Multiples (1983-87)

by Robert Silverberg

  She had walked up and down the whole Fillmore Street strip from Union to Chestnut and back again for half an hour, peering at this club and that, before finding the courage to go inside one that called itself Skits. Though she had been planning this night for months, she found herself paralyzed by fear at the last minute: afraid they would spot her as a fraud the moment she walked in, afraid they would drive her out with jeers and curses and cold mocking laughter. But now that she was within, she felt fine—calm, confident, ready for the time of her life.

  There were more women than men in the club, something like a seven-to-three ratio. Hardly anyone seemed to be talking to anyone else: most stood alone in the middle of the floor, staring into the mirrors as though in trance. Their eyes were slits, their jaws were slack, their shoulders slumped forward, their arms dangled. Now and then as some combination of reflections sluiced across their consciousnesses with particular impact they would go taut and jerk and wince as if they had been struck. Their faces would flush, their lips would pull back, their eyes would roll, they would mutter and whisper to themselves; and then after a moment they would slip back into stillness.

  Cleo knew what they were doing. They were switching and doubling. Maybe some of the adepts were tripling. Her heart rate picked up. Her throat was very dry. What was the routine here, she wondered? Did you just walk right out on to the floor and plug into the light-patterns, or were you supposed to go to the bar first for a shot or a snort?

  She looked towards the bar. A dozen or so customers sitting there, mostly men, a couple of them openly studying her, giving her that new-girl-in-town stare. Cleo returned their gaze evenly, coolly, blankly. Standard-looking men, reasonably attractive, thirtyish or early fortyish, business suits, conventional hairstyles: young lawyers, executives, maybe stockbrokers, successful sorts out for a night’s fun, the kind you might run into anywhere. Look at that one, tall, athletic, curly hair, glasses. Faint ironic smile, easy inquiring eyes. Almost professorial. And yet, and yet—behind that smooth intelligent forehead, what strangenesses must teem and boil! How many hidden souls must lurk and jostle! Scary. Tempting.

  Irresistible.

  Cleo resisted. Take it slow, take it slow. Instead of going to the bar she moved out serenely among the switchers on the floor, found an open space, centered herself, looked towards the mirrors on the far side of the room. Legs apart, feet planted flat, shoulders forward. A turning globe splashed waves of red and violet light, splintered a thousand times over, into her face. Go. Go. Go. Go. You are Cleo. You are Judy. You are Vixen. You are Lisa. Go. Go. Go. Go. Cascades of iridescence sweeping over the rim of her soul, battering at the walls of her identity. Come, enter, drown me, split me, switch me. You are Cleo and Judy. You are Vixen and Lisa. You are Cleo and Judy and Vixen and Lisa. Go. Go. Go.

  Her head was spinning. Her eyes were blurring. The room gyrated around her.

  Was this it? Was she splitting? Was she switching? Maybe so. Maybe the capacity was there in everyone, even her, and all it took was the lights, the mirror, the ambience, the will. I am many. I am multiple. I am Cleo switching to Vixen. I am Judy and Lisa. I am—

  No.

  I am Cleo.

  I am Cleo.

  I am very dizzy and I am getting sick, and I am Cleo and only Cleo, as I have always been.

  I am Cleo and only Cleo and I am going to fall down.

  “Easy,” he said. “You OK?”

  “Steadying up, I think. Whew!”

  “Out-of-towner, eh?”

  “Sacramento. How’d you know?”

  “Too quick on the floor. Locals all know better. This place has the fastest mirrors in the west. They’ll blow you away if you’re not careful. You can’t just go out there and grab for the big one—you’ve got to phase yourself in slowly. You sure you’re going to be OK?”

  “I think so.”

  He was the tall man from the bar, the athletic professorial one. She supposed he had caught her before she had actually fallen, since she felt no bruises. His hand rested now against her elbow as he lightly steered her towards a table along the wall.

  “What’s your now-name?” he asked.

