Mind + Body by Aaron Dunlap (free books to read TXT) đź“–
- Author: Aaron Dunlap
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With a boy. Was that a joke about what this might look like, or what it was? I didn’t know anything about either. Jeez, she’s sixteen. I don’t know why that seemed so young to me, only seventeen myself. Maybe she was going to turn seventeen soon, because if not I was going to become two years older than her in a month. I could ask her when her birthday is, but I don’t want to keep bringing that up.
I realized just then that I hadn’t said anything in quite a while, so I pulled my eyes from Amy’s salad and asked her, “So what did you tell him?”
“That I was going to the mall with some girlfriends. He doesn’t like to deal with girl stuff so he doesn’t keep track of my friends well enough to know I don’t have any girlfriends,” she said.
Her hair kept falling from behind her ear and into her face. The streaks of color had mostly grown out and what was left had nearly faded away completely. I noticed she wasn’t wearing the “I’m a punk” wristbands she used to wear, and her shirt wasn’t heralding any bands or ironic 1980s fads. She wasn’t using pencil under her eyes anymore either, it made her face look more innocent, younger.
“What about your mom?” I asked. I never heard her say anything about her mother in the few times the conversation wasn’t on me.
Amy held her lower lip in her teeth for a moment before saying, “My mom left about six years ago.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”
She shook her head. “No, it’s all right. She had a breakdown or something, said she couldn’t live with my dad anymore and at first said she couldn’t even look at me. She moved out, never got around to filing for divorce. After a few months she started talking to me again, she calls every once in a while. Kind of distant, still, but I dunno. My dad’s been different since then too; he left the Marines and started doing construction. Sometimes I think he did something that freaked the hell out of her, but he never talks about it.”
“Wow.” I didn’t know what else to say.
Her face flushed for a moment. “Yeah,” she said.
“Do you have any siblings?” I asked.
“Nope, only child syndrome, just like you.”
Just like me.
“But anyway,” Amy continued, “since he keeps his distance from me I get plenty of freedom. If I wanted to I could be doing all kinds of wild stuff.”
“Like driving an hour upstate to go shoot guns with a boy,” I said. We both laughed, I was glad I could bring some levity to the conversation at last.
Amy pulled a napkin around in front of her. “I don’t have a pen,” she said, “but this makes, what, six?”
“What? The shooting?”
“Yeah, the shooting. I’m not like an expert on the matter, but you shouldn’t be able to shoot like that.”
And so the conversation was back on me. “Might bunch it together with the fight thing. Maybe something is just different with my brain where I memorize all the stuff I see in movies, fight scenes and gun fights, and it all simmers there under the surface waiting to be summoned up.”
Amy snuck one of my fries.
I thought for a second and said, “Maybe I’m some weird Remembers Everything Kid, and the FBI or NSA has been paying Mr. Comstock to keep an eye on me and stop the word from getting out until they could figure out a way to use me.”
Amy frowned, “And your dad got close to finding out so they killed him?”
I shrugged. “Maybe he just died. People die. Maybe this is all just some crazy way for me to keep my mind off of the fact that my dad is dead.”
Amy looked disappointed, “I asked you about that before, at Starbucks, and you said you thought this was real.”
“Maybe I wanted it to be real, maybe I wanted to keep going on not even thinking about the reality of the situation and keep my brain in fairy-tale land, maybe I wanted to get you to keep talking to me.”
This conversation was entirely too deep to be taking place at a Wendy’s.
“You think I just talk to you because I think you’re a ninja or Jason Bourne or whatever it is any given minute?” Amy asked defensively.
I didn’t say anything.
“I talk to you,” she went on, “because this is interesting, and you’re interesting. And because you talk back, and don’t just think I want to borrow your chemistry notes.”
“You don’t take chemistry.”
“You know what I mean.”
“You didn’t drink your milk.”
“Are you mad at me now?”
I pressed my back against the chair and leaned my head back. I didn’t know what I was mad at.
“No. I’m just worried, I think, that if this whole thing is real. If there’s some big, government… thing going on here, and it now involves me and guns…” I trailed off.
“What?” Amy asked.
“…then it’s only going to get worse.”
Amy set her elbow on the table and plopped her chin in her hand. “You should knock on wood,” she said.
“You should drink your milk,” I said.
“I’m serious.”
“The table’s formica.”
“That’s not wood?’
“Pretty sure it isn’t.”
“You should find some wood.”
