Deceit

by James Siegel

  “No.”

  “Ever read one as an adult?”

  “Can’t say I have.”

  “Maybe you should. Even when you stop believing in goblins, they can scare the shit out of you. Especially when you stop believing in goblins.”

  I didn’t know quite how to respond to that.

  “I guess you’re going to want to stay the night?” he asked.

  “If it’s not too much trouble.”

  “No trouble. You have six empty cabins to choose from.”

  I said thanks. Wished him luck with his truck in Fishbein.

  “My notes,” he said. “You can copy them or memorize them. I want them back where I left them. I’d pick a cabin with wood inside. Sweet dreams.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  The interview with Bailey Kindlon had obviously been taped, then both sides of the conversation transcribed.

  Wren’s Rule number two: transcribe your tape recordings for in case!

  He’d begun by jotting down his general impressions of her. The 3-year-old survivor of the Aurora Dam Flood was middle-aged by now. She was divorced and lived alone. He noted her living room was lined with books on alien abductions.

  He soon found out why.

  He began by thanking her for seeing him and reiterating the purpose of his visit. He was doing a story on the Aurora Dam Flood. He was hoping she could remember some things about that day, even though she was so little at the time.

  Actually, I remember a lot, she told him. You’d be surprised what a 3-year-old brain retains. Of course, doing the whole therapy thing’s helped. Wren acknowledged that it must have been horrible for her. You know, at the time, you’re a little kid, and in a way, that helps. And in a way, it doesn’t. I remember being photographed for some newspaper two days after I was rescued and cracking this big smile because I was going to be on the front page of a paper. This is two days after I was orphaned. So yeah, it helped being 3, but let me tell you, as the years went on, and all sorts of psychic shit began raining on my parade, it wasn’t so cool after all. Kids bury it, that’s all. And in some ways, that’s worse. Wren asked her if that meant she’d remembered things only later on. No. She’d always remembered some things. Playing in her backyard that Sunday morning.

  I remembered putting my Raggedy Ann in a stroller and singing a lullaby to her. I remembered my mother flying out of the screen door, yelling something to me, but not really hearing it very well because there was this roar-like a jet engine, but then not like a jet engine, like some 747 landing right on top of you. It was too close. I remembered that sort of confluence of sound and sensation. Then it was as if I’d been lifted up-my dad would do that, grab me around the waist from behind and swing me up in the air like a loop-de-loop. It was like that. I was suddenly picked up except my dad wasn’t there, and my mother was gone too, and I was all wet. I was suddenly in a pool-but the pool was my whole backyard, the whole street. I remember whizzing past Mrs. Denning’s house-she was our neighbor-and seeing the house itself; her entire house began moving, spinning past me like a top, and it was like I was in The Wizard of Oz, that scene where Dorothy gets picked up by the tornado and everything is swirling around in the air, only this was water. I remembered all that.

  Was that it, then? Wren asked her. All she remembered before therapy?

  No. She remembered being rescued. She’d grabbed onto a piece of wood-or it grabbed onto her. Who knows? That’s what saved her. An old cellar door. She was on it for at least a day before they found her.

  Who found her? Wren asked. The police, the firemen?

  No, she said. Not the police or firemen.

  Then who?

  Aliens.

  Wren managed to keep his incredulity in check. He asked her to tell him about that. The aliens.

  Well, they weren’t exactly aliens, she explained. Not at first. It was their robots. I was on the door. I remember being hungry and thirsty and wet and feeling like I was in this dream that I just couldn’t wake up from. There were all these dolls in the water, floating Raggedy Anns and Raggedy Andys. But they weren’t dolls, of course. When my therapist took me back, I saw them. All the dead people in the water, hundreds and hundreds, open-eyed, but like the eyes of dead fish, you know, that white, filmy, soulless look. They kept bumping up against the storm door, bobbing up out of the water as if they were trying to climb up there with me, but of course they couldn’t. They were all dead. That’s when the robots came. Wren asked her to tell him everything she remembered about the robots. She was drifting, she said. Maybe she’d even fallen asleep. She suddenly woke up, heard this kind of sloshing sound. They were coming through the water for her. White robots. They had arms and heads, but no hands or faces. That’s how she knew they weren’t human. They moved in slow motion, like mechanical dolls. How many? Wren asked. Six or seven, she said. And did they speak to her? How could they? she reminded him. They had no faces, no mouths. They just made these clicking sounds-like dolphins. The robots had lifted her up from the cellar door. Then they’d carried her off.

