These include head injuries and brain disease. AIDS dementia complex. Epilepsy or other seizure disorders. Identity disturbances in DID result from the patients having split off entire personality traits or characteristics, as well as memories. When a stressful or traumatic experience triggers the reemergence of these dissociated parts, the patient switches—usually within seconds—into an alternate personality.”
Pace liked listening to her. “Oh?”
“Some patients have histories of erratic performance in school or in their jobs caused by the emergence of alternate personalities during examinations or other stressful situations. Patients vary with regard to their alternates’ awareness of one another.”
It was good to know what you had, and what had you. He wondered if he could keep all the anagrams straight, if they had some kind of trick to help you memorize it Doe-Ray-Me style. “I wondered about all the people inside me.”
“You still feel them?”
“Yes.”
“All of us suffer from it,” Faust said.
Dr. Brandt nodded and looked around, like she was fielding questions from an audience. “Many DID patients sometimes have setbacks in mixed therapy groups because other patients are bothered or frightened by their personality switches. But you four—”
Again, she stopped. Never just giving him the answers he wanted, always forcing him to beg for more. And the thing inside him not wanting to hear.
“Us four what?” Pace asked.
“You four accommodate one another.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“It is. You make each other sicker.”
The name on the prescription bottles was WILLIAM PACELLA. Pace felt heat rising on the back of his neck and he saw Big Joe Ganucci’s elderly face, the Ganooch just sitting in his wheelchair in the middle of the room with the sacred heart of Jesus picture on the wall, overlooking the gutted bodies of his bodyguards.
The guy who was giggling inside Pace started toying with a knife.
four
Tell me again, please, what do these pills do?” he asked.
“They keep you from killing people,” Dr. Brandt said.
There it was, finally. The truth laid out, raw and bleeding. “Who would I kill? Who did I kill?”
“I’d prefer not to go into that right now.”
Just like a shrink to fuck with you when you were down. He shook his head. “I’d be in jail, not a psych ward. And if I was found not guilty by reason of insanity, which almost nobody ever is, then I couldn’t have gone in voluntarily, and I wouldn’t have ever gotten out of the Falls.”
“The police didn’t have enough evidence to indict you.”
“Then maybe I didn’t do it.”
Hayden, letting out a wild burst of laughter that sounded more animal than human, said, “Oh, believe us, you did it.”
He remembered Ernie calling him “killer.” Pace was recollecting pieces here and there, retaining more without the meds. “Tell me who Cassandra and Kaltzas and Pythos are.”
“You’re beginning to remember them?” Pia asked. “It’s a long story.”
He stared into the void where her eyes should be and said, “Give me an abbreviated version in thirty seconds, okay?”
She let out a deep breath and the scent of her lips, which he knew well, wafted against the back of his throat. “We were on the ward with Cassandra Kaltzas, daughter of a Greek shipping magnate.” The anxiety ratcheted her voice up an octave. “Are there any other kinds of magnates? Aren’t they all goddamn ‘shipping magnates’? What the hell is a magnate anyway?”
“Faster,” Pace said.
“Cassandra was beaten and raped on the ward four months ago. Kaltzas thinks one of you did it, and that I helped.”
“Helped?”
“I didn’t like her very much. I was jealous. Sick, you know? I have mother issues. Sister issues, really. Well, mother and sister issues. I wasn’t on the ward for my goddamn health. Anyway, the bastard sent men to visit us. They asked questions like they were our
Editors Of Reader's Digest