the air out like a man who’s just made a tough decision, then nods toward the cross-shaped table.
“No way,” says Lilah. “No fucking way.”
Yes fucking way. Hulk and Mullet Woman each take an arm and lift her onto the table as easily as if she were a scarecrow, then force her arms away from her sides and fasten her wrists to the crosspieces with fleece-lined clamps. “Help me,” she screams, kicking futilely as strong arms yank her legs out straight and clamp her ankles to the table. “Please somebody, help-”
Something is forced between her teeth, cutting her off in mid-scream. She tastes rubber. Another fleece-lined clamp swings over her forehead, clicks into place to immobilize her head. Out of the corner of her eye she glimpses the man in the white coat fiddling with the knobs of a machine about the size of a metal briefcase. Then he turns back from the machine and holds a syringe up to the light.
“You’re going to be taking a little nap now,” he tells Lilah, patting the inside of her elbow for a vein. “That’s all, just a little nap.”
She feels the needle sliding in, then a burning sensation in the crook of her arm. Please, somebody help me, she thinks. Somebody, anybody….
5
Once the short-acting sedative had taken hold, Alan Corder injected his patient with an even shorter-acting neuromuscular blocker known as succinylcholine-brand name, Anectine-to prevent her from breaking any bones while her body was convulsing.
Then an oxygen mask was placed over her nose and mouth, a conducting jelly rubbed on her temples, and the electrodes attached. “Let’s clear now,” Corder said quietly. Patty and Wally stepped back from the table; Corder pushed the green button on the front of the MECTA device, and silently, without drama, one hundred joules of electricity-about enough current to light a 110-watt bulb-passed down the leads into the electrodes, and thence to the patient’s brain, for a duration of one second.
The resulting grand mal lasted thirty endless seconds. Patty looked as though she wanted to throw herself across Lily’s thrashing body to keep her from hurting herself. Corder put his hand on Patty’s arm and smiled reassuringly. “She doesn’t feel a thing, she won’t remember a thing.”
“I know, it’s just…“
“I know.”
Then it was over-nothing to do but wait.
Most laymen, and many mental health professionals, think of electroshock therapy, formally known as ECT, or electroconvulsive therapy, as barbaric and archaic-
Alan Corder had first discovered the efficacy of ECT in treating dissociative identity disorder in the accidental fashion common to so many other scientific breakthroughs. Four years earlier, treating a severely depressed, medication-resistant female patient with several suicide attempts behind her, he decided to try electroshock as a last resort. The results were immediate and spectacular-the patient came out of the anesthetic feeling absolutely
But she was also an entirely different personality. At first Corder was afraid that what appeared to be a case of iatrogenic (therapist-induced) DID was an unwanted side effect of the electroshock. In a follow-up hypnotherapy session, however, he was able to determine that the depressive personality had been an alter all along-it wasn’t depressive disorder the patient had been suffering from, but rather dissociative identity disorder. And after the electroshock, that particular alter never appeared again.
That was the breakthrough Corder been hoping for. He didn’t pretend to know exactly how or why it worked- but then, nobody knows exactly how ECT worked on those other disorders, either. So he continued to treat his patient for DID-every time another alter surfaced, it was back to the ECT table for her. And shortly after Patient One had been discharged as cured, Patient Two, Ulysses Maxwell, arrived at Reed-Chase.
In many ways, Maxwell was the perfect guinea pig for Corder. He arrived with a definitive diagnosis of DID from Irene Cogan, one of the country’s leading experts in the field, and had no relatives to ask questions or raise a fuss. Nor was there much difficulty identifying Maxwell’s alters-each was clearly defined and easily delineated, and one by one, as soon as they appeared, they were dispatched to the cross-shaped table in the ECT room to be shocked out of existence.
That’s how it worked with the first several alters, anyway-the malevolent host alter who called himself Max proved strong enough to resist the initial treatments. But Corder, to whom alters were not people but symptoms, was pitiless, stepping up the voltage with every successive treatment, until finally, after a bilateral jolt of close to 150 joules (roughly the equivalent in foot-pound energy of a 110-pound weight being dropped on a person’s head from a height of twelve inches), Max gave up the ghost-or whatever alters did when they ceased to manifest. Then there was only Lyssy.
Obviously, with such a complete remission, there was no point in treating him for DID. Corder could of course have attempted to treat Lyssy’s amnesia, could have regressed him to foster recollection. But for what benefit, and at what risk? The only benefit, if one could even call it that, would have been to instill a sense of remorse in Lyssy; the risk would be inducing a recurrence of the DID.
So Corder made the decision to treat the developmental rather than the dissociative disorder, to progress Lyssy rather than regress him, and the results spoke for themselves. Over the course of the next two years, using a modified homeschooling Internet curriculum augmented with outside tutors, Corder brought Lyssy forward from kindergarten through high school, until by now he was operating at an adult level, intellectually if not emotionally or socially; it was in furtherance of Lyssy’s social development that Corder had initiated the visits with his own family.
Following his success with Maxwell, Corder had treated two more DID patients with ECT, without asking permission, but with equally spectacular results, and eventually word began going around the DID community, via websites and chat rooms, that something important was going on at the Reed-Chase Institute.
But secrecy was still of paramount importance. The anti-ECT lobby was not just vocal, it was loud and growing increasingly influential-the city of Berkeley, California, for instance, had officially (and illegally, as it proved) attempted to ban electroshock therapy within city limits. And by employing ECT for a disorder other than the ones for which its use had been approved by the American Psychiatric Association, Corder knew he was risking not just his reputation, but possibly even his license.
Fortunately, neither Lyssy nor the other patients Corder had successfully treated with ECT had any idea how their cures had been accomplished-that knowledge had disappeared along with the alters who had undergone the procedure.
And that was the way Corder intended to keep it until he had compiled such a demonstrable record of successes that even the most virulent ECT critics would be unable to deny the efficacy of the treatment-and even then, he expected there would be a hell of a battle when word finally did get out….
Patty and Corder were alone with the patient when she regained consciousness. Thirty minutes had passed- the clamps and electrodes had been removed, the telltale goo wiped from the girl’s temples, and a Band-Aid covered the puncture on the inside of her elbow.
“Lily?” Patty said softly, as the girl’s eyelids fluttered open.
Corder put his hand on Patty’s beefy arm to get her attention, and shook his head forcefully. “Don’t want to plant any suggestions,” he whispered, then tugged her back from the table and took her place in the patient’s line of vision. “How are you feeling?”
“My head,” she whispered, “Oh God, my head.”
“We can give you something for the pain in just a second. First though, I need you to tell me your name.”
A moment of panic; Lilith felt the seconds ticking by as she searched her memory-or rather, searched
