When She Was Bad

by Jonathan Nasaw

  Something is forced between her teeth, cutting her off in mid-scream. She tastes rubber. Another fleece-lined clamp swings over her forehead, clicks into place to immobilize her head. Out of the corner of her eye she glimpses the man in the white coat fiddling with the knobs of a machine about the size of a metal briefcase. Then he turns back from the machine and holds a syringe up to the light.

  “You’re going to be taking a little nap now,” he tells Lilah, patting the inside of her elbow for a vein. “That’s all, just a little nap.”

  She feels the needle sliding in, then a burning sensation in the crook of her arm. Please, somebody help me, she thinks. Somebody, anybody….

  5

  Once the short-acting sedative had taken hold, Alan Corder injected his patient with an even shorter-acting neuromuscular blocker known as succinylcholine—brand name, Anectine—to prevent her from breaking any bones while her body was convulsing.

  Then an oxygen mask was placed over her nose and mouth, a conducting jelly rubbed on her temples, and the electrodes attached. “Let’s clear now,” Corder said quietly. Patty and Wally stepped back from the table; Corder pushed the green button on the front of the MECTA device, and silently, without drama, one hundred joules of electricity—about enough current to light a 110-watt bulb—passed down the leads into the electrodes, and thence to the patient’s brain, for a duration of one second.

  The resulting grand mal lasted thirty endless seconds. Patty looked as though she wanted to throw herself across Lily’s thrashing body to keep her from hurting herself. Corder put his hand on Patty’s arm and smiled reassuringly. “She doesn’t feel a thing, she won’t remember a thing.”

  “I know, it’s just…“

  “I know.”

  Then it was over—nothing to do but wait.

  Most laymen, and many mental health professionals, think of electroshock therapy, formally known as ECT, or electroconvulsive therapy, as barbaric and archaic—One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and all that. But for some psychiatrists, ECT is a valuable tool for treating major depressive and bipolar disorders: it’s estimated that despite the opposition of a well-organized, patient-led anti-ECT movement, one hundred thousand patients a year receive electroshock treatments in the United States alone.

  Alan Corder had first discovered the efficacy of ECT in treating dissociative identity disorder in the accidental fashion common to so many other scientific breakthroughs. Four years earlier, treating a severely depressed, medication-resistant female patient with several suicide attempts behind her, he decided to try electroshock as a last resort. The results were immediate and spectacular—the patient came out of the anesthetic feeling absolutely chipper.

  But she was also an entirely different personality. At first Corder was afraid that what appeared to be a case of iatrogenic (therapist-induced) DID was an unwanted side effect of the electroshock. In a follow-up hypnotherapy session, however, he was able to determine that the depressive personality had been an alter all along—it wasn’t depressive disorder the patient had been suffering from, but rather dissociative identity disorder. And after the electroshock, that particular alter never appeared again.

  That was the breakthrough Corder been hoping for. He didn’t pretend to know exactly how or why it worked—but then, nobody knows exactly how ECT worked on those other disorders, either. So he continued to treat his patient for DID—every time another alter surfaced, it was back to the ECT table for her. And shortly after Patient One had been discharged as cured, Patient Two, Ulysses Maxwell, arrived at Reed-Chase.

  In many ways, Maxwell was the perfect guinea pig for Corder. He arrived with a definitive diagnosis of DID from Irene Cogan, one of the country’s leading experts in the field, and had no relatives to ask questions or raise a fuss. Nor was there much difficulty identifying Maxwell’s alters—each was clearly defined and easily delineated, and one by one, as soon as they appeared, they were dispatched to the cross-shaped table in the ECT room to be shocked out of existence.

  That’s how it worked with the first several alters, anyway—the malevolent host alter who called himself Max proved strong enough to resist the initial treatments. But Corder, to whom alters were not people but symptoms, was pitiless, stepping up the voltage with every successive treatment, until finally, after a bilateral jolt of close to 150 joules (roughly the equivalent in foot-pound energy of a 110-pound weight being dropped on a person’s head from a height of twelve inches), Max gave up the ghost—or whatever alters did when they ceased to manifest. Then there was only Lyssy.

