The Girls He Adored (32 page)

Alicea knows of course that outside this basement Carnivean is really Mr. Wandmaker who owns the Harley shop where Daddy works. She also knows she must never say that out loud. Mr. Wandmaker took Daddy in when he was orphaned and taught him to be a mechanic, and where would we be without him? With his clothes on he looks big and powerful, but naked he's just gross fat, with a big hairy belly and saggy boobies like an old woman.

When she hears him begin to grunt she knows it's almost over—and also that the worst part is about to begin. For now his weight drops down full upon her and the slapping begins—her buttocks, the back of her thighs, her shoulders and head under the cape; the thrusts grow deeper and more frenzied.

Tonight this final stage seems to go on forever. Alicea feels a
funny, pins-and-needles prickling in her head as his weight begins to squeeze the breath out of her. Just before she passes out from lack of air, though, she hears a voice in the darkness—the darkness inside her head, not the darkness under the cape. A man's voice— but not Carnivean's, not Mr. Wandmaker's. A somehow familiar voice, though she's never heard it before.

Alicea?

Yes?

I'm here. I'm going to take care of us now—I'll never let them do this to us again.

Who are you?
she asks.

Call me Max,
says the voice.

“A
ND
I
KEPT MY PROMISE,”
said Max, rubbing his fists against his thighs. “They never did that to her again.”

Irene recognized his voice. She'd missed the switch but observed the grounding behavior. From a purely professional point of view she was fascinated. The birth of an alter—terra incognita in the annals of dissociative identity disorder. “Do you have any sense of where you came from, Max? Where you were before you spoke to Alicea?”

He turned around in the chaise, amused, detached. “Do you, Irene? Do you know where you came from before you were you?”

“No—but I'm not an alter.”

“Neither are any of us, as far as we're concerned.”

“I don't think I'm following.”

“Then let me enlighten you.” He sat up and swung his legs casually over the arm of the redwood chaise. “How do you define an alter, Irene?”

She rattled it off: “‘A dissociated state of consciousness, with a persistent sense of self and a characteristic pattern of behavior and feelings.’”

“Very good. Here's how I define it: an alter is everybody else in here. All the other personalities, or identities, or whatever you want to call them, who inhabit this body—those are alters. I'm just me, the same as you're just you.”

“And if I asked any of the others the same question?”

“You'd get the same answer: ‘I'm me—everybody else in here is an alter.’ ”

“Fascinating.”

“Ain't it, though.” Max resumed his supine position on the chaise. “Oh—and by the way, Irene?”

“Yes?”

“I'm perfectly aware that Useless and some of the others think I'm a demon.”

“Why is that, do you think?”

“Because I made myself known to Alicea while she was getting fucked by a man wearing horns and calling himself Carnivean.”

“I'm not familiar with the name.”

“In demonology, Carnivean is the patron devil of lewdness, and his chief joy is enticing humans into obscene behavior.”

Despite the warmth of the morning, Irene was beginning to feel chilled. Max's behavior while attempting to rape her the previous day, she realized with a mounting sense of horror, was quite similar to Alicea's account of Carnivean's attack on her. Multiples often internalized their persecutors as a way of gaining a semblance of control over that which could not be controlled. Which meant that it was conceivable that on some level Max identified with or embodied Carnivean, that he thought of
himself
as the patron devil of lewdness and obscene behavior.

Equally troubling was the degree of Max's control over his alter switching. Irene couldn't recall ever having met a multiple who'd switched alters so easily, or with such eerie sureness. She didn't know exactly what that signified, though, or what it might portend. All she was sure of at the moment was that Ulysses Christopher Maxwell Jr. was like no other multiple she had ever encountered.

“Irene? Dr. Cogan?”

“What? Oh, sorry.”

“You need a break or something?”

“No—please go on.”

“Okay—but try to stay with me, hunh? I'm not flapping my gums for the exercise.”

Max's first act, upon taking possession of the body from Alicea, was to throw his head back with all the force he could summon. A crack, a moan, and the weight was off his back. He flipped the cape off his head and looked over his shoulder. Wandmaker, one of his horns knocked askew, was staggering backward across the basement, cupping both hands to his face, dark blood from his shattered nose dripping from between his fingers.

Max did not yet know how to engineer a switch without the cooperation of another alter. Consequently, it was Max who endured by far the worst beating the body had ever received from Ulysses Sr., then spent the next twenty-four hours locked in his bedroom closet in severe pain, without food or water. It would have been longer, but Monday was a school day.

Max knew how to turn both negative experiences into positives, though. He used the time in the closet to convince the others that the helter-skelter anarchy under which they had been living was a thing of the past, and that they would all benefit immensely from the change. Then, on Monday morning, he made sure that his beloved fourth-grade teacher noticed the bruises from the beating.

