Left No Forwarding Address (for fans of Stieg Larsson, David Baldacci and James Patterson)

CHAPTER I

Have you ever thought you would like to start all over again?

It was an offhand comment by a casual acquaintance that started me thinking. I had never even given the idea a moment’s consideration. You don’t start over. You just carry on. No matter how desperate your situation or how unhappy you are, you just plow ahead and hope that the next raise or the next job or the next marriage will improve your lot. Our society has no mechanisms for starting over. Just bankruptcy, perhaps. But even bankruptcy leaves you with a bitter residue, a bad reputation and some debts you never satisfy.

And what course of action is there for a bankruptcy of the self?

I was engaged in the serious process of getting inebriated at a cocktail party at Longshore when David said to me, Did you know that you can get a new identity for one thousand dollars?

I laughed and raised my glass. To a new identity.

He shook his head and put his hand on my shoulder. His words were slurred. No, I’m serious. A client of mine says he knows a man who can get all the documents somebody needs for a new identity for a thousand bucks. He swept his arm around the room and spilled some of his martini as he did. Imagine getting away from all this.

The country club was crowded with men in tuxedos and women in evening gowns. The sun was setting over the water in a splendor of colors. It was a lovely June evening. Everyone looked so rich and so happy. Why would anyone want to get away from all this, I thought. People were laughing. The string quartet was playing a piece by Mozart. Some enticing aromas were coming from the kitchen. I looked through the French doors that led out to the terrace and saw my wife talking to a tall man who was holding a drink in each hand and who kept glancing back into the room where I was standing. She obviously wasn’t holding his rapt attention in conversation.

I wasn’t drunk then, but I got drunk before the evening was over. Not any more sloshed than usual, just enough so the sharp edges didn’t hurt for a while. Nothing much happened at the party, except for the time when Philip’s wife put her hand on my knee under the table. I didn’t know if it was deliberate or just an inadvertent display of exuberance.

David’s comment didn’t really boil to the surface until later in the week. My boss had been out of town and had just returned to New York on Thursday. It had been a relatively peaceful three days. I had been able to sit in my cubicle and play solitaire on the computer without interruption. It wasn’t advancing the cause of mankind very much, but then it wasn’t doing anyone any harm either. I had once read, in a large leather-bound bible, the basis for western civilization. It said, Do not do to others that which is hateful to you. This is all you need to know. All else is commentary.

My boss had taken the nickname Sandy. His first name was actually Sanford. I always felt he should have called himself Sanford, no matter how unfortunate that sounded, rather than the feminine-sounding Sandy. As he leaned over me, I could smell the faint odor of garlic that always emanated from his body. He said, I want you to work on the Xylonol label today. Get it to me by four. I have to go to a party at five. Don’t mess up again or else, you know? He had a rudimentary command of the English language, even though it was his native tongue. He seldom used polysyllables.

It wasn’t what he said. It was the manner in which he said it. His tone set off an involuntary reflex within me. From deep down in some primordial sludge it produced an epiphany. A dark cavern was illuminated by a thousand torches. I had no advance warning it was coming. A decision was made. A barrier had been crossed. And I had never even suspected that the deliberations involved in making the decision were being carried on.

Sandy was a man of medium height with a square face, a prognathous jaw and a gravelly voice. His chin always had a dark shadow, probably from using an electric shaver. He invariably wore short-sleeved poly-cotton dress shirts, which made him look like a purchasing manager. I never saw him laugh or even say a single humorous thing and I had worked for him for more than five years. His only virtue, as far as I could see, was his longevity. He had been with the company for twenty years, doing the same job relentlessly day after day, plodding through life like an ox tethered to a mill. He had a sort of lumpen stolidity that the company seemed to value.

My job wasn’t any better. I sat at a small gray metal desk in a small windowless cubicle and wrote words that went on labels that were placed on small bottles of ethical and unethical pharmaceuticals. My nemesis was the legal department. I was always trying to sneak words past them that said this drug would cure cancer or that another drug would enable you to have sexual congress twelve times a day and they always censored my copy for some obscure reason or another that was unclear to me.

Sandy’s feeble imagination coupled with his sadistic streak made him view my output with a notable lack of enthusiasm. He took every opportunity to make a correction, even in those instances where none was called for. This usually caused me to put in twice as much time as was needed to produce the copy for a label. Drudgery was piled upon drudgery.

You better skip lunch today, Sandy said. You’ll be better off without the calories, anyway. He gave me a dry, nasty snicker.

It was at that point when I knew he was going to disappear from my life forever. To have no more Sandy. To be devoid of Sandy. A surge of pleasure overtook me. The thought of an existence free of Sandy made me feel like a schoolboy running through a field of daisies on a sunny summertime afternoon.

