The gentle sound of my wife’s voice floats into my consciousness. Why am I sitting up? I hear another man’s voice. Who is that?
Opening my eyes with a deep breath, I finally reorient. Ugh. I’m still at the shrink’s office. A glance at my watch shows almost forty minutes have passed.
“Are you with us, Danny?” Neil asks.
I look between him and Grace. Kendra is right where I last saw her, and now Garrison stands beside her at ease. “Did I check out again?” I ask.
Grace puts a reassuring hand on my knee. She doesn’t seem frustrated or sad like she usually is when I check out. She seems energized. “You did, sweetie. But some very interesting things happened while you were gone. Do you want to hear them?”
Do I? This is so bizarre. “Sure. I guess.”
“Danny,” Neil begins. “Earlier I mentioned that it sounds like you’re dissociating, and based on the last forty minutes, I am certain of it.”
“Why?” Red heat creeps up my neck onto my cheeks. “What’d I do?”
Neil looks at Grace. It’s clear he wants her to explain.
Grace pivots to face me fully. “So, when Neil asked if you felt threatened in the staff meeting, you sat back and kind of checked out for a second. But then your face changed a little bit. You started acting annoyed, like your leg started bouncing, you started biting your nails, and you kept shaking your head and running your fingers through your hair. You definitely weren’t acting like yourself.”
I look to Neil and back to Grace. No way.
“Then Neil asked you what your name was, and in a kind of squeaky, high-pitched voice, you said that your name was Jeremy.”
My brows furrow. “Why would I call myself that? My name isn’t Jeremy. My name is Danny.”
Neil clears his throat. “So in the world of dissociation, a personality that identifies itself by another name with different personality characteristics from the primary person, we call that an alter. Like an alternative.”
I had read a little about this studying for my masters. I always thought it was something people made up to get attention, or maybe it really came from a brain tumor. “How do you know I wasn’t just sleepwalking or having a nightmare?” I ask.
“You definitely weren’t asleep, Danny,” he answers. “This alter, this Jeremy, talked to us for over half an hour.”
Garrison and Kendra exchange worried glances.
I am definitely crazy.
“So what’d you all talk about?” I try to joke.
Neil slides a legal pad across his desk to Grace for her to pick up.
She gathers her thoughts for a moment. “So, when Jeremy told Neil what his name was, Neil asked him how old he was, and if he had a particular job in your mind. So he said he is fourteen, and he calls himself the gatekeeper.”
I scoff. “What, like I’m a kid in his mom’s basement playing in a video game kind of gatekeeper?”
Neil answers. “In dissociation, the alter known as the gatekeeper has access to every traumatic memory that the primary person, called the core, has ever experienced. So this role of the gatekeeper is to control what personality comes up at what time. They can be any age, any gender, any nationality, even any religion.”
Grace continues. “So Neil asked Jeremy if there was anything he wanted us to know, and he said that the others were tired of not being acknowledged, so he wanted to make sure everyone had their facts straight.”
My heart pounds. “What do you mean, ‘the Others?’” I dare not look toward Kendra or Garrison.
Grace moves the legal pad so I can see it. “Look, Danny. Jeremy wrote down absolutely everything.” She looks at Neil. “What did you call this? The structure?”
“The system,” Neil answers. “That’s the technical word for it.”
I run my hand over the words written on the page. Normally my handwriting is professional and polished. It looks nothing like the juvenile writing I see here.
“You’re saying I wrote this?” I ask.
“Technically, no,” Neil says. “You didn’t write that. The alter personality that took over who calls himself Jeremy wrote it.”
Grace points to the page. “Danny, do any of these things make sense to you? Look at the names and the roles they have taken.”
Like reading a cast list on the playbill at a live musical theater, my finger skims down the list of names with their ages and the role they apparently play in this system inside my head as Neil calls it.
I freeze about one-third of the way down the list.
Garrison. Age 30. Soldier and protector.
Garrison’s combat boots are visible in my peripheral vision, but I can’t look at him. My finger slides down to the next name.
Kendra. Age 47. Scribe and reporter.
Glancing from Kendra to Grace to Neil and back to the page, I cough nervously.
A few more lines down. The Bossman. Age 25. Encourager and big brother. Tiny Tot. Age 4. The one allowed to cry.
Grace leans in at my discomfort. “What’s going on in your head, babe?”
Squeezing my eyes shut, I pinch the bridge of my nose. “So, Neil. Tell me. All these alters or people or whatever you call them. Do people ever see them as if they’re actually there? You know, like A Beautiful Mind crazytown seeing people that don’t really exist, but to them, they’re real, only no one else sees them?”
“I’d never use the word ‘crazytown,’ Danny. But yes. You yourself have said many times that crazy has a name. A lot of times, that name is actually trauma. The mind is a complex piece of machinery. And when trauma happens, especially repeated trauma at an early age, the mind can fracture in all kinds of ways. So yes, sometimes some people do see some of these alters, perhaps pretty regularly.”
So I am certifiably crazy.
“Danny, let me in,” Grace begs gently. “You reacted to a name on this list. Which one is it?”
I blow out a deep breath and point to Kendra’s name first. “This one, here. This Kendra. She’s standing right over Neil’s left shoulder.”
Both Neil and Grace look toward where I indicate, but I know they don’t see her.
“She’s got her hair up in a bun. She’s wearing horn-rimmed glasses, she’s holding a clipboard, and she writes down everything I say, all the time. If I’m awake, she’s there. She’s been there my whole life.”
Grace and Neil are silent. Then I point to another name on the list. “And this one. Garrison. He’s standing just to Kendra’s left in the same corner.” I point but I don’t look at him. “He wears army fatigues and combat boots, and he stands at attention. He’s not visible one hundred percent of the time like Kendra is. But he’s around a lot, especially if I’m in an uncomfortable situation.”
Grace leans in. “Anyone else?”
She believes me.
I point to the Bossman. “I know this one’s name. I never see him. I just hear him inside my head. Usually he’s annoyed with me, and he’s always telling me I’m fine and to stop acting like a baby. He’s not very nice. Then there’s Brody. He’s the punk fighter. He’s like a one-man justice league. And I know Tiny Tot. He’s the little one who’s allowed to cry.”
The remaining names on the list are unfamiliar, but I count them up.
Ten pieces. Me and nine friends.
I fight tears that threaten to break as heat rises up my neck. Part of me is relieved and moved that Gracie believes me. The rest of me is deeply ashamed and embarrassed by what we’ve all just learned.
“Why would God do something like this to me, Neil?” I ask, anger blooming. “I mean, if ‘God is love’ and all that, why would He make me just as crazy as my mother if He’s supposed to be love? I just don’t get it.”
Neil opens his palms toward me. “If I had the answer to that, I’d be a rich man.”
His watch beeps softly. “Okay, Danny. So, thankfully we are at a point of actual diagnosis. This is a clear case of Dissociative Identity Disorder, which I’m sure you know they used to call Multiple Personality Disorder. This diagnosis is a good thing, because now we can move forward with starting a more appropriate therapy. There’s a ton of breakthrough techniques and new research that will make a huge difference in how we proceed after today.”
A tiny glimmer of hope flickers in my chest as I rise to shake Neil’s hand.
“Thanks, man,” I say as we walk toward the door. “So, how long are we talking?”
“What do you mean?”
“To be cured. From this dissociating. How long does that normally take once we start working on it specifically?”
Neil draws a full breath as he looks at me with sadness. My flicker extinguishes in an instant.
“Danny, there is no cure.”