by Truddi Chase
“Ask Frank Putnam that question. The guy has contributed more toward understanding in the area of MPD than I’ll know for another five years and in some learned circles they still spit on him. When Putnam was researching schizophrenia, he discovered that the term didn’t fit all the patients he encountered. That led him to research the multiple personality cases recorded since the early 1800s. His final documented conclusion was that ninety-eight percent of the multiples on record involved repeated and severe incidents of child sexual and physical abuse. Incest seems to head the list, culprit-wise. For better or for worse, multiplicity may not be as rare as we think—only misdiagnosed. All I can say is, I hope Stanley keeps doing what he’s doing. At least he won’t harm her. Or them.”
“Putnam.” The math professor frowned into his dinner plate. “I’ve heard that name somewhere before, on television, I think. It was a documentary on a man with five personalities. The actor, David Birney, was superb, and I’m sure they mentioned Frank Putnam’s research at the end of the show. I remember thinking how close to schizophrenia the symptoms were, and how severely they’d hampered the victim’s life. But you, and correct me if I’m wrong, don’t seem to regard MPD as being highly debilitating, as it was for Sybil, or even as a ‘mental illness.”’
“It depends on the multiple,” Marshall said. “In the case of Stanley’s client and the young woman studying for her law degree, yes, they’re going through hell, and yes, their lives have been damaged, but for them, MPD has also been a high-level coping mechanism. Their people have carried them through one accomplishment after the other, allowed them to exist in a world that is frustrating and sometimes impossible, even for the ‘sane’ among us. Think about it. No matter what, Stanley’s client has lived with her rage and it never erupted against society; she isn’t on welfare or in a mental hospital.”
* * *
The woman stared right back at Stanley and then at the wall. Finally she spread her hands out in front of her and looked at them for a long time, as if she’d never seen them before.
“Multiple,” she said in a shaky voice. “Three Faces of Eve, Sybil. I never wanted to read those books, never wanted to see the movies, either. What I’ve heard about them seemed so far-fetched.” She didn’t add that just the mention of Sybil or Eve called up ideas of science fiction and was, to her, somehow frighteningly repulsive.
Her voice changed abruptly; so did the look in her eyes, and Stanley had the impression that whoever was trying to get out held her in a desperate grip. He saw the laughter coming, long before it burst out of her mouth.
“What am I laughing at?” She raised her hands and pressed them to her cheeks, hard. “I knew back then that things were bad; I can’t remember them, can’t believe they were as bad as people described Sybil’s situation. Were they that bad? Is that what you’re saying?”
“What do you think?”
“The reactions of your students to the tapes, Sharon’s expression sometimes, even Norman’s, tell me it’s possible. But they must be wrong. Whatever else, there was never . . . penetration.” The word had come out of her mouth as if someone had strangled it. “Never. I was a full adult, far from that last farmhouse before I knew what a, uh . . .”
“Penis,” Stanley said.
“. . . what that looked like. Ugly, ugly word.”
With the differing facial and body language, he found it impossible to hold onto the single image he grasped of her at times. She tried to tell him over sobs that alternated with barely restrained nervous laughter, about the pink thing nestled in wiry brush. As usual she could not say any word aloud if it was connected to herself and described human sex organs.
Stanley didn’t need his notes to remind him that someone did remember penetration in the cornfield at the age of two, or that they had howled with remembered pain during the recall. Simple denial was not the issue here. The issue was that while other selves might remember many things, the woman did not.
“With or without penetration, which never happened to Sybil, by the way, even what you’ve remembered so far could cause multiple personality.” Stanley handed her a cup full of hot coffee. She stopped crying and drank. When he launched vehemently into pronouncing the words “penis” and “vagina” and describing sex acts, perverted and otherwise, in an attempt to blast away some of her mental cotton batting, she merely stared at the floor. It was apparent that while she acknowledged the words on one level, she couldn’t repeat them.
But all of it was having an effect. Inside her mind, something shot up like mercury heated at the base of a thermometer, rising to a point far beyond her own vision. “You’re telling me,” snapped a harsh voice, “that incest caused multiple personality, that because of it, I’m not alone in here, I’ve got to be part of a goddamned group? The stepfather did that to me? The bastard, if I had him right now, he’d be a dead man.”
For the person speaking, the rage at discovering close “neighbors” went on for the next ten minutes. Stanley didn’t even stop to wonder how he would feel under the same circumstances. He had enough trouble envisioning the woman’s world. As the rage dissipated, he brought up the subject of imaginary playmates.
“I never had an imaginary playmate,” the harsh voice told him stubbornly. “I wanted to be alone, got that? Totally, one-hundred-percent alone.” A shiver went through the hunched shoulders. “I never ‘saw’ myself doing anything, good or bad. What little memory I’ve got of those two farmhouses does not include an imaginary playmate.”
“You keep on asking,” the voice had softened and slim fingers buttoned and then unbuttoned the high-necked collar of the white blouse, “if I heard voices as a child. No, I didn’t. I never heard voices until I began putting journal notes together for the manuscript. One night I was walking from the kitchen to the gallery, putting coffee on. Someone whispered my name. That voice was real, Stanley, and I was all alone in the house. Am I crazy? Is that what multiple personality is all about?”
