The Flock Read online

  I have a hard time believing the strength of Renee’s denial. She must know that my colleagues, my receptionist—even the cleaning lady and security officers—are aware that something strange takes place in my office every afternoon. More than once, after hearing screams from the Sissy or Josie personality resounding through the almost empty wing, the cleaning lady has stopped me to ask “how that poor girl is doing.” It’s not many buildings where the guards have an order to “ignore sounds of distress between 5:00 and 6:00 p.m. on 5 West.”

  No, I guess Renee doesn’t know. She walks in competent and self-possessed, chats with the receptionist, and assumes that people judge her only on the basis of what she, the Renee personality, displays.

  She so badly wants people to perceive her as separate from the other personalities, and she is terribly worried that she will be judged by the actions of the others. On some level, at least, she knows she’s not her own self without the others, and she hates this.

  I’m concerned, as I always am when I commit some unforgivable “faux pas,” that she will not return. But I think I understand, better than ever now, that all of the personalities, Renee included, are sick, very frightened little girls in grown-up clothes. Their need is greater than their competence and even greater than Renee’s humiliation. I offer the promise of true health and true growth rather than a temporary mask. I think she’ll return for that.

  And also in my favor is the fact that Jo has been accepted for graduate study at Harvard. I don’t think they’ll really go, but Renee’s knowledge that she has an escape hatch may keep her coming despite her pain and humiliation.

  Even with the trauma, there was humor and some progress made in today’s session. After Renee had fled inward in humiliation and Jo had fled inward in anger, Josie was there, scrabbling quickly, as always, for the wall. Gordon said he heard the commotion in my office as I tried to restrain Josie, but he returned to his reading at the receptionist’s desk, remembering that I’d said I’d call him if I needed him.

  A social-work student who stood nearby, going through her mail, looked at him quizzically as the banging and thrashing resounded through the walls. “Lynn said she’ll let me know if she needs help,” he told her.

  Finally, I maneuvered close enough to fling open the door. The student gasped to see me literally lying on top of my patient. “Shouldn’t we do something?” the student asked Gordon.

  “No,” I heard him reply, “Lynn knows what she’s doing.”

  “Gordon!” I yelled with exasperation. I couldn’t imagine why he was calmly sitting there when the need was so obvious.

  “I guess Lynn wants me now,” Gordon said to the student as he set aside his reading glasses and book.

  He walked in, closed the door on the student’s astonished face, and wrestled Josie away from the wall. Josie struggled against him, then seemed to realize that she couldn’t get past his gentle but firm hold; in a minute, Missy was there. “You want your friend,” she whimpered. Gordon looked up at me. I nodded and he quietly left the office and returned to his reading.

  He’s eager to work as cotherapist, but told me that I’m going to have to be very clear about what I want him to do or not do. No kidding.

  I can’t help thinking that that social-work student is probably at this very moment considering changing her field of study.

  —

  TWO DAYS LATER, THERAPY-WITH-LYNN made a smooth transition into therapy-with-Lynn-and-Gordon. Gordon returned for a session, but this time he knocked on the door and joined Lynn and me in her office. He took off his jean jacket and shoes and settled on the rug. With no discussion, Lynn and I both slid off our chairs. Josie, Missy, Little Joe, or Sissy inevitably moved the session to floor level. What seemed to me at first a welcoming gesture to Gordon relieved some of the anxiety that rushed through the system. It felt safe to be sitting on the rug.

  Gordon and I picked up the conversation about teaching we had begun at the party back in January. He and I both had war stories to tell about our attempts to manipulate administrators and the system in order to help students in trouble. Gordon treated me just the way he had at the party, and I responded in kind. “Maybe Gordon is able to understand me the way Lynn does,” I thought, and then retreated inward in peace.

  Jo liked Gordon instantly. When she surfaced, Lynn gave her usual greeting, “Hi, Jo, it’s good to see you,” and Gordon smiled as she glanced in his direction. “I’ve been waiting a long time to meet you in person,” he said.

