Once, he reminded himself, I studied hard to learn to save lives.
Now I must educate myself in how to take one.
Ricky surprised himself with the sense of organization that he was able to impose on his thoughts and feelings. Psychoanalysis, the profession that he’d just departed, is perhaps the most creative of all the disciplines of medicine, precisely because of the changeable nature of the human personality. While there are recognizable diseases and established courses of treatment within the realm of therapy, ultimately they are all individualized, because no two sadnesses are precisely alike. Ricky had spent years learning and perfecting the flexibility of the therapist, understanding that any given patient could walk through his door on any given day with something the same, or something utterly different, and that he had to be prepared at all times for the wildest swings in mood and sense. The problem, he thought to himself, was how to find the strengths of the capabilities that he’d developed in his years behind the couch, and translate them into the singleness of purpose that would recover his life for him.
He would not allow himself to fantasize that he could ever go back to who he was. No daydream of hope that he could return to his home in New York and take up again the routine of his life. That wasn’t the point, he understood. The point was to make the man who’d ruined his life pay for his fun.
Once that debt was paid, Ricky realized, then he would be free to become whatever he wanted. Until the specter of Rumplestiltskin was removed from his life, Ricky would never have a moment’s peace, or a second’s freedom.
Of this, he was unequivocally certain.
Nor was he sure, yet, that Rumplestiltskin was convinced that Ricky had killed himself. The possibility existed, Ricky thought, that he’d only bought some time for himself, for whatever innocent relative had been targeted. It was the most intriguing of situations, he knew. Rumplestiltskin was a killer. Now Ricky needed to be able to outplay the man at his own game.
He knew this: He had to become someone new and someone utterly different from the man he once was.
He had to invent this new persona without creating any telltale sign that the man once known as Dr. Frederick Starks still existed. His own past was cut off for him. He did not know where Rumplestiltskin might have put a trap, but he knew one was there, waiting for the slightest sign that he wasn’t floating somewhere in the waters off Cape Cod.
He knew he needed a new name, an invented history, a believable life.
In this country, Ricky realized, what we are first and foremost are numbers. Social Security numbers. Bank account and credit card numbers. Tax identification numbers. Driver’s license numbers. Telephone numbers and home addresses. Creating these was the first order of business, Ricky thought. And then he needed to find a job, a home, he needed to create a world around him that was credible and yet totally anonymous. He needed to be the smallest and most insignificant of someones, and then he could start to build the education that he needed to track down and execute the man who’d forced him to murder himself.
Creating the history and the personality of his new self didn’t worry him. He was, after all, an expert in the connection between actual events and the impressions these made on the self. Of greater concern was precisely how to create the numbers that would make the new Ricky believable.
His first sortie out on this task was a failure. He went to the library at the University of New Hampshire, only to discover that he needed a college identification card to get past the security at the door. For a moment, he looked longingly at the students wandering through the stacks of books. There was, however, a second library, significantly smaller, located on Jones Street. It was a part of the county library system, and, while lacking the volume and the cavernous quiet of the university, still had what Ricky thought he would need, which was books and information. It also had a secondary advantage: Entrance was open. Anyone could walk in, read any newspaper, magazine, or book in any one of the large leather chairs interspersed throughout the low-slung, two-story brick building. To check out a book would require a card, however. The library also had another advantage: Along one wall was a long table with four different computers set up. There was a printed list of rules for operating the computers, which started with the first-come, first-available, rule. Then operating instructions.
Ricky eyed the computers, and thought to himself that perhaps they might be of assistance to him. Unsure where to start, wearing a sort of antique attitude about modern devices, Ricky, the onetime man of talk, wandered into the stacks of books, searching for a section on computers. This did not take more than a few minutes to uncover. He tilted his head slightly, to be able to read the book titles along their spines, and within moments spotted one entitled: Getting Started in Home Computing—A Guide for the Uninitiated and Afraid.
He dumped himself into a leather armchair and started reading. The prose in the book was irritating and cloying, directed toward true idiots, he thought. But it was filled with information, and, had Ricky been a little more astute, he would have understood that the childish word formations were designed for people such as himself, because the average American eleven-year-old already knew everything contained within the pages.
After reading for an hour, Ricky approached the rows of computers. It was midmorning, midweek, late in the summer, and the library was almost empty. He had the area to himself. He clicked on one of the machines, and drew himself up to it. On the wall, as he’d noted, were instructions, and he skipped down to the segment where it explained how to access the Internet. He followed the directions and the computer screen leapt to life in front of him. He continued clicking buttons and typing in instructions and within a few more moments had jumped full-bore into the electronic world. He opened up a search engine, as the guidebook had told him to, and typed in the phrase: False Identity.
Less than ten seconds later, the computer told him there were more than 100,000 entries under that category, and Ricky started to read from the beginning.
By the end of the day, Ricky had learned that the business of creating new identities was a thriving one. There were dozens of companies spread throughout the world that would provide him with virtually every sort of false documentation, all of which was sold under the disclaimer for novelty purposes only. He thought there was something transparently criminal in a French business that offered to sell a California driver’s license. But while transparent, it was also not against the law.