  Where? Wren asked.

  Their spaceship.

  I was on this table. Some of this stuff I always remembered, and some of it came back later under hypnosis. I was strapped onto this metal table and they were examining me with these awful-looking instruments. As you know, or don’t know, that’s pretty common with alien abductions. Have you ever read Whitley Schreiber’s book?

  Wren said he hadn’t.

  She explained that it was pretty much the bible among alien abductees. Schreiber had been abducted three times.

  Wren said he’d be sure to pick up a copy. He asked her to go on.

  I was on the table, she said. I couldn’t move my arms and legs. There was this… light shining down on me-a kind of blue glow-it was endless, as if there were no real source to it, understand? They were staring at me.

  Wren reminded her she’d told him that the aliens didn’t have eyes.

  Those were the robots, Bailey corrected him. These were the aliens. She was in their spaceship now. The aliens had eyes. But no mouths. Which means they couldn’t speak to her, either. But they could communicate with her. They could put their thoughts into her head. Like telepathy.

  What thoughts were those? Wren asked her.

  Well, she couldn’t really remember exactly. That she shouldn’t be afraid, mostly. That they weren’t going to hurt her. Even if that didn’t turn out to be entirely true.

  A couple of things did hurt. They put some of the instruments inside me-my mouth, and, well… lower down. I remember crying and asking for my mom and dad.

  Wren asked her to describe what the spaceship looked like.

  She couldn’t really see it. She was strapped down. There was this blue light boring into her eyes. She could only see them, pretty much. The aliens. There were a bunch of them. But one alien-he seemed to be their leader.

  He was the one right there, examining me. The others seemed to be… well, kind of like his helpers.

  It went on and on, she said. As if she were strapped onto that table for days. She knew it couldn’t have been days, that it wasn’t possible she was there that long, but that’s what it felt like. Then it was just over.

  Wren asked her if she could describe that. How it ended?

  She couldn’t.

  That’s the part I don’t really remember. They must’ve put me back-that’s all.

  Where? Wren asked.

  Somewhere dry. Somewhere people could find me. I guess they did-because I’m here, right? The lone survivor and all that? I was a big story for a day or two. Of course, if it had happened now, they’d put me on CNN. Not those days. Anyway, I was taken in by cousins in Sacramento. And I’ve never been back-not that there’s anything to see, I guess. It all washed away.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The next morning, Wren was still absent.

  I walked into his cabin to return his notes and make some coffee.

  I was only half-successful.

  He�
�d gone into Fishbein for supplies, he’d said. He needed them. He was out of coffee-seemingly out of everything.

  A gray mist was hovering inches above the lake. It felt like fall. I half expected to see swirling leaves carpeting the ground.

  On the way back to the highway, I reached over to turn up the heat just as a panicked deer flew across the dirt road. It clipped my hood with its back hooves, then tumbled off into the brush.

  I lurched to the right and stopped dead, then took a good minute or two to catch my breath.

  My heart wasn’t the only thing racing. My mind was too, replaying Bailey Kindlon’s surreal story. Floating houses spinning down the street. Hundreds of dead people bobbing around the water. The part of her story that was real.

  Do you believe in fairy tales?

  If you did, you would have to believe in the rest of her story. Little blue aliens with no mouths. White robots with no faces. Medical exams in the bowels of a spaceship.

  A fairy tale worthy of the Brothers Grimm. If they were on mushrooms maybe.

