Her mouth jumped ahead of her brain. “So it isn’t Agnes, then?”
“What?” His face crinkled like a wadded piece of paper.
April tried to shrink into the pillow. Her voice loweredto blend with its softness. “I thought maybe you were in love with Agnes, and that’s why—”
“Why are you always so worried about Agnes?”
“I’m not—”
“Physician, heal thyself.”
She reached back, pulled her pillow from under her head, and swung it into the side of his.
He grabbed it and pulled so hard she collapsed against his chest, her head against his cheek. Before she could react, he wrapped his arms around her. “Don’t push. Okay? I’m not a hopeless case. Just a helpless one. Can you be patient?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to be … with you.”
“Would it help if we met at my place next time?”
She smiled and slipped down to nuzzle his neck. “It’s not necessary. It’s enough you offered. You know, the walk-of-shame thing.”
His hand slid down her back, then up again. His light touch turned into a grip on her shoulder.
She leaned her head back. “What’s the matter?”
“I want to ask something, but the timing sucks. You’ll take it wrong.”
“If it’s about Agnes, you’re right.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Shit,” she said. “You know how to spoil a moment, don’t you?”
“I just want a professional opinion. That’s all.”
“Why now?”
“When else can I ask?”
“Come around more often,” she said.
He slid toward the edge of the bed.
She grabbed him around the waist. “I’m sorry. I admit it. I’m jealous. You always bring her up. Sometimes I think—”
“List the things we have in common,” he said. “No matter how long the list is, Agnes is on it, right near the top. Without her, we wouldn’t have found each other.”
“That’s supposed to help?”
“Right now, she needs a friend more than ever. What kind of turd would you think I was if I deserted her?”
April thought about answering.
“I’ll never deny that I care about her. I want her to get better. That should be another of our common points. I don’t understand what’s wrong with her, and I want to. I want to help, and it seems my visits do that.”
April went rigid. “You want an opinion of what’s wrong with her?”
“Yes.”
“Professional opinion?”
“Yes.”
She propped her pillow against the headboard, leaned against it, and raised the blanket just above her breasts. “How much do you know about how our minds process reality and our own identity?”
He leaned on his elbow, propping his chin with his palm. The look on his face was like that of a dog awaiting a treat. “Sounds like I’m about to get a mixture of psychology and philosophy. I know a little about both.”
“Have you ever heard of the Global Phenomenal Model of Reality?”
He bobbed his head. “You know, I was just discussing it with my barber the other day.”
“Was your barber real, or was he someone your mind invented?”
“He talked to me, touched me, cut my hair. My hair was shorter when I left, and some of it littered his floor.”
“How do you know you didn’t blank out, cut your own hair, and imagine the whole thing?”
“I just know. I’ve done the same thing dozens of times.”
April smiled. “So, over your lifetime, you’ve developed a set of experiences, and all of the events from your barber visit coincided with your experiences, right?”
“You could say it that way.”
“How about if I said it like this: Similarities between observations and experience make the event seem real.”
His eyes didn’t stray. “That sounds logical.”
“Then, let’s take the logic one step further,” April said. “The greater the details of the observations, and the stronger their coherence with experiences, the more real the event appears. How’s that?”
“I’m still with you.”
“So, what happens when an event is extremely detailed, but it goes against all of your experience and your perceived order of the world?”
“Like what?”
“What if you had an experience so horrific it didn’t fit any of your accumulated experiences, and it fell well outside of accepted limits of your perception of civilized society? What if your barber suddenly slashed the throat of a customer and began eating his neck flesh? Would that fit your concept of reality?”
He shook his head. “More like surreal. But if it happened in front of me, I’d justify it as an anomaly.”
“But what if it kept happening every time you went to the barber? Over and over again?”
“I guess I’d have to find a way to accept it as reality and deal with it.”
April shifted under the sheets. “What if it was totally unacceptable? Unacceptable, yet real?”
“I’d have to find a way to put it out of my mind. Maybe pretend it wasn’t happening.”
“So now, picture yourself as a little girl. You’ve been raised in a family situation with a father who has nurtured and protected you. But then, something happens with your father that is so unexpected and so horrible that it defies your experience-defined basis of reality. And it keeps happening over and over.”
Jason shivered. “I’d find a way to adapt. How did Agnes do it?”
“When experiences get too tough for her, she with-draws—blanks out. She calls herself ‘No One.’ As far as I can tell, she totally escapes. She stops observing. Her emotions succumb to the logic of survival. She doesn’t have any memory of the events. But there are memories in there somewhere. That’s what I’m going after.”
“You think that’s the solution? Get her to remember? What if that traumatizes her further?”
“If she’s going to deal with her problems, she has to face them.”
Jason sat up. He pulled the bedsheet above his waist. “How does Lilin fit in? Is she Agnes’s way of adapting?”
“Not really. I think Lilin’s more of a consequence.”
“Now you’re losing me.”
“It has to do with how we process our own identity. You think of yourself in the first person, right?”
“Yes.” He smiled. “I do.”
“Right. But is a first-person perspective necessary for a conscious experience?”
