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 brain aneurysm that I noted for future reference. Sometimes I find couples who died on the same 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
