by Thomas Perry
The disappointment hovered behind her bright smile, but she turned to look at the wine bottles on the shelf. “See you.” She didn’t push her cart away. Instead, she waited and let him move up the aisle away from her.
As he stood in the line at the check-out counter, he was filled with regret and sadness. But for the first time, that feeling was outweighed by something new. He was afraid of her. His disguise was transparent, his identity obviously false. He wanted to leave his shopping cart and slip out the door, hurry along the windowless side wall of the building, and disappear.
After that Sunday, David Keller always ate in his apartment, and when he needed supplies he walked to a small grocery store on Sixteenth Avenue after dark and paid cash for them, then carried the bag home in his left arm to keep the right one free to protect himself.
He had gone to a movie a mile away once, but he had been unable to get used to the sensation that people were looking at him. He knew, objectively, that they were. They might be wondering why a thirty-three-year-old man had nobody to go to the movies with, or they might only be looking at him because when the lights were still on in a theater there was nothing else to look at but a wall of white at the front of the room. But David Keller didn’t want people looking at him, and he especially didn’t want them wondering. When Pete Hatcher had walked into a room, people had lit up. He could still see them, hear their voices. “Hey, Pete. Have a seat.” And he would see pleasure on their faces, and he would make a joke out of it. “What, you’re so glad to see me, I owe you money, or something?” He had spent a good part of those thirty-three years learning about Pete Hatcher by seeing him through other people’s eyes.
David Keller didn’t exactly miss being Pete Hatcher. He had simply begun to realize that being Pete Hatcher had been easy. Being David Keller took a lot of thought, and there seemed to be no reward beyond waking up each morning and verifying that he was still alive. And because when he awoke he found himself still alone, he could regale himself with the strong likelihood that he would be alive to latch the windows and close the curtains that night.
He sat in his little dining room and stared past the gouged sideboard at the mirror above it. The glass had little black specks where the backing was showing through, but he could see himself well enough. He had gotten his hair cut short and lightened it, so he looked a little bit different from Pete Hatcher. The odd thing was that he didn’t seem to look like anybody else, either. Some time in his childhood he had been given a game that consisted of a board with a pink oval and a collection of eyes, ears, noses, mouths, and hair. Usually, when he selected features, he could put them together and they would practically scream out what they were: a pirate, a Chinese mandarin, a cowboy. But once in a while, when he put the pieces together, nothing happened. It was simply an oval with two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. That was what he saw looking back at him in the mirror tonight: it was a face, but it didn’t seem to belong to anybody.
He had lived for three months on a couple of conversations with a woman he didn’t even know. “If you want to be invisible,” she had said, “you have to do what other people do. Think average.”
“What’s average?”
“The average man your age makes about thirty-five thousand dollars a year.” He had felt distress, wonder. Could that possibly be all? She had tried to mitigate it. “The good news is that he doesn’t save any of it. But he’s always doing something. Busy busy busy.”
“Busy at what?”
“Watch people. Whenever they’re out of their houses, they’re engaged in some obvious activity. If you were a cop, you could stop every one of them and ask what they were doing, and they could all bore you silly with details. They’re dropping clothes off at the cleaners, then stopping by the drugstore for dental floss, and then they’re going to head home for dinner at the time when everybody else is too. An experienced cop wouldn’t even have to ask them, because he can read it on them: the way they walk, the way their eyes are set. The people you have to worry about think like cops. Men between seventeen and seventy don’t just hang out, sit on a park bench or something. If they’re out in a park, they’re jogging for their health or walking fast because they have someplace to go.”
“Where do I live? What do I do?”
“You rent an apartment. It’s in a large building, but not a building that’s fancy enough so they do any checking before you move in. I’ve already found one and rented it for you. I used an identity that’s old enough to stand up if it needs to. Nothing else is in your name. I’m your girlfriend. If anybody ever asks about me, we broke up and I moved out.”
“What do I drive?”
“For now, nothing. I’ll have to get you out quick, so I have no time to do it for you. Here’s a short lesson. Leasing a car triggers an all-out credit search. Buying a new car on time does the same. But it’s going to be tricky for you to write a check for the full price tomorrow or the next day, because it’s what the people who have studied you think you’ll do. So don’t. What you want is to find a used car for sale by the owner: it’s the only market where paying in cash is necessary, and it will keep you off a car company’s customer list. Have a mechanic check it out. For most people that’s just to see if it’s any good. For you, it’s also because he’ll warn you if it’s stolen. Register it and insure it under your new name. Car registrations are public records, and insurance companies sell lists of customers. There’s no way to avoid that. Just don’t do it right away.”
“How long should I wait?”
“If you do it tomorrow, you’ll be on a short list. The longer you wait, the longer the list.”
“What else?”
“Don’t do anything that brings you to the attention of the police, of course. If you see a fire or an accident or a politician, walk the other way. There could be news cameras. Don’t vote, file any legal papers, serve on a jury, buy land, buy a gun, or get married, because those create public records.”
