But this is what you wanted, she thought. Isn’t it? The intricacy, the mystery, the unpredictability, the sheer weirdness? A little cruise through an alien world because her own had become so stale, so narrow, so cramped. And here she was. Good morning, I’m Ned. Pleased to know you.
Van’s note was clipped to the refrigerator by a little yellow magnet shaped like a ladybug. DINNER TONIGHT AT CHEZ MICHEL? YOU AND ME AND WHO KNOWS WHO ELSE. CALL ME.
That was the beginning. She saw him every night for the next ten days. Generally they met at some three-star restaurant, had a lingering, intimate dinner, went back to his apartment. One mild, clear evening they drove out to the beach and watched the waves breaking on Seal Rock until well past midnight. Another time they wandered through Fisherman’s Wharf and somehow acquired three bags of tacky souvenirs.
Van was his primary name—she saw it on his credit card one night—and that seemed to be his main identity, too, though she knew there were plenty of others. At first he was reticent about that, but on the fourth or fifth night he told her that he had nine major selves and sixteen minor ones. Besides Paul, the geologist, Chuck, who was into horticulture, and Ned, the gay one, Cleo heard about Nat the stock-market plunger—he was fifty and fat, made a fortune every week, and divided his time between Las Vegas and Miami Beach; Henry, the poet, who was shy and never liked anyone to read his work; Dick, who was studying to be an actor; Hal, who once taught law at Harvard; Dave, the yachtsman; and Nicholas, the cardsharp.
And then there were all the fragmentary ones, some of whom didn’t have names, only a funny way of speaking or a little routine they liked to act out.
She got to see very little of his other selves, though. Like all multiples he was troubled occasionally by involuntary switching. One night he became Hal while they were making love, and another time he turned into Dave for an hour, and there were momentary flashes of Henry and Nicholas. Cleo perceived it right away whenever one of those switches came: His voice, his movements, his entire manner and personality changed immediately. Those were startling, exciting moments for her, offering a strange exhilaration. But generally his control was very good, and he stayed Van, as if he felt some strong need to experience her as Van, and Van alone. Once in a while he doubled, bringing up Paul to play the guitar and sing or Dick to recite sonnets, but when he did that the Van identity always remained present and dominant. It appeared that he was able to double at will, without the aid of mirrors and lights, at least some of the time. He had been an active and functioning multiple as long as he could remember—since childhood, perhaps even since birth—and he had devoted himself through the years to the task of gaining mastery over his divided mind.
All the aspects of him that she came to meet had basically attractive personalities: They were energetic, stable, purposeful men who enjoyed life and seemed to know how to go about getting what they wanted. Though they were very different people, she could trace them all back readily enough to the underlying Van from whom, so she thought, they had all split. The one puzzle was Nat, the market operator. It was hard for Cleo to imagine what he was like when he was Nat—sleazy and coarse, yes, but how did he manage to make himself look fifteen years older and forty pounds heavier? Maybe it was all done with facial expressions and posture. But she never got to see Nat. And gradually she realized it was an oversimplification to think of Paul and Dick and Ned and the others as mere extensions of Van into different modes.
Van by himself was just as incomplete as the others. He was just one of many that had evolved in parallel, each one autonomous, each one only a fragment of the whole. Though Van might have control of the shared body a greater portion of the time, he still had no idea what any of his alternate selves were up to while they were in command, and like them he had to depend on guesses, fancy footwork, and such notes and messages as they bothered to leave behind in order to keep track of events that occurred outside his conscious awareness. “The only one who knows everything is Michael. He’s seven years old, as smart as a whip, and keeps in touch with all of us all the time.”
“Your memory trace,” Cleo said.
Van nodded. All multiples, she knew, had one alter with full awareness of the doings of all the other personalities—usually a child, an observer who sat back deep in the mind and played its own games and emerged only when necessary to fend off some crisis that threatened the stability of the entire group. “He’s just informed us that he’s Ethiopian,” Van said. “So every two or three weeks we go across to Oakland to an Ethiopian restaurant that he likes, and he flirts with the waitresses in Amharic.”
