Bible Stories for Adults (20 page)

Izzard gulped. Repression is not a soothing sign in a psychiatrist.

“You're not finished, are you?” I said.

He flipped a notebook page: dozens of faces, each with a name and a characteristic countenance. “It's surely the most baroque case ever reported. Sybil Dorsett had seventeen personalities altogether. You've got . . .” He fixed on his notes. “William Orange, Roger Vermilion, Jason Gray, Peter Pink, Ilene Amber, Judith Fuchsia . . . I'll be candid, Gunther. A total of fifty-nine separate selves appeared today. And there may be more.”

“Fifty-nine?”

“Fifty-nine.”

“Jesus. Ilene, you said? And Judith? I have
women
inside me?”

“If you believe Carl Jung,” said Izzard, “we all have women inside us.”

 

N
OVEMBER
23, 1999

 

This morning I read the first five chapters of
Antichrist
, a hundred pages coated with ballpoint scrawl. They are uniformly awful. It is hard to believe that the man who wrote
Sermons by Satan
and
Cacodaemon
perpetrated this tripe.

 

N
OVEMBER
5, 1999

 

I awoke at three
A.M.
Brittany and I had been drifting over Queens in a hot-air balloon. A rope had broken, the basket had tilted, and my sister had fallen into the sky . . .

“You're certain it was your sister?” Izzard asked during our session.

“Positive.”

“Her death, her real death—let me hear about it once more.”

I flattened myself against the couch. “It's a horrible story.”

“How old was she?”

“Fourteen.”

“And you?”

“Ten. We lived in Queens, a Corona Avenue apartment near 108th Street.” So there I was, tricked by Izzard into telling it again. “One of those hot summer nights when the air feels like a snail's skin. Mom sent us to buy milk. A safe neighborhood—streetlamps, lots of cops. It should have been okay, but Brittany insisted we hike home through the park. I really don't like talking about this.”

“Kissena Park?”

“Kissena. Right. Suddenly something catches Brittany's eye, and she charges away. A full moon, but I still can't find her, not anywhere. Finally I run home. Dad has to slap me before I stop crying. He calls the police, and then everybody goes to the park, and they spot her about an hour later. It took them a while because the bushes were so dense. Two dozen stab wounds.”

“Did you see the corpse?”

“Not that night, only at the funeral. By then they'd covered her with cosmetics.”

“And the cops decided it was punks?” Strange to hear
cops
and
punks
from Izzard's Continental tongue.

“They questioned the local gangs. The Rodman Street Goons, the Corona Avenue Nightwings . . . a few others, I don't remember the names.”

“The cops came up empty?”

“They never even found the knife. Who would expect it? The punks just threw it in Flushing Bay, right?” Izzard's whole body became a frown. “Gunther, I have reached a conclusion. The analysis cannot proceed until we know
exactly
how many personalities inhabit you. Dawn-to-dusk sessions are not normally a useful technique, but in your case . . .”

“All day? I could never afford that.”

“I have a sliding scale. Like a parking garage.”

I pictured Izzard running a parking garage, speeding away in his customers' catatonic Volvos and manic-depressive Saabs, presenting them with sane cars at day's end. “All right,” I told him. “Dawn-to-dusk.”

 

N
OVEMBER
9, 1999

 

Antichrist
is hopeless. Satan's White House orgies are derivative and ludicrous. In Chapter Fourteen the real Jesus will appear and team up with Richard Nixon's ghost, the two of them forming a kind of ectoplasmic hit squad out to get Satan. This sounds promising, but I can't seem to write the intervening scenes.

The woman down the hall makes concrete phalli. We do not communicate. The young male misanthrope on the third floor writes poems without words in them. I have nothing to say to him. When a man suffers from dissociation and writer's block, dearest diary, he needs friends.

 

N
OVEMBER
14, 1999

 

When Izzard said dawn-to-dusk, he wasn't kidding. He insisted that I meet him at six
A.M.
All this special effort—my case must really fascinate him. Perhaps he's envisioning one of those multiple-personality cover stories for the
Journal of Abnormal Psychology
, or maybe he wants to take me to the upcoming International Psychoanalytic Association congress in Bonn. Look,
sehr geehrten Doktoren
, behold this most curious fish. It didn't get away.