I didn’t answer him. I gave him a wink, but it was more like a twitch than a wink. The great all-knowing wink/twitch that encompassed all the knowledge out to the horizon in all directions.

He didn’t know what to make of that, so he backed away slowly from my workstation, trying to maintain some semblance of his managerial demeanor. It wouldn’t do to have an underling give him a silent gesture of disrespect. When he was a safe distance from me, he spun around on his heels and walked away.

I tried to work for the rest of the day, but fevered thoughts kept rushing up to and then through me. My plan wasn’t formulated yet. It wasn’t even formed yet. But there was the beginning of the vaguest outline of a possible course of action. It was too exciting to even consider. It was far more reckless than anything I had ever done before.

As Sandy was leaving the office at five that evening to go to his party, I stopped him in the corridor.

I wanted to thank you for letting me see everything so clearly, I said. Your words have conveyed a much deeper meaning than you could possibly have imagined. I looked him straight in the eye in order to express the utter seriousness of my little speech. He met my gaze briefly and then glanced down to inspect the asphalt gray-tiled floor that management, in its quest for a bottom-line boost, had decided would be good enough for the employees on the fifth floor in place of slightly more-expensive industrial carpeting.

He mumbled something that indicated he didn’t know what to make of my remark. It was actually quite out of character for me. I invariably played the role of the dutiful corporate type with a deep voice, careful articulation and a hearty laugh. The old James Earl Jones-type King James Bible stentorian voice that all the executives strove to achieve.

I reached for his hand and shook it vigorously. With my left hand, I grabbed his elbow and clutched it. Some motivational speaker had once stood on a stage in a corporate gathering and said this was the way to make a positive impression on the person you were speaking to.

Don’t trouble yourself, I said. It will really mean very little to you when you consider it, but it will mean a great deal to me.

CHAPTER II

The commute home went much faster than usual. The familiar view through the smudged window of the New Haven line train took on a new intensity. The sights and sounds seemed to be much sharper and more vivid. Maybe it was the knowledge that there were a finite number of days to be spent on this train.

I couldn’t read. I kept looking up from my book and staring out the window. The young woman sitting next to me must have thought I had adult-onset ADD because I was so wired. The oversized can of Foster’s helped a little to calm me down, but soon I had to go to the lavatory. I said, Pardon me, in my most soothing tone and ignored her scathing look as I brushed past her. I left the book on the seat with the cover facing her so she would know I was not a complete fool. Not to be too obvious about it, but the book was The Odyssey in the Robert Fagles’ translation.

The girl was gone by the time I returned to my seat. I felt a vague sense of disappointment because I was planning to start up a conversation with her. This was out of character for me also. It was something I never did. To speak to a pretty young woman would be the first symbolic step of my new life.

When I got to the Westport station, the aging Jeep wouldn’t start up the first couple of times I tried. Finally, I got it started but then I had to wait a few minutes until it warmed up. By then all my fellow commuters had left the parking lot and I was resigned to sucking wind and bringing up the rear of the procession as it wound its way up Riverside Avenue toward town.

It was like a military convoy. A high-priced convoy of Mercedes SUV’s and Lexus SUV’s and Range Rovers with rhinoceros guards which seemed superfluous in a region of the world where you were unlikely to find a rhino on the loose.

The drive home was exactly the same as it had been for the last ten years, except for the grotesquely oversized houses that had replaced the modest ones which had been torn down in the relentless pursuit of excess. It was not what William Blake had in mind when he wrote that the path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

My house had remained resolutely unchanged. This was not due to any firm conviction on my part as to the value of the past, but rather to a long-term drying up of liquidity. Some needed repairs remained to be done and I was reminded of this by the sight of a shutter that hung at an awkward angle as I pulled into the driveway beside my wife’s road-weary Honda. I rolled to a stop outside the garage, shut off the engine and sat in the car without moving, staring straight ahead at a stand of trees. I stayed motionless for what seemed like a long time, but must have been no more than ten or fifteen minutes.

The steps involved in carrying out my enterprise had to be carefully planned. It wouldn’t do to make any mistakes or trip over some unforeseen consequence. Everything had to be written down in a logical progression, like a flow chart or a critical path diagram. Investigations had to be made and decisions taken. I would have to establish a timetable. And finally, a date would have to be set for departure.

The garage was too full of junk to pull the Jeep inside. I left it where it was and walked into the house. My heart was beating wildly and I had difficulty breathing. I stood still for a while in the entrance hall until I could breathe normally. Then I put down my briefcase and called out, Hi, ...hello.

Hi, came back my wife’s reply. She sounded like she was in the kitchen.

