The Face Thief (6 page)
Authors: Eli Gottlieb
T
wo days before flying east to see his mother, Potash’s stepsons threw a “celebration” for him. According to statistical opinion, he’d entered their life too late for him to have an easy ride as paternal stand-in. They were already twelve and thirteen upon his arrival and fully embarked on that loud, demonstrative phase of adolescence that is as close to a finished human being as an exploded diagram of a car is to an idling Rolls-Royce. Yet what the statisticians couldn’t know was that Potash had a secret weapon. As an educator, he’d spent the formative years of his adulthood “getting inside” of children, precisely the age of his new boys. He knew the lingo, the signs, the head fakes of being fourteen like very few adults—so he told himself—on earth.
On that particular day, Potash was returning, fatefully enough, from the bank, where he’d just overseen the arrival of a “bridge loan” of $25,000 from Cas in New York. This was useful both to keep the piranhas of his many autopays at bay and to buy him a little more time to sort out his mess without his wife knowing.
It was his wife whose plum-shaped derriere he now saw as he drove up the driveway. Wearing shorts, she was gardening with her headphones on—root-feeding the hydrangeas at that very moment. Rather than get out of the car, Potash parked, and tried to offset his maintenance-level bad mood by sitting there and consciously enumerating to himself—in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary—the good fortune of his life. This was an exercise recommended by his men’s group as a way, they claimed, of laddering one’s self nearly physically into a state of satori.
He began, as he was supposed to, with the local, or he supposed, Local. This he did by dwelling on the outlying suburban grid of houses, artfully screened one from the other through small trompe l’oeil wilderness settings, where lean, smart people were returning home from work in their low-pollution cars and sustainable light-rail conveyances. Many of them wore clothes made of recycled plastic bottles and employed personal skin and hair-care products derived from low-carbon footprint processes. They drank shade-grown coffee and ate foods rich in monophytomers and glyconutrients. Progressive on all the important questions, they drove life toward a kinder, cleaner, more humanly scaled future.
These were his people. He belonged among them. Somehow or another, he’d aligned the energies of his life to arrive at their golden summit in the pecking order of destiny. Had any citizens in history ever been more deliciously replete in their existence? Had any, through the weightless clairvoyance of connectivity, ever been more conscious of the planetary fragility of life—and more grateful for what they had?
He got out of the car, uncertain whether or not all this internal smoke-blowing had helped, and noticed his wife, attracted by the movement, standing up and slipping off her headphones. She sauntered over to kiss him hello, and then stood a moment smiling upward at him, while the sun lay in bright little cups on her cheekbones. Brimful of vitality, she sometimes made Potash feel as if he’d grown up entirely underground, like a mushroom.
“You smell like car,” she said, with a laugh. “Come inside, honey. The boys have done something special for the occasion.”
“The boys? What’d they do? What occasion?”
“You know them, they won’t tell me a thing. I’m just their mother.”
She drew him by the hand through the front door. The first thing he noticed was that the living room shades were drawn, creating a shadowy atmosphere, and that through the stereo speakers poured loud, breathy noises like those of a theme-park haunted house.
“Sit down,” said a freshly adolescent deep voice through the speakers, “and behold.”
As Potash sat, with Anabella alongside him on the couch, a slide was projected on a far wall. It was a photograph of their home taken from a hundred yards away and slightly below. The result, remarkably professional, was to give their split-level a beautiful, “house on a hill” look.
“Inside,” said the voice, “the new man of the house sleeps the sleep of the just.”
Where, Potash wondered, did his older stepson come up with this stuff? Most of the time he was occupied reading books about gory alien dismemberment with an occasional stab into Tom Clancy for some flag-waving crypto-fascism. But the source of his extensive vocabulary remained a mystery.
The slide now shining on the wall showed Potash porpoised on his side in sleep. His mouth was open. His hair, normally combed carefully over his bald spot, was spun around his head in satellitic disarray. His gut stuck out. Held warmly in his, his wife’s hand tightened.
“It stirs.”
In this next shot, he was lying on his back, his mouth open like that of a dying old person in the midst of agonal breathing.
“In the mirror, the creature stares at itself.”
Shot from what must have been a tiny pin-camera concealed near the shower tubing, a slide was projected of Potash, baggy eyed and palpably hungover, wearing only a towel and staring at the mirror.
“It checks itself for hostile bodies.”
A finger was now in his mouth, pushing his lip way over to one side as if to palp his gums for tenderness. Subsequent shots in front of that same mirror would show him yawning, scratching under his armpits, and then making a Magoo-ish expression into the glass, as if daring it to answer back. Finally, like most of the rest of the world upon awakening, he was seen brushing his teeth.
