For Erica, it was above the rim. With a freak velocity, she snatched the iPhone off the top of Jessica’s handbag, stood up, and walked out. My mind’s eye took a series of snapshots, which I would later rifle through like a flip-book: Erica increasing the distance away from the pew, and Jessica immobile, deep in supplication.
Erica walked quickly up Eighty-Seventh Street, then suddenly sprinted away. I had exited and caught up to her, but she did not slow down. “We have to move quickly,” she said, then dashed out in the middle of Second Avenue to hail a cab.
“She left the phone on,” Erica said as we rode downtown toward her apartment. “The passcode hasn’t kicked in.” Erica scrambled through the settings, removing the passcode protector. She ignored me until we reached her apartment, where she slammed the door behind us, then ran to her computer.
I was relatively adept at technology, but Erica had an affinity for the field, an ability that seemed to clash with her higher calling. She was working feverishly, emailing document after document out of the iPhone, forwarding emails to an unfamiliar email address, then quickly and methodically erasing from the Sent folder any evidence of the emails and documents having been sent.
I sat down next to her. What a thrilling invasion. Phone calls. Contacts. Email messages, sent and received. But the greatest treasure trove, we quickly realized, was Jessica’s link to her Dropbox account. Erica forwarded links to documents that we would troll through later in great detail, but even now, in our haste to forward now and read later, we could see from snippets that we were retrieving documents of a deeply personal nature.
When would Jessica notice that her phone was missing? Where would she be when she noticed? If she was in the church, she would undoubtedly remember that she checked her phone only moments ago. She would then frantically search her immediate surroundings and perhaps conclude that the phone was stolen. She would race out, find the nearest computer, and remotely shut down the iPhone.
But what if she made the discovery an hour or so later, back in her apartment? She might then conclude that she had accidentally dropped the phone at the church. She would call, perhaps, or maybe dash back to the church. Would she, in the meantime, shut her phone down? Would she check her emails to see whether anyone was in the process of downloading or forwarding her information? Then again, she might not notice until late in the evening or the following morning, which would give us hours upon hours to ransack her life.
And could the process of forwarding the information be tracked? Erica was careful, forwarding everything to an email address she hardly used, and deleting from the Sent folder. The impropriety weighed on me. We were deep into criminality. But the purity and scope of the wrongdoing were clarifying and emboldening.
Erica shoved her computer in front of me, and I joined in. One by one, as each new link or forwarded email arrived in Erica’s inbox, I printed out the documents, then erased them from Erica’s computer. Time lapse photography shot from behind would have shown the two of us, side by side, barely moving, perhaps only our shoulder muscles twitching as our unseen hands flew across the keyboards, and the pile of papers to my right would slowly mount until the tower became too high, prompting me to straighten the pile and start a new one.
We worked all night. We were gripped by an energy that vanquished fatigue and focused concentration, fueled by purpose, resolve, revenge, and justice. I understood my role, even if I couldn’t answer this question: What the fuck were we doing?
We worked straight through the night and barely noticed the sun edging up above the East River. But I was fading. I recalled my first job at a law firm, as a paralegal in the litigation department, into my twenty-third straight hour of document production. I fell asleep on my feet, opened my eyes, and found a senior associate standing in front of me. He stared at me with understanding but no compassion. “Fresh paralegal!” he yelled. “I need a fresh paralegal!”
I collapsed on Erica’s bed, and before my senses gave way, I saw Erica position herself in front of her computer. She had taken on both of our tasks, and I considered the likelihood that overall productivity improved as a result. Then, I fell deep into slumber, lulled unconscious by the staccato sounds of thumbs attacking screen and fingers typing on the keyboard.
When I woke up, Erica was gone. Twelve thirty p.m. The laptop was closed, and next to it were seven tall piles of paper. I searched through Erica’s apartment until I found two large, expandable, upright carry-on wheelies. I emptied their contents and began neatly placing the piles of paper inside. I then wheeled the two stuffed baggage pieces to a copy center three blocks away. For the next two hours, I scanned the documents. Then, I brought them back to Erica’s apartment and fed them through Acrobat to render them word-recognizable. I lay my head down on the desk while the program deconstructed each page.
The sound of a door closing startled me, and I awoke bathed in the prethought recognition that a large segment of the day had passed. Erica was next to me, rummaging through the stack of papers.
“I scanned all of them,” I said.
“That’s great. Really great,” she said in the tone of an instructor who was pleased that her teachings had finally taken root in a gifted student.
“Where were you?” I asked.
“I returned the phone to the church,” she said. Briefly, I allowed my thoughts to consider the constellation of mishaps that could have occurred in this audacious act, but these concerns eased, not through an act of will but through the natural course of dissipation. Through will, guile, stealth, and perhaps an assist from universal energy, I had little doubt that Erica had accomplished her task.
I considered where this probably left us. First things first. We got away with it. Jessica had probably called the church and asked whether anyone had found an iPhone. The church had probably called to let her know that they found it. Jessica would retrieve the phone, relieved that it was all just a clumsy mistake, not that any harm would have come from it, given that her passcode would have protected her information.
