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Memory makes the difference. There are facts that everyone knows, but memories, and the feelings they evoke, are unique to individual souls. Memories can be described, but can never truly be shared; and knowledge that is bound up in especially strong memories can’t be shared either.
after one memorable early meeting held back before the house was built, my father returned to the body to find a crow pecking at his chest.
Julie once asked me what it feels like to leave the body. “Do you contract into yourself, or float away, or what?” After several mangled attempts at a description, I came up with the following exercise, which, while not perfect, at least conveys the general idea: Tilt your head back as far as you can. You will feel a tension in the muscles at the back of your neck that quickly becomes painful. Imagine that tension spreading outwards, wrapping around the front
drugs, reintegrate them into a single, unified whole. You know, like in Sybil. The only problem with this scenario is that the metaphor is faulty. You can smash a vase, bury it in the ground for twenty years, dig it up again, and piece it back together just fine. You can do that because a vase is dead to begin with, and its pieces are inert. But human souls aren’t made of porcelain. They’re alive, and, in the nature of living things, they change; and they keep on changing even after they get smashed to bits.
So forget about the vase; think instead of a rosebush, torn apart by a storm. The branches get scattered all over the garden, but they don’t just lie there; they take root
again, and try to grow, which isn’t as easy now that they are competing with one another for space and light. Still, they manage—most of them manage—and what you end up with, ten or twenty years after the storm, is not one rosebush but a multitude of rosebushes. Some of them are badly stunted; maybe all of them are smaller than they would have been if they’d each had a garden of their own. But they are more, much more, than a simple collection of puzzle pieces. The remedy suggested by the broken-vase metaphor doesn’t work with t...
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and uprooting and discarding as well, and what you end up with when you’re done isn’t the original rosebush, but a Frankenstein parody of it. And you may not even get that far: little rosebushes do...
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my father could sometimes make that Witness’s memories his own, and so absorb it. But the process was extremely traumatic, and it didn’t always take. As for attempts to absorb more complex souls like Simon or Drew, not only were they completely unsuccessful, they usually triggered periods of chaos and lost time.
“The primary difficulty faced by multiple personalities,” Dr. Grey wrote in her preface, “is not that they are abnormal; it is that they are dysfunctional. Multiplicity, of itself, is no more problematic than left-handedness. Losing time, being unable to keep a steady job or maintain a residence, requiring detailed lists just to get through the day—these things are problems. But they are problems that a well-organized multiple household, acting cooperatively, can learn to overcome.”
“You could have gone crazy, with what your mother did to you. Or you could have turned mean, like the man at the diner. But you didn’t. You did something creative. And that’s great; only now you’re going to have to be even more creative, if you want to get your life together.”
And he, the Andrew she spoke to, was not his father’s biological son, but a member of his father’s Society—a special member, maybe, but still essentially a figment of his, of the original Andy Gage’s, imagination.
you do seem to have many of the experiences that an untreated multiple personality would be expected to have. The blackouts; the things done, evidently by you, that you can’t remember doing.
Mouse doesn’t want to look in the light—its brilliance dazzles her, and it emits an ugly tweet with each flash—but she can’t help herself; her eyes move of their own accord. As her gaze fixes on the center of the strobe’s reflector,
From just outside the cave mouth Mouse hears a voice—her own voice, but with a new cadence—echoing back to her: “Hello, Dr. Grey.”
A hand comes into view from below the cave mouth. It’s her hand; Penny Driver’s hand. It reaches out, across the coffee table—dipping, briefly, to switch off the strobe—and shakes with the doctor.
reentering her body at such velocity that it is a wonder she doesn’t go flying off the sofa. As it is, her torso jerks forward violently; the safety helmet slides off her lap and tumbles to the floor.
it would probably cut down a lot on the real-world clutter that makes life as a multiple so cumbersome.
a false memory that he’d somehow infected us with,
Dominance, in a multiple household, is all about being able to endure more trauma than anybody else. The more a particular soul can resist the impulse to switch, the more it gains power over those that can’t.
When a Witness shares its secrets with you, it swallows your head.
“Andrew’s not even real, Mouse.”
Over the course of my therapy, I absorbed all but a handful of the Witnesses, making their memories my own,
