I never knew there were so many ways a person could go crazy. My fingers graze over the spines. Finally I find a thick book, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This will take a while.
There are comfortable looking chairs in the periodicals area, where several people sit reading newspapers. One is an old man with half moon glasses. Another man sits with a newspaper over his face. His clothes are dirty and he smells like I did this morning. If the librarians are letting him sleep, perhaps they will not notice me sitting here, either.
Each disorder has a checklist of symptoms. It is long past lunchtime, as my stomach reminds me, when I come across Dissociative Identity Disorder.
“The primary characteristic of this disorder is the existence of more than one distinct identity or personality within the same individual. The identities will ‘take control’ of the person at different times, with important information about the other identities out of conscious awareness.”
Though the only physical symptom is blackouts, this sounds more like what is happening to me than panic attacks. I sense no panic until I feel the darkness coming.
“Often triggered by physical or sexual abuse.”
Check.
“Patient may experience blackouts or missing time, but are usually aware of having done things during these blackouts.”
Check.
There’s no mention of the other personality sometimes being a psychotic killer, but I’m sure it’s very rare.
Unfortunately, the manual doesn’t explain how to get rid of a multiple personality. Years of expensive therapy, probably – nothing I can ever afford. If I get arrested maybe they can use the insanity plea, and then I could get therapy for free.
I was hoping for something easy, like a lobotomy or an exorcism. At the very least, some idea of how to control the other personality.
Suddenly I feel tired. There are no answers here. I drag myself to the fiction section and listlessly browse through the books. What am I doing? I’ve done this before. Stolen library books. Usually I end up returning them at some other library down the road, once I’m done reading, yet I still feel guilty. My eyes flicker toward the librarian at the desk until I give up. I can’t do it. I am about to leave empty-handed when a title jumps out at me.
Wolf Point.
I snatch the thick paperback off the shelf and shove it into my jacket pocket.
Then I wander around the fiction section. That is the key to shoplifting: never hurry off. They will always suspect you if you run away. By lingering, they can’t imagine you would stick around when you have just committed a crime.
When I see Lila’s face through the glass front doors, I head out. She wags her tail at me before she bolts off toward the north.
-30-
The last of Paul the Perv’s money runs out just before Lila and I enter the Nebraska National Forest.
It is five days after the library, and I haven’t been able to hitch another ride. I’ve only allowed myself one meal per day, and still the money disappears. I buy myself a pair of mittens and a fur-lined hat with ear flaps and a thick scarf at a thrift store. With my last few dollars I buy a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter.
All that’s left now is a fistful of coins.
It’s just as well, since Lila has led me deep into the forest where there aren’t any stores. It’s not like the forests in Montana. The ground is flat between the clumps of trees, which are sparse enough that I don’t get that claustrophobic feeling. Still, the shade of the pines blocks out any warmth from the sun. On our first night sleeping in the forest, I wake up covered in a light layer of snow.
Lila leads me along a lonely path, and I follow, as I’d prefer not to run into the forest rangers or campers. I can smell their traces, a whiff of exhaust from the rangers’ four-wheel drive vehicles or the smoky stench of a campfire that burned out many nights before. I’m most nervous when I hear the sounds of reckless youths riding ATVs through the wilderness trails, or when I smell that faint predatory scent I caught that night of the wild dogs.
I feel like we are running away from something.
My dreams are getting stranger. Kayla appears almost every night. “Only you can save us, Daniel,” she tells me.
“Save you from what?” I ask.
I never get an answer. Winds blow up and wrap that awful dangerous scent around us and then I’m running, we’re running. Or she starts to tell me but then I can’t hear her. She gets angry and screams at me. “It’s a part of you! It’s who you are!” That I hear, but I can never figure out what she means. Some part of what she’s said has been lost.
I often think about the hitchhiker inside of my head, that Other who steals my consciousness from me and uses me to kill. Does he know about me? Or am I an annoyance to him, making him come awake in random situations, hungry and angry and sometimes handcuffed to a bed with a predator looming over me?
The three of us hike through the forest. At night I collapse wherever Lila has found us a shelter. We walk until I have no more food left. And then, at night, after I fall asleep wishing for something to fill my stomach, curled up and shivering, I run.
The dreams of running are more than dreams. I wake up tired, in different places, having slept until the sun is high overhead. Yet in those running dreams I’m not running away. It’s freedom, flying faster than any human could go. Sometimes Kayla runs beside me; sometimes it’s Lila.
There comes a night when we run out of the forest. The moon overhead watches as we fly over roads and across vast fields covered in snow. I wake up in an abandoned car buried in bushes. I am so cold that my breath is not even a cloud in the frigid winter air. I am so hungry I am numb to it. Euphoria has me wondering whether I am awake now or asleep.
Lila licks at my face. Her tongue is warm but once it’s gone I feel her saliva turn to an icy crust on my skin. I don’t want to move. The ripped vinyl seats, their smell of decades of rot and mouse droppings, are the most comfortable bed I’ve had in more than a week. My limbs feel too heavy to lift.
My eyes slip closed.
Some time later, I’m not sure how long
(seconds, minutes, hours? days?)
