The Contortionist's Handbook Page 10

  I sat down. Up close, his eyes were red at the edges, softening his dead, black stare.

  “Gotcha soda.” He slid one across to me.

  We never had sodas at home. I only had them visiting Mom at work or when I was in jail. You had to drink them in the gallery, sitting down, and you couldn’t get up until a CO took your empty can. The visiting room soda machine had a sign:

  BEVERAGES ARE TO BE CONSUMED ON THE PREMISES

  LEAVE ALL EMPTY CONTAINERS IN PLAIN SIGHT

  FOR COLLECTION BY A CORRECTIONS OFFICER.

  To this day, I hate the taste of sodas.

  For nine months, I’d thought about what I wanted to say to his face when I saw him again. But the trial was distant in my head, like someone else’s home movies. The only knife I had to twist was not to let him know how happy I was to see him. In truth, I was flooded with warmth at the sight of him and worried that he was starting to look so old.

  I opened the can, the gaseous snap like a rifle crack in a room full of sniffling mothers and fathers holding their sons for their one chance that week. Dad flicked his ashes, took one final pull, and crushed the smoke into the embedded metal ashtray.

  “Smokin’ yet?”

  I shook my head. He fished another pack from his jacket and lit a fresh one. “I brought a carton for ya. CO will bring it later. They’re better than cash, inside. Got some toothpaste in there, too. Missed your birthday.”

  “I can’t have cash.” My voice was a whisper, pushing to crack as hard as it could.

  Quiet, then “Anyone hasslin’ you?” No other fathers had the balls to ask this to their kids. Veiled as it was, it took a lot.

  I shook my head. “Nope. I stay in my cell, mostly. Read a lot. Shelly sends me magazines.” I stopped myself from saying any more.

  “Yeah. I got some from her. They’ll bring ’em to you. You like news magazines? History?”

  “Sure.” I didn’t. But Shelly didn’t know that. Parent sniffles and murmurs crept over us. Dad looked at the clock, took a pull from his smoke.

  “I quit drinkin’.” He looked me in the eyes, then at the ashtray. “I’ve gone ninety days. Feels like longer. They give you one of these.” He showed me a metal ID bracelet, looked back at me.

  “Drinkin’ coffee and soda all the time now. I don’t sleep much anymore. Can’t hardly see straight.” He said can’t like caint. He took another drag, dropped his gaze, and stared straight into the ashtray.

  “Your momma died yesterday. Said John was all, ’fore she closed her eyes.”

  I scratched at a piece of graffiti with my fingernail—West Sixties in sharp, tagger lettering cut into the table.

  “You hear me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not yeah. Yes or no.” The mumbling hesitancy gone from his voice.

  “Yes, I heard you.”

  “What else?”

  If I didn’t say something, I’d start crying. If I said anything consoling, I’d start crying. I shrugged.

  “Look at me, boy.” He put force into his voice but kept it low in the visiting room. “Your mother’s dead. Yesterday. 4:57 p.m.”

  My memory’s good, but I was drawing a blank. When had I last seen her?

  “Say something to me, you little cocksucker.” The voice he used right before thrashing me when I was younger.

  I was about to buckle to the hot knot in my neck when cocksucker froze it away. I thought of Jeremy. I thought of walking into the blind that last time I saw him, how crying and/or showing weakness make you less invisible than anything. I thought of how Dad and I weren’t alone, how many people could see me.

  I looked Dad straight in the face, locked into his stare, his eyes burned and unfocused at the edges.

  “Fuck. You.” My voice sounded like his.

  He met my eyes, held his stare while I held mine. Then he looked back to the ashtray, crushed his cigarette, signaled a guard to let him leave.

  I sat in the visitor’s room for a few minutes, staring at my fingers, tuning out and getting lost until a CO told me to move along. In my cell, I tucked a roll of toilet paper under my head for a pillow, closed my eyes and tried to think of reasons to hate Mom and Dad. On my hands and knees, I scraped up every piece of hate I could find on the floorboards of my memory, stuffing them into my mouth and chewing, sucking on their juices to poison and drown any hint of hurt or sad or weak. Two days later, I had my third godsplitter.