“Miss Miller was an angel—an absolute angel. One of those teachers that every little boy falls in love with, and every little girl wants to be just like.

“I of course (that's the collective I, by the way) had long since been identified as a gifted child. They made me take the IQ test three times because they couldn't believe the score. Eventually they also recognized that I had total recall. Hypermnesia, the specialist called it.”

“This hypermnesia—is that the function of a particular alter, do you know?”

“Our MTP's name is Mose. He's a freak. Remembers everything, understands nothing.”

“Thank you—go on.”

“With a mind like mine, you'd think somebody would have given me some special attention, but up until fourth grade, all the other teachers expected from me was to learn the lessons and keep my mouth shut. But Miss Miller, she not only designed an enhanced curriculum for me, she gave me individual tutoring after school.”

“Is that ‘me’ primarily Max, or one of the other alters?”

“Christopher, mostly.”

“May I speak with Christopher?”

“Sure—why not? . . . Good morning, Irene.”

It had taken but an instant.

“Good morning, Christopher. Nice to meet you.”

“Oh, we've met. In the jail.”

“Yes, I remember. I believe you kissed my hand.”

A shy, winning grin over his shoulder. “A liberty—but irresistible.”

“Quite all right. So how do you feel about what's going on?”

“The therapy? What's good for General Motors is good for the USA.”

“I don't follow.”

“What's good for Max is good for the rest of us.”

“I see.” One of her professors used to call
I see
the therapist's hiccup. “Tell me about Miss Miller.”

He sighed—a lover's sigh. “She was in her late twenties when we first met. Delicate bones. Pale, freckled skin. Funny upturned nose. Radiant—
radiant!
—reddish blond hair she wore piled and pinned on top of her head like they used to wear it a hundred years ago. Sweet little figure. Very shy, very empathetic. You could see everything she was feeling in those big green eyes—when I showed her the bruises from the beating after Max broke Wandmaker's nose, they filled with tears. She took me down to the school nurse herself.

“After that everything happened pretty quickly. The police were called, my parents were arrested at work, and I went home with Miss Miller that afternoon—the alternative would have been a temporary group or foster home situation, or protective custody in Juvie, which they believed I would have seen as punishment.”

“Understandably.”

“Understandably. Anyway, Miss Miller lived in an old Victorian house within walking distance of the school. She fixed up the spare room for me. She said I didn't have to talk about anything if I didn't want to. I said I sure didn't. I remember we had Twinkies for an after-school snack—she bought them especially for me—and we watched old movies on television—she loved old movies—and I did impressions of the actors for her. Eventually I picked up all the classics—Bogart, Cagney, Stewart.

“Her bedroom was upstairs, with a spare room across the hall. She made that up for me, but of course I couldn't get to sleep that first night. So she let me sleep with her. We watched TV in her big bed, and drank cocoa. I remember watching her take her hair down. She was sitting at her vanity, wearing a long white nightgown. Her back was to me, but she knew I was watching as she unpinned it and it came tumbling down. She told me over her shoulder that she had to brush it a hundred and fifty strokes every night, and asked me to help count the strokes.

“The moonlight was coming through the window and shining off that beautiful strawberry blond hair, and when she let me do the last few strokes, I thought I was going to die from happiness. . . .”

Long silence. Too long. “What happened next, Christopher?”

Now the words came tumbling out rapidly. “It wasn't her fault, it wasn't Miss Miller's fault. She didn't get any pleasure out of what happened next, after she came to bed.
I
was the one who insisted on hugging
her
. I threw my arms around her and clung to her like a little monkey, and when she tried to push me away, I cried and clung even harder.”

He stopped. Irene waited a few beats, then prompted him:“Were you aroused?”

“Yes.”

“Did you experience orgasm?”

“A dry one—I was only nine.”

“From frott—from rubbing against her?”

“I know what frotteurism is. And the answer is yes.”

“Did she know?”

“Of course not!”

Irene couldn't miss the defensive tone, but decided not to call him on it yet. He was describing things as he'd experienced them as a nine-year-old. That was good—she didn't want to interfere with that. In the normal course of therapy there would come a time when she would need him to bring his adult perceptions to bear on the situation, in order for him to understand that as a child, he was blameless—that a woman who would allow a boy his age to have sexual relations with her, especially at such a vulnerable time, was as much a monster as Maxwell's parents. Once he understood that, she could help him deal with the anger and denial, hopefully without evoking the homicidal alter.

But this was not the normal course of therapy—not even close. With any luck, she thought, she would escape or be rescued before then. In the meantime, she had to feel her way along slowly and nonconfrontationally.