Anyone can start a new life, even in a small town. Everyone moves so much these days. You get a divorce, you move and start over. Try it. See how little people ask about you. See how little people listen. Or, more precisely, think about how little you really know about the people you know. Where they were born, for instance. Have you met their parents? Or siblings? There was a time, maybe, when just being new in a town made you seem suspect. Because you were suspect — people didn’t have any way to verify you were who you said you were. And why did you have to leave where you came from? But there is a long history (seldom spoken of in the gloriously amnesiac everyday) in America, and in a democracy, of starting over. It was almost an imperative, wasn’t it? America was founded, of course, by people who invented new lives, who wanted nothing more than to jettison the weight of all that history, all that burden and all that memory of Europe. That was one form of freedom. Freedom from memory and history and accounting. Even if an endless series of beginnings tended to reduce everything to shallow repetition and eliminate any possibility of profound experience, it certainly served her, at this moment, in this place.
New Year’s Eve, 1973. She sat at the bar and waited for her friend Betsy to return from the bathroom. They had already drunk many cocktails and were probably going to go to a party with Betsy’s boyfriend and his buddy. Or they would stay at the bar all night and listen to the bartender, Jack, in his early thirties and with the indifferent, slightly crawly sexiness of Bruce Dern, but with more muscles and less darkness. He doted on them but only ever spoke in a deadpan that the women found increasingly hysterical. He would do just as well as a party, and they would not have to worry about fresh drinks or melted ice at midnight.
It was true that she could have driven to L.A. She could have covered a few shifts at work, borrowed Betsy’s car and been in Venice in five hours. It was also true that, despite her drinks and Jack’s dry humor, she did think about whether Bobby had turned up at the designated place and was waiting for her right now. But she was pretty sure he wouldn’t have shown. She could not bear going there, all that way, to be let down by him. She would rather sit here and still have the possibility that he might have shown rather than the certainty of disappointment. It was 1974, and she celebrated with her new friends and began the unthinking of it. She tried not to think about the dream she’d had the night before. She didn’t believe in premonitions, of course, but she had started to feel uneasy. All the paranoia came back. Her ID here was not at all secure — she had been way too careless about that, again. And there, at the edges of the forced festivities of this night, among her new friends, she knew she would be leaving this place also — definitely and soon.
She told people she had to go back East and take care of her ailing mother. She had five hundred dollars saved, and by spring she finally reached the West Coast. She would get an airtight ID, and she would be safer in a big city. She moved randomly from place to place on the outskirts of L.A. These were the days of pale-beneath-the-tan partying, roller skates and halter tops. And harder, meaner drugs. It was as if someone had taken the aura of the counterculture and extracted every decent aspiration. What was left was the easy liberation of sex and drugs. Was this a function of Southern California, or was every place as weary as this now? Surely the sunshine and beach made the boardwalk a magnet for every marginal person in America. Southern California was full of off-the-grid illegals: draft dodgers, ex-cons, undocumented workers. It was exactly what she wanted. Here she could disappear into the everyday. She could stay far from the rads.
She drank beer and smoked pot all the time. She walked on the beach and had short relationships with men who lived off her.
Only one thing gave her purpose: she needed a new identity, not one made up but one that could be built on. It was a project. She scoured microfilm in the local libraries until she found a baby’s obituary. She needed a person with a birth certificate who had never applied for a Social Security number. She needed a baby who had died in a different county from where she was born, so no cross-reference was made with the death certificate. (Bobby described this method as straight out of Day of the Jackal, and why not?) She could easily obtain a copy of the birth certificate, and from there she could get fake “unfake” and untraceable ID. She could get a real Social Security number, a real driver’s license and even a real passport. She methodically built her documents. That was her main achievement of those L.A. years: a safe, airtight identity. She became the dead infant Louise Barrot.
Louise, I am Louise. It felt different taking someone else’s name instead of making one up. It was a deeper, meaner lie, somehow. The morbid origin of the name did affect her. Sometimes, though she knew this wasn’t what she should be thinking about, she thought of the baby Louise. She thought of the parents watching their baby in the hospital as she struggled to breathe, of her tiny, froggy legs and purple, balled fists. She even kept a copy of the infant’s obituary.
It took a year to build her new identity and assemble all the paperwork. After that, she had less to occupy her. One year turned into four. She cooked at a cafe in Marina del Rey. She rented a small apartment near the pier in Santa Monica. On her days off, Louise walked along the boardwalk or down Fourth Street. Some days she actually forgot where she was headed but kept walking anyway. On one occasion a man coming from the opposite direction walked straight into her. He didn’t stop but kept walking. His nonreaction to their collision bewildered her. She stood there, unmoving, staring at his back as he walked away. And then, maybe a week later, the same thing happened again. A woman walked toward her on the sidewalk in front of Ralph’s supermarket. She had the sort of unseeing stare that people wear in public. She didn’t sidestep when she got to Louise but walked into her, smacking her shoulder. Again, the woman didn’t stop walking or say anything to her. She kept going. This time Louise felt less disturbed. She almost laughed instead. Louise thought, It’s finally happened. I’m invisible.
She went on this way. Not visible really. A vapor.
If you don’t read the paper, time doesn’t move forward.
But she could see it in her hands — veins more visible beneath the skin — time passed. She didn’t read the news, but she kept the TV on all the time.
Raid. Kills bugs dead.
Aim. Fights cavities.
Oxydol. A better clean.
Then she met August. With his heavy, handsome face and very long black hair, which he kept pulled back in a tidy ponytail. He smelled slightly of coconut (which she later realized was suntan lotion) and strongly of tobacco. He bought her drinks and spoke to her in measured, soft tones. Gentle even. She didn’t mind his attention at all; in fact, what she felt was overwhelming gratitude. Who was she but a “speck in the cosmos”?
August kept a clean apartment. He owned a nice stereo and a new, large TV. He didn’t seem to care one way or another about who was president. He wanted her around all the time. She settled into cooking for him and the daily repetitions of an ordinary life. Laundry. Cleaning. Shopping. Why shouldn’t she enjoy being taken care of a little? The character of those first years as Louise was a swift and steady decrease in possibilities. But wasn’t that true of everyone? As time went by, wasn’t every life a kind of narrowing, a steady relinquishing of possibilities?