Legends

“Creating a working legend didn’t happen overnight. It took a lot of time and effort. The details were worked out with the help of a team of experts. Odum smokes Beedies, Dittmann smoked Schimelpenicks when he could find them, any thin cigars when he couldn’t. Odum didn’t eat meat, Dittmann loved a good sirloin steak. Odum is a Capricorn, Dittmann didn’t know what his Zodiac sign was and couldn’t have cared less. Odum washes and shaves every day but never uses aftershave lotions. Dittmann washed when he could and doused himself with Vetiver between showers. Odum is a loner; the handful of people who know him joke that he prefers the company of bees to humans, and there’s a grain of truth to that. Dittmann was gregarious; unlike Odum he was a good dancer, he liked night clubs, he was capable of drinking large quantities of cheap alcohol with beer chasers without getting drunk. He did dope, he solved crossword puzzles in ink, he played Parcheesi and Go. When it came to women, he was an unconditional romantic. He had a soft spot for females”—Martin remembered a mission that had taken Lincoln to a town on the Paraguayan side of Three Border—“who were afraid of the darkness when the last light has been drained from the day, afraid of men who removed their belts before they took off their trousers, afraid life on earth would end before dawn tomorrow, afraid it would go on forever.”

“And you—”

“I don’t do dope. I don’t play board games. I don’t do crossword puzzles, even in pencil.”

“So Odum and Dittmann are antipodes? That means—”

“Lincoln Dittmann would know what antipodes means. And in a corner of one lobe of my brain I have access to what he knows.”

“What does this access consist of?”

“You’re not going to believe this.”

“Try me.”

Martin said, very softly, “There are moments when I hear his voice whispering in my ear. That’s how I came up with those Walter Whitman lines.”

“Lincoln Dittmann whispered them to you.”

“Uh-huh. Other times I know what he would do or say if he were in my shoes.”

“I see.”

“What do you see?”

“I see why your employer sent you to us. Hmmm. I’m a bit confused about something. You talk about Lincoln Dittmann in the past tense, as if he doesn’t exist anymore.”

“Lincoln’s as real as me.”

“The way you talk about Martin Odum, it almost seems as if he’s a legend, too. Is he?”

When Martin didn’t answer she repeated the question. “Is Martin Odum another of your fabricated identities, Mr. Odum?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Are you telling me you really don’t know?”

“I thought that’s what you were supposed to help me find out. One of the legends must be real. The question is which.”

“Well, this is certainly going to be more interesting than I expected. You have a very original take on MPD.”

“What the heck is MPD?”

“It stands for Multiple Personality Disorder.”

“Is what I have fatal? Why are you smiling?”

“Multiple Personality Disorder is far more likely to be functional than fatal, Mr. Odum. It permits patients who suffer from it to survive.”

“Survive what?”

“That’s what we’re going to try to work our way back to. Let me give you the short course on MPD. My guess is that somewhere along the line something happened to you. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the trauma took place in childhood—sexual assaults are high on the list of childhood traumas, but not the only things on the list. I had one case about four years ago where a patient turned out to have been traumatized because he played with matches and started a fire that resulted in the death of his baby sister. The trauma short-circuited the patient’s narrative memory. This particular patient developed seven distinct adult personalities, each with its own set of emotions and memories and even skills. He switched from one to another whenever he came under any stress. None of the seven alter personalities—what you would call legends, Mr. Odum—remembered the original childhood personality or the trauma associated with that personality. So you see, switching between personalities—almost always accompanied by a headache, incidentally—was a survival mechanism. It was his way of erecting a memory barrier, of shielding himself from an extremely frightening childhood experience, and it’s in this sense that MPD is considered to be functional. It allows you to get on with your life—”

“Or your lives.”

“Very good, Mr. Odum. Or your lives, yes. My instinct tells me you certainly don’t fit neatly into the literature on the subject, inasmuch as you developed your alter personalities out of operational necessity, as opposed to a psychological necessity. When your psyche decided it needed to disappear behind a memory barrier, you had a series of personalities crafted and waiting to be stepped into. It’s in this sense that you can be said to fit into the Multiple Personality profile.”

“How different were your patient’s seven personalities?”