have been persuaded to meet him for another ride at one of those creek places she had mentioned and show him the bike route, if they went in different cars. Dinner would have made her feel at a disadvantage because it would mean she had picked up a man and made a date with him. But David Keller was not Pete Hatcher, could not afford to be.
“Well,” he said, “I’d better get the rest of my stuff and get home. Thanks.” He put the slip of paper in his pocket.
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.