“I wasn’t aware,” he said softly to his wife, “I was under surveillance, nor that the ‘celebration’ would be a disguised takedown.”
“You’re not offended, are you?”
She saw the whole thing through a forgiving maternal lens. It was high jinks. It was charming tomfoolery. She had a generous, open nature, and he told himself that she simply didn’t understand people like him, who worked from the ego, with the ego’s sullen strictures, its sour smell.
“Of course not,” he lied.
Ten months earlier, not long after his arrival on the scene in California, he and Anabella and the kids had gone to see one of those films in which cable optics have been inserted into the formerly private parts of men and women to observe the secret gestational processes of life at work: fertilization, pregnancy and birth. Potash had smilingly entered the theater, but as he watched the fizzing little whip-tailed sperm swarming the large, helpless moon of the egg, he was overcome with a remorseful sense of exclusion from his wife’s body so large it drove him from the theater and out to the hall, where, three floors up, he quite seriously pondered jumping from the balcony. Instead, childless himself, he sobbed uncontrollably at the thought he would never sire children with her. This, he thought, is love, what it does, how it deranges, and in the guise of passion, how it destroys.
The boys were coming forward to take a bow. They were deeply pleased with themselves. They relished giving him the business while remaining protected within their roles of just being kids. This seemed to Potash patently unfair, like a preteen committing murder and then walking. A friend had once told him that the main business of teenagers was to destroy their parents; that this was what being a teenager
was
. Potash was applauding the little murderers, thinking,
It’s only the beginning,
when his phone buzzed. It was the PI he’d contacted at the suggestion of Hiram Bortz, texting to ask him if they could advance their appointment by a day, to this afternoon.
He looked up from his phone to see the boys, Louis and Terry, now standing directly before him, awaiting his response. Early in his career, for three summers in a row, he’d counseled hard-core middle-school truants and had learned to keep his realer feelings to himself when faced with even the most flagrant provocation.
“Pretty funny, guys,” he said casually, and held out his fist.
They individually fist-bumped him back, giggling with pleasure while his wife made love-eyes at him for his big, understanding heart, and below the happy scene he struggled, as he had for four days straight, to understand how a man with everything in the world going for him could have so successfully buried himself alive. Dropping his eyes back to his lap, he only dimly heard the children and his wife laughing in an overflow of family feeling as he texted back, “Roger that. The sooner the better.”
W
hen college was over, the black-clad girlfriends she’d had for four years scattered individually to their summer islands and boats, moving on from there to graduate schools in England and the Ivy League. Two weeks after graduation, she took a job in Northampton, working for the Klein-Newsome art gallery. She’d ended college with perfect grades, a few acquaintances, several ex-lovers, sixty thousand dollars of debt and no prospects. Her father had by now drunk himself into a complaisant torpor and did paperwork three afternoons a week for his former assistant.
And so, while she regularly received postcards from Positano, and Cinque Terre, and Paros, Greece, which she carefully tacked in a gay little arch above the mirror of her bathroom in a rented room, her days were mainly spent watching herself impersonate a wholesome just-graduated college girl. For hours, she wandered each day at work amid watercolors of daisies, calla lilies and nasturtiums spilling over rock gardens, while saying to clients, “These are all by local artists,” and “That series is very popular as wedding presents,” and “Expectant mothers find that sea scenes are deeply calming.”
One afternoon in early September, with the town again flooded with students, she had an illumination. A father had come in with his daughter to buy a painting for her dorm room. The father was a handsome, well-dressed man with a mantle of gray hair and fine hands. He looked every inch the part of an Ivy League English professor. His daughter had about her the wholesomeness of a girl who’d played field hockey and aced Shakespeare at some country school with high educational standards and a Quaker-based curriculum.
Of course she loathed the girl; to a certain extent the father too. But later that night, while alone in her rented room, a searing rage at her father came over her, followed shortly by waves of tears so violent that her stomach began to cramp. On impulse, she shut off the television, lay down in bed fully clothed, put her sleep mask on, and thought hard for about a half hour. When she got up, taking off her mask, she had made up her mind.
The next morning, she called in sick to work and caught an early morning bus out of Northampton. Her father’s house was two hours away, and during the ride, she meditated on the plan that had come to her wholly formed while lying in bed with her eyes covered. Years earlier, in an effort to evade detection, her father had begun paying his multiplying numbers of “girlfriends” in disbursements of $200 and $300 out of a bewildering variety of accounts, and he had never consolidated them. To hear him say it, he was “flat broke,” but she knew he had many small sums of money scattered around various banks in a galaxy of mostly inactive accounts. These accounts would be her target.
