Virgin, Warrior, Priest, Hero

Lucy is an earnest member of St. Mary’s Girls’ Choir. While her peers mock and rebel, Lucy clings to faith with unsettling intensity, convinced she is touched by God. Her first mystical vision—of Christ and the Virgin Mary—ignites a desperate need to experience divine grace physically and repeatedly.

When the boys’ choir joins the girls for Easter service, Lucy meets Tom, whose charm and irreverence contrast sharply with her innocence. Exploiting her spiritual longing, Tom manipulates Lucy with a fabricated story of divine visions, leading to a traumatic encounter that shatters her understanding of faith, body, and self. Lucy interprets the experience through a distorted religious lens, but the aftermath is confusion, shame, and psychological fracture.

Act II: Lucy and Indians (1967)

Lucy now lives in a Catholic group home. She’s spent two decades institutionalized, medicated, and largely forgotten. Much older than the other residents in the group home, she’s told she must leave, since she makes enough from her job to rent a room of her own. She protests that she hates the job and they’re about to fire her anyway, to no avail. Staff has noticed her behavior becoming erratic, but she falsely denies that she’s stopped her medication.

The typing pool where Lucy works is across the street from the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, DC. Staring at the sign triggers a fusion of childhood memory, guilt, and identification with suffering. She begins to imagine herself as a Native American warrior. Her body becomes what she believes.

On the National Mall, she takes the mounted Park Police Captain to be the reincarnation of Custer. Her peaceful intent collapses into vengeance as visions of historical atrocities flood her mind. In a hallucinatory climax, she attacks — scalping the captain, setting the Capitol Building ablaze, and toppling the Washington Monument. She’s shot repeatedly by Park Police.

Cut abruptly to reality: A disheveled woman runs across the National Mall and collapses in exhaustion. No fire. No horse. No army. No wounds. Only Lucy.

Act III: Madmen (1987)

Lucy lives in a decaying institutional facility. She fully believes she’s a man and a priest. Her imaginary companion is MOTT, a former priest undone by his own collapse of faith. They exist in a shared limbo, detached from staff and patients alike. Their sanctuary is an abandoned solarium.

Her world is invaded by intrusive murders orchestrated by an attendant. She finds redemption in saving a young woman but is shot dead in the process. The scratched Gregorian Chant from her childhood begins again — but slowly, the scratches and pops fade. The sound becomes pure, transcendent, no longer distorted by memory or trauma. She smiles. Her eyes open — not in confusion, not in delusion — in peace.

Identity Fragments is a story of a life misinterpreted — by institutions, by men, by religion, and by Lucy herself. In the end, Lucy becomes neither saint nor warrior nor priest. She becomes wholly human.