Dear Mom, Dad, Jonas and Sarah,
I’m sorry I’ve had to do this.
Matt stared at the words on the screen, and then sighed and hit backspace. One, he realised, these should be handwritten letters. Two, he shouldn’t write them until closer to the date. Prepping too early carried the risk of the letters being discovered and the whole plan revealed. Three – the notes should be separate. One for each of them. One each to address everything they meant to him, and everything he hoped they could be.
Even looking at the blank screen, feeling himself tear up a little, Matt could see what the letters would say. That he wasn’t actually dead. That he'd had no choice but to fake it. Why it didn’t mean in any way that he didn’t want to be with them or that he didn’t love them; why he was sorry, but that this was the only way.
Then, he thought, recounting good memories, better days. The time they’d caught his Dad cheating at tennis. The tale of the burnt lasagne. Sarah’s phase of believing she was a fairy. Jonas’ years of mispronouncing words.
From the past then to the future. What he hoped for each of them; reassurances for his parents, encouragement and advice for his siblings. A promise to get in contact, if ever safe, if ever possible. A plea to move on. Permission to grieve.
It felt selfish, he realised as he typed it down, as he made notes, as he erased them. So utterly selfish to inflict this sudden loss without any warning after he’d already turned their lives upside down. But he was doing it for them. For all of them. It was the only way they’d ever know peace.
And they would be looked after. Matt was sure of that. Whatever support they needed, whether it be emotional or financial, Jane would see to it; the Legion would. There’d be enough people to share the truth with, in his small secret circle. Enough to mitigate the trauma. Hopefully.
Mom, Dad, Jane. Jonas, Sarah. Azleena. Giselle. Wally, because he’d probably psychically find out. Maybe Will, if Wally couldn’t keep his mouth shut. Already too many people. Far too few. You couldn’t just extract one life without entangling them all.
Matt sighed and closed down the empty farewell letters, packing away his yearning grief and trying to return to the fun bits of his semi-cidal plan. Money. Money, as always, presented an issue.
Unusually for a boy of nineteen, Matt Callaghan was not short on money. This was not due to any special effort on his part but merely his celebrity existence, which naturally Matt had wasted no time in monetising. There was his and Jane’s appearance on the Tonight Show; the use of their likenesses on a variety of licensed t-shirts, posters, costumes, stationary, action figures and bobbleheads; sponsorships from PsyBlock, Nike and Mountain Dew, of all companies; Jane’s earnings from being paid to show up and look decorative at particular events; and royalties from a series on mental self-defence a corporate training company had commissioned from Matt a few months ago. Once their income came in, minus their agent’s fee, Matt was the one who managed it – Jane’s approach to money being what could politely be called incautious and more accurately described as ‘spend it all immediately before some un‑articulatable threat steals it.’ Matt, on the other hand, had always been a very responsible saver and did not narrow his eyes suspiciously at the mere mention of bank accounts. He had therefore thus far taken charge of the couple’s wealth management and (he thought) been doing a very good job.
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The thing was, having money was not the issue – it was disappearing with it. In his initial brainstorming, Matt had noted down a variety of potential techniques, but all of them seemed to have drawbacks. There was of course the tried and tested ‘withdraw a bunch of cash and stuff it into a suitcase’ approach, but the problem with that was large withdrawals prior to his purported ‘death’ would raise suspicions, and it was vital no suspicions were ever raised past infancy. Similarly with off‑shoring large amounts of money into properties or foreign bank accounts – there was both the issue of the eyebrows the proximity would elevate, and the issue of how to access it after the owner (him) was allegedly dead.
Matt had also done a bit of research into cryptocurrency, a relatively new field which after an hour of research he was one hundred percent confident he was no closer to understanding or being able to explain. Apparently a computer solved some puzzles to make tokens, which were uncopiable, allegedly, except surely if a computer could do it a computer could also reverse engineer a solution, or at least trace where the tokens had been transferred. Matt didn’t really know – the whole thing sounded like a get-rich-quick scheme either set up by unscrupulous technopaths or at permanent risk of being eviscerated by them.
Then there was what some might have called the more ‘Bond villain’ techniques – using cash now to buy a bunch of gold or diamonds, to be sunk to the bottom of the sea or buried somewhere in a hole. Gold, no, that was entirely out – anyone who bought gold bars was clearly up to something. Diamonds though, diamonds might work. True diamonds, Matt learned, registered at time of mining, generally held value well and were considered difficult to fake, because while there were some limited number of diamond-Midas people out there who could transmute other materials to diamond just by touching, plus crystalmorphs who were able to, who knows, turn their flesh to diamond and then pull off a toenail or something, the former’s handiwork would reverse under the right conditions and the latter’s was contaminated with organic DNA. It wasn’t inconceivable that he, a young, potentially irresponsible man finding himself burdened with a sudden influx of wealth, would ‘invest’ in a large number of diamonds to, who knows, decorate his toilet… and for those diamonds to subsequently fall off the grid.
It all came down to how much money he had and how much money he actually needed, Matt thought to himself. If he had heaps of money, and he only needed to keep a little bit, then it wouldn’t be inconceivable for him to just buy some diamonds – maybe ostensibly to make Jane a necklace, or use in some kind of gift – and then when he died have those diamonds disappear in the… explosion? House fire? Matt was still undecided on how this whole fake death thing was going to happen. Because how he ‘died’ so completely and convincing that no one ever doubted it was still a very real, very pertinent question.
What was the most foolproof, harmless method, Matt wondered. What was the safest, most convincing way to die?