* * *
“How did she take the news this morning?” Marshall stood with Stanley in front of the university, his arms loaded with duplicate files of the woman’s manuscript. Students went by, laughing, scuffing their shoes on the cement sidewalk. There was a smell of fresh-cut grass in the air. It all seemed very normal.
“She thinks she’s crazy. I wish you were in town with me on this one,” Stanley said.
“I don’t. Particularly not this one. I read more of her stuff last night. The similarities to my friend are rather chilling.”
“I’ve only had time to read fifty percent of what you’ve got in that box. My schedule is worse than ever and, outside of the sessions and for a few days afterward when I’m energised, I’m exhausted.”
“No kidding?” Marshall pretended surprise. “Better get yourself some vitamins. You know, this manuscript, putting so much down on paper, is dangerous to a multiple’s sense of crime and punishment. If I were you, Stanley, I’d be busy hanging onto every scrap. Somebody in there writes with a very old hand and the symbolism, especially toward the end . . .” Marshall’s face clouded over and then the smile was back. “Listen, give Putnam a call when you get the chance. And let me know what’s happening. One more thing, Stanley. Sometimes during the most productive period, a multiple will panic for no reason. No reason the shrink can predict, that is. They start fighting it, they run.”
“I’ll watch her, Marshall.”
“You better. And watch yourself, too.”
Marshall waited by his car until Stanley had gone through the doors of the Humanities Building. He wondered, in view of what he had observed on the tapes, how long it would take Stanley to catch on to the most bizarre aspect of all—an aspect that professionals didn’t often risk talking about, even among themselves.
FIFTEEN
THE next session moved faster than Stanley had anticipated. From the beginning, the sketchbook had sat in her lap. Right in the middle of one of the wom
an’s blank-faced stares and a large bunch of snapdragons erupting under a pink crayon, he encountered a small self who told him that as children, “if you were smart, you didn’t write anything down and you didn’t draw anything, either. The mother would get you.”
At that, she burst into tears. He hadn’t learned to determine which child was which. But whenever creativity through painting or drawing, or the written word had been mentioned today, someone tiny wept buckets, holding her right hand protectively cupped inside her left, and sobbing words that sounded like “hot stove.”
Stanley instantly thought of the big black cookstove in the farmhouse kitchen and moved as if to pat her arm. He had been too quick; she reared back as if he had struck her.
“No skin,” she wept and continued to crouch over the hand in her lap.
“Who are you?” he asked, and watched another change take place. The attitude of the figure before him now suggested a teenager, laid back and in control of the situation. Without knowing it, Stanley had reached Sixteen, who was shy only in romantic situations.
“You shouldn’t do that,” she said. “The child can’t bear to be touched and hardly anybody here will say their own name aloud to you.”
Stanley asked if there was a reason; she told him her job was only to be around when the little one was out. Immediately her features seemed heavier, the brows lower on the forehead and they appeared fuller, as did the lips and cheekbones. The voice was husky.
Stanley was informed that in days of yore, soldiers came out single file, in full view of the enemy, and were shot down, one by one. Giving names, the husky voice said, was tantamount to giving someone control over you.
“The little one,” the husky voice went on, “was trying to tell you that the mother burned her drawings and everything she ever wrote in the big cookstove. The little one made the mistake of identifying herself with her work, and the mother held her hand over the front griddle one day. It taught us a lesson. Don’t identify yourself.”
“Why,” Stanley asked, “would the mother do that?”
“Almost anything one put on paper was interpreted by the mother to have a sexual, forbidden meaning. The little one never grew after she was burned, she was too frightened. Others of us continued to create but there was a fear about quality that wouldn’t rest, the feeling that we’d be punished. We kept everything away from the mother. Only when an art teacher noticed our class work and insisted that we enter a competition, did we all drag out what we’d hidden.”
“You received over one hundred and fifty awards,” Stanley said. “Didn’t so many convince you of your talent?”
“No,” the husky voice said, and Stanley heard the merest hint of a rich brogue, “the mother, strangely enough, took us into the city to receive our acclaim. She acted proud, but we didn’t believe her. Not after what she’d done to the little one. We felt shock at so many awards, especially since no one else in our high school had gotten a single one. After the shock wore off, we told ourselves the judges were only in a good mood, the best artists in the state had probably neglected to enter, etc. In short, the awards weren’t worth the paper they were printed on.”
For several minutes, the actions had been masculine. Whereas the smaller selves often wiped their tears on the hem of a skirt, and one of the older females licked her tears with her tongue, this one brushed them off with the back of his knuckles.
“Don’t stare at me that way, just listen. Someone is speaking through me, someone far back in the Tunnel. It’s my job to let him through.”
“He’s a man,” Stanley said. “I can hear it. Are you a man, too?”
“Are you?” A faint smile twitched at the corners of the heavy mouth.
“Something happened since the last session,” Stanley said, “to make the little one surface with those memories about the stove. What was it?”
