and I refer to him. No vague pronouns, because I’m talking about someone else, not myself, and that’s what he’s listening for.
“It says here that you took quite a few painkillers.”
“I know. My head hurt. I couldn’t get it to stop.” True. No pause, mild emphasis and I look him in the eye.
“Do you know how much you took?”
“I don’t have any idea.”
“Okay. Let’s come back to that later.” The Evaluator leans back, crosses his legs.
Convince this guy I’m not a head case. Whether or not I’m locked up is decided by a person who couldn’t pass the same evaluation under the same circumstances in a hundred lifetimes. He’s tagged me with at least one unfounded headache claim and at least one overdose, so I’ve got to think quickly.
The Evaluator is mixing his cue cards with instinct, like knowing when to kiss someone for the first time or push a bluffer into folding. People that survive shark attacks were never attacked. Sharks can tell with a single bite—a short fin mako’s jaws can exert four tons of pressure per square inch—whether they’ll burn more calories digesting the kill than they’ll gain from it. Millions of years of evolution tell them whether to eat you or not. This Evaluator is going to swim in wide, concentric circles of safe subjects until he thinks I’m relaxed enough to spill my guts. Older evaluators like this one spend less time interpreting. They read you quickly, so signs are easier to convey. That works in my favor.
First, he’ll assess my current mental state. This is called a Mental Status Evaluation. He’s laying the groundwork for the detailed questions, the personal details that could get me sent away indefinitely, or at least until a hearing. Anything goes wrong here and the rest of his questions are null and void. He’ll profile my most basic condition, such as how I’m dressed, how I’m acting and if what I say coincides with my behavior. If I say I’m fine but I’m bawling my eyes out, or I think I’m going to die while I’m smiling cheerfully, there’s a problem.
He’ll try to establish that I know who I am, where I am and what day it is. That I’ve got my memory—immediate, short- and long-term. Hygiene is important. Someone in the depths of depression (for which I’m a candidate) throws grooming to the dogs. No shave, white scalp flakes salting their shoulders, untucked shirts and swollen guts pushing belly hair through missing buttons, an Evaluator will mark it down. I’d splashed water on my hands in the bathroom, finger-combed my hair and chewed a handful of mints from the urology desk on the way here.
“How are you feeling now?” he asks.
“I’m all right. A little groggy. My throat hurts.”
“It’s swollen. Give it a day, maybe take a couple of aspirin. It should be fine,” he says, and writes Patient complaining of throat pain on the canary legal pad.
“Mr. Fletcher—may I call you Daniel?” Turn the dial to Informal, lighten the mood and tighten the circles. The distorted fish do their back-and-forth soothing trick.
“Yeah, sure.”
“You can call me Richard,” he says, then continues, “Daniel, I need to go through some exercises with you in order to identify a baseline in your thought process. I need to do this to be certain you’re able to accurately answer the background questions I mentioned earlier. That sound okay with you?”
“Okay.” Asking my permission is a lie. I’m low on coffee.
“Do you know where you are, Daniel?”
“I’m in a hospital.” I’m at Queen of Angels Hollywood Presbyterian. Saw it on the scrubs (antifreeze blue-green, professional, calming) but don’t want to look too observant. They think your intelligence is out of bounds, they get a bigger notebook and order lunch.
“Do you know which hospital?”
I shake my head, push my hair out of my eyes.
“L.A., somewhere.”
He nods, writes shorthand annotations, HG and three x’s, circles the third x beside my abbreviated answer.
“Do you have any idea where in this hospital you are?”
“I’m on the third floor, I think. No windows in here, so it’s hard to tell anything else.” False. I know exactly where I am. Wallace walked me three hundred and thirty feet from the emergency room and took an elevator up four flights. Two right turns and three left, so I’m facing south. If there were a window in here, I’d be looking down onto Fountain Avenue.
I lean back, cross my legs and fold my hands. Mirror. Trust me.
“How do you know you’re on the third floor?” PM, three x’s and circles the third, again.
“The elevator.”
“Very good.”
The Evaluator shifts in his seat, maintaining an open posture. He’s sitting at the corner of the table adjacent to me, instead of opposite. Legs uncrossed, left elbow resting on the arm of the chair (my chair has no arms—Wallace put me here), left hand rubbing his chin or mustache. His torso is exposed to say I’m not hiding anything. The most important thing to remember is that all of the pop-psychology magazine articles about body language are wrong. Crossing one’s arms or legs can indicate comfort or honesty just as much as it can defensiveness or barriers or deception. What’s important is knowing when to change body language, and how frequently.
My file is out of reach, and he writes on his yellow pad, right-handed. Top left margin starting out at one point five inches and swelling inward as he moves down the page, a pattern that prematurely forces him to start a new sheet. He writes in cursive but keeps his letters far apart from each other.
“Do you know what day it is?” he asks.
“Tuesday, the eighteenth.”
“You’re certain.”
“Yeah.” I don’t give up more than I have to, but I can’t appear obstinate or paranoid, either.
“How is it you’re certain of the date?”
“My headache started Friday. They usually last four days and I was fine yesterday when I woke up here.” I mime with my hands, pointing to here when I say here. Hidden hands say liar.
At the mention of the previous headaches, he flips back two pages, makes a note where we’ll get back to that later and returns. He checks my file, resumes his inward creep down the legal pad. Pen poised, thumb and forefinger rubbing his moustache, he continues.
“Okay, can you tell me the month and year?”
I shift in my seat, glance to my left because I’m remembering a fact. “It’s August, 1987.” Sigh, clench my left hand, then open. I’m doing exasperated. Without words I’m saying Why are you asking me this?
His first priority is to find out if I’m oriented, achieved via basic questions about where I am and how I got here, what day of the week or what year it is or who’s president. Same as when a field medic is checking to see if you’re coherent.
His next task is to establish that I know why I’m here, which tells him I’m aware of what I’ve done. That is, what did I do? And do I know that I did it? Hopefully, he’ll link my why back to my assessment of reality.
It’s a simple equation at heart, a clean chain of logic that forms a circle and bites its own tail. Question one: Do you know where you are? If you say a hospital, they can assume, for the time being, that you are sane. If they ask you if you know how you got there, and you say I cut myself, you’ve proven that you know right from wrong and are responsible for your actions. If they ask you why you cut yourself and you say to stop the voices in my head, that blows their first conclusion and you’re gone. But close the circle equation and you’re halfway home.