The Contortionist's Handbook Read online

  “Hey bro, c’mon back, getcha whatever you want.”

  I leaned into his window and said, “Tell your partner to check his watermarks.”

  Barker-Pimp looks at me, like he doesn’t know what a watermark is.

  “And tell him when he signs a document dated 1946 that he shouldn’t use a ballpoint pen.”

  ———

  “Where did you grow up, Daniel?”

  My name is Daniel Fletcher. I was born November 6, 1961, in Corvallis, Oregon. I graduated high school in June of 1978. I am twenty-five years old. My father, Karl Fletcher, died of a brain aneurysm when I was seventeen. My mother, Elaine Fletcher, lived for another seven years and died of natural causes. I am the youngest of three siblings, Ryan, Emily and myself. They are both married, and I have one niece through Emily.

  “Corvallis, Oregon.”

  My name is Daniel Fletcher. I was a decent student with an all-around B average and no noteworthy aptitudes or weaknesses. No extracurricular school activities (traceable), but I played in a church basketball league (untraceable). I wasn’t interested in college. I wanted to travel, get out of Oregon and see bigger cities. Seattle. San Francisco. New York. Los Angeles. My parents pushed me to apply to different engineering schools.

  I can tell you most anything you want to know about Oregon. 97,073 square miles averaging 3,300 feet above sea level. Population 2,617,778 spread across thirty-six counties. Admitted to the Union on February 14, 1859, a Sunday. I have a good memory.

  The residence I listed on my birth certificate might or might not have ever existed. I used a housing number sequence on a stretch of rural road that had surged to postwar-boom housing tracts, degenerated to lower middle-class, to a ghetto with the state’s violent crime record high, then to regentrification via bulldozers and ribbon-cutting into miles of twenty-four-hour grocery giants and shopping malls over the course of four and a half decades.

  “Is that where your parents are?”

  “They’re buried there, yeah.” I drop my gaze, my eyes say that I’m rifling through my emotional memory banks.

  “And how long ago did they pass away?”

  “I was seventeen when my father died, and my mother died some years later.” Eyes to my shoes again, I feed him my nervous grooming gesture and push my hair from my face.

  “What happened to your father?”

  “Brain aneurysm,” my voice soft.

  “Can you remember anything specific about his death?” The Evaluator shifts position, now he’s mirroring me—feet flat, elbows on knees when he’s not writing, leaning forward. He’s doing empathy, so I’ll open up.

  “I was at my after-school job when my mother called.” I’ve gone through this before, checked the dates, hospital admissions records, and maps. Four nights running, I sat in the dark with the air conditioner blasting, played the movie over and over on the backs of my eyes.

  “By the time I got home, they were loading him into an ambulance. His eyes were half-open and wet like he’d been crying and his skin was bright red. I followed them to the hospital but he was dead when they arrived.”

  “And what about your mother?” He’s dropped his voice. You can talk to me. I understand.

  “She sort of lost steam after my father died and quit pressuring me about college. She had a stroke, a while back.”

  “And is that how she passed away?”

  “Yeah. I flew home for her funeral. I spent a week helping my sister Emily clean out Mom’s house to put it on the market. She and Jeff—her husband—moved everything into a storage unit.

  “Did your father ever complain of headaches?”

  “Yeah. Mostly when I was younger. He took medicine, but I don’t know what.” False. I’m hoping that he’s not completely driven, that he’ll finish my evaluation without checking for Karl Fletcher’s medical history.

  “What did your father do for a living?”

  John Vincent Senior drank, moved furniture, drove a truck, drank, bought and sold a string of motorcycles, drank, was gone for months and years at a stretch, and drank. Mom said he was helping dig a gold mine. A polished lie to keep his kids from being ashamed of him. Dad called us and sent postcards.

  “He was an eye doctor. He did very well, was always getting some award or another from different groups for being a philanthropist and humanitarian.”

