Two for the Show (14 page)

“I know who did this to us,” I tell her quietly. “I’m starting to see how it was done to us . . .”

She looks at me horrified. “
Did
this to us? What do you mean?”

And I realize that it has not even occurred to her that what happened to us was purposeful. She assumes, I can see, it was a series of accidents, miscommunications, official mistakes, bad luck, in a life that has known its share of them. Of course she thinks that—this sweet, simple, private midwestern mom, after all. A plan, a purpose, is incomprehensible.

I am about to explain it, to tell her who it was, who was behind it all, to tell her more about Wallace the Amazing than she would ever guess from television. About his success and the cold calculations and manipulations that make his success possible—and that she and I have apparently been part of it, pawns in it. But is there anything to be gained by doing that right now? By sharing it with her? By bringing so much darkness into her reunion with her son? At some point, maybe. But not right now.

(And proof of the rightness of holding my tongue? That in those next few hours, I can hear my mother—ever private, ever reserved—weeping behind the bathroom door for several minutes, before composing herself, coming back out.)

In my confusion, my stunned fury, one thing is clear. I will help Archer Wallace. The real Wallace. Duped like me. I will help him. We will finish off Wallace the Amazing. I am his creation, his mechanical monster. So I’m the perfect creature to turn on him.

His little trick, his deft little turn, twisting my life like a picture card (a jack, a knave) around his practiced magician’s fingers. It makes everything around me feel like a stage set. Makes the past that surrounds me here in the hallway, the kitchen, the dark little house, feel unreal, since it had been scrubbed away, ceased to exist for me until a few moments ago.

Everything has happened. Everything has changed. Nothing has happened. Nothing has changed.
Despite the unvarying geography, the utterly predictable house and porch and shutters and fence and side chairs and breakfast table and a thousand other visual and physical markers and assurances, there is this enormous sense of dislocation of time and place.

Wrinkled, curled in on herself, as if patiently preparing for life’s last lap, quietly resigned to her final years on earth, my mother is suddenly brought alive. The years peel off; a new light in her eyes lifts her, enlivens her, animates a much younger being.

I return to what is relevant. To what is simple and primary, here and now.

“I . . . I didn’t know, Mom.” Half-formed, abject, apologetic. “I had no idea . . .”

“Of course not,” she says, her own words forgiving, her voice so familiar, speaking to me quietly across the decades. “How could you? How could anyone even imagine?” Looking at me closely, like a specimen. And then beginning, intuitively, to rebuild our bond. “But now we have to deal with it, Charles.” Blinking, as if to clarify the blurry thought for herself, clarify the necessary action. “We have to go forward. Repair what we can. We’ll always share the loss. Now we have to share whatever can be salvaged, whatever can be gained . . .”

We are not mother and son, we are instead survivors of a primordial disaster, of a shifting of planets, a teleological tsunami.

I am looking back over the years, past the wrinkles to the eyes I know but have never looked at so closely. It feels invasive. I turn away.

And then, she’s trying to rein it in for us, to normalize it, as if we
are
just a mother and son reunited in an old farmhouse on a dusty nameless American plain—exactly what we are. “Your jobs, your friends, your life . . . I want to hear it all,” she says with a warm smile. Settling back in her familiar kitchen chair. Feeling, it seems, with a crazy, impulsive optimism, that we can simply catch up on twenty years. That we can happily, merrily fill in the blanks over tea and tuna sandwiches. She looks at me, a look filled with a mother’s essential pride, admiration, joy, at an adult child’s mere presence. “Having you suddenly here in the kitchen again, Charles. My kitchen.
Our
kitchen. It’s . . . it’s . . .” She searches for a word. “It’s like
magic
.”

I stare at her, shocked and stricken-looking enough, I guess, that I take the warm American plain smile away from her.

Magic.
If only you could spit at a word. Chew it up, grind it into dust in your teeth, spit it out, bury it in the dirt with your boot heel. The long-dead mother alive; the unchanged landscape and details that I haven’t laid eyes on in twenty years; the return, the awakening of a former self; the fact that it is all at bottom a deft, fairly simple trick—it all conspired to create a sense of unreality, of a waking functional dream state, wherein I was observing events as if from elsewhere, as if from afar.

He has induced this dream state, this kind of coma, a drug trip, wherein bounds are fluid, conventions are altered, physical and psychological rules get stretched and suspended. Does he too, wearing his adoptive self, experience this dream state? Does he know what he has unleashed?

