by Truddi Chase
Stanley wanted her to say it clearly. The woman paused, looked at the floor, and wrung her hands. She couldn’t seem to open her mouth. Finally, she told him that the stepfather had “sexually related” himself to her.
She couldn’t tell him, because she had no mechanism for understanding or expressing such a thing—that beyond “fondling,” her own mind held nothing. For her, the degradation stemmed from the stepfather’s fondling.
“A teenager,” she said. “And I let him do those awful things. What does that make me?”
“Manipulated. That’s what it makes you. Nothing more.”
Relief, secondhand, from Sewer Mouth, took hold. The woman heard herself swearing as the coffee sloshed out of her cup. She swore and cursed and ranted. Stanley planted posthypnotic sentences, in haste and fury and a pride in her progress so deep that he was almost embarrassed.
“Bastard,” she screamed, “I hate him! The feelings, I can’t discount them this time; I can’t say I imagined the recall, it was too real! I was aroused, an animal at five years old—what am I talking about? I was an animal long before I was five!”
“He manipulated you. He was the adult. You aren’t to blame.”
“I understand you,” she screamed again, “intellectually I understand and agree with you, but part of me doesn’t understand a bloody thing and I want to kill him!”
“It’s easy to comprehend something on an intellectual level, but you still have to battle it emotionally. You’ve got to take it slowly.”
Stanley knew that to a certain degree, she was embroiled, finally, and ready for the next plateau. The words, “rode the pink thing back and forth,” could mean only one thing. But he’d heard the change of voice as penetration had been mentioned. Did the woman understand that the act had occurred? She’d screamed out, “I want to kill him.” Did she understand the implications of that either?
Sewer Mouth sat and continued to curse, using words Stanley had never heard before, even when he’d treated abusers in prison; she had variations on cursing that astounded him. In the control booth, Tony had forgotten sound quality and was eagerly writing it all down.
Based on what he’d heard in other sessions, Stanley suggested that they try for attic recall.
The woman balked. The first farmhouse had no attic, and one would have needed a ladder to get into the one at the second farmhouse. No ladder existed in her memory, only a terror of them and attics in general. But Stanley was adamant.
“Rabbit,” he told her again, “may hold the keys to many things. Would Rabbit like to help us?”
“How are you going to get Rabbit to come out?” The idea seemed stupid. “I can’t call any of them. I don’t know how.”
“I want you to concentrate on relaxing. Relax, take in the air, let it out.” Stanley’s voice droned on, insisting that she keep breathing and relax.
Control, Sister Mary hissed in the woman’s mind. Keep it. This will only be disgusting, dirty, and vile.
Stanley called Rabbit. The woman was too far into it now to come back. She began the count at ten, moving backward number by number, hearing voices in her head demanding control. A strain more mind-bending than any other time tore between the voices in her head and the voice on her left that was Stanley’s. She drifted past the final count of one, lost and unable to cooperate.
She hesitated, bereft.
Listen and watch, he said in the thickest of brogues. Escape, like denial, creates its own places. But the woman does not know that. She believes herself t’ have no options except t’ join us or Stanley.
But they are the same, Twelve said slowly, so why bother to give her a third option?
The woman must choose her own colours.
You, Twelve laughed, are a bastard of the first water.
You, he said, are learnin’ the language.
Without any warning the woman was in a part of her mind in which she’d existed all these years, away even from her own selves—and had never known at all.
It isn’t really yours, darlin’, except that everythin’ is yours, just as everythin’ is ours. Do y’ like the riddle? ’Tis no riddle, ’tis fact; each man among us has his own and only as the spirit moves the man, not as the man is moved against his will, does the sharin’ become a positive thing, an enhancement if y’ will.
The space, vast and comforting, shut Stanley out. It shut everything out. The light. Wonder filled every fiber, she felt every last particle of herself and she felt nothing. It was that kind of space. Quiet, a haven of it, shimmered unending, brilliant white. Not a glimmer of light, distant and easily ignored, or blazing like a beacon, or light framed in a friendly window on a dark night.
This light flowed forever and it consumed the space before her—everything without end. Without beginning.
Y’ don’t have t’ go back. The choice is yours.
The woman smiled and nodded. Time had lost all meaning and nothing existed except the complete wonder of her mind, bathed in the excruciating white light. Free and drifting she wandered, smiling and content within a blinding brilliance. Her selves might have been on another planet; they could not hurl anything at her. Stanley might have been on another planet. He certainly wasn’t up here, and could not reach into the light to pick and prod at shreds of memory, knifing through them to expose the rot.
She felt her own drool on limp fingers.
* * *
On her way to the ladies’ room, she passed the control booth, marveling at how quickly the time had gone in this first part of the session. How long had she been up there in the white light? It never occurred to her that it might be out of the ordinary, or even extraordinary. It seemed so natural, now that she’d experienced it.
Tony’s voice, conveying worry and frustration over another loss of sound, an extensive one this time, floated past her ears. Tony was complaining that the equipment had been completely overhauled since their last filming; it had been in perfect working order. So why, he wondered to Stanley, hadn’t it worked during this filming session?
