The Fourth Wall

by Williams, Walter Jon

  It takes me a few seconds to recover. “Why in hell would I fight you now?” I ask. “Where’s my paycheck? Where’s the cameras?”

  He gives me a sullen look. “Oh,” he says. “So now you’re afraid?”

  “Fuck yes, I’m afraid!” I tell him. “I’m afraid the producers are going to get one of us killed.”

  He jabs a finger at me. “Well, I’m not afraid, and that’s why I’ll win.”

  “The man who’s not afraid,” I point out, “brought two guards to a meeting in a coffee shop on Van Nuys Boulevard.”

  That silences him for a moment. I pick up my tea.

  “You might as well go,” I say. “Or I’ll have to drink my tea at you again.”

  He scowls, his lip curling inside his little goatee, and then he gets to his feet and marches out. His two amigos go with him.

  I sip my tea and wonder at the strangeness I’ve just experienced. Maybe, I think, he’s crazy enough to be the driver of the SUV. Maybe he’s been trying to kill all the other contestants.

  Which leads me to ask myself why I’m still in Celebrity Pitfighter at all. Maybe I was out of my mind to fix fights so that I’d win, when it would have made more sense if I’d arranged to lose. I’d be gone from the ring, I wouldn’t have to spend hours training, and I’d be able to concentrate on the people who have been trying to kill me instead of the ones who just want to beat me up.

  I suppose it was just too easy. I managed to corrupt Des and Lenny without any effort at all. Now I’ve won two matches, and I’ve erased most of the humiliation from the cottage cheese incident. I’ve made it to the finals.

  But the problem with that is that I’m going into the ring against a man who’s legitimately won three fights. I wonder if I ought to be more frightened than I am.

  I wonder how badly I want to be Grand Champion Celebrity Pitfighter, and conclude that I don’t, particularly, but since I’ve got into the finals by hook and crook, I might as well try to win.

  I suppose it wouldn’t do my career any harm to be known as a martial arts hero. It could even get me parts.

  Or, as Gregg with three g’s pointed out, I could maybe even make some money giving talks on the martial arts circuit, assuming of course that there is such a thing.

  But whatever the case, after my fight with Burt, I’m never going in the ring again, no matter how desperate I get.

  INT. SEAN’S SUITE—NIGHT

  The screams from my phone echo vastly in the tiled bathroom. I give a start and water moves in a great slide to the other end of the Jacuzzi. I heave my torso out of the tub and grope for my handheld. When I hear the voice on the other end, I realize I’ve been expecting it.

  “Is this Sean? I want to speak to Sean Makin.”

  I take a moment to deal with the shock, then another moment to make certain my voice won’t tremble when I finally speak. I slide back into the water, which gives another heave.

  “Hello, Dad,” I say. “I was wondering when you’d call.”

  “Some of the things you’d written in your blog, I didn’t know whether you’d want to hear from me.”

  “Dad,” I say, “I’ve always wanted to hear from you.”

  I’m soaking at the end of a long day in a tub scented with mountain flowers. I was running my lines in the tub, enjoying the reverb as my voice echoed from the tiles. The guys who had bugged my suite were gone: Astin got the hotel manager to throw them out, after which Richard peeled the listening devices from their hiding places and dropped them into a glass of water.

  Richard earlier slipped a tiny camera on the end of a fiber-optic cable under the door of their suite, and also got a microphone in there: he documented their reaction to my declaiming the lines from the fake script, and it sounded as if they’d bought my act.

  Richard also returned my phone, scrubbed clean of the malware that Ramona had installed. “Cloned,” he said. “They heard every phone conversation you made today, and read every text you sent or received.”

  I cast my mind over the day’s events. So Kari Sothern knew about PanCosmos’s trying to sign me up. But I hadn’t called everyone on my speed dial saying, “Hey, I just took a meeting with Bruce Kravitz, and he wants to make my dreams come true!” so the story wasn’t confirmed.

  Not that someone like Kari needs confirmation.

