Dead Anyway

by Chris Knopf

  “So I’m just supposed to sit and wait.”

  “You’ll be plenty busy. You can donate all our personal belongings to charity,” I said, giving her the name of an organization that would bring a truck and haul it all away.

  “Are you planning to work?” she asked, then raised her hands. “I’m sorry. No questions, I remember.”

  On top of all the other crazy impositions I put upon her was the agreement that I keep my plans to myself. It wasn’t a matter of trust; I didn’t want to make her more of an accessory than I already had.

  “As soon as things are settled, we’ll establish an email connection. I just need time to work out the details. I might have to communicate by letter, so please open all your mail, since you won’t know what form it might take. After you read the letter, bring it home and burn it, then spread the ashes on the lawn.”

  “Are you sure you’re ready for this? Whatever it is you’re doing?”

  “Since I’m doing it, I guess I’m ready.”

  The duffle bag had a shoulder strap, which I used to haul it down to the garage. I got in the back of Evelyn’s Jeep Cherokee. I lay in the foot well of the backseat and she put a blanket over me. She drove me to where I could leave the Jeep unobserved and walk a short distance to catch a cab.

  “By tomorrow morning, you’ll be dead,” she said. “Tell me what it’s like on the other side.”

  “Have you figured out the corpse part?” I asked.

  “If I can’t ask questions, neither can you.”

  I admired much about Evelyn, but especially her profound lack of sentimentality. Before she left me behind a grocery store next to a dumpster and a stack of collapsed cardboard boxes, all she did was squeeze my hand and say, “I’m hoping someday to give back that insurance money,” she said. “If you do anything to make the payout legit, I’ll kill you.”

  EVEN WITH the cane, my leg hurt from the weight of the duffle, as did my neck, head and back. But at least I could move under my own power. I made it to the cabstand, and an hour later a jumpy young East Indian took me to a spot less than a quarter mile from Gerry’s shop. I fixed my mind on my destination and set out.

  The factory was in an industrial area which had given up the industry of clock manufacturing almost fifty years before. Several low brick buildings covered about twenty acres, and maybe half had been turned into studio space for artists and craftspeople like Gerry. His place was around the back of one of the smaller buildings where he was the only occupant, and reachable by a narrow, windowless alley.

  When I got there, I was nearly felled by pain and fatigue, but kept up the effort until I secured the studio, with all the lights on, and convinced myself that everything was as I had last left it. Only then did I lie on the bed, where I instantly fell asleep.

  I slept in my clothes until the next morning. My mind was up to full RPM’s before my body showed the slightest interest in moving. I ran through my plan, step-by-step, arranging the sequence, identifying hazards, assessing risks, working my way back to the next thing I had to do.

  Which was to make a cup of coffee and stare at the names in my notebook. One I particularly liked, Alex Rimes. Alex left Connecticut when he was five years old and spent the rest of his truncated life in Alaska. On that basis, the clear winner.

  After unplugging the Ethernet cable connecting Gerry’s Mac to the wall, just to be 100% sure I was blind to the web, I re-familiarized myself with the computer. I’d set up a similar system for Florencia. The most important program for my purposes was Photoshop. Gerry had the latest, professional grade version, but I had little trouble working out the functionality. Mastering complex systems was another of my gifts, or just a variation on the core gift—the stubborn ability to figure shit out.

  I took my birth certificate out of an envelope held in the inside pocket of my jacket. It was a rectangular sheet of soft, yellowy paper with deep creases, having been folded and stored for years in the family bible. Evelyn had retrieved it from my house, and after close examination, I sent her off on another mission to buy, with cash, a customizable embosser. It took her a week, but she finally found one in a hobby shop: “Hey kids, make your own official seal!”

  She also bought a selection of paper that closely matched the feel and consistency of the original. She outdid herself on this one, discovering a fifty-year-old paper sample case in a collectibles shop.