  “Judy.”

  “I’m Van.”

  “Hello, Van.”

  “What about a brandy? Steady you up a little more.”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Never?”

  “Vixen does the drinking,” she said. “Not me.”

  “Ah. The old story. She gets the bubbles, you get her hangovers. I have one like that too, only with him it’s Hunan food. He absolutely doesn’t give a damn what lobster in hot and sour sauce does to my digestive system. I hope you pay her back the way she deserves.”

  Cleo smiled and said nothing.

  He was watching her closely. Was he interested, or just being polite to someone who was obviously out of her depth in a strange milieu? Interested, she decided. He seemed to have accepted that Vixen stuff at face value.

  Be careful now, Cleo warned herself. Trying to pile on convincing-sounding details when you don’t really know what you’re talking about is a sure way to give yourself away, sooner or later. The thing to do, she knew, was to establish her credentials without working too hard at it, sit back, listen, learn how things really operate among these people.

  “What do you do, up there in Sacramento?”

  “Nothing fascinating.”

  “Poor Judy. Real-estate broker?”

  “How’d you guess?”

  “Every other woman I meet is a real-estate broker these days. What’s Vixen?”

  “A lush.”

  “Not much of a livelihood in that.”

  Cleo shrugged. “She doesn’t need one. The rest of us support her.”

  “Real estate and what else?”

  She hadn’t been sure that multiples etiquette included talking about one’s alternate selves. But she had come prepared. “Lisa’s a landscape architect. Cleo’s into software. We all keep busy.”

  “Lisa ought to meet Chuck. He’s a demon horticulturalist. Partner in a plant-rental outfit—you know, huge dracaenas and philodendrons for offices, so much per month, take them away when they start looking sickly. Lisa and Chuck could talk palms and bromeliads and cacti all night.”

  “We should introduce them, then.”

  “We should, yes.”

  “But first we have to introduce Van and Judy.”

  “And then maybe Van and Cleo,” he said.

  She felt a tremor of fear. Had he found her out so soon? “Why Van and Cleo? Cleo’s not here right now. This is Judy you’re talking to.”

  “Easy. Easy!”

  But she was unable to halt. “I can’t deliver Cleo to you just like that, you know. She does as she pleases.”

  “Easy,” he said. “All I meant was, Van and Cleo have something in common. Van’s into software too.”

  Cleo relaxed. With a little laugh she said, “Oh, not you too! Isn’t everybody, nowadays? But I thought you were something in the academic world. A professor, perhaps.”

  “I am. At Cal.”

  “Software?”

  “In a manner of speaking. Linguistics. Metalinguistics, actually. My field’s the language of language—the basic subsets, the neural co-ordinates of communication, the underlying programs our brains use, the operating systems. Mind as computer, computer as mind. I can get very boring about it.”

  “I don’t find the mind a boring subject.”

  “I don’t find real estate a boring subject. Talk to me about second mortgages and triple-net leases.”

  “Talk to me about Chomsky and Benjamin Whorf,” she said.

  His eyes widened. “You’ve heard of Whorf?”

  “I majored in comparative linguistics. That was before real estate.”

  “Just my lousy luck,” he said. “I get a chance to find out what’s hot in the shopping-center market and she wants to talk about Whorf and Chomsky.”

  “I thought every other woman you met these days
was a real-estate broker. Talk to them about shopping centers.”

  “They all want to talk about Whorf and Chomsky.”

  “Poor Van.”

  “Yes. Poor Van.” Then he leaned forward and said, his tone softening, “You know, I shouldn’t have made that crack about Van meeting Cleo. That was very tacky of me.”

  “It’s OK, Van. I didn’t take it seriously.”

  “You seemed to. You were very upset.”

  “Well, maybe at first. But then I saw you were just horsing around.”

  “I still shouldn’t have said it. You were absolutely right: this is Judy’s time now. Cleo’s not here, and that’s just fine. It’s Judy I want to get to know.”

