by Alan Russell
“Give me an example.”
She shrugged, tried to put on a bold face, but failed. Probably had too many to choose from, thought Cheever.
“Pandora’s prevented me from self-destructing a few times,” she said.
“From committing suicide?”
She nodded.
“What drove you to make such attempts?”
“A better question might be, ‘What’s kept me from doing it?’ I had a boyfriend once who I was afraid to be intimate with. He was too good of a lover. When we had sex, my personalities kept popping out with my orgasms. I tried to make a joke about it, called it popcorn sex, but he couldn’t take it. How would you like to go to bed with a woman and have her keep changing on you, I mean really changing, every few minutes? I tried to tell him variety was the spice of life, but he told me chili powder and gun powder don’t mix.”
“He was one man.”
“He said what I believed.”
“How have you tried killing yourself?”
“Cutting my wrist, taking pills, the usual.”
“And Pandora’s thwarted you?”
“So I’m told.”
“But she hasn’t stopped you, or the other personalities, from hurting other people.”
“You mean the assault charges?”
Cheever nodded.
“They deserved it.”
“What happened?”
“Dr. Stern says I shouldn’t dwell on the negative.”
“Then tell me without dwelling on it.”
She accepted his casuistry easily, as if she were well practiced in that art. “A couple years back this creep was laying into one of my girlfriends, really slapping her around. Or so I’m told. So I guess I retaliated.”
“From what I read, he was her boyfriend and he was drunk.”
“Are either one of those things supposed to be an excuse?” There was a sharp edge to her voice. Cerberus raised his head to look at his mistress for a moment, then back at Cheever. When it was clear no one was moving, he put his head back on Cheever’s knee.
“You used a pool cue and a chair on him and sent him to the hospital.”
“He was an asshole.”
“Another time you used a razor and cut a woman’s face.”
“It was her razor,” she said, “and she was coming at me with it. She was coked up.”
“Do you know which personality came out during these incidents?”
“Dr. Stern tells me it was Nemesis.”
The goddess of retribution, of punishment. It made sense. Or made as much sense as could be expected given the situation.
“Why did you put clothes on your statues?”
She pretended not to know. “They were cold?”
Cheever shook his head.
“To get attention, I suppose.”
“Michelangelo didn’t even give a fig leaf to David,” Cheever said. “As the artist, I wouldn’t think you’d want to cover up your work.”
“What do you want me to say, Detective? I can’t tell you why I dressed them. It’s not something I remember doing. Maybe there’s something significant in my covering them up. Maybe there’s a reason why I undress myself and act like a statue. I don’t know. Why don’t you ask the personalities that do those things? They might know. And if they don’t, Dr. Stern’s probably your best bet.”
“Which personality did the dressing?”
“I’m pretty sure Caitlin.”
The little girl dressing up her dollies? Cheever considered that.
Her question interrupted his muse. “Would you pose for me?”
“You mean model?” he laughed.
“I mean just be yourself for a while.”
Cameras never bothered him. He was used to the media prowling around homicide sites. He’d seen himself on the eleven o’clock news too many times, a suit poking around in corners, to be self-conscious that way. But the idea of being under Helen’s scrutiny, of being revealed in some form, was intimidating. Every painting is a caricature, he thought, with the artist’s focus playing up different features. He wasn’t anxious to see what his were.
“I’m not very good at sitting.”
“You can stand.”
“I don’t think it’s for me.”
“You want to ask me more questions, don’t you?”
The trap was being set. He nodded.
“Then that’s how you’ll pay. Otherwise you’ll have to talk to some lawyer I pick out of the yellow pages. And I’ll look for the biggest ad.”
“Clothed,” said Cheever.
“Of course,” she said.
