Over the past few weeks, William and I have been e-mailing regularly. I will call him William Dockett, for clarity’s sake. Because when you live two separate lives, as he does, and when you have been maintaining these two separate lives for twenty years, as he has, coming across as shifty and paranoid is something of an inevitability.
Revealing it now would open him up to the potential of recognition, and, frankly, just imagining a scenario like that makes him wonder why he agreed to meet in the first place. He could tell me a fake name, he says, though not the one he typically uses when meeting a man in the middle of the day, since he has been using the same fake name for so long that it is almost real. The man sitting across from me would like to tell me his name, but doing so is against his rules.