  Obviously, with such a complete remission, there was no point in treating him for DID. Corder could of course have attempted to treat Lyssy’s amnesia, could have regressed him to foster recollection. But for what benefit, and at what risk? The only benefit, if one could even call it that, would have been to instill a sense of remorse in Lyssy; the risk would be inducing a recurrence of the DID.

  So Corder made the decision to treat the developmental rather than the dissociative disorder, to progress Lyssy rather than regress him, and the results spoke for themselves. Over the course of the next two years, using a modified homeschooling Internet curriculum augmented with outside tutors, Corder brought Lyssy forward from kindergarten through high school, until by now he was operating at an adult level, intellectually if not emotionally or socially; it was in furtherance of Lyssy’s social development that Corder had initiated the visits with his own family.

  Following his success with Maxwell, Corder had treated two more DID patients with ECT, without asking permission, but with equally spectacular results, and eventually word began going around the DID community, via websites and chat rooms, that something important was going on at the Reed-Chase Institute.

  But secrecy was still of paramount importance. The anti-ECT lobby was not just vocal, it was loud and growing increasingly influential—the city of Berkeley, California, for instance, had officially (and illegally, as it proved) attempted to ban electroshock therapy within city limits. And by employing ECT for a disorder other than the ones for which its use had been approved by the American Psychiatric Association, Corder knew he was risking not just his reputation, but possibly even his license.

  Fortunately, neither Lyssy nor the other patients Corder had successfully treated with ECT had any idea how their cures had been accomplished—that knowledge had disappeared along with the alters who had undergone the procedure.

  And that was the way Corder intended to keep it until he had compiled such a demonstrable record of successes that even the most virulent ECT critics would be unable to deny the efficacy of the treatment—and even then, he expected there would be a hell of a battle when word finally did get out….

  Patty and Corder were alone with the patient when she regained consciousness. Thirty minutes had passed—the clamps and electrodes had been removed, the telltale goo wiped from the girl’s temples, and a Band-Aid covered the puncture on the inside of her elbow.

  “Lily?” Patty said softly, as the girl’s eyelids fluttered open.

  Corder put his hand on Patty’s beefy arm to get her attention, and shook his head forcefully. “Don’t want to plant any suggestions,” he whispered, then tugged her back from the table and took her place in the patient’s line of vision. “How are you feeling?”

  “My head,” she whispered, “Oh God, my head.”

  “We can give you something for the pain in just a second. First though, I need you to tell me your name.”

  A moment of panic; Lilith felt the seconds ticking by as she searched her memory—or rather, searched for her memory. Then it all came flooding back to her—the tent, the circle of ogres, Mama Rose and Carson, the coffee shop, the psychiatrist, the photos, the tape recorder—and somehow, though confused and disoriented, Lilith understood that her very survival depended on these sadists thinking she was that poor little rich girl the shrink had told her about. “Lily,” she whispered, in a rough approximation of the girlish voice on the tape recorder. “Li
ly DeVries.”

  “Is it?”

  It is as far as you’re concerned, asshole, thought Lilith, nodding her head gingerly. But even that slight motion sent nauseating, purply-black waves of pain sloshing against the inside of her skull. “I think I’m gonna—”

  “Hasten, Jason, get the basin,” recited the mountain of mulleted flesh at Lilith’s side as she slid a curved metal pan under Lilith’s chin.

  Lilith turned her head and vomited clear bile into the receptacle. “Better out than in,” said the other woman, tenderly wiping the clinging strands from Lilith’s chin.

  Fuck you and the ox you rode in on, thought Lilith, closing her eyes to hide the murder in her heart. Just a little closer, she thought—just bring that nose a little closer….