“That can’t be too terrible a chore. I’m told Ethiopians are very beautiful people.”
“Absolutely. But they think it’s all a big joke, and Michael doesn’t know how to pick up women, anyway. He’s only seven, you know. So Van doesn’t get anything out of it except some exercise in comparative linguistics and a case of indigestion the next day. Ethiopian food is the spiciest in the world. I can’t stand spicy food.”
“Neither can I,” she said. “But Lisa loves it. Especially Mexican. But nobody ever said sharing a body is easy, did they?”
She knew she had to be careful in questioning Van about the way his life as a multiple worked. She was supposed to be a multiple herself, after all. But she made use of her Sacramento background as justification for her areas of apparent ignorance of multiple customs and the everyday mechanics of multiple life. Though she too had known she was a multiple since childhood, she said, she had grown up outside the climate of acceptance of the divided personality that prevailed in San Francisco, where an active subculture of multiples had existed openly for years. In her isolated existence, unaware that there were a great many others of her kind, she had at first regarded herself as the victim of a serious mental disorder. It was only recently, she told him, that she had come to understand the overwhelming advantages of life as a multiple: the richness, the complexity, the fullness of talents and experiences that a divided mind was free to enjoy. That was why she had come to San Francisco. That was why she listened so eagerly to all that he was telling her about himself.
She was cautious, too, in manifesting her own multiple identities. She wished she did not have to pretend to have other selves. But they had to be brought forth now and again, if only to maintain Van’s interest in her. Multiples were notoriously indifferent to singletons. They found them bland, overly simple, two-dimensional. They wanted the excitement of embracing one person and discovering another, or two or three. So she gave him Lisa, she gave him Vixen, she gave him the Judy-who-was-Cleo and the Cleo-who-was-someone-else, and she slipped from one to another in a seemingly involuntary and unexpected way, often when they were in bed.
Lisa was calm, controlled, straitlaced. She was totally shocked when she found herself, between one eye blink and the next, in the arms of a strange man. “Who are you?—where am I?” she blurted, rolling away and pulling herself into a fetal ball.
“I’m Judy’s friend,” Van said.
She stared bleakly at him. “So she’s up to her tricks again.”
He looked pained, embarrassed, solicitous. She let him wonder for a moment whether he would have to take her back to her hotel in the middle of the night. Then she allowed a mischievous smile to cross Lisa’s face, allowed Lisa’s outraged modesty to subside, allowed Lisa to relent and relax, allowed Lisa to purr—
“Well, as long as we’re here already—what did you say your name was?”
He liked that. He liked Vixen, too—wild, sweaty, noisy, a moaner, a gasper, a kicker and thrasher who dragged him down on to the floor and went rolling over and over with him. She thought he liked Cleo, too, though that was harder to tell, because Cleo’s style was aloof, serious, baroque, inscrutable. She would switch quickly from one to another, sometimes running through all four in the course of an hour. Wine, she said, induced quick switching in her. She let him know that she had a few other identities, too, fragmentary and submerged. She hinted that they w
ere troubled, deeply neurotic, self-destructive: They were under control, she said, and would not erupt to cause woe for him, but she left the possibility hovering over them to add spice to the relationship and plausibility to her role.
It seemed to be working. His pleasure in her company was evident. She was beginning to indulge in little fantasies of moving down permanently from Sacramento, renting an apartment, perhaps even moving in with him, though that would surely be a strange and challenging life. She would be living with Paul and Ned and Chuck and all the rest of the crew, too, but how wondrous, how electrifying.
Then on the tenth day he seemed uncharacteristically tense and somber. She asked him what was bothering him, and he evaded her, and she pressed, and finally he said, “Do you really want to know?”
“Of course.”
“It bothers me that you aren’t real, Judy.”
She caught her breath. “What the hell do you mean by that?”
