Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

“Stop it, Adam!”

  “I’ll stop when you stop,” Adam said. “Quit mooning around out here and leave the goddamn note already.”

  “All right, all right…” I crouched down, and reached across the gap to slide the note under the apartment door. Then, instead of getting up, I bent lower, placing my hands flat on the landing and dipping my head until my right eye was on a level with the crack under the door. I could see my note, safely on the other side, and the furry edge of a welcome mat, and a pair of Julie’s boots, and—

  My father’s voice: “Andrew.”

  “All right,” I said, “all right.” I stood up, and got out of there.

  I caught the 6:05 Metro bus to Seattle; with intermediate stops and rush-hour traffic, it took about an hour to reach the city. I was pretty bus-sick by then, so I opened my umbrella and took a stroll around Pioneer Square before heading to the waterfront. With what felt like half the souls in the house crowding into the pulpit to sightsee, I had no shortage of window-shopping suggestions.

  At 7:50 I boarded the Washington State Ferry to Bainbridge Island. The crossing takes thirty-five minutes; and since this was an unusual day, and since there’s only so much trouble you can get into on a boat, my father suspended the normal house rules and agreed to let Seferis, Aunt Sam, Simon, Drew, and Alexander each have a few minutes in the body. Drew and Alexander were content to just walk around and stare out the windows at the Sound. Seferis, who’d missed his regular morning workout, dropped to the deck to do push-ups. Aunt Sam went to the ferry’s snack bar and tried to bum a cigarette off the attendant—she might have gotten away with it, too, if my father hadn’t been watching her from the pulpit. Finally Simon took his turn. We were almost at the island by then, and despite the fact that it was still drizzling outside, Simon decided to go out on the open foredeck—without the umbrella—and watch the docking.

  Damp and shivering, I disembarked. I hiked a few blocks to the Streamliner Diner, where we took breakfast. It was a lot less efficient, and a lot more expensive, than one of Mrs. Winslow’s meals: I ordered two entrees, four side dishes, and three beverages. Most of the food remained on the plates, of course, but even so, by the time we were done, I was stuffed.

  It was about twenty after nine now. I went up the street to an arcade, and let Adam and Jake play a dollar’s worth of video games apiece. While Adam was engaged in Mortal Kombat, the sun came out, so after he decapitated his last opponent we did some more window-shopping.

  Finally, at ten o’clock, I caught another bus to Poulsbo, the town at the head of Liberty Bay where Dr. Grey lived, and where, back before she had her stroke, she used to see patients. I made a quick stop at a florist’s to buy a bouquet of daisies, and by five of eleven was at Dr. Grey’s house.

  This might seem like a long way to come for therapy. But my father used to make the journey regularly, at least once a week, sometimes twice a week when he could square it with his work schedule. He had to.

  Statistically, the average multiple goes through something like eight psychiatrists before being correctly diagnosed. And that’s only half the story; even after you get the right diagnosis, you may have to go through another eight psychiatrists before you find one who knows how to treat it properly.

  The classic therapeutic metaphor for a patient with multiple personality disorder (or “dissociative identity disorder,” as they’re calling it now) is that of a broken vase. The metaphor suggests an obvious remedy: pick up the pieces, grab some glue, and stick the vase back together. Or in human terms: identify all the shards and fragments of the original personality, and, using a “glue” of talk therapy, hypnosis, and drugs, reintegrate them into a single, unified whole. You know, like in Sybil.

  The only problem with this scenario is that the metaphor is faulty. You can smash a vase, bury it in the ground for twenty years, dig it up again, and piece it back together just fine. You can do that because a vase is dead to begin with, and its pieces are inert. But human souls aren’t made of porcelain. They’re alive, and, in the nature of living things, they change; and they keep on changing even after they get smashed to bits.

  So forget about the vase; think instead of a rosebush, torn apart by a storm. The branches get scattered all over the garden, but they don’t just lie there; they take root again, and try to grow, which isn’t as easy now that they are competing with one another for space and light. Still, they manage—most of them manage—and what you end up with, ten or twenty years after the storm, is not one rosebush but a multitude of rosebushes. Some of them are badly stunted; maybe all of them are smaller than they would have been if they’d each had a garden of their own. But they are more, much more, than a simple collection of puzzle pieces.

