The Analyst (42 page)

Ricky shrugged off the feelings of guilt as he expanded his world. He promised himself that he would return Richard Lively’s ID to him when he’d managed to truly extricate himself from Rumplestiltskin. He just didn’t know how long that would take.

Ricky knew he had to move out of the motel kitchenette, so he walked back to the area not far from the public library, searching for the house with the room for rent sign. To his relief, it was still in the window of the modest, wood-frame home.

The house had a small side yard, shaded by a large oak tree. It was littered with brightly colored plastic children’s toys. An energetic four-year-old boy was playing with a dump truck and a collection of army figures in the grass, while an elderly woman sat on a lawn chair a few feet away, occupied mostly with a copy of that day’s newspaper, occasionally glancing at the child, who made engine and battle sounds as he played. Ricky saw that the child wore a hearing device in one ear.

The woman looked up and saw Ricky standing on the walkway.

“Hello,” he said. “Is this your house?”

She nodded, folding the paper in her lap and glancing toward where the child was playing. “It is indeed,” she said.

“I saw the sign. About the room,” he said.

She eyed him cautiously. “We usually rent to students,” she replied.

“I’m sort of a student,” he said. “That is, I hope to be working on some advanced degrees, but I’m a little slow because I have to work for a living, as well. Gets in the way,” he said, smiling.

The woman rose. “What sort of advanced degree?” she asked.

“Criminology,” Ricky replied off the cuff. “I should introduce myself. My name is Richard Lively. My friends call me Ricky. I’m not from around here, in fact, only recently arrived here. But I do need a place.”

She continued to look him over cautiously. “No family? No roots?”

He shook his head.

“Have you been in prison?” she asked.

Ricky thought the true answer to this was yes. A prison designed by a man I never met but who hated me.

“No,” he said. “But that’s not an unreasonable question. I was abroad.”

“Where?”

“Mexico,” he lied.

“What were you doing in Mexico?”

He made things up rapidly. “I had a cousin who went out to Los Angeles and got involved in the drug trade, and disappeared down there. I went down trying to find him. Six months of stone walls and lies, I’m afraid. But that’s what got me interested in criminology.”

She shook her head. Her tone of voice displayed she had some large and immediate doubts about this abrupt outlandish tale. “Sure,” she said. “And what got you here to Durham?”

“I just wanted to get as far away from that world as possible,” Ricky said. “I didn’t exactly make a great many friends asking questions about my cousin. I figured it had to be someplace far away from that world, and the map suggested it was either New Hampshire or Maine, and so this was where I landed.”

“I don’t know that I believe you,” the woman answered. “It sounds like some sort of story. How do I know you’re reliable? Have you got references?”

“Anyone can get a reference to say anything,” Ricky replied. “It seems to me that you’d be a lot wiser to listen to my voice and look at my face and make up your own mind after a bit of conversation.”

This statement made the woman smile. “A New Hampshire sort of attitude,” she said. “I’ll show you the room, but I’m still not certain.”

“Fair enough,” Ricky said.

The room was a converted attic area, with its own modest bathroom, just enough space for a bed, a desk, and an old overstuffed armchair. An empty bookcase and a chest of drawers were lined on one wall. It had a nice window enclosed by a girlishly frilly pink curtain, with a half-moon top that overlooked the yard and the quiet side street. The walls were decorated with travel posters advertising the Florida Keys and Vail, Colorado. A bikini-clad scuba diver and a skier kicking up a sheet of pristine snow. There was a small alcove off the room which contained a tiny refrigerator and a table with a hot plate. A shelf screwed into the wall contained some white, utilitarian crockery. Ricky stared at the efficient space and thought it had many of the same qualities as a monk’s cell, which is more or less how he currently envisioned himself.

“You can’t really cook for yourself,” the woman said. “Just snacks and pizza, that sort of thing. We don’t really offer kitchen privileges…”

“I usually eat out,” Ricky said. “Not a big eater, anyway.”

