by Truddi Chase
Another image came, an image she did remember and could connect to the past. The stepfather stood in front of the barn door, watching the first raindrops fall. Pitch-black thunderheads rolled across the afternoon sky. There was the sound of what? A zipper, opening. It was similar to the sound she heard each night, grinding her teeth through her nightmares.
The stepfather had something in his hand. Yes, it had definitely been the sound of a zipper, opening.
The small presence who had wiped her nose with the woman’s skirt hem began to cry and then to moan. The sound grew into a howl, long and high and lost.
Ten-Four and Nails showed the lots to the builder that morning. When either of them became too tense or abrupt, as was their nature, the Outrider stepped in with a joke. They showed the lots and Catherine drifted in her own head, mentally designing houses and arranging floor plans with hidden escapes, private retreats. She designed, not according to building codes, but for safety from human predators. Some designs were hers, many came from the Troop members who lived behind her, ones who had never seen the light of day as it filtered through the tall trees over her head, and dappled the grass and stones at her feet.
Later that morning, the woman got out of her car only because the motor seemed to be shut off. With barely a sense of having been anywhere, she walked up the driveway to her house, placing one foot mechanically ahead of the other. The feet performing the zombie-like act did not seem to be her own. They moved mindlessly, as if getting there was all that mattered.
Once inside her house she bolted the door and headed to the powder room just off the foyer. The powder room, with all four walls of solid red brick, rose straight into the air, two stories above her head, where the walls met solid brick ceiling. The door was solid brick. The woman stood at the sink counter, washed her hands, and admired the hanging ferns suspended from the specially lighted ceiling high above. She felt very comfortable here, and safe. She even admired the framed lyrics from the song “Night Moves” hanging over the toilet, although she couldn’t appreciate the humour of it and did not know where it had come from.
Catherine, who had designed that room for security, smiled into the mirror now. Unlike the toilet facilities at the farmhouse, this narrow powder room did not have a single chink in the walls. She knew because she’d personally supervised with the mason the laying of every brick.
Catherine looked with approval at her reflection in the mirror and shook her hair back over her eyes. Very nice. Lovely, in fact. But one had to keep at it or things atrophied. She strode out of the powder room and stopped to admire the foyer. She had chosen much of the furniture and wall hangings in the house. She had not chosen the single canvas hanging on the two-story brick column formed by the powder room.
This was a long, skinny composition; its component parts assaulted the eye and snapped the senses to attention. Glued-on string, hanks of rope, strips of old rags, twigs, coffee grounds, and dental floss covered it from top to bottom. It had been sprayed in white lacquer and, in spite of its contents, echoed forcefully against the rough texture of the bricks. Someone had thought the collage important enough to have installed a single track light that beamed down its full length.
Catherine admired it as a decorator’s touch on an otherwise barren wall. Only the artist could admire its statement or the truth behind it [and that Troop member would not reveal himself for many months to come].
Intent on the manuscript, Catherine turned away. The stark white collage was no longer her focal point and the woman was able to surface. Each time she passed by the collage, she got an instant flick of hands, covered in a thick white substance, trailing string and laying down odd bits of twigs and twine. That was all. She tried never to look at it. It was only a collection of junk.
The collage was bothering someone. There came a soft, low sobbing, as if a small child sat in corner somewhere, awaiting punishment or witnessing some awful thing.
Hide. Pull everything down on top of you and hide. Both the small voice and her easy acceptance of the two unseen entities lay on one level of the woman’s mind. On yet another level, that acceptance was directly opposed by hysteria over what Stanley might say and do when she told him. Curiously, the hysteria seemed dead-ended by the same mechanical movements ruling her feet. She plodded back to the gallery. To the typewriter, sit, switch it on. With no emotion the woman reviewed the manuscript notes: fear of going to the bathroom at home or in school; the eventual outhouse smell of her body as a result; blood all over the bright yellow dress in a coed gym class. None of it seemed real. Staring out of the tightly locked gallery windows into the darkness, the horror behind each of the scribbled notes rapped softly on her mind.
Someone very small cringed and the hem of the woman’s skirt twisted. The wind had picked up, and tree limbs clattered against the shingles somewhere at the back of the house. Had the woman still been present, she would have been frightened.
Catherine didn’t even notice. The manuscript lay in a snowdrift over the desk and a red oriental rug. Before picking up a single sheet of paper she unfastened the latches on the tall windows and swung them open into the backyard. She inhaled deeply. Fresh air was good for the skin. The smell of raw new earth and approaching rain hung on the incoming spring breeze. Mindful of her polished fingernails, Catherine typed:
The outhouse at the second farm was right off the washroom that led into the kitchen. Jokes have been made, down through farm history, about outhouses. But they were serious business to the stepfather within the framework of his game plan.
Too early on, I suppose, I decided that his games were not for me and tried to evade him. Whenever he could not physically put his hands on me, he settled for watching. The idea of that was so awful to me that it was a long time before I could allow the strange sensation of being watched to seem even slightly real. But one day I stood inside the outhouse, noticing the slits between some of the panels. Outside, a large, dark shape unflattened itself from the wall and moved away. Curious because I could not believe what I was already thinking, I pressed my face close to the slits and looked out. The stepfather stood there on the garden path; he was grinning and his hands were in his pockets.
