The Man Who Was Someone

The storage facility didn’t need a night guard. The cameras did the work. The alarm system did the work. The chain-link fence topped with razor wire did the work. But the owner, a man named Palladino who wore tracksuits to business meetings, believed in the appearance of security. So Marcus Chen sat in a prefab office from eleven at night until seven in the morning, five nights a week, and drank coffee that tasted like it had been filtered through a sock.

Marcus was forty-three minutes into his Tuesday shift when he realized someone had moved his chair.

Not far. An inch, maybe two. The wear pattern on the industrial carpet showed where the caster had sat for months, and now it sat slightly to the left. He noticed because he noticed things like that. It was the only useful skill he had left.

He didn’t get up. He looked at the monitors. Twelve cameras, twelve angles of empty corridors and locked units. Unit 247 had a flicker. It always had a flicker. He’d reported it three times. Palladino had said he’d fix it. That was eight months ago.

Marcus reached into his bag and took out the flask. It was a Tuesday, so it was bourbon. Thursdays were vodka. He didn’t remember why he’d assigned them that way. Some system he’d invented to feel like he had systems.

The chair creaked as he leaned back. The ceiling had a water stain shaped like Florida. He’d named it after an ex-girlfriend. He couldn’t remember her name anymore, but he remembered the shape.

At 12:15, a car pulled into the lot. Marcus watched it on Camera 3. A silver Camry, nothing special. It parked in the visitor space and sat there with the engine running. Marcus counted the seconds. At forty-three, the engine died. At fifty-seven, the driver’s door opened.

A woman got out. She was maybe fifty, grey hair cut short, wearing a coat that looked expensive in a way Marcus could recognize but not afford. She didn’t look at the cameras. She looked at the office window, directly into the light Marcus had left on, and she smiled like she was expected.

Marcus put the flask away. He straightened his shirt. These were the moments he prepared for, the moments he had a script for.

The door opened. The woman stepped in, bringing cold air with her.

“Marcus,” she said.

He didn’t know her. He was certain he didn’t know her. He had a system for that too, a mental filing cabinet of faces, and hers wasn’t in it.

“Can I help you?” he asked. “We’re closed. Visitors by appointment only.”

“I’m your sister,” she said.

Marcus had never had a sister. He’d had a mother who died when he was four, a father who disappeared before he was born, and eighteen years in a group home where he’d learned that family was a word other people used. He’d never had a sister.

“I think you have the wrong person,” he said.

She reached into her coat and took out a photograph. She placed it on the desk between them. Marcus looked at it without touching it.

A boy and a girl, maybe ten and twelve, standing on a beach. The boy had Marcus’s face. Younger, fuller, happier, but his face. The girl had the woman’s face. Younger, fuller, happier.

“This was Cape Cod,” she said. “1998. You were eleven. I was thirteen. You’d just learned to bodysurf and you wouldn’t stop. Mom made you wear that rash guard because you burned so easily.”

Marcus looked at the photograph. He looked at his own face on the boy. He looked at the woman’s face on the girl.

“I don’t have a sister,” he said.

“You have me,” she said. “You have a whole life you don’t remember. A whole family. We thought you were dead for fifteen years, Marcus. We had a funeral. Mom never got over it. And then six months ago, a friend of mine saw you in a grocery store in Queens. Buying vodka and frozen pizza at two in the morning.”

She said this without judgment. She said it like she was reading from a script she’d rehearsed until the emotion wore off.

“I think you should go,” Marcus said.

She didn’t move. She took out another photograph. A house, a two-story colonial with blue shutters. A man and a woman on the porch, waving.

“That’s our house,” she said. “In Newton. Mom and Dad bought it in 1985. You were born in the upstairs bedroom because Dad couldn’t get the car started and the midwife was late.”

“I was born in a hospital in Jersey City,” Marcus said. “St. Mary’s. I have the birth certificate.”

“Do you?” she asked.

Marcus didn’t answer. He had a birth certificate. He’d had it for twenty years, folded in a file folder in a storage unit he rented in another facility, one where he wasn’t the guard. He’d looked at it maybe twice. It had his name, his date of birth, his parents’ names. It had an official seal.

