Shades of Eva (39 page)

I had no doubt that Mitchell’s condition was
a longstanding one that had a lot to do with alcoholism. I imagine
that Mitchell’s congregation was at some point a welcome invention;
for it gave Mitchell someone to play with, for lack of a better
phrase, even if these so-called playmates weren’t exactly
affectionate beings. Mitchell simply knew no different.

Children of alcoholics are also notorious
peacemakers. They are often the first to forgive, even though the
forgiveness offered to some may not be deserved. They are usually
the quietest children. They keep things to themselves. Therefore,
they’re more prone to internalize shame, to take responsibility for
others’ mistakes, or sins even, and to turn their pain and that
shame into patterns of self-injury. They may cut their flesh, burn
themselves, or pull their hair out. Later, they may develop eating
disorders and experience a multitude of anxiety symptoms. They may,
and often do, turn to substances to ease their pain, substances
like alcohol or Valium, which when combined can become a deadly
cocktail.

And sometimes they turn that shame outwards.
That’s when the hell begins.

Before I could settle on, or at least
offer Mitchell, a plausible diagnosis, I needed to complete a
battery of tests. I wanted to learn about his paranoia. I wanted to
assess his dissociative tendencies, to determine if these voices he
heard, this audible laughing and crying were schizophrenic in
variety, or if they were facets of his identity. In other words,
were these the voices of alter personalities raging inside of him
characteristic of a multiple personality disorder, personalities
that may take over his consciousness from time to time, or were
these hallucinatory phenomena more characteristic of a
schizophrenia?

We might not know until the whiskey and the
other substances were out of Mitchell’s system. But in the
meantime, Putnam and Bernstein created a pretty valid test of
Multiple Personality called the Dissociative Experiences Scale (or
DES). The DES is a measure of dissociation commonly seen in persons
with so-called multiple personality disorder (or MPD).

If Mitchell did have MPD, the DES might
alert me. If that were the case, he would need treatment by a
psychiatrist specializing in multiple personality disorder, not
merely substance abuse.

But for the time being, there was something
I could get Mitchell to do outside of our office visits. I reached
into my bottom desk drawer and pulled out a blue notebook and laid
it on the desk.

“I want you to begin journaling,” I told
Mitchell. “Not just writing down your thoughts and what happened
during the day. I want you to do something that we call Shadow
Journaling.”

Mitchell asked what that was.

I explained the Shadow Journal as a sort of
dialogue with your internal selves. “You write down what you’d like
to say to…say, to your mother. Give her a voice and start talking
with her. You’d be surprised what stuff comes up.”

Mitchell seemed displeased. “You mean you
want me to start imagining conversations between me and my dead
mother, and write them down?”

I was nodding. “That’s exactly what I mean.
And not just with her. You seem to miss your brother, wherever he
is. Write with him. Write with your anger; give that a voice. Write
with your tears. Give them a name if you want to. The point is: I
want you to start addressing the parts of you you’ve been
denying.”

“But why?”

“To get to know them. To understand them. To
confront them.  Here, in a safe place. Banish them if you have
to, or learn from them. Tears have a meaning, Mitchell. They’re
signals that alert us to the beauty of a person, to the fond
memories that we shared with them. And also to the beauty of life
and all that we have to lose if things continue the way they are. I
think your tears would tell you a lot of things, if you would let
them.”

“And anger? What does anger do for you?”

“Anger is a warning sign, and it’s a call to
justice. If you feel angry, then you feel called, and at a minimum,
warned. Would you agree?”

Mitchell nodded. “How about a voice that
just laughs at you? You don’t know what it is, or who it is. You
just know it’s there.”

I was nodding. “Then write with it. Try and
find out what this voice is laughing at.”

Mitchell hung his head as if reflecting on
something, and then said, “I had a friend once who told me that we
could remember things that happened to family by dreaming. Do you
believe that?”

“I don’t quite understand?”

