When She Was Bad elp-4

by Jonathan Nasaw

  “But isn’t it a fair trade-off?” asked Pender. “You can’t tell me Maxwell isn’t better off without monsters like Max or Kinch crawling around in his subconscious.”

  “From society’s point of view, yes, of course, although personally I’m not altogether convinced the Lyssy I met yesterday would survive five minutes in prison without Max or Kinch. But that’s a rather extreme example. In Lily’s case, I keep asking myself questions like, will Lily be able to lead the sort of life we’d all want for her without Lilah’s sexuality? Or take this newest alter, Lilith. Until Lilith’s appearance, Lily’s system of alters was unusual among the multiples I’ve treated, in that it never manifested any sort of protective identity-even the alters that appeared when she was being actively abused as a child ranged in personality from passive to very passive to downright autistic.

  “So in some ways, the appearance of a protector alter at this stage in her development represents a positive step for Lily. If I were still her doctor, I’d like to see Lilith’s confidence and sense of self integrated into Lily’s personality, not eliminated from it.”

  “Have you talked to her uncle about any of this?”

  “Not yet. But I fully intend to when we get back. First, though, I’d really like to talk to Lily again, see how she’s feeling. If she’s settling in, the last thing I’d want to do is uproot her all over again.” She held out her glass, which now contained only melting ice cubes. “Here, hit me again.”

  “You sure about that?” Pender asked her-the night before he’d had to help her back to bed (alone) after two shots.

  “Right now I’m not sure of anything,” said Irene.

  “Welcome to the club,” said Pender.

  8

  “Good night, Lyssy.”

  “Good night.” The door to the blue room slid closed behind the squat, homely night nurse. No stalling, for a change-Lyssy still didn’t care for the dark, but since his session with Dr. Al this afternoon he’d recovered some of his old optimism. Whatever happens, he thought, I can handle it.

  He was even looking forward to the darkness, for the privacy it afforded him. With his optimism restored, he’d managed to convince himself that last night’s runaway masturbatory fantasy had come about because he’d dozed off while jacking off-and as Dr. Al had often told him, none of us was responsible for our dreams. We all had depths and dark sides, Lyssy remembered him saying-you didn’t have to be a multiple for that.

  On with tonight’s fantasy, then. Starring Lily, of course: after saving her by shooting a rabid dog that had come wandering up the dusty street of the town where they lived (an image conflated from Old Yeller and To Kill a Mockingbird), he had to help her back to her house. As soon as they were alone, she covered him with grateful kisses. Her jacket fell open-her breasts were naked beneath it. She pulled his face tightly against the round, warm, sweet-smelling softness….

  Lyssy. Time for you to go now, Lyssy. A dry, whispery, unbearably intimate voice, like acid eating through glass.

  Startled from his fantasy, Lyssy opens his eyes and is shaken to see that the room has gone entirely black, blacker than it’s ever been before. “Who’s there?”

  An old friend.

  “You’re not my friend. Now turn the night-light back on, you’re scaring me, I don’t like the dark.”

  Lyssy, Lyssy, Lyssy. The voice is pretend-sad. Have you forgotten already?

  “Forgot what?”

  How many worse things there are than darkness.

  And suddenly there are flames everywhere, crackling flames, angry flames, searing, leaping, hungry flames. “No!” Lyssy cries, as the smell of roasting flesh fills his nostrils; his hands are clenched and burning. “Please-please, I’m sorry.”

  As abruptly as they had flared into existence, the flames are gone.

  Sleep now, Lyssy.

  The voice is gentler, soothing. The darkness is cool and comforting. Lyssy pulls it around himself like a blanket, like the folds in the fabric of space and time, and allows himself to drift away….

  A hand rubs a thigh for grounding, the eyes roll upward and to the right, and Max is back. The unaccustomed physical sensation sends a shudder through the body. “My dick,” he whispers aloud, peeking under the covers. “My hand, my dick-and about fucking time.”

