“This is no how-to manual.” Right. Playing Dead is no more not a how-to guide than is The Anarchist Cookbook. Nevertheless, here you will learn (or learn about) the dark art of fabricating your own disappearance. Or, should you wish to go six feet deeper, how to commit pseudocide — fake suicide. For those who prefer the step-by-step approach, there is one of those if/then diagrams, with boxes of questions and arrows that chart your next step depending upon your answer, a map through the mazy minefield of death fraud. Elizabeth Greenwood endeavors to kill herself. That’s commitment, even is she’s only playing.
What do Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakki , Juliet Capulet, Tom Sawyer, and Dan Draper share in common? They all faked their death. Playing dead is a hoary old trick, running across species — possums, of course, but it’s also practiced by lemon sharks, snakes, goats, and a passel of others — and serving as a protonarrative for many a myth. It was an exit strategy that Greenwood considered when her student loans threatened to reduce her life to debt management, half steps toward a vanishing point. No, “the dross of life would not inflict itself upon me: I would arrange and edit to suit my specifications. Faking death would be a refusal, a way to reject the dreary facts.”
But Greenwood didn’t rack up a “$100,000 deficit . . . (Well, actually closer to a half million after the lifetime of accrued credit)” via schooling without learning she had to do her homework, and so the “journey through the world of death fraud” begins. Playing Dead may be Greenwood’s first book, yet it is smart as a fox, displaying a wicked sense of humor braided with rue. It can’t help but be existential — of the plight-of-the-individual, assumption-of-unknowable-responsibility school — considering the subject matter. Still, Greenwood lifts the act of falling off the face of the earth from its melancholic slough to higher ground by telling us stories of how to pull it off without pulling the plug and how not to, true stories told by those who have done it and those paid to discover if someone is cheating the reaper (that would be the insurance company).
There are an average of 90,000 missing people in/from the United States at any one time. A very small percentage of them will have gone willfully absent for some reason, though a very significant percentage will be on the run from money trouble. “Money isn’t everything,” said one of Greenwood’s more roguish death fakers from money-poor northern England, “but it’s ninety-nine-point-nine percent of everything.” One moment before you climb on a high horse. “Greed is easy to see in others when you have enough. But when your origins are more humble, the goalpost of ‘enough’ moves constantly,” writes Greenwood. Wise beyond her years, she makes good use of that $100,000 education and remembers growing up in hardscrabble Worcester, Massachusetts as bleak as any Brontëan childhood.
Then again, there is greed. Your Ponzi scheme has fallen apart. As you enter the courtroom, an FBI agent leans in and whispers, “I have two words for you: Costa Rica.” What to do? You look under “privacy consultant” in the Yellow Pages. Greenwood finds one such — a blustery gent with high self-regard but a privacy consultant’s privacy consultant — who takes her through the paces. To start with, disappearing and pseudocide are different animals. Unless you have good (or no-good) reason to fake your death, disappearing is the way to go — from an incessant stalker, for instance. Dissolving your identity, physically and digitally, is not a crime. It isn’t simple, either, thus the consultant who destroys as much information on you as possible while sowing false leads. Then you must live off the grid, an austere ecosystem for sure: you must work off the books, pay all your bills through an LLC, leave behind almost everything, though there are devious ways of making contact with loved ones. File for any piece of paper — like a library card — under a false identity, and you have committed fraud. Now you are a criminal, a like-it-or-not fugitive.
Faking death, on the other hand, is a science. Brain surgery science, requiring an expert to kill you and appreciating that an expert will be tracking you if you are illegally skipping town or cashing in an insurance policy. For this chapter, Greenwood taps the experience of a private investigator who specializes in surprising the undead. The biggest problem with faking death is the need for others to help you. That might mean procuring a surrogate body; it will certainly require false documents, including a certificate of death. These co-conspirators will be of unsavory ilk. They are not your friends; you are another cash cow. Greenwood sits agog as the investigator fires questions at her: Can you leave your life behind, never see your family and friends again? Are you in good health, with enough cash to live for two or three years, with someone you trust to file the insurance claim, and an alternative identity prepared (one that you have taken a couple of years to construct)? What about your Internet presence, how about fingerprints on file? Have you an intelligent way to die? Hiking is a good one, but a natural disaster is better. How’s your conscience, your willingness to risk disgrace and imprisonment?
Greenwood’s storytelling invites you to participate. It challenges you to participate, and it takes sauce simply to enter these precincts. It is inadvisable, however, to follow Greenwood as she takes the investigative reporter’s dangerous plunge. (This is not to say that Greenwood is as flawless as a Fabergé egg. She pops some corn — “Perhaps faking death and disappearing appeals to the part of us that still carves authenticity and unfettered solitude, the truest antidote to loneliness” — and serves forth her share of floppers: “the thought undulating through my skull like squid ink.”) She travels to the Philippines to fake her death. No spoilers, but let’s say when she returns to the United States and shows some documents to her private investigator friend, he notes that “this one sucks. They actually double printed it with an inkjet printer.” How’s your willingness to risk disgrace and imprisonment? “Every debt has to be repaid. Repaying one’s debts, according to Plato, at least, is the true definition of justice,” Greenwood decides. See what an education will get you?
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2c675tv
Sig Nordal 