The Contortionist's Handbook Read online

  She set the glass down, leaned over and swung one knee over me, straddling me in the half-dark of the bedroom. I was waking up again.

  “I want to watch,” she whispered.

  Daniel Fletcher has a saline IV and a sore throat from being force-fed a rubber tube smeared with lubricant for a stomach pump. Daniel Fletcher is refusing the aspirin for his swollen trachea because a previous aspirin overdose ulcered his stomach. But Daniel Fletcher didn’t take too much aspirin. That was Paul Macintyre. So that overdose isn’t in Daniel’s file, nor is any other overdose, suicide attempt or history of mental illness.

  Daniel Fletcher is from Corvallis, Oregon. I come from Oregon a lot, or Arizona, or sometimes a remote part of Texas or Washington, Massachusetts once, but mostly Oregon.

  ———

  I added thirty-one months to my birth date, then ran the numbers for my new parents’ age brackets, the minimum and maximum age for each: Range for Father’s age equals target birth date minus forty-five minus twenty-one; range for Mother’s age equals target birth date minus thirty-five minus seventeen. I’m good with numbers.

  Nine cemeteries later, I found Mr. and Mrs. Karl Fletcher buried side by side beneath matching marble slabs engraved with their vitals and enough information—Humanitarian and Philanthropist—to tell me they’d warrant a larger-than-average obituary, so their biographies were waiting on library microfilm. Mrs. Fletcher survived her husband by seven years, smack in the middle of the widow’s bell curve. The library archive gave me the specifics of their birth and marriage dates, birth dates of their surviving offspring and details of Karl Fletcher’s brain aneurysm that I noted for future reference. Sometimes I find couples who died on the same day. Plane crash, car wreck, sometimes a fire, and there’s a whole row of stones: mother, father and children with matching dates.

  After years of hiking through cemeteries, I started scouring microfilm newspaper obituaries more and more. I can read quickly, combing through a decade’s worth of the dead, a light-speed pinball ricochet through ten thousand pinhead tombstones.

  I’d found many before the Fletchers, with perfect matching dates but with Spanish or Asian names that I couldn’t pull off. A Polish tangle of consonants that I logged for possible later use, an Armenian couple that I ruled out. I bypassed every Nguyen, Wong, Gonzales, and Rodriguez. My red hair and blue eyes narrow my options. I need Anglo names. I can get by with a French name sometimes, but I’ve got too much riding on what I do.

  Jail scares me. Involuntary electro-convulsive therapy scares me more. Or jackets made from military-grade canvas with D-rings on the wrists that cross-hook to your hips. There was a psych hospital near where I grew up. Stories went that the far-gone cases would wet themselves and the floor, then had to be restrained or sedated or both. The newspaper broke that patients were kept in their restraints so long they were forgotten, they had no choice. Other things happened there and they closed it down. A bunch of the orderlies went to prison.

  The Fletchers were New World, Mayflower working stock, God-fearing European Protestants with over four hundred and fifty identical directory listings in Los Angeles alone.

  I found parents, so I had a name. I needed a birth certificate so I could get a Social Security number so I could exist.

  Sunlight or black tea will age paper. Some guys think the smell of coffee or tea on a document can give you away. I say if a DMV or Social Security clerk is sniffing your birth certificate, you botched some other detail before that. I’m thorough. It’s why I’ve never been caught.

  I found A Pictorial History of the American Railroad, copyrighted 1957, at an estate sale. Paid ten dollars for it. Oversized with blank end sheets, I can harvest four naturally aged, empty paper specimens if I cut with a steady, straight hand. And I always do. My birth certificates could pass a carbon dating test. Like I said, I’m thorough.

  Guys screw up by using an incorrect birth number on their birth certificates—Oregon babies always begin with 1-36—or putting zip codes and two-letter state abbreviations on pre-1970 documents. I don’t. I own a 1955 Smith-Corona I use to fill them out, once I’ve stenciled the form and transferred the engraving. Ribbons are a bitch to track down, though. When I find them, I soak them in turpentine to lighten the ink.

  I bought a vintage business permit from an antique dealer near the Fletchers’ cemetery. Made a wax mold of the embossed civic seal, cast it in plaster, and transferred it to my new birth certificate with an ink roller. Birth Certificate, Social Security Number, California Driver’s License, credit history and employment record. It took time, but I became Daniel Fletcher.

