Set This House in Order (13 page)

“Oh good grief,” said Simon, “not
her
again…”

“It isn't just about Julie!” I protested. “I honestly think that—”

“Oh, not
just
about Julie! So you admit—”

“Adam! Andrew!” my father shouted. “Both of you stop—”

“I have a suggestion,” Aunt Sam said. Her level voice cut through the ruckus, quieting all of us at once. “I think,” said Aunt Sam, “that we should go see Dr. Grey.”

Jake, who'd been fidgeting uncomfortably in his seat throughout most of the preceding discussion, now perked up and said: “Oh,
yes!
Let's go see Dr. Grey!”

But my father wasn't so pleased with the idea. “Dr. Grey is retired,” he reminded Aunt Sam. “She's not well.”

“She's not
dead,
” Aunt Sam retorted. “It's high time we paid her a visit anyway, just for courtesy's sake—it's been over a year since we've seen her. And I'm sure she wouldn't mind giving us some advice. Maybe she'd even be willing to meet with Penny personally.”

“That's not appropriate. You don't show up at someone's house asking them to—”

“I think it's a great idea,” I said. “The part about going to visit her, I mean. Aunt Sam's right, she could advise us what to do. I mean, who better?”

“Andrew—”

“We could go see her tomorrow. We could call her tonight, and see if she's free.”

“Tomorrow is Friday,” my father said. “You're supposed to be at work.”

“But there's no point in my going to the Factory if I'm just going to play hide-and-seek with Penny. Julie won't mind me taking the day off—at least, not after she finds out we're trying to get Penny some help.”

“I don't like this idea,” my father said. “I—”

Down at the far end of the table, Drew suddenly piped up: “If we do go to see Dr. Grey tomorrow, could we stop at the aquarium on the way back?”

“Ooh!” Jake exclaimed, bouncing in his chair. “And what about the Magic Mouse toy store? That's practically on the way!”

That opened the floodgates. Whatever reservations my father had about visiting Dr. Grey had to be put on hold as half the souls at the table weighed in with suggestions for possible side-excursions. My father rejected all of them, but by the time he was finished, the visit itself had somehow become an established fact.

“All right,” my father relented. “All right. We'll go see Dr. Grey.”

“And
maybe
the Magic Mouse toy store,” Jake added, unwilling to give up.

The meeting ended soon after that. When I returned to the body, Mrs. Winslow was knocking on my bedroom door. “Andrew?”

“Yes, Mrs. Winslow?” I sat up stiffly, checking the clock on the nightstand: it was almost five.

“You have a telephone call,” Mrs. Winslow said.

“Is it Julie?”

“No—Julie called earlier, but I told her you weren't available. This person won't give her name, but she's very insistent about speaking to you.”

Uh-oh.

“Andrew? Do you want me to put her off?”

“No,” I said, swinging my legs out of bed. “No, I'll take care of it…” I came out into the sitting room. “I'm sorry about this. I hope she didn't say anything nasty to you…”

“She has a colorful vocabulary,” Mrs. Winslow allowed, “but nothing I haven't heard before.”

The phone was on a stand in the side hallway. Posted prominently on the wall above it was a list of emergency numbers: poison control, hospital, fire department, police department, and FBI.

I picked up the phone. “Hello?” I said.

No answer. But the line wasn't dead.

“Hello?…”

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

“Who is this? What's your name?”

“Cocksucker,”
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.”

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 glass of warm milk; the call came in just as I was passing 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 “cocksucking cunt,” 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 over.

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 space. 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 knob. The knob 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 pleasantly 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 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 porce
lain. 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, 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?”