I memorized the important stuff, credit card numbers, phone numbers, dates of birth, addresses, anything I might need to recite on the spot, but other than that, I didn’t think about the fakes Frank created, but he liked to create profiles and personalities for all of his alternate identities. Jacob Maris was a landscaper outside of Tallahassee. Gilbert Lesko was a systems analyst in Jersey City. Arthur Dodge was born in Missouri but moved around a lot before settling near Rockford, where he worked for a phone company. Frank knew the streets they lived on, the cars they drove, the clothes they wore, the books they read, the movies they watched, the music they liked, the food they ate, everything about them. “They all lead uninteresting lives,” I joked with him. “That’s the point,” Frank said. “They have enough detail to make them unique, realistic, but nothing anyone would be interested in. Nothing anyone’s going to ask about, nothing memorable enough to stick out later.”

Frank had complete backstories for all of his identities, and he would joke about it, knowing that he had taken it all to its absurd end. “Arthur never wears Nikes,” he told me one day when I was packing. Or, “Gilbert has Starwood points, remember,” when I was making hotel reservations. “Jacob has a shellfish allergy,” he reminded me when I was ordering Chinese takeout on a job (more than once). I could never remember who I was with, I joked with Frank. Me, always me, he would say.

He could have made a fortune in identity theft, would have been an effective spy or intelligence asset, something that would have taken advantage of his skills. None of that interested him, however. He wanted a simple life, he said. No life is simple, though. No matter how hard you try.