The Girls He Adored

by Jonathan Nasaw

  “That does sound like a dream, doesn't it?”

  “I know. I even dreamed I woke up. And I was staring at the wallpaper again, I couldn' see through any more. I'm still scared. I wanna call Mommy. But that's scary too. 'Cause what if what I saw was real? All they'd have to do is put on their people masks—how would I know?

  “So I climb out a bed, ssh, real quiet, and open my door. The house is all dark for the night, except for the night-light in the hall, you know, for when I have to get up to go peepee. Tippy-toe down the hall. I can see light through the bottom a their door. I'm pos' to knock, always knock before you come in Mommy and Daddy's room, only then I think about how quick they could put their people masks on. So I try and turn the doorknob. But it's locked. But I know how to open it, cause one time Walter locked hisself in the baffroom and Mommy got the ice pick outta the drawer and stuck it in the little hole in the doorknob and it opened up.

  “So I go into the kitchen and I get the ice pick outa the drawer and go back to Mommy and Daddy's room and stick it in and it goes pop and then the knob turns and I open the door and there's Mommy and Daddy with their regular faces on. Only they're not watching TV. Mommy is sitting in a chair all bare naked and she's all tied up and Daddy is standing over her, he's bare naked too and his peepee is all red and sticking out and he's holding this red candle, and he's dripping hot drips, I see the red drips on her boobies.

  “Then she sees me, she says, ‘Oh fuck, honey, it's the kid.’ So he turns around—his peepee's pointing at me and I can't move and I can't scream, just like in a dream only I know it's real. Then he's standing over me. He pulls the ice pick outa the doorknob and looks down at it in his hand, and I know, I just know he's gonna,wham, stick it right down through the top a my head, only instead he picks me up and carries me over to the bed and tosses me on the bed and pulls down my pajama pants and I don' wanna talk about it anymore and you can't make me.”

  Irene had no intention of forcing him. Even using hypnosis so early in DID therapy was unconventional—pressuring him at this point could be disastrous.

  “Lyssy, honey,” she said soothingly. “I need you to know you never have to talk about anything until you're ready. But when you are ready, I need you to know you're safe telling me anything at all—nothing you tell me can ever come back to hurt you. Now, you said your mommy told you it was all only a dream?”

  “A nightmare—next morning she said I had a nightmare. I axed her how do you know, she says I yelled in my sleep. Then she axed me to tell her about my nightmare. She says I hafta or it will never go away.

  “So I say I saw through the wall, and you and Daddy took your faces off and you were both monsters and I woke up and I went into your room to see if it was true and he was hurting you, and then he pulled down my pants and he hurted me.

  “And she says that proves it's only a bad dream because Daddy would never hurt us. She crosses her heart and hopes to die. But my butt still hurted, so you know what I think?”

  “What, Lyssy?”

  “I think either both dreams hafta to be real, the one where I see the animal faces through the wall and the one where I go into their bedroom, or both a them hafta be dreams. And sometimes I think what if everybody wears a people mask? What if everybody has a animal face under their skin. And sometimes in the bathroom I stand on my old potty stairs from when I was little, and I look into the mirror real hard, and I try to see what kind a animal I have under my skin.”

  He was starting to grow agitated again. Irene glanced at her watch. It was just past twelve-forty. She only had until one o'clock with the prisoner, and it was important to leave at least fifteen minutes at the end of a hypnotherapy session to bring the patient back and give him time to reorient.

  “All right, Lyssy. I understand. Thank you for sharing with me.”

  “Sharing's good. You're 'pos to share.”

  “Yes you are, honey. You did a wonderful job. Now I want you to think about your safest place, the place in the world, it doesn't have to be real, you can make it up, where you feel the best and the safest, and I want you to go there for me. . . . Safest place . . . You there yet . . . ? Attaboy. Okay, here we go. Five, four, three, two, one . . . applesauce!”

