Shades of Eva (49 page)

As Mitchell drifted into a restless sleep, I
wrestled with the choice of reading what he had to say or risking
offense by not reading it. I chose to read, if anything to see what
effect the writing had on man who, as far as my instinct was
concerned, had several personalities raging inside of him.

Mitchell’s primary voice was assigned the
moniker, the Critic. It seemed to represent the devilish, dare I
say Satanic, voice of self-hatred. This inner voice of contempt can
be quite cruel to say the least. To describe the homicidal hatred
such as that expressed by Mitchell’s critic is not easy. It was an
overwhelming voice of self-abasement I had not encountered since
reading Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, in which the hero of Kafka’s
macabre tale is suddenly and unexpectedly arrested and charged with
existence.

To give you a taste of what I’m talking
about, here is a passage from Mitchell’s journal:

Mitchell: Who are you?

Critic: I’m the rational part of you, the
one who sees all the mistakes you make.

Mitchell: Did I kill Mom?

Critic: You may as well have shot her. Had
you only listened to her and went inside, it might not have
happened. Had you quit your whining, she might have lived. You were
so spoiled!

Mitchell: I thought so.

Critic: You are the weakest, most pathetic
son I’ve ever seen. You’re worthless. No wonder your father left
you. It should have been you born into that place, not Elmer.
You’re a pitiful excuse for a human being, let alone a son!

Mitchell: You’re right.

I turned a page and Mitchell woke up. He
didn’t sit up. He just opened his eyes. I held the journal up for
him to see and asked him, point blank, if he had considered the
origin of this wellspring of utter wickedness, to which he replied
with the question, “I hold the pen, don’t I?”

It was not the answer I wanted. As
therapists we want that critical voice to be externalized, that is
attributed to someone outside of the self. In Mitchell’s case it
could have been the voice of his father, or his uncle, or another
person with whom he’d suffered this sort of verbal abuse.

His answer, however, suggested the
accusatory depravity of his critical voice was very much an
internalized aspect of his personality. His responses to this
Critic were completely submissive: You are right; I thought so; and
perhaps the most despicable response, a question: Did I kill Mom, a
question his Critic unequivocally affirmed.

Mitchell had taken on the archetypal
prisoner identification in Kafka’s book whose guilt was never in
doubt, a wormlike, shame-filled character who, according to the
story, was worthy of little more than scorn, and ultimately,
execution.

I sat there staring at my client, my mind
oscillating between Mitchell’s words I hold the pen, don’t I, and
something Kafka had written a hundred years ago about his
occupation: “Writing…is a deeper sleep than death…Just as one
wouldn’t pull a corpse from its grave, I can’t be dragged from my
desk at night.”

The next counselor Mitchell would see would
have to instill in him a sense of differentiation from these types
of voices. Mitchell would need to learn to argue with his critical
side, to understand this voice as an extension of another person in
his life, or a series of people. He’d need to learn that this voice
is not his; that it is a voice of needless shame, and it isn’t
correct.

It wasn’t important exactly how Mitchell’s
mother died, or what Mitchell had done or not done. Boys are
naturally insensitive, naturally unintuitive, unobservant, and
naturally defiant—particularly when fathers are absent. So the best
response to Mitchell’s self-abasement was the most obvious
response, and I told him so in those five simple words: “You were
just a boy!”

To every argument he mustered, I countered,
you were just a boy! To every hint of criticism, you were just a
boy! And to every unimportant fact, true or otherwise forgotten,
you were just a boy!

“I fainted in the shed, Ben.”

“You were just a boy.”

“But when I was writing, my mother’s voice
came to me and she told me something. She told me something that I
had forgotten all of these years.”

“You were just a boy!”

“She said that I handled it! My mother did
not shoot my rapist—I did!”

He paused, and then I paused. At that
instant, something wasn’t right. There was something in that phrase
that you were just a boy didn’t apply to.