Presto. A new game had evolved for him. Eventually, I learned to control my body when he was home. I tried never to go to the bathroom, unless I knew exactly where he was. Sometimes he won. There was an opening beneath the little bench. From the outside the pail could be taken away for emptying. One day I sat down without looking. Something made me get up in a hurry; there was his face when I stared down.
“Gotcha,” he said.
I still hate him. It doesn’t go away.
A glitter had come into Catherine’s eyes as her fingers flew over the keyboard. She was another of the Troop members who could not cry. The glitter increased as she typed, describing family life: the noise of constant battles, the hatred, and both the verbal and unspoken threats of killing. She wrote that sometimes the words hurt as badly as the physical abuse. So had the stepfather’s smile when he’d taken off his belt to beat her. All smiles, she added, had henceforth taken on an air of unreality, of insincerity. She’d thought often about knives and shotguns and killing, and about being a boy. Boys didn’t sit around, she wrote, with their legs crossed, waiting to be killed.
It annoyed Catherine as the words flew onto the paper, that she couldn’t remember the lashings themselves; only her rage and inability to cry. She did recall the marks on her skin afterward, how they’d turned a funny deep blue with little red spots, which had been the pores of her skin, filled with blood.
The rage, she admitted, had been building inside her for years. It had not been confined to the farmhouses, but extended to everything, including school. Some teachers had been nice. She hadn’t trusted them and pulled away or watched them suspiciously from a distance, sure that if they got too close, the niceness would change. Some teachers had hated her outright, and in the tiny schoolhouse,
in the third grade, she’d bitten one. Furious, the teacher had taken a big piece of chalk and marked all her math answers “Wrong.” A senior had stood up in the back of the room and laughed. He went to the blackboard, reworked the problems, and arrived at Catherine’s same answers, asking the teacher if his were wrong, too. Astounded, Catherine heard two separate thoughts in her head: One, she’d been right, and two, someone had defended her.
The woman surfaced with only the Buffer between herself and the typewritten pages. She did not know that she had what Stanley termed almost complete amnesia about her childhood and much of her adult life. Staring at the words the typewriter seemed to be producing, she sensed again the emptiness inside herself.
Why couldn’t she remember school or birthdays or more than one or two flashes of Christmas holidays? Why couldn’t she remember, more precisely, the family?
Family.
The gallery was dark except for the pale glow from the gooseneck lamp. Someone leaned over and spit on the floor. Someone else made the sign of the cross.
Come morning, the Outrider said to Twelve, the battle begins.
NINE
AT dawn the woman awakened at the sound of rain pounding on the skylight. Her eyes focused. What she had first perceived as a dull grey haze filtering into the bedroom now seemed to be an integral part of it. Her mind seemed to be a dull grey, too, and when she shook her head, it didn’t go away.
Now, said the Gatekeeper.
The haze remained, in the room and in her mind. She lay between the sheets, a full-grown adult, frightened and wary.
Now, the Gatekeeper said again and it flashed into the woman’s mind—this was the way she’d felt as a child at the second farmhouse.
The Gatekeeper gave the third signal. One by one, they began to gather. The woman tried to avoid them by getting up from the bed but the feeling of their presence continued to hang in the dead air. She drew back under the covers, stunned and shaken. Five of them: Rabbit, Ten-Four, Mean Joe, the Zombie, Miss Wonderful. Five separate individuals surrounding her at this moment, crouched around the bed, “crawling” in some indescribable fashion under the sheets with her.
She scrambled for the pad on the nightstand. The pen had disappeared; a box of crayons sat in its place. With trembling hands, she composed a note to Stanley. “Please,” she whispered, “let this make sense to him. It makes perfect sense to me and either that means I’m completely crazy, or I’m sane for the first time in my life.”
Through the fine grey haze, the Gatekeeper watched the woman, carefully. The Gatekeeper knew how many Troop members were in the bedroom. Of the Troops present this morning, the woman had missed far too many. The Gatekeeper considered the process that had given birth to them all as individuals and had kept each one alive. The process, while as natural as breathing, could not easily be described.
The Interpreter, meanwhile, considered that which bothered the Gatekeeper, and finally, with a silent thought, explained the discrepancy: some Troops had only, in weeks past, made the woman “acutely aware” of their presence; they had not yet actually presented by the more potent “evidencing.” And, the Interpreter added, sometimes Troops might evidence to the woman in tandem, yet still be unknown to each other.
* * *
Having read the crayoned note without expression, although it was probably the most difficult thing he’d done in his professional life, Stanley hooked it carefully onto his clipboard.
