Lost and Found

“He’s in the canal.” Simon cocked his head to the door. “Could be the one outside this pub, for all I know. Probably stuck to one of the bicycles at the bottom.”

Martin raised an eyebrow.

“You know, his shirt wrapped around a handlebar or something,” Simon said, as if it was obvious. “That’s why his body hasn’t floated up to the surface.”

“What makes you think he drowned? A missing teenager could turn up anywhere.”

Simon shook his head and took a gulp from his pint. “In the canal, I’m telling you. Just a drunk boy who lost his balance when he peed in the water.”

“You’re full of shit, man.”

“Don’t think so.” He tapped his shoulder. “See my spiritual friend perched right here, mate? I know these things.”

“Right. Just like you knew this pub would go up in flames last year. Just like you were sure your second marriage would last forever and you’d have four kids by now.”

A hint of a smile danced on Simon’s lip. “Just like that. Except this one’s true.”

“I think your spiritual friend drowned in your pint, man.”

When Simon raised his glass for inspection, Martin pushed against the bottom, so the liquid splashed into his friend’s face. Simon joined Martin’s cackle with a spluttering chuckle, and soon, they were howling with laughter—hardly remembering what they were laughing about.

Martin turned to the man behind the bar and said, “Another round, please, Paul.” 

***

The next morning, Simon woke up from impatient banging on the door of his apartment. He checked his phone. Not even 11 am. He moaned and buried his pounding head into the pillow. But the headache-augmenting thunders from the door continued. He flung the blanket aside and stumbled to his feet. It wasn’t easy to find his bathrobe in a room that was still spinning, but eventually, he succeeded.

“What?” he barked when he opened the door.

A young man shoved a microphone into his face, and the inquisitive black eyes of an elderly lady pierced straight into his hurting head.

“Good morning, Mr. Evans. Care to tell our listeners how you knew?”

Simon cleared what felt like sand from his throat and coughed with enough power to rain on the boy’s hand and microphone. He winced, which was the first thing that made Simon happy this morning—if anything can be called happiness inside a bubble of hangover dread.

“Knew what?”

“The boy, Mr. Evans. Haven’t you heard?”

“Heard what?”

“They found him. The teenager that went missing. He was exactly where you said he’d be: at the bottom of the canal outside your favorite pub. His shirt was entangled with the handlebar of an old bicycle, and his fly was open. Must have slipped when he peed into the water—just like you predicted. How did you know?”

An army of icicles marched down Simon’s spine. He was wide awake now.

“I didn’t—how do you know what I said?”

“You’re a funny man, Mr. Evans,” the woman said, holding up her phone.

Simon stared at himself on the display. A title across his chest read:

Lost & Found. Spiritual connections.

***

 After he’d kindly told his visitors that he’d call the police and just as kindly slammed the door closed, Simon rushed to his laptop. Sure enough, the first five search results on his name were social media accounts that hadn’t existed the day before. His hand hovered over the touchpad. This can’t be good. He crashed his finger down, and the first link opened.

A professional video channel featured Simon’s face and the title he’d seen on the lady’s phone. Below that, four videos with screaming headlines.

Spirits revealed the drowned boy!

Hero Evans does it again!

Evans and his guardian angel knew where she was!

Baby found—another prediction comes true!

“Damn you, Martin,” he muttered.

He didn’t have to watch the footage to know they were perfect deepfakes of himself predicting what had happened to these four missing persons. Without a doubt, they were time-stamped prior to the resolution date of each case, as if he had known before anyone else. Just his luck to be best friends with a twisted but brilliant digital artist. Simon couldn’t hold back a puny smile. But that was before his eyes fell on the number of followers.

Over twelve frigging thousand?

He gasped. Nearly five thousand comments, and exactly 986 shares—well, exactly that number only for an instant, as the statistics were surging like magma under Iceland.

***

 “Take it down, mate.”

“Good morning to you too.” On Simon’s display, Martin’s eyes competed for daylight with a pair of leaden eyelids.

“Take it down!” Simon yelled.

“Yeah. Great fun last night. I agree. Now leave me alone with my well-deserved beauty sleep, why don’t you?”

“I know it was you.”

“Hm?”

“The bogus profiles. The deepfakes. The idea wasn’t bad, but it’s exploding online. Take it down.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“As if you don’t know,” Simon said, sending a link to the video channel.

Martin squinted while he watched. “What the—Is this for real?”

Simon sighed. “No, it’s not for real, mate, and you know it. But it’s out there, for the whole wide world to see, and it’s out of control. So, make it stop. Great prank, you’ve outdone yourself, but take it down while we still can.”

“What are you saying, man?” Martin’s eyes grew dark and gained territory over the eyelids. “You think I’ve got something to do with this? You mad or something?”

***

 Simon stayed off the internet for the rest of the day. Whether Martin was behind it or not, he couldn’t deal with the online madness. He waited until the sun rose again before he switched his phone back on. A never-ending stream of beeps, dings, and pings entered his world and made him want to hide under the bed until this nightmare was over. But the little sense left in him funneled into his thumb, switching the phone to silent. Big problems call for simple solutions. While he watched the volume bar reduce to zero, one message caught his attention.

