“A single room for the night, if you have one, please.”
The ritual ensues: driver’s license, credit card, license plate number. I needed to stay for three days and I needed to be left alone. But if I paid in advance and told them as much, I might as well give them my real name and tell them I’ve got a corpse in my trunk. Grizzled truck stop and roadside motel owners can smell junkies, prostitutes and trouble in general from miles away. Most of the time they don’t care, unless they think they’re going to get saddled with a blue body in one of their rooms.
“What time’s checkout?”
“Ten ay-em,” she said, the last syllable catching, and she heaved a brown glob into the wastebasket next to Seaweed Man.
“I need to sleep in, tomorrow. Can I make it for two, maybe three nights?” I do casual, hoping there’s still color in my face. If she was suspicious, she didn’t show it. She ran my credit card while I guzzled tepid water from the drinking fountain in the lobby. My mouth was drying out and it was getting harder to speak.
She handed me a key, a routine lecture on the amenities and rules of courtesy while I nodded, yeah, uh-huh, on cruise control. There was a 24-hour market across the street and I had to get there quickly. I needed tape—gaffer’s tape, electrical tape, almost any kind of tape—and liquids, lots of liquids and something to eat for when I came to, three days later. If I wasn’t accidentally dead.
Room 15. Light is the enemy. I pulled the curtains tight and sealed the edges with the gaffer’s tape (hotel curtains can withstand a neutron bomb flash), used the tape to cover the bathroom window with a towel (I used foil at home). Do Not Disturb hung outside, secured the door chain and propped a chair under the knob. Off with the clothes because I was going to get hot. Dug the extra blanket from the closet because I was going to get cold. Pissed, shit, emptied my guts so they wouldn’t empty on their own. Four Darvocet, 100 mg per, cold shower, laid on the bed and waited for the worst. Right as the purple light was beginning to wash out the edge of my vision, I saw Mom.
She sat in the chair by the bolted-down television, looking at me. Hair parted down the middle, draping past her shoulders, blurry, green tattoos on her wrists and ankles, a pair of jeans and a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert T-shirt. It swelled under the slope of one breast, hung deflated in the absence of the other. No expression. Not pain, remorse, sadness or condemnation. Just looking at me.
My whole body seized motionless, I couldn’t move, couldn’t see.
Shower. Water was cold, building up around my ankles. How long? I got out, dried off with a stiff towel, the smell of chlorine bleach stabbing through my haze.
Bed. Television spitting blue noise, the light cutting through my eyes. I shut it off and the light went away but the pain didn’t.
Someone knocking on the door, shouting a name. Mine, I think, but I couldn’t recall it at the moment. On the floor, twisted up in a bedsheet, felt cold water soaking through the carpet at my feet. Something running in the bathroom.
On my back. Voices. Someone shone a light. My head was under the nightstand, I could see splintery stipples in the particleboard underbelly. I heard, Alive. Overdose. Check-in. ID. Shower. Damage. I asked if they’d seen my mom.
Vomiting black. A spew of activated charcoal and water pumped into my stomach, but it was supposed to stay down. Through the receding pain of the headache, I felt the acidic nausea that Darvocet brings on, like a gut full of hot snot and sandpaper kicking at the roof of my stomach.
I spent seventy-two hours in the hospital. The vomiting and dry heaves cleared my system but my blood pressure and temperature rode a three-day roller coaster, my head screaming every minute of it. X-rays and spinal taps yielded nothing (I knew this, couldn’t stop them) and on the second day I had to be treated for shock. They forced my blood through my veins to keep my organs from dying.
When I met the Evaluator after the Darvocet OD, I’d lost six pounds, six that I didn’t have to spare.
———
“Are you Mrs. Bishop?”
Keara had driven south, waited for me at the hospital during my third-degree with the Evaluator. I made it through the interview, the cold brick in my stomach telling me how much I wanted out, how much I wanted to see her again, telling me that I had to change names again, and telling me that I couldn’t walk away from her. Not this woman, not this time.
