You know me by now. I am working diligently at the opposite end of the belief/faith spectrum—at the end where it is all facts and data. As soon as I left my mother’s house, I had opened my laptop and started. I knew he was scrubbed from the Internet. Part of my job was to scrub him. To maintain the aura of mystery, to endlessly rewrite and reconfigure his past, to leave it in vague mists of southernness and poverty and a mysterious extrasensory gift. Part of my job was to keep him that way, but he had done a pretty creditable job of it before I even arrived on the scene. A quick look revealed how well he’d done. Tens of thousands of pages referencing the Wallace of today. But little to nothing of a verifiable past. Compared with audience members, whom I could trace back carefully, methodically, step-by-step, his life began fully formed at thirty, as if he had sprung whole from the soil one night. But that absence, that emptiness, made all the more apparent that there were answers, there was truth, hidden back there.
