Authors: Alan Zendell
Wednesday's Child (6 page)
Sunday morning, the second day in a row that Ilene and I awoke with no temporal disconnect, was a lovely morning, perfect for a drive in the country, except that we left the interstate well within the suburban sprawl of northern New Jersey. Just ahead was a startlingly modern building that looked like it was built entirely of glass and pure white marble and would have been at home perched on a cliff at Malibu.
“Jerry’s office is in there,” Ilene said.
Emotionally, I was still engaged with William and my squad. I hadn’t been thinking about hallucinations or living days out of order when I got home, and it must have showed in my body language, because Ilene’s face lit up with surprised delight when she saw me. She’d asked how my meeting with William went, then dutifully pretended that my perfunctory “fine” was actually a response.
When Ilene described my situation to Jerry, he offered to meet us in his office this morning at ten. I didn’t know him well, but the few times we’d chatted at cocktail parties had left a positive impression. He was one of those highly accomplished people who inspire confidence by speaking softly and surely, without arrogance. Even his car, which was parked in front of the dazzling white building, suggested unostentatious quality and efficiency.
“You’ve had quite a week,” he said, shaking my hand and directing me to an ergonomic wing chair. Ilene sat unobtrusively to one side on a brown leather couch.
“I’m amazed that you still have your wits about you,” Jerry began. I smiled at what I took to be a compliment. I imagine that my body language, still reflecting the buoying effect of the meeting on the boat, affected Jerry as it had Ilene on Saturday, the perversity of which wasn’t lost on me. I’d been shown an apocalyptic view of New York’s future that only a handful of people even suspected and come away feeling renewed.
Jerry explained how unusual it was to treat a patient who was closely related to a friend or colleague, even more so for her to be directly involved in our conversations. “I only agreed to this after I was sure I could be objective. Even so, many people would question my judgment.”
“I have no reservations about your objectivity, Jerry.”
“Good. We’ll observe strict confidentiality, and decisions concerning treatment options, if any, will be yours. If I become concerned about your well-being I won’t pull any punches. Ilene told me what’s been happening, but I want to hear it from you. Start from the beginning and take your time.”
I did, over the next hour, notwithstanding the irony that starting at the beginning only made sense in a linear world. To his credit, Jerry listened patiently, displaying no recognizable emotion or expression. He wasn’t someone I wanted to play poker with.
“You’ve said several times that you were terrified by all this,” he noted when I was done, “yet you sound like you desperately want it to be real.” I felt like a kid caught doing something he shouldn’t.
“Ilene asked if I’d rather live never knowing what day I was waking up to if I could make it stop by taking a pill. It’s not that I want it to be real, I
know
it is. What scared me was thinking I was a random victim of some quirk of quantum physics. I never understood that stuff very well.”
“You no longer think you’re a random victim? What, then?”
“I know how it sounds, but I feel like I’ve been singled out, somehow.”
“How do you know a thousand other people didn’t experience what you did?”
“Impossible.” My certainty surprised even me, but there it was. “The more people who skipped Wednesday, the more likely we’d be to know. Some of them would have been bound to freak out over it. There’d be reports of time-displaced people checking into hospitals, kooks claiming the end of the world was at hand, you name it.”
He reacted with a non-judgmental smile. “Let’s see if I’ve got this right. It’s easier for you to accept someone or something deliberately causing you to live days out of order, than to believe it was a random accident. Do you really think either is possible?”
I shrugged. “You’re the doctor. What do you think?”
Jerry considered that for several seconds, looking somber. “I don’t know, but I understand how you feel. I wouldn’t like my life determined by random events, but if I believed this was happening by design, I’d want to know who or what was manipulating me.”
“I think I’ll only find out if it wants me to. It’s only reasonable that if some entity powerful enough to make me live days out of order is doing so by design, there’d be some purpose driving it. I think I’m supposed to figure out what it is and use my day-skipping to accomplish it. But I still have free will in everything but the order in which I live my days. If this super-being wanted a pawn it could have programmed one.”
I told Jerry I expected to live Thursday before Wednesday again next week and every week after that until I accomplished what I was supposed to. It would always be the same two days of the week and never every second or third week. “If there’s a point to this that I’m supposed to figure out, changing days all the time would only introduce more complications.”
Jerry looked at me sternly. “You seem to be enjoying this, like solving a puzzle.”
“I am, in a way.”
“Does that bother you?”
“Why should it?”
“Ilene, for one thing. She’s pretty concerned about you.”
“You think enjoying this affects my willingness to consider the possibility that it’s not real, and that’s not fair to her.” I looked at Ilene then back at him. “Okay, I get it. This isn’t a game and I won’t treat it like one.”
“I’m going to hold you to that. Is there anything you’d like to say, Ilene?”
“What happens when I wake up Wednesday morning?” she asked. “How will I know whether you lived Thursday while I was sleeping?”
“Just ask me.”
Jerry said, “I think Ilene’s asking if she ought to act as though she believes you’re living days out of order or continue to challenge your perceptions. What if this is a delusion? Is it better for her to play along or not?”