Who this shooter was, was an epiphany, and
one of remarkable importance, perhaps, and one I could not
ignore—for it wasn’t an excuse, and it wasn’t an unimportant fact.
If Mitchell did shoot his rapist, then that shooting could be
understood as a powerful, self-affirming event. He was not
helpless. He acted. He protected himself. It was the answer to the
question I had been asking him all along. What did you do to help
yourself?

And on the flipside—there was the Critic’s
perspective—and I knew it was coming. “Mom was crying,” Mitchell
said, “and her words just poured out onto the pages like tears. It
wasn’t…it wasn’t even my own handwriting.”

“Mitchell!”

“I killed a man and my mother was punished
for it.”

I shook my head. “No!”

“It’s my fault! I shouldn’t have—

I cut him off. “You did not do anything to
your mother, Mitchell! If she took the blame for that incident, she
took the blame of her own free will. She did it for you.”

“But I killed him! And because of it, her
personality was ripped out of her.”

Again, I said, “You were just a boy!”

Mitchell fell silent. I did not know what
more to say, or if I should say anything more at all. I watched him
for another five minutes, he staring blankly into his fog, and I,
miserably into mine, wondering if this realization was true, if it
would resolve anything at all, or if I had somehow damaged my
client with my own journaling exercise.

Suddenly retirement seemed a little bit
further away.

I had the results of his DES
in my
desk drawer, concealed for the time being. I didn’t need a
psychiatrist to corroborate his scores. Mitchell had four, maybe
five subpersonalities inside of him. His mother was likely one of
them, and that was not just a wee bit disturbing. It was downright
terrifying given the threats of revenge I remembered Eva making.
Her sons were going to kill her rapist and burn down the mental
institution where she slept. His uncle and father were two other
personalities, and their voices seemed downright obvious. I
reckoned his missing brother was another alter, and his
grandparents, others.

This was not a multiple personality disorder
per se—this was a representation of a schizophrenia, or perhaps
some odd combination between the two disorders—perhaps a
schizophrenia undifferentiated, or as we used to say in his
mother’s day: Schizophrenia NOS—Not Otherwise Specified—and it was
as salient a case as I’d ever seen.

He had brought his family back to life by
imagining them back to life, and he was carrying them with him in a
most tortured way. They were his congregation. It just wasn’t the
time to tell him.

As it turns out, I probably should have. I
could have pushed the envelope. It might have cued him to get
started on some medication and to comply with my directions to seek
more expert assistance. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t have the
opportunity to tell him—at least not that day. He—or whomever he
was at that time—stood up, wobbly with something like inebriation,
grabbed his bomber jacket from the coat rack, and slid feverishly,
I might say wormishly, out the door.

***

Wednesday: 10:10 a.m.

I left Ben Levantle’s office that morning
feeling as if I were half asleep. It had been twenty-four hours
since my last Valium or Dilaudid, and four days since my last drop
of alcohol. I knew something was wrong with me because when I drove
away from Ben’s office, I didn’t know where I was going, and I
couldn’t remember where I was supposed to be.

Fact was I had a shift at Coastal State to
attend to at noon. I was supposed to locate the art gallery, but it
was a shift I wouldn’t make.

My phone was off and by the time I realized
Amelia had been trying to reach me, it was 6:00 p.m. I was six
hours late for work, and I’d lost almost eight hours of time. I
hadn’t a clue as to what I’d been doing since I’d left Ben’s
office.

It was around seven that evening when the
Impala wound up at Grandpa Virgil’s river house. Amelia was there,
thankfully. She seemed relieved when she opened the door to let me
in, but she was not happy.

“Where have you been?” She almost hollered,
grabbing me by the jacket and pulling me inside.

I think something in my eyes answered for
me, or gave me away. She let go of me and her mood mellowed. I saw
sadness in her eyes, or maybe sympathy. Maybe it was disgust. It
was hard to tell.

And then Amelia asked me a strange question.
She said, “Who are you?”

I just shook my head. I wasn’t sure how to
answer that.

Amelia took my hand and walked me through
the dining room and led me out into the back yard. She had a
strange look on her face. That’s when she told me that things had
taken a sideways turn. She said that Ully had flipped his lid. I
asked her what she meant by that—but somehow I knew. I’d been
suspecting Ully would turn on us all along.