  For the last two and a half years, Max has confined himself to seeing through Lyssy’s eyes and hearing through Lyssy’s ears, but without sensation or control. This arrangement, which the psychiatrists call co-consciousness, is at best a skewed and distorted two-dimensional simulacrum of real life, like watching somebody else play a video game; at worst, it’s a frustrating, helpless feeling, like riding in the passenger seat of a car that’s heading toward a cliff.

  But patience is the watchword, and that was something Max had had to cultivate, once he’d realized what the ECT sessions were doing to him. It wasn’t just the headaches following the shock treatments, or the overall bone-deep soreness, as if his body had been tossed around in a giant Cuisinart, but rather the realization that he was gradually losing his memory, and along with it his identity (which basically speaking was all he had and all he was), that had finally convinced Max he couldn’t beat Corder at his own game.

  And why should he even try? he’d asked himself, after the third session. Why fight Lyssy for consciousness when the only way out of this madhouse for either of them was through Lyssy? All Max really had to do, he recognized eventually, was wait patiently while darling Lyssy earned the trust and even the love of Dr. Al and his staff, causing the security measures surrounding them to grow less stringent with every passing year.

  But Lyssy has taken them as far as he can-to the very door of the director’s residence, so to speak. All he can do between now and the party tomorrow night is screw it up by blurting out something incriminating.

  So: to the dark place for Lyssy, and into the body for Max. He throws back the covers and hops into the bathroom on his crutches. The light goes on automatically; catching sight of his reflection in the slightly warped, unbreakable mirror over the sink, he breaks into a crooked grin. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” He cackles, then tries on his earnest, goofy Lyssy face-the one he’s going to have to deploy nonstop for the next twenty-four hours or so. “Hi there, Dr. Al, guess what time it is?” he chirps cheerfully, in Lyssy’s voice, then leans closer to the mirror.

  The grin fades, the eyes narrow and harden. “No, actually it’s payback time, my friend,” whispers Max. “With interest.”

  His mouth is dry as sandpaper. He fills a paper cup at the sink, glugs it down greedily. It’s his first drink in two and a half years-he’s forgotten how good something as simple as water can taste.

  Pissing feels damn good, too. Lyssy the Sissy’s been hogging all the good stuff, thinks Max, hopping back into the bedroom without washing up afterward (start with the little sins, he tells himself, work your way up).

  He climbs back into bed and slides his scarred hand under the waistband of his pajama bottoms to take up where Lyssy had left off. But soon Lyssy’s fantasy of rescue and passive sex is subsumed by Max’s own, immeasurably darker fantasies of rage, rape, torture, and murder (which strictly speaking are not so much fantasies as memories), while Lyssy waits in the dark place, unable to escape for the same reason the dark place is so dark: because he has no body there. No eyes to see, no legs to run, and no voice with which to cry out.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1

  Lilith’s headache is gone when she awakens the next morning. She discovers she can think again, and what she thinks about, with concentrated, pinpoint, laser-like intensity, is escape. Not why she needs to escape-for a limited consciousness like Lilith’s, there are no whys. Somebody’s raping you, you bite their nose off; somebody locks you up, you escape.

  There is a complication, though: the need to keep Mullet Woman and the Mad Doctor from discovering her true identity, so to speak. It is imperative they continue to think of her as Lily. Because where Lilit
h gets a zillion volts of electricity through the brain, Lily gets her brow tenderly mopped. Where Lilith is under room arrest, Lily, eventually, will have the run of the hospital.

  Unfortunately, Lilith knows very little about Lily. She’s rich, she lives in Pebble Beach, has a place in Puerto Vallarta; she has a mental disorder; her grandparents were recently killed in a car wreck-everything else will have to be improvised.

  The door to her room slides open. “How’re you feeling this morning?” asks Mullet Woman.

  “Lots better,” replies Lilith, mimicking as best she can the childish voice on Dr. Cogan’s tape recorder. “A little sore, but at least my headache’s gone.”

  “Good, good. Do you think you’re up to having breakfast in the dining hall?”

  “Sure,” Lilith simpers. “I guess.”

  In Alan Corder’s well-informed opinion, the better the food was in an institution, the less guilty rich people felt about committing their relatives. After a welcome in the spacious reception lobby, a turn around the arboretum followed by a meal in the dining hall had sealed many a deal for Dr. Al.

