Brian Garfield: Necessity

Ellen, she thinks.

But Ellen can’t help her fend off the terror; not now.

She opens Charlie Reid’s spiral-bound primer and tries to memorize the rules of flying.

In the morning she sells the car for $800 cash on a small used-car lot two blocks from her motel. The dealer, a man with a sunburned bald head and an expression of wry bemusement, must be accustomed to buying cars for cash: he’s probably seen a hundred examples of the hopefuls who arrive in Las Vegas in their $20,00 °Cadillacs and depart a few days later in $100,000 buses. Those big-spending high rollers must have their mundane $100 counterparts and this is precisely the impression she wants to leave: she wants to differ in no way from the multitude.

According to the radio on the bald man’s desk the official temperature is 108° Fahrenheit-and it isn’t even eleven o’clock yet. The dealer sees her expression and says, “Wait till August, you want real heat.”

When she signs the bill of sale she has to show identification; that is why she’s saved the old driver’s license. He glances at it, comparing signatures, but he’ll forget her name as soon as she leaves the shack and he files the papers away.

She is curious whether he feels much pain in his red burned scalp but she doesn’t ask; she takes the cash and walks away, squinting behind her sunglasses.

Back in the air-conditioned motel she plucks the blouse away from her fried skin and makes a little ceremony out of burning the old driver’s license and flushing the ashes away.

Nothing left of the old life now except a ring of keys.

At the cheap blond desk she begins to make a list on motel stationery: a list of all the things she knows about herself. It isn’t the first time she’s done it. The ostensible purpose is to check off the items she’s changed and to see what remains to be done. The actual purpose is to keep from going insane.

At one of those political dinner parties last year a guest was the private detective whose specialty is skip-tracing. “Raymond Q. Seale,” his business card announces, and if you ask him what the Q stands for he replies, “Questing,” with an irritating smugness: a self-important little man slicked up in a tight suit. Phony smile and the sleazy artful manner of a cynic who insists that the world lives at his own gutter level. But she listened to him with interest; the pressures on her had kept increasing and by then she’d already begun to fantasize ways of escape.

She recalls how annoyingly self-confident Seale was-but knowledgeable. “Your teen-agers run away from home. Twelve-year-olds sometimes. Or even younger. Half of them pregnant. They’re the hardest ones to find-no fingerprints on file, no credit records, no paper trail to identify them by.

“Grownups run out on their bills, mostly. Sometimes they just get tired of their husbands or wives-sometimes the guy just doesn’t want to have to pay alimony.”

She pictures him now-a mean man, amused by the misfortunes he’s describing. “We work for the bank to find the guy and repossess the car, or the parents ask us to find the runaway, or the woman pays us to go after the husband and bring him back so she can hit up the poor guy for alimony, whatever.”

She remembers hearing the investigator say: “Most people got no idea how hard it is to lose yourself.” He was playing to his audience with the cunning of a seedy nightclub comic. “If we’ve got a client who’s got a pile of money and plenty of time and he wants to find you bad enough, we can find you. We can find anybody, see?

“I mean, it’s impossible for most people to disappear and stay disappeared. It’d take brains and a lot of hard work. They’ve got to change their whole lives. If they used to play tennis, they’ve got to take up bowling. If they used to go to ball games, they’ve got to start going to the opera. A guy that used to live in conservative business suits, he’s got to start wearing loud sports jackets and leisure suits and Levi’s. If they’re stamp collectors, they’ve got to quit it-and remember not to subscribe to any stamp-collecting magazines. If they drove a small car they should buy a big car, or a pickup truck or maybe a motorsiccle.

“And they can’t ever make contact with any of their friends or relatives. That’s what trips most of them up. Sooner or later they get the urge to drop a postcard to Momma or make a long-distance call to Uncle Fatface. That’s when we get ’em.

“See, it’s not enough just to change your name and move to Florida. You’ve got to change everything. Every detail. You make a list of everything you know about yourself and you change every single thing on the list. You try and change the way you walk, the accent, everything. You’ve got to become a new person-a whole new type of person in a different social class. That’s the only way to hide from guys like me. See, most people just aren’t willing to make those kinds of changes.”

That was when she thought: I am.

14Going home from Las Vegas-home: she’s realizing that never before has she truly understood the complexity or ambiguity of the word-she spends three days on various buses and trains; she isn’t in a sightseeing mood but she wants to be sure her trail can’t be picked up and followed from the car she’s just sold and so she endures a roundabout tour of Lake Tahoe, Sacramento, Napa and San Francisco. At every stop she converts thousand-dollar bills into postal money orders and bank cashier’s checks.

Finally she returns by air coach to Burbank in the Valley.

On the plane she studies her list. It seems important to keep the mind pragmatically focused on details; otherwise she has the feeling she may fly apart.

For this flight she has paid cash and assumed yet another new false name. By now she feels able to do this with a certain distracted aplomb. Not like the first time, when she nearly gagged with alarm-filling out a motel registration slip in Pennsylvania, scribbling a name she’d made up on the spot, concocting an address, paying cash in advance for the room, hardly daring to look the room clerk in the eye.

The clerk didn’t even lift an eyebrow and that was when she began to realize that nobody has any reason to care. Nobody suspects you if you just behave naturally. The world is indifferent to the way you spell your name. As long as you pay the bill nobody gives a damn whether you’re traveling under a nom de guerre.

She’s thinking: Nobody even notices. Then why’s my heart still pounding so?

During her absence the first Social Security card-Jennifer Hartman’s-has arrived in the mail. She looks at it in a kind of wonder. It gives her the oddest feeling: as if she is giving birth to a new person, one piece of paper at a time.

She takes a cab to the Motor Vehicle office and stands in queues all morning and part of the afternoon filling out a driver’s license application and taking the written test; she stands in front of a machine that takes her picture-short fair hair and glasses; and now they want to take an ink impression of her thumbprint.

“Do I have to?”

“Why? You got something against it?” The man has greasy black hair and suspicious little eyes.

She says, “We’re all just numbers in somebody’s computer, aren’t we. I don’t want to be fingerprinted and weighed and whatever else they do in prisons. I just want a driver’s license.”

“The thumbprint’s for your own protection. We don’t send them to the FBI or anything. It’s just for identification in case of-you know, suppose the car gets smashed up and burned.”

“If that happens I won’t care much, will I.”

“The thumbprint’s optional,” he concedes. “You don’t have to do it.”