The woman reached into her coat again. This time she took out a folder. She placed it on top of the photograph.

“Mom died last year,” she said. “Cancer. She left you everything. The house, some money, her jewelry. She never stopped believing you were alive. She used to say, ‘Your brother’s out there, Rachel. He’s just lost. We have to wait for him to find his way home.’”

Marcus looked at the folder. He looked at the woman. Rachel.

“I don’t know you,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m here. To help you remember.”

She stood up. She buttoned her coat. She took a business card from her pocket and placed it on the desk.

“My number. My address. The lawyer’s number. Take your time. But Marcus? Don’t take too long. The house needs to be sold or kept. There are decisions. And I need to know my brother. Even if he doesn’t know me.”

She left. The door closed. The Camry started. The Camry left.

Marcus sat in his chair. He looked at the photograph. He looked at the folder. He looked at the business card.

Then he reached into his bag and took out the flask again. He drank until the burn made his eyes water.

At 2:00 AM, he locked the office and walked to his car. He drove to his apartment, a studio in a building where the elevator worked every other day. He climbed three flights of stairs. He unlocked three locks. He went inside.

The apartment was small and clean in a way that suggested absence rather than care. A futon folded into a couch. A hot plate. A mini-fridge. On the wall above the futon, three medals hung in a shadow box.

Marcus took the shadow box down. He opened it. He took out the medals.

They were beautiful. Bronze and silver, with ribbons in red and blue and green. One had an eagle. One had a star. One had a wreath. They looked like military decorations. They looked like the medals of a man who had been somewhere, done something, been someone.

Marcus turned them over.

On the back of each, in small engraved letters: Replica. Not for official wear. $12.99.

He’d bought them online six years ago. He’d bought the shadow box too. He’d hung them on his wall and told himself the story of who he used to be, a story of service and sacrifice and a fall that wasn’t his fault, a story that explained why a man with medals lived in a studio apartment and drank bourbon from a flask and worked security at a storage facility no one wanted to break into.

He’d invented the fall because the truth was worse.

The truth was he’d never been anyone. He’d never served. He’d never sacrificed. He’d never been a hero who lost his way. He’d been a boy in a group home who grew into a man with no one to witness his life, and one day he’d decided that being a fallen hero was better than being nothing at all.

Marcus put the medals back in the box. He put the box on the shelf. He lay down on the futon and stared at the ceiling.

The woman, Rachel, had photographs. She had a folder. She had a house in Newton and a dead mother and a brother who looked like him.

She had a story.

And Marcus, who had spent six years telling himself a story about medals he bought for thirteen dollars, knew exactly how powerful a story could be.

He didn’t sleep. At 5:00 AM, he got up and made coffee. He sat at his small table and opened the folder she’d left.

Inside: more photographs. A birth certificate. Not his. A different one, with a different hospital, a different city. A childhood in color. Birthday parties. Graduations. A young man in a college sweatshirt, smiling, whole, loved.

The young man was Marcus.

Or looked like him. Or was him, in some life he didn’t remember, couldn’t remember, had never known.

At the bottom of the folder, a newspaper clipping. A small article, local news. Local Man Missing. Marcus Chen, 22, last seen leaving a party in Cambridge on October 14, 2005. Family requests information.

Marcus read the date. October 14, 2005. He’d been twenty-two. He’d been in a group home in New Jersey, then in a halfway house, then on his own. He’d been nowhere near Cambridge. He’d never been to Cambridge.

Had he?

He looked at the photograph of the young man in the college sweatshirt. Harvard. Crimson and white. The young man was smiling at a camera held by someone who loved him. Someone who knew him. Someone who was his sister.

Marcus touched his own face. He touched the photograph.

He didn’t know which one was real.

He didn’t know if either was real.

He only knew that for the first time in six years, the medals on his wall didn’t matter. The story he’d told himself didn’t matter.

Someone else had told a story about him. And she was coming back.

Chapter 2