by Truddi Chase
“I’m sorry,” she said, because if nothing else in the pages was clear or real to her, the emergence of the other selves was. “That’s the way it happens, exactly as it’s written.”
Had Phillips ever mentioned putting her away for a while, Norman asked. The woman misunderstood and told him she was fine. Norman asked if it had been Rabbit, frothing at the mouth and howling, just before the woman had left him for good.
“We think so, yes.”
“You think so? You mean you haven’t catalogued these people yet?” Norman sounded horrified.
“It takes time. Some of them are very frightened. There are so many of them.”
“How many?” he demanded.
“Over fifty to date.” She didn’t give him the new figure. Norman would never believe it.
He made a choking sound. The woman felt the anger thinning out. Norman, a layman without Stanley’s background, understood, merely because he’d been shown the actuality of it by the manuscript. There was hope.
* * *
“Sorry,” the man said, his arms loaded with packages.
“You’ve got super reflexes, mother.”
Page grinned as they prowled the racks for her winter coat. The woman, however, grew quiet, filled with someone’s memory of the man who had just shoved her without meaning to—and how her arm had swung back, ready to strike. Sometimes, seeing exactly how much instant rage so many were capable of . . . it wouldn’t take much to deal a lethal blow. There were times when she sensed just how satisfying such a blow might be if directed at an enemy. Might Page ever be considered an enemy?
She didn’t wait until they’d finished shopping. She called from a pay phone while Page window-shopped in a pet store.
“No,” Stanley said over the phone. “No danger to Page, not from you and not from the others.”
She took Page home and watched her race around the perimeter of the loft, her hair flying in the sunlight. When she inspected the worm farm and declared that its inhabitants had multiplied, the woman shrugged. All she hoped was that Page didn’t run into any of the other things that seemed to pop up in strange corners. Some were weird, some were downright frightening. But each time she tried to remove any of them, small voices told her not to.
* * *
On the heels of the woman’s phone call, Marshall dialed Stanley.
“Somebody’s finally figured out a term for what your client’s going through,” he said. It’s called the ‘revolving-door syndrome.’ Probably the most frantic, confusing time of all for a multiple; it happens when the going gets really rough. The people come and go rapidly, yet the changes, while almost constant, are fully formed.”
* * *
Page left immediately after dinner that night, to go home and study. The woman found herself at the hot plate, brewing tea. Haughty and unsmiling, with her knees primly together under the table in the loft’s kitchen area, Lady Catherine sat, ready to be served. In front of her was a fragile cup the woman had seen many times but never used.
Of the group expressing themselves to the woman at that moment, no one neglected to give their name. Catherine snorted. She didn’t have a title and always, snidely, referred to herself in Lady Catherine’s presence as “Just Plain Catherine.” Actually, Catherine did not regard herself as plain at all, but rather the best of the lot. She lifted an eyebrow and drummed her fingernails on the tablecloth.
“Why,” the woman asked, “couldn’t you two have had different names?”
“She’s not original,” said Catherine, studying her image in the glassware. “She copied me.”
An argument broke out over who had emerged first. The woman tried to evade them all, but their strength today forced an examination of each one. Lady Catherine of the prim kneecaps refused a cookie but Lambchop ate two, catching the crumbs on her tongue.
“I was here first,” Lady Catherine told the woman. “If it were not for me, there’d be no manners, no sense of proper behavior. And while I countenance no abuse, verbal or otherwise, you, on the other hand, let everyone rag you to death.” She adjusted her skirt and breathed through narrow, fine nostrils, elevating her chin.
“Screw you, darling.” Catherine opened a bottle of wine.
“None for the child!” screamed Lady Catherine, sending the glass out of Catherine’s hand with a blow that spoke not of drawing rooms, but of downtown bars.
* * *
“Stanley,” the woman said in the next session, “they’re children.”
“Some of them are. For others, their development was simply halted along the way.”
She looked over at him, through both her own eyes and those of the Troop member right behind her. “They’re shoving something into my mind right now. . . . Do you understand how somebody could go their entire life like me . . . with no act of penetration, anywhere in their head? Especially with what the others say about the farmhouses?”
“Yes, I think I do,” Stanley said.
“It doesn’t surprise you a bit?”
“We’re trained to ask the right questions and listen carefully to the answers. Right from the first day I met you, you couldn’t say the words for sex organs when they related to anything remotely connected to you. Others in the Troop Formation have had sex, but you weren’t there.”
“Who was?”
“They’ll tell us when they’re ready. My sense is, there’s more than one, possibly as many as four.”
“Oh god,” she said, as somebody thought of Mean Joe. “Does that mean I could be a lesbian?”
Stanley smiled and shook his head. Then he laughed. “No,” he said. “My senses are not leading me in that direction.”
“People like Sharon and Norman are confused. They insist that to a degree, everyone has multiple personalities, that everyone has different sides, and sometimes they can’t remember things either.”
