Command of Silence

by Paulette Callen

  “Do you make their travel arrangements?”

  “Only for Manfred. Spencer makes his own.”

  “Do you use the same travel sites that Spencer uses?”

  “Yes. We have a travel agent that gives us special rates.”

  “Camden Travel?”

  “That’s them.”

  “Thanks.”

  I took the papers from the printer and as I folded them to stuff them into my pockets, Manfred walked through the door. The showroom lights spiked off his glasses and his face was lost for a moment in a mask of light. He was dapper in sage-colored trousers, matching shirt and tweedy jacket. Today, he wore a tie in a muted green. With one more step into the room the light was not directly on his face and I could see his skeletal features grinning down upon her. “So, Beauty, are you ready for your spanking?”

  “Manfred, you are sooo bad!” Kim twittered.

  “Ehhh,” he sighed. “And you, Beauty, are so very good. Any messages?”

  She handed him three pink message slips. He caught sight of me and scowled. “What is she doing here? She will scare away our customers.”

  “Spencer said…”

  “All right, all right.” He dismissed her explanation with an irritated wave of his hand and positioned himself in the doorway to the office. “I must return my calls. You tell me please when I may use my phone. Kimberly, my beauty, could you order me a cup of Sanka with skim milk and two slices of dry whole wheat toast, please. I missed lunch and I’m famished.”

  She nodded and reached for the phone.

  “I’m finished,” I told him. I felt a rising tide of nausea.

  He turned back to Kim, and spoke as if he were introducing me to her for the first time. “Our interrogator. Our inquisitor.” Turning back to me, he asked, “Are you still wasting my niece’s money?”

  Even though he stepped back, giving me ample room to pass him, I felt a prickling over the entire surface of my skin and the wave of nausea was replaced by dread, like I was tipping over the side of a cliff. No! You aren’t allowed…Gatekeeper!!

  Just before the gyre enveloped me, I heard Dora telling Kim, “You can sue that old fart for what he just said to you.”

  Chapter 16

  “Doctor Ray?”

  “Hola, Chiquita! How are you?”

  A pause. “Doctor. Ray?”

  “Yes, Chiquita.”

  “Everybody’s gone.”

  No, I’m here, Bethy-June!

  “Did you look around? Are there any notes from the others?”

  “There’s stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff? Where?”

  What stuff?

  “On the bed. Papers. White papers and pretty, shiny things.”

  My printouts. What the hell is that other stuff?

  “Bethy-June, if you get very quiet, you can’t even hear Isadora? Let’s get very quiet now. I’m right here. Close your eyes and breathe slowly. I’ll wait. Are your eyes closed?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I’m here, Bethy-June!

  “Now breathe calmly and slowly. I won’t hang up.” She listened to the shallow breathing of a child on the verge of tears.

  Then, just above a whisper, Bethy-June said, “I don’t hear anybody. I’m scared, Doctor. Ray. I’m all alone. Are they all dead? Who’s going to take care of me?” She started to cry.

  Bethy-June! Sugartime! Where is everybody? Why can’t she hear me? Gatekeeper! Let them up. What’s happening?

  “Okay, Chiquita. I’m coming over. It will be all right. Don’t worry.”

  “Okay.”

  “Just play on your quilt or lie down and try to take a nap. I’m leaving my office right now.”

  When Ray hung up, Bethy-June stifled a sob and I screamed. But no one heard me.

  Chapter 17

  I struggled to surface from my murky dream. I knew Ray was wondering, Are they all asleep? Trapped in the gyre? Where is the gatekeeper? I heard the fear in my doctor’s voice as she called to me again. Ray had, in a manner of speaking, trained the Company to respond like little dogs to her calls. “Isadora. This is Ray. Wake up now.” Then more commandingly, “Isadora.”

  I knew she was afraid that she was looking at Stone Baby. The last time Stone Baby was out was back in the state hospital, when Ray was an intern and had moved too fast, pushed too hard exploring memories in too much depth with too little finesse. She brought out Stone Baby, and there was no reaching past her. She lay comatose, oblivious to her surroundings for eight days. Ray was frantic and even considered shock treatments. And then I just woke up. Well, Sugartime woke up first and told her, “Go a little easier, or you won’t get anywhere at all. I think you can help this child, but go easy.” And so she did.

