And Now the News (29 page)

“It is? Well, then … But I hate talking like this to you. It doesn't seem right.”

“Go on!”

She said, almost in a whisper, “Life is plain hell sometimes. He's gone and I don't know where, and he comes back and it's just awful. Sometimes he acts as if he were alone in the place—he doesn't see me, doesn't answer. Or maybe he'll be the other way, after me every second, teasing and prodding and twisting every word until I don't know what I said or what I should say next, or who I am, or … anything, and he won't leave me alone, not to eat or to sleep or to go out. And then he—”

She stopped and the doctor waited, and this time realized that waiting would not be enough. “Don't stop,” he said.

She shook her head.

“Please. It's impor—”

“I would, Fred,” she burst out frantically. “I'm not refusing to. I can't, that's all. The words won't—”

“Don't try to tell me what it is, then,” he suggested. “Just say what happens and how it makes you feel. You can do that.”

“I suppose so,” she said, after considering it.

Osa took a deep breath, almost a sigh, and closed her eyes again.

“It will be hell,” she said, “and then I'll look at him and he … and he … well, it's
there
, that's all. Not a word, not a sign sometimes, but the room is full of it. It's … it's something to love, yes, it's that, but nobody can just love something, one-way, forever. So it's a loving thing, too, from him to me. It suddenly arrives and everything else he is doing, the cruelty, the ignoring, whatever might be happening just then, it all stops and there's nothing else but the—whatever it is.”

She wet her lips. “It can happen any time; there's never a sign or a warning. It can happen now, and again a minute from now, or not for months. It can last most of a day or flash by like a bird. Sometimes he goes on talking to me while it happens; sometimes what he actually says is just nothing, small talk. Sometimes he just stands looking at me, without saying anything. Sometimes he—I'm sorry,
Fred—he makes love to me then and that's … Oh, dear God, that's …”

“Here's my handkerchief.”

“Thank you. He—does that other times, too, when there's nothing loving about it. This—this thing-to-love, it—it seems to have nothing to do with anything else, no pattern. It happens and it's what I wait for and what I look back on; it's all I have and all I want.”

When he was quite sure she had no more to say, he hazarded, “It's as if some other—some other personality suddenly took over.”

He was quite unprepared for her reaction. She literally shouted,
“No!”
and was startled herself.

She recoiled and glanced guiltily around the café. “I don't know why,” she said, sounding frightened, “but that was just—just
awful
, what you just said. Fred, if you can give any slightest credence to the idea of feminine intuition, you'll get that idea right out of your head. I couldn't begin to tell you why, but it just isn't so. What loves me that way may be part of Dick; but it's Dick, not anybody or anything else. I
know
that's so, that's all. I know it.”

Her gaze was so intense that it all but made him wince. He could see her trying and trying to find words, rejecting and trying again.

At last, “The only way I can say it that makes any sense to me is that Dick couldn't be such a—a louse so much of the time and still walk a straight line without something just as extreme in the other direction. It's—it's a great pity for the rest of the world that he only shows that side to me, but there it is.”

“Does he show it only to you?” He touched her hand and released it. “I'm sorry, but I must ask that.”

She smiled and a kind of pride shone from her face. “Only to me. I suppose that's intuition again, but it's as certain as Sunday.” The pride disappeared and was replaced by patient agony. “I don't delude myself, Fred—he has other women; plenty of them. But that particular something is for me. It isn't something I wonder about. I just—know.”

He sat back wearily.

She asked, “Is all this what you wanted?”

He gave her a quick, hurt glance and saw, to his horror, her eyes
filling with tears.

“It's what I asked for,” he said in a flat voice.

“I see the difference.” She used his handkerchief. “May I have this?”

“You can have—” But he stopped himself. “Sure.” He got up. “No,” he said, and took the damp handkerchief out of her hand. “I'll have something better for you.”