  Six months of hope cost me three thousand dollars. Travel, antique and estate sale purchases, materials, new mail drop, secured credit card and deposits and fees—DMV, SSA, passport application, car registration, insurance, first, last, deposit.

  ———

  Wallace escorts me to the hospital’s evaluation room. Wallace is courteous and deferential. He stands six-four, pushing two-sixty. The top of his skull and his shoulders barely clear the doorframe. He can be as courteous and deferential as he wants to be, or not. Wallace isn’t sold on the healing properties of apple juice so he lets me keep my smokes and five dollars, indulges me in a bathroom stop, then a detour through the cafeteria where I buy a large cup of coffee, palm the lighter sitting next to a respiratory nurse preoccupied with her minestrone soup. Wallace never noticed.

  Where I am: A ten-foot by twelve-foot room, one hundred and twenty square feet with nine-foot ceilings, one thousand eighty cubic feet of county-issue recycled air. They want to disassociate you from your normal environment, the place where your destructive behavior began. You don’t know what to look for, you see a stark room, table, chairs, fishtank and strip mall landscape paintings. You do know what to look for, and you know they mean business.

  A metal door designed to withstand two hours of inferno heat before buckling, so your foot or shoulder won’t have much effect, and covered with an innocuous coat of eggshell white, no inside lock, eight by ten wire-glass portal with diagonal spider-threads of cross-hatching filament. Means you need a sledgehammer to get through, and they didn’t leave one in here. Bare, steel sphere for a doorknob, no keyhole, no lock. I don’t even try. No magazines. You can roll one up into a tight cone, punch through somebody’s trachea with the sharp end.

  Brushed steel tabletop curving all the way down the edge and under, one piece of welded smoothness. Guys will rip the aluminum or plastic edge off a table if there is one, cut someone’s throat or their own wrists if they’re certain the doctors are alien-funded drones out to swap their prostate for a tracking chip. I’ve met guys like that. No edge here to rip. A fishtank is recessed into the wall. They look too big, so I’m guessing one-point-five-inch shatterproof acrylic, refracting the fish to double or triple their size. They say fish are soothing.

  Watercolor seascapes and sunsets. No Van Gogh. No Picasso. No borderline disorders or schizophrenia leaking through a reproduction to set off any alarms with a new patient. No Magritte, and that’s a shame. I like Magritte. Lots of pale blues and muted greens. Keeps you calm. Same reason doctors aren’t wearing traffic-cone-orange scrubs when they’re telling you to Calm down, this won’t hurt, everything’s going to be all right. The paintings are behind plastic sheeting, all four corners bolted into the wall. No nails, no hooks.

  I miss Keara. I can close my eyes and see her. I can see her freckles, hairline wrinkles, fingernails, the shape of her walking to and from the shower, and it fills me with a sweet ache to see her. I like sitting and watching her put on her makeup in the morning, while she stays oblivious to me, like I’m part of her surroundings, part of her normal.

  I love her, and it should scare me—the ease with which I can say that, but it doesn’t. I should tell her so. Her sister was in town again. Keara was gone for half the day before she came back and found me. I hope she’s okay, and I’m scared she’s not.

  I need to:

  Focus, focus
.

  Finish my coffee.

  Ask for a cigarette break as soon as I can.

  Ask for more coffee, maybe tea. I hate sodas.

  Here’s how it works: A hospital is legally obligated to detain an overdose victim for a psychiatric evaluation if the reason for the overdose is suspect. This psychiatric evaluator has a set checklist that he or she runs through, a predictable maze of questions looking at a series of cause-and-effect answers to determine if you’re depressed, manic, or both (manic-depressive or bipolar), paranoid or schizophrenic. Like a job interview, your appearance, demeanor and responses either fit into the check boxes or they don’t. And like a job interview, whether or not you’re qualified means next to nothing. You came from a rival company or weren’t recommended by the right person. Your boss is white, and you’re not. Or you’re not showing enough cleavage. You either get the job, or you don’t. You either end up in the custody of the state, or you don’t.

