Alien Accounts (15 page)

‘I should warn you,’ Mr Boyle said, ‘that you’ll need a SECRET clearance for this job. If you know any reason you won’t be able to get such a clearance, let me know now.’

Naturally I knew of no such impediment. Mr Boyle gave me forms for my clearance application, to be submitted in triplicate with a set of my fingerprints and a copy of my birth certificate.

I applied in person to the state records office for the latter. After a wait of twenty minutes, jerked out on the wall clock, the trim young woman behind the counter explained that my birth record was not on file
here. She suggested I try the county records office.

Next day the county records office clerk suggested I try the hospital. The clerk at the hospital had neither any record of my birth nor any suggestion.

Such mistakes will happen. Clerks are human. I’m willing to tolerate a few mistakes, a lot of mistakes, any finire number of mistakes, choose one. I returned to the state office and explained my predicament. The clerk, a young woman with short hair, seemed to sympathize. She suggested I try obtaining copies of other documents attesting to my birth and present those to the clearance people. She seemed about to make another suggestion, but I saw by the jerking clock that I was already late for another appointment, to have my fingerprints taken. – I submitted the fingerprints with the triplicate clearance application, attaching a letter of explanation in lieu of my birth certificate. Then I set about tracing my birth.

Several routes were already closed: (a) My parents were dead, and everyone I could think of who might have known me as a child was either dead or untraceable.

(b) Tracing my school records was impossible, since the school had burned down.

(c) I telephoned county and state education departments, who refused to divulge any information whatsoever.

(d) I wrote to my old family doctor and dentist. The doctor’s niece replied that he had died two years ago, and that she had no idea what had happened to his old files. The dentist did not reply.

(e) I wrote asking for a copy of my baptismal certificate. The minister who replied (not the one who had baptized me) said that he was very sorry, but his predecessor’s files were in a chaotic state, and my certificate was not to be found. Perhaps out of habit, he urged me not to give up hope of his finding it eventually.

It was depressing, but still only an odd set of circumstances, up to this point. Then my application for a SECRET clearance was rejected, for two reasons: ‘Fingerprints not clear’ and ‘No birth certificate’. My letter of explanation was not returned with the other documents.

Mr Boyle called me into his office next day. He explained that the department hadn’t foreseen this new difficulty. Now, since I wasn’t cleared, he would have to give the promotion to someone else. I said I understood.

‘I don’t think you do,’ he said. ‘For one thing, when we created the position you were to fill, we also deleted your present position. Now there really is no room for you in our office. Naturally we can’t fire you, but – we think it would be better for everyone if you resigned.’

I agreed. For a moment I sat snapping a card between my front teeth – my rejected, blurry fingerprints – then I rose and shook hands with Mr Boyle. I hadn’t spent ten years in his office to become a liability to it now. I walked with slow dignity to the door, then turned to look at Mr Boyle.

‘Good luck,’ he said, and turned to drop some papers in the waste
basket.

I spent the next few days wandering the streets, being ‘unemployed’. For one entire week I stationed myself on a particular street corner and made a note of the serial number of every bus that passed. For an afternoon I sought out weighing machines of the fortune-telling type. I wasted perhaps too much of my diminishing resources on this, and on taking my own picture and recording my own voice, but it was a comfort.

One day at the dinner hour, the plangent dinner hour, I wandered alone in an unfamiliar part of the city, thinking and no doubt talking to myself. The loss of two or even three documents could be a coincidence. But a dozen? Surely the odds against this were astronomical.

I found myself standing before a large building that was made of, or at least covered with, cast iron. Fireproof. Enduring. The sun must have been setting, for great flocks of noisy birds began to wheel and wheel in the changing light. A foreign ecstasy began to fill me, drawing me on like a glove. How could mere cards and papers matter, when I was here, alive, myself, and full of ease?

I must have fallen face down; when I awoke, it was night, and my mouth was full of drying blood. A policeman prodded me in the ribs, gently, with his stick. ‘You okay, fella?’ I sat up and nodded. ‘I seen right away you wasn’t just a drunk. What happened to you?’

‘I don’t know. Must have fainted.’

He asked if I’d been rolled. It was then I discovered that my billfold was missing.

A policeful day. When I got home at last, two FBI agents were waiting for me: Agent Barkley, and another whose name escapes me. I didn’t really realize how much of my official substance had eroded until our little, as they called it, chat. This took place in their small office – uncomfortably small, it seemed to me, for two large men and a taperecorder and myself. After taking a loyalty oath, I was permitted to tell my story.

‘You expect us to believe this?’ asked Agent Barkley. ‘That your high school burned down, and your doctor died, and you’ve lost your billfold with all your ID? And no one else has any records of you?’

‘There must be something,’ the other agent put in. ‘Your college transcript. Your dental chart. Old tax records.’

‘I’ve moved several times,’ I explained. ‘Certain papers have just disappeared in the shuffle. But surely the Internal Revenue Service has copies of my tax returns …’

The two agents looked at each other. Barkley asked about my college.

‘Cypress University,’ I said. ‘School of Business Administration.’ Again they exchanged looks.

‘Kind of a coincidence, isn’t it?’ asked Barkley. He showed me an evening paper, headlining a violent disturbance at Cypress University. Transcript files had been ransacked and many destroyed.

The FBI men told me I could go home, but not to try going anywhere
else. They promised to contact me shortly.

That night I lay awake theorizing. Three theories might account for what has happened: coincidence, a prank, and a conspiracy.

