halfway through his third decade and he’s had one too many anonymous parking lot dings on his precious convertible and been yelled at by his boss once too often and ignored by the waitresses in the short skirts and you are his breaking point.
You need to disappear. Maybe find somebody your age, with your stats, with no family, friends or police record who’s at death’s door and will sell you his name for a few hundred bucks. But the odds are against you finding someone like that. So you need to work from the beginning.
Find a name. Check tombstones, obituaries, estate sale Bibles. Find something familiar but not obvious, distinct but forgettable: Norton, Dillon, Harris.
Occupations: Cooper, Porter, Taylor, Donner, Thatcher, Barber, Farmer.
Materials: Wood, Silver, Steel.
Flora: Branch, Fields, Weed.
Fauna: Wolf, Bird, Crow, Hawk.
Titles: Sheriff, Sage, King, Pope, Priest.
Colors: Brown, Black, White, Green.
A name people have heard before, won’t think twice about, won’t remember. You’re not looking for a baby, you’re looking for parents.
Get a birth certificate. Write the county registrar. Insist there’s a mistake if they say your birth record isn’t on file. I keep a list of forty-five hospitals and county registrars with pending lawsuits for mismanagement and neglect. Illicit requests slide through because they’re scared of the heat another delay can bring. Sometimes I’m lucky, I’ll be setting up for a change when a hospital registry or county hall of records catches fire. Birth certificate requests take longer, but they never check their authenticity because they couldn’t if they wanted to.
I can make a birth certificate if I have to. Twenty-five minutes, not counting aging if I don’t have a vintage paper specimen. Strong coffee, tea or chicory, room temperature, soak for one hour. Or leave it taped to a sunlit window for two weeks. Seal it inside a plastic bag with rust scraped from a nail, let the moisture make spots. Heat a bent paperclip, make wormholes. Sodium silicate on a linoleum block stamp for a watermark, because the pencil pushers will always hold it to the light. And be subtle, subtle, subtle. I saw a guy hand his fake to an SSA clerk. His overzealous paper-aging made his job look like an amusement park treasure map. They cuffed him right there, and I doubt he’s out yet.
Work up a new signature, spend the time to get it right and real. Look through old yearbooks, junk-store postcards, used textbooks, Bibles, antique-store photographs stacked in cigar boxes, fifty cents each. Find the names, the letters, piece together one after the next. High, confident crossbars, forward slants. No underlines, flourishes—too arrogant. Don’t cross over the name or dot an i too low—too subdued. Build it, write it left-handed, upside down, give it its own style, then do it right-handed, practice, practice, practice, repetition, repetition, repetition.
Then burn every sample and practice signature and every sheet of paper less than ten sheets beneath those practice sheets. Do not throw them away, tear them up or ditch them in a dumpster in another zip code or trust a paper shredder.
I started doing favors for people. Big mistake. Jimmy or somebody would introduce me with words like forger or counterfeiter, sometimes with expert or master thrown in. Like I should be proud. I hated being introduced to people, and I told them not to use words like that. Whadda we call you, then?
Told a girl once that I’d wanted to be a contortionist. Saw a guy on TV when I was younger, bend, twist and crumple his body into an airtight box no bigger than a knapsack. Stayed inside for two hours, like he didn’t breathe at all. When they opened the box, he crawled out slowly like some strange hatching thing, every bone intact and breathing like normal. I can’t explain it, but that seems closer to what I do than anything else.
Met a guy in a DMV parking lot, said he could get me anything I needed. Probably made his money selling his work to illegal immigrants, but I caught his eye for some reason. I hate when I catch someone’s eye, so I wanted to make sure he never came back. In the passenger seat of his ’77 Cadillac, bigger than God and twice as conspicuous, I choked back the bile from the smell of sweat and fast food wrappers while “Eddie” fiddled with a combination lock briefcase, asked if I was a cop.
“No,” I said.
“Anything you need, man, anything. Get you a driver’s license, or clean record if you got a DUI. Check it out.”
Half pimp, half sideshow barker, he showed me twenty driver’s licenses with Sanchez, Lopez or something, photos of Mexican men all middle height and weight, blank Social Security cards, green cards, immunization documents and baptismal certificates. I rifled through, found a birth certificate that looked solid at first glance.
“Any name you want, brother,” he started up again, drive-through grease fumes drifting from his glossy pimp shirt.
“Make you a couple of years older, I can give you a deal,” he said.
The birth certificate, for a Carlos Mejia born in 1946 in East Los Angeles, was artfully browned with time, all the data intact. I held it up to his windshield for the sun to shine through.
“Best you can find. I got this partner who’s a real pro at this,” he said.
The sun hit the paper, dull watermark letters glowed through the page, they said 100% acid free. I tossed it back into his briefcase and got out, shut the door behind me, heavy as a bank vault.
“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