'Yes.'
'Is he no longer interested in them?'
'No.'
'Why not?'
'His father died.'
'His father taught him about the stars?'
'Yes.'
'He was an amateur astronomer?'
IA-huh.'
'Was his father always interested in the stars?'
'No.'
'When did he become interested in them?'
'After he was hurt at work.'
'Because he had nothing to do?'
'No. He couldn't sleep.'
'Because of the pain?'
'Yes.'
'Did he sleep during the day?'
'Only one or two hours.'
'I see. And one of the constellations your friend's father told him about was Lyra?''Yes.'
'When?'
'Just before he died.'
'When he was six?'
'Yes.'
'Did he ever tell him there were planets around any of the stars in Lyra?'
'He said there were probably planets around a lot of the stars in the sky.'
'One more thing: Why don't you go out and watch the stars by yourself?'
'I can't.'
'Why not?'
'He wants me to stay with him.' Prot yawned. He was beginning to sound tired and I didn't want to push him too far at this point. I brought him back to the present time.
'I think that's enough for one day. You may close your eyes. I'm going to start counting backwards now, from five to one. As I count you will become more and more alert. On the count of one you will be wide awake, refreshed, and feeling fine. Five ... four ... three ... two ... one.' I snapped my fingers.
Prot looked at me and smiled brightly. 'When do we begin?' he said.
'It's already over.'
'Ah. The old 'fastest gun in the west' routine.'
'I know that feeling!'
He had his notebook out; he wanted me to tell him how hypnosis worked. I spent the rest of the hour trying to explain something I didn't fully understand myself. He seemed a little disappointed.
After Jensen and Kowalski had escorted him back to the wards I listened to the tape of the session we had just completed and, with mounting excitement, jotted down my conclusions. It seemed clear to me that prot was a dominant secondary personality who had come into being as a result of the perhaps unexpected death of his alter ego's father, a trauma which was obviously too much for the primary personality to bear. It seemed evident also why he (prot) had chosen an alien existence: his (their) father had instigated in him an interest in the stars and in the possibility of extraterrestrial life occurring among them, and this revelation had come immediately prior to his father's demise.
But this did not account for the extraordinary dominance of prot over the primary personality. It is the secondary identity who ordinarily remains in the background, watching, waiting to take over when the host personality runs into difficulty. My guess was that some far more traumatic event must have drawn the primary-let's call him Pete into a thick, protective shell, from which he rarely, if ever, ventured. And I was more certain than ever that this terrible incident, whatever it was, occurred on August 17, 1985, the date of prot's most recent 'arrival' on Earth. Or perhaps a day or two earlier, if it had taken a while for Pete to 'call' prot, or for him to respond.
Why did I not suspect that prot was a secondary personality earlier on? MPD is not an easy diagnosis under the best of circumstances, and prot never showed any of the symptoms usually associated with this disorder: headaches, mood changes, frequent memory lapses, depression. Except, possibly, for his outbursts of anger in sessions six and eight, and the episode of panic on the Fourth of July, the host personality (Pete) had never made his presence felt. Finally, I was completely thrown off by his other aberrant traits-a dominant secondary personality who is himself delusional, and a savant as well-the odds against such a phenomenon must be astronomical!
But who was Pete, the primary personality? Apparently he was in there somewhere, living the life of a recluse in his own body, refusing to divulge his name or much of his background, except that he was born in 1957, apparently, to a slaughterhouse worker who died in 1963, perhaps somewhere in the northwestern part of the United States, and he had a mother and two older sisters. Not much to go on, but it might help the police trace his origin. Strictly speaking, it was Pete's identity, rather than prot's, that we needed to ascertain. Any information we could get about him, any knowledge of things familiar to him, might facilitate my persuading him to come out.
All this put prot's 'departure date' into an entirely new light. It is one thing for a patient to announce an end to a delusion, but quite another for a dominant alter to disappear, leaving behind a hysteric, or maybe worse. If prot were to leave before I could get to Pete, it might well preclude my ever being able to help him at all.
I wondered whether the unhypnotized prot knew anything about Pete. If not, the plan would remain as before: to bring prot/Pete slowly and carefully, under hypnosis, up to the time of the traumatic event(s) which precipitated Pete's dramatic withdrawal from conscious existence. Even if he did know about Pete, however, hypnosis might still be necessary, both to facilitate prot's recollection and to make possible direct contact with the host personality.
But there was a dilemma associated with this approach. On the one hand, I needed to talk to Pete as soon as possible. On the other, forcing him to relive that terrible moment prematurely could be devastating, and cause him to withdraw even further into his protective shell.
GisELLE seemed a little less cheerful than usual the following Monday morning. 'My friend down at the Sixth Precinct couldn't find any report of a missing person who disappeared from the upper West in August of 1985,' she said, consulting a little red notebook much like the one prot was fond of. 'Somebody killed a man and then himself in a little town in Montana on the sixteenth of that month, and in Boise on the eighteenth another guy ran off with his secretary and a hundred fifty thousand dollars of his company's funds. But your guy isn't dead, and the one who ran off with his secretary is still in the Idaho State Penitentiary. My friend is expanding the search to cover January through July of 1985, and then all of the United States and Canada. It will be a while before he gets the results.'I also know someone in the Research Library at New York Public; during her breaks she's doing some searches for me for the week of August seventeenth. You know newspaper reports of anything unusual that might have happened during that period in Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Nothing there so far, either.' She closed the little book. 'Of course,' she added, 'he might have been raised in the Northwest and then moved somewhere else....'
I told her about prot's (Pete's) father and the slaughterhouse. 'Ha!' she replied. 'I wonder how many of those things there are in the United, States?'
'I don't know.'
'I'll find out,' she said with a wave.
'Wait a minute,' I called after her. 'He was born in 1957.'
'How did you find this stuff out?' she demanded to know.
'Ve haff arrrr vays, mein Madchen.'
She ran back and kissed me on the mouth (almost) before dashing out. I felt about thirteen years old again.
KAREN and I were inseparable after my father's funeral. If we could've lived together, we would have. I especially loved her fat, pink cheeks, which became red and shiny, like little apples, in the wintertime. But it took