  Ray tried again. “Isadora!”

  I jerked my thumb out of my mouth and sat up. “What are you doing here?”

  “Bethy-June called me. She said she was alone.”

  “Oh. Right.” I had to strain for the memory. “I’ve got to…” I scattered toys and dolls getting to my feet. “Where are my…” I took three strides to the bed to check my papers. “What’s all this?” Bethy-June had mentioned papers and other things. I didn’t know what she was talking about. The children babble.

  Ray just shook her head.

  I picked up a sheet of paper. “These are the homepages I printed off the Burkes’ computer. But all this…Dora!” I remembered everything now and checked my pockets. I found a small scrap of paper. If we can’t keep the bad bitch down, what are we gonna do? The blocky scrawl was Cootie’s. “Damn it!” I wadded up the paper and threw it. Ray watched me calmly from her place on the stool.

  I let my anger fly at her. “This shouldn’t be happening. Where is the gatekeeper? She wasn’t supposed to be let out. Everything is…” I realized I was waving my hand over the bed as if it were the replica of my disordered life. “I don’t have time for this. We were past this!”

  The expression on Ray’s face didn’t help. It was almost a smile. “You’re angry.”

  I felt like throwing something at her.

  “Isadora, you’re feeling and expressing anger.” I had heard her go on for hours over the years about how I could have feelings of my own if my personalities integrated. Whenever I exhibited anything resembling a feeling, she felt we were that much closer to fusion, her goal more than ours. “Olive said you were unraveling. Is she right this time?”

  “No!”

  “Sit and tell me. Who was the note from?”

  “Cootie. Ray, I don’t have time. I have to find a missing kid. It might already be too late.”

  “When did you last eat?”

  “I don’t know.” I tried to put the papers in order. “I’m almost there. I just need a little more time and I can give something to Leo he can use, but they keep...and then that snake.”

  “What snake?” She swore softly in Spanish.

  “Olive didn’t tell you?”

  “She left that detail out.”

  “Vin—Keating’s housekeeper—and I were out on Broadway after my first meeting with the family, and this guy was out walking his snake, for God’s sake, and I didn’t see what it was till I was this close. The next thing I know I’m in Starbucks drinking sweet coffee with Vin who’s just had a chat with Sugartime.”

  “That’s interesting.” She kept her voice calm, even though the apprehension was back and full-blown, and even though she knows it’s no good trying to fool me. But I didn’t care about her feelings or mine. Not today.

  “And at the police station, Hawk came out.”

  This news startled her more than the snake. “Who threatened you?”

  “Nobody! Someone else was being threatened. Or at least it looked that way. She’s never come out before to rescue somebody else. And Hester is getting pushier, and Olive is getting pissier. I can’t shut them up. When this is over we are going to radically renegotiate these contracts. And then Dora came out in the showroom just as I was going to talk with Spencer Burke
and I couldn’t stay. I tried but—where is the damned gatekeeper? What is he doing?” We referred to the gatekeeper as he, but who knew what it was? I imagined some little gremlin operating the sluices in my head, letting personalities flow in and back, and after years and years, when we could hear each other, when we were all out of the gyre, but not out, inhabiting the body fully... Only Dora was not allowed access because she had broken the contract that allowed us to function, to work. It took all our combined strength to keep her in the gyre, and if the gatekeeper was asleep or getting weak or sloppy we were in trouble. Well, I already knew that. I asked Ray once what would happen to the gatekeeper if we fused. “He is absorbed like stitches as a wound heals. He is a function of your brain, only for as long as you need it.”

  Sometimes I think Ray just makes things up as we go along.

  “Isadora, wait…go back. You said you couldn’t stay for Dora, but you stayed for Hawk?”

  “Yeah. And what is all this stuff?” In my attempts at creating some order, I was really only making more of a mess.