  “Umm, you know, do you know, umm, who I am?” she asked cautiously.

  “I know you’re Jo,” Gordon said, “and Lynn’s told me that you enjoy thinking about people and reality. Me too. I’m really interested in how people live their lives and how any of us end up being here in the first place.”

  Jo started to ask him what he meant, but her question was stopped by an icy finger of suspicion.

  She glanced at Gordon briefly before turning her eyes to the wall.

  “Do you believe me? I mean, do you believe I’m a multiple personality?” Jo asked.

  “I think such a phenomenon is possible,” Gordon replied.

  Jo blushed, now frightened and defensive. If this man thought she was a fraud, she wanted to know it now. “What do you mean, it’s possible?” She tried to sound nonchalant.

  Gordon smiled warmly at Jo, as though sensing her confusion, and said, “You have a lot to learn about me. I don’t accept things the way they are. I do a lot of questioning about what society says is so. I’m open to many possibilities—reincarnation, telepathy, the sorts of things that many other people just laugh at and push aside.

  “Now, to answer your question, Jo, I think multiple personality is possible, because I know there are group minds.”

  Jo remained silent, puzzled. Gordon’s calm, deep voice was soothing, but she was still on guard for rejection.

  “When I’m sailing, sometimes I’ll spend hours watching flocks of birds. They have something special going on there,” Gordon continued. “They are all separate entities, those birds, but they share a single thought. Watch them fly in formation and suddenly veer around some invisible obstacle. Watch them flutter in swirling confusion and then, abruptly, move together in perfect formation again, each knowing its part in the whole. That’s what I mean by group minds.”

  Gordon seemed to weigh his remarks, as though each word had significance. And his metaphor appealed to Jo. She relaxed again.

  “A flock,” she said, testing the term. “I guess my group of personalities is like a flock.” She smiled ruefully. “I only wish I could be lead bird sometime.”

  The personalities monitoring the exchange between Jo and Gordon latched on to the term quickly.

  “A flock is what we’re like,” I thought, “even if we’re more ‘swirling confusion’ than ‘formation.’ ”

  “Group mind,” Isis considered. “Yes, I share in Jo’s group mind, but I’m also separate. I guess it’s accurate to say that I am part of the Flock. This Gordon’s pretty perceptive, even if he is a man.”

  Lynn had once said that calling the personalities “the others” was hostile. I had always thought that “the group” sounded too cold and abstract. At last we all had a term we liked for referring to the personalities. We were the Flock.

  Jo suddenly realized that she had gone way over her appointment hour and was afraid of intruding on Lynn and Gordon together in a way that she no longer feared intruding on Lynn alone. Flustered, she got up to leave.

  “Don’t go,” Gordon said. “You’re not ready to leave yet, and Lynn and I have no place we need to be.” Was it possible that Gordon was enjoying their talk as much as she?

  During that session, Gordon met Rusty, Theresa, Joan Frances, and Missy, as well as Jo and me, and responded to us all as our individual selves.

  —

  DURING GORDON’S FIRST FEW WEEKS as cotherapist, Josie fought hard against him in her attempts to reach the wall. But she eventually understood that
she couldn’t get past his gentle restraint. Gordon held Josie as she struggled against him and against her panic. The memories caught up with her in his arms.

  As Josie spat “Don’t touch me!” and “Please don’t!” in terrified whimpers, I watched the film of past horrors play out before me on an internal screen. I fought to keep my distance as memories slipped through Josie’s attempts at repression, bit by bit.

  “I can’t tell you everything that happened the night that Josie is reliving,” I explained to Gordon and Lynn, “because Josie is still fighting the actual memory. I know she was asleep and she awoke to some man fondling her. Each time the memory flows over Josie, she has more details. I think she’ll have it all soon.”

  Josie felt terrorized and attacked because she believed her memories were happening now. At the same time, Gordon’s gentle hold made her feel safe and protected. As she became able to put more trust in the safety of Gordon’s nonsexual touch, she was able to allow more memory into consciousness.