  I scanned my birth certificate into the system at the highest resolution the system would allow. Ten minutes later it was up on my screen. From there it was two days of eye-straining and tedious painting by mouse, as I methodically turned Arthur Hemple Cathcart into Alex Bryson Rimes, son of Timothy and Sarah Louise Rimes.

  The printing process was more difficult than I thought it would be, mostly because the old stock easily jammed the printer, which was geared for modern office paper. Luckily, I had plenty to experiment with, so in the end I had a half-dozen copies I could use to move on to the next stage.

  I took one of the ersatz birth certificates, and using black dust harvested from the motor of one of Gerry’s power tools, and some regular sawdust from a piece of red cedar cut on the band saw, mimicked the natural decay caused by a document being pressed together for years in an old bible. I cut the sample paper to the correct size, then softened and roughed up the edges.

  With all these features in place, I used my toy embosser to duplicate the official seal. It was maybe a sixteenth of an inch smaller in diameter, but otherwise, an exact replica.

  Then I moved to the final stage—folding and refolding the document as my mother had folded the original forty-two years before. Then I repeated the process until the seams were ready to part. I laid my creation next to the original under a bright task light.

  Perfection in any pursuit is unattainable, but to my careful eye, I could see virtually no difference between the two. I closed my eyes and felt the two documents, confirming the feel was also identical.

  It had taken three days to achieve, but I finally had the fulcrum on which the entire plan would rest.

  I waited until night to venture out again. I needed food and a chance to catch up on the news. I stocked up on canned goods and frozen entrees at the grocery store, as much as I could comfortably carry in a kid’s knapsack bought out of a sale bin, and found the hoped-for news in a deli, after the clerk generously offered to look in the back for recent issues of the local paper.

  I didn’t dwell on my obituary, but noted the key facts, which held to what Evelyn and I agreed upon.

  Soon I was back home again, where I took a much needed shower, ate enough to kill my hunger, and passed out again, still dog-tired, but vaguely satisfied with my progress.

  CHAPTER 4

  The rest of the week was filled with another round of forgery. This involved one of my expired passports, covering the years 1987 to 1997. There were two pages I had to process through Photoshop to alter names and addresses. The stickiest issue was the passport number, which was unalterable, since it was hole-punched into the first four pages of the passport, including the cover. The other obvious problem was the number itself—which belonged to Arthur Cathcart, not Alex Rimes. Thus the utility of this forgery was restricted to situations where they’d either ignore the number, or be unlikely to go to the trouble of checking its validity.

  That put a big burden on the final forgery, Alex’s Social Security card. Fortunately, I’d held on to my very first one, issued in 1983, before the days of Photoshop, Homeland Security and international databases. It was a quaint little slip of paper that fit in your wallet, a manifestly stupid thing to do, but that’s what they did in those days.

  This time it only took me a day and night to recreate a new card with Alex’s number. It was a much simpler job, and I was getting more proficient with the computer.

  The next day I took the train to Hartford, then a cab to the Department of Motor Vehicles in Wethersfield. There were DMV locations closer to Stamford, but I didn’t want to risk someone recognizing G
erry’s address at the old clock factory complex.

  I’d left the cane behind to avoid messy questions about my ability to drive, so it wasn’t a painless trip, though pain wasn’t an unfamiliar companion, cane or not.

  The train ride gave me a chance to collect myself and frame how I thought the experience might go. It was impossible to fully anticipate every contingency. I was confident that my forgeries looked legitimate. Based on documents from an earlier, pre-9/11 era, they were relatively simple to manipulate. I respected the people working the windows at the DMV, oft-vilified though they were. They were crushed under a mountain of paperwork which they had to process under merciless time frames. You couldn’t expect them to be forensic scientists. The most worrisome danger lay in security procedures I knew nothing about. Alerts triggered by automatic data scans.

