Set This House in Order (14 page)

My father was nearing his wits' end when, one day in the spring of 1992, he stopped in the Seattle Public Library and discovered a self-help manual called
The Practical Guide to Living with Multiple Personality Disorder.
The
Guide,
by Dr. Danielle Grey (a local author, according to the sticker on the front cover), approached multiplicity as a condition to be managed, rather than as a pathology to be cured. “The primary difficulty faced by multiple personalities,” Dr. Grey wrote in her preface, “is not that they are abnormal; it is that they are dysfunctional. Multiplicity, of itself, is no more problematic than left-handedness. Losing time, being unable to keep a steady job or maintain a residence, requiring detailed lists just to get through the day—
these
things are problems. But they are problems that a well-organized multiple household, acting cooperatively, can learn to overcome.”

While Dr. Grey stopped short of saying that reintegration was never an
appropriate goal in the treatment of MPD, she made it clear that she considered it, at best, a low priority. The important thing was to eliminate the confusion that resulted from uncontrolled switching: to impose order. Whether you ended up with one soul, or ten, or a hundred—that was a side issue.

It would be an understatement to say that Dr. Grey's views had been poorly received by her peers. But to my father, the
Guide
was a godsend, and he would have traveled a lot farther than Poulsbo to meet Dr. Grey in person.

Dr. Grey's house was a two-story Craftsman that she had designed and built herself, appropriately enough. I knocked on the door and Dr. Grey's partner, Meredith, came to let me in. She complimented me on my choice of flowers, and invited me to wait in the front parlor. “Danny's still getting herself together upstairs,” she explained. “It'll be a few minutes.”

Meredith took the daisies to put them in water; I went into the parlor. This was the room where Dr. Grey used to meet with her patients, and where she had first spoken to my father about the idea of constructing a geography in Andy Gage's head. The parlor was big and bright, with antique lamps and a working gas-fireplace, and tall windows that could be opened wide, lightly curtained, or tightly shuttered, according to the patient's mood.

An oak coffee table sat on a rug at the center of the parlor, surrounded unevenly by an overstuffed chair with a footstool, a straight-back chair, a padded rocker, and a comfortable sofa that was wide enough to lie down on. Two books had been laid out on the coffee table. One of the books was Dr. Grey's
Guide.
The other, which I didn't recognize, had an illustration of a broken mirror on the cover. The pieces of the mirror were made of some shiny material that was actually reflective, so that when you picked up the book and looked at it you saw your own face, in slivers. The title of the book was
Through Shattered Minds,
by Dr. Thomas Minor.

“God,” my father said from the pulpit. “Not that piece of shit.” I couldn't tell whether he was referring to the book or its author.

“Is this the same Dr. Minor you used to see?” I asked him.

“Yes. That book's out of print, thank God.”

“It looks new,” I observed. I flipped it open to the first chapter, and read a paragraph at random:

I was stunned. “This man is a professional psychiatrist?”

“It gets worse,” my father assured me. “And that's only his first book, the one he wrote before he discovered the Satanic conspiracy.”

From outside the parlor, I heard a motor whirring: a wheelchair lift, carrying Dr. Grey downstairs. The lift clunked to a halt a moment later; there was a brief silence, a prolonged grunt, a clank, and then I heard Dr. Grey say, “Ah, damn it!” Footsteps came running from the back of the house; Meredith said, “Is that gate stuck again?” Then they were both talking—“I can do this on my—” “Just let me—” “
Damn it,
Meredith!” “Danny, let go of—” “All right, all
right!
” “—roll back two inches while I—” “Hurry
up
”—until finally there was a second clank, and Dr. Grey said, “OK, that's fine, back off!”

Another, smaller motor started humming, and Dr. Grey's wheelchair cruised gracefully into the parlor. “Andrew!” Dr. Grey greeted me, and I tried to act surprised, as if I hadn't heard her coming.

