John Katzenbach - The Analyst

The hours that had followed seemed to Ricky, alone in the kitchenette, to be the stuff of memory nightmare, like those details of a dream that stick with one after waking, giving a sense of unsettled uneasiness to each daytime step. Ricky could see himself dressing on the bluff in the extra set of clothes, pulling on the running shoes in a frantic hurry to escape the beach without being spotted. He’d strapped the crutches to the backpack, then hefted it onto his shoulders. It was a six-mile run to the parking lot of the Lobster Shanty, and he’d known that he had to get there before dawn and before anyone else taking the six a.m. express to Boston arrived.

Ricky could still feel the sensation of wind burning in his lungs as he’d raced the distance. The world around was still night and filled with black air, and as his feet had pounded against the roadway, he’d thought that it was like running through what he imagined a coal mine to be like. A single set of eyes marking his presence might have destroyed the slender chance at life that he was seizing, and he had run with all that urgency driven into every step taken down the black macadam street.

The lot had been empty when he arrived, and he’d drifted into the deep shadows by the corner of the restaurant. It was there that he’d unstrapped the crutches from the backpack and slung them on his arms. Within a few moments, he’d heard a distant sound of sirens blaring. He took a small satisfaction in how long it had taken someone to notice his home burning. A few moments later, some cars began to drop people in the lot, to wait for the bus. It was a mingled group, mostly young people heading back to Boston jobs and a couple of middle-aged business types, who seemed put out by the need to ride the bus, despite the convenient quality it had. Ricky had hung back, to the rear, thinking that he was the only one of the people waiting on this damp, cool Cape morning bathed in the sweat of fear and exertion. When the bus arrived two minutes late, Ricky had crutched out into line to board. Two young men stood aside, letting him struggle up the steps, where he had handed the driver his ticket purchased the day before. Then he had sat in the back, thinking that even if Virgil or Merlin or anyone assigned by Rumplestiltskin to probe the suicide and who might have doubted the truth of his death thought to question any bus driver or passenger on that early morning trip, what they would remember was a man with dark hair and crutches, and not known that he had run to the waiting area.

There had been an hour delay before the bus to Durham. In that time he’d walked two blocks away from the South Street bus terminal, until he’d found a Dumpster outside an office building. He’d thrown the crutches into the Dumpster. Then he had returned to the station and boarded another bus.

Durham, he thought, had one other advantage: He had never been there before, knew no one who’d ever lived there, and had absolutely no connection with the city whatsoever. What he did like were the New Hampshire license plates, with the state motto: Live Free or Die. This, he thought, was an appropriate sentiment for himself.

He wondered: Did I escape?

He thought so, but he wasn’t yet sure.

Ricky went to the window and again stared out into a darkness that was unfamiliar. There is much to do, he told himself. Still searching the nighttime beyond the motel room, Ricky could just make out his own reflection in the glass. Dr. Frederick Starks no longer exists, he told himself. Someone else does. He breathed in deeply, and understood that his first priority was to create a new identity for himself. Once that was accomplished, then he could find a more permanent home for the upcoming winter. He knew he would need a job to supplement the money he had left. He needed to cement his anonymity and reinforce his disappearance.

Ricky stared over at the table. He had kept the death certificate for Rumplestiltskin’s mother, the police report for the murder of her onetime lover, and the copy of the file from his months in the clinic at Columbia Presbyterian, where the woman had come to him for help and he’d failed to deliver it. He thought to himself that he had paid a large price for a single act of neglect.

That payment was made, and he couldn’t go back.

But, Ricky thought, his heart filled with a cold iron, now I, too, have a debt to collect.

I will find him, he insisted to himself. And then I will do to him what he did to me.

Ricky stood and walked over to the wall, where he flicked the switch for the lights, dropping the room into darkness. An occasional sweep of headlights from outside sliced across the walls. He lay down on the bed, which creaked in an unfriendly fashion beneath him.

Once, he reminded himself, I studied hard to learn to save lives.

Now I must educate myself in how to take one.

Ricky surprised himself with the sense of organization that he was able to impose on his thoughts and feelings. Psychoanalysis, the profession that he’d just departed, is perhaps the most creative of all the disciplines of medicine, precisely because of the changeable nature of the human personality. While there are recognizable diseases and established courses of treatment within the realm of therapy, ultimately they are all individualized, because no two sadnesses are precisely alike. Ricky had spent years learning and perfecting the flexibility of the therapist, understanding that any given patient could walk through his door on any given day with something the same, or something utterly different, and that he had to be prepared at all times for the wildest swings in mood and sense. The problem, he thought to himself, was how to find the strengths of the capabilities that he’d developed in his years behind the couch, and translate them into the singleness of purpose that would recover his life for him.

He would not allow himself to fantasize that he could ever go back to who he was. No daydream of hope that he could return to his home in New York and take up again the routine of his life. That wasn’t the point, he understood. The point was to make the man who’d ruined his life pay for his fun.

Once that debt was paid, Ricky realized, then he would be free to become whatever he wanted. Until the specter of Rumplestiltskin was removed from his life, Ricky would never have a moment’s peace, or a second’s freedom.

Of this, he was unequivocally certain.

Nor was he sure, yet, that Rumplestiltskin was convinced that Ricky had killed himself. The possibility existed, Ricky thought, that he’d only bought some time for himself, for whatever innocent relative had been targeted. It was the most intriguing of situations, he knew. Rumplestiltskin was a killer. Now Ricky needed to be able to outplay the man at his own game.

He knew this: He had to become someone new and someone utterly different from the man he once was.

He had to invent this new persona without creating any telltale sign that the man once known as Dr. Frederick Starks still existed. His own past was cut off for him. He did not know where Rumplestiltskin might have put a trap, but he knew one was there, waiting for the slightest sign that he wasn’t floating somewhere in the waters off Cape Cod.

He knew he needed a new name, an invented history, a believable life.

In this country, Ricky realized, what we are first and foremost are numbers. Social Security numbers. Bank account and credit card numbers. Tax identification numbers. Driver’s license numbers. Telephone numbers and home addresses. Creating these was the first order of business, Ricky thought. And then he needed to find a job, a home, he needed to create a world around him that was credible and yet totally anonymous. He needed to be the smallest and most insignificant of someones, and then he could start to build the education that he needed to track down and execute the man who’d forced him to murder himself.