Later, of course, I’d come to understand that these feelings arose from a subconscious awareness that sinister presences live among us, passing for human. And they aren’t restricted to parking garages; the world is their playground.
Anyway, when I reached the sixth and highest level, I warily surveyed the rows of vehicles, expecting to see among them a brace of men in dark suits and sunglasses, like the pair who’d flanked me at the lunch counter in the diner. Considering that I had escaped the first crew sent to arrest me, maybe I shouldn’t have regarded the ISA as omniscient and omnipresent. However, even though the government is so deep in debt that it’s technically bankrupt, and even though a dollar today will buy only what a dime would buy in the 1950s, the feds can still print money almost as fast as trees can be felled to make paper, which means that when they field an agency like the ISA, its name is Legion. I felt watched where no watchers waited, heard where no listeners lurked, and I approached my Toyota with caution, wishing I had a fresh fire extinguisher and a cloak of invisibility.
In addition to my suitcase and a spare tire, the car trunk contained a simple tool kit. I was able to remove the license plate quickly.
At that point, I began to act with what some might insist was criminal cunning, though I preferred to think of it as the street smarts of a wrongly accused fugitive. A Porsche stood next to my rust bucket. I removed the plate from it, put it on the Toyota, and then attached the Toyota plate to the fancier vehicle. The owner of the Porsche would incur the cost of ordering a new plate, and until he realized what had happened, he was at risk of having his car stormed by ISA agents hot for vengeance.
The chance was small, however, that Mr. Porsche looked enough like me to be gunned down in a case of mistaken identity. Anyway, the ISA didn’t want to kill me. They wanted to interrogate me, and depending on what they meant by “unique,” they might want to put me through a lot of annoying tests, maybe a few exploratory surgeries, but surely nothing worse.
Nevertheless, as I drove down through the garage, I knew the good sisters of Mater Misericordi? would not approve of the cost and inconvenience to which I had subjected the owner of the Porsche. Were I still living at the orphanage, they would have me peeling potatoes for a week.
If I was slightly embarrassed by what I’d done to Mr. Porsche, and if I was afraid for my future and my life, which I was, then I was also pleased with myself because I had devised a plan while swapping the license plates.
If I’d had a list of the dry-cleaning deliveries Juan Santos was making, I would have tried to find him and thank him for having mentored me regarding the need for having a plan. I was so pleased to have one that I wanted not merely to express my gratitude but also share my delight.
My plan was to drive to Peptoe, Arizona, and track down the three men who found me in a bassinet in the middle of that highway nineteen years earlier. During most of my life, I’d been as ordinary as mud. However, the strange magnetism that recently compelled me hither and yon seemed to suggest something might indeed be unique about me. Back in the day, perhaps Hakeem, Bailie, and Caesar had concealed an important fact, or they might have seen something that seemed inconsequential at the time but that would be a key piece of the puzzle that was me.
They had not been old men at the time, but after two decades, perhaps one or more of them had died. Or they might have moved away from Peptoe to a more exciting town, like Gila Bend or Tombstone.
I have always been an optimist, because pessimists seldom have any fun and usually fret their way into one of the horrible fates they spend their lives worrying about. Of course, being an optimist doesn’t guarantee you an unrelievedly happy life. You can still lose your job on the same day that your house burns down and your spouse informs you that he or she has shot the sheriff. But the optimist, unlike the pessimist, believes that life has meaning, that there is something to learn from every adversity, and even that the absurdity of such an excess of misfortune will likely seem at least somewhat amusing after enough time has passed. That is why, years after they have lost everything, optimists are frequently richer and happier than ever, while pessimists often had nothing to lose in the first place.
As I piloted the Toyota out of the garage and into streaming traffic in the street, I assured myself that I would find Hakeem, Bailie, and Caesar thriving in Peptoe. I could be there in three hours and perhaps would be able to speak with the first of them as early as that evening.
For all that Juan Santos knew about the need for having a plan, he didn’t know everything on the subject. In 1785, in a work titled “To a Mouse,” the poet Robert Burns warned “the best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft a-gley.” You don’t have to understand Scottish dialect to know he wasn’t assuring the mouse that its plans were certain to win it a life of comfort and fine cheeses.