“You know what I mean,” he said quietly, sadly. “Don’t try to pretend any longer. There’s no point in it.”
It was like a jolt in the ribs.
She turned away and was silent a long while, wondering what to say. Just when everything was going so well, just when she was beginning to believe she had carried off the masquerade successfully.
“So you know?” she asked timidly.
“Of course I know. I knew right away.”
She was trembling. “How could you tell?”
“A thousand ways. When we switch, we change. The voice. The eyes. The muscular tensions. The grammatical habits. The brain waves, even. An evoked-potential test shows it. Flash a light in my eyes and I’ll give off a certain brain-wave pattern, and Ned will give off another, and Chuck still another. You and Lisa and Cleo and Vixen would all be the same. Multiples aren’t actors, Judy. Multiples are separate minds within the same brain. That’s a matter of scientific fact. You were just acting. You were doing it very well, but you couldn’t possibly have fooled me.”
“You let me make an idiot of myself, then.”
“No.”
“Why did you—how could you—”
“I saw you walk in that first night, and you caught me right away. I watched you go out on the floor and fall apart, and I knew you couldn’t be multiple, and I wondered, What the hell’s she doing here? Then I went over to you, and I was hooked. I felt something I haven’t ever felt before. Does that sound like the standard old malarkey? But it’s true, Judy. You’re the first singleton woman that’s ever interested me.”
“Why?”
He shook his head. “Something about you—your intensity, your alertness, maybe even your eagerness to pretend you were a multiple—I don’t know. I was caught. I was caught hard. And it’s been a wonderful week and a half. I mean that.”
“Until you got bored.”
“I’m not bored with you, Judy.”
“Cleo. That’s my real name, my singleton name. There is no Judy.”
“Cleo,” he said, as if measuring the word with his lips.
“So you aren’t bored with me even though there’s only one of me. That’s marvelous—tremendously flattering. That’s the best thing I’ve heard all day. I guess I should go now, Van. It is Van, isn’t it?”
“Don’t talk that way.”
“How do you want me to talk? I fascinated you, you fascinated me, we played our little games with each other, and now it’s over. I wasn’t real, but you did your best. We both did our bests. But I’m only a singleton woman, and you can’t be satisfied with that. Not for long. For a night, a week, two weeks maybe. Sooner or later you’ll want the real thing, and I can’t be the real thing for you. So long, Van.”
“No.”
“No?”
“Don’t go.”
“What’s the sense of staying?”
“I want you to stay.”
“I’m a singleton, Van.”
“You don’t have to be,” he said.
The therapist’s name was Burkhalter, and his office was in one of the Embarcadero towers. To the San Francisco multiples community he was very close to being a deity. His specialty was electrophysiological integration, with specific application to multiple-personality disorders. Those who carried within themselves dark and diabolical selves that threatened the stability of the group went to him to have those selves purged or at least contained. Those who sought to have latent selves that were submerged beneath more outgoing personalities brought forward into healthy functional state went to him also. Those whose life as a multiple was a torment of schizoid confusions instead of a richly rewarding contrapuntal symphony gave themselves to Dr. Burkhalter to be healed, and in time they were. And in recent years he had begun to develop techniques for what he called personality augmentation. Van called it “driving the wedge.”
“He can turn a singleton into a multiple?” Cleo asked in amazement.
“If the potential is there. You know that it’s partly genetic: The structure of a multiple’s brain is fundamentally different from a singleton’s. The hardware just isn’t the same, the cerebral wiring. And then, if the right stimulus comes along, usually in childhood, usually but not necessarily traumatic, the splitting takes place, the separate identities begin to establish their territories. But much of the time multiplicity is never generated, and you walk around with the capacity to be a whole horde of selves and never know it.”
“Is there reason to think I’m like that?”
He shrugged. “It’s worth finding out. If he detects the predisposition, he has effective ways of inducing separation. Driving the wedge, you see? You do want to be a multiple, don’t you, Cleo?”
