The Contortionist’s Handbook. Craig Clevenger
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, fish-tank 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,