“Yes?”
April snickered. “No. A dream is a conscious experience, but pain, smell, and taste aren’t usually represented. One can argue that a dream isn’t a complete first-person experience, that we dream outside of the first person. And that’s not all. Schizophrenics frequently have auditory hallucinations—voices speaking to them. But as far as I can tell, the voices almost always speak in the second person: ‘You do this. You do that.’”
“How does that fit with Agnes?”
“I’m getting there. Be patient.” She leaned forward, and a breast escaped from the covers. She left it out. “There can’t be a multiplication of the first-person self. More than one first person is mutually exclusive and functionally incompatible. So any additional identity occurs in the second person. And what’s really interesting is that the host—that’s the first-person identity—is usually amnesiac to the other, or others.”
Jason lifted his eyes from April’s breast. “Is this reality or just theory?”
“Mostly the latter.”
“So if that’s true, Agnes doesn’t know what Lilin does, right? How about the other way around?”
April let the blanket slip from her other breast. “Good question. Since Lilin is a second-person, minor identity, she’s aware of Agnes’s world. She remains a distant observer as long as Agnes is around.”
“Why is Lilin so different from Agnes?”
“Alt
ernate identities are always exaggerated in specific dimensions, like in drastic behavioral traits. The dimensions are invented to help adapt to the trigger experiences: the horrific abuse and murder of her sister, in Agnes’s case.”
“So Lilin deals with violence with exaggerated violence?”
“Exactly. When things get stressful to Agnes, she blanks out; she becomes No One. That allows the alternate personality to fill in, with her exaggerated behavioral traits. And whatever happens with Lilin, Agnes doesn’t remember. But Lilin doesn’t go blank. She’s aware of Agnes’s world. When Lilin takes over, she can react to things that are happening to Agnes, or that happened to Agnes in the past.”
Jason reached out and touched April’s breast.
She slapped the hand away. “We’re talking about Agnes here.”
He shook his hand like it hurt and came back on track. “I still don’t understand why Lilin didn’t come out earlier in Agnes’s life.”
April pulled up the blanket. “I have a theory. Her great-aunts, Gert and Ella, replaced her father but without the socially inconsistent experiences. As long as they kept tight control, there were no experiences to trigger Agnes’s mental lapses, letting Lilin in. When Gert died and Ella went into the home, Agnes probably searched for a substitute. That created a crack. When she found out her father was still alive, that dredged up specific anxieties and really opened the door for Lilin.”
Jason tried to pull the blanket off of April, but she held it in place. “Any support for the theory?” he said.
“Plenty. Lilin talks to Agnes.”
“I know.”
April frowned. “Did she tell you Lilin talks in secondperson—tells her to do things?”
“No,” Jason said. “We didn’t discuss grammatical framework.”
April slumped on her pillow and pulled the covers up to her neck. “What do you think of Agnes’s personality?”
“She’s shy, quiet. Very conservative.”
“How about emotional?” April said.
“That’s not a word I’d use to describe her.”
April smiled. “That’s my observation, too. In fact, I think she’s nearly devoid of emotion. Everything is logical to her. She cries, gets upset. But she doesn’t make any decisions based on emotion. Only on logic.”
Jason folded his arms over this chest. “Is that bad?”
“In her case, I think it’s devastating. We all balance emotion and logic when we make decisions, and for most of us emotion is at least as powerful as logic, more so in most cases. Whenever emotion starts to creep in, Agnes heads for No One.”
“And Lilin?”
April’s smile widened. “My guess is that Lilin operates on emotion only, logic be damned.”
Jason shook his head. “Sounds like my big brother. Tell me what you’re going to do with Agnes, and maybe I can use it on Donnie.”
“I have to try to get Agnes to act on emotional experiences. Set up some stressful situation where she fights back instead of backing out to No One. If she can learnto handle stress without bailing out, it’ll give her confidence. It’ll bring her back to a more central position. And—”
“And if she gains balance, there’s no room for Lilin in her mind.” He paused. “There’s just one problem. If Lilin is aware of Agnes’s world, won’t she react to your attempts to get Agnes to handle these situations?”
“If it’s a true dominant-secondary hierarchy, I don’t think so, but this is an untilled field. There isn’t much in the literature except speculation and anecdotal reports of therapy results. Nothing scientific.”
“What if your treatment backfires and Lilin gets stronger? Are there any cases where the dominant and secondary personalities reverse?”
“It’s been reported.”
Jason rubbed his temples. “Shit.”
CHAPTER 9
Agnes watched the light fade through the high windows of the Day Room. Most of her colleagues were in their rooms now. Like circus animals, they followed a routine that no longer required reinforcement and didn’t need a clock. Each person probably had a unique set of cues—the diminishing light, the long shadows, the accumulating fatigue of boredom—that triggered the migratory response.
It was Agnes’s favorite time of day. The only time she was alone outside of her cramped, sterile sleeping cubicle. Her room was painted glossy light green, like everywhere else. Green had once been her favorite color.
