Free The Dead Student by John Katzenbach Page B

strongly—that’s saving a life,” his father used to say. His father had been wrong. Or, if not wrong, he thought, limited.
    He considered the name he’d been born with to be a sort of slave name, so he’d left it behind, discarding it along with his past as he’d shifted trust funds and stock portfolios into anonymous overseas accounts. It was the name of his youth, his ambition, his legacy, and then what he thought of as his abject failure. It was the name that he’d had when he’d first plunged helplessly into bipolar psychosis, been ousted from medical college, and found himself in a straitjacket on the way to a private mental hospital. It was the name that his doctors had used when they treated him, and the name that he’d had when he’d finally emerged—allegedly stabilized—only to survey the wasteland that his life had become.
    Stabilized was a word he held in contempt.
    Exiting the clinic where he’d spent almost a year, even as a young man he had known he had to become someone new. I died once. I lived again.
    So, from the day of his release, through each year that passed, he was careful to always take the proper, daily psychotropic medications. He scheduled regular six-month, fifteen-minute appointments with a psychopharmacologist to make certain that unexpected hallucinations, unwanted mania, and unnecessary stress were constantly kept at bay. He was devoted to exercising his body and was just as rigorous in training his sanity.
    And this he’d accomplished. No recurrent swings of madness. Levelheaded. Solid emotionally. New identities. Constructed carefully. Taking his time. Building each character into something real.
    On 121 West 87 th Street, Apartment 7B, he was Bruce Phillips.
    In Charlemont, Massachusetts, in the weather-beaten double-widetrailer on Zoar Road with the rusted satellite dish and cracked windowpanes that overlooked the catch-and-release trout fishing segment of the Deerfield River, he was known as Blair Munroe. This was a literary homage that only he could appreciate. He liked Saki’s haunting short stories, which gave him the Munroe —he’d reluctantly added the e to the author’s real last name—and Blair was George Orwell’s actual last name.
    And in Key West, in the small, expensively reconditioned 1920s cigar-maker’s house he owned on Angela Street, he was Stephen Lewis. The Stephen was for Stephen King or Stephen Dedalus—he changed his mind from time to time about the literary antecedent—and the Lewis was for Lewis Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson.
    But all these names were as fictional as the characters he’d created for them. Private investment specialist in New York; social worker at the VA hospital in Massachusetts; and in Key West, lucky drug dealer who’d pulled off a single big load and retired instead of getting greedy and hauled in by the DEA and imprisoned .
    But curiously, none of these personae really spoke to him. Instead, he thought of himself solely as Student #5. That was who he had been when his life had changed. That was who had systematically repaired the immense wrongs so thoughtlessly and cavalierly done to him as a young man.
    Still walking north, he took a quick left to Riverside Drive so that he could steal a look from the park across the Hudson toward New Jersey before the sun finally set. He wondered whether he should stop in a grocery over on Broadway to pick up some prepackaged sushi for dinner. He had one death that he had to carefully review, assess, and analyze in depth. A postmortem conference with myself, he thought. And he had one more death to consider. A premortem conference with myself. He very much wanted this last act to be special, and he wanted the person he was hunting to know it. This last one—he needs to know what’s coming. No surprises. A dialogue with death. The conversation I wasn’t allowed to have so many years ago. There was both risk and challenge within this desire—which gave him a sense of