The Analyst (39 page)

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, and 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 amp; 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 pants 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.

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.

There was both luxury and fear in what he was, he realized. Belonging nowhere, it was almost as if he were invisible. While there was a momentary relief, knowing that he was hidden from the man who had so successfully destroyed who he once was, he understood this was elusive. His being was inextricably wrapped up with the man he knew only as Rumplestiltskin, but who once had been a child of a woman named Claire Tyson, whom he had failed at her moment of need, and now was alone, because of that failure.

His first night was spent alone beneath the curved brick of a Charles River bridge. He wrapped himself in his overcoat, still sweating profusely with the leftover heat from the day, and thrust himself up against a wall, struggling to steal a few hours away from the night, awakening shortly after dawn with a crick in his neck, every muscle in his back and legs shouting outrage and insult. He rose, stretching carefully, trying to remember the last occasion he’d slept outdoors, and thinking it was not since his childhood. The stiffness in his joints told him that there was little to recommend it. He imagined his appearance, and thought that not even the most dedicated method actor would adopt his approach.

There was a mist rising from the Charles, gray banks of vaporous fog that hung over the edges of the slick water. Ricky emerged from the underpass, and stepped up to the bike path that mirrors the bank of the river. He stood, thinking that the water had the appearance of an old-fashioned black typewriter ribbon, satin in look, winding through the city. He stared, telling himself that the sun would have to rise much higher before the water would turn blue, and reflect the stately buildings that approached the sides. In the early morning, the river had an almost hypnotic effect upon him, and for an instant or two, he simply stood stock-still, inspecting the sight in front of him.

His reverie was interrupted by the rhythmic sound of feet slapping against the macadam of the bike path. Ricky turned to see two men running side by side, approaching fast. They wore shiny athletic shorts and the latest in running shoes. Ricky guessed they were both close in age to himself.

One of the men gestured wildly with his arm toward Ricky.

“Step aside!” the man yelled.

Ricky stepped back sharply, and the two men swept past him.

“Out of the way, fella,” one of the two said briskly, twisting so that he wouldn’t make physical contact with Ricky.

“Gotta move,” the other man said. “Christ!”

Still within earshot, Ricky heard one of the joggers say, “Fucking lowlife. Get a job, huh?”

The companion laughed and said something, but Ricky couldn’t make out the words. He took a step or two after the men, filled with a sudden anger. “Hey!” he yelled. “Stop!”

They did not. One man glanced back, over his shoulder, and then they accelerated. Ricky stepped a pace or two after them. “I’m not…” he started. “I’m not what you think…”