She thought about why she spent the minimum amount of time in her room. It wasn’t decorated like some of the others. Marsha had pictures pasted on every available inch or two of the four walls. She was aboutto start a third. Most were of her family and friends, although their correspondence had tailed off in the last couple of weeks, so she had started cutting photos out of magazines. She said the pictures were of her new family.
Tammy and Patty had a few photos, tastefully placed, in exactly the same locations. When Patty received a new one, Tammy went into a funk until she got something to hang in the exact same spot in her room. Patty had told Agnes about an experiment she had conducted once, moving the pictures by no more than six inches each. Tammy had duplicated the alteration with baffling exactness. The mimicry didn’t frustrate Patty; she seemed flattered.
Agnes didn’t know what the men’s rooms looked like. They were on a different hall. One time, Patty had said that Stuart the Stud’s walls were the only ones in the place that weren’t green. Everyone had laughed. Except Agnes.
But why were the walls of her room so bare? A memory flashed but extinguished, and it startled her. Another flash, this time in slower motion. It was of a room, a scary room. The walls were decorated with a sparse assortment of framed photos, but that wasn’t what made it so scary.
The memory pressed down on her, like weighted mist, billowing from above. And she wasn’t alone. The mist clouded her eyes, reduced the framed photos to dark shadows on the light walls. She thought she hearda muffled scream. A scream for No One.
The dog. The only decoration in her room was a stuffed dog, given to her by Jason. She blinked back the memory, focused back to the Day Room and its golden tint of sunset. The dog. It was in her arms throughout the nights and assumed the place of honor—the middle of the bed—throughout the days. It was her connection to the past in Mendocino, her hope for the future. Her job in the animal shelter had been God-given. She understood animals, particularly dogs, and she felt like they understood her. They didn’t have pretensions or lofty expectations. They wanted love and companionship—and what they craved, they gave back in triplicate. Even the mean ones seemed to warm to her, like she was a sanctuary. She’d loved her job.
Her future was Jason. She was sure of it. He wasn’t just one of the good ones—he was the good one. And tomorrow was his visit day. His visits weren’t as regular as Dr. Leahy’s, but he usually gave a one-or two-day advance notice. On the mornings of his visit days, time crawled by like a roller coaster scaling the highest incline. It was slow, deliberate, but it didn’t bother her. She knew that every inch of elevation provided energy for the belly-tickling descents, twists, and turns that paid for the wait. It was pure inertia as soon as he turned the doorknob—emotional free-fall. But she was buckled in tight. And Jason was right beside her. Their laughter merged into asingle voice.
The fuzzy shadow of a wind-blown branch flickered on the wall, stealing her attention. She relaxed her smile. But she wasn’t upset at the interruption. The thin wisps of movement were pretty, mostly because they were fleeting, ethereal. They were real, but they couldn’t be touched.
She stood and walked to the wall. She could superimpose the shadows of her fingers on those of the branches. Mingle with them, play a game of tag. Part of her was with the branches—for the moment, the wall between them didn’t exist. She held out a pinch of hair and let the shadow fall with the branches. She swore it didn’t fall straight back, but caught some of the breeze that gave the branch shadows life.
An abrupt squeak startled her. She tu
rned her head, but arms surrounded her just below the shoulders, pinning her arms to her sides. She felt a hand cup her left breast, kneading it like a lump of bread dough. She tried to twist her body, but she was forced into the wall, obliterating the branch shadows with an obscene blob.
“I told you I’d get you, bitch.”
She knew what to do. Relax. Let Stuart have his feel. He’d soften his grip so she could free her arms and cover up, and he’d be off to his room in his hurried, hunched shuffle. “I’m letting you do it. Now let me go.”
He didn’t let go or even let up. His right hand maintained the grip on her breast while his left moveddownward, across her belly. Its fingers turned inward, followed the contour of her groin. They moved against her, manipulating, probing, taking.
Don’t let him. Stop him.
Agnes tried to spin from his grip. “Let me go, Stuart. I don’t want you to get into any more trouble.”
He pressed her hard against the wall so her head was wrenched to the side, her left cheek flat on the cold, green plaster. “Shut up, bitch.”
“Please. I won’t tell anyone.”
His left hand continued to probe, harder now, and his right moved off her breast to the middle of her chest. It pulled on her jumpsuit, trying to tear it open.
He won’t stop. Make him stop.
Agnes raised her right knee, parting her legs. His movements halted, but only for an instant. His left hand pushed farther between her legs, and he let out a low moan. His right hand stopped pulling at her garment and returned to her breast. She felt him push his pelvis against her, bracing the contact with his left hand. His moaning and movements synchronized.
Hurt him. Hurt him.
She raised her right leg a little higher and he responded, like a python tightening its grip with each exhalation of its prey.
Hurt him, damn it.
She slammed her heel down on the top of his rightfoot with all the force she could muster.
A high-pitched scream rang in her ear. Stuart’s grip loosened enough for her to turn and push him away.
He fell to the floor, screeching, and pulled his right foot up to his hands. He rolled on his back, his screeches turning to loud cries, then to sobs.
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