do.”

  “People comment on it?”

  “I don’t know. Sure. I guess a couple of people have commented that I talk to myself on occasion.”

  “Do you believe in the paranormal?”

  “I try not to fall into the arrogance that science has everything figured out. But, in general, I only believe what I can prove. Why?”

  That’s a pretty good way to characterize an open mind, but I don’t think he’s telling the truth. I’ve dealt with enough crazies to know that Ted believes in everything he hears: ghosts, aliens, fairies, gnomes, trolls, you name it. He likes to paint himself a scientist, or at least a skeptic. He’s really just a hardcore pushover for anything that makes his spine tingle. I decide to play his gullibility.

  “You’ve got a poltergeist attached to you,” I say.

  “A what?”

  “You know, a malevolent spirit. It’s tried to put you off-balance with this email thing, but what it really wants is to cast your life into turmoil by committing evil acts while it implants them in your imagination.

  “What?”

  “Think about it,” I say. “When all rational explanations fail, you have to turn to the irrational.” I’m going to have a hard time selling this line of bullshit, so I’m hoping that he convinces himself. Actually, the fact that he’s here means he’s already nearly convinced himself, so I shouldn’t have to do too much work. Still, I have a hard time keeping a straight face through this. Somewhere in the back of his brain, he knows the real truth about how he’s sharing a life with his brother. I need find out if he’s anywhere close to admitting that to himself.

  “So will you let me help you document this thing?” I ask him. “It will get us proof that you’re not crazy.”

  “But how?”

  “We’re going to have to follow you into your dreams.”

  ♣ ♢ ♡ ♠