as well. One of the cops, the shorter one, sees me staring and closes the curtain.
The orderlies have instructions not to give me my street clothes back. If I’m trying to kill myself, I’m a candidate for the State ward and they don’t want me to bolt. Either way, I puked on my T-shirt and the paramedics sliced it open with surgical steel scissors before they smeared me with saline paste and shot three hundred volts through my heart. They meant well.
I make my case, that I don’t want to meet a psychiatrist while I’m wearing hospital garb. They concede, keeping my wallet and keys, bring me a tropical print shirt they’ve fished from their clothing bins—a mixture of donations and unclaimed DOA threads—and assign me to an orderly named Wallace. With my jeans and leather coat, I look like some porn theater doorman. Not the best option when meeting an Evaluator, but much better than the alternative. First impressions count. If I look like I’m crazy—and a hospital gown will have this effect—I might as well fold.
So we’re clear from the beginning, my name is Johnny. John Vincent. John Dolan Vincent. Today my name is Daniel. Or Danny or Dan. Whatever. As far as the paramedics are concerned, my name is Daniel Fletcher. Same for the nurses, doctors, EMTs, LAPD and anyone else responsible for getting me here and/or keeping me alive and/or keeping me here whether I like it or not. My boss knows me as Daniel Fletcher, says so on my job application, so does the dispatcher, my regular pickups and drop-offs and the company’s insurance carrier.
The only person who calls me Johnny is Molly, and only during sex. Usually once. Sometimes she’ll call me Johnny two or three times if I’ve got the stamina or the drugs. But since Molly’s real name is Keara, we’re even. I made her Molly. She asked me to. Wanted to learn the ropes.
Keara was naked. She returned to her bedroom with a glass of water, set it onto the empty wine crate beside her bed. She coiled against me, settling into the curve of me beneath the blankets, closed her eyes.
Yellow streetlight glow seeped through the curtains, a perfect crescent shadow below her cheekbone. I looked at her, watched the slumbering symmetry of her face, the simple lines. Even without makeup, her lips looked carved, set into her face and, in her sleep, she was a jewel. I could draw the contour of her profile from memory with a single line, my eyes shut. Sometimes I’d do that if I couldn’t sleep. Two hundred face lines, evenly spaced on a blank sheet, Keara’s profile repeated mantra-perfect, each line identical to the previous and the next.
I placed my forefinger against her face, faint as a landing moth. I’ve got a gentle touch, when it’s called for. Ran a line down her nose, straight septum from bridge to tip, out to the peak of her cheekbone, corner of her lips, down to her chin. Counting the different angles, their degree, feeling the dips and peaks on the surface of her skin.
“Don’t.” She moved her face, took my hand, interlocked her fingers with mine, kept her eyes closed.
“You’re beautiful,” I said.
“No.”
“Keara.” Whispered, wanted her to open her eyes. “Hey.”
“I don’t like my face,” she said, then opened her eyes, held my left hand to the faint light, looked at my fingers.
“What you told me today,” she said, “You do that by hand? No rulers or anything?”
“Sometimes. Depends on what I’m doing.”
“But you can draw a straight line, can’t you? I’ve seen you do it.”
I cleared my throat, reached for the water. I don’t ever get to talk about it, what I do.
“Yeah, but I still need certain tools. Templates, stencils. Sometimes an official stamp or seal. Whatever I make has to look perfect.”
She smiled, the only unsymmetrical thing about her face. Her mouth stretched more to her right side than her left when she smiled, but her teeth were a perfect white and even row, her eyes squinting into twin sparks.
“Show me,” she said. “Make me someone, Johnny.”
The glow was as close to a coke rush as I got while straight and sober—laying out my process and putting pieces together, ensconced inside my own brain and feeling it fire, functioning in a way that made thought feel primitive, slow.
“Okay,” I said. “But not the real thing. I’m not going through the whole process if the risk isn’t necessary.” But I owed her. She’d let me slide on my biggest lie, regardless of my intent, and so I wanted to indulge her.
“Just give me a name.” She traced the outside of my fingers with one of hers. “Jones or Smith or something.”
“That’s the first rule,” I said. “No Jones. No Smith. No Anderson or anything too plain. Names like that stand out because they’re too ordinary.”
She sat up, took the glass from my hand, and I was caught up in the rush, showing somebody for the first time how I worked, unseen and unknown.
“You want a name that’s common enough to bury you with other identical names in any kind of directory or list. But it can’t be too common.”
“Like …?”
“Like Scottish or Irish surnames. O’Fallon, McGuire. Or Anglo-occupational names. Wheeler or Taylor,” I said. “Archer, Carpenter, Cooper, Mason. Something forgettable to anyone who hasn’t met you twice.”
“Fletcher?”
“You’re quick,” I said and she giggled, nudged me. “But that’s if you’re doing it on your own. If you’re taking an existing name, you work with whatever you can get, minding nationality.”
“What about my first name?”
“Same rules, common but forgettable. How ’bout Molly?”
She’d told me that a guy had been drunk at the bar that evening. Golf shirt yuppie with bleached teeth singing Molly Malone over and over, substituting baby-talk syllables for the words he didn’t know, which were most of them. She pushed her wheelbarrow, through streets broad and narrow and Molly Malone were all, so he sang them over and over, out of tune.
“Molly Wheeler,” Keara said.
“You’re getting it. I’ll make Molly Wheeler a birth certificate this weekend.”
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