He’s sitting alone at the bar in the international airport in a place like Bhutan or Myanmar or Sri Lanka. He’s got a three-thousand-dollar watch on his arm and five-hundred-dollar sunglasses on his face, but these things don't distract us from the fact he hasn’t showered or shaved in five days. And it’s hot, mind you. A woman who may be a prostitute stares at him unabashedly from the other side of the room, into which orange sunlight pours through windows set way up high, amongst steel rafters, where wobble the ancient ceiling fans. He’s what we might call impossibly good looking. Even through the grime. He checks the Rolex. Gestures vaguely at the empty glass in front of him. The bartender, sixty-five and fatless unto ropiness, fills it halfway up with J&B. No ice. No water. A bereted soldier with a Kalashnikov ambles in, does a slow circuit of the place, examining the might-be prostitute, the rattan furniture, the chrome ashtrays, the polish of the red concrete floor, the CNN broadcast on the ’80s-era Trinitron behind the bar. Everything but the foreigner.
First you destroy all documents whose belief it is you exist. Birth and marriage certificates, apartment leases, gym memberships. You take a hammer to the cell phone, then drown the remains in the sink for good measure. You cancel all credit cards and have the bills forwarded to a P.O. box in a megalopolis like New York or L.A. A month later, you change the forwarding address to a different city. A month after that, change it again. Pay all balances in full. Then start weaving the perfunctory web of bullshit. Go to Duluth, say, and apply for an apartment rental. Go to Sarasota and apply for a loan at the local Cadillac dealership. The credit checks show up on your credit report, so it’s to Duluth and Sarasota they go looking. Or, if they’ve got the I.Q.s of baseball bats, even, everywhere else. Which is a lot of places to look. Next, open new bank accounts on several different continents, places where you’ve got, as they say, people. Get said people to make ATM withdrawals on your behalf from each new account. Have a sibling or close friend call the same number the same time of day every day for three weeks, a pay phone, maybe, in Liverpool, St. Petersburg, Messina. Anywhere you’re not. They’ll see this, of course, when they get to rooting through your siblings’ and friends’ phone records. In the final stages things get more abstract. You need no fewer than two but preferably four or five dummy companies where you can hide the money that’s all that’s left of you. And you’ll naturally want to incorporate in countries whose banks are in the habit of giving the finger to foreign governments and police departments. Finally, choose a new home. A politically troubled region, maybe, that no one really wants to travel to. Stupidest would be the island paradise any jack-booted thug would be happy to vacation in anyway. Don’t give them any more reasons. Arrive at your destination via stops in four or five major cities, paying cash for airline tickets at each one.
You’d think we spend our whole lives trying
