The Fraud

by H. Claire Taylor

  “One at a time. I’ll address one at a time.”

  Captain Alex shrugged, “Okay, then what’s with the quiche?”

  “What, you don’t like quiche?” Larry looked incredulously at Captain Alex.

  “Well, I do… but… that’s not the point!” The Captain was having difficulty restraining his emotions, and even though he knew he’d probably regret it later, he kept on. “Stop playing games with me, Larry, I’m no one to be trifled with! Don’t you know I pushed a baby stroller down a busy street?” He got a crazy look in his eyes and lowered his voice. “I’m a bit loco, hence the cape.”

  “You pushed a baby stroller down a busy street?” Melono asked, looking slightly sick to her stomach.

  “You’re not loco,” Larry said to The Captain. “You just wish you were.” Larry turned to Notmie. “He’s not crazy; don’t for one minute think he’s crazy. He’s perfectly sane. Okay, Brodie, next question.”

  “Okay, explain to me what the French have to do with me.”

  Larry paused, leaned over to his mother who mumbled in his ear, then said to her, appearing slightly irritated, “Mother, all right already, this isn’t the time for jokes. Ugh. Ok, fine. Who’s there?”

  Mumble.

  “Cash who?”

  Mumble.

  Booming laughter.

  “No, you’re a nut, Ma.” He turned to the other three. “Get it? Cash who? Like, cashew. ike the nut? That’s a good one. I’ll have to remember that.”

  “Er, I guess I wasn’t paying attention, what was the punch line?” Notmie asked, hoping he didn’t come off as an airhead.

  “Okay.” Larry really seemed to have gotten a kick out of the joke, because his face still displayed a big grin. “Knock-knock,” he looked expectantly at Notmie.

  Sheepishly, Notmie replied, “Who’s there?”

  “Cash.”

  “Cash who?”

  “Cashew? What are you, a nut?” Then Larry doubled over in laughter while Notmie froze, hoping that if he remained still, the joke might sink in.

  “Excuse me,” Captain Alex interrupted. “I hate to seem rude, but can we get back to my question?”

  Larry changed gears and became completely serious, his face solemn.

  “But don’t you see? I already answered your question.”

  The Cap’n was pissed. He didn’t like being toyed with.

  “You—what? You already answered—but—cashews? I ask you what the French have to do with me and you answer with some stupid knock-knock joke about nuts? What are you implying? That I’m a nut? This doesn’t make any sense!”

  “Whoa, Alex, breathe.” Melono rubbed him cautiously on the back as his whole body heaved in breaths, forcing them out rapidly.

  “As far as the fortune teller,” Larry began, appearing unaware of Captain Alex’s near mental breakdown, “he was for real. He could see your past, present, and future, and that’s why you’re here today. But he didn’t see everything. No, no, he definitely missed some key parts, and that’s why you’re here today, too.

  “Unfortunately, your parents’ deaths were caused by you. Not directly, but indirectly. However, you are still able to avenge them and rid yourself of some guilt. The fortune teller was French, was he not?” His eyes narrowed on Captain Alex.

  “Yes. He was. All the more reason for me to hate him.”

  “And am I correct in assuming that he’s not the only Frenchman to crop up in your life recently?”

  “Yeah, you’re correct in assuming that, but what does that even mean? What are you getting at?” Captain Alex was hooked onto every word that Larry spoke.

  “Next question, please.”

  “What! No! I want answers! Okay, my next question is, what does what you just said imply?”

  “Nope, that’s cheating. I told you I wouldn’t tell you everything.” Larry rolled his shoulders, moved his head from side to side slowly, loosening some of his old, aching muscles. He cracked his knuckles (much to the dismay of Notmie, who shivered at the sound), crossed to the other side of his mother, then took a seat next to her. This was going to be a while longer.

  “Ugh, fine. Okay, my next question is how is Notmie afraid of mirrors when he looks in them all the time?”

  “Maybe you should address that question to Notmie,” Larry replied.

  Captain Alex shrugged and followed Larry’s suggestion. “Notmie, how are you afraid of mirrors when I see you looking in them all the time?”

