by Truddi Chase
“Stanley,” the woman said as she surfaced abruptly, “I don’t think my mind works the same as yours.”
“Of course not.” Stanley laughed, right over the distraction he felt. “Your mind is unique and so is everyone else’s.”
“That isn’t what I mean. I have thoughts in my head, just like other people. But their thoughts are connected to feelings. What I’ve got are only the unconnected thoughts and feelings given me by other selves.”
“Alright,” he said, “is someone giving you thoughts and feelings now? Who is giving them to you?”
“They are. My other selves. The voices I hear through the thought transference are from them to me. Not from me to them.”
For the first time, he knew how very removed she was, even from the horror of the concept she presented. A grown woman who, if her statement was valid, had never lived a single moment of her own life. Perhaps, on the other hand, he’d misunderstood.
“It’s a weird place up here.” She was alternately pulling at the blond hair and tapping her skull. “It’s so hard to explain one’s own mind.”
“Try,” Stanley urged.
“I’ve told you, or at least I hear myself saying it too often, that when someone screams at me as my mother did, or when I even suspect that someone might, I go away in my mind.”
“By what mechanism? Can you tell me how you do that?”
“No. Because I don’t do it. It just happens.”
“Where do you go?” he asked her. “When it happens, what goes on up there in your head?”
“What goes on?” The woman stared at him for a moment. “Stanley, when it happens, I’m not here. There’s nothing in my mind except when they give something to me. Right now they’re giving me the words I’m saying to you.”
The woman did not understand the meaning behind what she’d just said. She’d said it because another Troop member “gave” it to her and yet another Troop member sat a long way off—puzzled as to the exact meaning as it pertained to herself. The woman on the orange cushions was silent and growing uneasy at the disbelief on Stanley’s face. Her unease vanished. She might have been shrieking in the dead silence, so fast and furious were the motions made by the individual facial muscles. Her body strained against the seams of her clothing, the muscles knotting and unknotting.
No previous change had been as harsh as this one, nor had the struggle among her people been so fierce. As features one after the other bent under the onslaught, another person turned to face him. Stanley asked for a name. Silence.
“Do you have a name?”
“You may call me the Interpreter. The differences between the Buffer and myself are vast and complicated. The Buffer stands between the woman and the outside world, absorbing emotional and physical impact. She also absorbs any stray knowledge the Weaver cannot reweave from her mind. The Buffer cannot reason as well as I. She is more emotional about the past because she operates on an emotional level and I operate on the cognitive. I am trying to make this very simple.”
The voice of the Interpreter was devoid of emotion, not like the ragged, erratic sound of the Buffer, who would join future sessions. The Interpreter’s eyes were tranquil with a hint of humour, they did not flash with anger or widen in terror. Indeed, her body language conveyed self-confidence and lack of fear.
“You want to know what happens in your client’s mind. Her mind is only a tunnel, an avenue to each of us when we choose to enter or “flood” it, on occasion. The opening of the Tunnel or avenue is a choice—and you can be sure it is made wisely at all times. The Gatekeeper is the one who makes the choice.
“When the avenue from one or more of our minds to that of your client is opened by the Gatekeeper, we send memories. You know what confetti looks like: little, shredded fragments of coloured paper. We send your client memories, seldom in whole segments, but rather in those shreds; a flurry of them at times, swooshing through the avenue of her mind. To give her or most of us the whole picture at once would be too dangerous, it couldn’t be coped with. Our pain would be too great.”
“How can you be sure of that?” Stanley asked. “Perhaps everyone’s strength is greater than you know.”
“You say that with no concept at all of what’s back here. I will give you an example. When a child is tortured, as we were by the stepfather, the child cries. The mother hated crying; to her it was a sign of weakness. ‘Be strong,’ she used to say, ‘and if you don’t know how, I’ll show you, otherwise you’ll never make it in that world out there.’ The mother took whatever nightmare things the stepfather tortured us with, and did some torturing of her own. To make us strong, she said. It worked. Some of us are very strong—and stripped of human emotion. Others have no emotion and are weak. The woman is in yet another category. I cannot tell you more. I can only trust you to accept what is said, and hope that you will use caution in working with it.”
The Interpreter saw that Stanley was willing to try and understand what she’d given him so far. One day she might lay out the rest. It was far more complicated and involved the efforts of the entire Troop Formation and the state of the cores. What would he say when he discovered the monstrous number of Troop members that clustered around that double core? Worse, could he, could anyone, understand the intricate, convoluted, but essential mechanism that protected that double core?
“Who,” Stanley muttered over his clipboard, “is the one with nothing in her mind? The one you all refer to in the manuscript as ‘the woman’ or ‘the client’?”
The Interpreter gave what might pass for a smile. “She has no other name. Someone had to operate in the world with no memory of the abuse. The woman is merely the tool of the Troop member who, among other things, directs her as the façade.”