So the Amazing has pulled off his scam, his act, not just on the Internet, where lies can be composed, alternate realities can be constructed fairly easily. No, he has done it in reality, in
my
hometown, for God’s sake, altered reality. My mother’s and mine, at least, and all of those acquainted with us.

To expunge someone from the Internet, that is technology. That is expertise. But for me to stride into a past that had been obliterated, that existed only in my imagination and is now fully restored in front of me, surrounding me, reproduced as if out of thin air—for someone to achieve that, is high art.

Magic?

Sure, Mom. Magic.

TWELVE

And so it is only appropriate,
wouldn’t you agree, that the magic continues. The dream rendered into reality, reality into dream.

Archer Wallace and I wait in glimmering dusk, beneath an otherworldly sunset of maple red, tangerine, and buttery gold, outside the gates of Shangri-la. Its spiral turrets and gleaming whitewashed flanks, sparkling jewel-like in the sunset, are familiar to me. I have seen this stunning stucco castle—studied it—on several pages in
People
magazine. Glimpsed its sumptuous colorful interiors in a spread in
Architectural Digest
. A sultanate in the desert. An oasis rising from the sand and scrub. I have never been here. I have never risked coming so close to it. But now, all bets are off (or on). Now risk—the big payout—is part of my vocabulary. After years of observing Las Vegas from a cool distance, I am in it—for the big payoff, with all attendant risks.

I know the gate code and door codes and alarm codes. I supervised and reviewed much of the security for him, set up and informed my boss how to create and maintain the security he craved, so I now have a level of access I never even thought about. (Unless he’s changed the codes, but I would have known about that.) I know where to park the car so it can’t be seen by the cameras. I helped set up the cameras—aiming them, adjusting them remotely—years ago.

We are waiting here outside the gates until Wallace the Amazing’s show begins. We know he’ll be out of the house for those hours, onstage and preoccupied and therefore out of the way. It’s the one thing we can count on.

We sit silently in the rental car. There is nothing to say at this point. The plan is clear. We have been over it repeatedly. Unnecessary to verbalize it further. Its contingencies drilled into each other.

As Wallace’s show begins at eight, just after nightfall, our show begins too. Archer Wallace and I scurry silently toward the front gate. I punch the keypad—first the code to cancel the previous code, then my new code, then confirming the new code, and the gate swings open.

We are hoping no one happens to be watching. But why would they? We are assuming, but we aren’t sure, that his family is gathered around the television for the broadcast. Assuming it’s their nightly ritual.

As we approach, silently, the glow of a big-screen television tumbles out of a bay window into the courtyard. Just as we imagined. So far so good.

The huge TV blares. It brings Wallace the Amazing practically life-size into his own living room. It masks the sound of my pressing the front door keypad and gripping the gold (yes, eighteen-karat gold) latch and handle with both hands, and pushing it gently open, and presumably it masks the sound of our footsteps. Wallace’s own voice, confident, polished, booming through the home-theater speakers
profundo
, provides the real Wallace and myself the auditory cover we need.

Edging the front door open only as much as necessary. Up the half-dozen broad, grand entrance foyer stairs. In front of us, the family is sprawled like pashas on huge couches and colorful mats, watching rapt, as rapt as anyone in the show’s live audience. They have seen the tricks a thousand times but don’t know how they’re done, and seem still as fascinated as ever to witness them. Or maybe now it’s just to hear the funny, sordid, or unpredictable details of audience members’ lives.

Archer Wallace draws his gun. I draw mine. (I had initially refused to carry one. This was going to be the end of our cooperation, the end of our plan, but Archer Wallace proposed a compromise. What if I brandished a gun with no bullets? I relented.) By the time the Wallace family becomes vaguely aware—senses something, turns—we are behind them, guns to their heads. Archer’s gun is held to the head of the maid. Mine is held to the head of Sasha, the Amazing’s amazing wife.

Archer Wallace is coolly proactive. “Everyone stays quiet, and no one gets hurt. Not a sound. No sudden movement. Got that, girls?” His health and appearance have improved markedly over the past few days. He acts strong, authoritative. As if all his strength, his energy, his whole being, has been waiting for this chance for action, this overdue revenge.
“Everyone stays quiet, and no one gets hurt.”
Hearing that cliché aloud only makes the scene more unreal for me. Like it will all cease to exist in the next moment, turn out to be merely—and poorly—imagined.

