Death begins the moment anyone fills in this blank: I am a ______. Even “I am an astronaut” or “I am a professional football player”, spoken plainly, implies you have become only that, for eternity, resigning everything else you might become. Yet Riggs was desperate to abandon himself to a blank, anything, as long as it wasn’t his father’s “mechanic”, and so down at the diner where he ate twice a day, he started telling the waitress “I am an agent”. At night he drank bottles of cheap beer to dull the panic. He stared blankly at the frayed carpet, and he was an agent.⠀