seascapes and sunsets. No Van Gogh. No Picasso. No borderline disorders or schizophrenia leaking through a reproduction to set off any alarms with a new patient. No Magritte, and that’s a shame. I like Magritte. Lots of pale blues and muted greens. Keeps you calm. Same reason doctors aren’t wearing traffic-cone-orange scrubs when they’re telling you to Calm down, this won’t hurt, everything’s going to be all right. The paintings are behind plastic sheeting, all four corners bolted into the wall. No nails, no hooks.
I miss Keara. I can close my eyes and see her. I can see her freckles, hairline wrinkles, fingernails, the shape of her walking to and from the shower, and it fills me with a sweet ache to see her. I like sitting and watching her put on her makeup in the morning, while she stays oblivious to me, like I’m part of her surroundings, part of her normal.
I love her, and it should scare me—the ease with which I can say that, but it doesn’t. I should tell her so. Her sister was in town again. Keara was gone for half the day before she came back and found me. I hope she’s okay, and I’m scared she’s not.
I need to:
Focus, focus.
Finish my coffee.
Ask for a cigarette break as soon as I can.
Ask for more coffee, maybe tea. I hate sodas.
Here’s how it works: A hospital is legally obligated to detain an overdose victim for a psychiatric evaluation if the reason for the overdose is suspect. This psychiatric evaluator has a set checklist that he or she runs through, a predictable maze of questions looking at a series of cause-and-effect answers to determine if you’re depressed, manic, or both (manic-depressive or bipolar), paranoid or schizophrenic. Like a job interview, your appearance, demeanor and responses either fit into the check boxes or they don’t. And like a job interview, whether or not you’re qualified means next to nothing. You came from a rival company or weren’t recommended by the right person. Your boss is white, and you’re not. Or you’re not showing enough cleavage. You either get the job, or you don’t. You either end up in the custody of the state, or you don’t.
The ideal Evaluator wears a cheap haircut, a pastel sweater, a wedding band, and a watch. If you have an Evaluator expressing himself, wearing his identity on his sleeve, you’ve got a problem. Long hair, chunks of turquoise jewelry, designer interpretations of aboriginal garments, or scarves from third-world flea markets means that you’ve got someone who resents working at County and wants to be a healer. Silk shirt, overpriced sunglasses, and he’s going through the motions while he thinks about his screenplay. What they wear tells you what they want to show, and what they show tells you what they want to hide.
The combination to be on guard for is young and bored, or young and resentful. You can spot them at social gatherings, the grad students or interns who tell you about syndromes, conditions, deviances and disorders, and they love, love, love to talk. They speak in half-sentences with a knowing smile-squint, watch you falter at the pause, and then keep talking.
During an interview, if you make a remark like you know what I mean? they’ll say, 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.