  This led to a decision to stick with the birth certificate and the Social Security card, which a simple check would tie together, and leave out the passport. According to DMV instructions, this was enough to get a replacement license. The passport number may or may not be easy to check, so I couldn’t risk it, even though in other ways it would handily lock in the deception.

  And then there was the possibility that Alex’s relatives in Alaska, or some savvy friend, would have already spotted the scam and alerted the Social Security Administration. That was a pure risk, and there was nothing I could do about it but speculate on how I’d survive prosecution and jail time.

  Hiding from the criminal world meant hiding from the legal world as well, since the former required violating the rules of the latter. Caught by the criminal world, I’d just be killed, and that would be that. Caught by the legal world, I’d be exposed, and then eventually killed in prison, or have my freedom so sorely compromised that death would be welcome.

  My greatest advantage was that none of my potential pursuers thought I was available for pursuit. With luck, they all thought I was dead. As for law enforcement, this would suddenly change if I slipped up on any one thing, especially if it happened online. But that was an exposure I’d have to face. I could have tried to stay completely off the grid, but that would have rendered me helpless to do anything other than simply survive.

  I had greater ambitions.

  As no one knew to stalk me, I was relatively safe. I would take every possible precaution, put up every screen I could and leave as faint a trail as possible. Though in the post-9/11 world, no one could roam the network fully secure from a determined tracker, who would be invisible to the tracked. And even the faintest trail lasts forever. Every keystroke, whether made for good or evil, was recorded somewhere, becoming your eternal legacy.

  I let thoughts like these run free for several hours, then put them all back in the box from whence they’d sprung. I’m dead anyway, I decided, one way or another. Dead men don’t have the luxury of speculating about things they cannot control.

  THE LINES at the DMV were predictably long, but things were running smoothly, so it only took about a half hour for my number to be called to the designated window.

  “Hi,” I said, my whole being pitched for friendliness and an eager desire to please. “I’m in a bit of a pickle.”

  The woman gave me a slight smile and said she’d do her best to unpickle me.

  “I just moved back to Connecticut from Alaska. I looked on your web site for what I need to get a Connecticut driver’s license, but when I started gathering up ID, I couldn’t find my Alaska license. So now I’m wondering if I have to replace that one first, or can I just get a replacement here.”

  “You need at least one primary and one secondary form of identification,” she said, sliding a small pamphlet across the counter.

  “I know,” I said, without looking at the pamphlet. “I saw that on your web site. So I brought what I had.”

  I unfolded the birth certificate, and presented it to her along with the Social Security card.

  She had a confident look about her as she carefully gathered up the tattered documents and walked back into the maze of desks behind the counter. After asking a managerial type a few questions, she sat in front of a computer screen. I casually looked around the general area, and counted three security people.

  After nearly ten minutes, she came back to the window.

  “I checked with Alaska DMV,” she said. My heart, as yet maintaining a steady pulse, took off like a greyhound.

  “And?”

  “Your license is valid, with no encumbrances. They sent me an affidavit, so I can just put it with these and your application and we can get this done today.”

  “Boy, that was nice of you to do,” I said, with a slight trill in my voice, which she might have interpreted as deep gratitude, which it was, only not for reasons she might have thought.

  She didn’t answer, already busy prepping me for the next stage in the process, which was to pay the fee and get my photo taken.

  “Good luck, Alex,” she said ten minutes later, as I walked past her window holding a little manila envelope containing my forged documents and an official Connecticut driver’s license. “Must be nice to be back home.”

  I almost said, “Like I’d died and gone to heaven,” but just thanked her and left.

  THE WORLD is a much bigger and easier place to live in when you have a driver’s license. It’s the difference between being part of society and being a specter, invisible to all official and unofficial proceedings, civil and commercial. In a period of two days I had three bank accounts and three debit/ATM cards, a replacement birth certificate, officially obtained from the office of Norwalk Vital Statistics, and a car.