  Once again, Irene observed a radical alteration in the prisoner's body language. The fidgeting and squirming ceased. There was a tense stillness about him. His neck stiffened. His scarred hands, which as Lyssy he'd used expressively, within the range of the manacles, now curled into protective fists. When he opened his eyes, they darted nervously around the room, then fixed suspiciously on Irene.

  “What happened?” He was acting out his grounding behavior again, rubbing his fists against the coarse orange fabric of his jumpsuit.

  “It's all right, you just came out of hypnosis.”

  He moaned. “Who did you talk to?”

  Irene's turn to go still and watchful. It was a crucial moment in their relationship—the closest Max, as Max, had come to acknowledging the nature of his dysfunction. “I'm not sure I understand your question.”

  “Cut the crap, Irene.” His hands strained, twisting against the manacles. “We both know I'm a multiple—now who the fuck did you talk to?” It was the first time she could remember hearing him swear; his face had darkened with anger.

  Recognizing that she'd erred in pretending to misunderstand his question, she tried to make up for it. “A little boy named Lyssy.”

  “That titty-sucking wimp? What'd he tell you?”

  It took all the self-control Irene could muster not to draw back in her chair—she couldn't remember ever seeing an expression so purely murderous. “He told me about the first time he was molested by his father.”

  “I bet he didn't tell you how he provoked it—did he tell you that? Did he tell you it was his own fucking fault?”

  “No, he didn't feel that way. Do you remember the incident?”

  “No, I don't remember it,” he said, spitting out the words with unconcealed contempt. “I wasn't there. But I know about it. Little fucker breaks into his parents' bedroom while they're going at it— what the fuck did he expect?”

  “All right, all right, I understand you're angry. I wish we could deal with it now, but our time's almost up for today. So let me just give you a little food for thought—something to toss around until our next session. Your anger at Lyssy—do you think it's possible it might be displaced? That you've turned the anger you feel for your father in on yourself because it's not safe to be angry with your father, Max?”

  The prisoner turned his head to the side and spat violently onto the linoleum floor of the interview room. When he turned back to Irene, he was calm again, or at least under control, and when he spoke his voice was level, reasonable.

  “Food for thought, is it? I'll give you some food for thought, Dr. Cogan. One: I'm not Lyssy, and Lyssy is not me. Two: I don't have a father, and I never did. And three: you're not my therapist. This is a court-ordered evaluation—as far as you know, there's not even going to be another session. So if you're not going to be treating me, Dr. Cogan, I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't fuck with my head. You have no business fucking with my head.”

  Irene had no problem apologizing to a patient—dealing with multiples was always a process of trial and error. “You're right. I'm sorry. I had no intention of messing with your head.”

  His eyes were downcast; he nodded warily without raising his head.

  “But about that last point you made.” Irene struggled to keep the eagerness out of her voice. “If I could arrange it, would you like for me to treat you, to be your therapist?”

  “I-I-I'd like that very much,” said the prisoner softly. When he raised his head, Irene saw that he'd executed another switch—this was the exhausted, defeated-looking alter with the slumped shoulders, the vowel stammer, and the tic in the right eye. “But he'll never let ih-ih-it happen.”

  “Who? Who'll never let it happen?”

  “Max.”

  “What if we could con
vince Max that therapy would be in his best interest as well?”

  “You couldn't—he wouldn't.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because . . . he's . . .” Irene watched in astonishment as the personality sitting across the desk from her began to disintegrate. The tic worsened, until both eyes were twitching violently; the face clenched like a fist; the head began to tremble violently as he fought to get the words out. “. . . he's a demon. His name is Car—”

  The prisoner went limp; he sagged down in the wooden chair, then toppled forward, striking the top of his head against the edge of the desk as he fell. Irene jumped up, started toward him, then thought better of it and reached for the phone on the wall instead.

  15

  PENDER WAS on his second cup of coffee when his cell phone began chirping in his pocket. “Pender.”

