The Names

But who were they really after?This is it, this is the thing I can't resolve. I'd gone running at the same hour for six straight days. No sign of David at that hour except on the last of these days. Were they waiting for me? Did David precipitate the action by rushing the gunmen before they had a chance to realize this was not the man they wanted? Or did they simply mistake him for me? There would be a curious symmetry to such an error, a symmetry of misidentification, especially if we believe that Andreas Eliades was behind the action or somehow involved in it. It was Andreas who mistook me for David Keller the night we first met. He thought I was the banker. Did his companions think David was the risk analyst? The possibility is haunting, that there is an exact correspondence at the center of all this confusion, this formlessness of motive and plan and execution. A harmony.What is the counter-argument?There was no mix-up. David and I don't look alike, we weren't wearing similar clothes, we hadn't been following similar routines. They wanted the banker. They waited outside his building, saw him come out in running clothes, drove up to the woods and placed themselves at the end of the likeliest path.Which do you believe?I want to believe they plotted well. I don't like thinking I was the intended victim. It puts all of us at the mercy of events. It's one more thing to vex me with its elusiveness, its drift-a fading into distances of human figures and whatever is real and absolute about the light that falls around them. When the gunman turned my way, I was at that instant not only the intended victim but had clearly done something (I tried to remember what) to merit his special attention. But he didn't aim and fire. This is the point. It turned out that he didn't know who I was, what I was supposed to have done. I want to interpret this as a sign in my favor.Did you think you were going to die?A pause filled my chest, a blank fear. We stood looking at each other. I waited for the second self to emerge, the cunning unlearned self, the animal we keep in reserve for such occasions. It would impel me to move in this or that direction, strategically, flooding my body with adrenalin. But there was only this heavy pause. I was fixed to the spot. Helpless, deprived of will. Why was I standing rigid on a wooded hill, fists clenched, facing a man with a gun? The situation pressed me to recall. This was the only thing to penetrate that blank moment-an awareness I could not connect to things. The words would come later. The single word, the final item on the list.American.How do you connect things?Learn their names. After I told the man from the Ministry what I'd seen in the pine woods, I told him everything else I knew, gave him all the names. Eliades, Rowser, Hardeman, all the tenuous connections. I gave him business cards, supplied approximate dates of conversations, names of restaurants, cities, airlines. Let the investigators work up chronologies, trace routes, check the passenger manifests. Their job was public order. Let them muse on the plausibilities.What else?Nothing. I reconstructed events in such a way that I was able to omit a certain name without causing the sequence to appear incomplete. It was Ann Maitland I didn't want them to know about. She was not of a type or mind to disavow this kind of protection, it seemed to me.She and I said nothing directly to each other about the shooting. It was coded matter. It was matter we could refer to only within the limits of a practiced look. Even this became too much. We began to look past each other, as if at meadows in the distance. Was Andreas the figure we saw? Our talks became ironic pastorales, slowly paced, with repeated attempts at tenderness.Lindsay spoke only of my coming to David's aid, which put a fine sheen on her tendency to reassure us all.The city went white with sun and dust. Charles would labor in the Gulf, installing radio links, infrared sensors. David would recover without complications, cracking jokes in the mandatory American manner, the cherished manner of people self-conscious about death. This is the humor of violent surprise.I see them in the primitive silkscreen the brain is able to produce, maybe eight inches in front of my closed eyes, miniaturized by time and distance, riddled by visual static, each figure a dancing red ribbon. These are among the people I've tried to know twice, the second time in memory and language. Through them, myself. They are what I've become, in ways I don't understand but which I believe will accrue to a rounded truth, a second life for me as well as for them.