“Can we use hypnosis to remember? Perhaps
remember other people’s lives?”

Mitchell was speaking of an arena of
metapsychiatry that, honestly, I didn’t feel safe dabbling with.
I’d used hypnosis on a few patients in the past with mixed results,
but never to elicit what we’d refer to as other-consciousness,
which, I believed, was akin to spirit possession, and as a
practicing Catholic I treaded the grounds around that sort of
spiritualism very carefully.

But I was curious about this friend of his,
as well as why he—or she—would say such a thing. So I asked.

“Her name’s not important,” Mitchell
replied. “She calls it genetic memory. She says that often times
ancestors share a part of their lives with the living through
messages that can be interpreted through dreams.”

Mitchell had just given me a good chunk of
what Carl Jung used to write about. See Jung’s seminal works:
Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, or the Undiscovered Self for
primers on the subject.

We’d gotten to this point because I wanted
Mitchell to dialogue with dead people—or other innate, inanimate
notions like anger or a phantom third arm if so chosen. These were
imaginative exercises, not meant to confuse anyone, so I could
understand why he’d ask about something as esoteric as genetic
memory.

But for someone like Mitchell who was prone
to dissociative states (as I came to learn) dabbling with the
spirit world, or altered levels of consciousness, was a lethal idea
that I would soon come to regret having encouraged. To someone like
Mitchell, noises in the head can become detached voices; internal
mockery becomes the shameful admonishments of ancestors past;
longings for a grandfather’s affection can morph into an ethereal
visual hallucination of him. Dreams of a little girl in an old
country home can become visions of a mother’s past.

For this kind of conversational writing to
work, as imaginative as it is, it has to be undertaken with someone
who is sufficiently integrated. Sometimes patients are instructed
to write in their off hand—if they’re right handed, I’d instruct
them to write with their left, or vice versa—this gives more of a
differentiation. It’s not that we are trying to split the
personality, or divide it; the personality is already split in some
ways. Giving the dissociated aspects of one’s personality—the
shadow or rejected aspects, using Jung’s terminology—a voice, and a
handwriting pattern of their own, allows the core self to respect
them as separate, yet important elements within the core person,
and hopefully, when understanding takes place, those elements can
be more integrated so that they become more like members of a team,
and less like outcasts.

But one has to be sufficiently integrated to
manage such a synergy.

I thought Mitchell was resilient enough to
undertake that kind of naval gazing—and that was my first mistake.
With Mitchell, I was never sure who was sitting across from me. I’m
sure the tablet that bore the brunt of his writing in the days and
nights to come wasn’t sure, either, of whose eyes were searching
her lines, eyes sometimes opened and sometimes closed, sometimes
wandering to different years and into different dream states only
to return a darker shade of blue than they were when the writing
began.

Consider walking into your house and
realizing someone’s rearranged your furniture and there are things
missing. You know that you didn’t do this, or you’d remember it.
Suppose you have a video-surveillance system and are able to see
who entered your house and see who did that re-arranging. Suppose
you hit play and when the screen comes on, it’s not a stranger that
is moving your furniture, but you, yourself on screen, moving in
ways that aren’t natural to you as if you are possessed, saying
things you’d never say, putting things in places you never would,
and talking to yourself in voices you’ve never heard before.

This is called Lost Time in multiple
personality parlance, and what happens in these lost periods is the
mystery of mysteries—but it has something to do with trauma, and
trauma was something Mitchell had more experience with than even he
realized. That much is fact.

I gave Mitchell one of my best pens
to commemorate our first meeting, as well as his agreement to begin
Shadow Journaling. I gave way to the resilience of youth, to the
hunch that there were other things that could explain his
eccentricities besides alter spirits and lost time.

I watched him nod hesitantly at the blank
notebook before him. He said he’d try his best. I promised to try
mine. I just didn’t know how dangerous making that promise would be
for Mitchell. He not only tried to reach his demons, I thoroughly
believe that he did.

“See you tomorrow?” I said.

