Robert Silverberg - Multiples

She knew she had to be careful in questioning Van about the way his life as a multiple worked. She was supposed to be a multiple herself, after all. But she made use of her Sacramento background as justification for her areas of apparent ignorance of multiple customs and the everyday mechanics of multiple life. Though she too had known she was a multiple since childhood, she said, she had grown up outside the climate of acceptance of the divided personality that prevailed in San Francisco, where an active subculture of multiples had existed openly for years. In her isolated existence, unaware that there were a great many others of her kind, she had at first regarded herself as the victim of a serious mental disorder. It was only recently, she told him, that she had come to understand the overwhelming advantages of life as a multiple: the richness, the complexity, the fullness of talents and experiences that a divided mind was free to enjoy. That was why she had come to San Francisco. That was why she listened so eagerly to all that he was telling her about himself.

She was cautious, too, in manifesting her own multiple identities. She wished she did not have to be pretending to have other selves. But they had to be brought forth now and again, Cleo felt, if only by way of maintaining his interest in her. Multiples were notoriously indifferent to singletons, she knew. They found them bland, overly simple, two-dimensional. They wanted the excitement that came with embracing one person and discovering another, or two or three. So she gave him Lisa, she gave him Vixen, she gave him the Judy-who-was-Cleo and the Cleo-who-was-someone-else, and she slipped from one to another in a seemingly involuntary and unexpected way, often when they were in bed.

Lisa was calm, controlled, strait-laced. She was totally shocked when she found herself, between one eye-blink and the next, in the arms of a strange man. “Who are you?—where am I?—” she blurted, rolling away, pulling herself into a foetal ball.

“I’m Judy’s friend,” Van said.

She stared bleakly at him. “So she’s up to her tricks again. I should have figured it out faster.”

He looked pained, embarrassed, terribly solicitous. She let him wonder for a moment or two whether he would have to take her back to her hotel right here in the middle of the night. And then she allowed a mischievous smile to cross Lisa’s face, allowed Lisa’s outraged modesty to subside, allowed Lisa to relent and relax, allowed Lisa to purr—

“Well, as long as we’re here already—what did you say your name was?”

He liked that. He liked Vixen, too—wild, sweaty, noisy, a moaner, a gasper, a kicker and thrasher who dragged him down on to the floor and went rolling over and over with him. She thought he liked Cleo, too, though that was harder to tell, because Cleo’s style was aloof, serious, baroque, inscrutable. She would switch quickly from one to another, sometimes running through all four in the course of an hour. Wine, she said, induced quick switching in her. She let him know that she had a few other identities, too, fragmentary and submerged, and hinted that they were troubled, deeply neurotic, almost self-destructive: they were under control, she said, and would not erupt to cause woe for him, but she left the possibility hovering over them, to add spice to the relationship and plausibility to her role.

It seemed to be working. His pleasure in her company was evident, and the more they were together the stronger the bond between them became. She was beginning to indulge in pleasant little fantasies of moving down here permanently from Sacramento, renting an apartment somewhere near his, perhaps even moving in with him—though that would surely be a strange and challenging life, for she would be living with Paul and Ned and Chuck and all the rest of the crew too, but how wondrous, how electrifying—

Then on the tenth day he seemed uncharacteristically tense and somber, and she asked him what was bothering him, and he evaded her, and she pressed, and finally he said, “Do you really want to know?”

“Of course.”

“It bothers me that you aren’t real, Judy.”

She caught her breath. “What the hell do you mean by that?”

“You know what I mean,” he said, quietly, sadly. “Don’t try to pretend any longer. There’s no point in it.”

It was like a jolt in the ribs. She turned away and stared at the wall and was silent a long while, wondering what to say. Just when everything was going so well, just when she was beginning to believe she had carried off the masquerade successfully—

“So you know?” she asked in a small voice.

“Of course I know. I knew right away.”

She was trembling. “How could you tell?”

“A thousand ways. When we switch, we change. The voice. The eyes. The muscular tensions. The grammatical habits. The brain waves, even. An evoked-potential test shows it. Flash a light in my eyes and I’ll give off a certain brain-wave pattern, and Ned will give off another, and Chuck still another. You and Lisa and Cleo and Vixen would all be the same. Multiples aren’t actors, Judy. Multiples are separate minds within the same brain. That’s a matter of scientific fact. You were just acting. You were doing it very well, but you couldn’t possibly have fooled me.”

“You let me make an idiot of myself, then.”

“No.”

“Why did you—how could you—”

“I saw you walk in, that first night at the club, and you caught me right away. And then I watched you go out on the floor and fall apart, and I knew you couldn’t be multiple, and I wondered, what the hell’s she doing here, and then I went over to you, and I was hooked. I felt something I haven’t ever felt before. Does that sound like the standard old malarkey? But it’s true, Judy. You’re the first singleton woman that’s ever interested me.”

“Why?”

He shook his head. “Something about you—your intensity, your alertness, maybe even your eagerness to pretend you were a multiple—I don’t know. I was caught. I was caught hard. And it’s been a wonderful week and a half. I mean that. Wonderful.”

“Until you got bored.”

“I’m not bored with you, Judy.”

“Cleo. That’s my real name, my singleton name. There is no Judy.”

“Cleo,” he said, as if measuring the word with his lips.

“So you aren’t bored with me even though there’s only one of me. That’s marvelous. That’s tremendously flattering. That’s the best thing I’ve heard all day. I guess I should go now, Van. It is Van, isn’t it?”

“Don’t talk that way.”

“How do you want me to talk? I fascinated you, you fascinated me, we played our little games with each other, and now it’s over. I wasn’t real, but you did your best. We both did our bests. But I’m only a singleton woman, and you can’t be satisfied with that. Not for long. For a night, a week, two weeks, maybe. Sooner or later you’ll want the real thing, and I can’t be the real thing for you. So long, Van.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Don’t go.”

“What’s the sense of staying?”

“I want you to stay.”

“I’m a singleton, Van.”

“You don’t have to be,” he said.

The therapist’s name was Burkhalter and his office was in one of the Embarcadero towers, and to the San Francisco multiples community he was very close to being a deity. His speciality was electrophysiological integration, with specific application to multiple-personality disorders. Those who carried within themselves dark and diabolical selves that threatened the stability of the group went to him to have those selves purged, or at least contained. Those who sought to have latent selves that were submerged beneath more outgoing personalities brought forward into healthy functional state went to him also. Those whose life as a multiple was a torment of schizoid confusions instead of a richly rewarding contrapuntal symphony gave themselves to Dr. Burkhalter to be healed, and in time they were. And in recent years he had begun to develop techniques for what he called personality augmentation. Van called it “driving the wedge.”