Jonathan Nasaw - When She Was Bad

Lilith looked him in the eye-not the easiest thing to do. “Maybe you ought to rethink your priorities.”

“Revenge is the priority,” Max whispered, leaning across the table-they were sitting catty-corner from each other-and dabbing a spot of ketchup from the corner of her mouth with his own napkin.

At the neighboring table, the burly psych techs exchanged knowing glances. “Don’t they make a cute couple?” said Wally.

Patty grinned. “Multiples in love,” she said. “Imagine the possibilities.”

The message-waiting button on the in-room telephone was blinking when Lilith returned to the observation suite after lunch to wait out the last few hours of her captivity-the less contact with the staff, she and Max had agreed, the slimmer the chances of their respective masquerades being uncovered.

Lilith picked up the handset, pressed the lighted button, and was informed by the switchboard operator that Dr. Cogan had called her again-twice. Lilith thanked her. Yeah, I’ll get right back to her, she thought. When hell needs a Zamboni.

She hung up the phone and lay down, looking up at the ceiling. The acoustic tiles were white and textured like the surface of the moon-Lilith discovered that if she held her breath and let her eyes drift out of focus, it felt as if, instead of lying on her back looking up, she was skimming low over that desolate moonscape, looking down at a land of barren white rocks and sharp black shadows….

Four o’clock. Another hour to kill. Max’s skin was beginning to crawl. He sat up, looked around the little blue room for something to occupy his mind. Lyssy’s books, most of them Christmas or birthday presents from Dr. Al, were chronologically arrayed on a recessed shelf, ranging left to right from the Suesses and Sendaks suitable for the three-year-old mentality with which Lyssy had arrived, through the Robert Louis Stevensons and Harry Potters of his so-called childhood, to the required high school reading- Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, and the rest of that aging canon.

But there was nothing Max might have chosen for himself. No Stephen King, no Thomas Harris, no true crime or graphic novels-in short, nothing to engage the interest of your average American adolescent, not to mention a thirty-one-no, thirty- two- year-old sociopathic alter.

Ditto for the pitiful collection of PG-rated videos Lyssy had accrued over the last few years. Charlotte’s Web, Old Yeller, The Princess Bride, Time Bandits. Max tried watching television for a little while, but sitting there staring at the screen was too much like being in co-consciousness. He limped over to the window. From here, he could see a sliver of the tiled roof of the director’s residence peeking through the arboretum pines.

His thoughts drifted back to the last time he and Lyssy had been over there. It had been, what, six, eight weeks ago? The girl, Alison, had taken Lyssy up to her room, ordered his attendant to wait outside. She and Lyssy sat together on her little bed while she gushed on and on about her new boyfriend, some lummox from the football team. From her point of view Lyssy might as well have been one of the cute little stuffed animals propped up against the headboard, but life-size, with a marvelous ability to nod on cue.

Things would be different tonight, though, Max promised himself. His hand found its way into his trouser pocket and he began fondling himself through the fabric, thinking about how soon all that sweet pink virginal softness would be his. And if revenge was indeed the priority, it would be doubly-no, triply sweet. Because the suffering he’d be inflicting directly on Corder, the fear, the pain, even the man’s death, would be chump change compared to the sheer delight of drinking in Dr. Al’s helplessness and humiliation as he watched his wife and daughter being raped and tortured. That, as they say in the credit card commercials, was going to be priceless.

And it would be only the beginning. Though their plan called for Lilith and Max to lie low with her biker friends until the heat died down, afterward there would be plenty of opportunity to settle old scores, and plenty of old scores to settle. Pender, for instance, the fat old G-man who’d gunned him down three years ago, costing him his leg and very nearly his life-Max would definitely be looking him up.

Then there was Dr. Irene Cogan, who’d almost become the last of the strawberry blonds to go through the processing plant. But Max, after breaking out of the Monterey County Jail, hadn’t kidnapped her and brought her up to Scorned Ridge for her hair, but rather for her professional services. He’d been having trouble controlling the other alters-that’s how he’d been captured in the first place-and figured that with the help of a good psychiatrist, he could tighten his hegemony over the system.

And like everyone he’d ever trusted, she’d turned on him. Taken his confidences and ground them into the dirt. Talk about a breach of professional ethics-just thinking about her had his free hand tightening around the hilt of an imaginary knife.

But grasping even an imaginary knife was a mistake-suddenly, in his mind’s eye, Max pictured Kinch sitting up in the darkness like a corpse rising from an open coffin, and his half-hearted erection wilted like a week-old stalk of celery….

A telephone rang. From the twilight land halfway between dreaming and waking, Lilith reached out and fumbled the receiver off the hook. “H’lo?” she murmured, cotton-mouthed from sleep.

“Lily?” A not-unfamiliar female voice jarred Lilith into full consciousness.

Oh fuck, she thought. “Dr. Cogan?”

“Yes, I-Wait a minute, who is this?”

Double fuck-Lilith realized suddenly that she’d used her own voice. She faked a cough, tried again. “Sorry, I must have had something stuck in my throat.”

She waited for a response, heard only a puzzled silence, hastened to fill it. “Listen, Dr. Cogan, I really want to tell you about everything that’s been happening, but now’s not a good time, ’cause…“She glanced at the clock-radio bolted to the nightstand: 5:15 P.M.-she’d slept the afternoon away. “’Cause I’m just getting ready for dinner. Maybe I could call you back later tonight. How’s that? Or come to think of it, tomorrow morning’d be even better. I’ll call you back first thing tomorrow morning, I promise.”

Lilith hung up without waiting for a reply. The phone began ringing again; when it stopped, she took the receiver off the hook and went into the bathroom to splash cold water on her face.

After showering, Max dried and powdered his stump. He loathed the sight of it-the way the surgeon had drawn a flap of skin underneath the femur and reattached it to the back of the thigh with a sort of tucked-in curl made it look a little like a shrimp’s head.

His newest prosthetic leg was handsome, though, with a locking knee-joint and a contoured pink calf instead of a stark titanium rod. It was held on by suction, too-no more cumbersome harness. And once he was dressed (Lyssy’s favorite outfit, comfortable chinos and a dove-gray corduroy shirt, gray socks, black sneakers) there was no way anybody could tell him apart from a two-legged man-at least as long as he was standing still.

Just after five o’clock, Wally arrived. He’d changed from his hospital whites into baggy shorts and a green bowling shirt worn unbuttoned over a ribbed wife-beater undershirt. Sandals, no socks-the Big Lebowski look. “Happy birthday, dude,” he said, producing a small gift-wrapped box from behind his back. “That’s from the whole staff-we all chipped in.”

Max tore it open greedily-it was an MP3 player, with earphones and software. “Wow,” he Lyssy’d. “Wow, thanks, this is-I don’t know what to say.”