He had heard the list, and none of those things had been anything he would have done anyway. At any rate, Pete Hatcher would not have done them. He looked at his face in the speckled mirror. The part of this that was beginning to weigh on him was that he had not had enough time to get used to the idea before he had done it. One day he had been Pete Hatcher, walking through the cavernous casino in his tailored summer-weight suit, and a few hours later he had been sitting here in this small, dark apartment in Denver.
She had asked him where he wanted to live, where he could live without being recognized. He had not been able to think of a place. She had rattled off a list of cities and when she had said Denver, he had said yes, just because it was a city where he had never lived, never been for more than an hour or two to change planes, and now even that was safe because it wasn’t even the same airport. She had said Denver was okay, because it was only eight hundred miles from Las Vegas, and a person running for his life didn’t usually stop that soon.
There were lots of things she had not told him, because there had been no time. She had not told him that David Keller would one day sit in this room and look at himself and find that he had not the slightest vision of a future—not just what to do, or what to expect, but what to want, who to be. And she had not told him that David Keller would be afraid.
It was late. Through the open kitchen window he could hear faint traces of the music from the bar floating up through the still, late-summer air, and cars hissing past it on Colfax. He closed the window and locked it, sat on the single bed in the small bedroom where he slept. He should have felt safe. She had chosen a fourth-floor apartment so he didn’t need to worry about somebody climbing in the windows. It wasn’t even in a male name, so it would be hard to trace him here. Pete Hatcher had left Las Vegas with over six hundred thousand dollars. He could live like this for ten or fifteen years without poking his head above the surface.
He took his shirt off and lay in the tiny, dark room, on the surface of the bed. He had found David Keller was not comfortable taking
all his clothes off in a bed. There was something especially frightening about having them come for him while he was naked, so now he always kept his pants on and his shoes. He had forgotten something. He got up, walked into the kitchen, opened the drawer, and took out the butcher knife. He wrapped the blade in a dish towel and set it beside his left hand in the bed, so they wouldn’t see it behind his thigh, and he wouldn’t roll over on it. He rested his hand on the handle and lay back in the darkness, feeling the drops of sweat forming on his forehead in the airless room.
As he waited for sleep he thought of the woman in the supermarket. He wished, more fervently now than ever, that he could have responded to her differently when she had spoken. She had been in the market on a Sunday afternoon with nothing much to do, and she had liked him. She had not wanted to put him in danger. She had wanted somebody to play with—to ride bikes, like kids. He had thrown away her telephone number, but maybe he could still find her. He could buy a bicycle, go to one of the places she had mentioned, and just happen to meet her.
No, it was impossible. She would talk, and he would have to talk too—pay out to her an endless series of lies, like beads on a string. There was something too quick about her for that. She would remember what he said, see that bead sixty-seven wasn’t the same as bead nineteen. Or she would tell people about him, even make him meet them, and then he would have two or three strings of lies going at once, then more. They would all get farther and farther out of control until he got himself tangled in lies. She would never be in this bed with him, lying with her soft chestnut hair on his chest. Not her, not anyone. The difference between being alive and being dead had all but vanished.
He awoke to the glare of the sun hitting the window above his head and throwing a square patch on the wall. He closed his eyes again and lay perfectly still. If they had come into the apartment while he was asleep, they would have gone straight to the bigger bedroom, and their muffled creaking and rustling would be what had awakened him. He listened for a long time, as he did every morning, at length satisfied himself that no sound had caused him to wake, and sat up. He sensed a change. The world was different this morning.
He went into the big bedroom, laid out some of his favorite clothes—the plain blue oxford shirt, the blue jeans between new and broken in—and stepped into the shower. This was the best part of the day. It always seemed to him that in the morning the universe was starting out clean and fresh. Anything could happen.
It wasn’t until he was dressed and eating his breakfast under the open kitchen window that he recognized what was different. It was David Keller. He was through holding his breath.
He found the car after an hour of looking in the newspapers. He knew he couldn’t buy something like a Mercedes. Even an Audi or a Saab was pushing his luck. It should be dull and American and cheap. The sliver of an ad said, “96 SL2, 4 door, air cond., automatic, PS. $12,000 OBO.” He called the number and he could hear a baby crying in the background. The woman said, “You should probably come after dinner, when my husband is home. I can’t answer any questions about it. I don’t know a thing about cars.”
He made his voice sound worried and disappointed. “Oh. That’s too bad. I just got to town, so I’ve got nothing to drive, and I start work in a couple of days …” A little of Pete Hatcher seemed to come back to him. He could sense there was something bothering her. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m being stupid. Your husband’s not home so you don’t want some stranger showing up. And of course, I don’t want to buy a used car in the dark. So I guess I’m out of luck.… Hey, I have an idea. Is the car on the street?”
“No, but I could move it.”
“Great. I’ll just come by and take a look at it. If it’s not what I want, I won’t bother you.”
“I guess that would be all right.”
