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.”
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 called 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