Jonathan Nasaw - When She Was Bad

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.

Lilith’s headache is gone when she awakens the next morning. She discovers she can think again, and what she thinks about, with concentrated, pinpoint, laser-like intensity, is escape. Not why she needs to escape-for a limited consciousness like Lilith’s, there are no whys. Somebody’s raping you, you bite their nose off; somebody locks you up, you escape.

There is a complication, though: the need to keep Mullet Woman and the Mad Doctor from discovering her true identity, so to speak. It is imperative they continue to think of her as Lily. Because where Lilith gets a zillion volts of electricity through the brain, Lily gets her brow tenderly mopped. Where Lilith is under room arrest, Lily, eventually, will have the run of the hospital.

Unfortunately, Lilith knows very little about Lily. She’s rich, she lives in Pebble Beach, has a place in Puerto Vallarta; she has a mental disorder; her grandparents were recently killed in a car wreck-everything else will have to be improvised.

The door to her room slides open. “How’re you feeling this morning?” asks Mullet Woman.

“Lots better,” replies Lilith, mimicking as best she can the childish voice on Dr. Cogan’s tape recorder. “A little sore, but at least my headache’s gone.”

“Good, good. Do you think you’re up to having breakfast in the dining hall?”

“Sure,” Lilith simpers. “I guess.”

In Alan Corder’s well-informed opinion, the better the food was in an institution, the less guilty rich people felt about committing their relatives. After a welcome in the spacious reception lobby, a turn around the arboretum followed by a meal in the dining hall had sealed many a deal for Dr. Al.

When Lilith and Patty reached the dining hall, a high-ceilinged, wood-paneled room with white tablecloths and a cafeteria-style counter, half a dozen white-clad nurses and psych techs on break or coming on or off duty were chowing down in great good humor at the largest table, laughing, gesticulating, spearing food from each other’s plates. At a table for one sat a gray-haired man in wrinkled pajamas and limp seersucker bathrobe, chewing single-mindedly at a corner of toast. Somehow a pat of butter, backing paper attached, had managed to affix itself to the side of his head; as they passed him on their way to the counter, Patty reached down and plucked it away.

Food and free entertainment, thought Lilith-but she kept the joke to herself. Turning up her determined little nose at the precooked scrambled eggs in the chafing dish, she ordered two eggs fried sunny-side up, not dry but not runny either, and polished off a Danish and a cup of coffee while she was waiting.

By the time her eggs and Patty’s flapjacks arrived, the room had emptied out until there were only two other diners present. At a corner table, sitting with a huge, curly-haired psych tech, was an oddly familiar-looking little guy in chinos and a dark blue corduroy shirt. Gorgeous, heart-shaped face, bowed cherub lips, and long-lashed, gold-flecked brown eyes. His hair too was brown-not the color people call brown because it’s neither black nor blond, but a deep, rich nut-brown like Guinness ale.

Lilith was on the verge of asking Mullet Woman who he was when it occurred to her that perhaps the reason he looked familiar was that she had met him before, as Lily, at some point during the missing time between Monday morning, when Dr. Cogan gave her that needle behind the coffee shop in Weed, and Tuesday afternoon, when she’d awakened on the cross-shaped torture table with the mother of all headaches.