Alexandra

[Golden Applesauce]

One last thing to mention before we meet Alice. I made minor edits to the previous segment as well.

Alexis has only told a very small number of people about her DID, and Alice is very good at hiding from people she doesn't want to meet. Her parents and Clarence have no idea. Not even her psychiatrist knows. Bob knows, along with two or three other people that I haven't met. The relevant person from that group is her friend Ian, who she spent a lot of time with while Bob was in Japan. Ian himself also has DID; his alters are a tiger and a dragon. Alice wanted to bang Ian!Tiger, the idea of which horrified Alexis. Ian wasn't for it either, and rebuffed Alice's attempts to seduce him. I don't know if he wasn't interested, or if he was turning her down out of respect for Alexis. Either way, Alexis felt safe around him. She made a point of telling me this, I think because she was afraid that Alice would try to seduce me as well.

[Golden Applesauce]

Alexis and I both drive (separately) to my apartment, with the plan that she'd spend the night and we'd figure out what to do next in the morning. The apartment complex's parking lot was extra full that night, so we split up to find spots, and couldn't immediately find each other afterward. My parking lot has four freestanding garages in the middle of it, so there's no place you can stand and have line of sight to the rest of the lot. I think we went in circles around each other for a bit.

"Huuuummaaaaaaaaaaaaan.... ! Human, where are youu?!?!"

I eventually hear Alice calling me. I had expected Alexis to meet me in front of my apartment building, but Alice didn't know which particular building I lived in. That was an Alexis memory.

I go over to her, and she clings to me. "Human, where were you? I was scared! Don't leave me alone like that!"

The first thing I notice is that Alice's voice is completely different from Alexis's: higher pitched, a sort of falsetto, extremely effeminate. So is her breathing, for that matter. Alice keeps her mouth slightly open, and her breath has a panting quality to it that becomes more puppy-like when she's excited. She holds herself differently, slightly crouched, with her head and shoulders down and forward but with her hands held higher up. She turns her whole head if not upper body to look at things. Imagine a cross between an hyper-girly video game character trying to stealth-move and really curious yet vulnerable velicraptor.

She studies the mailboxes while I unlock the outer door. She follows me up the stairs and into my apartment. As soon as she comes in, she plops herself down against against a wall and pulls out her iPhone, saying "Let's see what's she's been up to♪" Alexis takes lots of pictures on her phone. She once mentioned that she liked to take pictures of things so she wouldn't forget, saying that she had bad memory. I didn't think much of it at the time. Alice went through all of the photos taken since she was last out, and all of the Facebook statuses, and a lot of text message history. When she's down, she asks me:

"So you must be... Gol-den... App-ul-sauce?"

Pronouncing a proper name instead of saying "human" is apparently difficult for her, and requires lot of uncertain hand gesturing.

Me: "Yes, that's me. And you must be Alice?"
Alice: "Yeaa~aah." She says it like a kid confessing to something they're not sorry for at all.
Me: "So, um, how'd you know who I am?"
Alice: "Alex talks about you a lot. And I remembered your last name from the mailboxes."
Alice: "Soo... you're not afraid of me?"
Me: "No, of course not."
Alice "Why aren't you afraid of me?"
Me: "You're half my weight, and your shoulders dislocate if you raise your arms over your head. Plus you're like 16. Why would I be afraid of you?"
(She doesn't seem completely satisfied with that explanation.)

The next thing Alice does is curl up on the carpet and start crying, very quietly. I bring some pillows and blankets from my bedroom and lay down next to her. We hold hands, and Alice has me stroke her hair while she cries. She cries about a lot of things. Slowly her voice changes and it's Alexis doing the crying.

It hurts. Everything hurts. People are cruel. Alex is stupid and weak and pathetic and I hate her. If this is all life is I don't want to keep living. I'm tired of hurting. Nothing I ever do is good enough. There aren't any good people in the world. No one cares about me, or anyone else. All Alex does is make things worse because she's pathetic and weak and doesn't stand up for herself. Bob is the first boyfriend I haven't cheated on. Why are you being so nice to me? I'm sorry for crying so much. I'm worthless and pathetic. I couldn't handle my problems so I made up other personalities because I'm not strong enough to do it myself. I miss Bob. I'm not as nice of a person as you think I am. I'm sorry you had to miss work to pick me up. My parents don't love me and I know that but I'm so pathetic I help wanting them to anyway. I'm too broken to save. Bob would be better off with anyone but me. The world would be better off without me. Why are you helping me?

"Why be moral?" was a question that came up a lot in my philosophy and religion classes. People frequently ask Superman and The Doctor why they keep going out of the way to help humans. A common trope in science fiction is for the hero to have to justify the continued existence of humanity to some alien power, in spite of all the objectively awful things humans actually do. I don't think most people expect to actually have run apologetics for life and humanity with real stakes on the line. Maybe part of me did, and maybe that helped. I kept idiotically wishing that I'd paid attention to the speech Picard gave to the glowy blue gas god thing, or finished C.S. Lewis's Perelandra. All I could think of was the scene in the So You Want To Be a Wizard? series where the little sister fails to convince a magic planet-sized computer from halting existence until she abandons words and uploads her entire life experience to it instead.

