Burnt Tongues Page 8
Everything in life is temporary, and I knew that the news attention would last for only a week at most. I had to take full advantage of it until the façade crumbled and truth won out. I anxiously awaited the response of the real Swanstrom, who I imagined was locked inside a bunker, quietly churning out novel after novel, hiding from the wolves. He had to address this; there was no way he could ignore it.
Late in the afternoon I was in the middle of my third interview with the press, explaining again my reasons for coming out into the open, how I was tired of the mentally disturbed fans who were determined to find me, when my lawyer, Kelly Davis, whispered in my ear that Swanstrom had issued a statement through his literary agent calling me a fraud.
I had anticipated this. I was not disappointed because I hadn’t expected the game to go on indefinitely, not in this day and age with computers and databases and electronically saved documents. But it takes time to gather information and only seconds to make earth-shattering claims that the press has to jump on just in case it all turns out to be the real thing. They can’t let the news slip past them, even if it’s made up. It’s easier to retract headlines and apologize than it is to wait and hope the story is verified. The world will keep spinning, and no twenty-four-hour news organization could survive unless a certain percentage of all reported stories were erroneous.
What all the news channels and I both knew was this: even if my story of the break-in turned out to be a lie, there was a secondary story waiting behind it. Who was this man, and why was he pretending to be a famous author no one has ever seen?
Just think, after every mass shooting that takes place in America, there is a week or so of news coverage about the victims, then the focus shifts to the perpetrator. It’s a natural progression of interest. Once we know everything about those who died, we want to know about the person who killed them.
By five o’clock that evening I was sitting in a CNN trailer outside my house, listening to a producer explain how the show would be conducted while a young woman applied powder to my face. I wore an old grey sport coat, a flannel button-down shirt, and although I didn’t need them, a pair of black eyeglasses purchased from a thrift store. I was unshaven, and my eyes were bloodshot—I was the very image of a camera-shy genius.
The interview was to be conducted in my living room with the stone-faced news anchor and me seated on either side of the fireplace. He shook my hand quickly and without much enthusiasm while looking over a list of questions. I felt certain he’d never even heard of Don Swanstrom, let alone read one of his books. I took the opportunity to close my eyes and fall back inside my own story, into the lies I’d recited to myself over and over until I believed them. By the time the producer started counting backwards from ten, I was no longer myself.
I was Don Swanstrom.
I stepped into the role I’d written, the fiction I was living. My own memories disappeared, and I saw things that had never happened. I could picture the house where I, as Swanstrom, lived, the office where I worked. I instinctively knew the extreme measures I took to avoid detection. When the red light of the camera turned on, I was ready.
I answered every question without a single pause, withholding certain information because I wasn’t suddenly an
extrovert after all.
The interviewer asked if I was concerned about the literary agent claiming I was a liar. The agent who claimed to represent the real Swanstrom.
I laughed. “If he’s real, where is he? It’s just a faceless voice. Probably a fan upset that I don’t fit whatever image he had of me.”
Then at the very end, I looked into the camera and spoke directly to the thief, begging him to return the stolen manuscripts so I could finish them and give the books to him as completed works.
That night my sleep was interrupted by dreams of Swanstrom looking at me with disappointment, shaking his head, and asking me why I did this to him. I woke up, saying, “I thought you of all people would understand.”
Early in the morning the phone started ringing incessantly. I ignored it the first couple of times and then finally picked up. It was Kelly Davis.
“We need to talk,” he said, “immediately.”
I watched through the window as his Mercedes pulled into the driveway and he stepped out. A former high school athlete, Kelly looked like an overweight linebacker stuffed into an expensive suit. A suit now so wrinkled and creased it appeared as though he had slept in it. As Kelly walked to the door, he waved away reporters and brushed past microphones, ignoring shouted questions about his client’s identity.
I opened the door for him and locked it once he was inside.
His face was a mask of anger and sleeplessness. “Are you seeing this? When I agreed to represent you I did so under the premise that you would be honest with me, that you would divulge any information pertinent to your defense and protection. Look me in the eye, and tell me that you haven’t lied to me.”
I looked away.
“Do you realize how this makes me look?” he said. “You think just because I’m a lawyer I don’t have any integrity, that I only want publicity? Is this a stunt? Because I’m telling you, Don, if it is, I want no part of it. You tell me the truth, and I’ll walk away right now without calling the cops.”
I motioned to the kitchen. “Do you want some coffee?”
Kelly said, “This is serious. You cannot claim to be someone you’re not without consequences.”
I described everything to him, leaving nothing out—he deserved to know. I explained how Swanstrom had lost his gift, how it disappeared somewhere in the fall of 2007. I told Kelly that everything I’d done was to give the man a plot, one that he was obviously in desperate need of.
Kelly sat at the table holding up his head with his hands, sighing like all his breath was leaving him at once. “I can’t believe this.”
I showed him Swanstrom’s picture. I asked him if he’d ever been mistaken for his hero, for someone he idolized. He said no. I asked him what he would do in my situation, if someone sees in you a man that everyone is searching for but cannot find. According to the news, there had been a surge in the sales of Swanstrom’s books since my unveiling.