Now what? Questions like this hounded me, but not Erica. We had work to do. Read through the entire stack of emails, essays, and drafts. We would create two piles of paper: interesting and uninteresting. We could devise other categories, but the criteria of selection would be the same. Find those documents that would cause mortification if released.
This was easy. Jessica was skilled with words and took obvious refuge in aimless ruminations, sometimes in emails to identifiable recipients, but also in expostulations that were in equal parts diary entries and essays. What she hid from the world, she did not hide from herself, and so we hacked our way through the thicket of questionable personal habits, odd sexual proclivities, and imbalanced harangues. I couldn’t make a thesis out of it, but I suspected that her published articles were shaved versions of her unedited musings.
After a few hours, we had separated out the inconsequential, and what remained was a foot-high stack of paper. Erica opened up a blank Word document and typed: “This is what it feels like . . .” She printed out the page and placed it on top of the stack. Without looking at me, she gathered up the pages and placed them in her backpack.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“To the post office.”
I nodded, but I didn’t kid myself. We could throw words at this, like meeting evil with the appropriate degree of justice. Inhibiting the worst instincts of a damaging soul. Saving the next victim. All of these considerations danced around in my head, because they were not thoroughly implausible.
But I wanted to hurt Jessica. And as I watched Erica walk out the door, I comforted myself with the thought that we had embarked on nothing more than a first step.
40
Circling
One week passed, and while a steady stream of calls, texts, and emails continued, I could feel the interest level dissipate. Reporters who called five times a day were calling twice. Crank emails to my work address fell off, and I reversed my decision to cancel ou
t my Canaan email account. I believe this trend would have continued, and I would have been consigned first to cocktail chatter, then to nothing more than a wispy vapor floating through the New York atmosphere.
But Lindquist and Kravitz intervened. I doubt that theirs was a coordinated campaign, and I’m certain that they hadn’t thought through the consequences of their actions. Maybe one without the other would not have halted my slide back into obscurity, but together, they brought the level of interest to a fever pitch.
The following week’s edition of New York magazine contained no follow-up stories, and at first glance, it seemed that there was a mere scattering of letters to the editor responding to Jessica’s article. The authors of two letters jumped off the page. Mark Lindquist and Robert Kravitz. Lindquist’s letter appeared first, prefaced by the subheading “High Tech Wizard to the Defense: Mark Lindquist Responds.”
I’ll leave it to others to fathom such imponderables as cause and effect, supernatural abilities, and the state of our culture. These matters are above my pay grade, although frankly I believe they may be above the pay grade of Jessica Bryant as well. I write this letter with the conviction that Ms. Bryant may have accomplished the not-inconsiderable feat of getting her facts right, and everything else wrong. Still, I’ll confine myself to my own experience, and allow your readers to draw their own conclusions.
I met Will Alexander. I had heard from a colleague that he was gifted in ways that Mr. Alexander refused to acknowledge. I pestered Mr. Alexander for his intervention. And I will spare you all of the details, except for these: When I met him, I was suffering from a terrible, life-threatening disease. After I met him, my disease vanished, under circumstances that still baffle my physicians.
There are many things I don’t know. I don’t know if Mr. Alexander has any healing capabilities. I don’t know why my disease vanished. I don’t know if I’m fully cured. I don’t know what the future holds.
Here’s what I do know. Mr. Alexander is not a fraud.
The next letter was from Robert Kravitz.
I was suffering from fourth-stage pancreatic cancer. I spent an evening with Mr. Alexander, and shortly thereafter, my doctors informed me that my cancer went into remission. I just thought I should share this with your readership.
These letters were not prominently displayed in the Letters to the Editor section, but the effect was immediate. Two days later, the New York Post carried the cover headline:
IS HE THE REAL HEAL?
Would-Be Healer Will Alexander receives ringing
endorsement from Hi Tech Honcho Mark Lindquist.
In smaller type, the headline continued:
Chappaqua real estate heir also
sings praises to the High Class Healer.
The newspaper uncovered a two-year old photo of me at a Canaan cocktail party, enlarged many times to produce a grainy, ominous look. The article provided details confirming that both Lindquist and Kravitz had in fact authored the letters to the New York magazine editor, then went on to quote various luminaries in the medical and alternative universe fields about the possibilities of energy healing. Side articles written by physicians ridiculed the notion that the recoveries experienced by Lindquist and Kravitz amounted to anything more than coincidence or the placebo effect. Even Adriana Pitzer, the well-known acerbic New York Post columnist, weighed in:
Sorry, Willy Boy, I’m with Jessica. And I would add this to the equation. You are so thoroughly a fraud that you’ve deceived yourself, which of course makes your deception all the more convincing. And is any of this so surprising? I’ve done some checking, and here’s what I come up with. Stop me if I’m wrong. Your legal career is undistinguished. You’ve done nothing productive or useful in your life. Soup kitchens? Pro bono work? Volunteering at a nursing home? I think not. You’re like Major Major in Catch-22, Willy Boy, born mediocre, with a lifetime of both achieving mediocrity and having mediocrity thrust upon you.