Everything went exactly as planned. She’d phoned her father from the bus to make sure he’d be at work. A taxi took her to the deserted house. Once inside, she moved with a dowser’s intuition in a widening spiral through the rooms with their various caches and hiding places till she found the object of her desire: a wooden box containing a collection of ancient flapping checkbooks. From there it was but a signature forged, a friendly handshake with the elderly teller at the local credit union where her family had banked for years and she was heading back to campus with a thousand dollars in her bag and a cushion of several weeks or months before her father figured out what had happened.
As the bus on giant tires advanced over winding sunset roads she told herself she felt like a seed being borne on a river to a sacred patch of soil. This she would make flower into a plant of deep importance. The secrecy of her mission lent it power. The illegality of it lent it extra life. She felt calmer and more centered than she could remember feeling in years. Shit, she thought, staring out the window, I could get used to this.
“Get used to what?” Dan France now said directly into her ear.
She opened her eyes.
“What?” she asked, slowly.
“You were muttering to yourself in your sleep,” he said, clearly very pleased with himself.
“I—”
“I couldn’t make much out, but I did hear ‘get used to this.’ ”
“Oh, God,” she said softly.
“No worries!” He laughed delightedly. He was out of his normal suit, and dressed casually in chinos and a T-shirt. He moved around her bed, raised on the balls of his feet, and smiled with his catlike lips.
“So, how’s tricks?”
“Fine,” she said automatically, and then with an effort, correcting herself: “Tired, actually. Very tired.”
“That’s good that you’re tired. Before you were so tired you didn’t even know you were tired.”
She yawned.
“Tired is as tired does,” she said, “or something.”
His smile was steady; it seemed as if fed from some internal spring.
“You wanna take a ride?” he asked.
“I don’t under—”
“A little spin around the grounds?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Just this.” He stood up and retrieved from behind him a wheelchair, which he brought around smartly to the side of the bed.
“Seriously?”
“I’ve already cleared it with the powers that be.”
An hour later, he was pushing her slowly along the flagstone paths. The wheels crackled over the leaves. The daylight, sunshine, and smells flowed across her senses with shocking vividness.
“The world,” she said softly, “is kinda intense.”
“After your ‘accident,’ almost anything would probably feel like that.”
“Why do you do that?”
“What?”
“Say the word like that, ‘accident.’ ”
“Ah.” He stopped pushing and came around the front of the wheelchair and squatted in front of her in a way that made his head look unnaturally large and detailed.
“Well, that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it, whether this was an accident, or not.”
She merely stared at him.
“I’m here on a kinda two-track mission,” he said, and held his hands again up in the air. “The professional,” he said, wiggling his right hand, “goes forward with the investigation. The personal”—he wiggled his left—“well . . .”
He dropped his hands.
“I think you’re a very special person,” he said. “So sue me.”
She looked at him.
“Is that the way detectives talk?” she said slowly.
He laughed again. “See?” he said. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
A chrome tanker truck, crossing a distant bridge, threw a glowing star of light across a mile of air and directly into her eye. Didn’t everyone understand how smashingly violent the world was?
“Listen,” he said, “in all seriousness, I have something for you.”
“What’s that?” she asked, as with great care he placed a blank pad of paper in her lap.
Instead of answering, he drew a sharpened number 2 pencil from his pocket and closed her fingers around it in a way that made a hot and sour tingle run through her body.
“I want you to draw a face,” he said.
“A face? What kind of face?”
Sometimes she could feel the place where it used to be, wit; a blank space of bumpy air. But it was coming back.
“What kind of face?” she repeated.
“Any kind,” he said, and then in response to her evident incomprehension, he said, “Your memory has been impaired by what happened to you, but I have a real interest in knowing more about the people who’ve been around you recently. And drawing the last face you can remember seeing might just furnish us some clues.”
He leaned forward into the smooth, sparkling, incredibly interesting air.
“Okay?” he asked.
“Okay,” she said, feeling it coming back, fast. It was an old story. She had once been so good at it. It had once been so dependable. Now she remembered. You put the feelings in the one side, and out came the hard, specific things from the other. Sex, interest, and money especially. Big jangling showers of money. Delicious rivers of it, winding among sparkling far banks of commodities. Those black-clad friends of hers of college had almost all of them married rich or been rich to start with. But what had she done? Why hadn’t she gotten rich? Or had she? Dan France was nodding at her like he knew something and wasn’t telling.
Or had she?