Set This House In Order Part 11

I picked up the phone. "h.e.l.lo?" I said.

No answer. But the line wasn't dead.

"h.e.l.lo?. . ."

I could hear breathing, now. I started to get mad.

"Who is this? What's your name?"

"c.o.c.ksucker, " the caller hissed, and hung up.

I set the phone handset back in its cradle. Mrs. Winslow, who'd been listening from the kitchen doorway, came forward and stood beside me.

"Andrew?" she said, indicating the list of emergency numbers. "Do we need to call somebody?"

"Yes," I said. "But not the police. Dr. Grey."

"Oh. . . well wait a moment, I think I've got her number in my address book upstairs."

"It's all right," I told her, picking up the phone again. "I'm sure my father still remembers it."

8.

A fine drizzle was falling the next morning as I walked up Olympic Avenue to Julie's apartment, but I didn't mind it. I had my umbrella, and the cold damp air blowing past my cheeks helped keep me awake. It was 5:45 A.M., give or take a couple minutes.

It wasn't just the early hour that had me yawning. Penny's souls had called two more times the night before, once at around nine, and then again after midnight. The nine-o'clock call was from Thread, initially; Mrs. Winslow picked it up, and came back to my bedroom to ask "Do you know someone named 'T'?" But once I got on the line, Thread only managed a brief utterance -- "Mr. Gage?" -- before the foul-mouthed protector took over, blistering my ear with a stream of curses and threats and hanging up before I could get a word in edgewise.

The after-midnight call was Foul Mouth from the first syllable. By sheer luck I answered it instead of Mrs. Winslow. I was having trouble falling asleep, and was walking back to the kitchen to fix myself a gla.s.s of warm milk; the call came in just as I was pa.s.sing the phone in the side hall, and I grabbed it in the middle of the first ring. I lifted the handset to my ear, heard the words "c.o.c.ksucking c.u.n.t," and immediately hung up again. I counted to fifteen to make sure the connection was broken, then left the phone off the hook for the rest of the night. But after that, the warm milk didn't help much.

At least my one outgoing call of the evening had gone well. I'd reached Dr. Grey with no trouble, and she'd said she'd be happy to see me. She sounded good on the phone: her voice was strong, with only a trace of slurring.

I'd thought about phoning Julie as well, to let her know that I wouldn't be coming into work, but realized that that would probably involve more explanation than I was really in the mood for. So I decided instead to get up a little early and leave her a note on my way out of town. Of course, this also served as an excuse to go by Julie's apartment, which, Adam argued, was the real reason I was doing it.

During the first year I knew her -- the first year of my life -- I was a frequent visitor at Julie's, often following her home from work to hang out, sometimes for hours. At one point these visits became daily, so that it was almost like I was living there -- I even had my own key -- and in fact, Julie and I had talked about becoming roommates for real. Then things changed; for a long while, Julie's apartment was off-limits to me, though I still saw her every day at work. Even after the no-visits restriction was lifted and I was allowed to come around again, it wasn't the same as before. Having worn out my welcome once, I was afraid of wearing it out a second time, and could never really relax, even when Julie specifically invited me And so a funny thing happened. You'd think that the whole purpose of visiting someone's home was to spend time with them, wouldn't you? Certainly that's what I would have thought. But now, as much as I still liked coming by Julie's apartment, I only got comfortable enough to really enjoy it when she wasn't there. Like the time three months ago, when Julie had gone out of town for a week and asked me to water her plants while she was away: every day, after seeing to the plants, I would go sit in Julie's bedroom for a while, feeling happy. Which made no sense, since without her in it, Julie's bedroom is just a s.p.a.ce. But it made me happy anyway, being there, because it reminded me of what it was like back when Julie and I had almost been roommates. Back when my visits were still casual, and I didn't have to worry about overstaying my welcome.

So maybe Adam was right: maybe the real reason I decided to leave Julie a note was so that I could go by her apartment while she was still asleep, and "visit" her without feeling I was imposing on her.