  I drove straight down the PCH without stopping.

  The forests thinned, the surf quieted, the steep cliffs turned into flat sand, the B amp;Bs into motels and fish fries. I found a classic rock station with a DJ named Frankie Foo and tapped the steering wheel to “Soul Sacrifice,” “Layla,” and “Brown Sugar.”

  When the sun went down, I could just make out the Ferris-wheel lights on the Santa Monica Pier. It made me think of my one and only childhood visit to an amusement park. Not really a park-one of those traveling carnivals with junky rides and shoot-water-in-the-clown’s-mouth concessions. After Jimmy died. After I told the police and the caseworkers that he slipped on the ice. That he fell in the tub. That he walked into the door. What happened, Tommy? An accident. He was clumsy. At the carnival my mom took her lying son for a spin around the Ferris wheel, then threw up while we were suspended at the top. The resulting screams had nothing to do with the cheap thrill of being carted up to the stars. One sniff of her breath once we were back on the ground was enough to secure her a lecture on responsible child-rearing-this from an itinerant barker who looked like he did a fair amount of drinking himself. It was enough to swear me off carnivals forever-though not enough to swear her off Jim Beam. Do you still blame her? Dr. Payne had asked me. He meant did I blame her for being a drunk-for being verbally abusive, for fucking anything in pants. He didn’t know what I really blamed her for.

  How could he?

  I remained the ever-dutiful son.

  I didn’t tell.

  I’m not sure when I chose not to turn off to the 405, when I made the conscious decision to keep motoring straight into Santa Monica.

  Maybe I wanted one more turn on the Ferris wheel-figuratively speaking. There’s 2 percent of your brain that can believe just about anything. I should know-I made liberal use of it in other people’s brains. The Children’s Protective Services caseworkers, for example, who somehow believed a 6-year-old boy could have a strange affinity for hard surfaces. My editor, for another, who swallowed stories about Jesus think tanks, con-men actors, and bomb-throwing pediatricians. It’s the same 2 percent that tells you that the beautiful woman who sat across from you in Violetta’s found you irresistible. Or at least mildly attractive. The 2 percent, in other words, where dumb hope resides.

  I didn’t have a plan.

  I was fairly sure I wasn’t going to fulfill my e-mail threat and park myself on the Third Street Promenade till she passed by. I had a general address and her cell number-I was kind of chicken to use it. The other 98 percent of my brain remembered her expression when I told her the good news-that she was dining with a famous liar. I remembered her good-sport attempt to keep the conversation rolling; it was more painful than silence.

  I parked in the municipal parking lot on Fourth and strolled around for a while.

  It was prime time on the promenade. Once, in the not-so-distant past, downtown Santa Monica had been a haven for America’s refuse-an army of strung-out, homeless, down-on-their-luck, just-released-from-a mental-asylum kind of people. After all, it was warm, and there was always a place under the piers to lay your head.

  The Third Street Promenade had changed all that. It had turned downtown Santa Monica into a crowded outdoor mall, replete with street jugglers, musicians, and dinosaur topiaries.

  I window-shopped, wondering who that disheveled middle-aged man was staring back at me through the window of VJ Records, and was only mildly surprised to discover it was me.

  I escaped the crowds by ducking through an alley onto the next street, where there were still people milling around, but not as many. Where it was at least breathable.

  I knew I was slowly working my way somewhere, even if I wasn’t exactly admitting it.

  There was a coffee shop on Fifth called Java.

  An Adidas store. A Blockbuster.

  Two residential buildings connected by a single lobby, with wraparound terraces and what appeared to be an inner courtyard with a pool. I could just about sniff the chlorine.

  On Fifth, she’d said, right off the promenade.

  I stopped and took in the scenery. I admired the rhododendrons and bougainvillea fronting the buildings. I noted the new coat of black paint on the filigreed railing that lined both sides of the walkway.

  The one I was strolling down toward a suddenly beckoning lobby.

