Two for the Show Read Online Free PDF Page A

confirm immediately that Wallace the Amazing has all his facts exactly right.
    The only problem is, that’s not Dave Stewartson he’s talking to.
    The Internet is showing me a photograph of a different guy.
    And what’s obvious to me immediately, unless something untoward and unprecedented has happened to Wallace the Amazing, is that Wallace must know it’s not the right guy. This is what he does, after all, this is the skill he works from, his remarkable visual memory. Unless he’s had some kind of stroke, or short-term memory event or disruption, his visual memory has been infallible.
    Not the right guy—and yet the guy is acting happily amazed.
    I keystroke madly, cross-checking. There is no mistaking. I am looking at the photo of the real David Stewartson. Or at least, my Dave Stewartson. A guy whose photo is there on the Internet in front of me. And the guy now on television, in the Vegas audience of our show, is someone else—someone, for whatever reason, who is saying he’s Dave Stewartson.
    I hit keys in a blur, checking now on wife Sandi. And there is Sandi Stewartson online (second-grade teacher Sandi, Michigan State teaching certificate Sandi, maiden name Parker, etc., etc.), but the mousy Sandi seen in online photos does not match the bob-haired and somewhat brassy-looking blonde on my television screen. So . . . double trouble. Tending to move whatever is going on from the arena of mere error to the arena of malign purpose.
    The plot thickens almost immediately. Because as I keystroke back to Dave, cross-checking, scurrying site to site, this Dave Stewartson—the one still on my TV screen, hugging his wife, lit up, virtually atremble with Wallace the Amazing’s abilities—is now making several cameo Internet appearances before me. Here he is on a social networking site. Here he is on an archived computer dating site. Here he is on a job-search site. Here he is on someone’s blog. Here he is in someone’s group photo, his name in the caption. Yet racing back now to the sites I rely on—“unhackable” police databases, protected governmental and encrypted military-service identification sites with no consumer access—there is the original Dave. My Dave. Serious, smileless, guileless. A mild frown. A straight-ahead, no-nonsense guy. A different guy.
    I am, of course, struggling instantly—panicky, heart racing—with a couple of obvious questions. Which one is the real Dave, which is the Dave Stewartson imposter? Although I’m pretty sure I know already—that somber old photo from the official sites, versus the charmer, the smiler, on the consumer and social networking sites—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn—so susceptible to misrepresentation.
    Have I not been thorough enough? Clearly not. And now my shoddiness, my not double-checking, my small moment of laxness, could topple us. Bring it all down.
    And still the bigger, simultaneous, and more confusing question: Why has Wallace called on him? If this Dave didn’t match the visual description, didn’t click with Wallace’s prodigious visual memory, why did he choose him?
    Maybe it was a momentary slip on Wallace’s part—just a momentary lapse, and now he’ll have to dig out of it. But this strikes me as off, somehow. The whole enterprise, his life, our life, is built on not making a slip like that. In having never made a slip like that.
    And the big accompanying question: Why is this fake Dave (if this is the fake Dave) playing along like this? Is he going to turn at any moment and reveal—prove with his driver’s license and birth certificate, waving them around, offering them to the TV camera for a close-up, for instance—that he’s not Dave Stewartson at all. Showing that Wallace is merely a smooth charlatan, a high-level, supremely accomplished card counter of some sort (which arguably is exactly what he is), backed into an error that pulls aside the curtain, unveils the utterly conventional rods and levers and pulleys and