When She Was Bad

found herself wondering which version she’d be seeing in her next nightmare.

As soon as Wells had signed off, the screen split vertically in two, silently rolling the TPP credits on the right half, while the left half ran a visually elongated promo for the show coming up next on The Crime Channel. It was a two-year-old documentary about a DID patient up in Washington whose alter had attacked his therapist.

Irene, who’d seen it before, turned the volume down and began channel surfing idly, her mind a thousand miles away again. She was thinking about her upcoming trip to Salem, the Oregon capital, to testify before a committee looking into the alleged abuses of electroshock therapy protocol at the Reed-Chase Institute. Irene had at first been reluctant to participate in what looked like a very public flogging of a very dead horse, but eventually she’d decided that someone had to speak up for poor Al Corder, if only to point out that however misguided his methods, he might very well have been on to something.

Exhibit One, of course, was the astonishing improvement in Lily DeVries’s condition. As soon as the legal hassles were behind her (in light of Alison Corder’s testimony that Lily had saved her life, the Portland DA had decided to go the slam dunk route and charge Maxwell with all four Oregon murders), she’d enrolled full-time at CSUMB-California State University Monterey Bay, also known jocularly as UFO, the University of Fort Ord, because it was situated on the vast, decommissioned military base.

The university was currently on spring break, Irene was reminded, when she looked up and discovered she had channel surfed her way from The Crime Channel to MTV’s Spring Break Party-Cancun. Lily had been frantic for permission to attend the event with a few of her college girlfriends, but after conferring with Irene, now counseling Lily on an as-needed basis, Uncle Rollie had made a counteroffer of an all-expense-paid trip to Washington, D.C., for Lily and a friend.

And judging by the goings-on currently being aired, thought Irene, they’d made the right decision. The overheated atmosphere, the girls in their skimpy tops and butt-floss thongs, the bare-chested, sweating boys, the orgiastic dancing, the overt sexuality, the whole suds-and-Ecstasy subculture, would surely have been-

Ohmigod! thought Irene, doing a full Wile E. Coyote double take, jaw dropped, neck outstretched, eyeballs all but popping out on springs. “Pen!” she shouted. “Pen, get down here quick!”

Pender had never much enjoyed watching himself on television. He’d been up in his study, formerly the spare room, playing poker on the Internet when he heard Irene shouting. He tore off his computer glasses like Clark Kent turning into Superman, grabbed a 3-iron from the golf bag leaning against the wall, and was out the door and down the stairs in seconds, hauling ass faster than he’d hauled it in years.

But then, there was a lot less ass to be hauled. The Grim Reaper is a hell of a motivator-Pender had lost fifty pounds since his heart attack, given up cigars, and cut way down on the Jim Beam. He’d also kept his promise never to use a golf cart again, and coincidentally or not, had lowered his handicap two whole strokes-it was now under the drinking, if not the driving, age.

“What is it?” he called, racing into the living room.

“Take a look at this.” Without turning around, Irene nodded toward the television.

Pender circled around behind the sofa, sheepishly dropping the 3-iron behind it, and sat down next to her. The two had been living together for almost seven months-Irene had insisted on Pender moving in with her while he was recuperating from his heart attack, and once they’d become lovers, it hadn’t seemed to make sense for him to pay rent elsewhere when they were sleeping together every night anyway.

“What is this, some kind of a test?” he asked her incredulously. In Pender’s experience, women Irene’s age-or any age-did not customarily insist upon their boyfriends watching nubile, half-naked college girls shaking their hooters.

“Wait, she just moved out of the picture…watch the right side of the screen…there! There she is-red top.”

He had already spotted the well-developed girl in the red top-he just hadn’t looked up at her face. “Oh shit, oh dear,” he said, feeling like a dirty old man. “I thought she was supposed to be in D.C., taking in all the fine educational sights.”

“So did I,” said Irene.

“She does seem to be enjoying herself,” said Pender after another few seconds.

“She does, doesn’t she?” Neither of them had taken their eyes from the screen.

“Are you going to tell Rollie?”

The show cut to commercial. Irene hit the Mute button on the remote. Her heart (to use a nonpsychiatric term) was so full she couldn’t find words to express what it meant to her to see Lily dancing, happy, surrounded by kids her own age. Pride was in there somewhere, parental and professional. Also awe, and a little understandable trepidation. She turned to Pender with tears in her eyes. “Sweetheart,” she said softly, “if I’d had boobs like that when I was her age, I’d have been shaking them, too.”

2

“Good evening, Mr. Maxwell-and how’s my strong silent type this evening?” Swingshift nurse, fat, cheerful, sloppy in white. Max, paralyzed from the neck down, followed her with his eyes, mentally gagging and hog-tying her.

“Ooo-if looks could kill,” she said forbearingly. “Look here, I’ve brought your dinner. Let me see now, we have…sirloin steak, medium rare, peas, mashed potatoes, garlic bread, Caesar salad, hold the anchovies….”

All nonsense, of course. Max received his nutrition through a nasogastric feeding tube. He tried to stop her from talking by the sheer force of his loathing, but all she had to do was move out of his direct line of sight and she would disappear. Max could no more have turned his head than he could have tap-danced his way out of the state- run shit hole to which he’d been confined since his extradition to Oregon, pending a dozen trials that were now unlikely to ever take place.

For one thing, Max’s lawyers could now legitimately argue that he was unable to aid in his own defense-the doctors were split on whether his continued mutism, even when the feeding tube was removed, was physical, voluntary, or psychosomatic. For another, not many prosecutors were all that keen on trying a man who’d have to be wheeled into the courtroom tied to his wheelchair, with urine dripping into a baggie at his side and his respirator, plugged into a permanent tracheostomy hole, going hiss-suck! hiss-suck! every five and a half seconds.

So the view from the antique, horizontally rotating Stryker frame never really changed. It only shifted between the discolored, water-stained, off-white ceiling tiles and the one-foot-square, black-and-white floor tiles whenever the staff got around to clamping a canvas stretcher on top of him and spinning him around like a pig on a spit. There was a window somewhere off to one side, but all he could see of it was the waxing and waning of daylight.

As if being sentenced to life without parole in his own body weren’t punishment enough (only the State was debarred from cruel and unusual punishment: nature practiced it on a regular basis), every so often Max would be stricken by a headache. For the able-bodied, even the able-bodied migraine sufferer, it’s hard to fathom the effects of a headache on someone who only has sensation from the neck up-let’s just say that old cliche about being in a world of pain had never been more applicable.

And there was another factor that exacerbated his suffering: Max had skated through most of his existence without having to endure even prolonged discomfort-that, after all, had always been Lyssy’s job. From youthful boredom to third-degree burns, from gas pains to gunshot wounds, from aches to amputations, the system had always had Lyssy as its scapegoat.

But Max could no longer summon Lyssy at will. He’d tried, those first few months, fucking Jesus how he’d tried. Raging, cajoling, threatening, promising-nothing worked. Even worse (dear God and all the angels in heaven and all the devils in hell, how many layers of “even worse” were there in this stinking onion of existence), Max himself had been unable to retreat to the dark place-it was as if Lyssy had somehow locked the door behind him. The door in the wall that didn’t exist.

Sleep was the only refuge left to Max-but with sleep came dreams even less bearable than his waking hell. He could never fully recall them when awake, but they must have been pretty awful if he could wake up to all this with even a transitory sense of relief.