“No,” she said. “I’m his girlfriend.”
The cold feeling in my stomach melted. They wheeled me out—hospital insurance won’t let you walk out—and I climbed into Keara’s car. The rental company had taken their car from the hotel lot, sent me a bill in the mail. I never made Mexico pickups in my own vehicle.
“How you feel?” She brushed her hand against my face.
“Better. Tired.”
She pulled out of the hospital lot, headed toward the freeway.
“They said you were being examined by a psychiatrist.”
“It’s the law,” I told her. “If they’re not sure whether or not you made a suicide attempt, you gotta talk to someone.”
“So, what, they’ll lock you up if they think you did it on purpose?”
“Yes, they will,” I said.
More than seventy percent of the Evaluators who handle people like me don’t have licenses to practice. They’re students logging in their hours to meet certification requirements. And like ninety-five percent of everybody else, most of them believe in astrology or UFOs or the power of crystals or crop circles or reincarnation or something else. And if these people think you’re a threat to yourself or others, they’re obligated by law to intervene. I haven’t found a solid definition of intervene yet, but I didn’t want to be within a dog’s light-year of knowing firsthand. Yes, yes, yes, they would lock me up, Keara.
Staring out the window, wondering how I was going to tell her the truth, I took the cigarettes from her dash, lit one. They always feel so good after three days. A deep drag, I held it in for as long as I could. I was laying the groundwork for another change in my head, preparing to grab the next name in line and make Eric Bishop disappear forever.
In a rare moment with Dad, when he was home and we had a conversation of more than eight or nine words, he once told me, As bad as somebody wants to hear a secret, that’s how bad they want to tell it to somebody else. Keara hadn’t asked why I’d tried to make a surreptitious trip to Tijuana, why I’d rented a car while she was on a two-day shoot, but I knew she was wondering, and I wanted to tell her. She pushed a tape into the deck. I finished my cigarette and I closed my eyes. Neil Young sang “Sugar Mountain” while Keara and I held hands—her right, my left—in silence for two hours. I’d never done that before.
I slept at her place for an hour when we arrived. After a shower, I made coffee while she dressed for her shift that night. “Listen,” I sat Keara down. “I have to move. No big deal, I’ll be staying in L.A. But I have to move.”
“Eric, sweetie, what’s the matter?” She was fitting a silver hoop into her earlobe.
“There’s something else.” My mouth had dried out, fingers got cold. The truth, that everything she knew about me was a lie, could mean I might never see her again. “My name isn’t Eric. My name is going to be Daniel. Or Danny. Daniel Fletcher.”
I told her about the headaches, their history and that no doctor could explain them. I told her about the overdoses, how nothing seemed to stop the pain and how I couldn’t risk any records being cross-referenced, couldn’t risk having any documented link between identities. I couldn’t stay at a job where people knew me, couldn’t stay in an apartment where my new name would conflict with my name on the lease. I’d have to sell my car and pay off my Eric Bishop credit card because I couldn’t risk a collection agent tracking me down. I didn’t tell her about Jimmy and the Business. I didn’t tell her about the Executive.
I pointed out her balcony window.
“See that building there?” I said. “There’s a vacant lot behind it. That’s where I live.” I explained that I use
d that lot’s street number for Eric Bishop’s address, but had a forwarding request at the post office that routed my mail to a drop in Pasadena.
And I told her that she was the only person in the world who would know me as both Eric Bishop and Danny Fletcher, if she wanted to.
“And if you really want to know,” I said, “and it matters to me that you do, my real name is Johnny.” I hadn’t said that name out loud, on purpose, in years.
Her eyes were wet. She forgot about getting dressed.
“Johnny? That’s your real name?” she whispered.
“John Vincent. After my dad, John Dolan Vincent. I’m John Vincent Jr.”
She wrapped around me, hot tears on my neck and I couldn’t understand why she was crying if she wasn’t hurt or angry. But the cold left me, and it hasn’t been back since.