She went to get her sketch pad, came back, and immediately started scratching away with a pencil. Cheever felt as if he had made a deal with the devil and still wasn’t sure how it had happened. Whenever he looked up he found her staring at him, peering at God knows what. Being subject to her scrutiny felt like a risky business. He might as well have agreed to pose nude. That’s how exposed he felt. There were parts of him that he was sure were dead and buried, but she kept proving that wasn’t so, kept showing him just how alive those nerve cells were, and how much they could hurt. He had visited Hawaii once and been told, “If you don’t like the weather, just wait half an hour and it will change.” With Helen you could almost say the same thing. She was volatile, far too volatile, but she was alive. For twenty years Cheever had insulated himself with the static weather pattern of gray skies. This young woman was the elements, was earth and wind and water and fire. Oh yes, fire.
“You can breathe,” she said, “even act human if you want.”
“You might find me out then.”
“Is that what you’re worried about?”
She could draw and talk at the same time, which wasn’t a good thing as far as he was concerned. “Who says I’m worried?”
“Your rigid neck, clenched fists, pursed lips, and frown lines.”
“Sounds normal to me.”
“Looks like rigor mortis to me.”
It was better, far better, he thought, to put her on the defensive. “Have you seen anyone in that state before?”
Helen didn’t answer, though she continued to sketch. Was it that she didn’t want to dignify his remark, or had silent Pandora stepped in?
“Were you at the gallery the night Bonnie Gill died?”
He wanted to connect her to the time and place of the murder. Her pencil stopped moving.
“Do you own a red wig?” he asked.
Her pencil slipped from her hand. He watched her face go slack, saw it reborn.
“Can you take me to the beach tomorrow, Daddy?”
Cheever felt the sting of her words. Play with fire and you get burned. Why hadn’t Nemesis come out and attacked him for being an enemy? Or Eris—he had thought about Eris more times than he wanted to admit. But there was no better defense than the little girl, and somehow she must have known that.
Cheever and Cerberus had made a friendship of sorts, or at least an extended truce, with the detective scratching away behind the dog’s ears, but now the animal was alert. He ran from Cheever to his mistress and tried to lick her face. When she said, “Good doggie,” he trembled with delight. Then he awakened to his responsibilities, went on full alert, pressing his body between Cheever and Helen.
The dog growled at Cheever. No one was going to come near the little girl he had charge over. He showed his fangs, and another one of his faces, to the detective.
Cheever got up slowly, made soothing sounds, kept saying, “It’s all right, Cerberus,” while backing away. The dog didn’t follow him, was uncertain of his own emotions, his hackles raised to the potential threat, his body wiggling at the touch of her hand.
“Promise you’ll take me to the beach, Daddy.”
The rational mind told him to refuse. The instinctual mind told him to hurry out of harm’s way, to get away from the dog and not answer. The detective’s mind was still figuring out the angles when his words came out: “We’ll go tomorrow. I’ll
pick you up in the morning.”
“Oh, thank you, Daddy.”
He opened the door, closed it behind him, then started down the stairs. Why had he made such a promise?
Because, he decided, he had always been a sucker for his own little girl, especially when she called him Daddy.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
Cheever read until very late, usually a form of escapism for him, but not tonight. He alternated his reading between Rachel’s psychological texts and the books on mythology. Sometimes there wasn’t much difference in the reading.
He delved into the mythology to better understand the themes Helen had selected for her statuary. Cheever thought it telling that she hadn’t gone with classical choices, hadn’t portrayed Hercules or Perseus or Theseus in some heroic contest, or picked beautiful gods such as Venus and Apollo to sculpt. Her choices centered around death and tragedy: Anthor being killed accidentally by a spear meant for another; Pentheus being turned into a boar; beautiful Hyacinthus dying after accidentally being struck by a quoit thrown by his friend Apollo; Dryope changing into a tree after inadvertently picking flowers that were the embodiment of the nymph Lotis.
Forbidden flowers, Cheever thought. He was reminded of carnations and Bonnie Gill, but perhaps he should have been thinking of hyacinths. Apollo was so grief struck at having caused Hyacinthus’s death that he summoned a new and beautiful flower to arise from the earth, and on its petals were the letters AI, Greek for “woe.” The sun god decreed that each spring the flowers would bloom and forever mark the death of Hyacinthus.
