Sybil (45 page)

When Sybil blacked out in the apartment or returned to it as one of the other personalities, almost inevitably Teddy was a witness. It was even more disturbing to face the fact that Teddy had built quite separate relationships with Vicky, the Peggys, Mike and Sid, Marcia and Vanessa, Mary, Sybil Ann and the other personalities. This knowledge deepened Sybil's uneasiness and gave loneliness a terrifyingly new dimension. What did these others tell Teddy? Privacy was impossible as long as unknown voices proclaimed secrets in the apartment.

Henry. Male companionship. Perhaps the father of the baby Sybil so urgently wanted but probably couldn't have. Whenever a man had entered her life, she had wanted his children even more than she had wanted him. And the desire for Henry, although deeply buried, had been there.

The dance? She couldn't have gone to the dance. Her religion didn't permit it. She couldn't have gone even if there were no religion to stand in her way.

Why not dinner? One thing would lead to another. If she allowed herself to become involved with Henry, he would come to know her well and learn all about her. Then he would reject her. She knew that she had to protect herself against such an eventuality. No man must come close until she was well. Well? She winced. Would she ever be well?

The mantel clock was striking eight. Teddy wouldn't be home for two hours. Sybil went out. As she walked, the buildings of the city seemed to stretch endlessly to the east. She kept on walking west.

Life had stopped while she had reversed her route. She still had a whole world to forge. So far the analysis was taking her backward, not forward. The ambition to become a doctor had been consistently frustrated by her blackouts in science classes, and the ambition was constantly receding. She couldn't bear to try and fail.

She could scarcely even endure just being awake. Waking, she knew one of the others might take over. Even when there wasn't an actual takeover, there was the everlasting internal pressure, the interference by the others. She felt alone, useless, futile. Convinced that she was never going to get better, Sybil was faced with self-recriminations and complaints.

Certain that her life had stopped while she retraced a path that uncovered only anguish, Sybil felt that she had indeed come to the end of the line. She didn't want to live this way.

She reached the Hudson River, brownish-green and deep. She envisioned herself in the water, sinking. Death would bring surcease.

Sybil walked closer to the river, but before she could actually reach it, her body turned, propelled by another's will. The body, controlled by Vicky, sought and found a phone booth in one of the apartment houses on Riverside Drive. After dialing, Vicky said in a firm, clear voice, "Dr. Wilbur, Sybil was going to throw herself in the Hudson River, but I didn't let her."

At first Sybil had doubted that any mere medicine could produce any decisive changes, but when the few electric shock treatments for which she had asked to make her feel safer after her suicide attempt had effected no discernible difference in her feelings, she had agreed to sodium pentothal because she trusted Dr. Wilbur.

The doctor herself had suggested pentothal reluctantly because she believed that straight psychoanalysis was the treatment of choice in Sybil's case. But the intimations of suicide, the actual near-attempt, made it necessary to resolve, to some degree and over a short period of time, the intense anxiety and depression. From long experience Dr. Wilbur knew that abreaction--the emotional release or discharge resulting from recalling to awareness a painful experience that has been repressed because it was consciously intolerable--with pentothal was a markedly useful tool. By discharging and desensitizing painful emotions, pentothal often led to increased insights.

The first pentothal treatment, administered by vein, appreciably diminished Sybil's anxiety.

In the sessions that followed, for fifty-six, sometimes seventy hours after receiving pentothal, Sybil came to know a sense of freedom that never before had been hers. Pentothal, a barbiturate that is both an anesthetic and a hypnotic, had conferred the sensation of feeling perfectly well-- an experience Sybil had never had before. On the day after the treatment, there was always euphoria, which was due not only to the anti-anxiety effect of the barbiturate but also to the abreaction of severe trauma. Pentothal brought to the surface the deeply buried, debilitating hatred of her mother. Although Sybil could not yet accept this hatred, the fact that it was no longer buried paved the way to a later acceptance.

The freedom Sybil knew through pentothal the other selves also experienced. Now as never before the others had the opportunity both to be and to talk. Vicky had all the memories, her own and those of the other selves, including Sybil's. The other fourteen personalities had their own memories and some of the recollections of the other alternating selves and of Sybil.

Only Sybil possessed none of the memories of the others. But as pentothal unleashed some forgotten fragments of the past, the memories relating to the experiences of the others and the memories of events that Sybil had lived through as herself but had forgotten began to filter into awareness.

Memory didn't just happen. After the pentothal treatment Dr. Wilbur would confront Sybil with the deeply buried memories that returned during the pentothal "sleep" and vanished upon waking.

"Oh, I had forgotten all about that," Sybil would remark when, upon awakening, she was presented with the memory. Then after remembering the event for a time, she would lose it again. The doctor would then try again, until, very gradually, what had been remembered under pentothal began also to be remembered during normal living.

Aware of the new order, Sybil had the feeling of expansive sidewalks, wherever she stood, reaching beyond the painful present and the even more terrifying past. The sidewalks pointed toward the promised land of either being freed of the others or becoming one with them. Neither Sybil nor Dr. Wilbur knew which of the two forms getting well would take.

For the first time Sybil also began to experience the emotions attributable to each of the other selves.

Beginning to understand, too, what triggered dissociation, the patient now knew not only intellectually but emotionally that "When I'm angry, I can't be." Anger, of course, was Peggy Lou's province.

The impression Sybil herself had was that subsiding slowly was the gnawing conflict that had driven her to the Hudson River--and also away from it. More concerned now with "Who am I?" she informed the doctor, "Pentothal makes me feel that I am me." Yet although the conflict had ebbed, it had not disappeared. For the present the barbiturate bestowed a sense of release, and concurrently, the feelings of unreality that had been hers almost since time began for her were gradually replaced by a feeling of solidity. Always far away from her feelings, she was coming closer to them now.

