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Night had blanketed the city in darkness. I stood on the balcony of my hotel room, cigarette between my lips, enjoying the warmth. It had been a long cold winter. Now late spring was bringing heat already, something I could appreciate. I felt stiff from spending most of the day in the car or sitting at a table in the conference room at the police department studying files. Gabriel was with me. He’d been on his own balcony next to mine smoking when I came out. He’d leaned over and asked if he could come over. I had agreed and he’d foregone the doors and climbed from his room to mine via the balcony. We were only four floors up. If he’d fallen, it would have hurt, but I’d noticed he had become more adventurous lately.
“You doing okay?” He asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“You have acted like you were avoiding me since we got back from Maine. And that’s difficult given that I’m your boss.”
“I’m not avoiding you because of Maine. I don’t hold you responsible for Raphael.” I told him. “I’m avoiding you because I want you to be happy.”
“That doesn’t exactly make sense to me.”
“You’re my neighbor. We both have security cameras. I don’t know whether to tell you to run away or not. It’s a difficult position for me to be in.”
“Oh,” Gabriel said and exhaled a plume of smoke. “Yeah, we thought you might know.”
“Nyleena avoiding me was the first clue, but then I saw her sneak into your house when my mom got back from Australia. I’ve seen it a few times since. It isn’t like I need a degree in rocket science to figure it out.”
“You disapprove?” Gabriel said.
“Yes and no. I do, but I suspect my reasons for disapproving are different than what you expect.”
“You’re worried about our cases being marked as tainted if someone finds out?”
“That’s what I thought you might think, but that isn’t my issue with it. Nyleena isn’t the settle down and get married type. I love her, but happily ever after for her involves a good book, some Thai take-out, and going to bed alone. She’s more walled off than I am, which is saying something. I’m worried she will cut and run if things start getting serious and I don’t want her to hurt you.”
“My ex-wife shot me, maybe my happily ever after involves the same thing.”
“I haven’t ruled that out as a possibility, that’s why I said yes and no, implying I was still on the fence about it. Nyleena is beautiful on the inside and out, I can see why you’re attracted to her. I just worry that further down the road, you’ll be like every other guy that has come into her life. She’ll tire of you and begin to push you away. She isn’t incapable of love, she just doesn’t believe it conquers all. She is committed to a lot of things all the time, most of them not relationships with others. Most men last a year or two and then its over, as if she has become bored and tire of them.”
“You worry I won’t be able to handle it if she does it to me?”
“Not exactly. I think you can handle it, but I have ASPD Gabriel. I won’t lie and tell you it’s about you or about Nyleena. I am solely concerned about my own interests here. I worry that when she throws you over, I will be left to deal with the repercussions.” I looked out over the small manicured yard that surrounded the hotel. “Essentially, your relationship with Nyleena affects our relationship, yours and mine. And I worry about the consequences of it.”
“I see.” Gabriel stubbed out his cigarette.
“I know it’s selfish to think this way. I should be happy for you and her. You’ve found a few bright moments in this world. But, at the end of every day, I’m still a narcissist and my main concern is always going to be me. Your relationship with Nyleena does affect me, it always will, regardless of how it turns out. And for that reason, I can only see it through the filter that promises me problems because of it.”
“That is the most honest and introspective thing I have ever heard you say.” Gabriel lit another cigarette. “And I do appreciate your honesty. I can’t promise how things will go in the future between her or me and I can’t promise that if we stop seeing each other, there won’t be at least a little discomfort between you and I. At first, it may be very awkward. The only thing I can promise is that, for now, she and I are both happy and enjoying the bright spots of life together. I came into this knowing that she isn’t the committed relationship type. And because you’ve been honest, I will keep your concerns in mind. I won’t stop seeing her because of them, but when things end, I will do everything I can to not take it out on you if she breaks my heart.”
“Thanks, I think.” I responded.
“Is that all that’s bothering you?” He asked.
“I don’t like this case. I can’t decide who is guilty or who is complicit or if anyone is. And I don’t understand why this happened to them.” I admitted. “Why did she fracture into separate personalities? Why is only one of the personalities a psychopath and not all of them? And is that personality a psychopath in the way I think of psychopaths or is it somehow different than what I’m used to.”
“That sounds like a Lucas question.”
“I’m not sure Lucas isn’t struggling with the same questions. I’ve read the file and know that she suffered horrific abuse and her mind created alternates to shield the person from the abuse. Why doesn’t it happen more often? Why didn’t it happen to me? Do you think I had a lot of happy thoughts when I was in the clutches of Callow? I knew what he was. I knew what he was going to do to me. Sometimes, the imagination is worse than what actually happens. Why didn’t I end up fractured like they did? Why doesn’t everyone end up fractured like that?”
“I think the obvious answer is that you didn’t need to fracture, you were already protected from anything Callow did because you were born with the mental capacity to process that information differently. Not your intelligence level, your mental illness. It was a built in defense mechanism. We’ve talked before about the fact that sociopaths and psychopaths have elements of dissociative behaviors. You have said that you and Malachi both occasionally don’t recognize your own reflections. You don’t feel connected to it or the world. You have memory gaps. You are terrible at keeping track of linear time. Lucas cherry picked some articles for me and Fiona to read to give us an understanding of dissociative identity disorder. You have some of the symptoms. I asked Lucas about it late last night and he said most sociopaths and psychopaths have those symptoms. Which leaves me wondering if psychopathology doesn’t contain elements of dissociative identity disorder.”
