Two for the Show

It’s the strangest job you’ve ever heard of.   
            Stranger still, it’s mine. 
            I’ve been doing it over twenty years.  Which makes it a career, I guess.
Technically, I’m a detective.  A private investigator.  But not the kind you’re thinking.  One client.  Ongoing investigation.  The case never closes.  The job never ends. 
            I’m in the entertainment business.  But not in the way you’re used to thinking.
            I work for a mentalist; a famous magician and stage personality who astounds members of his audience by knowing everything about them – who they are and where they work and who they share an office with and what car they drive and used to drive and want to drive and what they just ate for lunch and who taught them kindergarten and sixth grade and how much cash is in their wallets and what labels are on their shirts and skirts and their shoe sizes and where they were last night and who they were with – and most impressive of all, even what they’re thinking about.  Knowing their life situations and communicating with their dead relatives and relating uncanny details.  Supernatural powers.  Extraordinary ESP.  Conversing with the Other Side.  All of that. 
            We’ve worked Atlantic City.  Mohegan Sun.  Branson, Missouri.  Royal Caribbean cruises.  Mississippi riverboats. Tours, television appearances; even a TV series loosely based on his life.   It’s been a lot of time on the road over the past twenty years.  But for the last few of them, I’m glad to say, we’ve had our own exclusive venue here in Vegas.  For that peculiarly American combination of miracle tent-show theatrics, slick overproduction, and celebrity, Vegas is true north.   
            Of course there’s nothing supernatural about it.  I supply him all the information.  I get it for him with each show.  I start with the credit card information from the advance ticket purchases – get the names, addresses, their pictures, their basic life facts.   But that’s just a start.  I dig in.  Hacking new internet databases, my job gets easier every month.  And of course, I follow up with, still use, traditional detective work.  Tailing.  Snooping.   Shadowing... 
            What my boss does have is an extraordinary memory.  A memory that he trains, works out with every morning and exercises on stage every night.  Seeing the face triggers the facts for him.  Triggers the account numbers in the mark’s pocket.  Triggers the names of the kids and the dog and the cat and the recently deceased uncle and the homebound aunt, all of which I’ve provided him with.  He takes it from there; inserts the theatrics, the lighting, the shock and awe.     
            So yes, I’m kind of a detective . . . and kind of in the entertainment business . . . and I’m also a kind of biographer.  I supply biographies – quickly, efficiently, digging out family secrets by the quick shovelful, looking around in the darkness to make sure no one will see.  I get the information to him nightly.  We have a smooth untraceable mechanism for that, which has evolved considerably over the past twenty years. 
            I never see him face to face.   I can’t risk being seen in the same room with him.  I spend my life avoiding him – professionally.  I have no contact, no intersection with him, except for the information I provide him in our secure, circuitous way.  I could never risk attending his show, although of course, I watch him on television.  My anonymity, my invisibility, is obviously essential to the enterprise.
            And obviously, I work alone.  (Never has that statement been so profound.  It probably explains this need to communicate, to reach out, that you are witnessing here.)   Presumably there are others doing this job for other “mentalists” and “magicians,” guys just like me, but of course, I don’t know that for sure, and of course, we can never know who each other are.  These possible, theoretical colleagues—who are not really competitors, who would be wonderful to commiserate with, swap war stories with—I can never know them.  We can never be revealed to one another. 
            We are partners in the ultimate sense – each unable to proceed or succeed without the other.  And despite his fame and my anonymity, we both hold enormous power over one another.  He is nothing without me.  I am nothing without him.  We are each other’s secret.  Each other’s best friend, each other’s lurking nightmare.  A secret shared with one another, and with no one else.  We are brothers who never share a story or a beer, but who are nevertheless everything to one another. 
            Secrecy, silence, discretion – they’re obviously a way of life for me.  For twenty years now, I’ve known nothing else.  I’m a professional ghost.  And because I have not yet decided, as I write this, exactly what I will be doing with this document; what its ultimate use or final home will be – and in light of a professional habit of protective silence and secrecy and shadow that I am already, somewhat uncomfortably, jeopardizing here – I’ll refer to my employer, for the moment anyway, for the purposes of this record, as . . . oh, I don’t know, let’s call him, Wallace the Amazing.