Lila becomes more insistent. Aggressive. How did the car’s rusted door open? I didn’t hear it. Did I do that? I stare at it vacantly until I realize that Lila’s teeth are digging into my arm. She’s pulling me. Without the strength to pull away, I fall out of the car and onto the hard, frozen earth.
The movement has woken something in me and I begin to shiver.
It’s too much it’s too cold
She’s still tugging, yanking with her teeth. In the flashes that follow sometimes her teeth and sometimes human hands haul me to my feet. When I am finally upright it is just my mutt Lila beside me. No one else.
so hungry
All around me is dead, dead grass, dead leaves swirling in the dead wind, dead earth. The wind is too cold for my nose to smell anything.
Blindly I follow Lila.
Time slips in and out. I hold myself, pressing against the emptiness inside of me.
And then it comes: a wisp of scent, delicious meat smell, tender and young and fresh
and I am lost
-31-
A screaming wail wakens me.
Full, I am warm and full and sleepy with that fullness. I lick my lips. Blood drips from my chin but I don’t care.
Then I look down.
-32-
How is Kayla here? Why is she screaming?
(It’s Kayla screaming not the child’s mother)
“What have you done, Daniel? How could you?”
I’ve run away, following my own trail automatically, grabbing my clothes from where they are piled carelessly on the ground, still running, that familiar voice in my head, screaming at me, “How could you? How could you?” Kayla isn’t here. Just her voice in my head.
I keep going until I get to the car. I brace myself with a hand on the rusted frame. It’
s not right, none of it. I threw up when I saw what I had done to that old couple in the farmhouse. Yet now I cannot even summon tears. I am blank.
little legs with the flesh gnawed off
little fingers bent and broken
blond hair on a little skull, held back with a purple barrette
I’m a monster.
My clothes make no sense as I try to put them on. It’s like I exploded out of them when the Other Me took over. I stare at the ruins of fabric and make this my mission: to put myself back together again.
little body in pieces that will never fit back together again
-33-
The miles all look the same. Barren, dead.
look what you done you little monster
I don’t know why I keep walking. Sometimes I stop, staring at the road in front of me, unable to go on. Other times it feels like something else is making my body move. My legs keep walking because I don’t care enough to stop them.
I wish my legs would just walk me right over the side of a cliff.
monstermonstermonster
I walk through darkness. I veer off where there are no roads. I don’t want to be near people. I don’t want to eat. I don’t want to sleep.
I drag myself onward.
-34-
The night is like the empty expanse inside my brain
like that black hole inside of that baby’s skull
my entire head opened up and immense spinning wildly overhead. It’s too much, it’s too big.
(make it stop stop stop)
I close my eyes and see that little body there, what I did to it
you monster
I open my eyes and still see
monster
It’s too much for my head to hold.
I can still feel her blood on my face.
-35-
“Daniel, stop.”
Gentle hands I don’t deserve. I am pushed to the ground as easily as a blade of grass, away from the tree trunk I’ve been smashing my head against.
-36-
I’m not entirely sure how I got here, but it’s as good a place as any to die.
There are lots of beams overhead, and I’ve found a rope.
With more energy than I’ve had in weeks, I throw the rope up and over, secure a knot that will hold my weight.
Through the soaped over windows, light gleams, a milky twilight. When I was in grade school, one of my classmates showed us how to tie a hangman’s knot. “You have to wrap the rope around thirteen times,” he said. In a corner of the playground we watched him wrap the rope around and around, mesmerized by the repetitive action.
around and around and around
There is a rickety chair in this abandoned warehouse. I drag it through the dust on the floor and step onto the seat. Slowly, to keep my balance, I stand up straight and hold the noose out in front of my face.
Through the loop Lila sits, watching me with sad eyes. I see her, and I see my father, and my uncles, and a small child, and hundreds of other who are shades, waiting for me on the other side.
“I have to,” I tell her.
Her eyes accuse me.
“You’ll be fine on your own. Better than fine. You’re better off without me.” I take a deep breath. “You’ve seen what kind of monster I am.”
She has seen. She knows what I am. And still she is here.
No. I’m a monster.
“It’s better this way,” I say, and slide the garrote over my head, pulling it tight like a dog collar, pulling it tighter so it’s hard to breathe. I don’t deserve such an easy death. I should die in terror, my limbs torn apart like those of my victims. I should die with sharp teeth coming after me, feeling my flesh being eaten and ripped from my bones.
That is what kind of monster I am.
Now Kayla stands before me as I struggle to breathe, nude, her long toffee-colored hair draped over her. “It isn’t your fault, Daniel,” she says.
your fault your fault your fault
Her voice stabs me.
“I can’t control it.” My eyes blur. “It’s better this way. For everyone.”
“No.”
She steps forward. She has a shadow. Her musky woodsy scent drifts up to me, fills all the air I breathe. “You’re not even really here. I’m imagining you.”
“They should have told you,” she says. “Warned you. But that is the way of the pack. The men face it alone.”
There is a darkness crowding in. I blink, try to see what is real. Where is Lila? Is the sun really setting so fast?