  The remedy suggested by the broken-vase metaphor doesn’t work with the rosebush metaphor. To turn a whole rose garden back into a single rosebush takes more than just fitting and gluing; it requires pruning and uprooting and discarding as well, and what you end up with when you’re done isn’t the original rosebush, but a Frankenstein parody of it. And you may not even get that far: little rosebushes don’t always react well to being cannibalized for parts.

  My father learned this the hard way. Dr. Kroft, the Ann Arbor, Michigan, psychiatrist who first diagnosed him with MPD in 1987, was a firm believer in the broken-vase metaphor. Together they spent four years trying to merge my father with the other souls in Andy Gage’s head. The only reintegrations that were even partially successful were those involving Witnesses; by abreacting—mentally reliving—the incident of abuse that had created a particular Witness, my father could sometimes make that Witness’s memories his own, and so absorb it. But the process was extremely traumatic, and it didn’t always take. As for attempts to absorb more complex souls like Simon or Drew, not only were they completely unsuccessful, they usually triggered periods of chaos and lost time.

  It was in the aftermath of one of these chaotic periods, when my father woke to find himself in a locked observation-ward at the Ann Arbor Psychiatric Center, that he began to consider the possibility that Dr. Kroft’s methods were misguided. Following his release from the ward, my father had a long argument with Dr. Kroft about alternative treatment options. Dr. Kroft insisted that there were no other options: reintegration was the only way to go, period. My father, losing his temper, suggested that Dr. Kroft’s “fixation” on reintegration was really a form of projection.

  It was a terrible thing to say. Dr. Kroft was an amputee, a former college-football star who’d lost a leg in a drunk-driving accident; my father was insinuating that his MPD treatment strategy was a way of compensating for the fact that he couldn’t put himself back together. As my father later admitted, this accusation was inexcusably rude, no matter how frustrated he might have felt at the time. Dr. Kroft thought so, too: he retaliated by sending my father back to the locked ward.

  After my father got out of the ward the second time, he decided to leave Michigan. He’d heard that the West Coast was the place to go for cutting-edge mental health care, so he relocated to Seattle, where, sure enough, he found plenty of “innovative” psychiatrists. He got to know quite a few of them.

  There was Dr. Minor, who believed that most MPD cases were the result, not of ordinary child abuse, but of ritual abuse perpetrated by a nationwide conspiracy of Satanic cults. There was Dr. Bruno, who was into past-life regression. There was Dr. Whitney, who as a sideline to his regular practice ran a support group for people who had been sexually assaulted by extraterrestrials. And then there was Dr. Leopold, who recommended litigation as an adjunct to psychotherapy. “Sue your parents,” he advised my father during their first session. “You’ll never reclaim your sense of self until you strike back at the bastards who did this to you.”

  The one thing all these innovators had in common was that, like Dr. Kroft, they were proponents of the broken-vase metaphor. Whether they believed that multiplicity was the fault of Satan-worshippers or a side-effect of being drawn and quartered in a previous lifetime, the
y all agreed that Andy Gage would never be healed until he was one soul again. As Dr. Whitney, the interplanetary-rape counselor, put it: “Of course you’ve got to reintegrate! Don’t you want to be normal?”

  My father was nearing his wits’ end when, one day in the spring of 1992, he stopped in the Seattle Public Library and discovered a self-help manual called The Practical Guide to Living with Multiple Personality Disorder. The Guide, by Dr. Danielle Grey (a local author, according to the sticker on the front cover), approached multiplicity as a condition to be managed, rather than as a pathology to be cured. “The primary difficulty faced by multiple personalities,” Dr. Grey wrote in her preface, “is not that they are abnormal; it is that they are dysfunctional. Multiplicity, of itself, is no more problematic than left-handedness. Losing time, being unable to keep a steady job or maintain a residence, requiring detailed lists just to get through the day—these things are problems. But they are problems that a well-organized multiple household, acting cooperatively, can learn to overcome.”