“The other day, the woman saw the face of the Well in a rain puddle. Now the Well’s memories are surfacing—so, too, the memories of the others around her. In a manner of speaking, the Well of Creativity has been awakened. Before her death there were certain others, learning, absorbing her talents. When the Well died, their growth stopped, too.”
Stanley asked if the Well had a first name. There was no response. “The child who just told me about her burned hand—is she the Well, and what is sometimes called the ‘core’?”
“Never. Your journey to both will never end.”
The Troops had begun to trust Stanley more than he realised. Most members would never trust anyone enough to part with their own individual names in face-to-face conversations. But Stanley was about to receive one name that would encompass the whole of their operation. The heavy brogue in which it was announced called up for him visions of the greenest land on earth.
“Y’ may,” the husky voice said, “call us the Troop Formation, f’r that is what we are.”
The Front Runner sensed that for the one in the depths of the Tunnel, the conversation had ended. She readied herself to surface. The Front Runner never slept. Various other Troop members who were practiced enough at front running under her direction might sleep, but never the Front Runner. Her duties were inner circle in nature, and her ministrations were performed constantly, close-up, eyeball to eyeball.
From the husky-voiced male who had been talking, the switch to the Front Runner was fluid, without apparent strain. It took place like the ripple of horseflesh in strong sunlight. The Front Runner saw Stanley smile to indicate that he acknowledged her presence, with or without her name.
“How,” the Front Runner asked Stanley, “do you think personality is formed?”
“No one knows, exactly,” he said, “or at what stage of life it begins to be formed. Some insist that personality is fixed in the womb by one’s genes; others say that we ‘learn’ our personalities as we go through life. I don’t think the answer is readily available or that there is one single answer.”
“For the sake of argument, let’s envision within each individual human being a tiny, utterly priceless core, containing one’s own persona, or personality, one’s own self. And let’s say that during the formative years from birth to seven years old, the core is open and very vulnerable.”
“Done,” said Stanley, entering a dialogue he sensed the Front Runner enjoyed.
“Even with the torment that began at two and continued on a daily basis, ripping that core in half, we’ve heard you express dismay at the amount of disjuncture present. Precisely what do you mean by disjuncture?”
“I suppose what I mean is the necessity for so many of you. No room is left for the woman. Where is she in all of this?”
“We are a necessity for each other, not a luxury or a whim. Individually, each of us has certain memories. As some of us begin now to put the top layers of memory together and evaluate the evidence, a certain knowledge emerges. As the Front Runner, the duty to inform you is mine. Our core, what should have been one person, is split in two. One half is a ‘child,’ and the other a ‘woman.’ The two halves are so damaged that the child is little more than an infant mind. The adult half is so unevolved that, were we to describe her condition, you might be skeptical. We can only tell you what we observe. Neither of our cores, ‘child’ or ‘woman,’ exists in the outside world.”
On the one hand, Stanley was elated. The Front Runner had given him her name. Good manners in this case dictated that he not acknowledge the introduction. On the other hand, he was horrified. Nowhere in other multiple case studies had there been more than one core. What kind of parental guidance, under what guise, from what corner of hell, produced damage so severe?
Furthermore, how did the information he’d just received apply to the woman who had initially asked for therapy?
In her careful, watchful way, the Front Runner stole a look at him. She was aware, although his face was placid, that the news rocked him, but he was not her main concern. Her duty lay with the Troops, with
the woman. Given the limitations of the English language, problems loomed ahead in translating for him the exact mechanics of her duties and the Troop Formation’s inner workings. It was possible, sometimes, to override another Troop member and pass information to Stanley, using nothing more than her thoughts. In reading the expression in his eyes, the thoughts behind them, and applying just the slightest pressure when he did not receive properly, the Front Runner had thus far been able to convey meaning. But passing information was one thing; would Stanley be adequate to the task of receiving what was to come? Would he be willing to receive all of it, as regards the Troop Formation’s inner structure and working apparatus? There were Troop members living behind Catherine and the Outrider, whose identities might never be discovered; Troop members whose minds had never been explored because their thoughts lay on a plane that left them isolated; they might begin to express their views but no one to date had known how to respond. Would Stanley be different, as the Front Runner sensed that he might; would he know enough to ask and pursue the right questions when he did not understand? And would he, conversely, ask too much, too soon?
For all her strength, both of self and of purpose, the Front Runner felt a sliver of doubt at the advisability of the therapy.
Hi, ho, the Outrider laughed inside the Front Runner’s mind as she passed her own silent thought. In for a penny, in for a pound.
The Front Runner paused to wonder why that one had ever been chosen to perform a high-echelon task. Probably because she was more than she seemed.
“Behind whom do those Troop members live?” Stanley asked, looking at his notes because the question had just popped into his head. He assumed that he’d written it down somewhere.
The Front Runner had the grace not to smile. “They live in the shadows where it’s safe,” she said. “For one, they live behind Catherine.”
Having said as much as she wanted to for the time being, the Front Runner removed herself, but left what the Troops would someday define as a “marked conversational trail.”
