Going incognito is easier than you think. First you have to cut your hair, which is probably the hardest part. You’ve always had long hair — at least since you were nine or ten, anyway. Sylvia always wanted to cut it short because she said she thought you looked so cute with short hair, or maybe she just said that because you never brushed it and it got all knotted and she ended up yanking clumps of it from your head while you howled, face skyward, eyes scrunched shut against her annoyingly beatific smile. The way you cut it now isn’t cute; it’s just short. Shockingly short. Even Sylvia would hate it if she saw it, although she would probably just smile even bigger and look even more critical of you. You’ll cry a little about the hair, but after it’s done you’ll look so unlike your old self you’ll realize it was worth it.

You can color the hair, too — either bright red or else good old standby blonde, and when the roots come in, tint those bluish-black so that people will be confused and think that was your original shade. The goal here is to erase whatever you were and start anew so no one could possibly recognize you. It doesn’t matter that you don’t know that many people — you’ve made sure of that — and that few if any of the people who do know you would bother to hunt you down if you disappeared. Those who would hunt you down are strangers. You need to be a stranger too.

Next you get holes. Three more on the left and two more on the right. You think about doing a nostril but it looks like a hassle so you say forget it, seven silver hoops tangling and dangling from your lobes will do. You consider a tattoo for some time in the near future, but it has to be something random, without any significance to your or anyone else’s life — a toad, maybe. Or a peanut. Something brown, something you won’t miss when it fades to unrecognizable haze.

You don’t need them, but get a pair of vanity glasses — big, dark, nerdy-in-a-chic-way frames. It also doesn’t matter much what you wear as long as it’s baggy and ill-fitting and misrepresents the real shape of your body. It won’t be fun dressing this way but at least you won’t be stared at like poultry — legs, thighs, breasts, in a tight-fitting, see-through package. You’ll think it’s funny how most women your age yearn to be seen that way.

One thing you don’t do, though, is start some sort of method acting exercise where you invent a role to fit your new look. Don’t pick up a Cockney accent or start quoting Dostoevsky or throwing your head back recklessly when you laugh. You’ve always been a good liar, but good liars know what they can and can’t get away with, and you know you’d never be able to get away with lying a whole new personality for yourself. Besides, you don’t have to do all that; you’ll probably become someone else anyway, without even trying. All this time, when the peroxide is being squirted in, when you’re sitting in the piercing shop waiting for the third hole on the right, when you’re pawing through bins of nubby flannel shirts in the thrift shop, you’ve been thinking of that someone else you used to be. It’s hard to even remember who she was, if she was anyone at all. So now, perhaps she — you — really could be anyone at all.

Recognition is a tiny explosion in the brain. When you look at yourself, finally, after all the changes, there’s no explosion; you aren’t shocked at how you look so not you. You simply don’t acknowledge that what you see is you.

The last step is different. It requires help and cash. You need to purchase the name of some girl who was born and was given a social security number but died very, very young. That becomes your new name and social security number, your newly minted identity. This is serious going under, a major felony and a lot more drastic than putting seven holes in your head, since even those will close up if you let them. The illegality isn’t what scares you, though. You keep thinking that you might be waiting tables somewhere one day and this woman you’re serving keeps staring at your nametag with an odd look on her face until you realize she’s the dead baby’s mother. You wonder what would happen, if she’d be violently angry at you for desecrating her dead daughter’s name, or if she’d completely flip out and think you really were her daughter, alive all these years and living incognito. Mary-Lou, honey, is that really you? My baby’s all grown up now. It’s crazy, especially the name Mary-Lou, but you keep thinking about it until you can actually see this woman running up to you, arms wide to take you back in, and for one confusing moment you forget who you’re supposed to be and panic, thinking there’s some other life you should have been living all this time, but you weren’t living it at all.

This is my life. It’s a life of such strangeness it often doesn’t feel like it’s mine but someone else’s — yours, not mine.