  Monday, May 16, 1977. One year to the day since I’d last seen Dad. One year and one day since Mom had died. I was eighteen, my juvenile record ordered sealed by the court. I signed for my belongings one last time, dressed in front of a uniformed guard one last time. For the last time, I heard the gates buzz open one after the next, my name called out with each one. For the last time, I heard the same joke at the final gate: See you again real soon, boy. Outside, I lit a smoke.

  Dad wasn’t waiting this time. I spent most of the day on the bus, but I got home. I stayed there for one week during which time Dad said the following:

  Shelly’s moved out, you can take the couch.

  You need to help out with the rent.

  Grab some sodas while you’re out.

  Empty the trash.

  I’ll be home late.

  Hand me the paper.

  After seven days, I packed a single bag and left.

  I’d decided on the West Coast, someplace dense where nobody knew me or my Special Ed time or my jail record. The cops wouldn’t know me so wouldn’t mess with me on their slow days. I was getting good with my hands—you could know me for months and never notice my fingers. I could make coins, marbles, watches and rings vanish, pull a card out of a deck that you’d held in your head for only a few seconds, and in general pass myself off as a central casting, corn-fed, red-headed boy with ten fingers.

  I knew that I couldn’t make a driver’s license, that the state had to give me one. And I had to show who I was to the state with a birth certificate, so I made one along with a new school ID. When I arrived in California, I’d be Brian Delvine, age nineteen.

  I walked out Dad’s front door and into the dark, headed for the bus station. The Ranchero was parked in its spot, #49, the driver’s door open, dome light off. Dad sat sideways in the driver’s seat, feet on the ground, his head down, running his fingers through his hair—still greasy-black, in spite of how the rest of him had aged. Lucky butts piled on the ground between his work shoes, another glowed between his knuckles. He held a bottle on his right knee, three inches of clear liquid remained. He didn’t look up, I didn’t say anything.

  I can still see his face. I remember every black strand of hair, his ash-brown, snow-mud beard, the deep lines in his skin and his two missing teeth. I can’t picture his eyes though, hard as I try.

  The bus grazed the edge of a dilapidated residential neighborhood before reaching the highway. It was dark, but beneath the streetlights and the full moon, I saw Brett. A different house, the yard nothing but packed and petrified dirt. His hair was longer and something about his clothes said he hadn’t washed in a long time. He was walking the yard, edge to edge in straight lines, one to the next. No lawn, no mower, just Brett walking the paces over his imaginary grass under the watch of the streetlights and junebugs.

  “This is Erica at the L.A. County Department of Mental Health. I’m unavailable at this time, so please leave a message.”

  “Erica, it’s Dr. Carlisle. I’m with a patient right now, taking a quick break and I need some background data. Can you locate a city or county medical clinic in Long Beach? I need to get a record of a visit from a Fletcher, Daniel J., DOB 11/6/61. He would have been there approximately twelve months ago. I’d like to know who he spoke to so I can get some details on his visit.

  “Also, Daniel Fletcher’s parents are deceased. They’re up in Corvallis, Oregon. I’d like to track down any information on his father’s history. I’ll ask Mr. Fletcher about any records, but he’s not likely to have anything.

  “If you have
any time to get started, leave me a note in my box and let me know what you find out, so I can do some follow-up this week. I’ll send the specifics right over. I appreciate it.”

  ERIC BISHOP

  ELEVEN

  Maybe you’re a woman and God was too good to you, and people—men—pay serious cash to look at you. Sometimes when you’re naked, sometimes not. Sometimes you know it, sometimes you don’t. Maybe you smiled at one of them while serving cocktails or waiting for an elevator and now he knows where you live, where you work, your phone number, and your cat went missing a week ago, and the police tell you that the note saying I want to take you with me to the afterlife doesn’t explicitly threaten you and, anyway, you don’t have any proof that he wrote it.