  This last acquisition followed my first trip to Gerry’s vintage guitar warehouse. It was in Danbury, Connecticut, which first meant a bus, then a cab ride to a giant corrugated metal building sitting in the middle of an industrial park just north of town. I paid the Ethiopian cabby to wait for me while I went to the office, where I had to use my real ID as Arthur Cathcart to negotiate the security checkpoints. I hoped the woman at the desk wouldn’t check me out against a database of legitimate living identities, noting the irony.

  The guitars were in shelves stacked ten feet high lining the walls of a large open area. Using Gerry’s code sheet, I dug out three guitars that most closely fit my criteria, based on some research I’d done on vintage guitar values at the anarchist’s café. I piled them on a cart which I pushed with agonized slowness back to the office, where the cabby helped me load everything in the cab.

  I paid the cabby a hundred dollars to take me all the way to the clock factory and help me haul the musical loot into Gerry’s studio. By then, I was deranged by weariness, my hands shaking so hard I could barely get the bills out of the binder clip I was using to hold my cash. The cabbie stood and waited patiently, with no apparent complaint. This built his tip into a heroic amount.

  He took the money and gave me his card.

  “You need something else in the transportation regard, you call me, sir. I come from wherever.”

  I spent the next few hours lying on Gerry’s cot trying to regain my strength. When I thought I could speak without sounding like my mouth was full of cloth, I used my disposable phone to call another disposable I’d sent to Evelyn the week before.

  “Oh, thank God,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “You called. I was afraid I’d never hear from you again.”

  “No such luck. How did the funeral go?” I asked.

  “Everyone honored my request that we skip the funeral. I gave out a list of charities for donations in your name. I think your passing was well publicized. And you’re right, the cops were furious, though they bought the dumb doc excuse.”

  “I saw the obit in the Stamford Advocate.”

  “And it made the evening news. How’re you feeling?” she asked.

  “It’s getting better all the time,” I said.

  “Nice to hear, but it would be nicer if you told me something that made me less worried.”

  I
thought about that.

  “When I went off to college, you told me I could do anything I wanted. You didn’t mean that in a ‘this is America where anybody can follow their dream’ sort of way. You meant I was so omnivorous in my interests and abilities that I could achieve any single thing I wanted to achieve. Remember?”

  “I was just trying to get you to focus,” she said.

  “Well, I’m focused now.”

  “Thank you,” she said, after a moment of thoughtful silence.

  “You’re welcome.”

  THE NEXT day I went to Wally’s Wall of Music in Bridgeport and sold him a mint 1960 Gibson ES-335, with a sunburst finish and a double bound maple body, mahogany neck, bound rosewood fret board, dot inlays, twenty-two frets, two PAF humbuckers, original electronics, stop tailpiece and original Kluson tuners and hardware, for $32,567.

  This was about two grand less than what I could have gotten for it, but part of the deal was being paid with a bank check, which I took to one of my new banks and deposited all but $7,000, which I added to the $15,000 I still had in my cash pouch, and went car hunting.

  Plowing through a stack of want ad flyers, I quickly spotted a late model Subaru Outback on sale for $21,000 by a guy in Darien, Connecticut. I liked the Outback for its sturdy utility and ubiquitousness, so I called the guy on my disposable phone and arranged to meet him two hours later. I test drove the car, then said I could do ninety percent of his asking price if he’d take cash. Two hours later, the car was registered and parked in Gerry’s garage, supplanting his white van, which I parked out in the alley.

  I felt a little bad about that, but his van was a familiar sight around the clock factory, and it would only be there for a few days.

  The next day, I deposited $2,635 dollars in one of my accounts—an entirely innocuous amount, well below various thresholds for federal reporting. Over the next few days I made other deposits at all three of my banks, being sure to widely vary the amounts. This was after several agonizing hours working out a deposit schedule that would keep a steady flow of cash into the accounts while staying well under the regulatory radar. Something I once could have done in the time it took to write down the figures.