Ilene nodded and Jerry waited for me to reply. When I didn’t, he said, “Okay, let’s defer that. Can you tell me why a superior entity would select you for this special mission?”
“Look, Jerry, I know how this sounds, and I realize I may have just invented that idea as a coping mechanism. I’m still learning to live with this. It’s like I’ve found myself in a place that looks and feels like the one I’ve always lived in, but the rules have changed. The only thing I’m confident of is that it’s really happening.”
“Ilene said you mentioned alternate universes.”
I probably shouldn’t have. “A lot of stories have been written about causality paradoxes. What would happen if I went back in time and killed my grandmother before she gave birth to my mother? But modern quantum theory says I can’t change my own present; instead my action is the catalyst for creating an alternate universe in which I never come into existence.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Frankly, the idea gives me vertigo, but people like Stephen Hawking do.”
Jerry smiled. “You seem angry about having to live with a new set of rules. Have you experienced that before?”
Good question. I had to think.
“I was raised by religious parents and grandparents. By the time I was twelve, I knew I didn’t believe in their God, but that meant all the rules I’d learned were wrong. I felt lost until one of my teachers told me trying to figure out whether God existed was a waste of time and energy. What mattered was being true to what I felt. So I learned a new set of rules and went on with my life. That’s pretty much how I feel now.”
“You’d rather adapt to your new reality than fight it. How’s that going?”
“It’s tiring, but I have no choice now that there’s evidence to back me up.”
“I’d like to defer that too, okay? It’s getting late. I’ll tell you what I think,” he said, ticking things off on his fingers. “You’re clearly not suffering from amnesia, unless it’s accompanied by complex delusions. An unlikely combination.
“It’s also unlikely that you suffered a stroke, but I’ll order a neurological workup – blood tests, a CT head scan, an MRI. Frankly, I don’t think we’ll find anything. A TIA or stroke wouldn’t explain your symptoms, and the tests aren’t conclusive, but they’ll give us a baseline.”
“Does that mean you’re confident that there’s nothing wrong with him?” Ilene’s eagerness warmed me, but Jerry wasn’t finished.
“In the sense of a catastrophic neurological event, yes, but there’s another possibility. Is there any history of dissociative disorder or schizophrenia in your family, Dylan?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” I said, but an uneasy feeling was growing inside me.
“Have you ever had a dissociative episode?”
Jerry had been phrasing everything in common lay terms. I wondered if he’d been trying to avoid putting specific ideas in my head…until now.
“You mean like hearing voices, imaginary companions, a secret life no one else knows about?” I retorted in a challenging tone that took him aback. He knew he’d touched a nerve, but he maintained his professional poker face, looking me in the eye with determined concern.
“Is there something you want to tell me?”
Hesitating would raise a red flag, but I had to think. I couldn’t tell him about William. I certainly couldn’t discuss nuclear terrorism with him and Ilene. I was beginning to feel like someone being framed for a crime he didn’t commit. Even my internal reaction seemed damning, but that was nonsense. My Intelligence activities and my relationship with William had spanned more than twenty years. I’d left a trail in dozens of countries.
Jerry could say that can all be explained by my job.
Of course it could. My job was a front for my other activities. I felt my heart rate increase and I drew shorter, faster breaths. Jerry was a neuropsychiatrist. He couldn’t have missed my distress. He glanced quickly at Ilene, who didn’t seem to have picked up on the tension between us, then back to me, waiting for my answer.
“No,” I said, trying to sound calm and collected. “It’s not as if I see CIA agents lurking in every shadow.” I’d been joking, but I didn’t think Jerry heard it that way. Shit, what a stupid thing to say.
Instead of challenging me, Jerry turned clinical. “I told you I wouldn’t pull punches, Dylan. Everything you’ve told me fits with a dissociative illness, sometimes referred to as a multiple personality disorder. I’d like to give you some case studies to read. If they strike a chord in you, we can talk about it. In the meantime, I’ll schedule the neurological work-up. We can do it in town or in Hackensack, whatever’s more convenient for you.”
I felt like I’d been let off the hook, but I knew Jerry was just trying to avoid making me feel like I was being backed into a corner. He wanted me to be a willing conspirator in my own treatment and he trusted me to do my work honestly. He also knew Ilene would make sure I did.
Jerry shook my hand again. “Don’t worry, Dylan. We’ll sort this out. You’ll see, everything will fall into place.”
If that was intended to be encouraging, why did it sound so ominous?
We were quiet on the drive home. I worried that Ilene might have reacted negatively to the last part of the session, but when I reached for her hand she smiled, showing me only the love and concern that had been there earlier. She’d been fooled by Jerry’s deadpan expression and didn’t realize anything unusual had occurred. Aside from my momentary lapse in judgment, I didn’t think anything had.
My juvenile need to resolve things myself and my fear of not being taken seriously had kept me from telling Ilene what was happening. I couldn’t have stood having her think I was losing my mind, but strangely, I’d left Jerry’s office feeling fortified and unburdened.