  “This is Dr. Cogan. Irene Cogan. I understand you've been trying to get in touch with me?”

  “You're the psychiatrist who's been evaluating the John Doe who knifed that young woman in June?”

  “I am. What can I do for you?”

  “I'm investigating a series of abductions of females whose descriptions match the current victim—I'd be interested in anything you can tell me about the suspect.”

  “Even if I had the time, Agent Pender, I'm not sure it would be ethical for me to—”

  Pender, with forced calm: “Doctor Cogan, this man is a prime suspect in a dozen unsolved abductions. In less than half an hour I'm due to be locked in a cell with him. I assume you know what he did to Refugio Cortes?”

  After a short pause. “I do.”

  “Yes, well, anything you can tell me that might help give me a handle on him could save me from a similar fate.”

  Pender could almost hear her thinking it over. He crossed his thick fingers and pushed her a little harder. “I give you my word that anything you can tell me will be held in absolute confidence— he'll never even know we've spoken.”

  A few more seconds passed. “Agent Pender, are you familiar with dissociative identity disorder?”

  “I don't believe so.”

  “How about multiple personality disorder?”

  “Oh, sure. Like Sybil, or Three Faces of Eve.”

  “Exactly. Or rather, not exactly—forget what you've seen in the movies. The disorder was renamed a few years ago, to take into account the fact that the split-off identities—we call them alters— aren't really separate personalities, but aspects of the same, dissociated identity.”

  “How does that work?”

  “Every case is different, of course. But they all have in common a history of horrendous abuse beginning early on in childhood—in some cases infancy—and continuing for years.”

  “Sexual abuse?”

  “Sexual, physical, emotional, even satanic—you name it.” Irene, who had been lecturing and writing about the disorder since 1989, switched onto automatic pilot: “With no way for the child to escape the abuse, the child's mind dissociates in self-defense, creating a more or less coherent system of alter identities to help the child deal with the trauma.

  “Now the reason we use the word system is that despite the outward appearance of chaos, internally the alters function together to help the child, and later the adult, cope with his or her world. Over the years we've identified dozens of different classes of alters. For instance there's the host identity, not to be confused with the original identity. The host is the one who tries to hold the system together. There are also child identities, frozen at whatever age they were created, who hold the memories and affects of the original traumas.

  “And one of the best examples of how the alters function together is the interaction between the persecutor or suicidal identities, who attempt to punish the individual to alleviate feelings of guilt, and the protector alters, whose function is to protect the body from harmful or neglectful alters—they'll usually step in to keep the persecutors from going too far. In some instances a suicidal alter or a substance-abusing alter will take an overdose, and the protector will call an ambulance.

  “There are also ISHs—internal self helpers—who are like internal therapists, providing perspective and giving advice, and MTPs—memory trace personalities—who maintain a coherent memory of the patient's life history, regardless of which alter was in control at the time.

  “Then you have cross-gender and/or promiscuous identities to act out conflicting sexual urges, as well as administrators and obsessive-compulsive identities who come out to perform work-related activities. There are autistic and handicapped alters who emerge in highly stressful times; alters with artistic skills; analgesics who don't feel pain; impostors who can imitate not only other people but also other alters; substance abusers who attempt to self-medicate and dull the pain. Some alters believe themselves to be demons or spirits.

  “During the course of a day, the patient can switch between alters with different voices, postures, and affects hundreds of times, dozens of times, or not at all. And it's important to understand that the patient's body image, or self-image, actually changes depending on the alter. When a male patient is under the control of a female alter, he will actually see himself as a woman, while a child alter will see itself as a child, no matter what the patient's chronological age. And not just see itself—I once treated an anorexic sixteen-year-old girl with an older male alter. He came out once when she was hospitalized for tube feeding, and it took three strong attendants to subdue him—her.”

  “You're telling me she actually had the strength of a grown man?”

  “It's not at all uncommon.”