“Woe,” Cheever said aloud. “Woe.”
The word spoke to the motif of Helen’s statues. Death, or imminent death, was on display. Most of the deaths, he noticed, were the results of accidents. There was a sense of unfairness about them: death from a fluke, or ignorance, or as an object of some god’s unjust wrath. Though the gods weren’t on display, their emotions and responses were. Helen Troy’s cosmos was a dangerous place. Pick the wrong flower, stand in the wrong spot, or offend the wrong god and you died, more often than not at the hand of a loved one.
Cheever had the feeling of reading ghost stories too late at night, the kind that keep you turning your head to shadows or reacting to the sounds of the night. The sensation didn’t pass when he put the mythology aside for Rachel’s psychological tomes. The tales therein weren’t so much ghost stories as people turned into horror stories. Minds didn’t typically shatter into pieces without a lot of hammering.
He read about abuse and torture and traumatic experiences and how they had translated into altered and twisted psyches. In some multiples there were personalities that were both right- and left-handed, had different politics and religion, were optimistic and pessimistic, had dissimilar handwriting, and held down two very different jobs. There were cases of one personality having a crush on another and being devastated when learning that a face-to-face could never occur. And then there were personalities who hated one another with a pathological vehemence, who were more than willing to cut off their nose to spite their face.
Not that all mental health professionals were comfortable with the quantifiable symptoms of dissociative identity disorder. There were researchers who said that the brain waves and just about everything else in multiple personalities were not demonstrably different from one personality to another. And there were contradictory studies about whether the personalities in a multiple displayed different physical, chemical, and psychological makeups. But it was hard not to believe, Cheever thought, when you read certain stories, like the multiple who had found herself pregnant. The host personality was convinced she was a virgin, certain she had never been with a man. But even that personality couldn’t deny her pregnancy, couldn’t wish away her burgeoning belly. When the baby came, the personality accepted the delivery as a blessed event, telling one and all it was a virgin birth.
Emperor’s clothes, thought Cheever. We’re all wearing them. But some of us have piled on more imaginary layers than others.
What Cheever enjoyed most about reading Rachel’s books was getting the benefit of her many penciled notations. He invariably paid more attention to her jottings than to what the authors had to say. Her notes were written in a featherlight hand with small but neat handwriting that was feminine without being frilly. There was a touch of voyeurism in Cheever’s scrutiny, an interest in wanting to undress Rachel’s musings, a desire to see how she thought. His compulsion annoyed him, but he couldn’t fight the urge to flip ahead through the pages to hurriedly see everything she had written.
It was late when Cheever lifted Gumshoe up and gently deposited her outside his room. Whenever an exit was forced upon her, she always acted like it was her idea. Cheever made a point of not looking at the clock in his room, didn’t want to be dismayed by the hour. He settled into bed. As tired as he was, he still had the urge to read one more myth, and settled upon Hercules fighting the Hydra.
The Hydra lived in a swamp in the country of Argos. It had preyed on the nation, ravaging the citizens of Argos. The Hydra was a creature with nine heads, the middle one of which was immortal. Hercules battled the Hydra near the well of Amymone. Fighting well didn’t help him, only seemed to make matters worse. For every one of the Hydra’s heads Hercules decapitated, two grew back in its place. Driven back, facing defeat and death, Hercules was cued by his servant Iolaus to burn away the heads of the Hydra, and one by one did so.
The Hydra’s ninth, and immortal, head could not be killed, but Hercules defeated it by another means. Lifting up a gigantic boulder, Hercules threw that last head under the great rock and buried it under its weight forever.
A Hydra can be defeated, Cheever thought, turning out the light. But tired as he was, he didn’t get to sleep right away. There was that last head to think about, and wondering where it was buried.