  Jo also began to find fragments that added pieces to the puzzle of Josie’s terror. Jo was not consciously aware of the substance of Josie’s memories, but the release of Josie’s old terror triggered the recollection of associated experiences in the other personalities.

  “You know, I’ve been thinking about something that happened the summer when I was twelve,” Jo said to Lynn and Gordon.

  “My mother was spending most of her evenings out with her new friends, and my father stayed home, alternating between being furious with her and despairing because he couldn’t do anything to keep her home.

  “One night, I was sitting in the family room reading a book. It was a story about a foster child who was finally adopted and got a family of her own. When I finished the story, I remember feeling empty and aching. I knew I’d never have the sense of belonging that the character had gotten by the end of the book.

  “I was sort of weepy and wandered upstairs to find my father in bed, watching TV. He asked me what was wrong. I told him that I had read a book that had made me feel sad. ‘Come on in here and crawl in with your old man,’ he said. I did. I didn’t care what was on TV. It felt good and safe to be cuddling with my father. I must have fallen asleep, and I guess my mother didn’t come home that night, because I remember the fuzziness on the TV screen after all of the programs had ended.”

  That was all Jo remembered, and though her memory was shrouded in melancholy, it held no fear. But her offhanded retelling snapped into place for me with Josie’s snatches of memory.

  An entire event projected itself on my internal screen. I found myself unable to look away from the scene. Finally, shaken, I turned to Gordon and Lynn. “Josie was raped by her father,” I said with certainty.

  —

  JOSIE AWOKE THAT NIGHT lying on her side, facing the wall, now flickering in the fuzzy light of the TV set. Ray’s hand was between her legs. He rubbed himself against her back. Josie couldn’t quite conceptualize what was happening, but she sensed that it was dangerous to be awake and aware.

  She must go back to sleep. If she were asleep, this wouldn’t be real. “Sleep, sleep,” she instructed herself, and stared at the wall, losing herself in its blankness, distancing herself from wakefulness by fantasizing throwing herself against the wall. Again and again, until the pain of the wall would bring the pleasure of darkness.

  Then she was distracted by his voice, hushed and throaty, so different from Daddy’s. “Are you my woman?” he asked. “Doesn’t that feel nice?

  “You’re cold, shivering,” he said. “Let me cover you up.” He folded her on her stomach and eased himself between her thighs.

  In her mind, Josie threw herself against the wall in time with her father’s strokes. The pain between her legs she relocated as her fantasy of the deliciously releasing pain of her head hitting the wall. The wall, the wall, nothing mattered but the wall. She imagined the blood she would see on the wall when she hit her head hard enough against it.

  An eternity later, he stopped. “You’ll tell your mother you were asleep. You just fell asleep. That’s all.”

  Though she had no memory of the event itself, Jo supplied the epilogue to Josie’s rape. “The day after I fell asleep in my father’s room, I found him crying in the basement,” Jo told Lynn and Gordon. “I felt so bad. This was the first time I had ever seen my father cry. I tried to give him a hug, but he ordered me away. I knew I wasn’t the cause of his pain,” Jo said with confidence, “but it hurt me that he wouldn’t let me comfort him. He felt so bad that he and my mother were splitting up.”

  Jo’s amnesia continued to protect her from the memories of abuse. Josie, less panicked now that the memory had surfaced, began to heal. And I felt as if I was the only one horrified by this piece of reality from the Flock’s past.

  I could no longer divorce myself from the Flock’s childhood. Watching the memories unfold and sharing them with Lynn and Gordon made me an accomplice. I knew that my days of saying “That’s their problem, not mine” were past, but I couldn’t figure out just where I fit in.

  21.

  Josie’s memory of being raped by her father opened the gate to a stampede of other memories of abusive incidents, relayed now by Rusty, Sissy, Missy, and Little Joe as well as Josie. I became increasingly irritated by Jo’s stubborn unwillingness even to consider the possibility of abuse.