  “All these alters—do they know about each other?”

  “It varies. Every system has its own rules and manner of functioning. Some systems have subsystems of alters, who share memory and consciousness, and others who are isolated. In therapy, one of our first jobs, with the patient's help, is to map out the systems and subsystems.”

  “Sounds complicated.”

  “It is.”

  “What can you tell me about this particular individual?”

  “The first thing you'll need to recognize is how he manifests his alter switches. When he's about to change, you'll see his eyes roll up to the right, then his eyelids will flutter. Sometimes the alter who's just taken over will look around the room, perhaps rub his thigh—it's called grounding behavior. As for the alters themselves, the identity that seems to be in charge of the body most of the time calls himself Max.”

  “Is Max the, what did you call it? The host?”

  “I'm not sure at this point. Max's affect is all wrong. Most hosts are depressed and anxious. I did meet another alter who filled that bill—he even asked me for help. But he definitely wasn't in charge—he referred to Max as a demon, and I think Max punished him for coming out to speak with me. I don't know his name—if you see him, you'll recognize him by his stammer, and the tic in his right eye. There's also a child alter named Lyssy—that's L Y S S Y— and a sexually seductive identity known as Christopher. I think Christopher might have been the alter who abducted the Wisniewski girl.”

  “How would I recognize Christopher?”

  “There's nothing overt. A little more eye contact, perhaps—a softer manner than Max. But that may have been because I'm a woman. You might not meet Christopher—unless of course he's bisexual. Or there might be a female alter, or an alter with a homosexual orientation.”

  “So what have we got? Max, the host with the tic, Lyssy, and Christopher. Just the four?”

  “That's all I've met so far. I think two others took some of the standardized tests for me yesterday. One of them was textbook well-adjusted—he tested saner than I do. That might be the ISH. Another tested as a classic sociopath—he's probably the one to watch for, the one who committed the murder. Then again, you might meet an entirely different set of alters than I did—I would expect the dynamic to be quite different in a more stressful environment.”

  Pender glanced at his watch—1:50. “Thank yo
u, doctor—you've been very helpful. Can I call you after my interview if I have any more questions?”

  “Sure—just call my office.” She gave him the number; he jotted it down in his notebook. “If I'm not in, you can leave a number with my service—they'll know how to get in touch with me.”

  “Great. Thanks again, Doctor Cogan.”

  “No problem. Oh—one more thing, Agent Pender. If I were you, I would definitely take every precaution. Because the only thing I can tell you for sure about any of this individual's alters is that one of them is homicidal. At least one of them.”

  16

  THE BODY OF ULYSSES MAXWELL lay motionless on its bunk in the county jail on Natividad Road, an icebag balanced on its forehead. The skin was unbroken, the swelling had gone down, and the nurse at the jail, in consultation with Dr. Cogan, had already determined that there was no concussion, else Maxwell would have been transferred to the county hospital just up the road. The reason the body lay as if unconscious was that for the moment, there was no one in charge.

  Inside the head, though, things were anything but quiet. Max raged about traitors, traitors who should be burned, traitors who could be expelled or banished into the darkness of non-being forever, while Lyssy the Sissy whimpered that it wasn't his fault, that he hadn't wanted to come out, that the doctor had made him, and Ulysses, the deposed host alter, known to the others as Useless, pleaded for his very existence—when he could get a word in edgewise.

  In the end it was Ish who brought peace to the system, pointing out that the debacle in the interview room was at least partly Max's fault, in that it was Max who, in the mistaken belief that he could control the situation, had given the psychiatrist permission to attempt to hypnotize them in the first place.

  Ish was the only alter who was allowed to criticize Max, or at least call some of his actions or decisions into question. He pointed out, in a diplomatic fashion, that although their system represented a new and superior order of multiple personality, DID was still DID, and every one of the interlocking identities, even Max, an alter like no other, was by nature enormously suggestible.