The Analyst (41 page)

Ricky moved cautiously toward the noise. To his side he heard some animal, he guessed a rat, scuttling away with a scratching sound. He fingered the small flashlight in his hand, but tried to let his eyes adjust to the pitch-black in the alleyway. This was difficult, and he stumbled once or twice, his feet getting tangled in unrecognizable debris. He almost fell once, but kept his balance and continued moving forward.

He sensed he was almost on top of the man when the singing stopped.

There was a second or two of dark silence, and then he heard a question: “Who’s there?”

“Just me,” Ricky replied.

“Don’t come any closer,” came the reply. “I’ll hurt you. Kill you, maybe. I’ve got a knife.”

The words were slurred with the looseness that drink provides. Ricky had half hoped the man would have passed out, but instead, he was still reasonably alert. But not too mobile, Ricky noted, for there had been no sounds of scrambling out of the way or trying to hide. He did not believe the man actually had a weapon, but he wasn’t completely certain. He remained stock-still.

“This is my alley,” the man continued. “Get out.”

“Now it’s my alley, too,” Ricky said. Ricky took a deep breath and launched himself into the realm he’d known he would have to find in order to communicate with the man. It was like diving into a pool of dark water, unsure what lay just beneath the surface. Welcome madness, Ricky said, trying to summon up all the education that he’d gained in his prior life and existence. Create delusion. Establish doubt. Feed paranoia. “He told me we’re supposed to speak together. That’s what he told me. ‘Find the man in the alleyway and ask him his name.’ ”

The man hesitated. “Who told you?”

“Who do you think?” Ricky answered. “He did. He speaks to me and tells me who to seek out, and this I need to do because he’s told me to, and so I did, and here I am.” He rattled this near-gibberish out swiftly.

“Who speaks to you?” The questions came out of the dark with a fervent quality that warred with the drink that clouded the man’s already crisscrossed mind.

“I’m not allowed to say his name, not out loud or where someone might hear me, shhhh! But he says that you will know why I’ve come, if you’re the right one, and I won’t have to explain any further.”

The man seemed to hesitate, trying to sort through this nonsensical command.

“Me?” he asked.

Ricky nodded in the darkness. “If you’re the right one. Are you?”

“I don’t know,” was the reply. Then, after a momentary pause, the addition, “I thought so.”

Ricky moved swiftly to buttress the delusion. “He gives me the names, you see, and I am supposed to seek them out and ask them the questions, because I need to find the right one. That’s what I do, over and over, and that’s what I have to do, and are you the right one? I need to know, you see. Otherwise this is all wasted.”

The man seemed to be trying to absorb all this.

“How do I know to trust you?” the man slurred.

Ricky immediately slipped the small flashlight out and held it underneath his chin, the way a child might when trying to spook his friends around a campfire. Ricky flashed the light up, illuminating his face, then instantly swung it over at the man, taking seconds to survey the surroundings. He saw the man was lying with his back up against the brick wall, the bottle of wine in his hand. There was some other debris, and a cardboard box to his side that Ricky guessed was home. He switched off the light.

“There,” Ricky said as forcefully as he could. “Do you need more proof?”

The man shifted. “I can’t think straight,” he moaned. “My head is hurting.”

For an instant, Ricky was tempted to simply reach down and take what it was that he needed. His hands twitched with the seduction of violence. He was alone in a deserted alley with the man, and he thought, the people who had put him in that location wouldn’t have hesitated to use force in the slightest. It was only by the greatest sense of control that he was able to fight off the urge. He knew what he wanted, only he wanted the man to give it up. “Tell me who you are!” Ricky half whispered, half shouted.

“I want to be alone,” the man pleaded. “I didn’t do anything. I don’t want to be here anymore.”

“You aren’t the right one,” Ricky said. “I can tell. But I need to be sure. Tell me who you are.”

The man sobbed. “What do you want?”

“Your name. I want your name.”

Ricky could hear tears forming behind every word the man spoke. “I don’t want to say,” he said. “I’m scared. Do you mean to kill me?”