I went upstairs to the bedroom, took off my tie and suit jacket, washed my face and brushed my teeth. I looked in the mirror. An abundance of hair confronted me. I had worn a beard ever since I was able to grow one. The beard had been longer in my younger days, but was now closely-trimmed, as suited a corporate type. It was well on its way to turning gray. The hair on my head was less gray. There was a lot of hair for a man who had turned fifty just a month earlier. The haircut was longish and covered the top of my ears and my shirt collar in back. I sighed. The hair would have to be the first casualty of my new identity.

I stared at my face. It was the face of a man who had not seen joy stealthily stealing away, bit by little bit, over the decades. Unnoticed, unattended and unremarked. Where once there had been the possibility of some modicum of satisfaction at some time in the remote future, now there was only the bleak prospect of the same tedious repetition until the end of days. It was the face of a man who was already dead.

All I had to do was add an r and I would have a new word. I would have Dread. Dread was the operative word. Dread of continuing day by day in this petty pace until a heart attack or the Big C put me in the ground.

I took a couple of deep breaths, walked down the stairs and stepped into the kitchen.

My wife didn’t look up. She continued to stir a pot on the stove. Her thoughts must have been deep in that pot. The television was tuned to CNN but they were broadcasting a piece on the ecology of sub-Saharan Africa that I knew she wasn’t listening to. All she needed was the sound of a human voice in the room. I knew so much about her.

She looked very tired.

The table was already set for dinner. She emptied the contents of the pot into a serving dish and put it on the table. The food looked bland and smelled bland. You could tell it would need salt and pepper. Then she rinsed off her hands and dried them with a dishtowel. She pointed the remote at the TV and aimed it as you would aim a gun and turned it off, cocking her head slightly to one side as she did so. She had never been completely comfortable with electronic devices. It went against natural law, as far as she was concerned. There was an element of magic involved in these strange technological advances. Somehow, she felt there must be little people inside who ran around and pulled little levers and turned little switches to make these unnatural devices work.

We sat down without speaking. I unfolded the napkin and placed it on my lap. She still hadn’t looked at me. She reached across the table and slid the serving dish toward me so I could help myself. I wanted to see how long it would take before she looked at me. After I had served myself, she put some food on her plate. It was a tuna dish without much flavor. The noodles were overcooked and there were a few green peas to give the meal some color.

The house was very quiet. There was no sound except for the silverware clicking against the plates.

She still hadn’t raised her glance to look at me. She ate deliberately, taking small bites. Her hair had been combed neatly and pulled to the back of her head with a tortoise-shell clip. Dyeing her hair was out of the question. Her hair was loosing its brownish luster and strands of gray were making steady inroads, but my wife said she was a natural person who didn’t want artificiality to color her appearance. She would, by God, accept nature’s progress without a struggle.

Her skin was still smooth and moist, although the little wrinkles about the eyes and mouth were becoming more prominent. She had always been a thin girl. The passage of the years had not added any weight to her frame, but the pounds had been slightly redistributed. She was lean, spare and unyielding. But that is not to say she had not surrendered.

She had surrendered. We had both surrendered. We had been defeated. There were no battles left to fight. We would place one foot in front of the other and continue to take steps, but that was only because we didn’t know what else to do.

The house was unbearably quiet. We ate without speaking. She was wearing a blouse with little flowers on it and a black skirt. The blouse reminded me of what she wore the first time we met. A sort of flowery T-shirt. It was in the sheep meadow in Central Park on the first warm day of spring. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Instead, there were kites with long rainbow tails dueling with flying Chinese dragons. I was playing Frisbee and ran into her and knocked her down. I fell on top of her.

I’m sorry, I said. Forgive me.

She shook her head. No, I’m sorry. Forgive me. I should’ve seen you coming. Her hair was long and flowed over her face. She brushed it back with a hand that had a deep gash in it which I had caused.

But I had touched her and she had touched me. And we had started by asking forgiveness of each other.

Really, I said. We were still lying on the grass, side by side. I took her hand and examined the wound. It looks serious. You might get lockjaw and that could seriously hinder your social life.

She giggled. I’d manage somehow. She had a sweet laugh and an innocent face. I wanted to know her.

Let me clean it and bandage it for you, I said. I ran my hand softly over hers.

She raised an eyebrow skeptically. Do you always carry a first-aid kit with you?

I should have, for an occasion like this. It isn’t every day I have a chance to help such a beautiful damsel in distress. The words sounded phony, and I regretted saying them. I was searching for something cleverer to say.

But she didn’t seem to mind. Especially when you were the one who caused the distress in the first place. She smiled at me as if to say she had forgiven me for