Actually, it wasn't that hard to look surprised; her appearance was a shock. Her voice was strong and clear, as I've said, and her eyes were as bright as ever, but she'd lost a lot of weight—when I bent down to hug her, her body was all loose skin and hard angles. And she'd aged; in the year since I'd seen her last, she'd put on what looked to be ten years' worth of wrinkles, and her hair, once brown, had gone the way of her surname.

“Ah,” Dr. Grey said, as I straightened up from the hug, “I see you found Minor's scribble.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, glancing down at the book in my hand. “My father thought they'd stopped printing it.”

“They had; it's being reissued. That's a review copy that Minor had sent to me. His way of gloating.”

“Oh. Well that's rude.”

“Mmph,” Dr. Grey grunted in the affirmative. “Anyway, sit!” She gestured at the sofa. “Sit, get comfortable. Let me say hi to the family.”

“Sure.” I sat on the sofa, and stepped back into the pulpit so that the others could say hello. This was expected, and only polite, but suddenly I wished, very selfishly, that I could skip it. I was anxious to talk to Dr. Grey about Penny, and worried that the others would tire her out before I got a
chance. Our last visit had had to be cut short after Dr. Grey suddenly became exhausted.

She'd had her stroke in January of 1995, just as my father was putting the finishing touches on the geography and the house—potentially disastrous timing. I still wasn't entirely sure how my father had withstood the shock, though I knew Dr. Grey's own foresight had a lot to do with it: the day after she was taken to the emergency room, my father was visited in person by Dr. Eddington—a sympathetic associate of Dr. Grey's, from Fremont—who broke the bad news and offered his services as a trauma counselor. Dr. Eddington also brought a postdated letter from Dr. Grey which said, in so many words: if you are reading this, something terrible must have happened to me; but I don't want anything terrible to happen to you, so please, try to be strong, and accept Dr. Eddington's help.

My father was strong; he finished the house on his own, and called me out of the lake, exactly as planned; that was the official story, anyway. Dr. Grey, meanwhile, remained bedridden for some months; when I first met her, about a week after I was born, she was still struggling to string whole sentences together, and though she improved markedly after that, it became clear early on that she would never fully recover.

The saddest thing about the stroke, other than the damage it had done to Dr. Grey's mind and body, was the effect it had had on Dr. Grey's relationship with my father. This was something I didn't really understand, and my father refused to discuss it with me. At first I'd thought it must just be too painful for him, seeing his good friend so debilitated, but later I decided that couldn't be it. My father had never shown any qualms about visiting Dr. Grey in the hospital, when she was at her worst. It was only after she got out that he became reluctant to visit her or call her—increasingly reluctant, even as she regained her ability to have real conversations. My current theory was that this reluctance stemmed from a combination of guilt and fear: guilt that as Dr. Grey's patient he had contributed to the overwork that had caused her stroke; and fear that as her ex-patient he might, even with a strictly friendly visit, somehow cause her to have another.

Even now he hung back: instead of rushing forward to be the first to say hello, my father let all the other souls go ahead of him. When his turn finally came, he kept his greeting brief and—it hurt to see it—almost emotionlessly polite. When Dr. Grey suggested that he clear the pulpit so that they could have a private chat, my father begged off, saying he didn't want to tax her strength. I should have been happy about this, but it actually disappointed me. Dr. Grey was disappointed, too: she pursed her lips, and
looked as if she was about to insist on a private chat, but before she could, Meredith entered the parlor, carrying a tray full of snacks, and my father took advantage of the distraction to pass the body back to me.

“Look, Aaron—” Dr. Grey said, as Meredith cleared a space for the tray on the coffee table.

“Nope, sorry, it's me,” I told her. “He's gone back inside.”

“Damn it! Tell him I—”

“Aren't these nice?” Meredith said, lifting a vase from the tray.