Paul hasn’t come home. I need your help. Susan.

Paul was the owner of Simon and Martin’s favorite pub, and Susan was his wife. Everyone knew Paul to be a meticulous planner. He would never stay away for a night—unless he was with his girlfriend, of course, but there was always some plausible, well prepared excuse for those occasions.

Simon still stared at the message when Susan called. He nearly dropped the phone.

“I know something bad has happened,” a sniveling Susan said. “You’ve got to help me, Simon. I need to know.”

“He’ll probably show up again during the day, Suz.”

The sobbing stopped. Susan seemed to have given up breathing altogether. “Is that what your spiritual friend says?” she eventually asked. “That Paul’s okay and will come back today?”

“My what? No—”

“What do you mean? What does the spirit say?”

Simon didn’t know what to reply.

“He’ll be back today, right? Right, Simon? Isn’t that what your psychic powers tell you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he mumbled, thinking that the world had gone mad. He hung up and switched the phone off.

Like a déjà vu, forceful banging pulled his attention back to the entrance door. But he couldn’t deal with nosy reporters any more than with Paul’s disappearance or crazy people thinking he had some spiritual connection. He swapped his t-shirt for a hoodie, stuck the phone into his back pocket, hid most of his face behind a pair of massive sunglasses, and left through the fire escape.

After dodging a neighbor who tried to keep him from running through his garden, Simon navigated the most narrow back streets he knew and stopped running when he reached Sarphati Park. His heart hammering in his chest and his hands clammy, he switched his phone back on and called Martin.

“Now, Martin,” he said before his friend could speak. “Take it down now. Stop fooling around; this just isn’t funny, mate.”

“You heard about Paul?” Martin asked, as if the fake online profiles didn’t even exist.

“Paul? Yes, I—do you even listen? You’ve got to give me back my life, alright? Stop this nonsense!”

“You mean it doesn’t bother you? It’s Paul we’re talking about.”

Simon pulled the phone from his ear to release a grunt in exasperation. An elderly couple on the other side of the pond shot him a glance and accelerated their pace.

Squeezing his eyes shut, Simon spoke into the phone again. “Paul will show up again somehow. If he’s not cooling in his girlfriend’s freezer or something. Meanwhile, everyone thinks I can solve their problems and they won’t leave me alone. Please, make it stop.”

“In her freezer?”

“Whatever, mate. I don’t get why she stays with him, knowing he’ll never leave Suz. Couldn’t blame her for taking revenge, know what I’m saying? But really, delete those damn profiles of mine. I have”—he checked the latest status—“fifteen thousand deranged followers now. I’ve had it, Martin. Please.”

“I still have nothing to do with it, man. Sorry.”

***

Breaking news: Bar owner found in freezer of mistress

Simon gaped at the headline on the 2 a.m. news. Since the madness began two days ago, he only enjoyed being home at night—when the reporters outside his door had gone to bed. He stayed offline most of the time to avoid going insane. Martin opened another can of beer and spilled some on Simon’s couch, like he usually did when we came over.

He shot Simon a guilty glance. “Sorry, man—Hey, what’s the matter?” He followed his friend’s gaze. “Oh Lord. That’s Paul, isn’t it?”

Simon nodded in slow-motion, unable to speak. Martin turned up the volume on the TV.

A handsome twenty-something said, “Based on a prediction from our local medium Simon Evans, the police searched the girl’s house. Not only did they find the bar owner’s body in her freezer, exactly as Mr. Evans prophized . . . professed”—a rosy shade of pink rose on the young man’s white skin—“prophesied, but they also found pictures and other evidence of a secret relationship between the two. The girl has been taken into custody.”

“Damn,” Martin said. “He’s dead. Paul! Can you believe it?”

Simon shook his head, still speechless. He should’ve checked his fake profiles; apparently, someone had published his private thoughts on the case. Once again.

“Seems like you weren’t joking about that spiritual fellow on your shoulder,” Martin said.

Simon glanced at his shoulder before he could stop himself. Was it possible? Did he really have some sort of spiritual connection telling him things he couldn’t know?

“Mate, I was just bluffing,” he muttered. “I thought I was bluffing. But . . . There’s more to it, isn’t there?” He raised his gaze to the ceiling. “A higher power? Scares the crap out of me.”

He locked eyes with Martin again, who nodded with empathy. They sat in stunned silence for minutes. Then, without warning, Martin burst out laughing.

Simon’s face crumpled into a giant frown. “What?”

“You should see yourself, man,” Martin wheezed in between his cackles. In an exaggerated imitation of his friend’s voice, he said, “Ooh, me and my godly spirit! You lost a loved one? Who you gonna call? Me and my spiritual connections, y'all!” He collapsed into a laughing fit again.

Blood drained from Simon’s face. “So it was you. It was you all along!”

“Duh. What were you thinking? Of course it was me.” He slapped Simon on the shoulder, crushing the angel that apparently had never been there.

“But the teenager! And now Paul. What happened to them is exactly what I’d said—” to you. He didn’t voice that last part.

Martin nodded vehemently. Proudly. “I know!” He chortled with glee. “It was the ultimate prank!”