“Tomorrow it is,” he replied.

But a lifetime can happen in the morrow, and
it seems like a lifetime did.

***

Text message from
AMELIA
.

April 23, 1995: 8:56 a.m.

Ully is on his way. He’s in a bad way! Have
a great first shift!

This message sent via Phone-Effigy
Wireless.

The morning was warm. The sun was shimmering
through the trees. The birds of Michigan were singing like their
lives were at stake, and Ully was on his way. I was on my way to my
first shift, Chester Imil, a pistol-packing mercenary with good
morals bent on redressing a couple issues. And oh yeah, I was
pretty stoned on pills.

I wasn’t a gunman, let alone a mercenary. I
was a drifter, an addict, and a bad actor. I was unstable, but I
guess my redemptive quality was that I now cared about something,
and I had a goal in life that didn’t have everything to do with
me—it had something to do with family, and someone else. This had
as much to do with Amelia, now, and her family, and her family’s
art, as it did with me or with Ully or with what I wanted.

As I made my way to the guard shack to check
in, I was privately rehashing the prior night’s conversation with
Amelia. I’d told her that I’d met Ben Levantle, liked him, and that
I didn’t believe he had a clue as to where his brother was.

Amelia wasn’t surprised. When she told me
Ully didn’t know where Fred was, either, neither was I
surprised.

Amelia was concerned that I’d compromised
the mission by naming names. She had told me to use my true name in
counseling, but to use the names of my family members sparingly, if
at all, and bank on Ben not putting two and two together until
Amelia and I were long gone. If he knew where Fred was, then great!
But he didn’t.

Ben didn’t react to the Rennix name; nor did
he react in any particular way when I mentioned Elmer’s. If he did
suspect a relationship between my story and my mother’s, he didn’t
verbalize it. But I could tell he was bothered by something. Midway
through my story, he seemed to have entered a rather long daydream.
By session’s end, I’m not sure he ever came out of it.

To that extent, I was content with what I’d
given Ben. I’d given him something to remember, which is what
Amelia had given me. I had at least met him, and he was, at least
so far as I thought, beginning to remember. If he deserved to know
what was going on, and he did, it was going to have to be up to him
to figure it out. Ully was on his way, and I was quite sure that in
not so many minutes there’d be a case open, again, against old
Ben’s brother, and police would be knocking at Ben’s door.

To that end, my time with Ben was going to
be very short lived.

Regarding Ully. He came home
from a
short day’s work expecting an empty house. That wasn’t what he’d
found. He found a pretty pissed-off female MP waiting in his living
room for him, along with a contact of hers who Amelia still wasn’t
identifying. There was a brief struggle and Ully got laid out. Laid
out was the term Amelia used.

Ully had made some confessions that night.
He had confessed to his role in profiting from his sister’s rapes
by allowing Fred Levantle access to my mother through the attic
entrances in his childhood home. This happened four or five times,
he said, at the river house, and once at Coastal State.

Access. His confession validated each and
every word in my mother’s diaries.

He had confessed to being with Fred the
night Elmer was taken, too. This didn’t surprise Amelia. She’d
reasoned he was there. Ully told her that Fred was drunk, and that
he wanted one more night with my mother before he flew back to
Korea. One more night of access! This was the only time, Ully said,
he ever brought Fred to the Asylum for the exchange: access to sex
for money.

That just happened to be the night Elmer was
taken!

Ully said Fred wasn’t the type of person to
say no to. So Ully agreed to go; to take Fred, more accurately.
Ully confessed to driving with him to the University nearby, where
they parked, and then to walking up the ravines out back with him,
up which they climbed toward my mother’s dormitory. Ully said he
pointed out the room where my mother was staying, and that he
waited in the ravines for Fred to come out.

I wanted to hear this, but I didn’t. I
needed to hear it, but I needed to sleep. It was more than I could
bear to listen to that night. It was enough to make me go to sleep
with untold numbers of pills in my body.