  “I do not look in them all the—”

  “Yes, you do. Now, how are you afraid of them?”

  Notmie contorted his face, looked uncomfortably at Melono for backup, which she was not even close to giving, then looked at Captain Alex before diverting his gaze to the ground.

  “Ya see, the thing is—” He glanced up at Captain Alex and saw that he would have to be honest. “The thing is that I didn’t used to have this fear. It’s a very recent thing, like in the past day. I used to love seeing myself. But now… now it’s different. Now I don’t seem so great.”

  Captain Alex was immediately sorry he’d asked. He wasn’t comfortable dealing with such an emotionally mushy situation like the kind this one was becoming; too close to male bonding for his liking.

  “Okay, Notmie, never mind. You don’t have to tell me; it really makes no difference anyway.”

  But Notmie continued.

  “Ever since I went to the family reunion and saw the mass amounts of people who did nothing with their lives and still got by, I began to wonder if I was just doing the same thing. I mean, I had a job, but I was just a fraud. I would show up to work every day wearing this T-shirt I have on, and people would give me money for standing around and assigning reports that never really existed. That’s not honest work. So, today… or yesterday, or whenever—I don’t know what time is it, so I don’t know if it’s tomorrow yet—I was looking at my reflection in the car mirror—this was right before I ran over you, Cap’n,”—he gave a cute little smile to Captain Alex, which wasn’t returned—“and no matter what angle I looked at myself from, even when I did my usual Little Gorgeous Riding Hood routine, it didn’t feel the same. For the first time in my life I actually felt like a fraud. Then later, it just started getting worse. I was fixing my hair in the reflection of the car window, and for a split second—and this is like one millionth of a second, mind you—I thought I was… ugly. Well, okay, not ugly as in ooooogly, as in ‘a face yo mama couldn’t love’ but like, just beautiful rather than unearthly beautiful.”

  “Okay, Notmie, that’s good. We got the picture now,” Captain Alex said.

  But Notmie wasn’t finished.

  “So, it was sort of increasing every time I saw my reflection. I was more and more regular beautiful”—he shuddered slightly at the word—“and then what are the odds of us finding our way into a room full of mirrors!” Though Notmie seemed astonished and slightly put out by the matter, the coincidence seemed suspicious to The Captain.

  “How do you know it was a coincidence?” Melono asked, addressing Notmie, though she was looking directly at Larry, as if challenging him to answer instead.

  Notmie didn’t appear to think this possible or even conceivable, so he dismissed the notion.

  “That’s not possible, Melono, don’t bring up ridiculous things like that, you’ll just confuse me. As I was saying, The Room of Self-Mutilation or whatever you called it—”

  “Self-Reflection.”

  “Yeah, well, same difference, it really got to me. I couldn’t just turn my head and escape it all.”

  “But Notmie,” Melono began, “I thought you said it had something to do with The Shining or something.”

  “That was just a cover. I thought you would make fun of me if I told you the real—wait-just-a-second! Melono, how come you don’t feel like that when you look in the mirror?”

  “I’m not a fraud, Notmie. I have a real job where I’ve actually proven myself.”

  “But you still have that shirt. It says �
��liar’ and it’s ruby-studded!”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So… Ugh, there’s some sort of accusation I was coming around to.”

  Melono sighed. It really wasn’t her job to keep Notmie on task with his accusations of others, but she felt a bit sorry for him, and whatever accusation he had, she was sure she could shoot it down fairly quickly anyway.

  “You were probably going to ask me how I could look in the mirror and still be the type of person to get a ruby-studded shirt with ‘liar’ on the front.”

  Notmie nodded enthusiastically.