  So you have to make what you need, whatever papers or documents to say who you want to be. Just don’t expect them to stand up to scrutiny unless you’re good.

  I’m good. Baptismal certificate, thirty minutes. I get them in bulk at church supply shops in East L.A., artfully age them and find a recently deceased priest to sign them. Affidavit of Citizenship, five minutes. Work ID, municipal employee ID, student ID, two and a half hours, average. International driver’s license—paper, Mojave Sand, 50# cotton bond, passport photo, custom-made rubber stamps. Two hours, eighteen minutes.

  I have three shoeboxes full of samples. I used to tend bar, built a collection of confiscated licenses. Someone gives me an ID with red-eye flash in the picture or an address that doesn’t match their ZIP code, I keep it. German driver’s license (Hollywood tour bus Lost and Found), three hours. British work permit (expired, in the trash at the Westwood Federal Building), ninety minutes. Drink at bars around the airport, lots of work ID badges come loose from their pocket clips.

  Excuse me… anyone find a Pacific-West Expediters badge?

  You Rick?

  Yeah, thanks.

  Every tourist theme park and gimmick-driven chain restaurant has a Lost and Found. Forty percent of European tourists are from the UK and twenty percent are from Germany. I’ll take a stab in the dark and say I called earlier about my wallet? and let the accent do the work. If I’m lucky then someone from a different shift told someone who told someone on this shift and they don’t even check me against the picture, or they can’t tell when I’m doing British that I’m not from Australia or New Zealand or South Africa. Sometimes with an open-ended question or well-timed pause, they’ll fill in the gaps for me. Yes, you were with the group in the corner last night, weren’t you? or You’re Mr. Pierce? And they’ll hand me someone else’s wallet without a second thought. I do trustworthy.

  Or I’ll suit up, walk into a four-star hotel. I checked out this morning and put my bags in storage. I need to get some traveler’s checks. They never ask for my luggage ticket, never stay and watch me.

  I have passports from fourteen countries, driver’s licenses from eight, work permits from nine, affidavits of citizenship, green cards, employee ID badges, mug shots, booking forms, birth certificates, security passes, immunization papers, student ID cards, adoption records, and one Proof of Indian Blood Degree.

  ———

  The Evaluator removes his glasses, rubs his eyes. They look smaller and more fatigued. He puts his pen down and still holding his glasses, says “Are you sexually active?”

  ———

  Blood straight from a cut is red-black, shiny and thick. Mine’s thinner if I’ve been drinking.

  Early March, Keara left for San Diego to spend a long weekend with her sister. Andrea had just moved from the East Coast to go to graduate school in the fall, and wanted to see Keara before she started working in April. I spent those three days piecing our new place together, putting everything in my name because landlords and utility companies don’t like actors or actresses—they want a steady check. Keara was an actress, though she did more cocktailing jobs than acting. I kept hoping she’d call but she never did except to check on me. The phone rousted me in the middle of the night—silence, then hang-up, when I answered Hello? Keara?

  I’d had zero luck combing junk stores and cheap hardware shops for a fireplace screen, but I had salvaged an armload of sap-ridden lumber scraps from a remodeling site three blocks over. Dense knots, dry rot and resin wads swelling out of hollow pockets like old infections and hardening on the surface, rusted nails with sheared heads and the peeling residue of paint and varnish. It would still burn, and that was all the romance Keara needed in the nominal cold of a California winter.

  She came back. We showered, left our half-finished Cantonese take-out on the kitchen table. I drank a beer while Keara rinsed off. She stepped out for a towel, I reached through the curtain to set the bottle on the sink and it slipped, blasted into a thousand shiny brown shards and amber foam inside the tub and I cut my foot stepping out. The red was luminous, diluted from the shower against the white porcelain and swirling into the drain like a horror film close-up. Beautiful.