“But—”

“Everything orchestrated, man. All planned by yours truly. I had to make sure your predictions came true after setting up your public profile, didn’t I?”

“You mean . . . ”

Martin sighed. “Yeah, Paul. Pity. He wasn’t a bad bartender. But hey, no victory without collateral damage, right? Don’t look at me like that. It was you who gave me the idea when you spouted your thoughts about what must have happened to that teenager. I hadn’t made up my mind yet what to do with that boy in my basement. So, thank you. I couldn’t have thought of any better way.” He winked. “Pretty impressive, isn’t it?”

Simon gawked at his friend. His mind raced to find reason in all of this. It hunted for hints that Martin was joking again, but everything fit with his version of the story and nothing else did. Frozen in a dreadful moment that may have been a minute or an hour, he wondered if he’d be next in this grisly game.

***

“You’re our very own Amsterdam hero, Mr. Evans,” a ridiculously gorgeous woman in her early fifties said while a grin revealing perfect, glittering teeth nearly split her face in half. “Tell us how your spiritual guide helps you crack these cases.”

Simon tried not to look into the cameras hovering around the podium and mirrored her smile. “It’s hard to explain. I just close my eyes and focus.”

“And then she reveals things to you?”

“And then she reveals stuff.”

On TV, the bar on the twentieth floor of A’DAM Tower looked bigger than it was. The popular talk show was broadcasted live from there every week, but he’d never been inside. Certainly not as the main guest of the show. Until tonight.

“But now, your own best friend is missing,” the host said.

Simon’s face dropped.

“He hasn’t been seen or heard from for three days now.”

A boy rushed over to splodge more powder on Simon’s face while a video played showing Martin’s desperate boyfriend’s plea for help.

When the cameras turned back to Simon, the host asked, “What happened to him, Mr. Evans?”

“I don’t know.” He lowered his gaze to the floor.

“Why don’t you ask your friend from the spiritual world?”

“When I do, the visions I get are gruesome. I’d rather not know.”

“Maybe this time, you can save him. Why don’t you try?” She turned to the audience. “Don’t we want to know? Don’t we want Mr. Evans to ask the spirit?”

The audience chanted, “Ask her! Ask her! Ask her!”

Simon showed his palms in surrender, and the crowd cheered. He closed his eyes and swayed back and forth for a while. The bar-turned-studio went silent. When Simon’s eyes flung open, a collective gasp punctured the tension in the air.

“He’s alive!” he cried out. “And he’s right here, on this roof.” He pointed at the ceiling.

***

Moments later, Simon and the host stepped out onto the rooftop of A’DAM Tower, surrounded by three cameras and a sound boom operator. Two lighting engineers carried powerful film lamps to light up the dusky setting. Under a clear sky, punctured by a few stars and blinking airplanes, the skyline of the city on the other side of the river was dazzling. It almost eclipsed the sad little pile of human that sat on the roof, propped up against the barrier on the roof’s edge.

Simon strode toward it. The show’s host reached for his arm but wasn’t fast enough to stop him.

“Maybe we should wait for the police.” Her voice wasn’t as confident as it was before.

Simon ignored her while a cameraman, the sound guy, and two bright film lights moved with him.

“Hey man, good to see you,” Simon said jovially.

Martin raised his head and dropped it again. A string of saliva dangled from his mouth. Simon forced him to look into the camera by holding his chin up.

From behind them, the host said, “This is a bad idea. Let’s go back, guys. The kidnapper may be—”

But no one was listening. This was ultimate entertainment.

“You feel a little woozy, my friend?” Simon asked.

Martin groaned and gurgled when Simon helped him to his feet. He was drugged, but not unconscious. Simon wrapped an arm around his side and faced the camera.

“Amsterdam, listen carefully. I’ll make one more prediction. One more, then I’m done. I promise you that after tonight, the city is safe again. The kidnapper and killer will be the last victim in his own story. That’s what the spirit tells me.”

He pressed a kiss on Martin’s cheek. “How do you like my prank, mate?” he whispered into his ear, then hoisted his friend over the barrier and dove after him into the cool marine nothingness.

***

A week after the show reached record ratings, the local pub of Simon and Martin reopened. Susan decided life had to go on, and this was Paul’s legacy. The only person not allowed in was his mistress, who she wished hadn't been released after she appeared not to be Paul's killer. On opening night, the place was packed. Having had a pair of infamous regulars appeared to be magnificent for business.

“I still can’t believe what happened,” a young man with a mustache said to his companion, a curvy woman with glasses. They sat at the bar where Simon and Martin had discussed the teenager’s fate a few weeks ago.

“It’s crazy what people do for fame,” she said, sipping from a glass of bubbles. “Pretending to have psychic powers and killing people to make your bogus predictions come true? That’s as sick as it gets.”

“Pretty smart, though, you have to admit.”

“It’s sick.”

“That, too. And then taking his best friend’s life on live TV . . . That guy wasn’t joking around. Remind me to choose my friends wisely.”

She nodded and raised her bubbles. “To friends and joking around, then.”

They clinked their glasses. “To friends and joking around,” he agreed.