  Dad looked like the pictures of Chet Baker midway through his aging continuum, dead between the stop-and-stare handsome that made waitresses blush and the later years, after shooting four times his body weight in Mexican brown tar into his veins. Dad never shot anything, but did most everything else. I know Dad was a lady-killer at one time, but he also ate a few pool cues, steering wheels, dashboards and nightsticks in his day. Decades of vodka give you a high pain threshold.

  My smile twitches, my story locked and loaded.

  “What’s funny?” the Evaluator asks.

  “I wanted one of those games where you put the plastic on the television screen and colored along with the cartoon. He wouldn’t get me one. He said they were bad for your eyes. They took ’em off the market, but I was always mad at him for that.” Stop fidgeting, resume eye contact because this is more comfortable territory for me.

  “I’ll bet he wouldn’t let you have an air rifle either, would he?” The Evaluator is smiling. His fatigue is showing but, just for a moment, he wants me to see his guard drop.

  “Or lawn darts,” I say.

  I’ve given him his rapport: a mix of nostalgia and sugar-coated resentment over some bygone childhood toys. He’s content to move on, which is good. I don’t want him pressing for more detail because I don’t improvise as well as I plan. I relax my posture, return my voice to normal volume. I do unconcerned, at ease.

  “Okay, what about your mother? Did she work?”

  Mom was a coffee-shop waitress. Mom drove a school bus. Mom didn’t drink, or at least didn’t let me or Shelly see it. Mom dated some of the coffee-shop customers while Dad was away. I could tell she was pretty compared to other women her age. She went out on her nights off. Whether she was bored, needed companionship, wanted a decent meal, rent or pocket money, I don’t know. Thinking about it makes my throat hurt, so I don’t think about it.

  Sometimes I’d go to the coffee shop after school, when Dad wasn’t home. Mom would give me a meatloaf sandwich and a soda and I was supposed to sit at the end of the counter and do my schoolwork or color. The manager, I never knew his name, was a bloated man with a sopping cigar stump permanently wedged between his teeth, always wore a short-sleeve, pearl-button shirt and bolo tie, had sideburns like two hairy Floridas crawling down his fat jowls. He was tactful to me, and very nice to Mom. I put that together later, too. Mom kept that job, thick and thin, getting progressively more bold with what she filched to bring home for Shelly and me.

  I didn’t do any schoolwork, even as little as there was to do in kindergarten. I drew elaborate line doodles on the backs of the children’s placemats, ignoring the coloring or connect-the-dots on the front, and created huge labyrinths or perfect line replicas of the wood-veneer countertop. Or I’d play a game, watching the waitresses pause at the register to add up their checks. I’d read them upside down, add them in my head to see if I could beat their speed at the register, see if my numbers were right. Then Mom would scold me for daydreaming, put my workbooks back in front of me.

  “My father made decent money, so my mother could stay home and take care of us,” I tell him, moving in my seat.

  “So you were close to her?” And the Evaluator moves with me. A few beats behind, thinks I don’t notice, thinks I trust him. He’s writing more and more quickly, shorthand abbreviations stacked atop one another—PS, HE, HN, arrows pointing up, down or to one side, x’s and circles—confirming some of my conclusions, obliterating others. We do a slow dance of posture changes, eye movement, eyebrow scratching and throat clearing, and I piece together his truncated record of our conversation, one line at a time. I want to go home. I
miss Keara. I really wish I could get a line.

  “Not really. I wanted out of the house as a kid. I was gone right after my father died. I kept up with her after that, but we never got close.”

  “Can you recall the last time you saw either of your parents?

  “Not sure. It’s been a long time. My father, it was that morning I went to school. My mother, it was on a visit home after I’d moved away, but I don’t remember exactly when.”

  “What about any siblings? You mentioned an ‘Emily.’”

  “I’ve got an older brother and sister. Ryan works in banking on the East Coast. Emily’s still in Oregon with her husband. They just had a baby girl.”

  “So, you’re the youngest of three. Is that correct?”

  “Yeah, I’m the youngest.”