  But it’s not a bad story, that I’m being courted by a powerhouse agency. I want her to report that one.

  “That’s cool,” I said. “I didn’t tell them anything that won’t be made public in a few days anyway.”

  “It’s lucky they didn’t turn the phone into another bug.”

  I was startled. “They can do that?”

  “Well,” Richard said, “the phone’s on anyway, right? It’s got a microphone attached to the handset that’s there whether you’re talking into it or not. So yes, it’s possible to turn your phone into a kind of double agent that reports every word you say to a third party.”

  “Ouch.”

  Astin leaned close and put a hand on my shoulder. “You know,” he advised, “you can avoid this kind of trouble if you only fuck your friends.”

  Sound advice, but the sad fact is that I don’t have that many women friends, and none of them will have sex with me.

  Probably that’s my fault. I seem to have trust issues.

  And now the principal reason for my trust issues is on the phone. (“Trust issues.” Get it? That’s a pun.)

  “Where are you calling from?” I ask.

  “I’m back in the States,” he says.

  “Are you in town?”

  He gives a laugh. I remember that laugh. It’s the laugh that says, “That question is inconvenient.”

  Memories are piling up thick around me. It’s like fifteen years have melted away and I’m a kid again, waiting for my dad to decide what happens next.

  Jesus, I feel like I’m swimming in déjà vu.

  “I don’t know if I should tell you where I am,” he says. There’s a smile in his voice. “You might have a warrant out for me or something.”

  I examine my toes on the far end of the tub. “There aren’t any warrants, Dad,” I say. “Even if I wanted to prosecute you, the statute of limitations expired years ago.”

  Which is one of the things that has me grinding my teeth whenever I think about it. The DA had four years to prosecute from the date the crime was discovered. The fact that my father fled added another three years.

  But it’s now been eleven years. Dad’s been away enjoying my money all that time and there’s no way he’ll ever be brought to the bar of justice.

  A civil suit is another matter. But if I file against him, he’ll just disappear again, unless I can figure out a way to nail him to the deck somehow. Or find his funds, and then get a court order to seize them.

  “So,” I ask, “what happened to all the money?”

  Nothing like running headfirst at the gate. Dad doesn’t seem surprised by the question.

  “I had an investment opportunity,” he says. “A one-of-a-kind thing. I needed to increase my buy-in.” He gives a little delicate clearing of the throat. “That’s why I needed your money, Sean. I was trying to make us all supremely rich.”

  I’m guessing that the buy-in he’s talking about was maybe at a poker table.

  “It must not have gone well, then,” I say. “Because I seem not to be supremely rich.”

  “There was a change of government,” Dad says. “Not our government, theirs. They became a lot more hostile to foreign investment. And then there was a downturn in the economy—not theirs, but ours, except it spread to them, and they blamed us. And…” He sighs. “Things happened.”

  “Anything left?”

  “Oh, I’m doing all right.” There’s a kind of hearty humor in his voice that’s scraping my nerves raw. I want to leap through the telephone and strangle him.

  “I’m relieved,” I say. “I wouldn’t want you to have to move in with me because you’re destitute or something.”


  “No,” he says. “That’s not going to happen.” There is a long pause. Then he says, “You’re doing well for yourself.”

  “Oh, I’m doing all right.” In exactly the hearty tone he just used. If he notes the mockery, he fails to acknowledge it.

  “Your movie,” he says, “I’ve seen it. You’re great.”

  I feel a little jet of delight pulsing somewhere in my thorax. Some part of me is still longing for Daddy’s approval. I slap the feeling down like the reflex zombie emotion that it is.

  “Yep,” I say. “I’m a sensation.”

  “You know.” There’s another pause. “I know you’ve gone through some tough times. I know you’ve been mad at me. But…” Another pause. “I’d like to try to be your friend, Sean. I’d like to make it up to you.”

  The water in the tub is getting cold. I manipulate the hot water tap with one foot. Water gushes; scented steam rises.