“No,” Ricky said. “I will not harm you if you prove to me who you are.”

The man paused, as if considering this question. “I have a wallet,” he said slowly.

“Give it here!” Ricky demanded sharply. “It’s the only way to be sure!”

The man scrambled and scratched, and reached inside his coat. In the darkness, his eyes barely adjusted, Ricky could see the man holding something out in front of him. Ricky grabbed it and thrust it into his own pocket.

The man started to cry then. Ricky softened his voice.

“You don’t have to worry anymore,” Ricky said. “I will leave you alone, now.”

“Please,” said the man. “Just go away.”

Ricky reached down and removed the bottle of cheap wine that he’d purchased at the liquor store. He also grasped a twenty-dollar bill from the lining of his coat. He thrust these to the man. “Here,” he said. “Here is something because you weren’t the right man, but that is no fault of your own, and he wants me to compensate you for bothering you. Is that fair?”

The man clutched the bottle. He didn’t reply for a moment, but then seemed to nod. “Who are you?” he asked Ricky again, with a mingling of fear and confusion still riding every word.

Ricky smiled inwardly and thought there are some advantages to a classical education. “Noman is my name,” he said.

“Norman?”

“No. Noman. So, if anyone asks who came to visit you this night, you can say it was Noman.” Ricky presumed that the average cop on the beat would have about the same patience for the tale that Polyphemus’s cyclops brothers did, and the fiction created centuries beforehand by another man adrift in a strange and dangerous world. “Have a drink and go to sleep, and when you wake up, all will be exactly the same for you.”

The man whimpered. But then he took a long pull from the bottle of wine.

Ricky rose, and picked his way gingerly down the alleyway, thinking that he had not exactly stolen what he needed, nor had he purchased it. What he’d done was what was necessary, he told himself, and was well within the rules of the game. Rumplestiltskin, of course, didn’t know that he was still playing. But he would, soon enough. Ricky moved steadily back through the darkness toward the weak light of the city street just ahead.

Ricky did not open the man’s wallet until after he’d reached the bus station, a trip across the city that required him to change subways twice, and after he’d retrieved his clothes from the locker where he had stored them. In the men’s room, he managed to get at least partially cleaned up, scrubbing some of the dirt and grime from his face and hands, and rubbing a paper towel soaked with lukewarm water and thick-smelling antibacterial soap in his armpits and across his neck. There was little he could do about the slick greasiness that matted his hair or the overall musty odor that only a long shower would repair. He dumped his filthy bum’s clothes into the nearest wastebasket and climbed into the acceptable khakis and sport shirt that he’d kept in the backpack. He inspected his appearance in the mirror and thought that he’d crossed back over some invisible line, where now, once again, he appeared to all to be a participant in life, rather than an occupant of the nether regions. A couple of strokes with a cheap plastic comb aided his look, but Ricky thought that he still was located on some edge, or close to it, and far distant from the man he once was.

He exited the men’s room and purchased a ticket for a bus back to Durham. He had nearly an hour’s wait, so he bought himself a sandwich and a soda and repaired to a corner of the station that was empty. After looking around to make certain that no one was watching him, Ricky unwrapped the sandwich on his lap. Then he opened up the wallet, concealing it with the food.

The first thing he saw brought a smile to his face and a sense of relief flooded him: a tattered and faded, but legible, Social Security card.

The name had been typed: Richard S. Lively.

Ricky liked this. Lively was what, for the first time in weeks, he felt. He saw an additional good fortune; he wouldn’t have to learn to accommodate a new first name, the common nickname of Richard and his own Frederick, being the same.

He put his head back, staring up into the fluorescent ceiling lights. Rebirth in a bus station, he thought. He supposed there were far worse places to reenter the world.

