When She Was Bad: A Thriller (9 page)

“Settling in,” the doctor replied, not at all fooled. “I noticed you two seem to have hit it off quite nicely yesterday.”

“Yes sir, we did. Matter of fact, I was hoping I could invite Lily to my birthday party tomorrow.”

“Well I can’t make you any promises yet,” said Dr. Al. “There are quite a few variables that would have to be—Lyssy? What is it, son?”

For Lyssy’s gold-flecked brown eyes were swimming with tears. Turning away, he shook his head in anguish. “I love her, Dr. Al. I know it sounds stupid, but I really really love her.” And it all came pouring out—or almost all: Lyssy knew better than to mention that he’d even considered the possibility of escape.

“There’s nothing for you to be ashamed of,” said Corder, when Lyssy had finished. “She’s a lovely young lady, and the two of you have so much in common, it would be almost unhealthy if you
weren’t
attracted to her.”

“But of all the times for this to happen,” Lyssy moaned. “It’s all so…so hopeless.”

You can say
that
again, thought Corder. His heart went out to poor Lyssy—he decided to inform the staff that if Lily seemed amenable, they were to give the two patients a little more room and a little more privacy. Let them have their walks, get to know each other in the short time Lyssy had left.

As for the birthday party, he told himself, that would depend on how quickly Lily recovered from the morning’s ECT therapy. If there were no complications and no further alter switches, he decided, he’d ask Patty to escort Lily to the party tomorrow after work. It would mean paying two, three hours at time-and-a-half to Patty as well as Wally, but that was a small enough price to make Lyssy’s last birthday here as happy as possible. (It was also fully billable.)

And in the meantime, there was one other thing he could do to help relieve Lyssy’s anxiety. “Grab some couch, young man,” he said, pushing his chair back from the desk. “I think we’re long overdue for a hypnotherapy session.”

The book of things that
all
DID patients have in common would be a short one indeed: 1) they all suffered egregious abuse in childhood, really over the top stuff; 2) they all have at least one alter identity; and 3) they are all tremendously suggestible when it comes to hypnosis—which may in fact be the very quality that engenders the disorder in the first place.

For a psychiatrist, having a patient who can be slipped into a trance state so easily is the equivalent of an internist having a patient with a glass abdomen—it makes it a lot easier to see what’s going on. For that reason, and to save time, early in their association Al Corder had implanted a code phrase in Lyssy’s subconscious mind, one that would trigger a hypnotic trance state whenever he heard it.

From then on, all Corder had to do to put Lyssy under was whisper that trigger phrase in his ear. It even worked on the alters, which indicated to Corder something that may have been intuitively obvious, but had never been proved clinically: that the alters all share the same subconscious from which they had sprung.

After dabbing away his tears and blowing his nose with a tissue from the box on the desk, Lyssy limped over to the green leather couch across the room from the fireplace and lay on his back, his head resting on a hard leather cushion encased in a disposable paper pillow cover—a cootie protector, Lyssy called it.

“Comfy?” asked Dr. Al, taking a shiny silver dollar out of his pocket, holding it over Lyssy’s head, and deftly walking it from knuckle to knuckle to distract Lyssy’s attention while he leaned in close and whispered the trigger phrase into Lyssy’s ear: “Lyssy is a
goooood
boy; Lyssy is a
goooood
boy.”

That was all it took: Lyssy’s breathing slowed, then his eyes fluttered closed. To test him, Corder suggested to Lyssy that his right arm was growing lighter and lighter, so weightless it was floating off the chair—and it did.

The rest of the session occupied only a few minutes, which Corder used to implant the following suggestion in his eminently suggestible patient: that when he, Lyssy, grew frightened thinking about the future, about leaving the Institute, about his trial, about jail or whatever, instead of giving in to panic he would tell himself:
Whatever happens, I can handle it; I can handle whatever happens.

“Okay, let me hear you say it.”

“Whatever happens, I can handle it; I can handle whatever happens.”

“Again.”

“Whatever happens, I can handle it; I can handle whatever happens.”

As always, extracting Lyssy from his trance state took longer than getting him into it. Corder had to explain the exit strategy—when I snap my fingers twice, you will awaken refreshed and calm—as well as reinforce the trigger phrase for the next session. But when they were done, and Lyssy was sitting on the edge of the couch, his little feet, one real, one prosthetic, swinging just short of the carpet, Corder was well pleased with his afternoon’s work.

And when he asked Lyssy at the end of the session, casually, almost as an afterthought, how he was feeling now, the boy—no, the man!, Corder had to remind himself; with Lyssy it was easy to forget—flashed him a wink and a thousand-watt grin. “I dunno, Dr. Al, but somehow I feel like, whatever happens, I can handle it; I can handle whatever happens.”

“That’s my boy,” said Corder.

7

Just after Irene had finished showering and drying her hair with a pistol-grip blower supplied by the hotel—she’d spent the afternoon browsing at Portland’s famed Powell’s bookstore—she heard a rap on the door between the adjoining rooms, then the verbal equivalent:

“Knock knock,” called Pender.

“Who’s there?” Irene said suspiciously.

“Love me.”

Even more suspiciously: “Love me who?”

“Love me Pender, love me true, never let me go,” he sang—the tune, of course, was Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender.”

Irene groaned as she opened the door. His outfit was sedate, for him: brown slacks, short-sleeved white pongee sport shirt, green socks, tan Hush Puppies; he had two glasses in one hand, an ice bucket in the other, and a bottle of Jim Beam under his arm. “Did you have a good day?”

“Not bad. How’d the interview go?”

“Not bad either, thanks to a trick I learned in the media workshop the publishers sent me to before my book tour.”

“What’s that?”

“If you don’t want to answer the question the interviewers actually ask, just answer the question they
should
have asked.” He handed Irene a glass of mostly ice, with a splash of Kentucky’s finest. “Did you ever get hold of Lily?”

“Her room didn’t answer all day.” Irene took a sip, grimaced, smacked her lips gamely. “I left a couple messages for her with the switchboard.”

“They’re probably keeping her pretty busy,” Pender suggested. “I’m sure if anything was really wrong, she’d have called you.”

“I don’t know—I just don’t know.” Irene sat down heavily on the edge of her bed—or as heavily as her hundred-and-twenty-pound frame could manage. “I can’t help thinking it’s a terrible mistake, leaving her there.”

“It wasn’t your decision,” Pender reminded her. He was standing by the window, looking out over the city; the sky was steely gray, but it didn’t look like rain. “Besides, I distinctly remember you telling me last night at dinner how you were so knocked out over all the progress Corder had made with Maxwell.”

“I suppose I was. But the more I think about it, the less comfortable I am with it.”

“With what?”

“It’s a little hard to explain.”

“Try me.”

Another sip, another grimace. “Okay, you know how in DID the psyche splits up into various identities in response to childhood abuse?” Pender nodded. “What you have to bear in mind is that instead of being a complex bundle of personality traits, like the rest of us, these alter identities generally embody one-sided aspects of the original personality. Lily’s Lilah represents sex, for instance, Maxwell’s Kinch is pure rage, and so on. Concentrate of Character, we used to joke: just add water.

“That’s why the traditional goal of DID treatment has been integrative. To make a whole, healthy human being, you need to
integrate
the aspects of personality embodied in the various alters with the
original
personality. But judging by what little he told me yesterday, Al Corder appears to be taking the exact
opposite
approach, banishing or discouraging or somehow destroying the alter personalities instead of integrating them.”

“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.