“Johnny,” she whispered again, in my ear.
“But please, don’t call me that. Please call me Daniel. It’s very important that you never call me John.”
“I’ll call you Johnny very quietly, when nobody’s around. Okay?” She squeezed again. I had no words.
“I have to get ready to go, sweetie,” she said. “Are you going to stay?”
“I’ll be here,” I said.
When she left, she kissed me and said, “I’ve been shopping, so there’s plenty of food. Please eat something, Mr. Fletcher,” and smiled.
“I will.”
“And rest.” She leaned in and whispered, “Because when I come home, I want to talk to Johnny.”
I ate, poured a glass of bourbon and played “Sugar Mountain” over and over, smiling alone in the dark.
EIGHTEEN
The dispatcher relayed a message from Keara to me while I was making a delivery to Ventura. I worked a lot of courier and driving jobs. New identities with clean DMV records and short résumés made them ideal. I called her from a lobby phone after making a drop.
“Hey,” her voice sounded thrashed, 976-bedroom rasp about to crack.
“What’s wrong?”
“They’re kicking me out,” she said. “The neighbors have been complaining.”
“About you?”
Someone in a truck had been blaring the horn and shouting outside her complex one night. The neighbors thought it was her name being shouted, and when a used spark plug took out a tenant’s front window after a second horn-blowing incident, the manager called the cops and gave Keara her thirty days—a pink A4 sheet, Notice to Vacate the Premises,pinned to her door while she slept.
“Sarah’s helping me pack. I’m moving into her place this weekend.” I’d met Sarah once, a cute redhead she knew from her previous cocktailing job. She let Keara register her car in Sarah’s name. Keara’s driving record left her with horrible insurance rates, she told me.
“Slow down,” I said. “You’ve got a month to find a place and pack. I’ll be there tonight and we can talk. You can contest the eviction. It won’t hold and you won’t pay a dime in rent while it’s in dispute.”
“No, Eric. I want out of here. I don’t want to deal with any of it.”
I’d already paid for two previous broken windows, one on her apartment and another on her car. I kept telling her to park closer to her complex, but she insisted that she could never find a spot when she came home late. Each time, nothing had been stolen but both events filled her with a paralysis, a hopelessness out of proportion to the damage. The fearless woman I was contemplating going clean for would retract, become inert for a whole day before resuming her old persona. I kept saying This is Los Angeles, this happens to everyone, but I was wasting my time.
A flattened cardboard box fixed in place with duct tape covered Mrs. Phelps’s downstairs window. She smoked, wearing a pink bathrobe at her open front door, a talk show blaring from the television inside. “You the one with the horn?” she barked. I walked past her, eyes straight ahead.
Keara’s apartment was directly above. She and Sarah had consolidated her belongings into boxes—music, books, toiletries, makeup, cleaning supplies, dishes, cutlery, pans and miscellaneous effects (junk written in red marker), and three plastic bags of clothes and linens. Anything non-functional, aesthetic, she had carefully placed into another box already in Sarah’s Volvo: rolled-up posters (Van Gogh, Kahlo, the Ramones), paisley blankets she had tacked to her walls, candles of sandalwood, jasmine, sage, rose. She owned less than I did, because of my behemoth reference library that I’d culled from a thousand yard sales, junk stores, and used book dealers—Bibles, out-of-state phone books, expired medical references and outdated engineering texts came cheap. I read a lot. Keara’s ten boxes and six bags of personal possessions looked like a life in microcosm, a core sampling of accumulated strata salvaged in haste. Rasputin yowled, confused by the presence of three distinct voices.
“Sarah’s in the shower.” Keara handed me a joint, said, “We’re going to take my stuff to her place, get some Indian food. She brought me a housewarming present, too,” and tossed me a small tin of throat lozenges. That’s what it said on the outside. Inside, half a gram of coke in a brown vial, and nineteen pills, cream-yellow tablets with a butterfly puncture. Valium, 5 mg.