  While Dr. Grey stopped short of saying that reintegration was never an appropriate goal in the treatment of MPD, she made it clear that she considered it, at best, a low priority. The important thing was to eliminate the confusion that resulted from uncontrolled switching: to impose order. Whether you ended up with one soul, or ten, or a hundred—that was a side issue.

  It would be an understatement to say that Dr. Grey’s views had been poorly received by her peers. But to my father, the Guide was a godsend, and he would have traveled a lot farther than Poulsbo to meet Dr. Grey in person.

  Dr. Grey’s house was a two-story Craftsman that she had designed and built herself, appropriately enough. I knocked on the door and Dr. Grey’s partner, Meredith, came to let me in. She complimented me on my choice of flowers, and invited me to wait in the front parlor. “Danny’s still getting herself together upstairs,” she explained. “It’ll be a few minutes.”

  Meredith took the daisies to put them in water; I went into the parlor. This was the room where Dr. Grey used to meet with her patients, and where she had first spoken to my father about the idea of constructing a geography in Andy Gage’s head. The parlor was big and bright, with antique lamps and a working gas-fireplace, and tall windows that could be opened wide, lightly curtained, or tightly shuttered, according to the patient’s mood.

  An oak coffee table sat on a rug at the center of the parlor, surrounded unevenly by an overstuffed chair with a footstool, a straight-back chair, a padded rocker, and a comfortable sofa that was wide enough to lie down on. Two books had been laid out on the coffee table. One of the books was Dr. Grey’s Guide. The other, which I didn’t recognize, had an illustration of a broken mirror on the cover. The pieces of the mirror were made of some shiny material that was actually reflective, so that when you picked up the book and looked at it you saw your own face, in slivers. The title of the book was Through Shattered Minds, by Dr. Thomas Minor.

  “God,” my father said from the pulpit. “Not that piece of shit.” I couldn’t tell whether he was referring to the book or its author.

  “Is this the same Dr. Minor you used to see?” I asked him.

  “Yes. That book’s out of print, thank God.”

  “It looks new,” I observed. I flipped it open to the first chapter, and read a paragraph at random:

  My initial diagnosis of Theo was that she was a classic neurotic—a spoiled little rich girl, who after squandering several thousand dollars of her parents’ money on therapy would become bored with psychoanalysis and decide, belatedly, to grow up and face life, as we all must do. That was my prediction for the future; but for the time being she was proving to be an enormous pain in the ass.

  I was stunned. “This man is a professional psychiatrist?”

  “It gets worse,” my father assured me. “And that’s only his first book, the one he wrote before he discovered the Satanic conspiracy.”

  From outside the parlor, I heard a motor whirring: a wheelchair lift, carrying Dr. Grey downstairs. The lift clunked to a halt a moment later; there was a brief silence, a prolonged grunt, a clank, and then I heard Dr. Grey say, “Ah, damn it!” Footsteps came running from the back of the house; Meredith said, “Is that gate stuck again?” Then they were both talking—“I can do this on my—” “Just let me—” “Damn it, Meredith!” “Danny, let go of—” “All right, all right!” “—roll back two inches while I—” “Hurry up”—until finally there was a second clank, and Dr. Grey said, “OK, that’s fine, back off!”

  Another, smaller motor started humming, and Dr. Grey’s wheelchair cruised gracefully into the parlor. “Andrew!” Dr. Grey greeted me, and I tried to act surprised, as if I hadn’t heard her coming.

  Actually, it wasn’t that hard to look surprised; her appearance was a shock. Her voice was strong and clear, as I’ve said, and her eyes were as bright as ever, but she’d lost a lot of weight—when I bent down to hug her, her body was all loose skin and hard angles. And she’d aged; in the year since I’d seen her last, she’d put on what looked to be ten years’ worth of wrinkles, and her hair, once brown, had gone the way of her surname.

  “Ah,” Dr. Grey said, as I straightened up from the hug, “I see you found Minor’s scribble.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, glancing down at the book in my hand. “My father thought they’d stopped printing it.”

  “They had; it’s being reissued. That’s a review copy that Minor had sent to me. His way of gloating.”

  “Oh. Well that’s rude.”