“Fred,” she said distressed, “I—”

“I'm going, forgive me and all that,” he said, far more angrily than he had thought he would. But polite talk and farewells were much more than he could stand. “The layman stranger has to have a long interview with a professional acquaintance. I don't think I'd better see you again, Osa.”

“All right, Fred,” she said to his back.

He had hurt her, he knew, but he knew also that his stature in her cosmos could overshadow the hurt and a hundred more like it. He luxuriated in the privilege and stamped out, throwing a bill to the waiter on the way.

He drove back and plodded up the ramp to the clinic. For some obscure reason, the inscription over the door caught his attention. He had passed it hundreds of times without a glance; he had ordered it put there and he was satisfied with it, and why should it matter now? But it did. What was it that Newell had said about it?
Some saw about the sanctity of personality
. A very perceptive remark, thought the doctor, considering that Newell hadn't read it:

ONLY MAN CAN FATHOM MAN

It was from Robert Lindner and was the doctor's answer to the inevitable charges of “push-button therapy.” But he wondered now if the word “Man” was really inclusive enough.

He shook the conjecture and let himself into the building.

Light gleamed from the translucent door of his office at the far end of the corridor. He walked down the slick flooring toward it, listening to his heels and not thinking otherwise, his mind as purposively relaxed as a fighter's body between rounds. He opened the door.

“What are you doing?”

“Waiting,” said Miss Thomas.

“Why?”

“Just in case.”

Without answering, he went to the closet and hung up his coat. Back at his desk, he sat down and straightened his tired spine until it crackled. She put her feet under her and he understood that she was ready to leave if he wished her to.

He said, “Hypothesis: Newell and Anson are discrete personalities.”

While he spoke, he noticed Miss Thomas's feet move outward a little and then cross at the ankles. His inner thought was, Of all the things I like about this woman, the best is the amount of conversation I have with her without talking.

“And we have plenty of data to back that up,” he continued. “The EEGs alone prove it. Anson is Anson and Newell is Newell, and to prove it, we've crystallized them for anyone else to see. We've done such a job on them that we know exactly what Anson is like without Newell. We've built him up that way, with that in mind. We haven't done quite the same with Newell, but we might as well have. I mean we've investigated Newell as if Anson did not exist within him. What it amounts to is this: In order to demonstrate a specimen of multiple personality, we've separated and isolated the components.

“Then we go into a flat spin because neither segment looks like a real human being … Miss Thomas?”

“Yes?”

“Do you mind the way I keep on saying ‘we'?”

She smiled and shook her head. “Not at the moment.”

“Further,” he said, answering her smile but relentlessly pursuing his summation, “we've taken our two personalities and treated each like a potentially salvable patient—one neurotic, one retarded. We've operated under the assumption that each contained his own disorder and could be treated by separate therapies.”

“We've been wrong?”

“I certainly have,” said the doctor. He slapped the file cabinet at his left. “In here, there's a very interesting paper by one Weisbaden, who theorizes that multiple personalities are actually twins, identical
twins born of the same egg-cell and developing within one body. One step, as it were, into the microcosm from
foetus in foetu
.”

“I've read about that,” said Miss Thomas. “One twin born enclosed in the body of another.”

“But not just partly—altogether enclosed. Whether or not Weisbaden's right, it's worth using as a test hypothesis. That's what I've been doing, among other things, and I've had my nose stuck so far into it that I wasn't able to see a very important corresponding part of the analogy: namely, that twinning itself is an anomaly, and any deviation in a sibling of multiple origin is teratological.”

“My,” said Miss Thomas in mock admiration.

The doctor smiled. “I should have said, ‘monstrous,' but why drag in superstitions? This thing is bad enough already. Anyway, if we're to carry our twinning idea as an analogy, we have got to include the very likely possibility that our multiple personalities are as abnormal as Siamese twins or any other monstrosity—I
hate
to use that word!”

“I'm not horrified,” said Miss Thomas. “Abnormal in what way?”