Izzard had brought coffee and donuts. We feasted, and then he said, “I'd like to speak to William Orange now.”

“Is that really all it takes?”

A volcano erupted in my brain, the lava smothering my resented self.

Fugue state . . .

And suddenly I was asking, “What did you discover?” Odd. Izzard had claimed we would go till evening, yet ripe sunlight poured through the window. “It didn't take as long as you thought?”

“Longer,” Izzard muttered, loading his Frederic March pipe.

“Longer?” I marveled at how Izzard could stretch out on the floor with so little loss of dignity. Scraps of paper, each decorated with notes and doodled faces, encircled his recumbent form.

“It's Sunday morning,” he said.

“Sunday morning? Are you serious?” He was. My vacant stomach tugged at me. Exhaustion hung on my bones. “Let's get it over with. How many?”

Izzard lit Frederic March. “In your case, the sheer quantity of selves may be less relevant than—”

“How
many?”
I insisted.

“It's difficult to say,” snapped Izzard, his tone clarifying who the therapist was in this case, who the patient. “Some of your selves reported the existence of personalities whom I failed to draw out. In other instances, I was told of personalities who sounded so innocuous that I decided against soliciting them.”

“Just give me an estimate, Dr. Izzard. I'm going to burst.”

“If I absolutely had to put a number on it, I would say about . . . well, three thousand.”

“Three
thousand?”

“Give or take a dozen.”

“That's preposterous.”

“They kept flipping past, one damn persona after the other. It was like scanning the Manhattan phone book.” Izzard began sketching Frankenstein stitches on his doodles. “The really interesting feature is the organizational scheme that's emerging. As you may know, Gunther, the human family is truly a family. Everyone on earth is everyone else's fiftieth cousin—if not closer. So it's not surprising that certain personalities are claiming blood kinship to each other and grouping themselves into surname categories.”

“Surname categories? I have families inside of me?”

“The Greens, the Silvers, the Siennas, the Pinks . . .”

“Be honest. This is bad news, isn't it?”

“Not necessarily. Remember, our goal is to fuse your various selves into a ruling ego. Within a given family, the challenge of assimilation should prove no harder than in a conventional multiple-personality case. Between families, however, we must contend with feuding, religious intolerance, ethnic pride, and similar schisms.”

“I'm crazy as a bedbug, aren't I?”

“Complex, Gunther. You are very, very complex.”

 

N
OVEMBER
19, 1999

 

Voices chatter within me, a cacophony of failed communication and successful disgust. My liberals scream at my conservatives. My racists spew epithets at my minorities. My fundamentalist Protestants condemn my Catholics to hell.

“Voices, Dr. Izzard. I'm hearing voices. Schizophrenics hear voices.”

“How do you feel about these voices?”

“They scare the crap out of me.”

“Good.” Izzard opened my file and removed a sheaf of doodled faces. “A true psychotic does not fear his voices. He takes them for granted. It never even occurs to him that they might indicate madness. You, on the other hand, have the reaction of a sane person. I'm most encouraged.”

“The reaction of a sane person suffering from history's worst case of dissociation.”

“Perhaps.”

“Can you make them stop?”

“I don't know.” Izzard drew halos above several faces. “I think we should go back to your sister's death.”

“We did that last week.”

“Tell me again.”

I spoke at twice normal speed. Walking with Brittany through Kissena Park. Her disappearance. The screams. My flight. The terrible funeral . . .

“You heard screams?” Izzard interrupted.

“Yes.”

“You never mentioned screams before.”

 

N
OVEMBER
22, 1999

 

Screams. I would settle for mere screams now, wouldn't I? Mere screams would be soothing compared with recent developments.

When my inquisitors burn my heretics, I feel the flames in my heart. When my bigots lynch my blacks, my windpipe constricts and I fall gasping to the floor. Call it psychosomatic, but it hurts.

