Perpetual Motion

1

The tale I am about to tell you isn't entirely true. Privacy issues have compelled me to modify certain parts of the account and several characters' defining features. This involved quite a bit of effort, and I would prefer that you refrain from attempting to ferret the changes. I hope you'll simply take this story as fiction. Fair enough? All right then, let's start. The main character of this story is one of my patients. She was thirteen when she first visited, a smart and gifted student already certified in two specialty areas. Her father had been killed in a traffic accident before she was born, but her mother was an exemplary parent who generously nourished her daughter's considerable creativity and talent. The mother was an image maker, a profession difficult for the general public to understand, but her convoluted works were famous for their undeniable quality and excellence.

At first, the veneer of an ideal mother-daughter pair mirrored their relationship behind closed doors. At least until my client discovered the modification in the materials she'd downloaded onto her computer.

The materials in question concerned the car crash that had claimed her father. She was midway through a homework assignment that involved writing a report, which she had titled "Government Responsibility for Traffic Accidents." She was aware of how her father had died, and wanted as a matter of course to look into the accident.

The father wasn't famous like the mother, but because the mother's star had yet to ascend, no significance in particular had been attached to his death. Even so, plenty of materials remained on file. She input her father's name, confirmed the accident site, accessed the police department database, and obtained all of the incident reports.

Reading and rereading these materials, she grew suspicious of some of the findings. According to the reports, it was determined beyond a doubt that her father had died alone. The eyewitness, however, was twice quoted as having said "they." Was it a slip of the tongue? If so, the computer would have flagged the discrepancy prior to the saving of the file.

Her interest piqued, she delved into the insurance company's records. There too was the same curious detail about her father dying alone in the crash. She found the eyewitness's testimony as well, but in place of the plural pronoun was "he." Except for this modification the testimony appeared to be exactly the same as in the police report. It didn't make sense—unless someone had falsified the data and then claimed that the resulting omission was accidental?

She scanned the local newspapers but saw nothing related to the crash. If there had been a fatal collision—precisely the kind of accident a newspaper would want to cover—she couldn't find it. And so she decided to reach out to the witness herself, only to learn that this individual, an elderly person, had died ten years earlier.

For a few nights she lay awake stewing. Who could the passenger have been? And who would want to tamper with the report, and why? She could simply have asked her mother. She didn't, though, perhaps assuming without realizing it that her mother might have been the other party.

The solution appeared one day, a blast from the past. One of her friends brought to school an antique printed newspaper and reported that a few small-scale newspaper companies had yet to convert to data files. Instead they archived the issues in bound format, as was done with newspapers from the 1800s.

Back home she returned to the local newspapers and looked for those that might have had print editions at the time of the accident. There were three—two weeklies and one that was issued every other day. She called all three, requesting scans of the print editions for days that she specified. Before long she laid eyes on a photo of the passenger who had been killed along with her father.

It was a photo of she herself.

2...