  When Lilith and Patty reached the dining hall, a high-ceilinged, wood-paneled room with white tablecloths and a cafeteria-style counter, half a dozen white-clad nurses and psych techs on break or coming on or off duty were chowing down in great good humor at the largest table, laughing, gesticulating, spearing food from each other’s plates. At a table for one sat a gray-haired man in wrinkled pajamas and limp seersucker bathrobe, chewing single-mindedly at a corner of toast. Somehow a pat of butter, backing paper attached, had managed to affix itself to the side of his head; as they passed him on their way to the counter, Patty reached down and plucked it away.

  Food and free entertainment, thought Lilith-but she kept the joke to herself. Turning up her determined little nose at the precooked scrambled eggs in the chafing dish, she ordered two eggs fried sunny-side up, not dry but not runny either, and polished off a Danish and a cup of coffee while she was waiting.

  By the time her eggs and Patty’s flapjacks arrived, the room had emptied out until there were only two other diners present. At a corner table, sitting with a huge, curly-haired psych tech, was an oddly familiar-looking little guy in chinos and a dark blue corduroy shirt. Gorgeous, heart-shaped face, bowed cherub lips, and long-lashed, gold-flecked brown eyes. His hair too was brown-not the color people call brown because it’s neither black nor blond, but a deep, rich nut-brown like Guinness ale.

  Lilith was on the verge of asking Mullet Woman who he was when it occurred to her that perhaps the reason he looked familiar was that she had met him before, as Lily, at some point during the missing time between Monday morning, when Dr. Cogan gave her that needle behind the coffee shop in Weed, and Tuesday afternoon, when she’d awakened on the cross-shaped torture table with the mother of all headaches.

  But while Lilith was trying to figure out a way to get the information she needed without giving herself away, the young man and his attendant rose to leave. On their way out, they stopped by the table where Lilith and Patty sat. The two psych techs exchanged hi’s; the two patients locked eyes for a few milliseconds of the shortest, most intense staring contest in the history of the universe. Then the boyish-looking young man broke into a crooked grin. “Hi, ’member me? I’m Lyssy,” he chirped. “I showed you around the arboretum the other day.”

  “Of course-how are you, Lyssy?”

  “Pretty good. Hey, me and Wally, we’re on our way to the arboretum. Do you guys wanna come? Is that okay with you, Patty?”

  The attendants swapped meaningful glances; at the staff meeting that morning, Dr. Corder had instructed the psych techs to give Lyssy and Lily as much privacy as the dictates of security allowed. “I think we can arrange that,” said Patty, through a mouthful of flapjacks. “Meet you at the gate in half an hour.”

  2

  Irene Cogan opened her eyes to steely daylight. Across the room, dirty dishes were piled high on a room-service cart; there was an empty bottle of Jim Beam on the dresser. She groaned and sat up, pressing her palms tightly against the sides of her throbbing head as if she’d just glued the pieces of her skull back together and was waiting for the Elmer’s to dry.

  Looking down, she realized she had fallen asleep in her sweatshirt and sweatpants, but didn’t remember changing into them. From the adjoining room came a bubbling snort. Irene turned stiffly, rotating her torso along with her head so the pain wouldn’t flare up, and discovered that the connecting door was wide open. Ohmigod! she thought, What happened last night? Then she saw the clock on the bedside table-8:15 A.M. Another heartfelt ohmigod! — she was supposed to be at the TV studio at 9:00.

  On the toilet, in the shower, brushing her teeth, changing into the russet jacket and skirt outfit she’d worn Monday, making up her face, the question continued to bounce around in her head: What happened last night? Pender was no help-he was still sound asleep when Irene closed and locked the door between their rooms. And though she tried to pay attention to the cab driver as he explained why he was taking this bridge and not that bridge or some other bridge-apparently bridges were very important in Portland-the half of her brain that wasn’t writing mind-screenplays about the upcoming interview was desperately trying to recall what had happened after that second glass of Jim Beam.

