All of Us. A. F. Carter
an opportunity to remind me.
“Go on, please.”
“Eleni has chosen to provide for this need.”
“Does she have a lover?”
Should I tell him the truth? Do I have a choice? Halberstam’s surely read the police report. Like any good lawyer, he knew the answer to his question before he posed it. For all Eleni’s pretense, she’s a reckless fool who’s never met a risk she didn’t want to take. Her preference, over the last few years, has been for drug-fueled hookups, often with multiple partners. More than once I’ve reclaimed our body only to find it bruised and battered.
“Eleni is promiscuous, Doctor. Six days ago, she traveled from our Brooklyn apartment to an area on the waterfront notorious for street prostitution.” I take a breath, utterly humiliated. Just words, I tell myself, just words.
“Go on.”
“Well, she propositioned a man standing outside a bodega who turned out to be an undercover cop working a prostitution sting. I don’t know what she said, but as she never asked for money, she couldn’t be charged with a crime. Still, something in her manner, in her words, in her dress activated the cop’s radar, and he decided that he was dealing with an EDP.”
“An emotionally disturbed person?”
“Exactly.”
A red light flashes on the intercom to the left of Halberstam’s notes. He glances at it for a moment, then turns back to me. “I’m afraid our time is almost up, but please describe what came next.”
“We were taken to Kings County Hospital for observation.” By then, Eleni had fled the scene, leaving me to handle the inconvenience. Wearing, of course, the slutty outfit she’d chosen for her excursion. “Prior to our mandatory hearing three days later, we were poked and prodded by psychiatrists and psychologists in one-on-one and group sessions. We were tested as well, with objective tests, projective tests, attitude tests. We even took what the examiner called an EPES test, an Erotic Preferences Examination Scheme.”
I don’t have to state the purpose of all this testing because the issue was and remains simple. Are we fit to live independently? Or does the danger we present to ourselves or to the public justify indefinite confinement—accompanied by a regimen of psychoactive drugs, many of which have a sedating effect that leaves our body’s multiple personalities with no personality at all.
Psychiatric hospitals are not prisons. So it’s said, especially by the politicians and medical personnel who run them. They just look and function like prisons. The doors are locked, and you exercise, sleep, and eat on a schedule you play no part in creating. True, the women on your ward usually aren’t criminals. Instead, three-quarters are either schizophrenic or bipolar. Despite the sedating medications, they howl, scream, bawl, and beg at every hour of the day and night. Patient-on-patient attacks are commonplace.
When I finally walked our body out of the psych ward at Kings County Hospital four days ago, I felt like I’d escaped death itself.
If so, that escape was tenuous. Our court-appointed attorney, Mark Vernon, had pulled no punches when he spelled it out only a few days before: “This is not a trial, Ms. Grand. It’s a medical hearing and many of the protections afforded defendants at trial are unavailable. Do you need to be protected from yourself? Doctors will examine you and doctors will ultimately decide. It’s a rare judge who’ll override a recommendation from the medical community.”
“May I sum up?” Halberstam asks, yanking me away from my thoughts.
“Certainly.”
“You’ve been granted a conditional release dependent on your entering into therapy. I’ve been assigned the task of conducting that therapy. You know this, right?”
“Yes, I do.”
I watch his eyes narrow slightly, a shift mirrored by his small, thin mouth. He’s about to assert his rightful authority as he leans forward to place his palms on his desk, as he tucks in his chin, as he peers over his glasses.
“I know your therapy has been forced on you. I know that you’re probably resentful and not without reason. But while I’m not a fan of coercive therapy, we are stuck with each other, which means in essence that only a short time from now I will be required to submit a recommendation to the court. I must choose, at that point, between three possibilities: return you to your ordinary life, continue your therapy, or recommend that you be confined. I’m hoping to make an informed choice and not an educated guess, which I cannot do unless I become acquainted with each of your identities.”
There’s nothing to be said here except: “I understand.”
“That’s good, Victoria.” He rises, our session now complete. “I’ll expect you tomorrow at ten a.m. and every weekday thereafter. We’ve a lot to go through before I make my recommendation.”
I can hear Martha’s voice offering advice, as usual. “Keep your mouth shut,” she tells me. “And get the hell out of there. Begging will do you no good.”
But I can’t stop myself. “I know it looks bad, Doctor. I mean Eleni and what she did. But we’ve been reintegrating for years. Jackson, Logan, Riley, Aria, and Chloe? They’re gone, Doctor, banished. Others are on their way out. It’s a hard path we’re on, but we’re moving. If you can help us, all the better. We want to unify.”
“Each of you? Every one?”
A gotcha question, but I’m ready this time. “Those who don’t will be eliminated. They’ll be the first to go.”
CHAPTER TWO
MARTHA
As I come out of the shower, I stop before a full-length mirror to examine our thirty-seven-year-old body. It’s an attractive body we share. Sexy enough for Eleni’s purposes anyway. But arousal’s not on my schedule. No, I’m fascinated by the scars—our legacy—the perfectly round cigarette burns on our abdomen. A spider’s web of thin white lines that could only have been made by a razor-sharp blade. There are other scars, too, but they only show up on X-rays.
I have no memory of my father, now in prison, or of his sadistic friends. Nor do I remember Benny Aceveda and his wife, the foster parents who rented us out by the hour. I can’t picture these assholes. I wouldn’t recognize them if they walked into the room and farted. That’s not my job. That task belongs to our rememberer-in-chief, Tina. It’s not fair to put this on a girl who will remain nine years old forever. But we’re not some academic paper on functional psychology. We’re not some bullshit theory. We’re real and the proof is Tina, herself. That she exists. That she suffers. That despite everything, she hopes to survive.
Our past is imprinted somewhere inside the brain we share, but Tina alone has access. If that saves the rest of us a lot of pain, the arrangement has a serious downside. Tina’s attempted to kill herself twice. The last time, only six months ago, she came very close to solving our problems once and for all. Fortunately, we woke up in our own bed. No cops, no hospital, no doctor. All in the family.
I’m not much interested in our past this morning and my inspection of our body is cursory. I’m Martha, family functioner. Without me, the rest of the assholes wouldn’t have food on the table, clothes on their backs, a roof over their heads. They wouldn’t have electricity or a telephone or toilet paper.
Victoria, if you talk to her, will claim that she’s the one who got us on disability, food stamps, Medicaid, and a Section 8 rent subsidy. The four engines of our economic survival. The only problem is that she’s full of shit. Yeah, she went to the interviews (and did a good job), but I filled out every form and there were hundreds. I also made the necessary calls when things went wrong, as they usually did. And I kept track of the bureaucrats, their names, their phone numbers. And I wrote the goddamned appeals and deposited the checks and created our tight, tight budget. And I’m still the one who pushes a shopping cart over to the food