The two daughters, Amanda and Alison, nod mutely, obediently.

Wallace the Amazing squints out into the audience sternly. As if he can suddenly see us. As if he is watching the action in his home but can do nothing about it. Life-size, as if he will step off the screen into his own living room, to defend it. But of course, he calls on someone. “You play the viola, don’t you?” he says. “A Carpini viola.” Viola repair bill, I remember.

Sasha looks in anxious, contained horror at me. She has no idea who I am, of course. No idea about my relationship to her and her family. No idea that I am a significant reason she is living in this sultanate, in such surroundings, in her lush life. To her, in fact, I am the precise opposite. A common thief, probably drug-addled, who with the capricious pull of a trigger will take this lush life away. I have spent years watching from afar the fruits of their marriage, the births and growth of their daughters, the living of their lives. She has never seen me and—given that she presumes her husband’s tricks are indeed magic—never even imagined me.

“Just tell me what you want,” she says to me, doing her best to contain her bile, to hold check on her fury and her fear, for they are working together in her, churning. I can see them both written across her face. She addresses it to me, as if intuitively singling me out for its existential meaning—
Just tell me what you want.
Taking charge for her daughters, dangling the possibility of a practical, civil solution, intending to get us out of there as quickly as possible.

It is Archer Wallace who answers from across the room. “What we want your husband is going to have to provide, Sasha.” Using her name, to show we have done our homework.

He grabs the maid’s arm, pulls her up, and, keeping the gun to the back of her head with his other hand, guides her across the room to where the girls are. He pushes the maid onto the couch between the teenage girls. Everyone understands this is to put them all together to keep an eye on them more easily. Everyone senses this is planning, professionalism. It seems to make them relax a tick, reassure them. Seems to say that this will be over soon, without incident, that the thieves will take whatever it is they want, and disappear into the desert as anonymously as they came.

Then, in an unforeseen instant (unforeseen by Sasha and the girls, anyway—I had been anxiously, literally “foreseeing” it all too clearly), Archer switches the gun to the back of Amanda’s head, pulls her up off the couch as brusquely as he pushed the maid down onto it. I can see the fresh horror etch onto Sasha’s face.

“Oh, no . . .” Faltering syllables as Sasha puts it together.

Wallace cuts her off. “Nothing’s gonna happen if your husband does what we tell him. It’s reasonable. He’ll understand. It’s evening the score. You ask him to explain it to you.” The real Wallace sounds reasonable but firm. Understanding but authoritative. He plays it perfectly, I have to say. “Don’t do anything—no police, no screaming, no panic—until you talk to your husband. Do you understand?”

No response. Staring.

“Do you understand?” With more force, with threat. This disheveled tuft-haired ghost—now he looks crazy. Reckless. And unafraid.

An alert nod of obedience from Sasha.

It is not the time, but I can’t help myself. I look at Amanda—the shape and color of those swimming brown eyes, the tilt of her head, the relaxed posture that signals serenity and stillness amid surrounding turmoil. I can’t help but admire her. She is terrified, yet she is also alert, fascinated, observing, somehow calm. Calmer than her sister, Alison, who is literally shivering in fear, and her mother, Sasha, standing immobile, paralyzed with panic.

While Wallace the Amazing closes his eyes onstage, wrinkles his brow in concentration—as if somehow seeing us, envisioning us, an interruption, a dark spot on the periphery of his thoughts—the real Wallace and I begin to back out of the family room.

The maid makes a sudden, protective move—to bolt from the room? grab a phone? pull an alarm?—and I swing my gun to her, and she screams, and Sasha screams in chorus, and Alison, the other daughter, begins to weep . . .

“Hey!” Wallace yells. “Hey!”

And another scream goes up, and Wallace fires.

Into the ceiling.

It silences them all bluntly and immediately.

As we cross the threshold of the front door, Amanda held between us, we are crossing another threshold, I know. From nuisance to menace. From annoying pest to deadly predator. A threshold where the police—the real police—could now be summoned, if that’s the way the Amazing Wallace decides to play it.

From theft of identity, to theft of child. The story’s dark new arc.

She is a beautiful young girl, Amanda. I glance at her in the rearview mirror. Archer Wallace sits beside her in the back while I drive. The gun is dangled casually in his right hand, exposed as a reminder to Amanda—and perhaps to himself. By previous agreement, Archer Wallace and I are silent. We don’t want to supply any inadvertent clues.

