That’s trite, he thought.
Then he put his head down on his knees and began to cry.
2
For Philip Candor life had become both simple and purposeful. As soon as Gregor Demarkian had left his apartment, Philip had gone into action. He had given his situation a great deal of thought. He had seen too many people who had gone “underground” only to be discovered in middle age and dragged back to face the spotlight. In his case he was branded with an identity he had never chosen for himself or wanted to choose for himself. When all that happened in Idaho he had been not much more than a child, and he had not been on some crusade to rob banks for the revolution or blow up town houses for world peace or destroy federal office buildings to strike a blow against One World Government. He’d been doing nothing but protecting himself and his family from armed men who were determined to kill them, and who had proved that determination a hundred times by firing shots right past their gate and into their house. It was true that you didn’t really have a right to self-defense against government officers who had come to arrest you, but they hadn’t come to arrest him, and he hadn’t fully understood what they were doing at the gate or why they had a right to be there. He had had no source of information about the outside world except his father—and, let’s admit it, his father was a raving nut. Philip thought he had known that even then, or at least suspected it.
The problem was that Philip didn’t want to turn himself in, didn’t want to risk the chance that he would not get a new trial after all, didn’t want to spend even a single day more than he already had in federal prison. They were supposed to be cushy berths, federal prisons, but Philip knew better.
They were brutal places, and the fact that you didn’t have to worry so much about getting porked up the ass by a man convicted of beating his baby to death did not make them easier to endure. Prison was the death of civilization. It was the place where you ceased to be a human being. It was the place where he himself had been frozen in time, so that it wasn’t until he’d walked out the door and gone on his own that he’d begun to change in the ways he had needed to change in order to grow up. He was not sorry that he had killed the two officers he had killed. He had only returned fire when fired upon. He was sorry that he had had to leave his brothers with his mother and the same vicious isolation he had experienced himself. He had a terrible feeling he knew what they would be like now if he could ever risk the chance of seeing them.
Fortunately, he was prepared for this, and he knew enough about the game to know what he must and must not do. He took his wallet out and left it on the coffee table in the living room, taking only the bills in the fold. He left everything else: ID card, driver’s license, credit cards, health insurance card, library card. He got an American Airlines flight bag out of his closet and looked under the stiff plastic shape board in the bottom. He had another wallet with another driver’s license in it, in the name of Joseph Baldwin, from the state of Colorado. There was also a bank debit card and a small key to a safe-deposit box in a bank in Chicago. The safe-deposit box held the rest of his identity cards, but no other bank debit cards. It was too hard to service two of those at once. He would have to go to Chicago first and get a safety net and set up yet another bank account. He could never be too careful.
He had ditched his clothes in the bedroom, then thought better of it and deposited them carefully in the hamper. He had changed his shoes and packed his favorite pair of sneakers and a good dress pair. He had filled the airline bag with all the underwear he could cram into it and a few things he might need to change. It was better to carry as little as possible. What you carried weighed you down. He dressed in chinos and a sweatshirt. He found the contact lenses that changed his blue eyes to a deep brown and popped them in. He found the dye comb and ran it through his hair. Joseph Baldwin was supposed to be a blond. He couldn’t really get that good an effect with a dye comb, but he could at least make his hair nothing like it was now.
He had stepped away from the mirror and looked himself over. The idea was not to completely transform his appearance. It was to look uninteresting so that nobody paid attention to anything you did. People could only see what they looked at.
Then he had gone back out into the living room and gotten the gun from the drawer in which he’d put it. He was not a naturally violent man. He was not a revolutionary. He wasn’t even a fugitive, at least not in his own mind. He was somebody named Philip Candor, not somebody named Leland Beech. He was a teacher of mathematics with a good degree from a Little Three college, not a back country yahoo surviving on roots, berries, populism, and conspiracy theories.