The Perfect Wife

A few days later our office walls were taken over by a display of photographs. Giant black-and-white prints, three feet square, starkly lit, taken at twenty-four-hour intervals, documenting the gradual disintegration of DO AS YOU PLEASE (FEEL FREE!). Abbie had come in each night to photograph our handiwork.

We were pleased there was a record of the project. We hadn’t liked to think of it just vanishing into the ether. But now that we studied it in time lapse, as it were, frozen mercilessly in those big, stark photographs, we could see just how quickly the sculpture had been reduced from graceful humanity to primordial sludge. It made us uneasy to think about it.

Those pictures, digital copies of which were sent—by Abbie? Or one of us?—to several art blogs and Instagram feeds, eventually found their way onto the Chronicle’s website, and from there to several Bay Area TV stations. As a result, Abbie became quite well known for a time, a minor local celebrity. The news stations’ angle was that what we’d done to the sculpture showed tech workers in a bad light; that we’d been creepy and destructive, like the antisocial nerds we were. We thought that was unfair. We were hardly vandals. Anyone would have reacted to the installation, and its deliberately provocative title, the way we did.

Luckily for us, Tim didn’t think it reflected badly on the company at all. He was immensely proud, particularly when Abbie started getting interviews and profiles. He even had one of her black-and-whites, the first one in the series, hung in his office, opposite the Muhammad Ali quote. And Katrina Gooding, the PR consultant, placed pieces in several tech blogs about how visionary and radical Tim was, to have thought of employing an artist-in-residence in the first place.

After Lisa leaves, you stay in the café, thinking. You’re pleased with how your conversation went, given what she’d previously said to the TV station. But then, you of all people know how those reporters can get someone to say whatever they want.

But you still have a sense—an intuition, if you like—that your sister was holding something back, not quite telling you everything.

Does she know your secret? Is she another one who’s afraid you’ll pass whatever she tells you straight back to Tim?

Before Lisa left, she asked if you remembered the Twilight Zone episode where a small-time thief wakes up in the afterlife. He finds himself living in a beautiful apartment, he never loses at the casino, and he’s surrounded by beautiful women. Eventually he becomes bored and tells his guide he’d like a break from being in heaven—he likes the idea of visiting the other place. To which his guide retorts, “What gave you the idea you were in heaven? This is the other place.”

“Or, to put it another way,” Lisa concluded, “be careful what you wish for.” And she’d given you a look you couldn’t decipher.

Even now, you can’t puzzle out what she meant.

You really have no choice, you realize. However unsavory the guy in the phone shop might be, you need to know what’s on that iPad.

* * *

—

When you get there, Nerdy Nathan’s leaning against the counter, doing something to the insides of a phone. Seeing you, he grins and pushes it to one side. Then he comes out from behind the counter and turns the sign on the back of the shop door to CLOSED, flipping the dead bolt for good measure.

“Come in the back,” he says.

He leads you to a tiny storeroom piled high with boxes. There’s a workbench, almost hidden by tangles of leads and bits of equipment, with a laptop open on it. You can feel the excitement radiating off him. Or is that just your own nerves?

“There’ll be a port,” he says impatiently. “Somewhere I can plug into.”

“On my hip. But I want the iPad first.”

“It’s still scanning. I can show you what I’ve got, though. I printed it out. I knew you’d be back.” He takes some sheets of paper from a shelf. “It’s part of someone’s internet history. It’s garbled, but it makes pretty interesting reading.”

You hold out your hand for it, but he shakes his head. “Uh-uh. When you’re hooked up.”

“Get on with it, then.” You give him a hostile stare.

You could help him by undoing your jeans, but you don’t want to make this easy for him. You want him to feel awkward, to realize what a violation it is. You look on with what you hope is a withering expression as he pushes down your waistband.

“That’s nice,” he says, oblivious, studying the neat row of ports. “Options. We’ll go for FireWire.”

You hear the click as he plugs in a cable. Then he turns back to his laptop.

