The Runner by David Samuels

relieved, but she was worried for him, too. She called his cell phone when he was on the run, and he took her calls.

    “Have you gone crazy?” she asked him.

    “I guess I have,” he answered. She thinks he told her that he loved her, but she is not
    sure. The story is at once pathetic and touching, because it shows what nearly all of us will do to hear the reassuring voice on the other end of the phone. Next to the promise of love, very little else matters. The next morning she found his jacket in her car with a note that said, “Happy belated Christmas, I love you, James.” He stayed in town for at least two weeks after he
    disappeared, living in abandoned condos, to see if things would cool down, and planning his getaway to Arizona, where he would start a new life.

    When I asked SuperStar for a positive memory of being with Jim, she answered that she
    had enjoyed spending time with him outdoors. “He loved being out in the snow, or in the
    mountains in the summer,” she remembered. He also loved kids, or the idea of kids, and spoke about having children. “But he can’t have kids,” SuperStar said, telling me of the medical articles he saved, and the times they had sex in the middle of her cycle. She wanted to know more about Jim. She wanted me to tell her the story of who he really is, because he was a good person
    sometimes, and because he hurt people, and because she doesn’t understand how the pieces of his frustrated personality fit together.

    “He really wanted to be the ideal person, to have the perfect life, but he couldn’t have it,”
    SuperStar said as the café closes. They would sit together on the bed, SuperStar stoned, Hogue cold sober. He never smoked the weed he grew. He would lie in bed and lay out his plans for the future. Sometimes it felt good to lie next to him. “But more often he wasn’t even looking at me,”
    she remembered, with surprising bitterness. “He’d be staring off into the dreamworld that he created.” Perhaps SuperStar was suspicious that Hogue’s dreamworld didn’t include her, or
    perhaps his descriptions of the future sounded like fantasies even to an eighteen-year-old girl.
    Their conversations left her feeling cold and alone. “He would keep talking and talking,” she remembered sadly. “I don’t think he was ever really there.”

    X. The Application

    On my last evening in Telluride, I opened up a battered manila folder that I brought with
    me from New York, and began to read. The papers inside had been written two decades ago by
    an eighteen-year-old whose amazing life story had captivated nearly everyone who met him until it was finally revealed to be a lie. The folder and its contents had arrived at my office in New York through the offices of a lawyer who had finally obtained copies for me more than fifteen years after the originals were supposedly destroyed. Some of the documents were typewritten, and others were written by hand. There are about thirty pages in all. Together, they served as the blueprint for the greatest deception of Hogue’s self-made career.

    Once the papers arrived, and I identified them as genuine, I found other things to occupy
    my time. The essays and letters and lists inside seemed too important to read in a hurried way, before the stakes of Jim’s case seemed clear, and before I felt sure about my own feelings about a subject whose defining feature was his opacity. Because Jim made himself so hard to read, and held so many parts of himself back, and became expert in inventing new identities, he made
    himself into a screen on which people could project their hopes and dreams. Jim could be
    anything that you wanted him to be. It was hard to say where my sympathy for Hogue came
    from, and that made me wary. Perhaps the idea of a continuous self was only a fiction that made it easier to enforce mortgage contracts and collect taxes. We become someone new every two or three years like a snake shedding its skin, and it is only