When She Was Bad

8

“Good night, Lyssy.”

“Good night.” The door to the blue room slid closed behind the squat, homely night nurse. No stalling, for a change-Lyssy still didn’t care for the dark, but since his session with Dr. Al this afternoon he’d recovered some of his old optimism. Whatever happens, he thought, I can handle it.

He was even looking forward to the darkness, for the privacy it afforded him. With his optimism restored, he’d managed to convince himself that last night’s runaway masturbatory fantasy had come about because he’d dozed off while jacking off-and as Dr. Al had often told him, none of us was responsible for our dreams. We all had depths and dark sides, Lyssy remembered him saying-you didn’t have to be a multiple for that.

On with tonight’s fantasy, then. Starring Lily, of course: after saving her by shooting a rabid dog that had come wandering up the dusty street of the town where they lived (an image conflated from Old Yeller and To Kill a Mockingbird), he had to help her back to her house. As soon as they were alone, she covered him with grateful kisses. Her jacket fell open-her breasts were naked beneath it. She pulled his face tightly against the round, warm, sweet-smelling softness….

Lyssy. Time for you to go now, Lyssy. A dry, whispery, unbearably intimate voice, like acid eating through glass.

Startled from his fantasy, Lyssy opens his eyes and is shaken to see that the room has gone entirely black, blacker than it’s ever been before. “Who’s there?”

An old friend.

“You’re not my friend. Now turn the night-light back on, you’re scaring me, I don’t like the dark.”

Lyssy, Lyssy, Lyssy. The voice is pretend-sad. Have you forgotten already?

“Forgot what?”

How many worse things there are than darkness.

And suddenly there are flames everywhere, crackling flames, angry flames, searing, leaping, hungry flames. “No!” Lyssy cries, as the smell of roasting flesh fills his nostrils; his hands are clenched and burning. “Please-please, I’m sorry.”

As abruptly as they had flared into existence, the flames are gone.

Sleep now, Lyssy.

The voice is gentler, soothing. The darkness is cool and comforting. Lyssy pulls it around himself like a blanket, like the folds in the fabric of space and time, and allows himself to drift away….

A hand rubs a thigh for grounding, the eyes roll upward and to the right, and Max is back. The unaccustomed physical sensation sends a shudder through the body. “My dick,” he whispers aloud, peeking under the covers. “My hand, my dick-and about fucking time.”

For the last two and a half years, Max has confined himself to seeing through Lyssy’s eyes and hearing through Lyssy’s ears, but without sensation or control. This arrangement, which the psychiatrists call co-consciousness, is at best a skewed and distorted two-dimensional simulacrum of real life, like watching somebody else play a video game; at worst, it’s a frustrating, helpless feeling, like riding in the passenger seat of a car that’s heading toward a cliff.

But patience is the watchword, and that was something Max had had to cultivate, once he’d realized what the ECT sessions were doing to him. It wasn’t just the headaches following the shock treatments, or the overall bone-deep soreness, as if his body had been tossed around in a giant Cuisinart, but rather the realization that he was gradually losing his memory, and along with it his identity (which basically speaking was all he had and all he was), that had finally convinced Max he couldn’t beat Corder at his own game.

And why should he even try? he’d asked himself, after the third session. Why fight Lyssy for consciousness when the only way out of this madhouse for either of them was through Lyssy? All Max really had to do, he recognized eventually, was wait patiently while darling Lyssy earned the trust and even the love of Dr. Al and his staff, causing the security measures surrounding them to grow less stringent with every passing year.

But Lyssy has taken them as far as he can-to the very door of the director’s residence, so to speak. All he can do between now and the party tomorrow night is screw it up by blurting out something incriminating.

So: to the dark place for Lyssy, and into the body for Max. He throws back the covers and hops into the bathroom on his crutches. The light goes on automatically; catching sight of his reflection in the slightly warped, unbreakable mirror over the sink, he breaks into a crooked grin. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” He cackles, then tries on his earnest, goofy Lyssy face-the one he’s going to have to deploy nonstop for the next twenty-four hours or so. “Hi there, Dr. Al, guess what time it is?” he chirps cheerfully, in Lyssy’s voice, then leans closer to the mirror.

The grin fades, the eyes narrow and harden. “No, actually it’s payback time, my friend,” whispers Max. “With interest.”

His mouth is dry as sandpaper. He fills a paper cup at the sink, glugs it down greedily. It’s his first drink in two and a half years-he’s forgotten how good something as simple as water can taste.

Pissing feels damn good, too. Lyssy the Sissy’s been hogging all the good stuff, thinks Max, hopping back into the bedroom without washing up afterward (start with the little sins, he tells himself, work your way up).

He climbs back into bed and slides his scarred hand under the waistband of his pajama bottoms to take up where Lyssy had left off. But soon Lyssy’s fantasy of rescue and passive sex is subsumed by Max’s own, immeasurably darker fantasies of rage, rape, torture, and murder (which strictly speaking are not so much fantasies as memories), while Lyssy waits in the dark place, unable to escape for the same reason the dark place is so dark: because he has no body there. No eyes to see, no legs to run, and no voice with which to cry out.