I have mixed feelings about all this. Terror at our actions, of course, terror at the possible outcomes, each worse than the next, but tender feelings also. Amanda has never seen me. I am sure she has never seen even a picture of me. But I have watched her grow. I have seen her from infancy, watched from afar as she has taken her first steps, swallowed her first spoonfuls of solid food, spoken her first words. I have checked her grades, zoomed in on class photos and soccer and swim team photos posted online, kept an encouraging though watchful eye on her. This was my surrogate family, all the family I had, the family that I had filled in for mine, though this was my first time of course (and no doubt my last) in the family home. The routine details of her childhood—riding a two-wheeler, splashing desperately but triumphantly through her first lap, scoring her first soccer goal, smiling with accomplishment after the final note of her first oboe recital—she was the human marker by which I had measured the passage of time; in truth, the marks were penciled onto my soul like the carefully penciled slashes marking her height on the jamb of her bedroom door. These details of her upbringing are how I was able to bear it. And before you think that there is some perverted attraction or avuncular affection that goes inappropriately over the line, let me add: I now have the chance to get to know my daughter.

My daughter, because she is. My sperm, my DNA, my biological offspring—and this known presumably not by Sasha, or Dominique, or any other “detective.” This known only by the Amazing and me. When his low sperm count and inadequate motility interrupted his plans for a perfect existence in a perfect oasis in the desert, he knew he did not need to turn to the inherent risks of a sperm bank. He had already, as it happened, intensively researched a candidate. Smart, proficient, loyal, alone in the world, already in his employ. Wallace engineered the sperm drop—my milky-white contribution in the cold cylinder, where Wallace picked it up a minute after I had left it for him—and it was his own specimen, as far as the world of medicine knew, with finally, miraculously, a viable sperm count. (The mysterious rhythms of reproduction still not thoroughly understood, but it happened all the time; couples couldn’t conceive and then, suddenly, inexplicably, they did.)

Certainly it helps explain, doesn’t it, why I felt my relationship with Wallace was so special, why I could not even imagine there could be another in my role. Certainly it explains my trust in him—because of his utter trust in me. His apparently profound and thoroughgoing admiration, sealed with the ultimate compliment.
I want you to be the father of my child.

Perfect for him. Because I had already proved I knew how, that I had the discipline, to keep my distance from his life. That I could respect and honor a bargain, a deal, utterly. I had proved it day in day out, year in year out. So I was the perfect candidate for surrogate fatherhood.

And in the context of my ongoing years of service and my relationship, it was the simplest, smallest thing ever asked of me. Nothing to it. I hardly gave it a second thought, said yes immediately, no big deal, happy to do it. Ejaculate into a container, drop it off. Hardly a precious possession of mine, that single successful spermatozoon. I have billions more, and only occasionally any place for them to go. It was a favor that took no real effort, that, in fact, was its own small pleasure—for once, masturbation with some greater purpose. As far as how I might feel about a child who I knew was mine, I had no idea; I had no point of reference for such feelings. I imagined they might be intense in some new way. Or that I might just as likely have none at all. It turned out to be the former: unexpected, powerful, relentless feelings of interest, joy, pride, and, most of all, connection.

So when Archer Wallace had proposed the kidnapping, I had little choice—I had to be there to protect my daughter from harm, to be there whatever happened, come what may—but it was also the chance to be with her finally, to get to know her a little, if under the worst possible circumstances.

From utterly selfless to utterly selfish, in one short step.

So Wallace’s two “detective” employees each have an extra connection to him—one his mistress, one the father of his child. Part of his method? Keep us close, keep us loyal, keep us protective, keep us interested? Now you can understand, that was part of the shock when she said she slept with him. It was another line of parallelism between us. We were not just both his employees, but both something much more—much more “connected.”

Connection, connection, it is all connection . . .

My sperm—creating his fatherhood, and guaranteeing my loyalty, in a single ejaculatory stroke. A way to be sure I’d stay in his employ. To dutifully do what would ensure the welfare of my child, because my child was in his charge. My sperm donation—a useful, convenient solution—and one more tactic from him. In light of my startling visit home, I saw the degree to which his whole identity was in service of his stage act—helping to protect it, to insure it. So why not the paternity of his children too? It made the threat of the blackmail—of bringing down the act—all the more powerful.