I had him and I let him go. I let Riley Wolfe go.
30
It was time.
All the prep work was done. Everything I could do to get my machine in gear and on the trail had been done. Now I had to put all the planning and worrying and setting up out of my head and just do it.
The first step for me is always the same. I turn myself into somebody else.
It starts like this: I sit in front of the full-length mirror and stare hard at my face for the last time. Pretty soon it wouldn’t be my face. It would be somebody else’s, somebody no one had ever seen before, including me. Because I was playing God and making a brand-new person, and that takes careful preparation.
For me, it takes a ritual, too. Not like prayers and incense and whining to some imaginary superbeing. This is a little more serious than that kind of ooga-booga crap. This is the ritual that turns Riley into Not Riley. No chanting, no incense—it’s only a ritual because I’ve repeated it so many times. At some point it turned into a list of things I had to do in exactly the same order every time. And the more I did it, the more mojo it gave me to do it exactly that way, the same every time. Sooner or later, you realize it’s turned into a ritual.
But it started as just good practice. Just doing the stuff that was practical and effective to turn Me into Somebody Else. If it sounds a little freaky that it’s always the same thing every time, like some kind of obsessive-compulsive fit—too bad. Maybe it is. But there’s a really good reason for that. Why? Simple: It works. Every time I do it, the New Me I make is successful. And because it works every time I do it the same way, I do it the same way every time so it will work. Yeah, sur
e, circular logic. Stupid. Except for one thing.
Like I said. It works.
So I stare into the mirror. And then, as I start seeing the change, I put on my music. Same playlist every time. First, while I’m still staring at Old Me, it’s Tupac—“All Eyez on Me.” That was playing now, as I concentrated on the area around my eyes. I would add a couple of lines, and—
“Riley, are you sure about my hair like this? Because I never— Oh! That’s Tupac, isn’t it? I love this song!”
Monique. Tearing into the room, breaking my concentration. And for what? Because we had decided her hair should be cornrowed. I mean, it was different from her normal hair, it was different from the ’fro she wore when we were scouting the Museo—it gave her a whole new profile, which is important. And we’d given her a couple of big patches of vitiligo on her face, those patches some people have where the pigment disappears. She looked very different, not at all Moniquey, and that was a very good thing.
And it had been her idea to do cornrows. She said she hadn’t done it since she was a kid, and oh what fun.
And now she wasn’t sure?
I paused the music. “Monique, it’s fine,” I said. “It’s even necessary.”
“I don’t know,” she said, looking very dubious.
“Well, I know,” I said. “Trust me here—you need a totally different look, and this is it. Unless you want to go with a shaved head?”
“Oh, Jesus, no, Riley, don’t even,” she said. “It’s just—I don’t know,” she said, putting a hand to her hair and then bending in to look in my mirror over my shoulder. “It doesn’t feel like—you know. It doesn’t feel like me.”
I mean, really. Didn’t feel like her? I know Monique is way smarter than anybody else I know and probably smarter even than me—but come on. “Monique,” I said, with a really powerful grip on my temper, “it isn’t you! That’s the whole fucking idea!”
“Don’t get snappish, Riley,” she said, with a kind of scolding tone of voice. “I’m just saying it doesn’t feel right. I’m not comfortable being this person.”
“Well, relax,” I said. “You’ve got plenty of time getting comfortable. Our flight doesn’t leave for six hours.”
“Oh, God,” she moaned. “Oh, my fucking God, when you say that it just—it’s terrifying, Riley, just to think of what we’re doing—and one small mistake and Jesus Christ . . .”
“Monique,” I said. “Would you get a grip? We’ve been over this a hundred times.”
“But all of a sudden it’s so fucking real,” she moaned.
“Yes, it is real,” I said. I heard a snarly tone in my voice and took a deep breath. “It’s very, very real, Monique. With even realer consequences. But here’s the thing—so are we.” She looked at me with a what-the-fuck expression. “We are just as real as you can get, Monique. What we do, how good we are at doing it—that is just about the most real thing in the whole fucking world. This is all part of that,” I said, waving a hand at all the stuff lying around to change us, “and we are going to be amazingly good at it.”
“But, Riley,” she said, getting kind of whiny.
“And, Monique,” I said, riding over the top of her voice, “and if we don’t totally fuck up, everybody will take our new real for the real real—because people see what you want them to see.”
“But what if I do fuck up?” she said.
“You probably will,” I said, and she looked like I’d slapped her. “But it doesn’t matter. You can fuck up once or twice, and nobody notices. Because they don’t know you. A fuckup is just a glitch. And like I said, they see what you tell them to see. All you have to do is pretend you didn’t fuck up and go back to being yourself. Your new self,” I said.