Nothing came next.
I am unable to say how much time had passed. At one moment, I was there on the curb, feet in the gutter, watching water swirling past the worn heels of my boots. The next, I was somehow in a park, conscious only of the fact that I had just heard, somewhere behind me, a voice.
The voice spoke again, uttering, perhaps somewhat tentatively, a name. I removed my notebook and made a notation in it, a notation meant to represent the name that had just been uttered: B.
I will be the first to admit that notation is not always enough. How much wiser it would have been had I recorded the name in full. But, having been scolded previously by my supervisor for moving from notation to longhand, I felt I had no choice.
A hand touched my shoulder. “Is that you, B?” a voice asked, and uttered the name again. No, I said, not me, and tried to continue on my way. But the man attached to the voice kept tight hold of my shoulder and slowly turned me about until he was looking me in the face.
“Ah,” he said. “It is you.”
But no, let me state, for the record, that it wasn’t me. Or, rather, wasn’t him. B. Or I wasn’t him, I mean. I tried to state as much, but without real success. As I tried again to disengage myself, the man tightened his hold, speaking excitedly and quickly. I was to come with him, he told me. I must come with him. I began to feel very afraid, though even now I am hard-pressed to say why. I struck him once, hard, and turned and ran.
I spent two days wandering the side streets, at night sequestering myself within a green metal dumpster. By the third day, I had convinced myself that I must flee the city. Perhaps, I told myself, if I returned to my second assignment, I would now understand what to do.
I had seated myself in the proper bus when it was boarded by the man whom I had encountered in the park, accompanied by a policeman. There was nowhere for me to go. As I watched them come down the aisle toward me, I discreetly recorded their movements in my notebook.
They stopped beside me, the man uttering the name again, like a greeting. I ignored him. This the man? the policeman asked, and when the other man responded in the affirmative, he asked me, You him? I did not answer. Both addressed me again, both were ignored. Eventually the policeman took my arm and tried to coax me from my seat, which caused me to wholeheartedly embrace the seat in front of me — much to the surprise and consternation of the man sitting in it. What followed, not necessarily in this order, were shouts, a rush and a sway, a torn shirt pocket, hands prying at fingers, a billy club, a terrified face. All of which culminated in my expulsion from the bus and my temporary sequestration within a police station. I had, I was told, a lot of explaining to do.
I was asked for a name. As per administrative regulations, I did not surrender it. I was asked if I was not one B. No, I claimed, not he. Then what was my name? I chose not to answer. Did I know who I was? I remained mum. The other man, I was told, was my relation. I shrugged.
The other man displayed a number of photographs — photographs of a man who, I was forced to admit, resembled me to no uncommon degree. Even his frozen gestures, at least as they were captured in the photographs, seemed to have been modeled after my own.
I will insist again, as I did in my first report, that I was not for a moment convinced. I was not, and never had been, this B, was certain of that even though I have some small difficulty in assembling the details of my life prior to my employment by the administration. Yet, as my questioning continued, it became clear to me that the choice was not between acknowledging this ersatz relation and being released on my own recognizance; it was between acknowledging him and becoming award of the state. I could produce no fixed address, not having one, and I was unwilling to speak of my name or my admittedly obscure past. All of these things marked me as a danger and suggested I must be restrained. When this became clear to me, I reconsidered my strategies.
Thus, I slowly began to acknowledge a connection to my ersatz relation, in bits and pieces at first, but slowly with more and more force. I claimed to hope that these assertions would pass as long-denied memories slowly bubbling to the surface. I was asked questions about my ersatz relative, which I answered to the best of my ability, my answers largely gleaned from what I had heard him say to me over the previous few hours. When I had to make guesses — names of other family members, specifics regarding various family successes and tragedies — I turned out to be unaccountably lucky.
I used this same phrase, unaccountably lucky, in my first report. I expect it is one of the aspects of that report that the administration expects me to elucidate further in this, my second report. Unfortunately, I cannot elucidate it further. I want to emphasize again that I never for a moment believed in the charade I was performing. I simply guessed correctly. I cannot explain it myself, and this, above all, is something that continues to trouble me.
In short, I performed well enough to be released into the custody of my ersatz relation. He promised to take me to his home, wash me, clothe me, feed me, care for me. I would, I thought, stay with him for a few days and then, once his suspicions were lulled, make my escape.
What followed was a static period as far as my administrative responsibilities were concerned. True, I remained with my ersatz relation not for the two or three days I had intended, but for several months. This can be partly blamed on me: it had been some time since I had slept in a soft bed or eaten a decent meal. These pleasures I was reluctant to surrender. It also had something to do with the pleasure that my presence gave my ersatz relation.
Yet neither of these would have been enough in and of itself to keep me there. Had it not been for the presence of a third factor, I wouldn’t have hesitated to leave.
The third factor: my ersatz relation occupied a house identical to the house in which the subject of my first observation had lived. At first, I wrote this off as mere coincidence, as an odd feeling of déjà vu, but as I continued to inhabit the house, the feeling grew rather than diminished. The proximity of the house to a nearby park was the same as well, and the park itself offered the same round of benches. It had to be the same house. But how was this possible?
I asked my ersatz relation how long he had lived in the house. Ever patient with my gaps of memory, he explained that the house had been in the family for nearly twenty years. I asked him if he had had a relation shot and killed in the adjacent park. True, he claimed, a man had been shot and killed in the park several years ago — a slow and painful death due to a bullet in the belly — but it had not been anyone he knew. And, he claimed, I — or B, rather — had disappeared shortly after this incident.
Troubled, I stayed on. I did not understand what this could mean. It exhilarated me and unsettled me. By day, I took a slow stroll through the park, moving from bench to bench, observing those around me. Was I myself, I wondered, being observed? By night I lay in my room with the lights extinguished, peering out from between the slats of the blinds.