  “You could,” I venture, “give me my money back. That would be an act of friendship.”

  “Oh, Sean,” he says. He sounds very emotional. “I’d love to. I’d love to be able to do that. But I can’t. The money’s just…gone.”

  “Here’s the deal,” I say. “You say you want to be my friend. But”—I find myself gesturing to the room—“I’m checking through my list of friends, just to see if there’s an opening for an embezzler, and there isn’t. There just isn’t.”

  There’s another pause. Then, “I could make it up to you in another way.”

  “Yes?”

  “What’s that rumbling sound, by the way?”

  “I’m in the tub. That’s the tap running.”

  “So can you hear me?”

  “I hear you fine.”

  Warmth spreads from my ankles up my calves. “There’s a project I’m involved in,” he says. “It’s a resort complex—a gorgeous thing. You could invest in it. You could make all your money back, and then some.”

  So there it is. He couldn’t even wait till the second phone call to make the pitch. He must really be short on funds.

  The warm water advances up my thighs. “So where is this resort?” I ask.

  “Well.” He’s hesitant. “I don’t know if I should tell you.”

  Okay, this is too absurd. Too pitiful. I laugh out loud.

  “You think I’m going to blindly hand you money for this resort project, without even knowing where it is?”

  “Oh no.” He seems shocked. “You wouldn’t give the money to me. I wouldn’t have anything to do with your money. You’d give it to the fund. The fund is controlled by the corporation, not by me.”

  I’d have to be out of my senses to believe that. “And where is this fund?” I ask.

  “It’s in the Antilles. But that’s not where the resort’s going to be. That’s just where the investors keep their money till it’s needed.”

  Warm water floats all the way to my shoulders. I feel sweat prickle on my forehead. “Dad,” I say. “Just tell me where the fucking resort is.”

  “Well,” he says. “It’s the Mosquito Coast.”

  I laugh again. “Mosquito Coast? That’s where Harrison Ford went nuts in that movie, right? Sounds like a great place to put a resort!”

  He responds seriously. “There’s going to have to be a certain amount of rebranding. But it’s a beautiful beach, really. Gorgeous white sand, lovely people who speak English and go to the Moravian church. Columbus visited there.”

  Before or after the Moravians? I think.

  “You have a prospectus?” I ask. “Because I could show it to my business manager, my lawyer. See what they say.”

  I don’t actually have a business manager or a lawyer, but there’s no reason my dad should know that.

  “Well,” doubtfully, “I suppose I could get one.”

  “You don’t have a prospectus? You don’t have any numbers or prognostications or data showing rates of return for similar projects amortized over a dozen years?”

  For a moment I’m deeply embarrassed by my father. Cripes, I’d thought my dad was a better con man than this.

  “I can get one,” he says. “But I’m not a salesman, you know? I don’t carry sales material around with me.”

  “When you get one, send it.”

  “Where to?”

  I grin at the opposite wall. “Can’t you get my address from the same place you got my unlisted phone number?”

  “I don’t want it to—”

  “Just send it care of PCTA. I’ll get it.”

  The tub is beginning to get uncomfortably hot. I turn off the tap with my toes.

  “Yeah,” Dad says, “I saw the news item that you went with PanCosmos. Bruce Kravitz is sharp.”

  “Yes he is.”

  “But, you know, he’s a shark.”

  “I know that.”

  “You’ll have to watch him.”

  “I will, Dad.”

  “You know,” he says, “I didn’t do so badly for you, when I was your manager.”

  This is so astounding that for a moment I’m unable to speak.

  “Dad,” I say, “you do know that I had an accountant go over everything, right? And that I know you were stealing from day one.”

  He sighs. “I wasn’t stealing, Sean, not really. There were opportunities, and I had to take advantage of them. I always meant to make it right.”

  Opportunities at the track. Opportunities in Vegas. Opportunities in shabby investment schemes in the Antilles. I find myself clenching my right fist. I look at it in surprise.