  “Well, when you have my line of work—being a police informant—you have to do a lot of lying to keep yourself alive. I was working on this particularly nifty jewel heist and we were seconds away from apprehending these fabulous rubies—they’re the ones on my shirt, actually—and the guy I was supposed to be capturing began to lower himself toward the cage—he was suspended from the ceiling. It was very Mission: Impossible —and as he lowered, I heard a sound like a gunshot, then I heard the security gates of the bank being opened, which wasn’t supposed to happen; it wasn’t in the plan.” The others were on the edge of their seats by this point. “Then there were these footsteps we heard coming down the hall. At least twenty pairs of feet. Now, I knew that the police were going to steer clear of the scene until we had gotten the jewels and were halfway down the block to keep from drawing suspicion to me being an insider, so that meant these footsteps were of some other group… Perhaps the group that we’d gotten in a gunfight with a few days before, when I nearly lost my left leg…

  “But now we were out numbered, and we could hear the large group of people drawing nearer. We knew we had only one option. So I took a deep breath and—” She paused, seemed to catch hold of herself, then said, “Eh, well it’s not that great of a story anyway. The point is that the rubies were taken up as evidence, and the bad guys were taken into custody. Well, the owner of the jewels was so grateful for my good work that he donated the rubies to me, and my coworkers insisted on making this shirt for me to wear since they figured that to pull off what I did, I must be the World’s Best Liar.”

  “Okay, so you’ve have a few adventures, big whoop!” Notmie said jealously.

  “Well, it’s all part of the job, I suppose.” She dusted off her shoulder unnecessarily.

  “Speaking of which,”—Notmie was becoming exasperated—“why do you even have a job? You could totally get by without one. You’re unearthly beautiful for goodness sake!”

  “Maybe I don’t want to just ride the waves of my looks; maybe I want to earn something.”

  “But you don’t have to—”

  “But I choose to, and that’s what matters. Notmie, you’re not born dumb. There’s no genetic make-up that our family passes down from generation to generation wiping all functioning brain cells from their spawn’s head. You’re just raised dumb, and you’re allowed to be that way, so why change?”

  “Exactly! Why change?” Notmie felt he was finally getting through to her.

  “Notmie, that was a rhetorical question,” Captain Alex interjected.

  Melono was becoming both irritated and offended. “You want to know why you couldn’t look at yourself in the Room of Self-Reflection and I could? It has something to do with the fact that you actually thought it was the Room of Self-Mutilation, that you have nothing to be proud of in your life or that you’ve actually earned for yourself, and now you’re finally realizing that looks aren’t everything!”

  The room fell silent after she finished. Notmie was at a loss for words, Captain Alex was too freaked out by everyone in the room to want to move, Larry and his mother seemed extremely amused, and Melono’s face was alarmingly red.

  The word “everything” echoed conspicuously around the room. Captain Alex finally built up all the courage he could muster and focused it into a grand effort of taking a sip of water. He might have seriously reconsidered this action had he known that his movements would attract all the eyes in the room. He also would have reconsidered if he had realized that he would dribble his drink all down his front. But unfortunately, he didn’t realize all these things. So, fighting back humiliation, he was forced to pull his cape over his shoulder to wipe the spilled water from his mouth, his chin, his shirt, the crotch of his pants, his shoes, and the ground next to his feet, while the others watched the sweat issuing from his forehead reflect the light off of his bald spot.

  Part 14

  Diamond Distortions

  Melono stood up from her seat.

  “We really should be going.”

  The tension in the room was still suffocatingly thick, and her words pierced it like a diamond drill through water.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Melono,” Larry said. “It’s too late to be heading out, or rather, too early in the morning. You three can stay in our guest rooms until you’ve had a good night’s rest.” He paused to see how the three would respond to this offer. They all looked willing to do anything to keep remaining with each other after what seemed rather like group therapy gone wrong.

  But they had no choice at this time of night; they had to accept Larry’s offer.

  Captain Alex and Notmie stood up awkwardly, Notmie still gripping his glass of water without realizing it. Captain Alex brushed his cape back over his shoulder and flinched at the cold wetness that hit his back.

  “I’ll show you to your rooms,” Larry said, grinning.

  They left the cozy study and found themselves back in the main hall, only a few doors down from where they had entered the Blind Hallway. Or maybe it was just a similar hall; it was hard to tell.