The owner continued to eye him. “How long would you be staying? We usually rent for the school year…”

“That would be fine,” he said. “Do you want a lease?”

“No. A handshake is usually all we require. We pay utilities, except for the phone. There’s a separate line up here. That’s your business. The phone company will activate it when you want. No guests. No parties. No music blaring. No late nights-”

He smiled, and interrupted her, “And you usually rent to students?”

She saw the contradiction. “Well, serious students, when we can find them.”

“Are you here alone with your child?”

She shook her head with a small grin. “There’s a flattering question. He’s my grandson. My daughter is at school. Divorced and getting her accountant’s degree. I watch the boy while she’s working or studying, which is just about all the time.”

Ricky nodded. “I’m a pretty private guy,” he said, “and I’m pretty quiet. I work a couple of jobs, which takes up a good deal of my time. And in my free time, I study.”

“You’re old to be a student. Maybe a bit too old.”

“We’re never too old to learn, are we?”

The woman smiled again. She continued to eye him cautiously.

“Are you dangerous, Mr. Lively? Or are you running away from something?”

Ricky considered his reply, before speaking. “Stopped running, Mrs…”

“Williams. Janet. The boy is Evan and my daughter whom you haven’t met is Andrea.”

“Well, this is where I’m stopping, Mrs. Williams. I’m not fleeing from a crime or an ex-wife and her lawyer, or a right-wing Christian cult, although you might allow your imagination to race ahead in one or all of those directions. And, as for being dangerous, well, if I was, why would I be running away?”

“That’s a good point,” Mrs. Williams said. “It’s my house, you see. And we’re two single women with a child…”

“Your concerns are well founded. I don’t blame you for asking.”

“I don’t know how much I believe of what you’ve said,” Mrs. Williams responded.

“Is believing all that important, Mrs. Williams? Would it make a difference if I told you I was some alien from a different planet sent here to investigate the lifestyles of the folks of Durham, New Hampshire, prior to our invasion of the world? Or if I said I was a Russian spy, or an Arab terrorist, just a step ahead of the FBI and would it be okay if I used the bathroom to concoct bombs? There are all sorts of tales one can weave, but ultimately all are irrelevant. The truth that you need to know is whether I will be quiet, keep to myself, pay my rent on time, and generally speaking, not bother you, your daughter, or your grandson. Isn’t that really what is critical here?”

Mrs. Williams smiled. “I think I like you, Mr. Lively. I don’t know that I trust you all that much yet, and certainly don’t believe you. But I like the way you put things, which means you’ve passed the first test. But how about a month’s security and first month’s rent and then we’ll do things on a month-to-month basis, so that if one or the other of us feels uncomfortable, we can bring things to a quick conclusion?”

Ricky smiled and took the old woman’s hand. “In my experience,” he said, “quick conclusions are elusive. And how would you define
uncomfortable
?”

The smile on the older woman’s face broadened some, and she maintained her grip on Ricky’s hand. “I would define
uncomfortable
with the numerals nine, one, and one, punched on the telephone keypad and a subsequent series of any number of unpleasantly pointed questions from humorless men in blue uniforms. Is that clear?”

“Clear enough, Mrs. Williams,” Ricky said. “I think we have an agreement.”

“I thought so,” Mrs. Williams replied.

Routine came as quickly to Ricky’s life as the fall did to New Hampshire.

At the grocery store he was swiftly given a raise and additional new responsibilities, although the manager did ask him why he hadn’t seen him in any meetings, and so Ricky went to several, rising once or twice in a church basement to address the room filled with alcoholics, concocting a typical tale of life ruined by drink that brought murmurs of understanding from the collected men and women and several heartfelt embraces afterward, that Ricky felt hypocritical accepting. He liked his job at the grocery store, and got along well, if not expansively, with the other workers there, sharing the occasional lunch break, joking, maintaining a friendliness that successfully masked his isolation. Inventory was something he seemed to have a knack for, which made him think that stocking shelves with foodstuffs was not all that dissimilar to what he’d done for patients. They, too, had had to have their shelves restored and refilled.