 

N
OVEMBER
24, 1999

 

I have become a sleepwriter. I doze off upon the couch and awaken in the dinette, a ballpoint pen in my hand, a legal pad pressed against my chest like a poultice. I cannot identify the various flags, national seals, military insignia, and infantry uniforms littering the pad, but the renderings have indisputable flair. Even the income tax forms boast a certain elegance.

My favorite flag depicts a rainbow arcing like a flying buttress between two mountain peaks. Most inspiring. Clearly I have hidden talent.

 

N
OVEMBER
25, 1999

 

Insomnia.

A walk through Washington Square.

Lighting flared everywhere, revealing a circle of Cau casian males in eighteenth-century greatcoats whipping a naked, dark-skinned, aboriginal woman.

When I got home, I found welts on my back.

 

N
OVEMBER
27, 1999

 

Saturday. Another dawn-to-dusk session. This one, at least, truly ended at dusk.

“You've gone political,” Izzard announced when I had regained myself. “The families have started forming . . . well, as you might imagine . . .”

“I know all about it. Countries, right?”

“You've got countries,” Izzard corroborated in the tone of a blunt but compassionate internist offering a diagnosis of AIDS. “And, naturally, alliances of countries. There's a communist pact, a free enterprise treaty, and a collection of poor, developing nations that view both blocs with grave suspicion.”

What can a man do under such circumstances but laugh? “I don't need a psychiatrist, Dr. Izzard, I need a diplomatic corps.”

Instead of echoing my laughter, Izzard offered a smile of corroboration, as if I had taken the words from his mouth. “I spent most of this afternoon talking with the secretary of state from Sovereigntia and the foreign minister from Proletariat' His earnestness left me impossibly depressed. “Gunther, it is my sad duty to inform you that, come midnight, a state of war will exist between your two superpowers.”

 

N
OVEMBER
28, 1999

 

Izzard called to ask how I'm doing—and to cancel next Friday's session. A therapists' convention in Philadelphia.

“The war has begun,” I told him.

 

D
ECEMBER
9, 1999

 

War. I look in the mirror and behold an amalgam of cancer patient and auto-accident victim. The main theater is above my shoulders. Bombs detonate, and my vision blurs. Shells explode, and my teeth rattle, sometimes working free of my skull. A patrol is ambushed, and the blood rolls from my ears and nose. Both sides are using mustard gas. My cough has become one continuous convulsion. I am as bald as Izzard.

In my torso, a second front has opened. My nipples drip pus. I quiver with third-degree burns, raw and weeping, black craters on the landscape of my chest.

The emergency staffs at Beth Israel Hospital and NYU Medical Center know me on sight. I am running out of lies.

 

D
ECEMBER
10, 1999

 

“My God,” said Izzard, beholding my torn and leaking self. Normally unflappable, he could not watch me without flinching.

“Help me,” I bleated.

“I'll try. Believe me, I'll try.” He guided me toward the couch, eased me onto its understanding plush. “I assume you're getting medical attention?”

“The best an emergency room can offer.”

“We'll cancel today's session if—”

“No!” How pathetic I must have sounded. Yes, Doc, I know I'm doomed, but give me some of your prettiest pills anyway. “Please!”

“I think we should talk about those nightmares again. Your sister is always killed by a sphere, correct?”

“Always.” With my tongue I probed a gap between two of my extant teeth.

Izzard procured a fat manila envelope from his top desk drawer, resting it on my chest. I opened it, and a dozen photographs tumbled out.

“Study them,” Izzard urged.

A snowball, a pumpkin, a hot-air balloon, a melon, the moon, a large female breast, a buttock of indeterminate gender, a globe, the Perisphere from the 1940 New York World's Fair, the Unisphere from the 1965 New York World's Fair, a soccer ball, an apple.

I reversed the exhibit. Apple, soccer ball, Unisphere. My intestines became a
Laocoon
, a mass of murdering serpents. “This one,” I groaned, shoving the Unisphere toward Izzard.