  “Mmph,” Dr. Grey grunted in the affirmative. “Anyway, sit!” She gestured at the sofa. “Sit, get comfortable. Let me say hi to the family.”

  “Sure.” I sat on the sofa, and stepped back into the pulpit so that the others could say hello. This was expected, and only polite, but suddenly I wished, very selfishly, that I could skip it. I was anxious to talk to Dr. Grey about Penny, and worried that the others would tire her out before I got a chance. Our last visit had had to be cut short after Dr. Grey suddenly became exhausted.

  She’d had her stroke in January of 1995, just as my father was putting the finishing touches on the geography and the house—potentially disastrous timing. I still wasn’t entirely sure how my father had withstood the shock, though I knew Dr. Grey’s own foresight had a lot to do with it: the day after she was taken to the emergency room, my father was visited in person by Dr. Eddington—a sympathetic associate of Dr. Grey’s, from Fremont—who broke the bad news and offered his services as a trauma counselor. Dr. Eddington also brought a postdated letter from Dr. Grey which said, in so many words: if you are reading this, something terrible must have happened to me; but I don’t want anything terrible to happen to you, so please, try to be strong, and accept Dr. Eddington’s help.

  My father was strong; he finished the house on his own, and called me out of the lake, exactly as planned; that was the official story, anyway. Dr. Grey, meanwhile, remained bedridden for some months; when I first met her, about a week after I was born, she was still struggling to string whole sentences together, and though she improved markedly after that, it became clear early on that she would never fully recover.

  The saddest thing about the stroke, other than the damage it had done to Dr. Grey’s mind and body, was the effect it had had on Dr. Grey’s relationship with my father. This was something I didn’t really understand, and my father refused to discuss it with me. At first I’d thought it must just be too painful for him, seeing his good friend so debilitated, but later I decided that couldn’t be it. My father had never shown any qualms about visiting Dr. Grey in the hospital, when she was at her worst. It was only after she got out that he became reluctant to visit her or call her—increasingly reluctant, even as she regained her ability to have real conversations. My current theory was that this reluctance stemmed from a combination of guilt and fear: guilt that as Dr. Grey’s patient he had contributed to the overwork that had caused her stroke; and fear that as her ex-patient he might, even with
a strictly friendly visit, somehow cause her to have another.

  Even now he hung back: instead of rushing forward to be the first to say hello, my father let all the other souls go ahead of him. When his turn finally came, he kept his greeting brief and—it hurt to see it—almost emotionlessly polite. When Dr. Grey suggested that he clear the pulpit so that they could have a private chat, my father begged off, saying he didn’t want to tax her strength. I should have been happy about this, but it actually disappointed me. Dr. Grey was disappointed, too: she pursed her lips, and looked as if she was about to insist on a private chat, but before she could, Meredith entered the parlor, carrying a tray full of snacks, and my father took advantage of the distraction to pass the body back to me.

  “Look, Aaron—” Dr. Grey said, as Meredith cleared a space for the tray on the coffee table.

  “Nope, sorry, it’s me,” I told her. “He’s gone back inside.”

  “Damn it! Tell him I—”

  “Aren’t these nice?” Meredith said, lifting a vase from the tray.

  “Hm!?” Dr. Grey snapped. Then she saw the daisies, and softened. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, they are nice.” She looked at me. “You brought them?” I nodded. “Very nice,” she said. “Very thoughtful, Andrew.” Her gaze wandered to the tray. “Would you care for a macaroon?”

  “No thank you,” I told her, “I’m actually kind of full right now. Maybe I’ll have something later.”

  “As you like.” She looked pointedly at Meredith, who took an espresso cup from the tray and filled it from a special pot. Dr. Grey drank the espresso black, gulping it down like medicine. “Another,” she said, and Meredith poured her a second dose; Dr. Grey gulped that one down too. Then she grunted “Enough,” and waved off Meredith’s offer of another refill. Meredith retrieved the cup and left the parlor.

  “So, Andrew,” said Dr. Grey, “you mentioned on the phone that you were having problems with a woman. Is it…” She paused, concentrating. “…Julie? That’s the name, right, Julie?”