He made lists of places and documents, putting together a fictional portfolio. He knew what he needed, but obtaining it was a bit of a problem.
He realized swiftly that people seeking fake identities already were someone.
He was not.
He still had a pocket filled with cash, and locations where he could spend it. The problem was, they all existed in the electronic world. The cash he had was useless. They wanted credit card numbers. He had none. They wanted an E-mail address. He had none. They wanted a home to deliver the material to. He had none.
Ricky refined his computer search and started reading about identity theft. He discovered that it was a thriving criminal enterprise in the United States. He read horror story after horror story about people who awakened one day to find their lives in turmoil because someone somewhere with little conscience was running up debts in their name.
It wasn’t a difficult leap for Ricky to recall how his own bank and brokerage accounts had been eviscerated, and he suspected that Rumplestiltskin had accomplished all this with remarkable ease simply by acquiring a few of Ricky’s numbers. It helped explain why the box containing his old tax returns was missing when he went to search for it. It wasn’t particularly difficult to be someone else in the electronic world. He promised himself that whoever he managed to become, he would never again idly toss into the trash a preapproved credit card application he received unsolicited in the mail.
Ricky pushed himself away from the computer and walked outside the library. The sun was shining brightly, an
d the air was still filled with the heat of summer. He continued walking almost aimlessly, until he found himself in a residential area filled with modest two-story wood-frame houses and small yards often littered with bright plastic children’s toys. He could hear some young voices coming from a backyard, out of sight. A dog of undetermined breed looked up from where he rested on one small lawn, restrained by a rope tied at one end to his collar and the other to a thick oak tree. The dog wagged his tail vigorously at Ricky’s appearance, as if inviting him to come over and scratch its ears. Ricky looked around, at tree-lined streets, where the shadows thrown by leafy branches created dark spots on the sidewalk. A slight breeze ruffled through the canopy of green, making the streaks and splotches of darkness on the sidewalks shift position and shape, before returning to rest. He took a few more strides down the street and in the front window of one house, he saw a small, hand-lettered sign: room to rent. inquire within.
Ricky began to step forward. That’s what I need, he said to himself.
Then, as abruptly, he stopped.
I have no name. No history. No references.
He made a mental note of the location of the house, and walked on, thinking to himself: I need to be someone. I need to be someone who can’t be traced. Someone alone, but someone real.
A dead person can come back to life. But that creates a question, a small rend in the fabric, that can be uncovered. An invented person can suddenly rise out of imagination, but that, too, creates questions.
Ricky’s problem was different from the criminals, the men seeking to run away from alimony payments, the ex–cult members afraid they were being followed, the women hiding from abusive husbands.
He needed to become someone who was both dead and alive.
Ricky thought about this contradiction, then smiled. He leaned his head back, facing into the bright sun.
He knew exactly what to do.
It did not take Ricky long to find a Salvation Army clothing store. It was located in a small, undistinguished shopping mall on the main bus route, a place of pavement, low-slung, square buildings, and bleached and peeling paint, not exactly decrepit and not precisely run-down, but a place that showed the fraying of neglect in trash cans that hadn’t been emptied and cracks in the asphalt parking lot. The Salvation Army store was painted a flat, reflective white, so that it glowed in the afternoon sun. Inside, it was similar to a small warehouse, with electrical appliances like toasters and waffle irons for sale on one wall, and rows of donated clothing hanging from racks occupying the center of the store. There were a few teenagers pawing through the racks, searching for baggy, fatigue pants and other bland articles, and Ricky sidled in behind them, inspecting the same piles of clothes. It seemed to him upon first glance that no one ever donated anything to the Salvation Army that wasn’t chocolate brown or black, which fit his imagination.
He quickly found what he was seeking, which was a long, ripped wool winter overcoat that reached to his ankles, a threadbare sweater, and pants two sizes too large for him. Everything was cheap, but he selected the cheapest of the offering. Also the most damaged and the most inappropriate for the still-hot last of the summer weather that gripped New England.
The cashier was an elderly volunteer, who wore thick glasses and an incongruously red sport shirt that stood out in the bleak and brown world of donated clothing. The man lifted the overcoat to his nose and sniffed.
“You sure you want this one, fella?”
“That’s the one,” Ricky replied.
“Smells like it’s been somewhere nasty,” the man continued. “Sometimes we get stuff in here, it makes it to the racks, but really ought not to. There’s much nicer stuff, you look a little harder. This one kinda stinks and somebody should have repaired that rip in the side before putting it out for sale.”
Ricky shook his head. “It’s exactly what I need,” he said.
The man shrugged, adjusting his glasses, peering down at the tag. “Well, I ain’t even gonna charge you the ten bucks they want for that. Say, how about three? That seems more fair. That okay?”
“You’re most generous,” Ricky said.
“What you want this junk for, anyway?” the man asked, not unfriendly in his curiosity.
“It’s for a theater production,” Ricky lied.
The elderly clerk nodded his head. “Well, I hope it isn’t for the star of the show, because they take one whiff of that coat, they’re gonna go looking for a new prop master.” The man wheezily laughed at his joke, making small breathy sounds that sounded more labored than humored. Ricky joined in with his own false laugh.