  “You will,” she said. “But you can meet Cleo too, and Lisa, and Vixen. I’ll introduce you to the whole crew. I don’t mind.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Some of us are very secretive about our alters.”

  “Are you?” Cleo asked.

  “Sometimes. Sometimes not.”

  “I don’t mind. Maybe you’ll meet some of mine tonight.” She glanced towards the center of the floor. “I think I’ve steadied up, now. I’d like to try the mirrors again.”

  “Switching?”

  “Doubling,” she said. “I’d like to bring Vixen up. She can do the drinking, and I can do the talking. Will it bother you if she’s here too?”

  “Not unless she’s a sloppy drunk. Or a mean one.”

  “I can keep control of her, when we’re doubling. Come on: take me through the mirrors.”

  “You be careful, now. San Francisco mirrors aren’t like Sacramento ones. You’ve already discovered that.”

  “I’ll watch my step this time. Shall we go out there?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  As they began to move out on to the floor a slender T-shirted man of about thirty came towards them. Shaven scalp, bushy moustache, medallions, boots. Very San Francisco, very gay. He frowned at Cleo and stared straightforwardly at Van.

  “Ned?” he said.

  Van scowled and shook his head. “No. Not now.”

  “Sorry. Very sorry. I should have realized.” The shaven-headed man flushed and hurried away.

  “Let’s go,” Van said to Cleo.

  This time she found it easier to keep her balance. Knowing that he was nearby helped. But still the waves of refracted light came pounding in, pounding in, pounding in. The assault was total: remorseless, implacable, overwhelming. She had to struggle against the throbbing in her chest, the hammering in her temples, the wobbliness of her knees. And this was pleasure, for them? This was a supreme delight?

  But they were multiples and she was only Cleo, and that, she knew, made all the difference. She seemed to be able to fake it well enough. She could make up a Judy, a Lisa, a Vixen, assign little corners of her personality to each, give them voices of their own, facial expressions, individual identities. Standing before her mirror at home, she had managed to convince herself. She might even be able to convince him. But as the swirling lights careened off the infinities of interlocking mirrors and came slaloming into the gateways of her reeling soul, the dismal fear began to rise in her that she could never truly be one of these people after all, however skilfully she imitated them in their intricacies.

  Was it so? Was she doomed always to stand outside their irresistible world, hopelessly peering in? Too soon to tell—much too soon, she thought, to admit defeat—

  At least she didn’t fall down. She took the punishment of the mirrors as long as she could stand it, and then, not waiting for him to leave the floor, she made her way—carefully, carefully, walking a tightrope over an abyss—to the bar. When her head had begun to stop spinning she ordered a drink, and she sipped it cautiously. She could feel the alcohol extending itself inch by inch into her bloodstream. It calmed her. On the floor, Van stood in a trance, occasionally quivering in a sudden convulsive way for a fraction of a second. He was doubling, she knew: bringing up one of his other identities. That was the main thing that multiples came to these clubs to do. No longer were all their various identities forced to dwell in rigorously separated compartments of their minds. With the aid of the mirrors, of the lights, the skilled ones were able briefly to fuse two or even three of their selves into something even more complex. When he comes back here, she thought, he will be Van plus X. And I must pretend to be Judy plus Vixen.

  She readied herself for that. Judy was easy: Judy was mostly the real Cleo, the real-estate woman from Sacramento, with Cleo’s notion of what it was like to be a multiple added in. And Vixen? Cleo imagined her to be about twenty-three, a Los Angeles girl, a one-time child tennis star who had broken her ankle in a dumb prank and had never recovered her game afterwards, and who had taken up drinking to ease the pain and loss. Uninhibited, unpredictable, untidy, fiery, fierce: all the things that Cleo was not. Could she be Vixen? She took a deep gulp of her drink and put on the Vixen-face: eyes hard and glittering, cheek-muscles clenched.