Amelia was angry. She was pacing
almost frantically. “He’s told them about you…and about me. He told
them I tortured a false confession out of him, and that you did,
too. He told them that we sent him to the Asylum to point out
Elmer’s grave—a grave that didn’t exist. Police are looking for us,
Mitchell.”

I called Ully a couple different names, but
Amelia didn’t seem to hear me. She seemed lost in her thoughts.
Ully had a three-day pass and all he had to do was to cooperate
with us. All he had to do was lead us to the spot where Elmer was
buried and keep his mouth shut about the rest until we had Elmer
and the art. That was it. If he could do that then he’d keep ninety
percent of his money and walk.

But that wasn’t all Ully had done.

Amelia looked me in the eyes and said, “He’s
killed someone, Mitchell. He killed my best friend, and now he’s
going to pay.”

Before I could ask specifics
on who
this friend of hers was and what had happened to him (or her), or
what we were going to do about her aunt’s artwork, Amelia was
asking me where I’d been all day.

I told her I didn’t know…that I’d just been
driving.

Thankfully, Amelia let it go at that. She
seemed to understand what had happened to me, at least in part.

Amelia took my hand and led me to a tire
swing that was hanging from an aging maple near the bank of the
river. She took a seat in the tire and began slowly twirling
herself.

I sat down in the grass beneath the tree and
just watched her for a time, waiting for Amelia to relax and
explain what in the hell Ully had done to her friend.

She finally spoke. She asked me, “How was
your session with Ben?” Her friend and just gotten killed and she
was asking how my counseling session went.

“Police are after us, then?” I responded,
ignoring the question.

“Yes. They want us both, Mitchell.”

“Does Ben know about this?”

“Yes, they called Ben.”

“So they’re looking for Fred?”

“They’re looking for answers—and they’re
looking for you—and for me.”

“Well what did Ben say?”

“That he doesn’t know where Fred is! Or
you.”

“What else did Ully tell them?”

“Ully told them who I am. He told them you’d
taken an alias and together we’d infiltrated the Asylum to recover
the remains of your missing brother. He told them you were crazy,
Mitchell. He told them we cut an oak tree down trying to get to
Elmer and that we were looking for Fred Levantle.”

“So Ben knows what I’ve done.”

“Yes. They told him Ully’s story, and your
name came up of course. Ully was, after all, your uncle. Ben knows
you were just using him, Mitchell. It’s over.”

I was shaking my head. Any chance we had at
locating Fred seemed suddenly to have vanished.

“You said Ully killed your best friend. What
happened?”

“I sent someone to cash out the account in
the Caymans. But someone else was there.”

“Who?”

Amelia began crying. “I’m not sure who he
used, but he killed—

Amelia didn’t finish her sentence. For some
reason she still couldn’t tell me who this friend was.

 “The money’s gone, Mitchell.”

“Please tell me, Amelia. I need to know what
happened there. I don’t care about the money.”

Amelia just shook her head and wiped at her
eyes. She cried for another minute and then seemed to turn angry
again. She kept repeating, “That motherfucker is going to pay! That
motherfucker is going to pay!”

“Where is Ully? Is he still at the
Asylum?”

Amelia sniffed and wiped some more tears
away, and gathered herself. She was nodding. “Yes. He’s still there
until tomorrow.”

“Have they connected the Cayman account to
you?”

Amelia was shaking her head. “Not yet, but
they will. They haven’t yet identified—

Again, she cut herself off. This was
obviously someone very special to her.

“He was moved into the prison wing, Ward C,
this afternoon because he wants more protection. He’s going to line
up a private security team to guard him when he gets out. He’s
surrounded right now. It’s virtually impossible to get to him.”

Amelia had taken her Beretta out of its
holster and had begun to look down its sightlines. She was aiming
the gun at some arbitrary point in the distance out over the water,
and then she pulled the trigger. There was no bang. It was not
loaded.