Internecine by David J. Schow Page B

hydrocephalic presidential profiles spilling past the borders. Now it was a riot of hidden watermarks and foil strips, sprinkled in a snow of golden numbers as if for a remedial child—
now look, honey, this is a twenty, see? Twenty-twenty-twenty
—with a deranged inking scheme that appeared to me to have been run through the wash cycle in a pocket alongside a leaky blue pen. Our money had changed so much in the past few years, my thoughts were: [1] indecisive government, [2] field day for counterfeiters, and [3] we win the goofiest currency on the planet award. You could have three different forms of this one bill in your wallet at the same time. Yeah, that makes everything easier.)
    I stared at the spot where two twenties had been a moment before. “That was from the briefcase?”
    He dipped his head once; affirmative. “All they’ll know is some landed at the bus station, and forty bucks more landed here, a couple of blocks away. They’re waiting for us to try swapping out the whole bang for clean cash.”
    “And . . . we’re not going to do that?”
    Another dip of the head, like a teacher approving of a satisfactory test answer. “And we’re going to be best pals, until I can amass some more data. Remember not to whip out your credit cards for anything, either.”
    “You have a charming way of diverting the question of what’s going to happen to me.”
    He rose and returned the waitress’s passing appraisal, with just a hint of heat. She would remember he was handsome; she would remember her substantial tip, but she probably would not be able to describe his face. I had been staring at it for hours, now, and I knew it would turn to fog if I tried to describe it to a sketch artist. His face was . . . “uninhabited.”
    “Conrad—as for what’s going to happen to you, I don’t fucking know. But you’re stuck. We can get there easy, or hard. Pick one.”
    Introspection has never been one of my bullet points.
    My head was still swimming with an alphabet soup of sinister organizations, as reeled off by Dandine. If it was a smoke screen of noise to hide a larger lie, it sure worked. Looking at this man whom I still can’t describe in terms of facts and figures, I saw a man looking at me the same way. He was wondering who the hell I really was. Which meant
I
was now wondering who the hell I really was. In pro wrestling, this is called a “reversal.” Who was Conrad Maddox, this skin I wore?
    Hunger is the best seasoning
. Thanks, Mom.
    The person I presented to the world had no parents, no relatives, no ties that could not be clipped if they got messy or personal. This person, this version of me, was notably different from the person he once was. Blame was always assumed by others—
oh, he had a bad marriage, another failed career, a rebuilding year, a crappy childhood, a personal tragedy
. You take all those possibilities and toss them off in a no-big-deal way, and no one will ever press you for details. They will simply assume you have the same retinue of damage that everybody else pretends to carry around as a life burden. It’s sleight of hand at its best, and we all do it. . . . Why?
    To make ourselves
appear
more interesting than we really are. To bethe spy at the airport, like in that old George Carlin routine. In the airport, surrounded by total strangers, you get to pretend to be mysterious.
There’s a spy at the airport! Your job: FIND HIM!
    To pretend to be characters like Dandine. . . . Why?
    Have you ever seen one of those action flicks where ordinary people more or less just like you are suddenly plunged into a whirlwind of conspiracy and have to spend the next hour running away from helicopters and black SUVs? The thrills, if they work, are vicarious. Try taking it on the lam for twenty-four hours with no food and no rest and tell me it’s something your inner hero craves.
    No, people want to entertain the fantasy that anyone’s life can become exciting and dangerous in the blink