Greg Iles - Blood Memory

This afternoon I thought I’d learned the answer. As terrible as it was, at least it put firm ground beneath my feet. But now that ground has shifted, a seismic change wrought by only a few words from a psychiatrist’s mouth. You don’t know anything….

I don’t want to think about the things Dr. Malik said.

I want the questions to stop.

I want a drink.

Failing that, I want a Valium. But I can’t take one. And thinking of the reason why-the baby in my tummy-suddenly brings up my steak and eggs with a vengeance. I fall to my knees over the toilet, retching and shivering as I’ve done after my worst binges. Hugging the commode, I feel the substance of my body fading, as though I’m becoming transparent. I’ve felt this way before. I want to get up and check the mirror to make sure I’m wrong, but I can’t bring myself to look. Instead, I turn on the hot water, climb under the scalding spray, and sit on the floor of the tub.

My skin blisters red as the water rises above my hips, then to the edge of the tub. I shut off the tap and lie back, submerging my head. Here Malik’s words cannot hurt me. They’ll vanish like words spoken in a vacuum, like a scream in outer space. It’s not his words that matter anyway, but what was beneath them. A hidden key, waiting only for me to find it. Just as John Kaiser did, Malik asked if I thought I’d ever been his patient. That’s not a question you ask a normal person. That’s a question you ask someone with Alzheimer’s disease. Or amnesia. Or…

Something’s wrong. I’m bathing in zero gravity. The water won’t lie in the tub…it breaks into millions of droplets and floats into the air. Clammy liquid bursts from my pores like overflowing panic. Under the scalding water it feels like sleet on my skin. Do you think you might have been my patient at some point? That’s a question you ask a patient with dissociative identity disorder. What we used to call multiple personality disorder…. Sometimes the dissociation during sexual abuse is so profound and repeated that the mind splits into separate parts in order to wall itself off from the pain….

“No,” I say aloud, digging my fingernails into my palms. “Not possible.”

I’m certain I never saw Nathan Malik as a patient. But then I is a problematic pronoun in a sentence spoken by someone with multiple personality disorder. “I” may not have seen Malik, but “someone else” within my brain may well have.

The disorientation I feel now is much like that I’ve felt after waking from an alcoholic blackout, or coming out of a hypomanic state. I know I’ve been somewhere-a party, an apartment, a house-but I’m not sure what I did there. How far things went. And yet despite this similarity, I’ve never felt so disconnected from myself that a whole separate life seemed possible.

“Take it easy,” I say in a shaky voice. “What did Malik say before that?”

We were talking about group therapy…He said, You shouldn’t denigrate what you’ve never experienced. Why would he say that if I had ever been part of his Group X? A sense of relief washes through me, then evaporates. Could I have seen Malik one-on-one in a dissociated state, then forgotten or repressed it? I have no memory of that, but neither do I have any memory of my childhood sexual abuse. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Could Malik know so much about me because I told him myself ?

I lurch up out of the tub and splash cool water on my face from the bathroom sink. As I peer at my bloodshot eyes in the mirror, a shudder goes through me, heralding a terrifying thought. At one point during the phone call, I had the feeling Malik was telling me his patients were his lovers. Or ex-lovers. Could he have consummated his old lust for me during a session of which I have no memory? I still recall the shock I felt when Malik’s photo first scrolled out of my grandfather’s fax machine. That was the first time I’d seen his face in ten years, I was sure of it. But what is the value of my certainty? Once you open the door to the idea that you don’t remember parts of your past, anything is possible. And for someone who’s dealt with blackouts and manic episodes, it’s not a great leap to make.

Stop thinking, says a voice in my head-the voice of self-preservation. Too much truth too fast can kill you. …

Grabbing a large towel from the hanger on the door, I wrap it around me, then climb into bed and pull the comforter up to my neck. The light is still on, and I’m not about to turn it off. I set my phone to VIBRATE, close my eyes, and pray for sleep.

On any other night I’d need a drink or a Valium to shut off the thoughts racing through my head, but tonight exhaustion does the job for me. As consciousness blurs, Dr. Malik’s face flashes before me, his eyes cold and penetrating. Then Michael Wells’s face replaces it. Michael’s eyes are warm, kind, and open. Something about him reminds me of my father, but I can’t place what. It’s not his eyes, or his build. It’s just a way . A reluctance to judge, perhaps. Whatever it is, it draws me to him.

Why didn’t I tell Michael I was pregnant? It was the only thing I held back. Was it because, deep down, I’m the one hoping for this relationship to progress? Am I afraid that when he learns I’m pregnant, he’ll vanish like those men drawn by my body and my intensity would?

Stop! shouts the voice in my head. Stop stop stop!

I have a trick to deal with destructive thoughts. I put myself in a different place altogether, a place of peace. For me, it’s the ocean. I’m free diving down a multicolored wall of coral, a steep wall that slopes down through Caribbean blue toward depths of India ink. There’s no sound but the beating of my heart. My body knifes through warmth until warmth becomes cold, and my perception balloons out beyond the cage of my skull, taking in all that I see, and rapture comes over me, the rapture of the deep. I’m diving that wall now, down through the last glimmering stratum of wakefulness into sleep. I wish it were only darkness that awaited me below. But it’s never just the dark. Dreams lie in wait, as they always have. The netherworld where I’m always a stranger, or a fugitive, or a soldier frozen in the midst of battle. Fear and confusion are my only companions there, and our journeys are always long ones.

When I was a teenager, I heard that dreams that seem to last hours actually happen in a span of six or seven seconds. I know now that this isn’t true. Most dreams last ten or fifteen minutes, then fade into others in the deep reaches of REM sleep. Some dreams we remember, others we don’t. Most of mine-though often more vivid than life-leave only fragmentary images behind, like tattered pages from a picture book.

Tonight will be different.

Tonight I’m back in the rusted orange truck. Back on the island. My grandfather is behind the wheel. We’re rolling up the long sloping hill of the old pasture. On the other side lies the pond where the cows drink. Their patties dot the grass like dried mud pies. My grandfather’s hair is black, not silver. The truck smells bad. Stale motor oil, chewing tobacco, mildew, other odors I can’t identify.

It’s going to rain. The sky is leaden, the air still. We roll steadily up the shallow slope, making for the crest. Terror has closed my throat, but Grandpapa’s face is calm. He doesn’t know what’s on the other side of the hill. I don’t either, but I know it’s bad. I’ve dreamed this dream so often that I know I’m dreaming. Each time we make it a little closer to the crest, but we never top the hill. We’re getting close now, though…I know I’ll wake up soon.

Only this time I don’t.