“That doesn’t really answer the question, though, that is your brain chasing its own tail. I know because mine does the same thing. I know I fought back because I am a sociopath or psychopath, if you prefer. But I was still young when it happened and killing someone should be considered a traumatic event. Why then did my personality not fracture?”
“What if some people are just pre-disposed to fracture and others aren’t? Is that an answer you can accept?”
“In other words, perhaps it is a genetic expression that may happen if certain conditions are introduced to the brain while the personality forms?”
“Yes,” Gabriel responded.
“In other words, if she hadn’t seen her father murdered and her mother hadn’t gotten involved with a cult practicing pedophilia and human sacrifice, she may not have fractured either?”
“Exactly.”
“Then perhaps the trauma could be different from person to person as well.” I suggested.
“Or perhaps under just the right circumstances, it could happen to anyone, but most of us are not exposed to those circumstances. You referred to killing Callow as traumatic, but it was much less traumatic for you than it would have been for Nyleena or Xavier or me. If Nyleena had been forced to kill Callow to survive, then perhaps those would have been the specific circumstances required for Nyleena to fracture to protect herself from the trauma.”
“Oh,” I sighed. “Perhaps that’s why some physical conditions can cause it.”
“Could be.” Gabriel answered. “One of the articles I read said young children that experience migraines are more likely to experience symptoms of DID. Perhaps, as well as a mental illness, it’s a neurological disease like Alzheimer’s.”
“That makes some sense. But I had childhood migraines.”
“Yes, but I think your brain was already insulated against trauma.” Gabriel stubbed out his second cigarette and flopped into one of the chairs. “You must at least consider that people like you, Malachi, Raphael, and Caleb process the world so differently from the rest of us, that your brains are insulated from the effects of emotional trauma. And if someone else had lived your life, someone without that built in layer of insulation, they might have fractured. If I had lived the life Raphael had lived mute, molested, ashamed, embarrassed, humiliated, and lonely, I don’t think my brain would have processed it as well as Raphael’s did.”
“Raphael is a serial killer,” I reminded him.
“And I can’t imagine how he didn’t turn out to be a mass murderer. When I am completely honest with myself about it, I think it’s a bit of a miracle that Raphael is only a serial killer. I feel he could have turned out much worse.”
“I’m not entirely sure how it could have been worse, but I see your point to some degree.”
“You are only thinking about the mental aspects of DID, there could be physical components that we just don’t understand yet. If psychopaths can be born or made, why can’t the same be true of people who suffer DID. Why can’t some of them be born with an inclination to experience a fracture of their personality?”
“Psychopaths are less rare than people with multiple personalities.”
“That may not be true.” Gabriel said. “I don’t know the statistics for it right off the top of my head, but I’m sure there are lots of people that have symptoms of dissociative identity disorder that never get diagnosed for whatever reason.”
“I don’t know,” I said after a moment or two and lit a new cigarette. Gabriel lit another one too. “We’re just gonna stand out here and work on giving ourselves cancer?” I asked.
“I’m game,” Gabriel said. “We may also be missing something big, too big to realize we’re missing it.”
“Well that doesn’t make any sense.” I told him.
“Sure it does. Malachi has a form of giantism. Patterson doesn’t have finger prints. You have a blood disorder. Caleb has synesthesia. Raphael doesn’t have vocal cords. All of these are rare genetic conditions. Lucas and Xavier think that having the genes for psychopathology makes it more likely for rare genetic conditions to express themselves. If that’s possible, and I’m inclined to agree with them, then why couldn’t something similar be happening with dissociative identity disorder. I don’t see why it would be impossible for DID to be the rare expression of a gene or combination of genes to create the symptoms we see and the reason nearly everyone has episodes of things like dissociative identity disorder amnesia is because it isn’t rare, like we think, it’s just rare for it to be fully expressed like it is in Amber. Which could be why emotional or physical trauma at a young age, could create a complete fracturing like it did with Amber, but normally doesn’t.”
“What if most of us carry the key combination to experience symptoms of DID, but rarely encounter the contributing factors that create a fully fractured person like Amber.” I frowned as I reworded what he said.
“You’re still thinking just of the mental side.” He said looking at me.
“What if the combination of genes have to be there plus another gene, so ABC and D have to be present coupled with some type of physical or emotional trauma to create someone like Amber.”
“Yes, and maybe 80% of the world’s population carries combination ABC, but only 1% carries gene D. But when something like a terrible car accident happens, because we carry ABC, we get a case of dissociative amnesia, but don’t end up fractured. Only the 1% that also carries D can be fractured completely.”
“That’s complicated,” I said. Lucas was right, everything about this case was complicated. I was getting annoyed with complicated.
“Aren’t most genetic expressions complicated?” Gabriel replied. “And maybe D doesn’t have anything to do with neurological workings, maybe it’s part of the encoding for toenails.”
“That would explain it,” I agreed.
