“But she was just here,” he says.
“Yeah,” I tell him, “but now she’s not. Now it’s just me.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not following,” he says, asking again if I’m feeling okay, if I’m all right, encouraging me to drink up the water.
“I’m feeling fine,” I say, drinking the water in one big swig. I’m thirsty and hot.
“Dr. Foust—”
“Camille,” I remind him, searching the room for a clock, to see what time it is, how much time I’ve missed.
He says, “Okay. Camille, then.” He shows me one of the pictures from the tabletop, the one where she’s covered in her own blood, eyes open, dead. “Do you know anything about this?”
I leave him hanging. Can’t let the cat out of the bag just yet.
SADIE
I’m alone in a room, sitting in a chair that backs up to a wall. There isn’t much to the room, just walls, two chairs, a door that’s locked. I know because I’ve already tried leaving. I tried turning the knob but it didn’t turn. I wound up knocking on the door, pounding on the door, calling out for help. But it was all in vain. Because no one came.
Now the door easily opens. A woman walks in, carrying a teacup in her hand. She comes to me. She sets a briefcase on the floor and helps herself to the other chair, sitting opposite me. She doesn’t introduce herself but begins speaking as if we already know one another, as if we’ve already met.
She asks me questions. They’re personal and invasive. I bristle in the chair, drawing away from them, wondering why she is asking about my mother, my father, my childhood, some woman named Camille whom I don’t know. In my whole life, I’ve never known anyone named Camille. But she looks at me, disbelieving. She seems to think I do.
She tells me things that aren’t true, about myself and my life. I get agitated, upset when she says them.
I ask how she can claim to know these things about me, when I don’t even know them for myself. Officer Berg is responsible for this, for sending her to speak to me, because one minute he was interrogating me in his tiny room, and the next minute I’m here, though I have no idea what time it is, what day it is, and I can’t remember anything that happened in between. How did I get here, into this chair, into this room? Did I walk here myself or did they drug and bring me here?
This woman tells me that she has reason to believe I suffer from dissociative identity disorder, that alternate personalities—alters, she calls them—control my thoughts, my behavior from time to time. She says that they control me.
I take a deep breath, gather myself. “That’s impossible,” I breathe out, “not to mention utterly ridiculous,” I say, throwing my arms up in the air. “Did Officer Berg tell you that?” I ask, getting angry, losing my composure. Is there nothing Berg won’t do to pin Morgan Baines’s murder on me? “This is unprofessional, unethical,illegaleven,” I snap, asking who is in charge so that I can demand to speak to him or her.
She answers none of my questions, but instead asks, “Are you prone to periods of blackouts, Dr. Foust? Thirty minutes, an hour pass that you can’t remember?”
I can’t deny this, though I try. I tell her that’s never happened.
But at the same time, I don’t remember getting here.
There are no windows in this room. There’s no way to get a sense of the time of day. But I see the face of the woman’s watch. It’s upside down, but I see it, the hands in the realm of two fifty, but whether that’s a.m. or p.m. I don’t know. Either way, it doesn’t matter, because I know good and well it was ten, maybe eleven o’clock in the morning when I walked to the public safety building. Which conceivably means that four—or sixteen—hours have passed that I can’t account for.
“Do you remember speaking to me earlier today?” she asks. The answer is no. I don’t remember speaking to her. But I tell her I do anyway. I claim I remember that conversation quite well. But I’ve never been a good liar.
“This isn’t the first time we’ve spoken,” she tells me. I gathered as much from her line of questioning, though that doesn’t mean I believe her. That doesn’t mean she isn’t making it all up. “But the last time I was here, I wasn’t speaking to you, Doctor. I was speaking to a woman named Camille,” she says, and then she goes on to describe for me a pushy, garrulous young woman named Camille who is living inside of me, along with a withdrawn child.
I’ve never heard anything as ridiculous in my whole life.
She tells me that the child doesn’t say much but that she likes to draw. She says that the two of them, this woman and the child, drew pictures together today, which she shows me, plucking a sheet of paper from her briefcase and handing it to me.
And there it is, sketched with pencil on a sheet of notebook paper this time: the dismembered body, the woman, the knife, the blood. Otto’s artwork, the same picture I’ve been finding around the house.
I tell her, “I didn’t draw that. My son drew that.”
But she says, “No.”
She has a different theory about who drew this picture. She claims that the child alter inside of me drew it. I laugh out loud at the absurdity of that, because if somechild alterliving inside of me drew it, then what she’s saying is that I drew this picture. That I drew the pictures in the attic, in the hallway, and left them around the house for myself to find.
I did not draw this picture. I did not draw any of the pictures.
I’d remember if I did.