  Sometimes a plane will go down and FAA investigators can’t identify any remains. A fuselage explosion at 35,000 feet or 800,000 pounds of flesh and metal hitting the water at four hundred miles an hour makes it hard to check prints or dental work. And sometimes the passenger manifests don’t check out. Names dead-end when they look for next of kin. Illicit lovers on secret vacations, drug couriers, battered wives, and federal witnesses die midair wondering why their oxygen mask doesn’t inflate, and nobody knows it because each one is a walking, breathing John Doe. That’s my family.

  “Are you close with your brother and sister?”

  “More or less. We live in three different states and don’t have holidays at home anymore. We talk every month or so. I have drinks with Ryan when he’s in town on business, and I went to Emily’s for Christmas, last year.”

  I don’t know what it’s like to have a brother, so I’ve got to be careful. I could paint myself into a serious corner if I give him fuel for the abandonment issue.

  “How were you as a child?”

  Bull’s-eye. He’s not dwelling on the parental death, though it’s going to show up in his report. He’s moved on, looking for a psychiatric history, another indicator of trouble.

  “In terms of what?”

  “Bed wetter? Sleeping problems? Anything out of the ordinary?”

  “Nope.” False. I wasn’t walking until a full year later than normal and didn’t begin speaking until age five. My parents thought I might have been retarded, but they couldn’t afford to have a doctor look at me.

  ———

  Once I learned to match the ten Roman digits to their amounts, learning math ceased to have any curve for me, but I didn’t know that. I could shuffle four digits in my head as soon as I learned how to do one. Add or subtract, not saying anything out loud or writing anything down. Feeling the new numbers bloom and swell within my chest. If I had to write it down or show my work, the numbers were silent. Math problems looked like broken numbers, their pieces misaligned for no reason. You don’t need water in a dry river to know where it’s going to flow. The bends, falls, banks and slopes tell you everything, water or no water. That’s what numbers were like for me from the beginning, and listening to a teacher explain how to line up columns—ones, tens, hundreds—and carry digits, I felt like a bird enduring a laborious, pop-up-book description of flight.

  I faded out in class one day, zeroed in on a linoleum square on the floor, the dull color of old milk, peppered with flecks and spots to camouflage its age and damage. I copied it on the back of my paper, ignoring the class exercises, matching it point for discolored point with my blunt pencil.

  Mrs. McMahon stood over me. She’d called me to the front of the class to solve one of the problems on the blackboard but I hadn’t heard her.

  “I’ve already solved them,” I said.

  Five other kids stood at the board showing their work, some drawing little stick-bundle fives to help their math.

  “He can’t count on his hands,” somebody said. Mrs. McMahon sent me to the principal’s office. I went three more times before they tested me and took me out.

  When you’re being tested for a special program, you’re lumped into a deaf-mute/brain-damaged category, longhand for stupid. I’ve seen kids in wheelchairs and on crutches, nerves that never touched in the womb so their joints are permanently kinked, the wrists, fingers and feet not fully formed, or their lips and faces struggle to give shape to the words in their brain. Someone will say How old is she? or What’s wrong with him? Because clearly, she or him can’t hear you or understand you or speak for themselves. When people think you’re stupid, they’ll talk right in front of you, like you’re nothing more than furniture. People thought I was stupid, so my notion of mental hospitals comes from a frankenstitched patchwork of the details deemed worth repeating in front of me—prurient, psych-student, water cooler gossip they thought I couldn’t comprehend.

  I learned that:

  Some patients sat in their own shit for hours before they were tended to.

  Medications were forgotten or transposed, sending one patient into an epileptic seizure and rendering another comatose.

  Patients were left for hours upon hours in a locked room with no toilet, then punished for urinating on the floor—a display of antisocialsocial behavior.

  Restraints were used less to protect one patient from another or himself, and more to protect staff lunch hours or coffee breaks.

  Not finishing dessert or not wanting to watch television with the others was considered antisocial behavior.

  Electroconvulsion had long since gone from a last resort to routine procedure.

  Diagnoses were exaggerated to perpetuate the flow of revenue from insurance companies.