Sailing along with the speed of a schooner in a gale, Sybil came to regard the weekly pentothal sessions as propitious winds. That Dr. Wilbur visited Sybil in her apartment when pentothal was administered brought additional comfort. Feeling more alive, more interested, Sybil redecorated the apartment, made it more attractive for her doctor-guest. The jab in the vein, the occasional inability to find a new vein after months had passed and so many veins had been pressed into service, the not-infrequent swelling of the injected part of the anatomy, the feeling of chill that sometimes ran through the patient, the hiccups ("I sound as if I'm drunk," Vicky said. "And here I am getting treatment when I'm not sick")--all of this physical discomfiture was there. None of it mattered, however, in the light of the bright new day sodium pentothal had brought. On sodium pentothal Sybil had even gained fifteen pounds.

Nirvana? No. The euphoria was often deflated, sometimes destroyed by the reawakened memories of childhood horrors that Sybil had so painstakingly buried.

"Your mother trapped you, and it's almost as if you have taken over trapping yourself," Dr. Wilbur would say. "But you're getting rid of your mother." Sybil had already done so in her dream about the mother cat, but she was horrified by the unnatural desire.

"I'm helping you to grow up," the doctor would continue. "You're getting better, and you're going to be able to use all your talents." The incantation, the exorcising of Hattie Dorsett, would proceed: "Your mother taught you not to believe in yourself. I'm going to help you do so. The numbers will come back. The music will come back. There will be an end to the painting blocks. You will do many things well."

"I'm so cold, so cold," Sybil would reply through chattering teeth.

Integration? Far from it. As the past flooded back, there was all the more reason to regress into the other selves, defenses against the past. Yet in the valley of dissociation there were also the first glimmers of coalescence.

There was a glimmer on a Friday night in the very height of spring. Seated on her bed after having awakened from a tranquil three-hour sleep following a sodium pentothal treatment, Sybil was thinking about the previous day, much of which had been blank. Suddenly action was etched into the blankness.

Was this memory? She did not know. If it was, it was memory of a different kind; for she was remembering not what she had done as Sybil but what--and this was the bewildering part of the recollection --she had done as Mary and Sybil Ann. Sybil was distinctly aware of two persons, each of whom knew what the other was doing and saying. Together these two persons went to the supermarket, bought groceries, and conversed about the prices of their purchases.

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the recollection was that Sybil remembered that at one moment she had been Mary, at the next Sybil Ann, and that when she was the one, the other was a person beside her, to whom she could talk and express opinions and from whom she could seek advice.

Sybil could see herself becoming Sybil Ann. As Sybil Ann she had returned to the apartment and had been suddenly obsessed with the desire to go off on a trip. Somehow this trip had not eventuated, but while planning to go, she had looked at a purse on the dresser with Sybil Ann's eyes, thinking that she would take the purse with her and return it as soon as she got settled somewhere. Observing that the name on the identification card was Sybil I. Dorsett, Sybil in the person of Sybil Ann thought: that must be the owner. The memory of being Sybil Ann was so distinct that it had even included Sybil Ann's confusion as to who Sybil was.

This glimpse into the present was followed some weeks later by an even more confoundingly swift perception of the past.

At breakfast Teddy was saying, "I'd certainly like to know what Peggy Lou was talking about when she said that letters make words, words make sentences, and sentences make paragraphs."

"You're asking me what Peggy Lou meant?" Sybil replied. "Me? I'm the last one to ask. You know how Peggy Lou and I feel about each other."

"Peggy Lou also said something about little gray boxes in rows and that she had to watch and be careful, that she had to get away," Teddy went on. "I've been hearing about these letters, words, and boxes for several years now."

Sybil replied thoughtfully, "I haven't the faintest idea." But as she spoke, she looked up at the blank red wall just ahead and, although aware of herself as Sybil, at the same time she felt like a little girl. It was not a matter of being childlike but of being a child. Then Sybil found herself saying, "When I was a youngster, I was not allowed to listen to fairy tales or any stories that were not "the truth." Nor was I allowed to make up stories. But I liked to write, especially animal stories and poetry. When Mother and Dad made me promise I would stop, I devised a way to "write" without writing. I would cut words and single letters in headings out of newspapers and put the letters in little gray boxes, which I took to school. Then I'd paste the words on sheets of heavy paper so that the letters made words, the words made paragraphs, and I could write without writing. You see?"

Bewildered, Teddy reminded her roommate, "But you just said that you didn't have the faintest recollection."

"I didn't," Sybil replied calmly, "but then I did. You see I devised that technique when I was in the third and fourth grades, after my grandmother died."

The third and fourth grades, after her grandmother died? The calm vanished as Sybil realized what she had said.

Out of the mist hanging heavily over Sybil's two lost years (between the ages of nine and eleven) Peggy Lou's memories were becoming Sybil's. By responding to Peggy Lou's memory as if it were her own, the waking self that was called Sybil had been able to recall an incident from the childhood of the alternating self. And all at once Sybil realized that at that moment she felt not merely like Peggy Lou; she was one with her. Pentothal had ripped open the unused line of communication between Sybil and one of her other selves to restore a fragment of the lost years. Sybil, who had never been ten or eleven years old, had in a swift flashback become those ages. What had started as a casual breakfast conversation had become a milestone along the pathways of restoration of the original Sybil.

With the new feeling of being one with Peggy Lou there also came a wholly new attitude toward both Peggy Lou and the other selves. Sybil was now becoming able to distinguish what she did, as she put it, as "someone else" from what she did "as myself." The Sybil who in Vicky's description stood aside had now moved in closer.