The Contortionist’s Handbook
A stunning novel about a brilliant young forger who continually reinvents himself to escape the authorities, described by Chuck Palahniuk, bestselling author of FIGHT CLUB, as 'the best book I have read in easily five years. Easily. Maybe ten years.'Following a near fatal overdose of painkillers, Daniel Fletcher is resuscitated in a Los Angeles emergency room and detained for psychiatric evaluation. Through a series of questions and tests, the psychiatrist must ascertain whether the patient intended to kill himself, or whether he can walk free. What the psychiatrist doesn't know is that 'Daniel Fletcher' is actually John – Johnny – Dolan Vincent, a brilliant young forger who continually changes his identity to save himself from a lifetime of incarceration. Johnny has done such assessments before – many, many times.As he creates an elaborate bluff for the evaluator, Johnny reveals the true story of his traumatic past – a broken family, descent into the sinister world of forgers and criminals, and his one chance of salvation in the beautiful and elusive Molly. But time is running out; as his underworld clients lose patience and the psychiatrist's net closes around him, Johnny has to negotiate the escape act of his life.Evoking the boulevards and strip bars of 1980s LA with cinematic intensity, The Contortionist's Handbook is a darkly hypnotic and stunningly original debut.
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CRAIG CLEVENGER
The Contortionist’s Handbook
CONTENTS
P. S. Ideas Interviews & Features …
Fugitive Tendencies by Will Christopher Baer
Stranger in a Gray Hat by Craig Clevenger
My cigar is not a symbol. It is only a cigar. —Sigmund Freud
I kissed her …. It was like being in church.
—James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice
I can count my overdoses on one hand:
August 1985. Percocet. The 5 mg tablets were identical to the 325 mg tablets which were identical to the generic laxatives. I was in no shape for fine print. ER, three ounces of ipecac and solid heaves of poisons and binder, thirty-seven hours of cramps and shitting blood.
February 1986. Methocarbamol. Yellow caplets, bright like a child’s crayon sunscape. Those five pills stopped my heart and I saw the brain seizure tunnel of light before the EMTs shocked me back alive. They billed me $160 for that jolt.
June 1986. Demerol and thirty-two aspirin reopening the damage I did when I was fourteen.
November 1986. A busy year. Vicodin. Imagine waking up to your morning stomach knot and subsequent rituals:
Shower.
Coffee.
Traffic.
Talk radio.
Hell.
Home.
Drink.
But you remember that it’s Sunday. That four-second blast of relief is what Vicodin feels like for six hours. But overdose and you’re heaving blanks, a pair of fists wringing your stomach like a damp rag, trails of warm spit hanging from your mouth while you try to move your limbs but can’t. Words hit your brain like garbage churning in a breakwater, no order, no connection. Fingers. Name. Hear.
February 1987. Darvocet. And a pint of bourbon.
Yesterday, August 17, 1987. Carisoprodol. Comes in a white tablet like a big-ass vitamin, 350 mg of muscle liquefier for those tense, recovering athletes and furniture movers. Too much, and those relaxed muscles include your diaphragm, then your heart. It feels like drowning or a sumo wrestler sitting on your chest. I’d done three rails of blow to keep my heart from stopping before the paralysis set in, but they hadn’t been enough.
That’s how Rasputin found me. Molly’s cat, fourteen pounds of mottled fur, she adopted him after his collision with the passenger-side Bridgestone of a speeding pickup. Rasputin was blind and near toothless from the accident, his remaining incisor jutting out ninety degrees from his mouth. He ate soft food. He would howl and stare at you with two transparent orbs of eye gel, the flaps of dislodged retina hovering inside. I used to shut off the lights and hold him while he purred. Put a flashlight to his face and look through his dead marble eyes and see his brain. Molly got mad when I did that.
I tried to sit up, lift the weight of my ribs from my lungs, but I couldn’t. Couldn’t curl my fingers or move my lips. Couldn’t stop my tongue from sliding backward and clogging my neck. Wanted to sleep but forced myself to breeeathe, a mechanical wheeze that cut through my fog. I lay on my back, a lance of orange twilight stabbing me square in the face through a slice of curtain where the gaffer’s tape had come loose.
Rasputin yowled for attention and licked my face until his sandpaper tongue burned through my stupor. A loud purring, the noise of a slow-motion wasp in my ear. He settled onto my sternum, sandbag-heavy. The walls of my lungs touched, stayed touching.
Sounds: Door. Handbag hitting the carpet. Rasputin’s weight gone and a merciful rush of sweet, sweet air. Molly’s voice, Baby, oh God baby.
I remember my eyes being peeled open, a blurry face, plaster ceiling over the shoulder. Words, chopped and scattered into a white noise seashell blast of static, shredded phonemes landing in and out of sequence. President. Are. Much. Day. Name. The electro-paddle-blast horse kick to my chest and I’m awake beneath nylon gurney straps, breathing into a plastic muzzle and being carried down the flight of stairs outside my front door.
Best I can, I repeat the drill in my head: My name is Daniel Fletcher. I was born November 6, 1961. I had a headache and it wouldn’t stop. I had some painkillers. They weren’t working and I took too many.
Open my eyes, Where are you taking me but my words are a numbed mumble of bloated syllables and spit-foam covered with an oxygen mask. Dream-coma blur: That’s not a dark blue medic’s jacket, it’s a dark blue suit. Then there’s Jimmy’s face, right over mine. I’ve got it all wrong, must have lost some hours because they’re not taking me down a flight of stairs, they’re lowering me into the dirt. Eliminating my position, phasing me out. I’m thinking At least I’ll be asleep when they bury me