“Can they deliver?” Sarah asked. She opened the bathroom door, expelling its bayou steam into the bedroom. Wrapped in a towel, she ran a comb through her hair, sat down on the bed.
“I’ll check,” said Keara. “I’m not paying this phone bill, might as well get some use out of it,” and left the room.
“My turn,” Sarah said, eyeballing the joint.
“Here,” I tried to hand it to her.
“My hands are wet.”
I started to put it to her lips for her, but it died. It wasn’t until after I’d fished out my lighter and held the joint back to her that I caught myself using my left hand. She leaned in to take a pull, her lips grazing my left thumb and forefinger and I snapped my lighter, held it for her.
And that was our position—Sarah’s towel draping looser, looser, Sarah not using her wet hands to close it—when Keara returned with a door-hanger delivery menu.
“Go easy on that, you two,” was all she said, reaching for the phone.
Guys write about this stuff, lie about this stuff. I should have seen it coming but I’m slow sometimes. I never asked Keara if they planned it, not wanting to press my luck. We never left that night, or the next day. I called in sick. We never slept. And when Sarah had to leave for her shift the next afternoon, Keara and I used the Valium to come down, finished the leftovers and slept.
“Maybe you and I should find a place together.” She smiled, put her head on my chest. I was looking for the compliment in her words, certain it was there but addled from twenty hours of Keara and Sarah naked, eating take-out Indian and Mandarin, the three of us crammed into Keara’s shower, on the bed, the living-room floor.
“Definitely,” I said. “We should definitely do that.”
———
I enjoy a certain feeling of new freedom after each change, each time I crawl out of that small airless box and breathe again. I have a clean name and a clean start. Then the rabbit-reflex tension returns on day twenty-two, like I could set my watch by it. I wonder if someone’s on to me, a subtle paranoia that a coke habit only encourages, and it’s worse with each passing day. I squint, glance over my shoulder when someone asks the time. Look for vans, delivery services—flowers, parcels, plumbing or electrical repair—stop at a pay phone and call the 800-number painted on the side. If I get a dead connection, I’m going to run. Disappear. That’s what I tell myself. Then I start seeing blue and the cycle starts all over again.
I held Rasputin in my lap, the room quiet and lightless when a knock at the door kicked the disappear wheels in my head into high gear. Through the peephole lens, the Executive’s bloated, fish-eye cartoon face stared back.
“Yeah?” through the door, fire-code sturdy but it seemed so thin right then.
“Conference,” he said, “I need some face time with you.”
&n
bsp; I sat in the passenger seat of a pristine Mercedes while he drove. “We’ve just closed the books for the quarter,” he said. “In a manner of speaking. We’ve exceeded projections, and the investors are quite happy.” He meandered the side streets, so far not going anyplace I didn’t recognize. I knew my way around.
“Costs are down. Revenues are up. Market share is increasing and we’re penetrating new territories each week. Everyone, including you, is up for a bonus. We’re putting together a bonus plan. Nothing on paper, you’ll just have to take our word for it. But right now, there’s a few more board members I need your help getting into the country. I can count on you, can’t I? It will count as overtime pay.”
“Okay.”
“Where you been?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
He turned his head, eye contact for the first time during the drive, looking at me and not the brake lights in front of him. I must have flinched or something because he stopped, just short of plowing into a BMW with a Baby on Boardsign in its rear window, but he never took his eyes from me.
“I never repeat myself,” he said.
“I was sick,” I told him.
“Sick? Sick, how?”
“I have migraines. Jimmy told you, didn’t he?”
Trying to piece it together for him, but it all seemed too obvious to put into words.
“They hit me every few months. I’m never certain, the intervals vary. I usually end up in the hospital.”
“Then get something for them.”
“That’s the problem. The doctors won’t give me anything, they don’t believe me. And it’s the stuff I get on my own that puts me there.”