  The ideal Evaluator wears a cheap haircut, a pastel sweater, a wedding band, and a watch. If you have an Evaluator expressing himself, wearing his identity on his sleeve, you’ve got a problem. Long hair, chunks of turquoise jewelry, designer interpretations of aboriginal garments, or scarves from third-world flea markets means that you’ve got someone who resents working at County and wants to be a healer. Silk shirt, overpriced sunglasses, and he’s going through the motions while he thinks about his screenplay. What they wear tells you what they want to show, and what they show tells you what they want to hide.

  The combination to be on guard for is young and bored, or young and resentful. You can spot them at social gatherings, the grad students or interns who tell you about syndromes, conditions, deviances and disorders, and they love, love, love to talk. They speak in half-sentences with a knowing smile-squint, watch you falter at the pause, and then keep talking.

  During an interview, if you make a remark like you know what I mean? they’ll say, No, why don’t you tell me? And they’re looking for a story to tell, confidentiality be damned. They swear they can see the emperor’s clothes. Nothing scares a young shrink like summing up a patient just a little unhappy right now, recommend exercise and sunlight. You tell them you kicked a vending machine that swallowed your dime, they’ll tag you schizophrenic with an acute bipolar personality disorder and an Oedipal complex. So you tell them you don’t sleep well. Tell them you still think about an old lover. Do not tell them everything’s fine or that you hear voices. Tell them, my boss is a jerk, I can’t sleep, I just don’t know what to do with my life. Keep it common and hope for the best.

  If they’re older, see if they’re hiding their age. Look for a wedding ring. Age and marriage are big. Beyond forty, being single eats away at them. There’s a chance they’re childless and going to stay that way. Your answers are likely to ricochet off some long-buried stigma and they’ll send you down as thanks for the reminder. Look for too much makeup or hair coloring, comb-overs and toupees. Glasses are okay, tinted glasses are not. I’ve seen them. Hiding crow’s feet or just hiding. If I can’t read your eyes, I can’t trust you.

  Never forget, even for a second, that your Evaluator’s black-and-white, yes-or-no list of checkboxes gets filtered through his morning fog, his repressed homosexuality, his hatred for his parents, or men, or women, or the fact that he’s married or divorced, childless or fat. Or all of the above. From his ears to his notebook, his own litany of childhood trauma and denial baggage that propelled him into psychiatric medicine is filtering your answers. And his signature can have you locked up.

  Yes, I’ve done this before. I’ve made mistakes that almost buried me in a place with no hard edges, my name a needle in the California Department of Mental Health Haystack. I’m looking for an Evaluator that doesn’t have an identity problem.

  I can hear the muffled hallway voices while I’m waiting for the half-second of doorknob lock-tumbler clicking before the Evaluator enters. At the doctor’s when I was a kid, that sound always made my heart thrash like a hooked fish. Always, after ten minutes of sitting on a tissue-covered cushion, staring at Pyrex jars full of cotton swabs and tongue depressors, machines with hoses and cables spidering out of them and isopropanol hanging in the air, the doorknob would rattle, the doctor would come in smiling with a needle. The doctors are different now, and the needle is a clipboard.

  The door opens, closes.

  My Evaluator is a weathered thirty-five, wearing a silver ponytail and thick spectacles that warp his eyes out of shape, ballooning their red edges and swollen lids. He bends to pull out a chair and I see an ankh dangling from his left earlobe. Notepad and file under his left arm, he carries a large paper cup in his hand, coffee beginning to seep through the seam like it’s his fourth refill and he’s been awake since before dawn. Dress shirt, no tie, wool trousers and jacket, his grudging nod to administrative regs. His ID badge hangs clipped to his breast pocket.

  RICHARD CARLISLE, M.D., PH.D.

  LOS ANGELES COUNTY DEPARTMENT OF MENTAL HEALTH.

  Aging environmentalist and activist, he would have been somewhere near draft age during Vietnam. Something there, but I don’t know what. I get a feeling in my chest and stomach when I’m scared, like my guts are melting and hot but my bones are turning to ice, and I have that feeling now.

  “Mr. Daniel—” looks at his clipboard “Fletcher?” I nod. “I’m Dr. Carlisle. I’d like to ask you some questions.”

  THREE

  Yellow pad, legal, one, blank. Manila file, one, “Fletcher, D.” inked onto the tab. The Evaluator writes eight lines of preliminary notes while snapping hummingbird f-stop glances in my direction. The Evaluator is clocking me clocking him.