Julie's apartment was the converted attic of a three-story private house. To get to it you had to take your life in your hands and climb an outside staircase, a sort of enclosed wooden fire escape, that had been attached none too securely to the side of the building. The door at the bottom of this covered stairway was missing its k.n.o.b. The k.n.o.b had been missing for at least six months now, and though Julie kept talking about getting it replaced, so far the closest she'd come was to thread a rope through the hole and knot it at both ends. A tin letterbox was nailed to the inside of the door. I could have just dropped my note in there, but I told myself that Julie might not see it -- after all, there was no reason for her to check the letterbox first thing in the morning. Better to slip it under her apartment door.

I climbed the stairs, which creaked and groaned ominously with every step. Reaching the top was only a partial relief. There was a two-inch gap between the landing and the attic doorway, so that if you looked down as you entered Julie's apartment, you could see the tops of her landlord's garbage cans three stories below.

It was all right; I'm not that afraid of heights. Mainly I was worried that the stairway's groaning would wake Julie. But standing on the landing, I didn't hear any sound of movement from inside the apartment. I decided to stand and listen a while longer, and while I did, I flashed back pleasantry on a winter day in that first year we'd known each other, when Julie and I had hauled a Christmas tree up these very steps, and -- "Oooh," Adam moaned, from the pulpit. "Oooh, baby. . . oh, yes. . . oh, right there!. . .

ooooohh. . ."

"Adam!" I whispered sharply. "Adam, cut it out!"

"Oooh, baby. . . oh, oh, oh, oh . . . yes . . . yes. . . YES!"

"Stop it, Adam!"

"I'll stop when you stop," Adam said. "Quit mooning around out here and leave the G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 b.u.m 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 s.h.i.+vering, 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 cla.s.sic therapeutic metaphor for a patient with multiple personality disorder (or "dissociative ident.i.ty 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 s.p.a.ce 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 mult.i.tude 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 s.e.xually a.s.saulted 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.ds 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-wors.h.i.+ppers or a side-effect of being drawn and quartered in a previous lifetime, they 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 G.o.dsend, 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 ill.u.s.tration of a broken mirror on the cover. The pieces of the mirror were made of some s.h.i.+ny 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 t.i.tle of the book was Through Shattered Minds, by Dr. Thomas Minor.

"G.o.d," my father said from the pulpit. "Not that piece of s.h.i.+t." 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 G.o.d."

"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 cla.s.sic neurotic-- a spoiled little rich girl, who after squandering several thousand dollars of her parents' money on therapy would become bored with psychoa.n.a.lysis 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 a.s.s.

I was stunned. "This man is a professional psychiatrist?"

"It gets worse," my father a.s.sured 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, d.a.m.n 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 --" "d.a.m.n 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 h.e.l.lo. 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 finis.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sociate 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 rus.h.i.+ng forward to be the first to say h.e.l.lo, 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 emo-tionlessly 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 pa.s.s the body back to me.

"Look, Aaron --" Dr. Grey said, as Meredith cleared a s.p.a.ce for the tray on the coffee table.

"Nope, sorry, it's me," I told her. "He's gone back inside."

"d.a.m.n 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 espres...o...b..ack, 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?"

"Yes, Julie Sivik," I said. "She's my boss. She's not the one I'm having a problem with, though."

"But you were, weren't you?" Her eyes became distant, recollecting. "The last time you were here? You were obsessing over her. . ."

"Well, yes, sort of, but --"

"She'd led you on somehow, romantically, then changed her mind about it, and you were having real trouble coming to terms with that."

"Yes, but. . . but that was a while ago. I got over it."

"Ah!" Dr. Grey snapped out of her reverie, brightening. "Well, good! So who's the new girl?"

"Her name is Penny Driver," I said. "But she's not. . . it's not a romantic relations.h.i.+p. We just work together." I paused, for some reason wanting Dr. Grey to acknowledge this point, but she just stared at me expectantly, so after a moment I continued: "She started working at the Reality Factory last Monday -- Julie hired her. And it turns out that. . ."

I told her the story. Dr. Grey was attentive but very unresponsive at first, so much so that I started wondering, half-seriously, whether she'd fallen asleep with her eyes open. But when I described how I'd confronted Julie about her ulterior motives for hiring Penny, Dr. Grey came back to life, nodding vigorously. "Good," she said, "I'm glad you called her on it. You were right, it was a bad idea, especially springing it on you that way."

"Well," I said, encouraged, "I'm sure Julie meant well --"

"Good intentions are overrated," said Dr. Grey. "Probably you know this, but I'm not a big fan of good intentions."