Two for the Show Read Online Free PDF

strings.
    I check my official data again. It’s as if I can’t believe, can’t accept, what I already know. The online picture is Dave Stewartson—Dave of the blue shutters and the chocolate Lab and the buried treasure, I’m certain—and this guy on television is not him.
    I check another file, one always at the ready on my laptop—my file of “frequent fliers,” crazy acolytes, stalkers, and nut jobs known to me and Wallace. I’m familiar with, on the lookout for, all of them. I thought for a moment I’d forgotten one, but no. No one like him there in the file.
    Another possibility: this guy has been given—or else has sto len—the real Dave Stewartson’s tickets, and is a legitimate, or illegitimate, guest of the real, somber, frowning, official Dave. This we’ve had happen before—but it was the visual ID that always prevented this brand of trouble. Wallace knew what appearance went with what set of personal data before he set foot onstage. So how did Wallace, the unerring Wallace, stumble into this?
    And with this imposter playing along like this—so entranced, so receptive, so amazed—does Wallace even realize his mistake? Or does he know exactly what he’s doing—and I don’t?
    My heart is pounding. I am riveted, transfixed, as if watching an oncoming train wreck. I am now in front of the TV screen, jumpy, coiled, ready to scream, to strike at it, like a Giants fan when the Eagles score, like an ardent liberal when the conservative invokes God or intelligent design. Ready to enter the television, administer swift, blind, unthinking physical justice to the babbling figure, who in reality is only projected light, only pixels, akin to throttling a ghost.
    “So . . .” Wallace continues confidently, the ersatz Dave Stewartson and wife still amazed, the audience of a thousand still appreciative. “As you have seen, I have connected to Dave’s old dog, and his old blue-shuttered house, and a few other things, and as you know about this show, we are dealing with the otherworldly, the phenomenological, the unexplained, and in keeping with that tradition, pay attention to what happens here. Because the problem is”—he turns boldly, broadly back to Dave—“the problem here is you don’t have that dog, you didn’t have that house, you didn’t grow up in that town. I don’t think you’re really Dave Stewartson at all, are you?”
    Gasps.
    Including—needless to add—my own.
    But even here, at this moment of confusion, of panic, of crunching anxiety, I doff my hat, I bow down to Wallace’s flair and instinct for drama, for upping the ante.
    “The question is, why are you playing at it? What’s going on here?” asks Wallace the Amazing grandly, and it is a dramatic moment in the show, not least because Wallace never asks the questions, never risks appearing at a loss or at sea.
    What’s going on here, indeed?
    But now I see, at least, that Wallace does know. Knows this isn’t the researched, vetted Dave. And I see—anxiously—that he is utterly trusting my research. The infallibility, the perfect record of twenty years of my research.
    So trusting, he is making a bold move with it. I feel my heart stuttering . . . like a drumroll of anticipation.
    Why would he risk it? Why would he play with fire like this?
    Did he sense something was off, out of the ordinary, even before he called on him?
    And if this is an imposter, if it’s some kind of identity theft—which would make sense, given “Dave’s” credulousness, “Dave’s” playing along with the amazement—is Wallace expecting imposter Dave to stumble and mumble and crumble in the glare of lights, shuffle uncomfortably, maybe make a run for it? In which case Wallace will be a hero, and a fraud will be unmasked on national television—great news for Wallace’s show and ratings.
    But Dave stands his ground. He is all innocent confusion and stiff resolve. “But I am Dave Stewartson. That was my dog Reddi who slept by my bed