The woman stared up at him from the bench outside his office, waiting for him to tell her what it meant. He was aware that the contents of the crayoned note could be termed hallucination—and she heard voices. Taken alone and at face value, those two things indicated a break with reality. But Stanley found the woman firmly rooted in reality, no matter how off-the-wall she sounded at times. The trouble with multiplicity, he supposed, was that to an outsider it did sound “crazy.” The multiple might look and act, in some cases, like anyone else on the street, but inside the mind, it was another whole ball game. Another form of sanity. He began to comprehend just how scared his client was. What must it be like for a multiple to start making comparisons between the world he or she lived in and what society said was the norm? Especially when everything being experienced was real to the multiple, and so unreal to everyone around them?
“Well,” he said. It was all that he could say.
“It happened. Maybe it doesn’t belong on the videotapes, but you said you wanted to know everything. What should I do?”
The words were the woman’s but the voice belonged to Nails and so did the face and body. Nails sat “up front” as she had from the moment the woman had entered the university grounds. Nails was absorbing from the Buffer the emotional blows the woman took, but only from the furthest distance possible. Nails didn’t need to know that she and the woman were separate, or why or how the Troop mechanisms worked. She simply needed to solve a problem voiced by a worry that belonged to almost the entire Troop Formation.
Stanley heard the questions. Today’s session and another later in the week would have to be navigated without help. Marshall Fielding would not arrive until the weekend.
“Well,” he said, repeating himself without shame. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”
“No.” Again, Nails voiced the woman’s words. “I have seen. It was real enough to me. The five of them were there in bed with me this morning. They’ve been here all week, not flesh and blood, Stanley, but an overpowering presence.”
Even as Stanley nodded to show that he understood, he knew that he did not. The woman’s amazement at what had happened to her, in days past and this morning, was a direct reflection of his own stupefaction. For the benefit of the video camera he asked for an outline of the early morning experience in the bedroom and the feelings it had produced. Afterward, the questions came faster than he could follow with pen and paper. When he had fielded as many questions as he could, there was a moment of silence.
“You still say I’m not nuts?” Ten-Four’s voice was sharp. Ten-Four acted on facts alone and wanted to know beyond any doubt that they were facts and not merely hopeful wishes.
“No. You are not nuts. Incest victims in order to survive the experiences of childhood sometimes live simultaneously in more than one world. We call that fragmentation.”
Stanley took a breath and leaned back on his cushions.
“Fragmentation?” Behind Nails and Ten-Four, the woman wondered at the word Stanley had chosen as a stop-gap measure. In actuality what she heard, and even her hesitant acceptance of it, came from Nails and Ten-Four—even as, in the separate minds of all three, no one was conscious of anyone but herself.
The woman’s awareness had always been sporadic. Very often it shut off because the thoughts of another Troop member took precedence; at other times the woman’s mind shut off because another Troop member was completely present . . . and the woman was gone, vanished.
Right now, the three of them, partially surfaced, stole a look at Stanley. Nails and Ten-Four kept their mouths shut. Stanley was the expert here and they waited for him to produce a satisfactory explanation. He watched the silent figure before him and knew that the word “fragmented” was being poorly received. He found a pair of eyes beneath the fallen bangs and held on. If the conclusions he’d reached were valid, and if the few multiple case histories he’d read were applicable, then anybody could be watching him from behind that barrier.
“Different emotions within you,” he said, “emotions you felt must not be expressed for one reason or another, compartmentalised themselves. They are separate from each other and you.”
The woman shook her head. “No. Even if it makes me crazy to say it, Stanley, I tell you, they were people!”
He went over in his mind the names on the list she’d given him: Rabbit, Ten-Four, the Zombie, Miss Wonderful, and Mean Joe. They sounded like people and if the names were any indication, people who might have separate, distinct
, characteristics. Still hesitant, he tried to give a definition of the term fragmented, knowing as he did, that it was a “trash can” term and that he was only biding time by using it.
“Well,” he said, “perhaps it felt that way to you. If they were—are—by whatever definition, people, as you call them, that’s one thing. More than likely, they’re separate emotions which you perceive as separate persons. Each one of them, or rather each emotion, may have lived in its separate compartment all these years, walled off, in a manner of speaking, unaware that there were others. Which may explain why you haven’t been aware of them.”
Stanley wondered: While attempting to explain “fragmentation,” had he just given her a partial definition of multiple personality? In his training as a therapist, Multiple Personality Disorder had been touched on lightly, as an afterthought. It had been regarded as a topic unworthy of full instruction.
“If no one dared to look over his or her individual wall, then how did Mean Joe get into the carry-out store with Miss Wonderful that morning? Have you ever heard of two of them operating in tandem that way?”
The point was legitimate. Neither Stanley nor the woman was familiar enough with the process of multiple personality to have figured out that in therapy, “leakage” occurred after a certain point and to varying degrees. Among the Troop members, only the Gatekeeper had observed through the Interpreter, how the “walls” had been worn away just enough for Miss Wonderful and Mean Joe to break through to each other in the car that day. Mean Joe had been born of a single-minded purpose, to protect the most vulnerable Troop members. Miss Wonderful’s innocence put her at the top of his list, so their instant recognition of each other once their barriers had come down was only natural.
