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the archive(s):
issue no. 6:
Faking It, Or, Dead Giveaway/ Jordan NA Fouts
"Think it's illegal, technically speaking," Nate had asked me in an offhanded way that one time, "to fake your own death?"
I looked at him. He was loosely gripping the neck of his open but still full beer bottle, absorbed in something across the street. Playing his thumb over the smooth glass, picking at the label. He sat perched on the top step outside the front door of my apartment house, his feet on the next step below, knees jutting out to either side in front of him. His forearm rested on one thigh, bottle poised between his knees, swinging back and forth with a slight motion of his wrist. His profile didn't tell me if he was serious or not.
"I dunno," I said, looking straight ahead too, trying to see what had his attention. Another row of houses same as the ones on this side of the street, people walking back and forth on the sidewalk, walking with dogs or kids or each other. "It's not, y'know, murder or anything, technically speaking," I said, treating his question like the rhetoricals we'd often toss back and forth during our beer'n'bull sessions on my front step. Last time it was whether or not some people were really aliens and how could you tell: like if they listened to weird music or something. I mimicked his phrase with a judicious emphasis, a law student debating the facts of a theoretical case. I was an ecology student, really, my only contact with the law in the form of parking tickets. He was in polisci but didn't really like it. "It'd depend on how you did it, I guess. And of course on whether you got away with it. If they decided you really were dead, or at least, I mean like, technically dead, officially kaput, there couldn't of course be any charges. Not against a dead man."
He was about to take a sip at my second technically but lowered the bottle again. "But suppose you were caught. I mean, how would they find out? How often do guys get away with it, or what mistake do they make that gets them found out?"
While mulling it over in my adopted legal student's mind, trying to remember any case I'd heard of where a guy faked his own death but later got caught or imagine how that all might go down, I picked out the nearest squirrel and threatened him with my bottlecap. Closed one eye, held the cap in front of the open one, wound my arm back and chucked it. My aim was straight and true, it bounced off the spot where the squirrel had been a second before, but the furry little bastard was too quick. Radar, I guessed.
"It's all in the evidence, of course: you leave no evidence. You probably need a body, to keep up appearances (otherwise it's just a 'disappearance under mysterious circumstances'), but the trick is to find one that could pass for you without, you know, being identifiable as someone else. Probably guys get caught 'cause they make some stupid mistake like, I dunno, leaving the real dead guy's license and everything in his wallet." That squirrel came back, so I reached for Nate's bottlecap behind him as I bullshitted. "Or they get overzealous and file off the fingertips or pry out all the teeth: a dead giveaway. Then the cops know something's up. Then they start looking for the real guy, and the bastard's probably so sure he got away with it that he's out living in Rio with an obviously fake name and a fake moustache, maybe thinking he's lying low. But the cops know what to look for." Mr. Squirrel was even closer, checking out some pizza crust I'd thrown on the lawn the other day; I took aim again and this time just flicked it at him, subtly, to foil his radar. Missed again. And this time he came scurrying back to sniff what I'd thrown at him, almost sauntering, rubbing it in. So I leaped off the step waving my arms madly in the air and growled at him, RAWRR. He bolted away up the nearest tree, tail straight up like an antenna. Satisfied, I sat back on the step, took a sip of beer and continued: "So you don't make that guy's mistake, you don't get caught." Then, having knowingly and frustratingly avoided his question, "Now here's one for you: What's the point of faking your own death? Why do guys try and do it?"
Nate shrugged. He shrugged in a way that said he'd obviously pondered that question awhile, or maybe he already knew the answer, but only said, "I dunno. Different reasons. Maybe he's got a job he hates or a wife he can't stand, snotty kids. Or, you know, massive loads of debt; maybe he owes the mob. So he hates his life, but then he's too chicken to just off himself, so he makes people think he died and goes on living some other life. Yeah, in Rio, or someplace. He doesn't stay in town, not even with a fake moustache."
"So you know of anyone who's gotten away with it?" I asked, then answered my own question: "I mean, not that you could really know, if he really has gotten away with it; that's the point of course. But maybe some guy, he's gotten away with it and how could you not, you know, tell someone? I mean, I'd be bursting, I'd be dropping hints here and there, like, 'Well, you know, in my other life, before I died, y'know, technically speaking, and got this great moustache..." I took another sip, swished the bottle around then tipped it way up to drain the suds. Nate still hadn't even started on his. He was watching the other side of the street. I looked across and saw an old lady trying to figure out how to get past a huge puddle in the sidewalk without getting her blue orthopedic shoes wet. "But I guess that defeats the purpose," I concluded, watching her trying to skirt the puddle and still stay out of the surrounding mud, meaning she had to tread slowly on the very edge of the pavement, through the shallowest water. "If you tell someone, even drop a hint -- bam!, they'll get'cha."
The old lady was almost through when up came this kid on a bike, raced right through the middle of the puddle, splash!, soaking her. I howled out loud, slapping the concrete step with my palm and almost falling off sideways as I laughed. "Oh man did you SEE that!" I was about to say to Nate, but realized he wasn't looking. He was busy folding the label he'd peeled off the bottle, folding it in half then folding the halves in half, seven times till it got too thick to fold again. Seven times, no matter how big or small the paper, that's all you can squeak out of it unless you use a clamp or press or something. I considered remarking on this, as he tossed the origami lump at his feet, toyed at it with his toe.
Instead, I asked him, "How would you do it? I mean, how would you fake your own death and make sure you didn't get caught?" I asked him how, not why. He was about to answer, about to outline the plan he must have already carefully thought out and decided on long before bringing up the idle question, when his cellphone rang. It was his girlfriend, something important and he had to go.
***
That was the unfinished conversation I ran through again in my head while sitting in a morgue waiting room, waiting for a man in a white coat and rubber gloves to lead me to another room with a large window and a white room on the other side of that, a table in the middle; waiting for him to peel back a shroud and ask me to identify the body of someone they thought I might know.
"Now, take your time sir."
We'd never figured out the trick, how to get away with it, how to make it convincing but not too convincing. Not too neat, just messy enough, I mean realistic, that there'd be no questions. Those cops are clever, they know the dead-giveaways. They watch cop shows too.
"I know this must be hard for you... but we couldn't locate any next of kin, no living relatives. So we had to look for friends, classmates, coworkers..."
Only the face, pale and scarred, was visible from inside the zippered black bag, flattened in places where body parts should have been. A car wreck, they said, rolled across the road at over 100 mph and into a ditch before catching fire, nearly incinerating the driver. The car's mangled plates were the only identifying marks.
"Is this him?"
The strangest thing about Nate was how he looked like anyone, everyone, always mistaken for someone else, told he resembled some celebrity or other. He had one of those faces.
This was one of those faces.
"Yeah... Yeah, I think that's him... Jesus, that's him..."
"You're certain? The face is all we have to go on, and granted there's... Well, it's not much..."
I nodded, not seeing the face or the zippered bag anymore.
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