I said, “Who does that benefit, Swanstrom or me? I came out so he wouldn’t have to. I took a bullet for him.”
My lawyer pointed out that I had fired the shot.
“True,” I said, “but I still took it.”
Kelly was lying on my couch with a cool washcloth on his forehead, running through his options while I watched the circus outside.
“A lawsuit has been filed against you,” he said. “Whoever this ‘faceless voice’ is, he can afford attorneys better than me.”
“What proof has he offered?” I asked. “How do we know that he’s the real Swanstrom?”
Kelly sat up and pointed at me. “If it’s Swanstrom he doesn’t need proof; he has the truth on his side. He is who he says he is. Truth is like a lion. It doesn’t need to be defended when it’s attacked—you just let it out of its cage. What do you have? Stories and lies, nothing more. And I think you know this. I think you’ve known all along that this could only go so far. You just wanted to see how far and how much you could gain before it fell apart.”
I said, “What have I gained?”
“Your face is all over the news, man. Some people would die to have their name uttered by a famous news anchor or to be interviewed on a major network. You’ve had both in the last two days—you can’t tell me that’s nothing. You’ll be written about, granted it will be as a psychotic fan, but you will be written about. You could probably even write a book about this and sell a million copies.”
Something clicked as the last of those words left his mouth, and he looked at me with an expression I could not name.
Kelly and I spoke late into the night over sweating glasses of whiskey and ginger ale. I let him in on every plan and begged him to trust me. I convinced him that I was not crazy and I had thought through every contingency.
By dawn I’d worn down his defenses, and Kelly agreed to my insane proposition. He left through the back door and walked three blocks to the nearest gas station where he called a cab. Once at his office, he filed a countersuit against the other man claiming to be Don Swanstrom.
Swanstrom refused to become visible, but he did conduct a phone interview with Larry King that was the beginning of the end. When I heard the man’s voice, calm and soothing, thickened by years of cigars, there was no doubt in my mind who he was. It was the voice of the man who wrote the novels that changed my life, that educated me and shaped the way I saw the world. It was the voice of a sage, a prophet. I felt overwhelmed as he told Larry he felt sorry for me. He said I was obviously disturbed—twice divorced, estranged from his children, failed writer—and I was under a great amount of stress and shouldn’t be judged too harshly. Swanstrom said he felt sympathy for me but would still press charges.
Even though I knew in my heart that he was who he said he was, he had still offered no definitive proof. I conducted more interviews with journalists and reporters, calling the interview with Larry King “an orchestrated piece of live cinema utilizing the talents of a voice actor.”
Swanstrom fired back in another telephone interview, sounding exhausted and frustrated, that he would not forfeit his privacy in order to disprove a liar.
I continued to push, further insulting him with every interview and magazine profile. Although I had heard his voice, I wanted more. I wanted to see his face just once, to see his eyes, his wrinkles, his hair. I wanted to see if time had caused us to look more, or less, alike.
I stood my ground for three more days, countering every attack from Swanstrom with more bold lies and accusations. He lamented the fact that a man who wished to remain unknown could not do so in a world overrun by technology and devices.
“Just show your face on television for five seconds,” I said to another expressionless news anchor. “That’s not going to make you any less unknown. Five seconds, that’s all it will take. If you have the nerve to call me a liar, at least have the guts to back it up.”
Unfortunately, I got my wish the very next day. I watched it live on the news as a gurney was wheeled through the front door of a modest Colorado home while a woman stood inside weeping into a handkerchief. The body was covered in a sheet, but I could make out the slight frame of a man lying motionless beneath it.
A few hours later a photograph was aired, a black-and-white portrait taken only two years prior that showed the same Swanstrom from the high school picture appearing older and wiser. Deep wrinkles surrounded his light eyes, which sparkled in spite of his severe expression. I felt weak when I saw his face. Though I was standing still, my heart was beating like I’d been running at a full sprint. We didn’t look anything alike. I looked like an older version of the young man while he looked exactly like himself.
Carol, Swanstrom’s plain, soft-spoken wife, explained that her husband had died of a heart attack brought on by high blood pressure and cholesterol.
“It was the stress that killed him,” she said in tears. “That awful man who put him through this should be imprisoned.”
She vowed that she wouldn’t rest until I was exposed, and I believed her.
That night I slept in fifteen-minute increments, waking up each time from the same dream. A dream in which millions of pieces of burning paper were falling from the sky.
The next day I turned on the news and heard my true name being spoken.
Earl Curtis Willard III—the name of a fake and a liar.
As I walked to the car in handcuffs, blinded by camera flashes, I asked Kelly Davis to retrieve my manuscripts from storage and burn them.
There was a combination of sadness and relief in his eyes, but he nodded and said, “Of course.”
I regret that I couldn’t be there when he did it. It would have been like a funeral.
Seven years seems like a long time for pretending to be someone else, but the court considered it identity theft with the intention to profit from another’s name. I didn’t fight the sentence; it seemed fair to me.