HELEN’S ENCOUNTER WITH Cheever had left her feeling out of sorts, angry. Her moods and personalities were often a chicken-and-egg question, with an uncertainty about which came first. In the midst of her confusion and discontent Eris assumed control.
Fuck the nosy detective, she thought, and fuck my humorless shrink too. She didn’t need their aggravation and she didn’t need them. Music was the ticket, loud and overwhelming enough to drive away any thoughts. She jumped into the Bug and drove to the Dead Club, expecting to find relief there. She thought she could outrun her demons, or better yet, outdemon them, but the club didn’t provide the escape she wanted. The band was playing reggae music, and the musicians were too damn mellow. She drank heavily, but it didn’t take away the edges, just added a few.
Grave diggers, she thought. A bunch of fucking grave diggers have entered my life. They keep poking and probing and hurting. Maybe I should get in some preemptive strikes, get them before they get me. The thought made her feel better, but it didn’t sustain her. Eris needed action. She needed something happening. Things were too slow, sluggish. She felt claustrophobic, boxed in, and walked outside to the front of the club. Sometimes there was more of a scene outside than inside. On good nights the hanging layer of smoke outside the club sometimes reminded her of the clouds around Olympus. But tonight it felt heavy, like a shroud.
Eris walked up to a long-hair in a tank top. Tattoos ran along the length of his muscular back and down his arms, creatures that crept and slithered and crawled and hurt: a coiled rattlesnake with bared fangs, a black widow in a tangled web, a scorpion with a raised stinger. “The club’s history,” she whispered. “The deal was signed yesterday.”
His muscles rippled, the creatures upset. “No.”
“Yeah. A fast-food place is coming in.”
The citizens of OB had once rallied against a proposed Winchell’s Doughnuts coming to town with the kind of fervor that’s usually reserved for toxic waste dumps. Starch and sugar and jimmies were fine, but not conformity, not in OB.
Tattoo man’s rambling anger started reverberations all around him. Eris flew forward in front of the storm,
landing in front of Corbin, another perfect patsy. He had wide, hopping eyes and cavernous dark circles, was a speed freak who dealt his product. “I just heard the cops are going to be coming in tonight,” she told him. “They’re planning a big bust.”
Corbin was paranoid to begin with, but her words sent him to the next level. He bounced away from her, panicked, calling out. And Eris went on to her next mark, this one an androgyne of a sex no one could be certain.
“New management rules,” she said. “No more unisexual bathrooms. It will be back to one for the little boys and one for the little girls, and they’re going to enforce it.”
An outraged shriek, and Eris moving on again, weaving, talking faster and faster, telling lies, agitating, provoking, pushing, pretending to be pushed, yelling, falling, expertly touching all the nerves around her that were just beneath the surface, spreading the tumult and anger that was in her.
Grabbing a surfer, she sobbed in his arms. “They’re closing down the OB Pier for good. Gonna make an amusement park.”
Around her the rumors met, escalated, and boiled. There was pushing and screaming and fistfights. In a giddy moment Eris felt like the Pied Piper of the disenfranchised. She knew how to play the notes of the dispossessed.
If the cops had been a little slower to appear, the temporary madness would have passed, but their arrival changed everything. Sirens blaring, two squad cars pulled up in front of the club. The ant hill, already agitated, spilled out, and the cops, ensconced in their squad cars, provided a target for unified anger. There was shouting and jostling of the vehicles, prompting the police to put out calls for more backup. More black-and-whites arrived, the cavalry loud with their sirens. Amidst all the noise and confusion, Eris danced and laughed. Finally something was happening.
The cops yelled for the crowds to disband, but that drew even more spectators. Siege mentality took over. It should have been a perfect forum for Eris, one of her “golden” opportunities for mischief making, but she was taken before she could further fan the flames. As she started slipping away, Eris had a fleeting vision of herself as the Wicked Witch of the West shrinking to nothing. She wanted to shout, “I’m melting,” but couldn’t make the announcement in time.