  6

  Lyssy was in love. Lily had been his last thought before he fell asleep and his first upon awakening. Picturing her—those eyes, so big and dark; that rich dark hair, like midnight and cream when the light hit it just so; the soft voice; the shy smile; the promise of a luscious figure under that too-large bomber jacket—filled him with emotions he’d only read about before. He took all his meals that day in the dining hall and wore the psych techs out with repeated requests to visit all the places he might run into her—the arboretum, the library, the pool, the game room. When she wasn’t at any of them, he realized why people said love hurt—and why five minutes of that hurt was preferable to a hundred years without it.

  But the timing! Falling in love just as his life was beginning to crumble around him struck Lyssy as profoundly unfair. He tortured himself with wild schemes and improbable hopes, even allowing himself to consider, for the first time, the possibility of escaping from the Institute before the deputies came to take him away. Then when Dr. Al dropped off the invitation to Lyssy’s own birthday party, hand-lettered and decorated by Alison with birthday icons—balloons, a cake with candles, packages tied up in ribbons and bows—he realized with a heady sense of guilt that that would be the perfect opportunity: freedom would be as close as the front door of the director’s residence.

  But Lyssy couldn’t think of anywhere to escape to, even if he had been able to convince Lily to come with him—nor could he think of any reason she’d want to. Outside of Lyssy’s fantasies, they scarcely knew each other. Perhaps, though, that could be changed—when Wally brought him down to the director’s office for his weekly therapy session that afternoon, with his heart beating like a rabbit’s from the strain of trying to sound offhand and casual, he asked Dr. Al how the new girl—what was her name, Lily?—how Lily was doing.

  “Settling in,” the doctor replied, not at all fooled. “I noticed you two seem to have hit it off quite nicely yesterday.”

  “Yes sir, we did. Matter of fact, I was hoping I could invite Lily to my birthday party tomorrow.”

  “Well I can’t make you any promises yet,” said Dr. Al. “There are quite a few variables that would have to be—Lyssy? What is it, son?”

  For Lyssy’s gold-flecked brown eyes were swimming with tears. Turning away, he shook his head in anguish. “I love her, Dr. Al. I know it sounds stupid, but I really really love her.” And it all came pouring out—or almost all: Lyssy knew better than to mention that he’d even considered the possibility of escape.

  “There’s nothing for you to be ashamed of,” said Corder, when Lyssy had finished. “She’s a lovely young lady, and the two of you have so much in common, it would be almost unhealthy if you weren’t attracted to her.”

  “But of all the times for this to happen,” Lyssy moaned. “It’s all so…so hopeless.”

  You can say that again, thought Corder. His heart went out to poor Lyssy—he decided to inform the staff that if Lily seemed amenable, they were to give the two patients a little more room and a little more privacy. Let them have their walks, get to know each other in the short time Lyssy had left.

  As for the birthday party, he told himself, that would depend on how quickly Lily recovered from the morning’s ECT therapy. If there were no complications and no further alter switches, he decided, he’d ask Patty to escort Lily to the party tomorrow after work. It would mean paying two, three hours at time-and-a-half to Patty as well as Wally, but that was a small enough price to make Lyssy’s last birthday here as happy as possible. (It was also fully billable.)

  And in the meantime, there was one other thing he could do to help relieve Lyssy’s anxiety. “Grab some couch, young man,” he said, pushing his chair back from the desk. “I think we’re long overdue for a hypnotherapy session.”

  The book of things that all DID patients have in common would be a short one indeed: 1) they all suffered egregious abuse in childhood, really over the top stuff; 2) they all have at least one alter identity; and 3) they are all tremendously suggestible when it comes to hypnosis—which may in fact be the very quality that engenders the disorder in the first place.

  For a psychiatrist, having a patient who can be slipped into a trance state so easily is the equivalent of an internist having a patient with a glass abdomen—it makes it a lot easier to see what’s going on. For that reason, and to save time, early in their association Al Corder had implanted a code phrase in Lyssy’s subconscious mind, one that would trigger a hypnotic trance state whenever he heard it.

  From then on, all Corder had to do to put Lyssy under was whisper that trigger phrase in his ear. It even worked on the alters, which indicated to Corder something that may have been intuitively obvious, but had never been proved clinically: that the alters all share the same subconscious from which they had sprung.