  “It looks like Dora is up to her old tricks.”

  “Oh, crap! I don’t even know where all this is from to take it back. She must have stopped into a lot of showrooms on her way out to filch all this stuff.” I picked through small silver items, a Fabergé egg, an expensive-looking fountain pen, miniature cloisonné boxes, tiny porcelain figurines, a crystal tea light candleholder and a gold-rimmed shot glass. I didn’t care as much about the stealing as the time she wasted doing it. “The only thing from the Burkes’ showroom, I think, is this cheese knife. I need to study these Web sites tonight. I don’t have time for all this.” I threw the knife on the bed. It bounced. “I can’t have Dora out now. Where is the gatekeeper? I can understand Hawk, maybe, but Dora? What’s he doing?”

  “Maybe this is a warning that he can’t keep things under control. Maybe he’s already lost control. Maybe you should stop.”

  “Well, I can’t stop. I just wish the little bastard would do his job. I can work around the others if I have to. But she’s a menace.”

  “Let’s talk about—”

  “No. I have to work. Time is passing and I have nothing to show for it because of all these interruptions!” I sighed. “Ray, I’m fine.”

  “Isadora, you are not fine. Look at you. The system is in chaos. If we just take a little time here, chaos is sometimes a good opportunity… Look, you stayed present when Hawk came out.”

  “So what?”

  “When has that happened before?”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Never, Isadora. Never. This might be the time to—”

  “No!” I stopped shuffling through papers and junk on the bed. I felt myself hyperventilating. “I know what you want. Not now.” I thought not ever, but said again, “Not now.”

  “When, then?”

  “There’s a child who is getting closer to dead every minute!”

  “You have already spent an hour on that play quilt with your thumb in your mouth as a five-year-old.” Ray was seldom this harsh with me. “How much more time are you going to waste with your system in chaos? Dora taking over without your permission or consciousness, you lost an hour for a snake on the street. You can’t spare an hour to talk to me?”

  “Not about—”

  “About what? Say it.”

  “Hawk.”

  “What about Hawk?”

  I felt a panic rise in me that was familiar. “I can’t. I can’t. Not now. I will. Ray, I will. Not now.”

  Ray usually knows when to stop. “Did you wake up this morning with what you thought was a mouth full of blood?”

  “I’m used to it. Doesn’t bother me anymore. Look, I know what she did. Why do I have to remember it? What’s the difference?”

  “Until you remember it, you can’t accept it. You’ll never be whole. It’s the last big thing standing in your way.”

  “Nothing is in our way. We’re fine. Just back off.”

  This time she did take the hint. “Maria is probably waiting dinner for me. I tell her not to wait, but she always does.” She cast those brown eyes at me, that went from warm to piercing in nanoseconds. “You don’t have to get through this by yourself. Don’t practice your independence when the stakes are so high. Call me…every few hours. Till this case is over. Isadora?”

  “Right. I’ll call you.” All the second pages were mixed up with all the first pages. “I have to sort these out. Dora did this on purpose. The bitch shuffled them.”

  “Well, I’ll just use your bathroom before I take off. Eat something. Low blood sugar never solved a case.”

  When Ray came out of the bathroom, Dora had removed my blazer and boots, shoved over the stolen showroom samples, tossed the papers to the floor, and was lying on her side, her head propped up on her hand. “Long time no see, Señora.” She smiled.

  Ray sighed. “Dora. How long have you been back?” She resumed her perch on the stool. Now, I was grateful she wasn’t leaving.

  “Hello, Dora, how are you, missed you, how’ve you been?” Ray didn’t react. Dora shrugged the shoulder she wasn’t leaning on and answered her own mock greeting. “I’m fine, thank you. Been back awhile. Since the snake. The gatekeeper was busy... everyone running like scared rabbits. Oooooh.” She wiggled her fingers in a cartoon-scary fashion and breathed, “Then, I just slipped out.”

  “Is Isadora there now? Can she hear me?”

  “Maybe.”