But it is mine. And I did, that Tuesday morning in mid-September, need to get new documentation. The place I chose wasn’t in some seedy dark alley littered with dirty needles; it was in one of those blandly generic office building complexes, the somewhat lower-end ones that house divorce lawyers and fledgling CPAs. There were a lot of these places in this city, which was one reason why I hadn’t left it, and so far had no need to leave it. The front this particular place used was a courier service, which was smart — it wouldn’t look so odd that odd-looking people were constantly coming and going. I tried not to use the same outfit more than once or twice, because I knew they’d start remembering me and putting the pieces together: young-looking Asian woman seeks new identity at a time when youthful Asian woman are routinely being asked to provide evidence of their date of birth to discover if it’s pre-21st century. My real birth date isn’t. That information is worth a lot of money to a great many people.

The best thing about the courier service front is that you never know who’s a courier and who’s on the run. When I arrived there was only one other person waiting there, a slightly scruffy young man, and since scruff is a common commodity in these places, he might have been there for any number of reasons, getting a bit of extra cash to carry a cooler full of transplant organs to Brazil or getting a bit of documentation asserting that he did, in fact, have the proper permits to own several hundred machine guns — or, for that matter, grenades. I sat an appropriate number of empty chairs away from him and waited.

There was a TV in the waiting room, turned to some newscast or other. Coming up next, is Gerald Lindstrom finally ready to share his discovery with the world? Or is the elusive Lao Baby genius taking his secrets to the grave? I shook my head. The same story, again and again, the worst kind of tease for an already tormented population.

“I know, right?”

I jerked my head up and cursed inwardly for doing so. I have to work on that, curbing my reflexive reactions. Those kinds of things can get you killed. Well, almost anything can get you killed these days. The young man was grinning at me. He nodded at the TV. “Same crap as always.” His scruff, now that I could observe more directly, seemed a little forced in the way of a young man who forgets to shave one day and likes the rakish way the stubble looks. The backwards baseball cap only added to the effect. “I’m here for a liquor license. You?”

Against my better judgment (but also because silence would seem too suspicious), I said, “You want a drink that badly? Could you wait another year or two?”

He frowned but was clearly delighted that I’d engaged him. “Not a fake ID. I am over 21, believe it or not. A liquor license. I want to open a restaurant. I’m a chef, see,” he beamed proudly, then added, “Well, I cook stuff, anyway. And maybe a lot of cocktails in my customers will make them think I’m a chef and not just a cook. But holy shit, you have any idea how long it takes to get a real liquor license?”

His chatter made me wary, struck me as totally inappropriate and thus possibly a ploy to divert my attention. But here’s the problem with living in a world where nothing is ever as it seems: everything becomes absurdly layered, and his overly friendly attitude was so very wrong that it had to be genuine. I looked at him looking at me. I watched him smile, slowly, lazily, like he’d just read my thoughts, or misread them, rather, and caught me picturing us somewhere else, without harsh fluorescent lighting and empty chairs between us. “You?” he said, softly, and I almost missed that it was a question and not a statement meant to draw me to him.

“Courier. Vaccines to west Africa. They won’t work, of course, but I get a free trip out of it.”

“Cynical.”

“Truth.”

He was enjoying this. “You’re one of those people who thinks the truth always has to be ugly, aren’t you?”

“I’m not one of ‘those’ people for anything,” I said, and could have smacked myself for being a little too honest, but I had to continue. “And truth isn’t ugly, beautiful or anything else. It just is. We’re the ones who want to force it in one box or another.”

“I don’t care about what’s ugly. There’s still beauty in the world.” He smiled, eyes focused on my mouth. “You’d believe that too if you let me cook for you.”

Well, at least he hadn’t said “cook breakfast.” That would have been just too perfect.

“My name is Jimmy. And you are…?”

Good question. New identity or old? Since I didn’t have my exact new identity, I had to tell him the old: “Jane.”

His face changed. Bad associations? Former girlfriend who dumped him? No, he didn’t look angry but puzzled. He looked off to my left — to the small window behind me. Stupid, stupid, stupid — I knew better than that. I had made sure to sit where I could see the door but hadn’t thought about the window.

“Uh, Jane?” he said.

My body tensed. “What.”

He said nothing for a moment, his face frozen. Then he sprang from his seat, right at me.

“Run.”