He considered the name he’d been born with to be a sort of slave name, so he’d left it behind, discarding it along with his past as he’d shifted trust funds and stock portfolios into anonymous overseas accounts. It was the name of his youth, his ambition, his legacy, and then what he thought of as his abject failure. It was the name that he’d had when he’d first plunged helplessly into bipolar psychosis, been ousted from medical college, and found himself in a straitjacket on the way to a private mental hospital. It was the name that his doctors had used when they treated him, and the name that he’d had when he’d finally emerged-allegedly stabilized-only to survey the wasteland that his life had become.
Stabilized was a word he held in contempt.
Exiting the clinic where he’d spent almost a year, even as a young man he had known he had to become someone new. I died once. I lived again.
So, from the day of his release, through each year that passed, he was careful to always take the proper, daily psychotropic medications. He scheduled regular six-month, fifteen-minute appointments with a psychopharmacologist to make certain that unexpected hallucinations, unwanted mania, and unnecessary stress were constantly kept at bay. He was devoted to exercising his body and was just as rigorous in training his sanity.
And this he’d accomplished. No recurrent swings of madness. Levelheaded. Solid emotionally. New identities. Constructed carefully. Taking his time. Building each character into something real.
On 121 West 87 th Street, Apartment 7B, he was Bruce Phillips.
In Charlemont, Massachusetts, in the weather-beaten double-wide trailer on Zoar Road with the rusted satellite dish and cracked windowpanes that overlooked the catch-and-release trout fishing segment of the Deerfield River, he was known as Blair Munroe. This was a literary homage that only he could appreciate. He liked Saki’s haunting short stories, which gave him the Munroe-he’d reluctantly added the e to the author’s real last name-and Blair was George Orwell’s actual last name.
And in Key West, in the small, expensively reconditioned 1920s cigar-maker’s house he owned on Angela Street, he was Stephen Lewis. The Stephen was for Stephen King or Stephen Dedalus-he changed his mind from time to time about the literary antecedent-and the Lewis was for Lewis Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson.
But all these names were as fictional as the characters he’d created for them. Private investment specialist in New York; social worker at the VA hospital in Massachusetts; and in Key West, lucky drug dealer who’d pulled off a single big load and retired instead of getting greedy and hauled in by the DEA and imprisoned.
But curiously, none of these personae really spoke to him. Instead, he thought of himself solely as Student #5. That was who he had been when his life had changed. That was who had systematically repaired the immense wrongs so thoughtlessly and cavalierly done to him as a young man.
Still walking north, he took a quick left to Riverside Drive so that he could steal a look from the park across the Hudson toward New Jersey before the sun finally set. He wondered whether he should stop in a grocery over on Broadway to pick up some prepackaged sushi for dinner. He had one death that he had to carefully review, assess, and analyze in depth. A postmortem conference with myself, he thought. And he had one more death to consider. A premortem conference with myself. He very much wanted this last act to be special, and he wanted the person he was hunting to know it. This last one-he needs to know what’s coming. No surprises. A dialogue with death. The conversation I wasn’t allowed to have so many years ago. There was both risk and challenge within this desire-which gave him a sense of delicious anticipation. And then the scales will finally be balanced.
He smiled. Murder as talk therapy.
Student #5 hesitated at the corner of the block and stole a glance toward the river. Just as he’d expected, a shimmering slice of gold from the sun’s last effort creased the water surface.
Out loud he said to no one and everyone: “One more.”
As always, as was his custom with all his plans, he intended to be surgically meticulous. But now he was giving in to impatience. No lengthy delays. We have saved this one for last. Get to it and set your future free.
7
The Doctor’s First Conversation
The saleslady showing Jeremy Hogan through the nursing home was filled with bright and cheery descriptions of the many features available for residents: gourmet meals (he didn’t believe this for a second) served either in one’s apartment or in the well-appointed dining area; modern indoor pool and exercise suite; weekly first-run movies; book discussion groups; lectures by formerly prominent professionals who now made their homes there. She coupled this bubbly enthusiasm with more sobering lists of à la carte medical care available-did he need a daily injection of insulin?-a dedicated, well-trained, twenty-four-hour nursing staff, rehabilitation facilities located on site, and quick and easy access to nearby hospitals in the case of a real emergency.
But all he could think of was a simple question, which he did not ask: Can I hide here from a killer?
In the deeply carpeted corridors, people were relentlessly polite, swooping past him on motorized scooters or moving slowly with walkers or canes. Many “Hi, how are you?” and “Nice day, isn’t it?” inquiries that no one really expected to be answered with anything other than a fake friendly smile and a vigorous nod.
He wanted to reply: “How am I? Scared.” Or: “Yes. It’s a nice day to possibly get killed.”
“As you can see,” the saleslady said, “we’re a lively crew here.”
Doctor Jeremy Hogan, eighty two years old, widower, long retired, a lanky onetime basketball player, wondered if any of the lively crew were armed and knew how to handle a semiautomatic pistol or a short-barrel twelve-gauge shotgun. He imagined he should ask: “Any ex-Navy SEALS or Recon Marines living here? Combat vets?” He barely listened to the saleslady’s final pitch, outlining the many financial advantages that accompanied moving into the “deluxe” one-bedroom apartment with the desultory second-floor window view of a distant tangled stand of forest trees. It was only “deluxe,” Jeremy decided, if one considered polished aluminum rails in the shower and a safety intercom system to be riches.
He smiled, shook the saleslady’s hand, told her he’d get back with her within the next few days, wondered about the misshapen fear that possessed him to make the urgent appointment for the tour of the home, and told himself that death couldn’t be worse than some kinds of life-no matter what sort of death came visiting.
He expected his to be painful.
Maybe.
And he believed it was closing in on him rapidly.
Maybe.
The part that concerned him wasn’t only the threat at the end. It was the pillar on which the threat was built:
“Whose fault is it?”
“What do you mean by ‘fault’?”
“Tell me, Doctor, whose fault is it?”
“Who is this, please?”
The curious thing, he told himself as he drove away slowly from the nursing home, is that you spent much of your career in and around violent death, and now, very possibly facing it yourself, it seems like you don’t have a clue what to do.