On March 21, Nick brought Milligan from the special-care room, now locked only at night, to the activities room. The slender twenty-seven-year-old psych-tech, who sported a full beard and wore two earrings—a delicate gold loop and a jade stone—in his left ear lobe, had heard of Milligans hostility toward males because of the sexual abuse he had suffered as a child. He was curious about multiple personality, though he was skeptical about the whole idea.

Rosalie, a blond, blue-eyed occupational therapist in her late twenties, had never dealt with a multiple personality before. But after the briefing by Dr. Harding, she became aware that the staff had quickly divided into two camps: those who believed Milligan was a multiple and those who believed he was a con man—faking this exotic illness to gain attention and to avoid going to prison for rape. Rosalie was struggling hard to keep an open mind.

When Milligan seated himself at the end of the table; apart from the others, Rosalie Drake told him that the mini-group patients had decided the day before to make collages that would say something about themselves to someone they loved. “I don’t have anyone I love to make one for,” he said. “Then do it for us,” Rosalie said. “Everyone is doing it.” She held up a sheet of construction paper she was working on. “Nick and I are doing them too.”

Rosalie watched from a distance as Milligan took a sheet of eight-by-eleven construction paper and started cutting photographs from magazines. She had heard of Milligans artistic ability, and now, looking at the shy, quiet patient, she was curious to see what he would do. He worked silently, calmly. When he was done, she walked over and looked at it.

His collage startled her. It showed a frightened, tearful child looking out of the center of the page, and beneath him the name morrison. Looming over him was an angry man and, in red, the word danger. In the lower right comer was a skull.

She was touched by its simplicity of statement, the depth of emotion. She hadn’t asked for anything like this, and it wasn’t what she’d expected. It revealed, she felt, a painful history. She shivered when she looked at it, and right then and there she knew she was hooked. No matter what doubts the others in the hospital might have about him, this, she knew, was not the product of an unfeeling sociopath. Nick Cicco agreed.

Dr. George (so called by staff and patients to distinguish him from his father, Dr. George Harding, Sr.) began to read the relevant psychiatric journals and discovered that the disease known as multiple personality seemed to be on the increase. The doctor made calls to various psychiatrists, and all of them said much the same thing: “We’ll share with you the little we know, but this is an area we don’t understand. You’ll have to blaze your own trail.”

It was going to take much more time and effort than Dr. George had first imagined, and he wondered if he had done the right thing accepting this patient in the middle of a fundraising campaign and expansion program for the hospital. He reassured himself that it was important to Billy Milligan, and important to the profession, to help psychiatry probe the limits of knowledge about the human mind.