On the other hand, if I expected him to be able to help, I had to stop saying stupid things like my inane quip about CIA agents, or telling him I was involved in covert, top secret work I wasn’t allowed to discuss. Wouldn’t that make a lovely impression? Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t discuss details without permission from the Agency, who’d want to put Jerry through a thorough security review, first, and might decide that talking to him at all made me a liability.
The issue was moot, anyway. I didn’t see how missing Wednesday could be related to William. I’d barely thought about him in years, and he hadn’t called until after it happened.
The case studies were a fast read. I started them when we got home, and Ilene, wanting to be sure she didn’t distract me, made the ultimate sacrifice: an afternoon at the Paramus Mall. I was done by the time she returned with carryout for dinner.
“How’d you do?” she asked, handing me some chopsticks.
“For one thing, I realized that Dissociative Identity Disorder is quite different from delusions, voices, and imaginary companions.”
“I could have told you that.”
“I think Jerry wanted me to work it out for myself. When he mentioned them in almost the same breath, he made me stop and think.” I thought that last was inspired, just in case she’d noticed.
“And?”
“I understand why he thinks DID fits what I told him and why he put off talking about my evidence.”
“If you mean your CyTech chart, I assumed he wanted to get home, and he expected that to be a long conversation.”
“I think we’re both right. From what I found on the Internet, there’s no consistent theory on dissociative disorders. It’s hard to separate science from fiction because of the lay public’s fascination with multiple personalities.”
“What does that have to do with not talking about your chart?”
So far, our mood had been light. We’d been savoring our food, blurting out sentences between mouths full. I put down my chopsticks and pushed my plate aside.
“Look, I get Jerry’s concern that an alternative personality might be messing with my perceptions. The stuff he gave me to read said that the primary personality is usually unaware of the alternate’s existence, and that he usually experiences periods when the alternate takes over as lost time or unexplained blackouts.”
“That might explain skipping Wednesday, but not living Wednesday after Thursday.”
“Ahh, well, alternate personalities are sneaky, especially when the subject is very smart and well-educated.” I mimicked a slight bow. “Since their natural habitat is the primary’s unconscious mind, a clever alternate can create mayhem in there. A lot of doctors think that’s what’s behind many possession myths. Remember the old line, ‘The Devil made me do it?’”
“You’ve obviously figured something out.” Ilene stopped eating, too, and sat back to listen.
“I tried to see it the way Jerry would. Suppose there was an alternate personality lurking in here,” I said, tapping my temple, “and it wanted to take control. Alternates are sometimes so intent on taking over, they consider the primary an adversary, as though he were an enemy, a different person. They often behave in complete disregard of the primary’s welfare, even though it hurts them, too.”
Ilene nodded, and I went on.
“I’m not saying I actually believe that, but that’s what the case studies said. Let’s say I’m a strong primary and my alternate is getting desperate. He knows he can’t win unless he weakens me. He can’t injure me physically without injuring himself, so he tries to unbalance me or force me to deal with a reality so disturbing I’ll cede control.”
“How can you give up control to the alternate if you don’t know he’s there?”
“If he scares me enough I might just withdraw from reality and he’d fill the gap…”
“…and convincing you you were living your days out of order might be an effective way of accomplishing that. Very neat.”
“Jerry didn’t want to discuss my CyTech chart until I understood that. The chart would have been easy for an alternate to fake. He could have emerged Thursday afternoon and printed it – I told you I drifted off for a while in my office. Everything, the conflicting memories, my belief that in my linear time frame I actually remembered living Thursday first, could be a result of tricks the alternate played in my subconscious.
“I read several cases in which a therapist believed an alternate personality was able to distort a primary’s memories to make him think he was going crazy. In extreme cases, the primary personality disappeared; sometimes they both expired to be replaced by a third.”
“And you think Jerry suspects that could be happening to you? Do you think so?”
My zeal had caused me to get carried away. I took Ilene’s hands and made eye contact with her. “Absolutely not.”
“What makes you so sure? You didn’t sound this way on Friday.”
“I’ve had some time to live with this – I’m not even frightened any more. I can’t explain why logically, but I feel certain, deep inside. I know there’s nothing wrong with me, but that’s the kind of scenario Jerry’s looking at, if only to rule it out.”
“Just so you understand – there’s no way he can rule it out conclusively. You can’t test for DID chemically, only observationally and cognitively.”
“That sounded awfully clinical. I forgot that you studied this stuff for your dissertation.”
An unpleasant thought popped into my head. “Were you testing me, just now? Did you discuss this with Jerry ahead of time?”
“There’s no need to get hot with me over this. I didn’t have to talk to Jerry about it. We both knew it would be a mistake to feed you ideas. I wanted to let you form your own opinions. Believe me, it wasn’t easy to be quiet. That’s why I left you alone this afternoon.”
Rod wasn’t the only one who could be a jerk sometimes. “I know, I’m sorry.”
At least she didn’t ask me if I had any imaginary friends, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t wondering.