  You damn well know I can! I couldn’t stop her from taking over, but at least this time I didn’t black out. I was still there.

  Ray said, casually, “Before you go…”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Before you go, tell me something.”

  “Mmmmm?”

  “Snakes. Why does Isadora and most of the Company black out when they are in proximity of a snake? I know of two other instances when this has happened.”

  “Did you miss the class on archetypes and symbols? I can lend you a book.”

  “If that’s all it was, she’d faint when she sees a cigar. She doesn’t.”

  “How should I know?”

  “I don’t know, but I think you do.”

  “You think many things.You are a thoughtful person. You’ve put on a little weight there, haven’t you? Since last we met? Menopause not being kind? Your hair is almost all gray, too. Tsk tsk tsk. I imagine we are responsible.” That was probably the most truthful thing I ever heard Dora say.

  The fine lines around Ray’s eyes crinkled slightly. She was used to Dora’s taunts and always seemed merely curious about what Dora would throw at her next, about her age, her weight, her being Mexican, gay or whatever else Dora could dredge up. Ray kept to her train of inquiry. “Isadora doesn’t know why she reacts so strongly to snakes. The others don’t know. I think you may be the only one who does.”

  “Why don’t you do one of those regression thingies you like to do. Go on Oprah. No, wait, you’ve been on Oprah, haven’t you? Okay, Dr. Phil. They are so dramatic. ‘Youuuu are getting sleeeee peeee...’ ...‘Daddy daddy no! Nooooo!!’ Movie of the Week.”

  “People can’t remember what they weren’t there for. I want you to tell me.”

  “Whoa! I just heard you telling Isadora she had to…”

  “Had to what?”

  “I know you’ve been trying to get her to remember Hawk’s little fit of pique with Daa-dee, but she can’t remember it if she wasn’t there…” Dora tossed Ray’s words back at her in a kind of sing-song. “Besides, we all know what Hawk did. Who cares if we share the memory?”

  “It’s part of the process. Part of the therapy. You know that. As more memories are shared, the more—”

  “Yeah, yeah. The therapy. Why are you still around? It’s been years. Are we like Helen Keller? We’re stuck with Teacher for life?”

  “You know the deal.”

  “What deal?”

  Ray considered her thoughtfully. “It’s possible you don’t
know, but I doubt it. I made a promise to Isadora. I promised I would never abandon her. No matter what she says or does. She, however, is absolutely free to move on and never contact me again.”

  “Good. I’d like you to leave now and never come back. I am moving on.”

  “You, however, I will haunt until you are extinct. I made no promise to you. Now tell me about the snake. Is it a painful memory? Is that why you are stalling? Or do you just like wasting my time?”

  Dora just snorted and flopped over on her back, for once tired of the game. “Oh, all right. It isn’t such a big deal. If she were going to freak over something you’d think it’d be buckets. That damn bucket nearly crippled me. Anyway. I don’t really know.” She studied her nails. “I merely surmise.”

  Ray waited for her to continue.

  “Once I woke up with my knees pushed against my chest, sort of folded up. It was cold, I remember, and dark except when I looked up and there was a circle of light way up. Straight up. The sky. But it was getting dimmer. I reached out. The sides of the well were rough, mossy, and there were lots of holes and crevices where the rocks and bricks had fallen away. There was a snake draped over me. Must have come to me for warmth. I figured Daddy Dearest had put her down the well to punish her for something, and they all took off when the snake found her.”

  “How old were you?”

  “I guess four.”

  “How long did he keep you in the well?” Ray asked softly. She’s never gotten used to hearing these stories. She probably thought she’d heard them all.

  “I was down there several hours. Till after dark. I don’t know when Isadora was put in the bucket.”

  “Was that when you were born?”

  “Oh, God no! I’d been around forever. I just stayed below everybody’s radar.”

  “Why did you come out in the well?”

  “Somebody had to hang on if he tried to shake her out of the bucket or start yelling if he never came back.”

  “You weren’t terrified?”

  “It’s always been my job to not be terrified. Besides, it was a harmless little snake.”

  “Did you remove the snake?”