  After dabbing away his tears and blowing his nose with a tissue from the box on the desk, Lyssy limped over to the green leather couch across the room from the fireplace and lay on his back, his head resting on a hard leather cushion encased in a disposable paper pillow cover—a cootie protector, Lyssy called it.

  “Comfy?” asked Dr. Al, taking a shiny silver dollar out of his pocket, holding it over Lyssy’s head, and deftly walking it from knuckle to knuckle to distract Lyssy’s attention while he leaned in close and whispered the trigger phrase into Lyssy’s ear: “Lyssy is a goooood boy; Lyssy is a goooood boy.”

  That was all it took: Lyssy’s breathing slowed, then his eyes fluttered closed. To test him, Corder suggested to Lyssy that his right arm was growing lighter and lighter, so weightless it was floating off the chair—and it did.

  The rest of the session occupied only a few minutes, which Corder used to implant the following suggestion in his eminently suggestible patient: that when he, Lyssy, grew frightened thinking about the future, about leaving the Institute, about his trial, about jail or whatever, instead of giving in to panic he would tell himself: Whatever happens, I can handle it; I can handle whatever happens.

  “Okay, let me hear you say it.”

  “Whatever happens, I can handle it; I can handle whatever happens.”

  “Again.”

  “Whatever happens, I can handle it; I can handle whatever happens.”

  As always, extracting Lyssy from his trance state took longer than getting him into it. Corder had to explain the exit strategy—when I snap my fingers twice, you will awaken refreshed and calm—as well as reinforce the trigger phrase for the next session. But when they were done, and Lyssy was sitting on the edge of the couch, his little feet, one real, one prosthetic, swinging just short of the carpet, Corder was well pleased with his afternoon’s work.

  And when he asked Lyssy at the end of the session, casually, almost as an afterthought, how he was feeling now, the boy—no, the man!, Corder had to remind himself; with Lyssy it was easy to forget—flashed him a wink and a thousand-watt grin. “I dunno, Dr. Al, but somehow I feel like, whatever happens, I can handle it; I can handle whatever happens.”

  “That’s my boy,” said Corder.

  7

  Just after Irene had finished showering and drying her hair with a pistol-grip blower supplied by the hotel—she’d spent the afternoon browsing at Portland’
s famed Powell’s bookstore—she heard a rap on the door between the adjoining rooms, then the verbal equivalent:

  “Knock knock,” called Pender.

  “Who’s there?” Irene said suspiciously.

  “Love me.”

  Even more suspiciously: “Love me who?”

  “Love me Pender, love me true, never let me go,” he sang—the tune, of course, was Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender.”

  Irene groaned as she opened the door. His outfit was sedate, for him: brown slacks, short-sleeved white pongee sport shirt, green socks, tan Hush Puppies; he had two glasses in one hand, an ice bucket in the other, and a bottle of Jim Beam under his arm. “Did you have a good day?”

  “Not bad. How’d the interview go?”

  “Not bad either, thanks to a trick I learned in the media workshop the publishers sent me to before my book tour.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If you don’t want to answer the question the interviewers actually ask, just answer the question they should have asked.” He handed Irene a glass of mostly ice, with a splash of Kentucky’s finest. “Did you ever get hold of Lily?”

  “Her room didn’t answer all day.” Irene took a sip, grimaced, smacked her lips gamely. “I left a couple messages for her with the switchboard.”

  “They’re probably keeping her pretty busy,” Pender suggested. “I’m sure if anything was really wrong, she’d have called you.”

  “I don’t know—I just don’t know.” Irene sat down heavily on the edge of her bed—or as heavily as her hundred-and-twenty-pound frame could manage. “I can’t help thinking it’s a terrible mistake, leaving her there.”

  “It wasn’t your decision,” Pender reminded her. He was standing by the window, looking out over the city; the sky was steely gray, but it didn’t look like rain. “Besides, I distinctly remember you telling me last night at dinner how you were so knocked out over all the progress Corder had made with Maxwell.”