I awake inside his mind; frightened, disoriented from so much reading and researching. As if my eyes had opened in an unfamiliar room. Angst from the dream lingers. I had committed a heinous crime or was being pursued and condemned despite my innocence. Someone was pointing a gun at me and I could not run or defend myself. I could not move. Before thoughts can fully form, the secret novelist inside us all is already plotting stories. The room in shadows was concave and the ceiling low like a cave or basement or the skull that holds his brain, his feverish mind, exhausted from reading and solitary thinking, with all his memories, his physical features, the images of his life, his heart palpitations, the propensity to believe he had contracted a fatal disease, cancer, an angina, the routine of hiding and fleeing.

I woke up and for a moment I forgot where I was and I was like him, or he himself, because I was having a dream more his than mine. I was in shock that I could not recognize the room where I had fallen asleep just two hours earlier; was not able to remember the position of the bed in relation to the window and other furniture, or my location in a space that was suddenly unknown; I even struggled trying to remember what city I was in. This probably happened to him often, after sleeping in so many places while on the run, thirteen months and three weeks, five countries, fifteen cities, two continents, not to mention all the nights in different motels and boardinghouses, the nights curled, shivering against a tree, or under a bridge, or in the backseat of the car, or on a bus that smells of tobacco and plastic and arrives at the underground parking of a station at three in the morning, or that night he was so anxious, flying for the first time, paralyzed by fear, looking out through the small oval window into that dark abyss, the surface of the ocean shining like wet ink under the moonlight. (He would fly overnight once more, crossing the Atlantic in the opposite direction; this time in handcuffs and fetters; dozing off against the window, in a dream where the handcuffs transformed into vines and the weight of the fetters was the mud where his feet were sinking.)

* * *

My dream could have been his and, in any case, has everything to do with him, although he did not appear. I have spent too many hours immersed in his life, days on end since I arrived in Lisbon. It only takes a few seconds online to access the archives containing detailed accounts of almost everything he did, places he visited, crimes he committed, prisons where he was held, even the names of women who slept with him or shared a drink at a bar. I know the magazines and novels he read and the brand of salted crackers left open and half-eaten in a rented room in a boardinghouse in Atlanta where his name never made it to the register because the owner was too drunk to ask for it. Photocopies and scanned pages of old files list every article of clothing he took to a dry cleaner in Atlanta on March 30, 1968, and picked up the morning of April 5; or the forensic report on the trajectory of the bullet he fired the day before, April 4, in Memphis, from the bathroom of a boardinghouse, resting the barrel of a Remington .30-06 rifle on the windowsill; or a declaration from the plastic surgeon who operated on the tip of his nose in Los Angeles; or the copy of a fingerprint left on a mail order clipped from a photography magazine.

Even the most secret lives leave an indelible trace. At that time, advertisements in magazines often included mail order forms. The vastness of reality produces equal measures of astonishment and insomnia. It is amazing how much you can learn about a person and still never truly know him, because he never said what was most important: a dark hole, a blank space; a mug shot, the rough lines of a facial composite based on disjointed testimonies and vague memories. He survived on instant coffee, heated with a submersible heating element, powdered milk, canned beans, and French fries dipped in mustard or Kraft salad dressing. He frequented the cheapest diners and ordered his burgers with extra onion, bacon, ketchup, and cheese. He ate his fries by the handful. Some remembered him being left-handed, others were certain he always used his right hand to sign and smoke. In some of the police descriptions he has light brown hair; in others, black and graying on the sides. He had a small scar on his forehead and another on one of his palms. People remembered him smoking, holding the cigarette in his right hand, which displayed a gold ring finger with a dark green stone. But he was not a smoker and did not wear rings. A ring could be one of those details that make you easier to remember and identify. He never got any tattoos.

I stayed up late searching his tracks through the vast sleepless memory of the Internet. When I finally turned off the lights, my eyes burned from staring at the computer for so many hours, and my head turned with dates, names, and trivial events — a modicum of reality that was hard to imagine someone making up. In prison, to stay in shape, he learned to walk on his hands and do complicated yoga postures in the small cell. He could gain or lose weight easily. To the end, he took Polaroids of himself regularly: with sunglasses, without them, with eyeglasses, always foreshortened, never in profile because profiles were too distinctive, even after the nose surgery, also never directly from the front, as the big ears would surely set him apart. He would send different photos of himself to contacts in pen pal clubs, thinking this would confuse the authorities when they started looking for him. In a hospitality school in Los Angeles, he learned how to mix one hundred twenty different cocktails. For several months, he took a locksmith correspondence course offered by a school in New Jersey. Among his papers, they found a brochure about all the advantages of a career in locksmithing. When he was nine or ten, he would wake up to his own screams every night. He dreamed that he was blind. He tried to wake up and open his eyes, but he still couldn't see because he had fallen into another dream of blindness. He was scared of falling asleep, scared of his nightmares. He did his best to stay awake through the night. In the dark, he could hear his father and mother snoring, both drunk on a bare mattress, using old coats as blankets. On straw mattresses across the dilapidated floor, his siblings huddled together, covered in lice and bedbugs, hungry, trying to keep warm during those winter nights in the one-room house, breathing smoke from the old wood-burning stove.

* * *

I have learned so much about him that sometimes I feel like I am recalling his own memories, places he saw where I've never been: the Nevada desert on the highway to Las Vegas, the cobbled streets and low houses of Puerto Vallarta, the echoing corridors of a prison with stone walls and towers and Gothic vaults, the silhouette of the Lorraine Motel seen in the distance from a window in a bathroom, a putrid room in a boardinghouse surrounded by empty lots and heaps of trash, in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Memphis. I have decided I have no choice but to travel to Memphis. I have written down the address of the hotel in Lisbon where, forty-five years ago, he spent ten days while on the run. I googled the name and learned the hotel still exists and it is only fifteen minutes away from here. In this moment, a figment of my imagination suddenly...