The grown-ups are waiting for her in the basement. There are four or five of them tonight, all standing back in the shadows except for Carnivean, who sits on his black throne, under the red spotlight, naked save for the short goat horns set wide apart on his forehead.
When Alicea and her mother reach the bottom of the stairs, Daddy joins them. Like the others except for Carnivean, they're wearing loose-fitting robes. They walk her to the foot of Carnivean's throne. Grandly, rather like the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland, Carnivean gestures for Alicea to open her robe. She does so; he looks her up and down as if he hadn't seen her dozens of times before, nods approvingly, then steps down from the throne and takes her by the hand.
Her parents move aside; Carnivean leads Alicea over to the divan against the wall. She kneels, bends forward across the soft padded leather. He lifts her crimson cape and flips it over her head, enfolding her in a soft, incongruously private, ruby darkness. She rests her cheek on the back of her crossed hands and tries to tune out the pain.
Alicea knows of course that outside this basement Carnivean is really Mr. Wandmaker who owns the Harley shop where Daddy works. She also knows she must never say that out loud. Mr. Wandmaker took Daddy in when he was orphaned and taught him to be a mechanic, and where would we be without him? With his clothes on he looks big and powerful, but naked he's just gross fat, with a big hairy belly and saggy boobies like an old woman.
When she hears him begin to grunt she knows it's almost over-and also that the worst part is about to begin. For now his weight drops down full upon her and the slapping begins-her buttocks, the back of her thighs, her shoulders and head under the cape; the thrusts grow deeper and more frenzied.
Tonight this final stage seems to go on forever. Alicea feels a funny, pins-and-needles prickling in her head as his weight begins to squeeze the breath out of her. Just before she passes out from lack of air, though, she hears a voice in the darkness-the darkness inside her head, not the darkness under the cape. A man's voice- but not Carnivean's, not Mr. Wandmaker's. A somehow familiar voice, though she's never heard it before.
Alicea?
Yes?
I'm here. I'm going to take care of us now-I'll never let them do this to us again.
Who are you? she asks.
Call me Max, says the voice.
55
“And I kept my promise,” said Max, rubbing his fists against his thighs. “They never did that to her again.”
Irene recognized his voice. She'd missed the switch but observed the grounding behavior. From a purely professional point of view she was fascinated. The birth of an alter-terra incognita in the annals of dissociative identity disorder. “Do you have any sense of where you came from, Max? Where you were before you spoke to Alicea?”
He turned around in the chaise, amused, detached. “Do you, Irene? Do you know where you came from before you were you?”
“No-but I'm not an alter.”
“Neither are any of us, as far as we're concerned.”
“I don't think I'm following.”
“Then let me enlighten you.” He sat up and swung his legs casually over the arm of the redwood chaise. “How do you define an alter, Irene?”
She rattled it off: “‘A dissociated state of consciousness, with a persistent sense of self and a characteristic pattern of behavior and feelings.’”
“Very good. Here's how I define it: an alter is everybody else in here. All the other personalities, or identities, or whatever you want to call them, who inhabit this body-those are alters. I'm just me, the same as you're just you.”
“And if I asked any of the others the same question?”
“You'd get the same answer: ‘I'm me-everybody else in here is an alter.’ ”
“Fascinating.”
“Ain't it, though.” Max resumed his supine position on the chaise. “Oh-and by the way, Irene?”
“Yes?”
“I'm perfectly aware that Useless and some of the others think I'm a demon.”
“Why is that, do you think?”
“Because I made myself known to Alicea while she was getting fucked by a man wearing horns and calling himself Carnivean.”
“I'm not familiar with the name.”
“In demonology, Carnivean is the patron devil of lewdness, and his chief joy is enticing humans into obscene behavior.”
Despite the warmth of the morning, Irene was beginning to feel chilled. Max's behavior while attempting to rape her the previous day, she realized with a mounting sense of horror, was quite similar to Alicea's account of Carnivean's attack on her. Multiples often internalized their persecutors as a way of gaining a semblance of control over that which could not be controlled. Which meant that it was conceivable that on some level Max identified with or embodied Carnivean, that he thought of himself as the patron devil of lewdness and obscene behavior.
Equally troubling was the degree of Max's control over his alter switching. Irene couldn't recall ever having met a multiple who'd switched alters so easily, or with such eerie sureness. She didn't know exactly what that signified, though, or what it might portend. All she was sure of at the moment was that Ulysses Christopher Maxwell Jr. was like no other multiple she had ever encountered.
“Irene? Dr. Cogan?”
“What? Oh, sorry.”
“You need a break or something?”
“No-please go on.”
“Okay-but try to stay with me, hunh? I'm not flapping my gums for the exercise.”
Max's first act, upon taking possession of the body from Alicea, was to throw his head back with all the force he could summon. A crack, a moan, and the weight was off his back. He flipped the cape off his head and looked over his shoulder. Wandmaker, one of his horns knocked askew, was staggering backward across the basement, cupping both hands to his face, dark blood from his shattered nose dripping from between his fingers.
Max did not yet know how to engineer a switch without the cooperation of another alter. Consequently, it was Max who endured by far the worst beating the body had ever received from Ulysses Sr., then spent the next twenty-four hours locked in his bedroom closet in severe pain, without food or water. It would have been longer, but Monday was a school day.
Max knew how to turn both negative experiences into positives, though. He used the time in the closet to convince the others that the helter-skelter anarchy under which they had been living was a thing of the past, and that they would all benefit immensely from the change. Then, on Monday morning, he made sure that his beloved fourth-grade teacher noticed the bruises from the beating.
“Miss Miller was an angel-an absolute angel. One of those teachers that every little boy falls in love with, and every little girl wants to be just like.
“I of course (that's the collective I, by the way) had long since been identified as a gifted child. They made me take the IQ test three times because they couldn't believe the score. Eventually they also recognized that I had total recall. Hypermnesia, the specialist called it.”
“This hypermnesia-is that the function of a particular alter, do you know?”
“Our MTP's name is Mose. He's a freak. Remembers everything, understands nothing.”
“Thank you-go on.”
“With a mind like mine, you'd think somebody would have given me some special attention, but up until fourth grade, all the other teachers expected from me was to learn the lessons and keep my mouth shut. But Miss Miller,