He took a cab to the house and stood beside the gray car for a time, peeked at the underside, cupped his hands to lean against the window to peer at the number on the odometer, wrote down the license number and serial number, examined the tires. He was running out of things to do when the door of the old duplex opened and a young woman came out on the porch carrying a one-year-old girl on her hip. She had a corkscrew strand of blond hair that kept coming down across her left eye. She had been watching him, as he had hoped, and decided he didn’t look like a psychotic.
She said, “You the one who called about the car?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry to come at such an inconvenient time.” He smiled at the little girl. “Hi, cutie.”
“That’s okay,” said the woman.
“Well, I’m interested.” He looked back at the car. “Is there anything I need to know about the car? Any accidents?”
“No. My husband’s dad bought it, drove it for a year, and died. He seemed to like it, and he took care of it. I’m not going to be working again for a while, so we’d just be paying insurance on it for nothing.”
“I understand,” said Keller.
“Would you like to drive it?”
Keller said apologetically, “If it’s all right.”
“I called my husband and he said it was okay.” As she held out a set of keys, Keller sensed that she wasn’t telling the truth.
He took the keys and said, “I’ll be right back.” Keller drove the car around the block and pulled up in front of the house. This wasn’t exactly the way Jane had said to do it. It seemed better. The woman had seen him for a few minutes, could suspect him of nothing, and seemed too busy and housebound to talk to anybody about him. He got out of the car and walked to the porch. She came out and he held up the keys. “I’d like to buy it.”
She brightened. “Well, wonderful.” After a second she added, “My husband will be happy. It kind of reminds him of his dad.”
“Do you know what time he’ll be home? I’d like to get this done today.” He showed her the envelope. “I brought the money.”
“In cash?”
“I didn’t want to have to wait for a check to clear. I’m not exactly an old customer of the local banks.”
“We don’t need to wait for him. Come on in.”
Keller followed her into the house. She opened a drawer of the buffet, where she kept the dishes, and pulled out the pink slip. Keller handed her the envelope and watched her count the hundred-dollar bills. When she had finished, she leaned over the coffee table and signed the pink slip and handed it to him.
Keller glanced at the slip. It had been signed by Ronald Sedgely with the new owner as Maura Sedgely, and now she had signed it. The car was hers? There was no husband coming home tonight. Either Ronald Sedgely was her father, and she wasn’t married, or she had gotten the car in a divorce from Ronald Sedgely. The discovery made him feel elated, filled with confidence.
He wasn’t the only one. Everybody was lying. Everybody was hiding some vulnerability. Opening your face and telling people the truth about yourself wasn’t normal. She was normal. She was a single mother trying to deal with a man who called on the telephone and might try to cheat her on a car deal, or might even be a maniac who would rape and kill her in front of her baby. Pretending there was some guy who had to approve the deal and knew all about cars, and just might pop in to protect her, that was the sensible thing to do. She was perfectly normal. He was normal.
Keller drove the car to the D.M.V. to register it, drove to an insurance office he had picked out in the telephone book to insure it, and found that neither was as difficult to do as he had feared. They wanted to know the answers to questions he had prepared for a month ago. Jane had assured him that his driver’s license was genuine. It must have been true, because everybody’s computer loved David Keller. He had no outstanding warrants, no problems of any kind, and not even any disturbing blank spaces. He had gotten a new license a year ago, after driving in New Jersey for twelve years.
As David Keller drove around town, he couldn’t help feeling grateful that human beings were so simpleminded. All he had needed to do to break free of the depression that
had been paralyzing him was to get out and drive around in a car on a summer day with his window rolled down. It was such a small improvement that it made him laugh.
It made him even happier when he looked at it in reverse. He had bought the right kind of car in the way Jane had said was the safest. He had bought it from the ideal seller, a woman who didn’t even know his name. Maybe he had done it a little early for Jane’s taste, but she had not known how invisible he had been for three months. He had made no mistakes at all. And the car made him feel safer.
He would park it somewhere away from his apartment. If they found the apartment, he could sneak down the fire escape, get in his car, and go. If they found the car, he would see them watching it before he went near it. He would hide some emergency supplies inside the car—money, maybe ten grand in a clever place. And what else would he need if they found him?
The clerk in the gun shop was a woman. She was short and gray-haired and probably had been pretty once, but her face looked as though she had spent some time squinting into the sun. When she walked around the counter and he saw that she was wearing a pistol in a holster on her hip, he thought at first that it was some kind of illusion. Then he noticed that everybody in the store was wearing one, even the stock boy with the broom.
She let him stare down through the glass case for a few minutes, then came up and stood beside him. “Anything I can show you?”
He shrugged. “I’m not sure. Yes, I guess so. I just don’t know what.”
She smiled like an aging dance-hall girl in a Western movie. “Let’s narrow it down. You want to buy a handgun.”
He smiled back at her. “That’s right.”
“Are you an old shooter?”
“No. I’ve never even fired one of these.”
“What do you want it for? Target range or protection?”
“Protection. You know, burglars and so on.”
She stared at him for a moment as though she were estimating his hat size. “Well, okay. You know, of course, that if somebody comes into your house, what he really doesn’t want to see is one of these.” She pointed to a short-barreled pump shotgun on the rack behind her.