“Hm!?” Dr. Grey snapped. Then she saw the daisies, and softened. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, they are nice.” She looked at me. “You brought them?” I nodded. “Very nice,” she said. “Very thoughtful, Andrew.” Her gaze wandered to the tray. “Would you care for a macaroon?”

“No thank you,” I told her, “I'm actually kind of full right now. Maybe I'll have something later.”

“As you like.” She looked pointedly at Meredith, who took an espresso cup from the tray and filled it from a special pot. Dr. Grey drank the espresso black, gulping it down like medicine. “Another,” she said, and Meredith poured her a second dose; Dr. Grey gulped that one down too. Then she grunted “Enough,” and waved off Meredith's offer of another refill. Meredith retrieved the cup and left the parlor.

“So, Andrew,” said Dr. Grey, “you mentioned on the phone that you were having problems with a woman. Is it…” She paused, concentrating. “…Julie? That's the name, right, Julie?”

“Yes, Julie Sivik,” I said. “She's my boss. She's not the one I'm having a problem with, though.”

“But you were, weren't you?” Her eyes became distant, recollecting. “The last time you were here? You were obsessing over her…”

“Well, yes, sort of, but—”

“She'd led you on somehow, romantically, then changed her mind about it, and you were having real trouble coming to terms with that.”

“Yes, but…but that was a while ago. I got over it.”

“Ah!” Dr. Grey snapped out of her reverie, brightening. “Well, good! So who's the new girl?”

“Her name is Penny Driver,” I said. “But she's not…it's not a romantic relationship. We just work together.” I paused, for some reason wanting Dr. Grey to acknowledge this point, but she just stared at me expectantly, so after a moment I continued: “She started working at the Reality Factory last Monday—Julie hired her. And it turns out that…”

I told her the story. Dr. Grey was attentive but very unresponsive at first,
so much so that I started wondering, half-seriously, whether she'd fallen asleep with her eyes open. But when I described how I'd confronted Julie about her ulterior motives for hiring Penny, Dr. Grey came back to life, nodding vigorously. “Good,” she said, “I'm glad you called her on it. You were right, it
was
a bad idea, especially springing it on you that way.”

“Well,” I said, encouraged, “I'm sure Julie meant well—”

“Good intentions are overrated,” said Dr. Grey. “Probably you know this, but I'm not a big fan of good intentions.”

“Um…”

“But that's a tangent. I'm sorry. Continue.”

“Um, well, anyway, the very next day…”

During the second half of the story, as I described Thread's attempts to get me to “help Penny find herself,” Dr. Grey interrupted frequently, quizzing me about the exact wording of the e-mails, and about Penny's, Thread's, and Foul Mouth's demeanors when they'd said and done certain things. She also wanted to know everything
I
had done, and after her comment about good intentions, I was worried that my own actions would be found wanting. But Dr. Grey's judgment, when it came, was positive.

“It sounds like you handled yourself pretty well, under the circumstances,” she said.

“Well…except for the freaking-out part.”

“A certain amount of skittishness is understandable, especially given the threats. But you are going to have to talk to this girl—”

“I know. I just—”

“You're also going to have to tell Julie what's been happening—I know you don't want to involve her, but if Penny's behavior starts affecting your work, your boss needs to know about it. Particularly since it's her responsibility for hiring Penny in the first place.”

I didn't say anything to that, but Dr. Grey reacted as if I had. She must have seen something in my face—and whatever else the stroke had done to her, her instincts were as sharp as ever.

“If the situation with Penny were to go from bad to worse,” she asked, “do you think Julie would try to hold
you
responsible?”

“Well,” I said, carefully, “I don't think she'd blame me directly…but she might
act
as if it were my fault.”

“Let me ask you something else, then. You told me before that you'd gotten over your obsession with Julie. How, exactly?”

“How?”

“How did you get over it? As I recall, you were pretty hard up for her the
last time you were here. And God knows I can't have been much help, zonking out in the middle of our conversation…”

“Oh, no!” I said. “You were helpful…or at least, as helpful as you could be.”