I stood up, we were both done eating. “Come on,” I said, “you can take your milk to go.”
It was dark out now. I pulled out of the parking lot and could see the sign for the highway onramp when a bright light filled my vision. I looked up at my rear-view mirror, the car behind me was flashing brights.
“What is this?” I said to myself, angling the mirror to get the light out of my eyes, then more lights came — these ones red and blue and spiraling. The car behind me was a cop, trying to pull me over.
I swore, and tried to pull over but the road I was on had no shoulder and I didn’t want to just stop in the lane, so I flashed my brakes and kept going slowly until I got to a road I could turn into. It was a residential road with houses on both sides onward as far as my headlights reached. I pulled into the first driveway, and the police cruiser stopped on the road behind my car.
“Were you speeding?” Amy asked.
“No, I don’t thin—” I was reaching for my car’s registration when I suddenly remembered the gun in my back seat; and the hundreds of bullets. And the knife. I might as well have stopped and bought some crack and strapped a dead hooker to my trunk.
I should have found some wood.
I had a psychology class in my junior year at East Fredericksburg High. I loved it. Who cares about algebra homework when you have a paper on sexual deviation due on Monday? The chapter on criminal psychology was interesting, too, and it was right around the time the “Beltway Sniper” was shooting folks in and around my town so we spent a long time going over false empowerment and all that; but my favorite was mental disorders — the pinnacle of which is Dissociative Identity Disorder.
People call it “Multiple Personalities” usually. It’s fascinating, the reality of it. Sure, it’s used as a cheap plot device in a lot of bad fiction to the point that most people start to question whether it really exists (like amnesia), but the mechanics of it are downright admirable.
You see, in some cases when a person’s body is experiencing some severe trauma his mind eventually decides that it’s not going to deal with it anymore, so it ducks back into the dark recesses of the brain and invents, on the spot, a new personality or character to take its own place and handle the trauma. This usually crops up in cases of repeated trauma, like being consistently raped or molested by a relative; the alternate personality will take over and handle it and leaves the “real” personality with no memory of what went on. You just wake up a few hours later, thinking you were asleep while “somebody else” was dealing with the pains of reality.
This creates massive havoc in the brain’s infrastructure, but the biggest problem is the same one associated with all coping mechanisms. As someone who drinks to forget his problems will soon start drinking for no reason, a person whose brain splits off into multiple personalities to avoid dealing with problems will start doing it for no reason. Coping mechanisms are addictive.
People with DID can go their whole lives without consciously realizing that their life is being shared between two or more identities that simmer below the surface and struggle for control.
If those problems could be solved, the concept has a high value for consumer application, as I see it. There’ve been many times when I have to deal with crap and I wish I could just switch off and have someone take over my body and I can wake up later with problems bypassed. Times like when I have to write essays about books I never read or for some reason have to sit around for hours to wait for something, it would be nice if some broken part of my psyche could take over for me and I could just forget it, then come back when it’s all taken care of.
Obviously, when I got in that fight or shot guns that well and couldn’t consciously account for my actions the first thing I thought of was that maybe my dream had come true and I had formed a separate identity to defend myself. I suppose if someone were to have a split personality, the most ideal would be to have one that could put three attackers on the floor in seconds or tag three bullet holes in a straight ascension in center-mass of a target ten yards away; it’s just not realistic. I didn’t show any of the signs of Dissociative Identity Disorder. I was never missing any time, I was always painfully aware of how unusual the world was becoming.
I hadn’t pulled the winning genetic lottery ticket; my brain was all Chris all day.
If there ever were a time when I’d want to leave my body behind and let someone else deal with things for me, it would have been here.
All I could do was stare at the rear-view mirror, past the police officer stepping out of his car, past the unlit street and shadows of mailboxes and sidewalks, hoping I could see into the inky darkness of the back of my mind. If ever there was a time to have a split personality, this was it, and boy was I trying.
I told Amy to slowly move my unused jacket to cover up the bag in the back seat; she did. It was completely dark out now, the only light available was from my headlights bouncing off the garage door of the house I had pulled up to, and the spinning blue and red cascade from the police car parked on the street behind me. It was enough to let me see that the police officer was walking right up to my window.
He looked young, no older than 30. He had long brown hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. His shirt hung loose around his neck and bagged a bit at the waist.
“Don’t say anything unless he asks you a question,” I said to Amy through my teeth. “Don’t look nervous, we haven’t done anything wrong.”
I put my window down, looked the
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