  “I don’t know what she’s trying to prove,” I remarked impatiently to Gordon and Lynn. “Even the memories Jo does have of her childhood are not worth hanging on to.”

  “That may be so, Renee,” said Lynn, “but Jo is afraid of what will happen if she gives up the perception that she has of Ray. Remember, for that personality, it was Ray’s love that sustained her through childhood.”

  Lynn and Gordon tolerated Jo’s stories about her loving father far better than I did. They listened without comment when Jo apologized for “all the lies those other personalities tell.” After letting Jo have her say, Lynn would repeat the experiences described by the other personalities. “It’s getting through on some level,” Lynn assured me.

  Jo admitted that her own memories of childhood were not very comfortable. She grew up feeling that her mother thought she was a failure. According to Mother, she was too ugly, too clumsy, too introspective, too everything to be a “good” child. And if Jo was overly endowed with undesirable characteristics in her mother’s view, in her father’s view she was seriously lacking.

  For Ray, Jo was just not good enough—not smart enough, not quick enough, and especially not male enough. “I know you call this emotional abuse,” Jo told Lynn, “but from my point of view these were just the facts. Maybe my parents weren’t tactful, but you can’t call them abusive for telling me the truth about myself.”

  Jo had learned from her reading of Sybil that it’s not unusual for a multiple’s primary personality to be amnestic for periods of childhood abuse, but her intellectual understanding of this didn’t quell her emotional frustration when Lynn detailed yet another abusive childhood episode.

  “My father wouldn’t have done that to me,” Jo told Lynn firmly. “How am I supposed to accept as memory things that I just don’t remember? How am I to incorporate these events into my belief system when I’m sure they never could have happened?” In this way, Jo moved the question from emotional reality to philosophical debate that she could handle.

  —

  LONG BEFORE JO HAD had a label for her problem, she knew she had no coherent sense of past. Jo’s memory was like a small photo album. She sometimes opened up that album and mentally fingered the photos to reassure herself that she had existed before this moment. The snapshot memories did that, but they rarely brought comfort. They depicted scenes she wouldn’t have minded forgetting.

  One series of mental images showed Jo at various ages, in various places, but always with the same intense expression. Eyes shining, lips puckered in thought. The Jo in those pictures was engaged in meaningful discussion. A glance at the other people in the pho
tographs reminded Jo that this one was when she had argued that an ideological skeptic was not the same as a political nihilist, and that one was when she had tried to explain why epistemology was more usually relevant than the metaphysical fact of truth.

  In this mental scrapbook of the past, she saw the puzzled faces in the snapshots, reread the captions, and heard again what was said to her at those times: “Practicing all of your big words tonight?” “Do you think anyone really cares?” Or, worse, “Jo, why are you acting so different all of a sudden?”

  Another series of mental pictures was more painful. In these memories, she stood mute, the accusatory faces of her friends, parents, and teachers frozen for all time. The captions read, “Why did you do this?” “Why did you say this?” “Why are you lying?” Jo had never had an answer when those people questioned her about her behavior. She had rarely known what they were talking about.

  When she was about twenty years old, Jo had forced herself to peruse again these mental pictures, looking for a key to lock away future pain. Confusion formed a central theme, but she also noticed another constant in the photos. In none of those horrid memories was Jo alone. Now she understood. If she stayed away from other people, she would be able to live her life in peace. And that was her goal before meeting Lynn.

  Only recently had Jo begun to think that maybe there was a way for her to become a social being. She couldn’t quite fathom what it would mean for her as her own self to be comfortable with people. But Lynn told her that other personalities managed to have friends. So, although Jo didn’t like hearing what the other personalities said about childhood, she listened with critical interest when Lynn talked about their current activities.

  As she listened to how Renee handled a troubled student or how Kendra managed to get the phone company finally to issue a deserved refund, Jo fantasized about what it might be like if she could do those things. But, although she had enjoyed these exchanges with Lynn for some time, she knew they weren’t “treatment.” She wasn’t in therapy to dream or to enjoy herself, but to work and to make sure that Lynn believed that she was trying to do something.