The wallet smelled of dried sweat, and Ricky quickly searched the contents. There was not much, but what there was, he realized, was something of a gold mine. In addition to the Social Security card, there was an expired Illinois driver’s license, a library card from a suburban system outside of St. Louis, Missouri, and a Triple A auto service card from the same state. None of these was a photo ID, except for the driver’s license, which Ricky noted, gave details such as hair, eye color, height and weight, next to a slightly out-of-focus picture of Richard Lively. There was also a hospital clinic identification card from a Chicago facility that was marked with a red asterisk in one corner. AIDS, Ricky thought. HIV positive. He’d been right about the sores on the man’s face. All the various pieces of identification had different addresses listed. Ricky removed all these and thrust them into his pocket. There were also two yellowed and tattered newspaper clippings, which Ricky unfolded carefully and read. The first was an obituary for a seventy-three-year-old woman, the other was an article about workforce layoffs in an automobile parts manufacturing plant. The first, he guessed, was Richard Lively’s mother, and the second was the job the man had had before launching into the world of alcohol that had delivered him to the street where Ricky had spotted him. Ricky had no idea what had made him travel from the Midwest to the East Coast, but recognized this was a propitious shift for his purposes. The chances of someone making a connection to the man diminished sharply.

Ricky read through the two clippings swiftly, committing the details to memory. He noted that there was only one other family member listed among the woman’s survivors, apparently a housewife in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A sister, Ricky thought, who’d given up on her brother many years ago. The mother had been a county librarian and onetime school principal, which was the modest claim on the world that had prompted the obituary. It said her husband had passed away some years earlier. The plant that had once employed Richard Lively had manufactured brake pads and fallen victim to a corporate decision to shift to a location in Guatemala, which made the same item for far less in wages. Ricky thought that created a not uncommon bitterness, and was more than enough reason to let drink take over one’s life. How the man had acquired the disease, he couldn’t tell. Needles, he suspected. He stuffed the clippings back inside the wallet, then he tossed it into a nearby wastebasket. He thought about the hospital identification card with its telltale red marking, then reached into his pocket, pulling it out. He bent it until it tore, then ripped it in half. He stuck this in the wrappings from his sandwich, and also stuffed it down to the bottom of the wastebasket.

I know enough, he thought.

The announcement for his bus came over the loudspeaker, spoken in nearly unintelligible tones by some clerk behind a glass partition. Ricky rose, swinging his backpack over his shoulder, and putting Dr. Starks deep within some hidden crevice inside himself, and took his first step forward as Richard Lively.

His life began to take shape rapidly.

Within a week, he had acquired two part-time jobs, the first manning a register at a local Dairy Mart for five hours a day in the evening, the second stocking shelves in a Stop and Shop grocery store for another five hours in the morning, a time frame which gave Ricky the afternoons for his other needs. Neither place had asked too many questions, although the manager of the food market pointedly asked whether Ricky was in a twelve-step program, to which he’d replied affirmatively. It turned out the manager was as well, and after giving Ricky a list of churches and civic centers and all their scheduled meetings, he’d handed Ricky the ubiquitous green apron and put him to work.

He used Richard Lively’s Social Security number to open a bank checking account, depositing the remainder of his cash. Once that was accomplished, Ricky found that sorties into the world of bureaucracy were relatively easy. He’d been issued a replacement Social Security card by filling out a form, one that he signed himself. A clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles hadn’t even glanced at the picture on the Illinois license when Ricky turned it in and obtained a New Hampshire driver’s license, this time with his own picture and signature, his own eye color, height, and weight. He also rented a post office box at a local Mailboxes Etc. location, which gave Ricky a viable address for his bank account statements and as much other correspondence as Ricky could produce rapidly. He welcomed catalogs. He joined a video rental club and the YMCA. Anything that provided another card in his new name. Another form and a check for five dollars got him a copy of Richard Lively’s birth certificate, mailed by a thoughtful county clerk outside of Chicago.

He tried not to think about the real Richard Lively. He thought it had not been a particularly difficult task to delude a drunken, sick, and deranged man out of his wallet and his identity. While he told himself that what he had done was better than beating it out of him, it was not much better.