A more important coup came in mid-October, when he spotted an ad for part-time help on the janitorial staff at the university. He quit his cash register job at the Dairy Mart and started sweeping and mopping in the science labs for four hours a day. He approached this task with a singleness of purpose that impressed his supervisor. But, more critically, this provided Ricky with a uniform, a locker where he could change clothes, and a university identification card, which in turn, gave him access to the computer system. Between the local library and the computer banks, Ricky went about the task of creating a new world for himself.

He gave himself an electronic name: Odysseus.

This gave rise to an electronic mail address and access to all the Internet had to offer. He opened various accounts, using his Mailboxes Etc. post office box as a home address.

He then took a second step, to create an entirely new person. Someone who had never existed, but who had a claim on the world, in the form of a modest credit history, licenses, and the sort of past that is easily documented. Some of this was simple, such as obtaining false identification in a new name. He once again marveled at the literally thousands of companies on the Internet that would provide fake IDs “for novelty purposes only.” He started ordering fake driver’s licenses and college IDs. He was also able to obtain a diploma from the University of Iowa, class of 1970, and a birth certificate from a nonexistent hospital in Des Moines. He also got himself added to the alumni list at a defunct Catholic high school in that city. He invented a phony Social Security number for himself. Armed with this pile of new material, he went to a rival bank to where he had already established Richard Lively’s account and opened another small checking account in a second name. This name he chose with some thought: Frederick Lazarus. His own first name coupled with the name of the man raised from the dead.

It was in the persona of Frederick Lazarus that Ricky began his search.

He had the simplest of ideas: Richard Lively would be real and would have a safe and secure existence. He would be home. Frederick Lazarus was a fiction. There would be no connection between the two characters. One man was a man who would breathe the anonymity of normalcy. The other was a creation and if anyone ever came asking about Frederick Lazarus, they would discover that he had no substance other than phony numbers and imaginary identity. He could be dangerous. He could be criminal. He could be a man of risks. But he would be a fiction ultimately designed with one single purpose.

To ferret out the man who had ruined Ricky’s life and repay in kind.

Ricky let weeks slide into months, let the New Hampshire winter envelop him, disappearing into the cold and dark that hid him from everything that had happened. He let his life as Richard Lively grow daily, while at the same time he continued to add details to his secondary persona, Frederick Lazarus. Richard Lively went to college basketball games when he had an evening off, occasionally baby-sat for his landladies who had rapidly come to trust him, had an exemplary attendance record at work, and gained the respect of his coworkers at the grocery store and the university maintenance department by adopting a kidding, joking, almost devil-may-care personality, that seemed to not take much seriously except for diligent, hard work. When asked about his past, he either made up some modest tale, nothing ever so outrageous that it wouldn’t be believed, or deflected the question with a question. Ricky, the onetime psychoanalyst, found himself to be expert at this, creating a situation where people often thought that he’d been talking about himself, but in reality was talking about them. He was a little surprised at how easily all the lying came to him.

At first he did some volunteer work in a shelter, then he parlayed that into another job. Two nights each week he volunteered at a local suicide prevention hot line, working the ten p.m. to two a.m. shift, which was by far the most interesting. He spent more than the occasional midnight speaking softly to students threatened by various degrees of stress, curiously energized by the connection with anonymous but troubled individuals. It was, he thought, as good a way as any of keeping his skills as an analyst sharp. When he hung up the phone line, having persuaded some child not to be rash, but to come into the university health clinic and seek help, he thought, in a small way, that he was doing penance for his lack of attention twenty years earlier, when Claire Tyson had come to his own office in the clinic he hated so much, with complaints that he’d failed to listen to and in a danger he’d failed to see.

Frederick Lazarus was someone different. Ricky constructed this character with a coldheartedness that surprised himself.