In the Tunnel, Twelve shivered. The white light, she said. How did you do that?
The woman did it herself, he answered. I only told her that she was able.
You gave her permission?
Merely encouragement. ’Tis better sometimes than a full round o’ ammunition. And now she’s got a thing all her own, a crutch for the journey just ahead.
Elvira could not resist. “All god’s chilluns,” she sang, “got somethin’, and somethin’ ain’t plenty for me . . .” and she took off running in the Tunnel darkness. Sister Mary Catherine’s beads were clicking at her heels.
Under light hypnosis, the woman smiled. She made it this time with Rabbit, up into the attic, through the dark hole in the upper hallway ceiling of the second farmhouse. Suddenly she was surprised to feel her stepfather’s arms around her middle, to feel the pressure of those arms; and when part of her mind rebelled at that, another part whisked the rebellion away.
He was helping her, he said in a low, husky voice. “Sssh. Touch it. Touch it,” he said. She heard him clearly as she squatted, unleashing the pink thing to let it move and swell.
Silence. The emotionally painful reality was the very familiar smell of the attic, the thin, faint whisper of light filtering in from the eaves. It was the pink thing in front of her face. The stepfather moved it for her now, his voice encouraging. He placed her so that the pink thing abrased her flesh in that one particular spot her mother had forbidden her to touch.
The woman wanted to cry for help, but her mouth was closed over the words and would not open. The hypnotic state weighed her down. Or perhaps it was only guilt that made her feel so heavy. An eerie, far-off, wailing sound came closer and, as it did, became first a moan and then the keen of an animal trapped in the woods. The seams on her blouse threatened to split under the strain of muscle swelling along her arms. She grabbed at her throat, trying to quiet the sounds she
couldn’t be making.
“Calm, calm, Rabbit.” Stanley’s voice at the woman’s side was an incantation but neither Rabbit nor the woman could respond with calmness. Stanley began the count back, from zero to ten but Rabbit had difficulty with sequential numbers. The woman, unable to shout “Help,” willed it instead, and help came, to Rabbit who mouthed the numbers one by one, stumbling all the way.
Gradually the wail subsided in the studio, but the woman still trembled. Stanley’s eyes were on the clipboard. It served no useful purpose to let a client coming out of that kind of hypnotic recall see the therapist’s reaction.
It seemed to Stanley that Rabbit was the only Troop member who expressed remembered pain. Especially the pain of what had obviously been penetration in the attic recall just now.
The woman sagged on the cushions. Her face was changing rapidly from awe to disbelief, to a helpless kind of terror, to rage and then embarrassment. Stanley noted her exhaustion. It was a difficult session for him as well. Her long withdrawal during the first half of it had forced him to wait interminably. He had no idea why she’d done it or why she’d come around so well after the break.
As to her embarrassment, a student had asked after viewing one of the tapes if it had anything to do with the era in which the woman had grown up. Stanley had replied that young incest victims today went through the same agony in the face of sexual recall. Victims, he’d said, including males, choked at expressing the degradation and dehumanisation they’d felt as children at the hands of supposedly trusted adult authority figures. Adult rape victims, he’d added, went through it, too.
At times he found it amazing—how everyone wanted to pin a victim’s reactions to sexual child abuse on anything but the abuse itself.
Recall was getting easier for her to achieve, if not to deal with, but each time another memory surfaced it tore to shreds what little self-esteem he’d built up. He wasn’t sure what capabilities belonged to her and what belonged to the Troop members. At this point, all he could do was “patch” and hope he was aiming at the right wound.
He pointed out to her her numerous accomplishments, her high energy level, her powers of concentration. He’d done the same thing before and knew it would take many repetitions to sink in.
“I know what you’re saying,” the woman told him. “But worthlessness sits right here in my brain; the idea of it blocks everything else. I get so scared that by losing control each time the recall surfaces, I’ll go to pieces. I’ll wind up a bag lady.”
“There isn’t any danger of that,” Stanley said because he had to; it was part of the mending process.
“I can’t operate the way I’m supposed to when the recall hits. I get tired,” she whispered.
“That’s alright, of course you’re tired. Others aren’t.” Stanley said it, hoping the others didn’t become tired.
Shoring up finances and choosing another occupation seemed to be on everyone’s mind today. Ten-Four didn’t give Stanley a name, she just barged into the conversation and began to talk, keeping her eyes hidden behind the bangs. She outlined all the jobs she’d gotten over the years, without benefit of a college education.
“Until we got into real estate, we were cheap labour. Now we can’t afford the office rent; we can’t even afford to renew the broker’s license. But there’s got to be something we can do, even if it’s becoming a housekeeper for someone.”
Ten-Four bit her thumbnail and frowned. Stanley watched her without knowing her name. She appeared competent to survive almost any financial disaster. He suspected that apart from harbouring a deep resentment, she did not become involved in disasters. As the woman emerged again, the resentment was gone. As she spoke, Stanley caught a glimpse of what her world was like. For her, none of Ten-Four’s conversation existed; she was still on the topic of being tired.
“I slept a lot in high school,” she said. “I was so afraid that I wouldn’t graduate. I still have nightmares about it.”