  “Er, Larry?” Melono said, following closely behind. “We’re going to get separate rooms, aren’t we?” Notmie could have sworn he saw her crossing her fingers as she asked.

  Larry chuckled. “Yes, you get your own rooms. And here we are at yours.” He pulled out a large ring of keys. Notmie thought it looked like it should belong to a prison guard, not a man like Larry.

  Maybe Larry was a prison guard when he was young, Notmie thought. Though there was no real evidence for this, it made enough sense for his brain to move on to other things, at least.

  Larry sorted through the keys, listing off the rooms for each as he went. “Garage, front door, back door, Mother’s room, Blind Hallway, secret room—”

  “Oooh! What’s in the secret room?” Notmie interrupted.

  Larry ignored him entirely. “—trophy room, ah, here we are.” He inserted the key and opened the door to reveal a spacious room decorated with rich oak furniture and dark, velvet tapestries.

  “I think this one might be best suited for a lady.” He stepped aside so that Melono could get a full look.

  Melono gasped. “This is so beautiful!”

  She stepped into the lamplit room, walked over to the lush bedspread and smoothed her hand over the surface. The others stood on the threshold watching her examine every inch of the bed.

  “Will it do?” Larry asked, barely suppressing a satisfied grin.

  “Will it—am I—it’s absolutely wonderful!” She couldn’t even get her words out as she gazed around at it all.

  “Try out the bed. You’re lucky—you just so happen to get what I consider to be the best mattress in the house. It’s so comfortable it should be illegal.” He no longer bothered suppressing his smile.

  Melono flopped on the bed and let out a loud groan. Yes, it was a very good mattress. So good, in fact, that she didn’t figure she would ever be willing to get up, no matter how long she may lie there.

  “Excellent. Well, you just relax tonight and get some good sleep so that you’re ready for tomorrow, okay Melono?”

  A muffled groan of agreement found its way from Melono’s mouth, which was now buried in one of the voluptuously fluffy pillows at the head of the bed.

  Larry closed the door, cutting off Melono from the view of Captain Alex and Notmie, who were just beginning to wonder if the bliss she seemed to be experiencing was en
tirely healthy, or even entirely pure.

  “Are our rooms going to be that”—Notmie paused, trying to think of an accurate way of describing it—“exciting?”

  “Depends,” Larry responded.

  “On what?”

  “On what excites you.”

  “Oh.”

  Larry pulled a one-eighty to face the door directly opposite Melono’s room. Notmie stood full of anticipation, wondering whose room this would be and whether or not it was something that would appeal to him.

  Larry again went through all the keys on the ring, naming off the same, plus a few more that he hadn’t mentioned before.

  “Den, the gallery, the chamber—”

  “Chamber?” This time, it was Captain Alex who interrupted.

  “Yes, the chamber,” Larry replied without giving it much thought.

  “What’s the chamber?” Captain Alex and Notmie asked simultaneously, exchanging troubled looks.

  “Ah! Here we are! This will be your room, Alex, if you don’t object.”

  He slid the key in the lock and pushed open the door.

  “Nice,” was all The Captain said, and he meant it. It was, indeed, a nice room. It held a modern silver-framed bed with brightly colored sheets and blankets that coordinated agreeably with the geometric shapes of primary and secondary colors scattered randomly, yet tastefully, on the walls. Orange and green armchairs held together the room’s theme as they sat in front of a small fireplace rimmed with shiny silver panels. The light from the moon shined through two large glass doors that opened up to a balcony on the far end of the room.

  “I like it. In fact, this is just the type of bachelor pad a Caped Avenger like me should stay in!”

  “Then enjoy yourself. We’ll see you in the morning.”

  Notmie stared longingly at Captain Alex’s room as Larry shut the door in his face once again. He really would’ve like to stay in a room like that, but doubted that Larry had two of the exact same room in his house.

  He was expecting to have to walk for a while down this hall (how long did it go on for anyway?) but instead, Larry simply pulled another one-eighty and walked to the door next to Melono’s. This time he didn’t need to go through the keys. The key to this room was quite distinguishable, seeing as how it was the only diamond-studded key.