I did my best to listen to, accept, and validate her pain, while also challenging her toxic thinking. Mostly I said variations on "I know", "I'm sorry", "That does hurt", squeezed her hand, rubbed her back, and held her head. I told her that crying was normal, healthy, and nothing to be ashamed of. There are good people in the world; you just got a bad batch. You don't have DID because you're weak, you've just been through more than any one person can handle so now there's more than one of you; it's a valid, if rarely used, part of the human psycho-immune system. I'm helping you because you're a good person. Because you're important. Because you're a human and humans help each other and that's what makes us different. Because you're a beautiful child of God. Because it offends my sensibilities that the world could so mistreat someone and I refuse to accept it. Because I want to help you and I don't need any reason other than that.

I ask her to promise me not to kill herself. She wails, "But that's... that's so hard. I can't... I can't promise that" and then cries harder. I eventually get her to promise to at least talk to me first before she makes any terminal decisions.

[Golden Applesauce]

Eventually she cries herself out. She asks me if Alice did anything embarassing, or hurt me, or made any moves on me. I reassure her that all Alice did was go through her phone and then break down on the pillow. We get to talking about names. I find out that while she lets everyone call her Alexis, she'd really prefer for people to call he Alex. "Alexis" was what her parents called her, so she doesn't like that name. She just didn't want to make a big deal out of it.

Alice regains control, and expands on her earlier comments about Alex's inadequecy. She has nothing but contempt for Alex, most especially her lack of assertiveness. I start arguing with her that Alex is neither weak nor stupid, but that seems unproductive so I suggest playing a board game. She agrees, and I get out a game called Tsuro, the only game two-player game I have other than chess. Alex and I had been playing it a lot over the past couple of weeks. The only thing was that her colorblindess (did I mention she was colorblind? Alex is colorblind.) made it hard for her to tell some of the pieces apart. She seemed to have trouble with the dull blue, red, and gray in particular. That didn't match any of my other colorblind friends, but I'm not an opthamologist.

Me: "I still don't understand how your colorblindess works, so pick out two pieces you can tell apart."
Alice: "Oh, I'm not colorblind."
Me: "What?"
Alice: "I'm not colorblind. Only Alex is."
Me: "No way."
Alice, going through the eight Tsuro pieces: "Brown, yellow, blue, red, gray, black, green, white. There."
Me: "Holy shit, you're not colorblind."

We play a couple games of Tsuro (it goes fast) and then move on to chess. Alice says she's never played chess before, so I should go easy on her. I start explaining how all the pieces move, but she gets board and tells me to just start the game already. So I set up the board, with myself playing white and her black, and move e4. She moves e5 with pretty much no hesitation. Nf3 is answered by Nc6. We get through all four knights and bishops entering play in a perfectly ordinary book opening. So yeah, she's played chess before, if differently than Alex does. Alex spends a lot of time worrying and second-guessing moves she's thinking about; Alice plays smoothly and is overall more aggressive, although I don't think she's actually any better at the game. The game develops as it normally would when I play Alex, which is to say I start winning pretty quickly. I shove a rook, a knight, and my queen behind her overdeveloped pawn line. Alice takes a long time to move, like she's confused or having a hard time concentrating. She moves a pawn completely unrelated to the crisis behind her lines - a bizarrely bad and pointless move - so I fork and capture her queen.

"Aah!" Alice exclaims. "That bitch messed me up! She made me lose my queen!"
Me: "I don't think it works like that. You're just trying to blame Alex for all of your problems so you don't have to admit that 'stupid' Alex is just as good at chess as you are."
Alice: "Fuck you human! She really did!"

We finish the game (I win). Alice slumps backwards for a second, and then Alex opens her eyes, smiles, and says: "Hah! I made her lose her queen! Payback's a bitch!" She goes on to explain that during the periods where her DID was really bad, Alice would interrupt and throw every single chess game (she played a lot online.) This was the first time she'd gotten to do it back to Alice and she was very proud of herself.

Me: "Before we started, Alice said that she had never played before."
Alex: "Yeah, she lies like that. Probably trying to get you to go easy on her so she could win."
Me: "She also claimed that she wasn't colorblind."
Alex: "She thinks she isn't allergic to cinnamon either. Every time she eats some, she leaves me to deal with the allergic reaction."
Me: "Okay, but -- she went through all the pieces and told me their colors."
Alex: "Really?"
Me: "Yeah."
Alex: "No way."
Me: "So -- this has been bothering me for a while -- but what type of colorblindness do you have? I've never heard of someone being red-blue colorblind."
Alex: "I don't know. I've never been officially diagnosed."

Most colorblindness is a result of one of the three types of color vision cells is absent or mutated. The mutations that break the red and green color vision cells (protanopia / protanomaly, deuteranopia / deuteranomaly) are on the X chromasome, which is why they're so much more common in men. The blue color cone is less commonly affected (tritanopia / tritonomaly), but it's equally common in males and females. That last type seemed to be closest what Alex has, but not quite right. I splurged when I bought my monitor and got one that displays colors well, so I find a tritanopia color vision test online. Alex takes it, and struggles really hard looking for shapes the colored dots. After adjusting for guesses she got was able to find the shape about 65% of the time, which is enough for the test to suggest she should see a real doctor. The next time Alice was out that night, I had her take the same test, only with all three color blindness types thrown in for good measure. Alice flies through the test, getting 100% in all three categories. For good measure I have Alex take the test again, also in all three categories, and she gets similar adjusted scores of 60-70% across all three categories -- highly irregular. You should either have regular color vision or fall into one of the three categories, not be moderately bad across all three.

I'm pretty sure we'll get to the actual doctor next time.