  Van was leaving the floor now. His way of moving seemed to have changed: he was stiff, almost awkward, his shoulders held high, his elbows jutting oddly. He looked so different that she wondered whether he was still Van at all.

  “You didn’t switch, did you?”

  “Doubled. Paul’s with me now.”

  “Paul?”

  “Paul’s from Texas. Geologist, terrific poker game, plays the guitar.” Van smiled and it was like a shifting of gears. In a deeper, broader voice he said, “And I sing real good too, ma’am. Van’s jealous of that, because he can’t sing worth beans. Are you ready for a refill?”

  “You bet,” Cleo said, sounding sloppy, sounding Vixenish.

  His apartment was nearby, a cheerful airy sprawling place in the Marina district. The segmented nature of his life was immediately obvious: the prints and paintings on the walls looked as though they had been chosen by four or five different people, one of whom ran heavily towards vivid scenes of sunrise over the Grand Canyon, another to Picasso and Miró, someone else to delicate impressionist views of Parisian flower-markets. A sunroom contained the biggest and healthiest houseplants Cleo had ever seen. Another room was stacked high with technical books and scholarly journals, a third was set up as a home gymnasium equipped with three or four gleaming exercise machines. Some of the rooms were fastidiously tidy, some impossibly chaotic. Some of the furniture was stark and austere, and some was floppy and overstuffed. She kept expecting to find roommates wandering around. But there was no one here but Van. And Paul.

  Paul fixed the drinks. Paul played soft guitar music and told her gaudy tales of prospecting for rare earths on the West Texas mesas. Paul sang something bawdy-sounding in Spanish, and Cleo, putting on her Vixen-voice, chimed in on the choruses, deliberately off key. But then Paul went away and it was Van who sat close beside her on the couch, talking quietly. He wanted to know things about Judy, and he told her a little about Van, and no other selves came into the conversation. She was sure that that was intentional. They stayed up very late. Paul came back, towards the end of the evening, to tell a few jokes and sing a soft late-night song, but when they went into the bedroom she was with Van. Of that she was completely certain.

  And when she woke in the morning she was alone.

  She felt a surge of confusion and dislocation, remembered after a moment where she was and how she had happened to be here, sat up, blinked. Went into the bathroom and scooped a handful of water over her face. Without bothering to dress, went padding around the apartment looking for Van.

  She found him in the exercise room, using the rowing machine, but he wasn’t Van. He was dressed in tight jeans and a white T-shirt, and somehow he looked younger, leaner, jauntier. There were fine beads of sweat along his forehead, but he did not seem to be breathing hard. He gave her a cool, distantly appraising, wholly asexual look, as though she were a total stranger but that it was not in the least unusual for an unknown naked woman to materialize in the hou
se and he was altogether undisturbed by it, and said, “Good morning. I’m Ned. Pleased to know you.” His voice was higher than Van’s, much higher than Paul’s, and he had an odd over-precise way of shaping each syllable.

  Flustered, suddenly self-conscious and wishing she had put her clothes on before leaving the bedroom, she folded one arm over her breasts, though her nakedness did not seem to matter to him at all. “I’m—Judy. I came with Van.”

  “Yes, I know. I saw the entry in our book.” Smoothly, effortlessly, he pulled on the oars of the rowing machine, leaned back, pushed forward. “Help yourself to anything in the fridge,” he said. “Make yourself entirely at home. Van left a note for you in the kitchen.”

  She stared at him: his hands, his mouth, his long muscular arms. She remembered his touch, his kisses, the feel of his skin against hers. And now this complete indifference. No. Not his kisses, not his touch. Van’s. And Van was not here now. There was a different tenant in Van’s body, someone she did not know in any way and who had no memories of last night’s embraces. I saw the entry in our book. They left memos for each other. Cleo shivered. She had known what to expect, more or less, but experiencing it was very different from reading about it. She felt almost as though she had fallen in among beings from another planet.

  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.