  “You know, Dad,” I say. “You’re starting to make me real angry now.”

  “I didn’t mean to do that,” he says. “I just wanted to see if we could be friends.”

  “Yeah, well,” I say. “You go on hoping.”

  I press the End button and then call Richard. I’m expecting voice mail but he picks up.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” I say.

  “That’s okay,” he says. “I’m heading for a meeting.”

  I wonder what kind of meeting he’s heading for at nine-thirty on a Monday night.

  “I just got a phone call from my father,” I tell him. “I’ve got the number he called from—I wonder if you can figure out where he is. He said he was in the States but there’s no reason to believe that.”

  “No problem,” he says.

  He reports within the hour. The call came from Vancouver, in Canada, which indicates that Dad’s concept of the truth has remained consistent over the years.

  “Can you see if he’s got property there?” I ask. Maybe I can get a court to seize it.

  “I’ll check. Would he be using his own name?”

  “Who knows? He had his real name on his Belizean passport.”

  He says he’ll check and get back to me. I get back to learning my lines.

  Tomorrow we actually go on location. And it’s going to suck.

  INT. BRUCE BENNETT BUILDING—DAY

  I’ve taken off the makeup and had my shower, and now I’m sitting on a bench in the dressing room next to the exercise room, and I’m smelling pleasantly of floral shampoo. I’m looking at my handheld, because I’ve just gotten a lengthy text from Richard the Assassin telling me that my father sold his apartment in Cap d’Antibes five years ago, and the house in Belize just last year. Richard and his crew of stealthy cybernauts haven’t located any other property, or any substantial sums of money, but he tells me they’ll keep trying.

  I start to text my thanks, and then the door to the exercise room slams open and a big booming voice laughs. The sound echoes off the tile walls.

  “I can’t believe the amount of data we’re getting!” he says. “Hundreds of millions of customers! I don’t know how we’re going to process it all!”

  I can’t see the speaker because there’s a bank of lockers between me and him, but I gather it’s one of the two men who were running on elliptical machines when I came in to take my shower. My guess is that the speaker is the big curly-headed guy, a man
almost as tall as I am—he seemed the sort of person who would shout even in a small, echoing room.

  “Are you reducing the data here,” says another voice, “or remotely?” The second voice is high-pitched, with an accent that comes from the Northeast somewhere.

  Locker doors clang open. “I’m doing it remotely,” says the first voice. “It’s a pain in the ass! I don’t even know where the servers are physically that I’m working with.”

  “Somewhere in the Sri Sphere,” the other man says.

  I hear this as “Shree Sphere,” and for a few seconds I’m trying to figure out what a Shree Sphere is. It sounds like an alien warship in a science fiction film, but I decide it’s likely to be a brand name for some kind of router. Then I realize he’s talking about Deeptimoy Srivastava.

  “Yeah. All this fucking secrecy is—”

  The big guy comes around the corner, heading for the toilets, and he sees me and stops dead. I pretend to be absorbed in the text message on my phone, and he pretends he hasn’t been talking at all. He walks past me in silence, leaving behind only the bracing odor of sweat.

  Later, after I’ve sent my thanks to Richard, collected my towel, and headed back to my dressing room, I begin to wonder just what becomes of the data I’ve given Great Big Idea.

  When I subscribed to the various installments of Escape to Earth, I provided some basic information. Name, address, email, birth date, and credit card. Presumably the system tracked other information, such as usage statistics.

  That isn’t really a lot. Plenty of online businesses have at least as much information about their customers. But once you have a name, credit card number, and birth date, you can shake a lot more information out of various online trees: profession, credit cards, credit rating, nationality, neighborhood, value of property, relatives, hobbies, business interests, religion, telephone numbers, family members, and all the data about those family members once you know who they are.

  All that is worth money to a savvy Internet entrepreneur like Sri—and to anyone else who has a product to sell—or anyone interested in fraud or identity theft. The Sri Sphere is a gold mine to anyone who has access to it.