  You were watched when you wanted to be alone, ignored when you needed help. An understaffed, under-qualified team of interns and trainees reported to an over-aged, overworked Board of Directors. They read insane into your every word and action, decided when you leave if they came to any decisions at all. And if you were a patient and a good-looking woman, then you were as good as in Hell.

  In jail, visiting day draws mothers, wives, fathers, siblings and children who skip work, school, drive for hours and tolerate spot-searches, metal detectors and X-rays to see their loved ones. When and if a mental patient receives a visitor, that patient is old and wealthy. Look at their visitors, check the watches and shoes—that’s how you spot money. Heirs come out of the woodwork, start spending before the judge can raise his gavel.

  ———

  “Did you go to college, Daniel?”

  “I did a couple of years at a junior college. Not my thing.”

  “And what about high school?”

  “Yeah, I went to high school. Graduated in ’78.”

  I finished barely over two years of high school. I spent most of it in jail, arrested twice between ninth and tenth grades. I logged eight fights in those two years, three of them broken up by a teacher or gym coach who had me suspended. Mom and Dad never knew. I signed their names on the forms, wrote an angry letter of apology in Mom’s cursive to accompany one that I mailed back, as well as signing Dad’s signature to an expulsion warning which was obviated by a stint in juvenile hall.

  “What were your grades like?” he asks.

  “Mostly B’s, except for a D in Art.” Plant the seed while I have the chance. “We had to do at least one semester of Visual Art during the four years.”

  “Didn’t like Art, I guess?”

  If you aspire to be the next Picasso or Gauguin, bury it for two hours with a guy like this. Even if you know for a fact that he owns a house full of stupid earth-hugger whale paintings or hippie pottery, keep your mouth shut. You mention art, anything creative, and your Evaluator has a mental stack of color-coded tab cards with a new question for every response that will cattle-prod you to a predetermined diagnosis. Drop your guard and some mommy-hating intern will take you by a leash to the manic-depressive-suicidal-multiple-personality-schizophrenic-sociopath diagnosis they’re dying to assign to someone so they can feel like their tuition wasn’t wasted.

  Creativity is either positive or negative, it has zero middle ground in an evalu
ation. And if your evaluation is mandated by a hospital, your artistic yearnings are going to be a three-alarm warning. Listen: you hate art. You are not creative. You get outdoors, socialize, go to the beach, hike, feed the homeless, visit your family, and surf. If an Evaluator sees creativity accompanying depression, anger or any sign of self-destruction, then that creativity is going to be relegated to finger painting and puzzles with grown men and women wearing cotton gowns, diapers and head injury scars.

  “I just wasn’t very good at it,” I say. “They had a beginning drafting class that filled the requirement and I thought I could handle that. But it was full, so I spent a semester sketching fruit bowls. My drawings stank, but the instructor passed me out of sympathy. He knew I made an honest effort.” True and false. I can draw if I have to. I’ve got a steady hand and a good eye, but I don’t understand the urge to create interpretive pictures of sunsets or fruit bowls.

  “So, what were you good at?”

  Math guys are loners, so:

  “History. Science.” False. False.

  “Do you remember your GPA?”

  “Three something.” Zero point eight.

  “Besides Art, did you have any other weak subjects?”

  “English, reading, those things were tough. The grammar. Too many exceptions to the rules.”

  “Were you involved in any extracurricular activities?”

  I signed permission slips and academic performance warning notices for five bucks a signature, sold records and pipes I’d shoplifted, and forged learner’s permits for the students who failed Driver’s Ed. I forged signatures on work permits and signed overtime on burger joint time cards. I did math homework for some students, charged big time to do it in their handwriting, and even more if I had to show their work. By high school I could do it, show my work, but it was a chore.

  “I played basketball in a church league. Mostly I worked, though. Dad wanted me to save for college.”

  “But no outside activities related to school?”

  “No.”

  “Was there a conflict with your working?”

  “No. I wanted to be on the track and field team but I was barred from the tryouts.”