“In your case,” Stanley said, “we’re talking about a continuum. The opposite end of the spectrum. Other people remember what their different sides or personalities do. They don’t have extensive memory blanks. Researchers feel that inside any one multiple group, there’s someone who knows everything. I don’t know if that’s true in your case, or if everyone in the Troop Formation may be said to have extensive memory blanks.”
“It’s really hard in the manuscript to convey me, how the thoughts and feelings of the others just . . . flow through me while I’m empty. The process, as you call it—sometimes describing it makes everybody really angry. It’s like we write for two days and spend six trying to make things clear. Do you, at least, understand more now? Do you understand that at this moment—as always—the others are flowing through me with their thoughts?”
“I’m afraid I do,” Stanley said. Her innocent facial and verbal expression told him that she didn’t understand the full implication of what she was saying. Logical progression made her situation plain—his human compassion still made an attempt to deny that situation.
* * *
Kill him. For days the chant had sounded so good. But each time the woman saw what it would take to kill the stepfather, she ran smack into the idea of having to touch him, to be in the same room with him.
Bobby Dylan’s voice on the stereo blended with the chant as he ground out, beyond a wall of static, the song Black Katherine loved. Bobby Dylan seemed to know what he was talking about. As he sang about his renegade subject, the words pierced the Weaver’s veil. The words exposed in the woman’s mind another layer of Troop reality.
She never stumbles, she’s got no place to fall
She’s nobody’s child, the law can’t touch her at all
She wears an Egyptian ring that sparkles before she speaks,
She’s a hypnotist’s collector, you are the one she can teach
The hatred in Black Katherine’s mind raced with voracious appetite, through the woman’s as well. The mirror above the worm
farm, alive with a light of its own in strong sunlight, cast a glow on the face reflected back. As if two wild animals had caught sight of each other in a forest glen, the stranger in the mirror gazed into the woman’s eyes. Trapped in Black Katherine’s world, the woman froze. The song played on:
For Halloween buy her a trumpet
For Christmas give her a gun.
Their eyes locked, one upon the other; and in the strange, mirrored eyes, the woman read over the words of the song, a maddened pain, a torrential outpouring of hatred. The song faded. The woman tried to break away but in the silent loft, the battle raged between them. A lifetime of anger and anguish rushed from one brain to the other. It seared the soul of both.
With a last torn look of acknowledgement, the woman forced her gaze away, and as she did, the strange eyes seemed to follow her. They were pale apple-green, with a hairline of black at the rims and in the center of each one, a tiny, dead-black iris.
* * *
That night in the Tunnel, the story being read to the children took on a particularly bloody tone.
THIRTY-ONE
“IT was like looking into the jaws of hell.”
“My sense is that she’s been in hell.” Stanley regarded his client matter-of-factly. “First of all, you ask questions because you need reassurance. There’s nothing wrong with that. Second, I believe I have heard of such a phenomenon, but only once. That doesn’t mean it isn’t going on out there. Let me try to understand. You saw someone else in the mirror?”
“Music was playing, that Bobby Dylan song ‘She Belongs to Me.’ When I looked in the mirror, I saw Black Katherine. For a minute I just stood there, she wouldn’t let me go, her eyes locked with mine. She seemed to be in front of me, superimposed over me but completely separate; she sent me her thoughts, they entered my mind, and I knew what rage is. I knew her.”
“How did that make you feel?” Stanley asked softly.
“Not so much fright as empathy. I guess her thoughts, with all that she’s been through, really scared me. But that made me understand the rage. Instead of hating her for it, and wanting her to go away, I just wanted to hold her, take the pain away. But nobody can do that, can they?”
“Someday, yes.”
“There’s more. I’ve tried to walk right up to the flicks, four giant steps, but then I run away. I’m such a coward.”
Stanley put down the clipboard, wanting to strike something with it. “You aren’t a coward,” he said. “I’ve told you, I stand in awe of incest victims. Somehow you manage to survive against pressures, tortures, as great as any concentration camp ever devised.”
From the moment she entered the studio this afternoon, he’d sensed how she hung right on the fine line between relative order (no matter how disorderly it might seem) and complete chaos.
“Except for moments of extreme awareness,” he said, “most of you are too caught up in the machinery, to feel the agony at its fullest. One day on down the road, you’ll be telling me it was a bitch, a bummer, a shot in the head.”
“What will happen to me then?”
“We’ll all be here for you,” he told her, “your people and me.”
“The pain.” There was a flicker of apprehension. “I don’t feel pain now. I tried to feel it the other day, but the others don’t let it through to me. One day soon, I know they will.”
“We’ll give you,” he leaned forward, grinning, “only the most exquisite pain.”
His manner had broken through the tension, the dread that had been circling. He’d managed to encompass both the absurd bravado of whistling in the dark—and the expression of enough confidence in her to treat the problem as joke material. She laughed, glad for the distraction before having to tell him the latest recall.
“Last night I saw myself standing there in the field, no higher than the stepfather’s belt buckle, his pockets were so tempting. I couldn’t figure out at first why I had to get my hands into them. The thought of warmth was in my mind; I wanted whatever was in those pockets. Suddenly we were further out in the field. The sun was buzzing hot, droning; the light lay in the field like a reflection from a giant mirror.
