Conrad

Conrad’s arrival in Chamblee marks a precarious passage from prison escape to life under an invented identity. The forged documents Lum Loc gives him make him Cornelius Alonzo DeCasi on paper, but a newspaper report about the ruins of Santa Rita offers no assurance that his escape has gone unnoticed; away from prison, Conrad finds that freedom brings an unsettling solitude.

Arrival in Chamblee

Conrad wakes on the filthy carpet of a shabby apartment, disoriented by a dream of the earth shifting and Five-O pinned beneath concrete. For an instant, he cannot place himself: Asian faces look down at him, and the carpet beneath him is the first clue that he is no longer at Santa Rita. As he comes around, the previous night returns to him. He is in a ground-floor apartment at Meadow Lark Terrace in Chamblee, just outside Atlanta, where Mai had promised he would be taken.

Lum Loc had met Conrad in the airport baggage-claim area, recognizing him by his Hi-Gro baseball cap. They drove to Chamblee in Lum Loc’s pickup, and Conrad spent the night in the apartment. By morning, the small living room is crowded with Vietnamese residents—far more people than he remembers from the night before. The crowded home is a temporary refuge, not a place where he can settle indefinitely.

Cornelius Alonzo DeCasi

Lum Loc takes Conrad aside and produces a paper bag marked with Conrad’s name. Inside are a Social Security card and a Georgia driver’s license bearing the name Cornelius Alonzo DeCasi, along with a Michigan birth certificate embossed with an official stamp. The license carries Conrad’s photograph; the birth certificate gives the new identity a date of birth, December 2, 1977, and parents named Margaret Stuart DeCasi and Demetrio Giovanni de Bari DeCasi.

Lum Loc presents the birth certificate as genuine and tells Conrad that Cornelius Alonzo DeCasi died in 1982. He has no death certificate to complete the story. The papers provide Conrad with a usable identity, but they also give that identity a history and an endpoint that belong to someone else. Lum Loc’s immediate instruction is that Conrad must get a job; the apartment is not a permanent hiding place.

News from Santa Rita

Conrad goes to Mr. Saigon Noodle Parlor, pays his bill, and buys a copy of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for sixty cents before returning to his table and ordering green tea for seventy-five cents. He searches the want ads, then turns urgently to the news, afraid that the earthquake and the escapees may have made him identifiable. The report says the long-dormant Hayward fault has caused a disaster: three blocks of downtown Pleasanton, the Camp Parks U.S. Army Reserve Center, and the Alameda County Jail have been demolished. Eight people are dead and twenty inmates remain unaccounted for, but the article gives no names and mentions no manhunt.

The lack of identifying information does not reassure him. Conrad wonders how authorities will search for escapees in an age of computers and the Internet, and he does not dare call Jill. He considers whether to contact Kenny or Mai, but neither possibility resolves his uncertainty. The newspaper lets him know what happened to the prison without telling him what will happen to a fugitive who has disappeared from its records.

Solitude after escape

The scene measures Conrad’s new isolation against the forced company of prison life. At Santa Rita, Five-O, Mutt, and the other inmates were part of the daily world he had to navigate, whether he wanted their company or not. In Chamblee, the apartment is full of people, yet Conrad feels a hollowness that food cannot fill. Lum Loc is the only person he can readily turn to, and Conrad suspects that Lum Loc has already moved on to other clients.

The contrast complicates escape as a simple arrival at freedom: the prison’s confinement had also supplied routine contact with other people, while the outside world leaves Conrad without a secure identity or dependable human connection. His forged papers answer the practical question of what name he can use; the unanswered question is where, and with whom, he can belong.