Though Raymond Halliday landed a job in television not long after moving to the North, he had never tried to make a new name for himself. It was enough for him to be working the nightshift at a local cable TV station, where he sat for nine-hour stretches before a wall of monitors flipping between black-and-white scenes of criminals and cops and commercials for the likes of litigation law firms and mattress salesmen. In that giant casino of a city where the stakes are so high in the fame game that a player can either become a household name or remain a stranger in his own neighborhood, Raymond counted himself in with neither the lost nor the found. He did not go there to be discovered but to avoid being condemned. After all, as he had conceded, driving was simply not working out for him. While still living in an anonymous suburb on the southern edge of the country, Raymond had totaled four cars in two consecutive accidents. The first time, he made a left turn in front of a young couple on the way to their friends’ wedding reception. The husband had carried his wife out of the passenger side of the wrecked sports coupe and, after gently laying her and her light pink dress on the dirty pavement, had scowled, “That’s right, look at her, you son of bitch!” Raymond’s next car tumbled across the asphalt like debris in a windstorm when the front of a speeding station wagon plunged into its passenger side door. The three people from the station wagon were already standing on the street by time Raymond had climbed out of his own edifice of bent steel and broken glass. The other driver, a tall heavy man no more than twenty years old, walked off from his crying kid sister and his cane-supported mother to meet the disoriented Raymond, whereupon the young man slightly furrowed his brow and stated, “You know you ran a red light?” Faced with an unmanageable new rate of auto insurance and a lack of desire to tempt fate any further, Raymond left his hometown for the city with the largest public transportation system in the country. But although he was being carried around by trains and buses now, he still always carried with him his driver’s license, which had been the most accepted proof of who he was. One morning after leaving the TV station, Raymond went to the Department of Motor Vehicles to renew his driver’s license. After pulling a number out of the dispenser and finding a seat beside another empty chair, Raymond scribbled his new address on an official form. Then, while listening to the ringing of a service bell and its accompanying automated voice announcing other people’s numbers, he took out the driver’s license