“The printout,” you remind him. Distractedly, he puts the pages in your hand.

“Incredible,” he breathes, tracing the numbers and code you can see flickering across the screen with his finger. You ignore him and look at the first page.

And what you see there brings you up short.

€€? ? ?

WWW.Undertheradar.com How to go off grid and disappear completely 0===== €€

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STEP ONE Plan carefully. About a month before you intend to disappear, show signs of depression. Ask your doctor for medication and remove the correct number of pills from the bottle each day.

€? 0€

STEP TWO Delete your computer history. Remove your laptop hard drive and boil it, then smash it with a hammer. Finally, run a degausser (electromagnetic wand) over it to obliterate information that may give you away (such as visiting this web page). €üà?a# _ e g ? à eE

STEP THREE Erase all information from your cellphone, then leave it on public transport. Someone will take it and start using it, creating a false trail which will help frustrate those looking for you later.

????????

STEP FOUR Purchase a vehicle for cash. Provide a false name. Remove all tracking devices (toll passes with RFID chips, satnav, OnStar car system, etc.) Root

STEP FIVE Practice your new lifestyle. Get food to go. Never order from chain restaurants. Change your eating habits, e.g. if you are a vegetarian, consider eating meat. Use alcohol wipes on glasses and cutlery to avoid leaving fingerprints/DNA which can be read with an easily purchased BPac machine. Use a sleeping bag in (non-chain) motels. Always pay cash.

????????

STEP SIX Reduce social media activity. Create a new, offline-only identity. (Do not make the common mistake of trying to obtain false papers in the name of a dead person) X0X0X0~~STEP SEVEN. Accumulate large amounts of cash. Getting into debt with a loan shark or drug dealer is a risky but effective ploy. They will come looking for you after your disappearance, which can help divert attention.

%%%%%0x0

STEP EIGHT Tell people close to you you’re worried about being followed. Alternatively, tell them you’ve started hiking in remote locations. (Hiking is preferable to drowning as fewer bodies are recovered from hiking accidents.) Tell no one what you plan to do, not even those you trust the most.

Purchase a baseball cap with LED lights under the flap. This will make your face a blur to infrared CCTV cameras when traveling.

Entry

%%%%%0xx0

STEP NINE Create a corporation under a name not connected to you. This will be a legal entity able to lease an apartment, pay bills, run a checking account etc. Use the corporation account rather than your personal account to pay whoever set it up for you.

Entr%%

STEP TEN Ditch all your credit cards, personal possessions etc. Then leave.

You stare at the pages. Whatever you’d been expecting, it certainly hadn’t been this.

Not an affair, after all. Not a suicide. A secret of a totally different kind.

You ran away.

True, not all the details match—the Web page specifically said not to fake being drowned, for example, and the iPad clearly hadn’t been hit with a hammer or boiled. But you must have decided your well-known love of surfing made the ocean more believable than a hiking accident. As for the iPad, perhaps you meant to take it with you. All the other details, such as the pills, are too close to be a coincidence.

You’re still alive.

The thought is shocking. Everything Tim believes—everything he’s done, from raising Danny on his own to reconstructing you—has been built on a monstrous deception. A lie, perpetrated on him by the woman he loved. The woman who always said she loved him in return.

Ironically, by finding the information that finally clears Tim of your murder, you’ve discovered something that will completely destroy him.

But—why? That’s what you still can’t get your head around. You had a good life, an adoring husband. Okay, so he preferred you with braids and didn’t like it when you faked an orgasm. Hardly reasons to fake your own death.

And if you had stopped loving Tim for whatever reason, it would have been a shame—but there would always have been the option of divorce. This was a man who gave you a beach house as a wedding gift. You could have separated and both still been ridiculously wealthy.

Most of all, though, you can’t understand how you could ever have abandoned Danny. No mother, surely, would walk out on her child like that—especially not a child as heart-achingly vulnerable as him.

People do, an internal voice reminds you. It happens.

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