  TPP Productions was housed in a converted warehouse close to the river. A production assistant met her at the reception desk and hustled her back to makeup, where a gum-chewing, big-haired cosmetician in her twenties admired her fair complexion, then all but obliterated it under pancake so she wouldn’t fade into Casper the Friendly Ghost under the TV lights.

  From makeup, Irene was led to a soundstage in the corner of the hangar-like building. The set was bare-bones: a lone wooden stool, a black curtain hanging in folds to provide a textured backdrop. Technicians crowded around, fussily posing and re-posing her, turning the chair a few degrees to one side, then the other, holding light meters to her face, clipping a tiny lapel mike to her jacket and cautioning her not to touch it, darting forward to mop the sweat already beading up on her forehead-and cutting through the chaos, the voice of a pimply young man with a headset and clipboard ordering her to just relax and be herself.

  Easy for you to say, thought Irene.

  3

  It’s hard to imagine two personalities less alike than the pair who shared Ulysses Maxwell’s mind. Where Lyssy was sunny and outgoing, as friendly and disingenuous as a puppy dog, Max was brooding and saturnine, with a sardonic wit and the compassion of a starving alley cat-if they hadn’t occupied the same body, he’d have strangled the cheerful little bastard years ago.

  In the good old days, in fact, Lyssy was only permitted consciousness when great pain or long periods of boredom had to be endured. The rest of the time the original personality was confined to the dark place, while in the external world his alter identities, under Max’s direction, functioned together as a sort of strawberry blond processing plant. At one end was the charming Christopher, whose job it was to seduce them; waiting at the other end was Kinch the Knife.

  But the other alters were gone now. Some had faded from existence while the body lay bleeding out on the floor of the barn at Scorned Ridge after being shot by Pender, while others had failed to return from their ECT sessions. Of that once-feared gang, only Max and Lyssy remained. In a way, thought Max, it was a lot like the end of the Arthurian legend, when the king and his page were all that were left of the mighty Round Table.

  Only in his case, the king wasn’t going to die-not if he was successfully able to masquerade as the page. And thus far Max had made it through his first meal in two and half years-his first crap in two and a half years, for that matter-without any of the staff noticing anything amiss. The cockteaser of a nurse Lyssy had dubbed Miss Stockings, the huge, dumb-as-a-sack-of-onions psych tech named Wally, even the sharp-eyed Patty Benoit-like most people, they saw whom they expected to see.

  Not Max, though. The instant he and th
e girl in the dining hall had locked eyes that morning, he’d realized that she had to have undergone an alter switch since Lyssy had shown her around the arboretum Monday-otherwise there’d have been at least a glimmer of recognition on her part. And if it hadn’t been for a challenging look in this new alter’s eyes, something steely and questing and determined behind her momentary confusion, he’d have busted her on it then and there, maybe picked up some brownie points with the staff.

  Instead, he’d bailed her out by prompting her with his name. And in just a few minutes, he told himself as the two of them set off down the sun-dappled path between the pines, followed at a respectable distance by their escorts, he’d find out whether fate had brought him a potential ally, or merely a momentary distraction.

  Until they achieved a little more separation from the trailing psych techs, though, Max confined himself to vintage Lyssy-babble. “It’s pretty here in the morning, hunh? Everything’s so fresh and new. Of course, it’s always pretty, even when it’s raining. That’s the neat thing about the arboretum, how it’s different at different times of the day. My favorite is around sunset, when the sky and everything lights up like the pictures in this Maxfield Parrish book my art therapy tutor gave me. The violet hour, she called it. Only it’s not always easy getting an escort that time of day, so…. “

  They reached a point where the gravel path, bordered on the right by a seven-foot hedge, looped tightly around on itself like a paper clip. Max glanced over his shoulder-the escorts had dropped back out of sight. “Wanna play a trick on them?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  He took the girl’s hand-how warm and alive it felt, like a small soft animal-and ducked lopsidedly through a gap in the hedge, good leg first, bad leg dragging. They rejoined the path on the other side. Still clutching one of her hands in one of his, Max held the forefinger of his free hand to his lips as the psych techs strolled by on the other side of the hedge, uniforms flashing white through the dark green leaves, then tugged the girl back through the hedge as the psych techs disappeared around a sharp bend.