(1) Coincidence. The girl in the state birth records office accidentally put her cup of coffee on my certificate and spoiled it. Rather than tell her superior, she destroyed the copy. At the drivers’ licence bureau a man with a cut on his finger, a paper cut, goes awkwardly through the file with it, missing my form. I can see my draft board file accidentally stored under my first name; my social security form crumpled down in the back of the drawer; other files fallen down behind file cabinets; still others turned back to front; my insurance premium card is spindled by a stupid typist, so that it keeps fluttering through the computer, never to be retrieved.

A mouse nests in my baptismal certificate. The burnt school. The dead doctor. The trashed university files. My letters to my parents were bundled in the attic, and after their deaths, given to a neighbour who moved away, whose kids now play a game with them, ‘mailing’ them through the slot ofa cardboard grocery box, say. One letter to a friend was delivered to the wrong address, where an inquisitive person, having read it, burned the guilty evidence and mixed the ashes with the soil in her window box. Another letter was never mailed, but fell into the lining of a suit I gave away to the Salvation Army. Someday the derelict wearing it will die, and it will be found on him by someone feeling his clothes for thousand-dollar bills. Other letters will be stolen by postal clerks, mutilated by experimental cancelling machines, somehow destroyed as pornography or Communist propaganda, none of the above.

Someone is gluing overdraft notices to account records at the bank, he spills a drop of glue and welds my record forever to the one in front of it. A department store clerk only pretends to search for my charge account record – actually he’s sneaking a smoke in the toilet. Who can blame him, he’s young, plays with himself though believing it causes the pimples he also plays with. Say a file clerk at the Internal Revenue goes quietly crazy and – what file clerk has not had this dream? – selects one file and tears it up. Or his radium watch dial emits a stray gamma ray which obliterates the microfilm of me. Finally, my dentist, while examining my teeth card, feels suddenly tired. He closes the card in a telephone directory, puts his head down on his desk for a brief nap, and dies.

(2) Pranks. No one knows me well enough to take the trouble.

(3) Conspiracy. Who, again, would bother? Why not simply kill me, instead of breaking into hundreds of offices (or infiltrating them), searching through tons of files and never overlooking a duplicate? They could spend man-years

or expropriating my official self. Think of them, hiring hundreds of agents to infiltrate bureaux, present their qualifications, hope to get hired, wait in line, fill out applications, perhaps miss the job after all, perhaps find out the bureau isn’t hiring today, the budget has been cut.., hoping all the while that I did not marry, have children, write letters to the editor, go to court, vote, sign petitions, buy something on credit, change dentists.., a foreign conspiracy it cannot be, and an American conspiracy is too terrible to think of.

After a week of waiting, Agent Barkley phoned me to say they were still investigating, and would I please remain available? I saw my mistake at once. It is a kind of crime, after all, to be unidentified. So long as the FBI were on the track of my identity, I was a house prisoner. When they gave up, I would be too dangerous not to arrest.

I packed at once and moved out, walked into the factory district across the river, and registered in a cheap hotel as ‘A. Barkley’. It is not necessary that a certain person exists. The mere use of a name, a fistful of cards of identity means nothing. I think of student pranks, of registering for classes fictitious persons: Mort Arthur, Phil Morris, Art Lesson and Mac Hines. These are figureless fields, I suppose, while I am a faceless, rather, fieldless figure. Gene DeFect.

Now I’m cut off. Even if some trace of me has now been found, I can’t contact the appropriate agency or bureau without coming to the attention of Barkley and his friend. Before, I could have found my old copies of tax returns, rent receipts, bills, the ones I saved. If any. I could have taken a lie detector test, affidavits from acquaintances and co-workers, thrown myself on the mercy of the FBI, the agents are human, too, they sweat, they bleed, they do pee-pee, choose one.

Yesterday a new telephone book came out. My name was not in it. Was it in the old? I …

Things aren’t too bad, really. I was unable to pay my bill for room and meals, so Mr Gurnt, the manager, arranged for me to mop the halls for my keep. Despite the beatings, I’m getting to feel at home here.

I’m keeping a journal, from which some of this is copied. Some of it is really written by me, the hall-mopper at this hotel. The person filling out this form is the same object of Mr Gurnt’s kicks and punches. Here I am. Not the government clerk, perhaps, not even the man who signed the register, but here I am writing this, this sentence, and the period at its end. Is this not proof of my true, dense, solid material substance? Answer in full.

No one has seen the journal yet, but me. I hide it from Gurnt and the others. I stop writing and slip it into a drawer when the door opens, always. At night, I keep it in my underwear, in the front, and endeavour to remain on my stomach all night. If anyone had seen it, I’d have been visited by Agent Barkley by now.

The beatings come daily, along with threats to fire me. Empty threats, empty as many of my tooth sockets. The beatings come daily, regular as
the meals of boiled cabbage and boiled potatoes, far more regular than my bowel movements. Things aren’t too bad, really.

It is not necessary for a certain person to exist. I said that. Did I mention the telephone directory? Yes. It is beautiful, and I enjoy its beauty still, from outside the page. As a child I was plagued by beauty: rainbows in the puddles by the gas station, dead birds by the gas station, the thumbless attendant at the gas station (I heard he had lost his thumb and believed it to be literally misplaced among his greasy tools. The stump was streamlined and elegant). Now I find teeth on my floor.

To simplify things, I’ve erased my alias from the hotel register. This made the page look odd, so I tore it out. But the pages are numbered – to hide the gap I burned the whole book. But the hotel looks strange without a register.