“Oh, yes, Van. Yes!”
Burkhalter wasn’t sure about her. He taped electrodes to her head, flashed bright lights in her eyes, gave her verbal-association tests, ran four or five different kinds of electroencephalograph studies, and still he was uncertain. “It is not a black-and-white matter,” he said several times, frowning, scowling. He was a multiple himself, but three of his selves were psychiatrists; so there was never any real problem about his office hours. Cleo wondered if he ever went to himself for a second opinion. After a week of testing she was sure that she must be a hopeless case, an intractable singleton, but Burkhalter surprised her by concluding that it was worth the attempt. “At the very worst,” he said, “we will experience spontaneous fusing within a few days, and you will be no worse off than you are now. But if we succeed—”
His clinic was across the bay, in a town called Moraga. She spent two days undergoing further tests, then three days taking medication. “Simply an anticonvulsant,” the nurse explained cheerily. “To build up your tolerance.”
“Tolerance for what?” Cleo asked.
“The birth trauma,” she said, “New selves will be coming forth, and it can be uncomfortable for a little while.”
The treatment began on Thursday. Electroshock, drugs, electroshock again. She was heavily sedated. It felt like a long dream, but there was no pain. Van visited her every day. Chuck came too, bringing her two potted orchids in bloom, and Paul sang to her, and even Ned paid her a call. But it was hard for her to maintain a conversation with any of them. She heard voices much of the time. She felt feverish and dislocated, and at times she was sure she was floating eight or ten inches above the bed. Gradually that sensation subsided, but there were others nearly as odd. The voices remained. She learned how to hold conversations with them.
In the second week she was not allowed to have visitors. That didn’t matter.
She had plenty of company even when she was alone.
Then Van came for her. “They’re going to let you go home today,” he said. “How are you doing, Cleo?”
“I’m Noreen,” she said.
There were five of her apparently. That was what Van said. She had no way of knowing, because when they were dominant she was gone—not merely asleep, but gone, perceiving nothing. But he showed her notes that they wrote, in handwritings that she did n
ot recognize and indeed could barely read, and he played tapes of her other voices: Noreen a deep contralto; Nanette high and breathy; Katya, hard and rough New York; and the last one, who had not yet announced her name, a stagy, voluptuous, campy siren voice.
She did not leave his apartment the first few days, and then began going out for short trips, always with Van or one of his alters close beside. She felt convalescent. A kind of hangover from the drugs had dulled her reflexes and made it hard for her to cope with traffic, and also there was the fear that she would undergo a switching while she was out. Whenever that happened it came without warning, and when she returned to awareness afterward she felt a sharp discontinuity of memory, not knowing how it was that she suddenly found herself in Ghirardelli Square or Golden Gate Park or wherever it was that the other self had taken their body.
But she was happy. And Van was happy with her. One night in the second week, when they were out, he switched to Chuck—Cleo knew it was Chuck coming on, for now she always knew right away which identity had taken over—and he said, “You’ve had a marvelous effect on him. None of us have ever seen him like this before—so contented, so fulfilled—”
“I hope it lasts, Chuck.”
“Of course it’ll last! Why on earth shouldn’t it last?”
It didn’t. Towards the end of the third week Cleo noticed that there hadn’t been any entries in her memo book from Noreen for several days. That in itself was nothing alarming: An alter might choose to submerge for days, weeks, even months at a time. But was it likely that Noreen, so new to the world, would remain out of sight so long? Lin-lin, the little Chinese girl who had evolved in the second week and was Cleo’s memory trace, reported that Noreen had gone away. A few days later an identity named Mattie came and went within three hours, like something bubbling up out of a troubled sea. Then Nanette and Katya disappeared, leaving Cleo with no one but her nameless, siren-voiced alter and Lin-lin. She was fusing again. The wedges that Dr. Burkhalter had driven into her soul were not holding; her mind insisted on oneness and was integrating itself; she was reverting to the singleton state.