  Do not:

  Tap feet

  Drum fingers

  Shift sitting position

  Scratch

  Wipe forehead. Because he’ll record it.

  But do not:

  Sit too still.

  I’m allowed to be nervous. Act too calm and it’s suspicious. It’s taken me years of practice to learn how to act natural. Think of the middle-class family man walking out of a triple-X theater, looking around like a startled rodent, checking his zipper, think of the kid airing out his bedroom and gargling away his bong breath before his parents get home. I’ve changed my name six times in three years, my name, Social Security number, parents, employment history, school transcripts, and fingerprints. I still have to remember how to act natural. I lapse into mirror mode, approximating the Evaluator’s posture—feet flat, hands exposed with a slight forward lean, confidence, honesty. The most important detail to remember here is frequency, frequency, frequency. Keep moving, shifting every five minutes. Guys get so locked into keeping their story straight, they forget to move, juggling so many details in their head that a rigor mortis stiffness seizes them, and it shows, throws a floodlight onto the flaws in their stories.

  I’ve got to keep my hands moving. Need a line. I work a quarter from the cafeteria over my knuckles, tumbling from finger to finger across the back of my right hand. Keeps me nimble.

  Three minutes pass, he reads my file, runs through five more lines on his pad. I pull two smokes from the pack, keep one in front of my eyes while I clip or palm the other. I practice a screen-and-cup drill, close-up maneuvers that make one cigarette appear to snap from one empty hand to another. This is clearly not the way to act natural, but I need a line right now, and this pulls my brain into a solid point where I can think for lack of a good hit.

  “That’s pretty good. You a magician?” he asks. He needs to establish a rapport. He wants me comfortable enough to confess every infectious corner of my Id. He makes small talk to say Don’t be afraid of me, wants to appear casual but I know he’s listening.

  Palms up, I show both cigarettes to the Evaluator. “Nah. Dabbled a lot when I was younger. It’s a nervous habit.” I smile. He’s got a basis for my Nervous Habit. I’ll use that later when I want him to think I’m on edge, pull his attention from the subjects that spook me. It’s call
ed a misdirect.

  “Are you nervous, now?”

  “Well, yeah. A little.” I slide the smokes back into the pack, brush my hair out of my eyes with my right hand. “Yeah.”

  The Evaluator writes, I can read the word magic annotated with HN. He opens my file again, shielding it from my view. No matter, I already know what’s inside.

  ———

  Raymond O’Donnell had a Nevada driver’s license but has never driven. Raymond O’Donnell had never voted, been arrested, leased an apartment, or been otherwise visible. Raymond O’Donnell kept cash in a Clark County account because Nevada is tight with banking privacy. His name was on twenty-four mail drops throughout the Southwest—Chatsworth, Indio, Twenty-Nine Palms, Visalia, Needles, Bakersfield, Lordsburg, Holbrook. Mail drops didn’t care. They saw the driver’s license, matched my face, took my cash, and forgot me in minutes.

  The DMV and Social Security offices always need an address, so I add my new name as an additional recipient on the mail drop for another name, one I don’t use in public. Sometimes I’ll pick another address, a house or apartment in a respectable neighborhood or an empty lot, give that to the DMV, then submit a mail forwarding request to the Post Office, and that mail goes straight to the designated mail drop. DMV never knows. It doesn’t even have to be a real address. When I change names again, I submit another forwarding request to a nonexistent address in Alaska. Somewhere up North is a mountain of mail miles high, waiting for a throng of people who were never born and never died.

  I was getting good by this point, really good. Jimmy and the business were starting to pay me more, depend on me more, trying to convince me to quit legit work altogether. I was regretting I’d ever met them.

  I was in Las Vegas, rotating mail drops and bank accounts in advance of another change, setting up ghost addresses and credit histories for some of Jimmy’s people. One ounce into a bourbon, the carnival slot machine noise had dimmed and I was scanning—eyes left, down, right, and back—out of habit, the casino floor and the lobby entrance in my line of sight. Five sorority girls bounced from a primer-smeared Jeep and waved down a bellhop. They checked in, passing me on their way to the elevators, one of them said pool. I found them twenty-eight minutes later, all in a bronze, buttery row, sunning on ribbed lounge chairs.