Identity
A man was brought up before the magistrates upon charges of failure to fulfill paternal duties. (He was obviously liable — late on alimony payments). The court’s session was disturbed when sheriffs arrived from a faraway city and claimed the man, saying that he was wanted in their precinct for murder and other brutal deeds. The locals reacted with disbelief. They knew him for years as a mild, quite man — somewhat hard on his luck, that’s all. The sheriffs produced forensic evidence to substantiate their claim. It matched. The man was interrogated about things past and said he did not remember. Years ago he was found wandering on the outskirts of town — perhaps after an accident, he wasn’t sure — and made a slight living at odd jobs ever since. He could not account for anything that happened before, and said that “before” was incomprehensible to him. If terrible, horrible things were done he was very sorry — awfully so — but they could not, have not been done by him.
The sheriffs grew impatient as the court’s session lingered. The town was small and offered few diversions, and their task kept them unduly away from their families and the other things that they valued. Their claim was satisfied to any reasonable person’s content, and what more could the magistrate ask for? He was a middle-aged man who said he has never heard of anything like it. He wondered whether a different person now inhabits the body, the brain, of a one-time murderer. A psychiatrist was called to examine the man and testified that he couldn’t tell. Instead of a priest, which the magistrate distrusted, a philosopher was called in, and two showed up, each contradicting and mocking the other and crying foul and nonsense (the bailiff’s intervention prevented a fistfight). Articles were printed in local newspapers. A wife appeared from a neighboring province and claimed the man as hers: she brought a child along. The man didn’t know either. She wept. He wept. The sheriffs became less confident. People said they never heard of anything like it. An impatient sheriff called them ignorant. The others hushed him up.
For a short while the man contemplated acceptance by both families, both lives. Were they willing? He felt that he was claimed. Children wanted a father, their father. To his surprise he found in himself tenderness for all. None of my lives, he thought, should claim an exclusive hold on me. Let me take on all these fates, be both husbands (or ex), both fathers, murderer and blameless, newcomer and native. At long last, however, having played poker and drank with the sheriffs and other folks at the Main Street Hotel and Grill, he understood that even if he could do without an answer, the world required one. It demanded a name, a distinct end for every story, a line of flesh leading to every child. He missed the quarrelsome philosophers. The warden heard him mutter that one way or another, a thief must hang. And so in the dead of night he slipped away from his cell (the door was left open) and disappeared, never to be seen in that place or heard of since. Years later in a faraway hotel bar I, then a traveling salesman for a liquor company, heard that his name was Robert Hackler or Elijah Koch, and that in any case both names have since vanished from that place, too.