Nicole should have walked away. Instead, she bought Sybil a drink.
But it was too late. The next morning, Sybil—the original Sybil, the one who wore cardigans and drank whiskey neat—was gone. In her place sat a woman Nicole didn’t recognize. Blank face. Flat voice. When Nicole asked who she was, the woman smiled and said, “I’m nobody. Isn’t that what you wanted? A clean slate for your script?”
They talked for three hours. Or rather, Sybil talked, and Nicole listened. Sybil spoke in fragments. One moment she was a child in Ohio, hiding from a father who threw clocks. The next, she was a medical student in London, cutting into a cadaver and realizing she felt nothing. Then a painter in Mexico City, then a taxi driver in Cairo. Not past lives. Parallel lives. All of them happening now.
“I have nine selves,” Sybil said calmly. “They don’t get along. But they all live in here.” She tapped her temple. “You act like different people. I am different people. The difference is, you get to go home afterward.”