The magistrate ushered me to the cashier. The hallway was all brown and municipal yellow, and I loved that no one had tried to make the building sleek or user-friendly. The civil courthouse and elementary schools in poorer neighborhoods were shabbily insulated from modernity.

I found the cashier on the aged eighth floor and handed over my records and the eighteen-dollar check that would grant me a new persona.

The cashier, a Black woman with a pug calendar next to her computer, said, “Sir, I need a proper check.”

“Excuse me?”

“It says that your name is now Penfield R. Henderson and that doesn’t match the name on the check.”

“Right, because I just got it changed.”

“I need an accurate check.”

“Should I come back?”

“No, you cannot leave the building with the valise.”

Before I could open my mouth to protest, she said, “And yes, I’ve read Kafka, Solzhenitsyn, and Achebe. I’m well-versed both experientially and in a literary sense in the serpentine nature of bureaucracy and how it is designed to subjugate—to smoosh, as Jewish mothers say—the ordinary citizen, and especially”—she winked—“the non-ordinary ones.”

I was almost ready to concede when Sara K. rushed up.

“Damn it, Pen, you shouldn’t try to do anything without your lawyer present. That’s for poor people who get totally chewed up by the system.”

Without waiting for any instruction, she took out an ink stamp from her bag, pushed in two truncheons to shorten it, dipped the stamp in ink and pressed it down on top of the U, T, and H.

Before the cashier could object, she whipped out a calligraphy tool and inserted a period next to the R.

“Are we all set,” she asked, although it was a statement.

The cashier sighed, peeled the seal off my forehead, and dropped it into the valise. She handed me three Declarations of a Changed Name.

“I’ll be in touch,” I told Sara K.

“Yeah, you must come up,” she said, referring to her five-bedroom house in Westchester, the end of a trajectory she briefly abandoned during her college stoner phase. As she kissed me on the cheek, I smelled her perfume, unchanged in ten years, the musky scent of Stella: rose, balsam, and amber mixed with parabens to maintain “freshness.”

If only I had the luxury—or was it a curse?—to keep any part of myself for ten years.

I found Aiden and Minna in the lobby. I showed them the official document. Behind us, the security guards were growing their piles of guns, liquids, metal-studded shoes, and other banned objects.

Outside, the sky stretched over everything without a break, a jagged tear, a lapse, or a lessening of soft, limp blue. The palette was kind, predating Pantone, which had separated every color into an upper-class shade, marring looking forever with Fig, Moss, Leaf, Prune.

I rlly am a new man, I said to myself, and carved out a little gem that I could share with Blithe, the soft freedoms that blow in and out the door.