Her soft hand reaches up and touches my face.
“It is forbidden to tell you. You have to figure it out. See what is in front of your eyes.”
Kayla.
Kayla is here.
it’s too much it’s too big
I try to step off the chair. There is no one here who can stop me. There is no one here except in my imagination.
A very real hand presses on my chest, keeping me alive.
“Listen to me,” she insists. “It happens on your birthday. Remember your birthday?”
my birthday
Today is my sixteenth birthday.
happy birthday to me
-37-
happy birthday to me…
Humming low so no one can hear over the truck’s roaring engine. My uncle Red was driving; my father and my uncle Buck filled the rest of the front seat. I was crammed in the back with the spare tire. Not a real seat, just a blanket thrown over the wheel well in the six inches of space.
I didn’t complain, because this was special. I could feel it. Usually my birthday consisted of my mom laboring over a cake, and my cousin Kayla coming over. My presents were usually clothes, stuff I needed. My mom tried hard to make it festive, but Dad and Uncle Red were never around. It was like Dad always forgot, or just didn’t care. This year, my thirteenth birthday, Dad woke me up real early. “We’re going on a trip,” he told me.
“A trip? Like a hunting trip?” Lots of kids at school went on hunting trips with their fathers. Maybe now that I was thirteen Dad would take me on one. Maybe Dad was always gone because he was off hunting.
“Yeah, something like that,” he said. “Get dressed. We’re leaving in ten minutes.”
So I pulled on my jeans and a flannel shirt, my boots. I was a bit surprised to find my uncles in the truck already, but it made sense. It was a hunting trip. All the men were going.
We drove until there were no more houses and trees crowded against the windows. Then Uncle Red parked and we started hiking. None of them had guns or anything. Uncle Buck had a flask that he passed to my dad and Uncle Red.
The hiking was hard. “Get a move on,” my dad snapped at me when I’d fall behind.
If I tried to get ahead, one of them would grab me by the collar of my shirt and yank me back. “Age before beauty,” Uncle Buck said once, and my dad and Uncle Red roared with laughter.
The way the three of them were carrying on, it was almost like I didn’t exist. I kept my head down and tried not to feel sorry for myself. It was my birthday and Dad was barely paying attention to me except when he’d put a foot on my ass and kick me forward. “We’re not there yet. No rest stops.”
I wasn’t entirely sure how they knew where we were going. I vacillated between thinking they must have been here a million times and thinking they were drunk and we were never going to find our way home. There was no path that I could see. They ducked through the brush and trees, splashed through tiny streams and climbed up rocks. I checked my watch. It was well past lunchtime. My stomach growled. We’d eaten breakfast on the drive out, but that was five hours ago.
Finally, sometime around three, I asked if we were going to stop to eat.
“It’s best if you’re hungry,” my dad said, not even looking at me.
I wanted to ask if wasn’t he hungry, and why didn’t they bring any food if they knew we were going to be hiking so long. But I still wanted to trust my dad. He knows what he’
s doing, I kept telling myself. I just wished I knew what he was doing.
The October sky had begun to darken by the time we stopped. I could barely walk anymore, although I could tell my father and uncles weren’t as tired as I was. Once I had caught my breath and sat up from where I had collapsed on the ground, I saw that we were in a clearing. The forest loomed up around us, filtering the orange sun into long shadows.
My father and uncles were just staring at me. I tried not to be self-conscious about this as I turned my head this way and that to try to figure out where we had ended up. There was no cabin, no hunting blind. Nothing. It was just a patch of dirt in the middle of the woods.
“Now we wait,” said my father to my uncles. They all hunkered down and started talking quietly, passing the flask back and forth without offering me a sip. I was mighty thirsty.
I didn’t have the energy to ask what they were waiting for. I flopped onto my back and stared up at the jewel tones of the sky. After a short time I must have fallen asleep.
When I woke up I was disoriented. The dark was so dark. I looked around wildly for my dad but I couldn’t find him. My watch had a glowing face and I looked at the time. Almost midnight. Once the glow disappeared, my eyes started to adjust to the darkness.
In the light of the moon, I could see the eerie green eyes of my father and uncles, watching me.
That was when I started to feel really weird. My stomach cramped so bad I bent over double, and my skin became slick with a sheen of sweat. I thought I was going to throw up. My vision swam and tilted, making the nausea worse.
I can’t be sure what I saw then.
I can’t be sure, but it still wakes me up in terror and cold sweat some nights.
With my pulse pounding in my head and my vision gone, I only felt this struggle to stay in one piece as my body felt like it was being torn apart. The darkness interceded for a time that was still painful, and when it all cleared I lay for a long time staring up at those same stars, gulping the fresh woodsy air and feeling better than I ever had.
That feeling lasted until I sat up and saw what I’d done.
They were dead. All dead. Torn apart. I gagged and spun away but it was everywhere. Entrails strewn about the clearing, dripping from the bushes. I couldn’t even tell what was my father and what were my uncles. Even the shreds of their flannel shirts were black with soaked blood. Pale bits shone through the dark liquid, and it took me until I was crashing through the forest several minutes later to realize those were bones.