Columbus, Ohio, is the temporary refuge DL constructs after escaping Ralph Wayvone senior: a place to exchange pursuit and danger for a deliberately unremarkable identity. The city offers her a version of the ordinary life she had long imagined, but that shelter proves vulnerable. She makes herself difficult to notice, settles into routine, and is eventually abducted from a parking lot, leaving her car behind as the stubborn trace of a life interrupted.

Arrival and the Search for Anonymity

After slipping away from Ralph’s agents near Drain, Oregon, DL changes cars before reaching Los Angeles. She retrieves documents from a bank in Wilshire, buys a used Plymouth Fury with cash, and alters her appearance with a wig in a gas-station restroom. The changes are practical: she needs a new identity and a way to travel without drawing attention. Columbus is the destination she reaches after driving without stopping, arriving near midday amid thick fog and traffic.

The city gives her a place to turn escape into a daily existence. She rents a small apartment and finds work as a typist and records clerk at a distributor of vacuum-cleaner parts. The job and apartment are modest, but their ordinariness is precisely their use: they let DL exchange the exposed life of pursuit for a schedule and a name she can pass as her own. Columbus is not described as a dramatic sanctuary; its promise lies in being somewhere she can blend in.

Making an Alias into a Life

DL spends days assembling a wardrobe designed to make her less conspicuous. She chooses neutral and pale colors, low shoes and matching handbags, beige stockings, and white underwear. The effort is at once practical and revealing: she studies the visual details by which a person might become socially legible as nobody in particular. In time, she grows used to the reflection the disguise produces: short hair with bangs, freckles softened beneath foundation, and cosmetics she would not previously have worn. The alias takes shape as a provincial woman whose appearance and manner seem subdued.

Her car becomes part of the same project. She names the Plymouth Fury Felicia, buys it a new stereo, and washes it several times during the workweek as well as on Saturdays. These repeated attentions give the car a place in the routine she is building, not merely in the escape that brought her there. DL also swims and practices Tai Chi and other exercises learned in Japan. Columbus thus holds both halves of her adaptation: the outward discipline of looking ordinary and the private continuation of skills and habits carried from her earlier life.

The Ordinary Life She Imagined

The life DL builds in Columbus echoes a fantasy she had once described to Frenesi. She imagined Clark Kent not as a failed version of Superman but as someone able to exchange exceptional exposure for a quiet, chosen routine. In a Midwestern city, she pictured working for an evening newspaper, leaving at press time, and spending the evening in a nearby café among familiar regulars. She imagined small, repeatable pleasures and relationships that did not depend on danger or notoriety.

That imagined newspaper life is not the job she actually takes in Columbus: she works among vacuum-cleaner parts, typing and keeping records. The distinction matters. Her employment does not fulfill the fantasy literally, but the city offers its central condition, anonymity. Columbus lets her try out a life in which no one is waiting for her and nothing extraordinary is expected of her. The contrast between the modest real job and the expansive private dream makes the refuge feel both achievable and incomplete.

Abduction and the City's Afterimage

The experiment ends when professional abductors seize DL in the parking lot of a Pizza Hut and take her back to Japan. The episode is presented as a violent interruption of her attempt to disappear, not as a choice to leave Columbus. She initially fails to understand that the abduction will be represented to her as a step forward in her career; the promise of advancement belongs to the arrangement imposed on her, not to the life she had chosen in the city.

Her small car is left alone in the parking lot. The narration returns to it as an emblem of the abandoned routine: years and many miles later, it seems to call out in bewilderment over DL's failure to come back. Columbus therefore remains more than a stop on her route. It is the brief place where an assumed identity becomes a lived pattern, and where that pattern's fragility is made visible by the empty car left behind.