“He’s lying down and his pants are open and I’m on top of him. I see that goddamned pink thing so clearly. He positions me so that I’m squatting above it, and the thing touches me.”
The woman had been holding her head between her hands. As Sewer Mouth emerged, the head whipped upward, the teeth clenched. Stanley heard both of them speaking, one after the other.
“The feelings inside me the whole time the recall was hitting were—say it, bitch—erotic.”
Sewer Mouth spit over her right shoulder. The woman’s eyes were closed. Suddenly the words weren’t hers or Sewer Mouth’s, but Rachel’s. Rachel, having evolved from Sewer Mouth over a nine-year period, had finally been born at the second farmhouse, exactly what she would always remain; a fifteen-year-old with the knowledge of a whorehouse madam. Rachel conveyed her nature today without her usual sensuous movements; an acknowledgement, perhaps, that many in the Troop Formation considered her overt sensuality an affront. The woman sat there, hearing Rachel’s voice, young and very far away.
“It’s over,” the woman said. “The stepfather is up, closing his trousers. But just as quickly . . . whether it happened that day or another, I couldn’t tell . . . but I follow him. I seek him out, I want those pockets. Of course I know that the pockets are not primary. The pockets represent something else.” An unpleasant smile flitted over her face. “The pockets represent the pleasure. Over the fields, stumbling, running as fast as the stepfather ever ran after me, I run after him!”
Someone again shoved it into her mind and let it remain for a moment: the fifteen-year-old girl in the field with the stepfather was another self.
“You weren’t there all the time, remember that.” Stanley’s posthypnotic words were spoken hurriedly. He couldn’t tell who heard him or who was spitting the words out.
“I find him, as if we were surreptitious lovers. His body is warm and I rub my own against it, son of a dirty rotten, shit-faced bitch, it was so clear the other day, where does it go?”
“The others take it away momentarily, to give you a chance to recover,” Stanley said.
Sewer Mouth’s angry street language, and the now simultaneous laughing and crying, grew louder. The battle went on, between the woman and which of the others besides Sewer Mouth Stanley could not tell. He saw it again, the wild flurry of muscle structure and the cheekbones shifting upward, the jawline lowering. The face had become a masque.
“You sought him out, looking for warmth,” Stanley’s voice was soft. “Who held you as a child?”
“No one.” The masquelike expression had shifted again, leaving the impression of nothingness behind.
“Did your mother ever hold you? Caress you with affection and tenderness, tell you how pretty you were?”
“No.”
“You panic now because there were good times with your stepfather, when he first took you and your mother to live in that first farmhouse. There was laughter and affection from him, aside from the incest. But if there was any good in him, that makes you the bad one, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.” The eyes were now dead and completely empty.
Stanley believed that just behind the masque, he might be seeing the essence of his client, for the first time.
“He’s still to blame totally, for all of it. No matter how much warmth or affection he supplied when you needed it, in the face of a mother who didn’t know how or wasn’t willing to nurture you, your stepfather manipulated, guided you, into areas too much for any child to handle. Your stepfather was the perpetrator of the crime and he is guilty. Not you.”
You can’t hold off, Stanley told himself.
“Do you remember the day your daughter was born?”
The figure before him, completely motionless, stared at the wall; th
e head swung slowly towards him. Somewhere far back in the empty eyes, a flicker of something he could not fathom crossed the wall of the iris. The figure opened its mouth and spoke.
“What?”
Stanley sat there, looking at what the woman had never seen because each time she had ever looked in the mirror, one of the others had always looked back. Stanley could find no expression of life in this face. For one awful moment he understood.
He was looking at the woman, devoid of input by the others. He was looking at her as she was, as she had been from the day of her “birth.”
* * *
Avoiding the reflection of her body in the mirror that night, the woman put on the nightgown and the white ankle socks, still negating the existence of the other selves as she dressed. She felt someone’s awe at trying to fully accept any of this. Jeannie Lawson had said that her acceptance had come during the final moment of integration and had been almost “spiritual.”
A cup of hot chocolate belonging to Me sat by the bed. Me seldom came out. The woman sensed that the child did not find things fun. The woman crawled under the blankets, too tired and confused to feel the terror. Except that she knew it was there.
* * *
As she handed over the sheaf of cartoons, the woman was unprepared for the look of shock on the face of Ms. York, the account executive for the advertising agency.
“They’re precisely what we wanted: strange little children, the lot of them, each one individual, easily remembered. But this job,” Ms. York protested, “is budgeted to take eleven months. We didn’t mean for you to do so many of the drawings in six weeks.”
Stung, the woman folded but Catherine did not.
“Really? Shall I take back the majority of them?”
Ms. York turned, distracted, muttering to Catherine that she must wait while she straightened out the timing on the project. How, she muttered, could the agency pay so much of the fee, all at once? Ms. York picked up the cartoons and marched into the back offices of the agency, slamming the door shut behind her.