“I don’t know what to do,” Mia Michaels sobbed into the telephone while talking to her closest friend, Lucy Hendricks. “I can’t get in touch with Sonny.” Mia explained that earlier that afternoon, Sonny came home in what appeared to be a dissociative state. Lucy was aware that her friend’s husband suffered from a mild disorder that mimicked schizophrenia but managed it reasonably well by taking a cocktail of prescription medications. The problem was when Sonny forgot to take his meds; if he suffered a head injury or was under an inordinate amount of stress, it could set him off into a place where his perception was separated from reality. Often in these situations he had exhibited alternate personalities and scared the hell out of his wife. Before the age of modern psychiatry, he may have been deemed possessed by the devil, but modern psychiatrists now know that what was once considered possession can now be explained by a host of psychotic conditions, schizophrenia being one of them.

“When was the last time you saw him?” Lucy asked.

“He came home early from work today, and I heard him talking gibberish as he was walking up the stairs toward our room. He was muttering something like, ‘I have to stop this; I have to stop them,’ but it was hard to tell because I was on the phone with my office at the time. He walked through the door to our bedroom, saw me on the phone, and went ballistic. And it looked like he had been bleeding from his head.”

“He seemed a little off when I saw him at the office earlier, but I just thought he was stressed out. How bad did it get?” Lucy had known Mia since kindergarten, and they were extremely close. Mia was fortunate that Lucy and Sonny worked at the same company so she had someone to keep an eye on her husband if his condition start acting up.

Mia explained, “He opened the door to our bedroom and screamed at me for not coming downstairs to let him in.” At other times when Sonny had been in a dissociative state, he claimed that his house keys no longer worked and accused Mia of changing the locks. Mia always kept the front door locked, even when she was at home, but she typically left the back door open, which was how Sonny was able to get in. “He started screaming at me when he saw me on the phone and I had to quickly hang up as I didn’t want my colleagues to hear him.”

“Was he violent? I swear to God, Mia, if he got violent again, you have to call the police on him!” One time when Sonny was in a similar state, he hit Mia, thinking she was a burglar.

“No, he was just really angry about something.” Mia explained that Sonny has been very stressed at work lately and said she thought it had something to do with their company going public the following day. As one of the company’s lead research scientists, she knew that Sonny was under pressure to constantly deliver the innovations that would lead to corporate growth, and she was aware his job could impact the price of the company’s stock. The fact that Sonny was shouting, “I have to stop this,” as he walked up the stairs signaled to her that something was wrong at work, and she suspected that whatever he found out may have helped put him in the dissociative state Mia found him in earlier.

“What do you think he meant by that?” Lucy asked. Mia was so upset that she missed the hints of desperation in Lucy’s tone.

“I don’t even know if he knows,” Mia admitted. “But he ransacked his closet looking for something, threw it in a bag, and then left. I’m really worried about him—he hasn’t been answering his cell since he left the house. I think I’m going to have to call the police and file a missing person’s report.”

“I’m not sure that will help given that he is an adult who hasn’t been missing for at least twenty-four hours,” Lucy said. She was right; the police in South Florida weren’t likely to put finding a missing research scientist who had a bad day at the office high on their list of things to accomplish. “However, I dated a guy last year who is a detective in Fort Lauderdale. Do you want me to call and see if he can come over and talk to you?”

“Lucy, yes—I would really appreciate that. Thank you so much!”

“Don’t think anything of it, Mia; that’s what friends are for. Just stay at home for the next few hours, and I’ll ask him to come over.”

Mia hung up the phone, feeling only marginally better than she did before talking to Lucy.