No one but Luz and the children believed that William was alive. There are about a hundred people who have never been accounted for, and it was assumed that William had either been killed during the bombing or had died in the day after. Luz moved them back to Pikesville as soon as they were able, in case William was looking for them. In the year before the Woodholme Country Club took her back, she worked a series of jobs. The kids remember going to a school that was mostly empty, so few people came back. There is no doubt that William’s disappearance affected the family both financially and emotionally. Robert had nightmares, and Inez wet the bed. Both were afraid that things were contaminated. Inez got food poisoning from a hot dog and refused to eat for days. Even now, she is in therapy once a week because she is afraid to eat.
Luz was haunted by the fear that William had been exposed to radiation and was sick. The amount of radiation in the bombs was small, and it dispersed in plumes that trailed south and east, nowhere near Pikesville. She obsessively tracked down as much information as she could about the dispersal of the contaminants. She knew that William’s school trip should not have exposed him (and it didn’t), but she wondered if he had left the museum for some reason. She couldn’t understand, if he wasn’t sick, why he hadn’t shown up on a list of displaced persons, somewhere.
But she couldn’t give up. Finally, a relief worker found a list of children who had been placed in foster homes and gave Luz the number of the social worker who had Simon’s case. The social worker wasn’t sure that Simon and William were the same person, but she gave Luz the phone number of the foster parents. That was on Friday. I asked Luz if she called right away.
“I couldn’t,” she admits. “I started thinking, ‘Why didn’t he call us? What’s wrong?’ I thought that it couldn’t be him. I thought a thousand things. I thought he was angry because I hadn’t come and gotten him.” The next morning she put the kids in the car, and they drove to Brookneal where she rang the doorbell of the foster parents. They sent her to Simon’s job.
“I did it all wrong,” she says. “I should have called him. I didn’t know about the memory thing. I thought maybe something had happened to him, that he had been hurt or abused or … I didn’t know.”
But she had to make the trip. Had to see him. She didn’t know what she would do if it was William and he didn’t want to see them. “When we in Pennsylvania and I kept driving back, trying to get into Baltimore to look for him, every time I got to a barricade and they turned me around, I felt as if William thought I was abandoning him. I wasn’t going to abandon him. I promised him every night, lying in bed, I would not give up. I would find him.” She looks fierce. “And I did.”
Finally in therapy, Simon/William was unable to talk much about either his life in Brookneal or his life in Pikesville. In the presence of his family, he became almost mute. It was too much. Something triggered the creation of Simon, but Stein Testchloff, an authority on Dissociative disorder at Cornell University Medical, says it didn’t have to be either abuse or some terrible event in Baltimore—or, at least, nothing more terrible than getting separated from his class. It appears that some people are predisposed to disassociation. “When someone goes missing for weeks,” he explains, “it usually turns out that they have experienced fugue states before, usually for only a couple of hours.” Luz says that as far as she knows, William never forgot who he was and left home, but as Testchloff points out, William was young and may not have had a fugue experience before. But if he did have a predisposition toward fugue, then the fear and chaos of his experience in Baltimore could certainly have brought it on.
Usually the treatment for someone with dissociative fugue is to bring them out of the fugue state, but William Weir/Simon Weiss doesn’t appear to be in a fugue. Testchloff says appearance can be deceiving. “We think of this as a dramatic thing, a kind of on/off switch. He was William, now he is Simon. But the brain can be much more fuzzy. I think after he’s spent five years of living as Simon Weiss, it is going to be very difficult for him to bring those two histories together.”
Testchloff feels that what has happened to William is close to Disassociative Identity Disorder (DID), which used to be called Multiple Personality. He is reluctant to make that statement, because there is so much misinformation about DID. “Everybody thinks Sybil,” he says. But there is a lot of doubt about Sybil, and, again, everyone assumes it is like the movies—that the separate personalities don’t leak over into each other—when in many cases, some personalities know all about other personalities, and there can be a kind of fluidity in which personalities merge and break apart. Again, popular literature and movies have given an impression that is perhaps less complicated than reality. Testchloff has not seen William and has only reviewed his chart (with the permission of William, his therapist, and his family). He says it seems that Simon now has memories of growing up in Pikesville, but there is some sense in which he has assigned all that to William and holds it at arm’s length.
When asked what he wants, Simon says he wants to keep working for Jim Dwyer. Does he want to continue to see his family?
He does, although he expresses no enthusiasm.
What does he think of his family?
He looks shy. “They’re nice,” he says, almost too soft to hear. “I like them okay.” Then, after a moment, “I always wished I would have a family.”
(Shortly after this piece was written, Simon disappeared for seventy-two hours. He called Jim Dwyer from Norfolk, Virginia, saying he didn’t know how he had gotten there. Dwyer drove to Norfolk and picked him up. Luz and Robert and Inez are still living in Pikesville, but they see William almost every weekend. He has plans to spend Thanksgiving with them.)
THE KINGDOM OF THE BLIND
At 3:17 EST, the lights at DM Kensington Medical did the wave. Starting at the east end of the building, the lights went out and, after just a couple of seconds, came back on. The darkness went down the hall. Staff looked up. It was a local version of a rolling blackout, a kind of weird utility/weather event. In its wake, IV alarms went off, monitors re-set. Everything critical was on backup, but not everything was critical. Some of it was just important, and some of it wasn’t even important, unless you consider coffee a life-or-death substance. Which, for a resident, might be true. It was not life-threatening in the immediate sense, but it wasn’t trivial, and it interrupted two nurses and a resident working on a woman in ICU having seizures, a pharmacist counting meds, a CT scan, a couple of X-rays, and it derailed a couple of consultations. The line of darkness washed across the buildings, leapt the parking lot, split into two parts, and then washed north and south simultaneously across a complex of medical offices.
At 3:21, the same thing happened at UH Southpoint Medical. UH Southpoint was in Tennessee, and Kensington was in Texas. At 3:25 it rolled through Seattle Kellerman, although there it started in the north and went south. The three hospitals were all part of the Benevola Health Network. Their physical plant—thermostats, lights, hot water, and air filtration—were all handled by BHP DMS, a software system. Specifically, by a subroutine called SAMEDI. SAMEDI was not an acronym. It was the name of a Haitian Voodoo loa, a possession spirit. A lot of the subroutines in BHP DMS were named for Haitian loa. The system that monitored lab results and watched for emergent epidemiological trends (a fancy way of saying something that noticed if there were signs of, say, an upsurge in cases of West Nile virus, or an outbreak of food poisoning symptoms across several local ERs) was called LEGBA, after the guardian of the crossroads, the trickster who managed traffic between life and the spirit world. Some programmers had undoubtedly been very pleased with themselves.