  It was lit by two banks of blue fluorescent lights.

  There were mailboxes on either side-one per building. I casually perused them, doing a little window-shopping again, even though, okay, I might’ve, just possibly, you never know, been searching for one particular hard-to-find item.

  The girl with Botticelli eyes. The one who’d made me tell the truth to her and then instantly made me regret it.

  No Anna Graham listed.

  For either building.

  Fifth, she’d said, but Fifth stretched on for blocks.

  I wandered out of the lobby, stopped short by the momentous decision of whether to turn left or right. I picked left, changed my mind, crossed the street, and drifted into Fatburger for something big and greasy.

  No false advertising there. I walked out with half a cow.

  I found myself in front of a playhouse. Or maybe I didn’t just find myself there. Maybe I was guided there.

  It was a play called The Pier.

  Evidently some kind of comedy, since the actors featured in several photos seemed to be mugging for the audience, one of the actresses holding up women’s lingerie in front of a man sporting an okay, you got me look on his bug-eyed face.

  I was going to turn and keep walking. To where?

  I didn’t know.

  I’d walk until I couldn’t. Until I ran across her, the odds of which were slim to none.

  But something caught my eye.

  Caught is right.

  Picture one of John Wren’s lake trout hooked right through its gut.

  It was an ensemble shot-that moment where all the actors come on stage hand in hand to take their bows.

  There were maybe eight of them.

  I leaned in till my breath smudged the glass and I had to step back, wipe it clean, then crouch down to stare at it again.

  I stood there transfixed. I might’ve been meticulously reading the review from Santa Monica Weekly, which promised a riotous night in the theater.

  You’ll shake with laughter, it said.

  Or with fear.

  I bought a ticket, center aisle, ninth row.

  I was right about it being a comedy. A sort of French bedroom farce, except most of the action took place on the Santa Monica Pier. It involved mistaken identities, mismatched lovers, lots of sexual innuendo. The funniest thing was the scenery-a painted backdrop of the pier that kept folding over. One actor or another would deviate from their marks in the middle of a scene in order to mosey over and casually push the Ferris wheel back into place.

  Still, the audience seemed to like it well enough. It’s hard to tell w
ith theater audiences, since they always seem to try so hard. It must be the proximity to the actors, who are not up on some celluloid screen but right there in front of you. No one wants to be impolite.

  By the second act, all the mistaken-identity stuff basically worked itself out. With one exception.

  He made his appearance at the end of act one.

  He played a gay actor pretending to be his straight roommate in order to impress a female William Morris agent, who had the hots for his roommate who she thought was him. The William Morris agent kept having conversations on one of those invisible cell-phone speakers that various bystanders took to be directed at them. That was the running gag, leading to all sorts of mistakes and would-be hilarity.

  He first appeared stage right, in tank top and running shorts, seconds away from bumping into the talent agent who was telling some producer-over her cell phone, of course-about some hot project, using words certain to be construed two ways.

  I leaned forward in my chair, nearly planting my chin into the person sitting in front of me.

  It was meant to be dusk, that twilight hour Shakespeare was so fond of. Magical things happened at dusk; people turned into donkeys, spells were cast and lifted, lovers parted and reunited. I leaned forward because the dimmed lights made it hard to see and I couldn’t be 100 percent sure.

  By the time he appeared at the beginning of act two in the full, glaring sunshine of morning, all doubts were dispelled.

  It was him.

  There wasn’t a stage door.

  This was off-off-off-Broadway. The actors exited from the same door the audience did, the one in the front.

  I had to wait them out, mingle with the handful of other theatergoers waiting for the actors to appear.

  After ten minutes, they began straggling out, first an actress met by a middle-aged couple I imagined were her parents. They wrapped her up in a big hug and gushed on and on about how hysterical the play was, exhibiting the acting genes they must’ve passed on to their daughter.

  Then one of the male actors, barging through the theater door and already yakking on his cell phone.