  On my back, still wet and soaking the rug in front of the fledgling fire, Keara crouched over my foot, mopping the cut with towels, dressing it with alcohol (that smell again) and gauze. She sat naked, her feet tucked beneath her, her belly creased as she bent down, her brown ringlets of hair hanging down and covering her face, the blast of freckles on her shoulders and the mole on her collarbone fading in and out with the popping and hissing of the flames. Rasputin sat on the couch, dead eyes aimed in our direction, following the sound of us, shrinking from the unfamiliar heat and smoke, lost in his new home.

  Keara finished bandaging my foot. I took a swallow from a fresh beer, started to sit up but she put a hand to my chest, eased me back down. Kissed both of my eyes to close them (I kissed her eyes a lot, she liked that) and kissed the rest of me. Mouth around me, I reached for her face, but she pushed my wrists back to the ground and continued to move her own hands across my stomach, hips, legs.

  If I tried to sit up, she pushed me back, running a hand over my face to keep my eyes closed while she climbed on top of me, slid me inside of her, and moved. Slowly. If I moved, she stopped.

  “Ssshhh. Still.” Whispered. She stayed quiet. I listened to the sputter of the flames and felt her on me, felt the heat of the fire on one side of my face, arm, chest. Touched her to feel the warmth on the one side of her body and she put my hand back. Kept moving. Churning. Slooow.

  My right side burned. I sat up, wrapped my arms around her and she pushed back but knew I wouldn’t stay this time and we rolled over, me inside and on top of her, she kept her hands on my face, my eyes closed. I never thought about anyone else the whole time. No one. Eyes shut, Keara not saying, whispering, a word.

  Moving slowly, her arms around me, my face buried in her neck and taking in her smell and her breathing a soft mmmmmm in my ear. My thoughts, my heartbeat and my blood all stopped and pooled into the middle of me ready to erupt. I tried to stop it because I wanted her to go first because I thought I would pass out but I didn’t want to think of something else to slow me down and finally couldn’t contain it any more and everything in me coiled back to burst when the fire popped loud from some ancient pocket of sap and one. Single. Pinpoint. Spark. Arched up and drifted down. Onto the back of my left thigh like a white-hot needle at the worst possible quantum second and I tried to push the pain out and focus on the burst and tried to stop the burst to tune out the needle and failed both at the same time and the needle and the burst both kissed in the middle of my brain and the middle of my chest and I couldn’t see anything but Keara’s face and felt the whisper of God deep within my bones.

  On my back again, I opened my eyes to see hers, dark brown, almost black, and the edges of my vision turned purple, creeping in until everything was bright purple-blue and I might have smiled. Far from the flames, again Keara naked and kneeling, salve and gauze for the same leg, she rolled me over to look at the burn.

  Every vein in my body carried the feeling like that first blast of coke years before, like all of the molecules in my body had bonded together for the first time
ever. Wet heat ran down both sides of my face and I’m sure Keara thought I was in pain, but I wasn’t. I was floating in the calmest hurricane eye of the deepest love I had ever felt for anyone in my life.

  “I love you,” I said. But not out loud.

  ———

  “Yes, I’m sexually active.”

  In most cases, the truth is your best option, but that depends on what that truth is. And in this case, I don’t know what his tripwires are. He’s getting old, maybe his dick’s not working. Maybe his wife/girlfriend walked out on him. Maybe he’s sleeping with one of his clients or another staffer. And maybe in his eyes I’m competition. In any case, I need to be definitive: Straight. Potent. Active. Ambiguity about sex puts capital-D depression back onto his radar.

  “Are you currently in a relationship?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And what is this person’s name?”

  “Molly.” Don’t like this. Maybe she thought she was helping me. Give them her new name as well as mine, make it twice as hard for them or twice as easy for me. But I’ve got enough to keep straight and I don’t need any more details. Too late, Keara has to stay Molly until I’m out of here.

  “How long have you and Molly been seeing each other?”

  “About seven months, now. Maybe eight.”

  “What’s the nature of your relationship?”

  “Not sure what you mean. We’re living together, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Do the two of you share the household with anyone else?”

  “No, it’s just us. We’ve got an apartment in Silverlake.”