“Well, in the crudest possible terms, what would you say was the abnormality suffered by one Siamese twin?”

“The other Siamese twin.”

“Mmm. And by the same analogy, what's the name of Newell's disorder?”

“My goodness!” gasped Miss Thomas. “We better not tell Hildy Jarrell.”

“That isn't the only thing we'll have to keep from her—for a while, at least,” said the doctor. “Listen: did you run my notes on Newell?”

“All of them.”

“You remember the remark she made that bothered me, about Anson's being only and altogether good, and the trouble I had with the implication that Newell was only and altogether bad?”

“I remember it.”

“It's a piece of childishness that annoys me whenever I find it and I was damned annoyed to be thinking at all along those lines. The one reason for its being in the notes at all is that I had to decant it
somewhere. Well, I've been euchred, Miss Thomas. Because Anson appeared in our midst shining and unsullied, I've leaned over backward trying to keep away from him the corruptions of anger, fear, greed, concupiscence and all the other hobbies of real mankind. By the same token, it never occurred to me to analyze what kindness, generosity, sympathy or empathy might be lurking in Newell. Why bother in such a—what was the term you used?”

“Heel,” said Miss Thomas without hesitation.

“Heel. So what we have to do first is to give each of these—uh—people the privilege of entirety. If they are monsters, then let us at least permit them to be whole monsters.”

“You don't mean you'll—”

“We,” he corrected, smiling.

She said, through her answering smile, “You don't mean we'll take poor Anson and—”

He nodded.

“Offhand, I don't see how you're going to do it, Doctor. Anson has no fear. He'd laugh as he walked into a lion's cage or a high-tension line. And I can't imagine how you'd make him angry. You of all people. He—he loves you. As for … oh, dear. This is awful.”

“Extremes are awful,” he agreed. “We'll have to get pretty basic, but we can do it. Hence, I suggest Miss Jarrell be sent to Kalamazoo for a new stove or some such.”

“And then what?”

“It is standard practice to acquaint a patient with the name and nature of his disorder. In our field, we don't tell him, we show him, and when he absorbs the information we call it insight. Anson, meet Newell. Newell, meet Anson.”

“I do hope they'll be friends,” said Miss Thomas unhappily.

In a darkness within a darkness in the dark, Anson slept his new kind of sleep, wherein now he had dreams. And then there was his own music, the deep sound which lit the darkness and pierced the dark envelopes, one within the other; and now he could emerge to the light and laughter and the heady mysteries of life and communication with Miss Hildy and Doctor Fred, and the wonder on wonder
of perception. Gladly he flung himself back to life to—

But this wasn't the same. He was here, in the bed, but it wasn't the same at all. There was no rim of light around the ceiling, no bars of gold pouring in a sunlit window; this was the same, but not the same—it was dark. He blinked his eyes so hard, he made little colored lights, but they were inside his eyes and did not count.

There was noise, unheard-of, unbearable noise in the form of a cymbal-crash right by his head in the dark. He recoiled from it and tried to bounce up and run, and found he could not move. His arms were bound to his sides, his legs to the bed, by some wide formless something which held him trapped. He fought against it, crying, and then the bed dropped away underneath him and stopped with a crash, and rose and dropped again. There was another noise—not a noise, though it struck at him like one: this was a photoflash, though he could not know it.

Blinded and sick, he lay in terror, waiting for terror again.

He heard a voice say softly, “Turn down the gain,” and his music, his note, the pervasive background to all his consciousness, began to weaken. He strained toward it and it receded from him. Thumpings and shufflings from somewhere in the dark threatened to hide it away from him altogether. He felt, without words, that the note was his life and that he was losing it. For the first time in his conscious life, he became consciously afraid of dying.

He screamed, and screamed again, and then there was a blackness blacker than the dark and it all ceased.

“He's fainted. Lights, please. Turn off that note. Give him 550 and we'll see if he can sleep normally. God, I hope we didn't go too far.”