“Well, the director said to get something ratty, so I guess it’ll be on him,” he said. “I’m just the gofer. Community theater, you know. No big budget . . .”
“You want a bag?”
Ricky nodded, and exited the Salvation Army store with the purchases under his arm. He spotted a bus pulling up to the pickup spot on the edge of the mall, and he hurried to catch it. The exertion caused him to break a sweat, and once he slapped himself down in the backseat of the bus, he reached inside and took the old sweater and dabbed at the moisture on his forehead and under his arms, wiping himself dry with the article of clothing.
Before he reached his motel room that evening, Ricky took all the purchases to a small park, where he took time to drag each one in some dirt by a stand of trees.
In the morning, he packed the new old articles of clothing back in a brown paper bag. Everything else, the few documents he had about Rumplestiltskin, the newspapers, the other items of clothing that he’d acquired, went into the backpack. He settled his bill with the clerk at the motel, telling the man he would likely be back in a few days, information that didn’t make the clerk even glance up from the sports section of the newspaper that occupied him with a distinct intensity.
There was a midmorning Trailways bus to Boston, which Ricky now felt some familiarity with. As always, he sat scrunched into a seat in the back, avoiding eye contact with the small crowd of fellow passengers, maintaining his solitude and anonymity with each step. He made sure he was the last to step off the bus in Boston. He coughed when he inhaled the mingled exhaust and heat that seemed to hang above the sidewalk. But the inside of the bus terminal was air-conditioned, although even the air inside seemed strangely grimy. There were rows of brightly colored orange and yellow plastic seats bolted to the linoleum floor, many of which sported scars and markings deposited by bored folks who had hours to kill waiting for their bus to arrive or depart. There was a noticeable smell of fried food, and along one side of the terminal there was a fast-food hamburger outlet side by side with a doughnut shop. A newspaper kiosk sold stacks of the day’s papers and newsmagazines along with the more mainstream of the pseudo-pornography available. Ricky wondered just how many people in the bus station were likely to buy copies of U.S. News & World Report and Hustler at the same time.
Ricky took up a seat as close to opposite the men’s room as he could manage, watching for a lull in the traffic heading in. Within some twenty minutes, he was persuaded that the bathroom had emptied out, especially after a Boston policeman wearing a sweat-stained blue shirt had walked in and then emerged five minutes later, complaining to his clearly amused partner loudly about the nasty effect of a recently ingested sausage sandwich. Ricky darted in as the two policemen walked off, their black brogans clicking against the dirty floor of the station.
Moving swiftly, Ricky closed himself into a toilet stall, and stripped off the reasonable clothing he had been wearing, replacing it with the items purchased at the Salvation Army. He wrinkled his nose at the difficult combination of sweat and musk that greeted his nose as he slid into the overcoat. He packed his clothes into his backpack, along with everything else he had, including all his cash, with the exception of a hundred dollars in twenties, which he slid into a tear in the overcoat, and worked down into fabric, so that it was if not totally safe, at least secure. He had a little bit of change, which he stuffed into his p
ants pocket. Emerging from the stall, he stared at himself in a mirror above the sink. He had not shaved in a couple of days, and that helped, he thought.
A bank of blue metal storage lockers lined one wall of the terminal. He stuffed his backpack into a locker, although he kept the paper bag that he’d used to carry the old clothes in. He put two quarters into the lock, and turned the key. Closing away even the few items that he had made him hesitate. For a moment, he thought that finally, right at that minute, he was more adrift than he’d ever been. Now, save the small key that he held in his hand to locker number 569, there was nothing that linked him to anything. He had no identification. No connection to anyone.
Ricky breathed in hard, and pocketed the key.
He walked away fast from the bus station, pausing only once when he believed no one was watching, to scoop some dirt from the sidewalk and rub it into his hair and face.
By the time he’d walked two blocks, sweat had begun to rise beneath his arms and on his forehead, and he wiped it away with the sleeve of the overcoat.
Before he’d reached the third block, he thought: Now I look to be what I am. Homeless.
Chapter Twenty-Two
For two days Ricky walked the streets, a foreigner to every world.
His outward appearance was of a homeless man, someone clearly alcoholic, drug-addled, or schizophrenic, or even all three combined, although if someone had looked carefully into his eyes, they would have seen a distinct purpose, which is an unusual quality for the down-and-out. Inwardly, Ricky found himself eyeing people on the street, half fantasizing who they were, and what they did, almost envious of the simple pleasure that identity gave one. A woman bustling ahead, gray-haired, carrying shopping packages emblazoned with Newbury Street boutiques, spoke one story to Ricky, while the teenager wearing cut-off jeans and hefting a backpack, a Red Sox cap tilted on his head, said another. He spotted businessmen and taxi drivers, appliance deliverymen and computer technicians. There were stockbrokers and physicians and repairmen and a man hawking newspapers from a kiosk on one corner. Everyone, from the most destitute and abandoned, mumbling, voice-hearing madwoman to the Armani-wearing developer sliding into the backseat of a limousine, had an identity defined by what they were. Ricky had none.
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