Greg Iles - Dead Sleep

My stomach turns a slow somersault. Jesus Christ. Two FBI profilers and a psychiatrist sit brainstorming around a table, and the photographer turns out to be right.

MPD, Dr. Lenz called it. Multiple-personality disorder. Fragments of the psychiatrist’s patronizing lecture come back to me. That’s not how MPD works… that’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Welcome to my nightmare, Dr. Lenz. What else did Lenz say? Always caused by extreme sexual or physical abuse…

“If you’re not Roger Wheaton,” I say carefully, “who are you?”

“I have no name.”

“You must go by something.”

An odd smile. “When I was a boy, I read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I loved Captain Nemo. Nemo means ‘no one.’ Did you know that?”

“Yes.”

“Sailing beneath the oceans of the world, trying to cure man of his self-destructive obsessions. I’ve wandered some of those same oceans. But I learned the truth much earlier than Nemo did. Man can’t be cured. He doesn’t want to be cured. Only a child can express the purity in human nature, and already the world is bearing down on him with all its weight, its corruption and filth, its violence.” Wheaton bites his lip, the gesture strangely childlike.

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Don’t you? Remember when you were a little girl? Remember when you believed in fairy tales? And the shock you felt as each one crumbled in the face of reality? No Cinderella. No Santa Claus. Your father wasn’t perfect. He wasn’t even good. He wanted things for himself alone. He wanted your mother behind a locked door. He wanted… other things. And it hurt you.”

Always caused by severe childhood sexual abuse. Always…

“There was no perfect prince waiting to carry you off to his castle, was there?” Wheaton’s smoldering eyes never leave the canvas now. “All the little pretenders wanted the same thing, didn’t they? They didn’t care about you. Not the soft little you that lived in your secret heart. They wanted to spend themselves inside you, anything for that, to use you and then ignore you, throw you away like trash.”

Wheaton’s getting wound up, and I don’t want him any more unstable than he already is. Time to change the subject. “I’m really hot now.”

He frowns in exasperation, but after a moment, he walks over and turns off the faucet.

“How did I get here?” I ask as he walks back to the canvas. In the deep valley between his back muscles, the bones of his spine show through his skin like a ladder.

“You don’t remember?” he asks, lifting his brush again. “You were conscious. Think back, while I finish your eye. And try not to move.”

I do remember some things. Flashes of light, waves of vertigo. A gray sky, bubbles of glass, a bridge of white tubes, and a long fall. “The roof. You took me out on the roof.”

Wheaton chuckles.

“But there were FBI agents up there.”

“Not after Leon was shot. They all wanted to see the trophy. There’s a catwalk of pipes running from the art center to the physical plant. It only runs over a narrow alley, but crawling over it with a woman on your back sure gets the heart pumping.”

“But how did you manage that? You’re ill.”

Wheaton’s lips curl in disdain. “That diagnosis is currently under review. Roger was weak. I am strong.”

What is he telling me? He’s not sick anymore? What did Lenz say about MPD? There’s a documented case of one personality needing heart medication to survive, and the other not…

“Why am I not like Thalia?”

Wheaton keeps painting. “Because I want to ask you something.”

“What?”

“You’re a twin. An identical twin.”

“Yes.”

“I painted your sister.”

Oh, God. “I saw that painting,” I say aloud.

“I’ve done some reading on twins. It’s an interest of mine. And I find a consistent theme in their stories of childhood. Many twins share a closeness that borders on telepathy. They tell remarkable tales: precognitions of disaster, intimations of death, silent conversations when in the same room. Did you and your sister experience any of that as children?”

“Yes,” I reply, since the answer he wants is so clear. “Some.”

“You want to know if your sister is alive or dead, don’t you?”

I close my eyes against tears, but they come anyway.

“Don’t you already know?”

Through the tears I see Wheaton’s eyes locked upon mine. This is a test. He wants to know if I know Jane’s fate. He’s testing my assertion of paranormal ability.

“Which is it?” he asks. “Alive or dead?”

Trying to read him, I’m suddenly thrown back to the street in Sarajevo, to the instant the world blacked out and I felt a part of me die. Despite all my subsequent hopes, despite the phone call from Thailand, I knew then that Jane was dead.

“Dead,” I whisper.

Wheaton purses his lips and goes back to his painting.

“Am I right?”

He cocks his head as if to say, Maybe yes, maybe no.

“Why are you so interested in twins?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Two personalities from the same genetic code? Twins are exactly like me in that way.”

I don’t know how to respond. He has clearly traveled far down this road, and I can only look for clues to what he needs to hear.

“When you first came into the gallery,” he says. “With Kaiser. I knew it was a sign. Sent by whom, I have no idea. But a sign nevertheless.”

“A sign of what?”

“That one half can survive without the other.”

His words hit me like a stake through the heart. Even though I knew it to be true, this confirmation dissolves some essential fraction of my spirit. “She’s dead?” I whisper.

“Yes,” Wheaton says. “But you shouldn’t be upset. She’s far better off the way she is now.”

“What?”

“You’ve seen my paintings. The Sleeping Women. Surely you understand?”

“Understand what?”

“The point. The purpose of the paintings.”

“But I don’t. I never have.”

Wheaton lowers his brush and stares at me with incredulity. “The release. I’ve been painting the release.”

“The release?” I echo. “From what?”

“From the plight.” His face is like that of a monk trying to explain the Holy Trinity to a savage.

“The plight?”

“Femininity. The plight of being a woman.”

A moment ago I felt only grief. Now something harder quickens my blood. A desire to know, to understand.

“I don’t understand what you’re telling me.”

“Yes, you do. You’ve tried so hard to live as a man. You work relentlessly, obsessively. You haven’t married, you’ve borne no children. But that’s no escape. Not in the end. And you’re learning that, aren’t you? Every month, the little seed inside you cries out to be fertilized. Louder all the time. Your womb aches to be filled. You’ve let Kaiser use your body, haven’t you? I saw it the morning you came back with him, to the house on Audubon Place.”

So I’m not at Audubon Place. Of course I’m not. If I were, I would have heard the St. Charles streetcar bell by now.

“Do you mean that killing women somehow releases them from pain?”

“Of course. The life of woman is the life of a slave. Lennon said it: Woman is the nigger of the world. From childhood to the grave, she’s used and used again, until she’s but an exhausted shell, broken by childbirth and marriage and housekeeping and-” Wheaton shakes his head as if too angry to further explain the obvious, then dips his brush in paint and goes back to the canvas.

Different voices are speaking in my head. Marcel de Becque, telling me that westerners fight against death while the people of the East accept it: This posture of acceptance is portrayed in the Sleeping Women. John’s voice: All serial murder is sexual murder; that’s axiomatic. Dr. Lenz, saying Wheaton’s mother left home when he was thirteen or fourteen, details unclear. Lenz badgering Wheaton about it at the second interview, Wheaton evading the question. That’s what all this is about – the paintings, the murders, everything – Wheaton’s mother. But I’m not going to question him about her until I’m fairly sure I can survive the asking.