So here you are, floating downstream with all the individualism of a dried twig, and just once, before you’re washed upon the embankment to be forever shredded by the currents of time and nature, you raise your shriveled hand to scream, “I matter.” But of course, your statement won’t be heard by dint of talent or accomplishment. So your tortured soul digs deep into the zeitgeist, and you find something that commands attention among the Alternative Class. That is your genius. Your newfound talents are so immeasurable and indefensible that you need not bother with measurement and defense. You just proclaim and hide. And you leave it to our absurd culture to fill in the gaps.
You may think I’m piling on, but worry not. You will profit. That is the crowning irony that Jessica Bryant may have missed. Her exposure has laid you bare with those who would use the gift of vision bestowed upon us by our Maker. But hey, this is New York, so how many people could we be talking about? Prepare, Willy Boy, prepare. You will know no peace; you will have no leisure. You will be busy. And you will be paid.
Adriana was right in part. The steady stream of calls and emails gushed forward, and while some of the communications were critical, the vast majority came from those seeking help. And even with everything happening, I thought about accommodating them, working them into my schedule. Erica was ready to help, ready to lend her considerable talents. You think you can shame me into a shell? Think again. I embrace your disdain and will profit from its by-product: publicity.
But I needed a break from the onslaught. So we went into isolation. I canceled all of my email addresses, disconnected my phone numbers, and provided new contact information to a few select individuals. And we left town, resolving to let the shit storm die out. The northeast was experiencing an unusually warm February, and we took our chances, cramming clothes and necessities into the panniers and top case of the motorcycle. We headed north on the Taconic, through Columbia County, and on to Bennington, Vermont, where we spent the night in a Courtyard by Marriott. The following morning, we arose early and headed up Route 7 through Rutland, then north on Route 100.
I had improved markedly as a motorcyclist, and Erica’s presence helped the aerodynamics. She knew when and how to lean with me, and her weight actually helped with cornering, as it stabilized the chassis when we accelerated through the curves. Our helmets were equipped with telecommunications gear, but we hardly ever spoke while riding. We were drifting through gentle hills, across babbling brooks, flying down straightaways and bearing down on the challenging twisties that sprang from nowhere. The stark beauty of country lanes, dotted with rickety general stores and old covered bridges, cleansed our souls and improved our spirits. We rode for hours at a time, stopping only for food and bathroom breaks.
For the next seven days, we crisscrossed through New England, riding six to eight hours a day. We ate lunch at Simon Pearce in Quechee, Vermont, with a view of a waterfall framed in the distance by a covered bridge. We spent time walking through the Dartmouth campus, and I was astonished to find, buried deep in the stacks of the main library, a hard copy of my law school journal, containing an article I had written on prisoners’ rights.
We barely spoke, and when we slept, I had recurring dreams that we had merged into one entity, conjoined in our movements. And to this day, I can’t identify a single thought that passed through my mind when we rode. I lack the insight to know whether this was happiness. It was the removal of debris, and maybe an immersion into a natural state consisting of nothing more than the elemental qualities of movement, air, and light. We were not conquering nature; we were eliminating barriers. It was without meaning and beautiful.
On our return to Erica’s apartment, we collapsed side by side on her bed, exhausted from a five-hour nonstop trek from Watch Hill, Rhode Island, to Manhattan. We would have fallen asleep without further adieu, fully clothed, had it not been for the sharp buzzer that halted our slide into slumber. Erica jumped up and pressed the intercom button.
“Who is it?” she asked.
Silence followed, then a crackled voice respon
ded. “It’s Jessica Bryant. I’d like to speak with you.”
I bolted up from the bed. “No way,” I said. “Not now.” I did not fear Jessica’s presence, but our meeting, if it ever came, promised to be momentous. I wanted time to prepare.
“No, let’s do this.” Without further commentary, Erica buzzed Jessica into the building. We both heard the skittish, light steps scrambling up the stairs. Erica opened the door before Jessica had an opportunity to knock. I stood directly in Jessica’s view, and we stared at each other, each seeking to wither the other away with the superior claim to indignation. Erica stepped back from the doorway to allow Jessica to enter, but she kept close.
Jessica walked in and moved directly to the far end of Erica’s couch and sat down. Erica sat in the middle. I remained standing.
“How did you do it?” she asked. She looked at me first, then turned toward Erica, suspecting that Erica would be a more promising source of information.
“Can’t imagine what you’re referring to,” Erica said.
“I want the files you created, in whatever form you stored the information, and I want all the printouts. I want everything.”
I walked over to the chair placed before the coffee table facing the couch and sat down. “I think she’s recording this conversation,” I said.
“I doubt it,” Erica answered. Erica swiveled her body to directly face Jessica.
“I want the files,” Jessica said.
“Would you like something to drink?” Erica asked. Jessica was startled by the question.
“Water,” she said. “With ice.”
I retreated to the kitchen and heard conversation without being able to discern the words. Erica was talking mostly, in a measured cadence, interrupted by Jessica, in tones whose intensity diminished with each succeeding interjection. I returned to the den and placed the glass of ice water in front of Jessica. Erica had moved closer, and Jessica was uncomfortable with the arrangement. She grabbed the glass and drank quickly.
The Reluctant Healer Page 25