Only a couple of months after I was taken to a minimum security prison I got a letter from a well-known literary agent who offered to represent me if I ever decided to write anything. My early work was a pale imitation of Swanstrom’s unique style, but now that he is no longer alive the world is in need of someone like him. His death has created a void, an indentation in the universe that I intend to fill.
At the end of the day, your life is just a story. If you don’t like the direction it’s going, change it. Rewrite it. When you rewrite a sentence, you erase it and start over until you get it right. Yes, it’s a little more complicated with a life, but the principle is the same. And remember, don’t let anyone ever tell you that your revisions are not the truth.
As of this date, I’ve sold contracts for three of my novels and one screenplay is in development for a film. My agent assures me that once I am released, I have a bright future ahead of me. Every day I receive letters from people who think of me as a martyr, some kind of flawed hero.
I did what I did, but I stand by it. It’s not easy to find an audience anymore—sometimes you have to let the audience find you. Maybe someday people will read my books not just out of morbid curiosity but because the words speak to them. Maybe a lonely young man will be inspired to write something of his own. More than anything I’m looking forward to the day I can leave this place and see the spine of my own novel on a shelf in the bookstore where I was first asked, “Would you be willing to sign this?”
Mind and Soldier
Phil Jourdan
Plant had fingers crusty with dried mud, and he pressed them against each other to twirl a blade of grass in circles.
Sometimes the world lets men prove themselves at the cost of their selfhood: Plant’s sense of time and space had dissolved into a mess of colors and shades, memories of days in the jungle, trying not to set off traps, living to be a hero, and falling asleep a wounded baby. This was the world to him, the flux, the dizzying fullness for which there existed medication.
Any faith in justice or honor had been poured out of him, and bravery, that thing you need on the battlefield and off, had dried up, prune-like, and discarded. There was more comfort in playing with a blade of grass than in the arms of his wife or in the smile of his son.
For some, in respectful neighborhood gossip, this was proof enough that he had fought the battle and must be left to brood. But to that curious boy from next door, Raul, Plant’s collapsed mind seemed to hold some allure of which Plant himself had not even an inkling.
He’d heard his wife scolding the kid for coming too close to her poor injured husband, but Plant wasn’t quite bothered by Raul’s visits. Reduced to permanent and maddening immobility, sitting on the porch all day only feet away from the creaking wheelchair, the soldier even took some semblance of pleasure in seeing Raul make his careful, clumsy way
towards him.
A peculiar pleading look in the boy’s eyes: eagerness and fear. His mouth was open, but he said nothing. He sat next to Plant, and together they looked out onto the street.
“Hey, Raul,” Plant said.
“Hello, Mr Vanderloo.”
The boy’s lips were thick and dark, but the rest of him, his skin and palms, were light, an ugly pale. There was something soft about him, a wimpy sadness in his movements. Perhaps a mere effect of the general blurriness through which Plant saw the world. He’d heard Raul described as intense, odd, clumsy. Maybe so. But in these moments they shared, the kid seemed less clumsy than improbable. The whole person of Raul: not right, not obvious, an unsettling thing to a man trained to find traps in implausible places. Raul’s big body and small limbs, his negroid lips, as Plant’s wife called them, his curly, dark hair that just touched his eyebrows, and the deep voice that seemed to
crawl out of his mouth like a beetle. Everything about him was likeable and scary, even terrifying because of the chilly quiet in his eyes. So it was no wonder Plant tolerated Raul’s visits. It was a trip into the weird.
“How you doing,” Plant said.
“I’m okay.”
“You come here to see Gordon?”
“No, sir.”
“We’re not in the military, Raul.”
“No, Plant.”
“So what’s happening?”
“I need advice.”
“What about?”
“Well,” Raul said, staring at the blade of grass in Plant’s hand, “I’m telling you this because it’s you that I trust the most for some reason.”
“Yes,” Plant said and handed him the blade of grass. “You can tell me. I’m not going anywhere.” He pointed down where there was no heavy, healthy leg. “Eh?”
(And as was prone to happen once or twice a day since he’d stopped swallowing his medication and started feeding it to the dog in secret, his mood dropped like an egg falling to the granite. He couldn’t explain it when it happened and could not bear to think of it when it passed. But he felt his insides solidify, and he grew a little too aware of those missing parts, the leg, the two testicles—two of them, lucky man—the skin of his buttocks. What a filthy, raging, disgusting mess he was. What a treat. What an embarrassment for everyone concerned, his wife with the unceasing care, his son with the admiration. The constant admiration, the father to be proud of. The country, the entire country grateful. Plant was missing chunks of his body, but everyone was so fucking grateful. And this kid was asking for advice.)
“Advice on what?”
“I think I’m in love with someone.” Raul tilted his head at him. “A girl, of course. I think I love her so much that it’s starting to make me sick.”
“Sick?”
“In the head.”
“You need to watch over your body and get yourself sorted out before you go chasing after girls. There’s plenty of time for girls.”