“Or,” Ten-Four said, “we could become a waitress, except that after being a real estate broker, people would recognise us. There’d be those looks.”
* * *
There seemed to be no way around one huge problem. Stanley wasn’t the only one who recognised it. Some of his colleagues told him that night at dinner for a departing fellow professor, what he already knew: the Troops had survived because the memories were compartmentalised, so that no one had to endure the whole picture. What kind of chaos, they asked, would be created by consolidating all that memory?
Several of them suggested a series of drugs that might dull the woman’s reactions; some recommended hospitalisation.
Two days later, Captain Albert Johnson put it more succinctly.
“You can’t dance her through therapy fast enough to outrun the consequences of all that memory, Stanley. Something’s going to give, long before she’s mended. It’s nature’s way. First you get the wound, then you heal. While you’re healing, though, you remember the gunshot and the bastard behind it. Your client isn’t a cop, she didn’t get her wound in the line of duty. She’s going to want redress.”
TWENTY-TWO
ALBERT’S comments stayed with Stanley and bothered him every time another plateau was reached. The plateaus were a natural evolutionary flow; therapy at work. But each one brought recall that heightened the Troops’ anger and reinforced the validity of Albert’s theory.
“I hear myself saying ‘I,’ Stanley,” the woman told him one night over the phone, “but there’s no way to explain how I . . . am just not speaking. It all comes from behind me, through me. I can’t separate me from them, except to say . . . it isn’t me, it’s them.”
He believed her. He tried to understand. When he did, he heard the tears and another voice.
“We’ve always run at the last moment, from violence of any kind,” Sewer Mouth said. “But I gotta tell you, things are changing. I figured out that there’s a part of the recall when it hits that’s just plain sadness. Because inside each flick is also a memory of how beautiful those farms were and what life could have been like without the mother and the stepfather. Sometimes the beauty just flooded you: summer grass, the hedgerows alive with sweet wild cherries and strawberries; raw earth, the smell of celery growing. Winters, like a white blanket covered in diamonds, and we skated on the big pond . . . in the fall you smelled apples and wood-smoke and saw all the little animals getting ready to go underground and you wished you could go with them. Every Thanksgiving we went into the woods and gathered moss and pretty leaves, red berries and pine cones, for the centerpiece on the dining room table. But spring—you had to catch your breath. The apple orchards burst into bloom overnight. The fragrance would hit you one morning and you’d lean out the window and there they’d be, apple trees turned to pink lace with a thousand bees buzzing.”
Stanley heard Sewer Mouth’s intake of breath, her amazement at what had loosened inside herself.
“There’s an apple tree at the first farmhouse,” she said at the other end of the line. “I never want to see an apple tree again in this lifetime. I think I want blood, Stanley. I want to see it flow. I want that bastard as dead as some of us.”
* * *
“Bloody shit,” said Sewer Mouth to Elvira. “Our names are down on the pages now. Shit.”
“Sad but true,” Elvira said. She began to hum new words to an old Alfred Hitchcock theme song. “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, in and out of the monkey’s snout. . . .”
The combination of Troop anger, fear, and sadness over the loss of their anonymity still did not fade. Elvira hummed another favourite to the tune of “London Bridge Is Falling Down”: “Lizzie Borden took an axe. . . .”
“Shit,” said Sewer Mouth.
And so it went. In the midst of what they felt was their world being torn apart, some Troop members called for caution and a slower pace, afraid for the woman. Mean Joe, of course, had known all along
where the real need for protection lay. He hunched his shoulders these days, like a Pittsburgh Steeler blocking the New York Football Giants en masse, and his eyes were flintier than ever.
But no matter who among them screamed caution, other Troop members would not be held back. Memories by thought transference came to the woman and, with the Weaver’s help, vanished. Until one day something stuck and allowed the other self who held that memory to break through and voice it clearly. The woman came into the session, muttering about hennaed hair and sausage curls. Through the eyes of another Troop member, she was seeing the stepfather’s mother very clearly for the first time. As the picture grew in detail Stanley knew they’d uncovered clues to the stepfather’s background, to his upbringing as a child, and possibly to his adult proclivities as a child abuser.
“Alma, my stepfather’s mother, is as clear to me as if she were sitting here. A heavy woman, soft, no muscle tone at all; she overflowed the seams of sheer, flowered dresses. She wore black, high-heeled shoes with bows and glittery, fake jewelry. Her mouth was plump and slack, a big blotch of purple or orange lipstick.”
The woman described a kind of mutual flirtatious, doting attitude between Alma and her son. On the other hand, Alma seemed to ignore her daughter Velma, a younger, morose version of herself. Alma’s husband had been silent most of the time, too. Alma’s husband, son, and daughter waited on her hand and foot.
In the initial interview, the woman had written the stepfather’s first name on a piece of paper for Stanley. As if to have it pass her lips would be an act of self-defamation. Only two other Troop members had said the name aloud since then, and both times it had been in scathing tones. The woman did not use his first name now. She outlined a relationship between the stepfather and Alma that sounded more like lovers than mother and son; a relationship that excluded Alma’s daughter and husband.