The Interpreter felt the reverberations of Stanley’s inner anger and saw him pushing it aside, plunging ahead.
“In all the case histories I’ve read on multiplicity,” Stanley said, “there is one among the other selves who knows everything. In the case of the Troops—would that person be the Buffer?”
“No.” The Interpreter spoke carefully. She was receiving information from more than one Troop mind and as quickly as she caught the words she juxtaposed them for Stanley. “The Buffer only sits in most instances in front of the woman. When one of us moves in, the woman is gone and so is the Buffer. In most instances. So you see, the Buffer couldn’t know everything.”
“Who does?’
“I do not have that information as yet.” She judged his face, inside the tailored Vandyke beard with its sprinkle of grey among the dark brown hair, to be kind; his eyes were alive with intelligence and humour and the anger that had crept to their surface. He looked to be the sort of man who could take anything in stride. Eventually. There was so much that she should be telling him, would be telling him, were it not for the warning signal being sent precisely then from inside the Troop Formation.
A pinpoint of light, for which the conversation and the Interpreter’s strong, innermost thoughts had been a catalyst, had suddenly entered the woman’s brain. The light was noted and immediately blocked, but the warning continued to sound.
Not yet, said the Gatekeeper.
The Interpreter agreed, and, as was the custom, sent a soundless acknowledgement. From far off, blanketed inside the protective mechanism, a faint cry echoed and was silenced.
The cry echoed and once more it was silenced.
Sleep now. The words came from far back in the woman’s mind. They were not directed to her at all, but to the cores. They did not come from Mean Joe this time, but from the one who waged his battle in the darkest recesses of the Tunnel.
Later that night, Stanley reviewed the session. One of Marshall’s remarks came back to him. “Regard yourself,” he’d said, “as an invited guest in a foreign land. The customs and the lifestyle may not be your own; they certainly won’t be your reality. But we don’t know zip about the human mind and
who’s to say, exactly, what the criteria are for human existence? When you’re in their territory, you might learn more by bowing to the East.”
All Stanley knew as he looked at the mountain of manuscript, read and unread, was that he’d have to change his perspective if he ever hoped to achieve full understanding—or to determine exactly where the “woman” was, within the scope of the Troop movement. He didn’t want to take literally the description of her as it had been given in today’s session. Yet when he turned that description over, examined it, it seemed to make more and more sense.
SIXTEEN
WITH a lot less to go over than Stanley, the woman reviewed the session herself that night, and brooded. She could not recall having said much. She shuffled manuscript pages under the gooseneck lamp, focusing her attention on scattered sentences and doubting the words. Was any of it true?
All this and more, someone said.
Several minutes later the woman surfaced again. She held the same batch of pages in her hand, but over twenty were now missing. Unable to think what she had done with them, she cried. Stupid people lost important things. The pages were irreplaceable and nowhere to be found, although she spent the next half hour searching everywhere.
The woman did not know that the manuscript held messages born of more than ninety minds, each one determined, desperate that the story be heard. Many of them were too young or too damaged to speak aloud. For one Troop member, the twenty lost pages had been her only hope of retribution.
The woman knew only that she had done something wrong. The harder she looked for the pages, the clearer it became that they were gone. Her mind could not identify their contents. As she ripped open the desk drawers and flung other pages about, a hailstorm of confetti burst into the Tunnel. The confetti gave up only shreds of recall. It was enough, however. She began to cry.
From the depths of the Tunnel and yet not, because the walls were vertical this time and cold and damp, someone stirred and cried out in utter agony. Shoulders hunched, Mean Joe moved instantly, on silent, monstrous feet. Catherine moved too, anxious to keep her secret. It was too late. She felt Mean Joe’s searching gaze as he followed the cries to their source. A child atremble with flesh so icy, so damp it might have been a fish out of arctic waters; Mean Joe knelt in the Tunnel tide and swept it to him. For one brief moment when the wet green eyes opened and locked with his, he knew her. His own eyes grew angrier—not at this sodden, quivering bundle of humanity, but at their mutual tormentors.
The green eyes saw him and shuttered closed against a fleeting recognition. As with a mummy preserved for a thousand years from the harsh light of day, the green faded. In a whispering flash of time, all that was left were two emptied, concave depths of deadened burnt-sienna.
Catherine of the worldly attitudes, the wry sense of humour, Catherine whom nothing ever touched or tormented, uttered against her will a strangled cry, half-felt, half-remembered. It was her own and yet not, enmeshed and yet separate from the frightened wet bundle Mean Joe held against his chest. Catherine’s mind fastened on his and sent a steady stream of messages. One of them was gratitude, held in her own eyes that mirrored exactly those of the creature Mean Joe had taken to him.
In the Tunnel darkness the cries grew louder; pain escalated, threatening all those within. The cries became a single shriek. Mean Joe captured the sound, muffled it against a body so tremendous that all reverberations were silenced. His hands, like huge butterfly wings, caressed the face of each tiny charge. With a mind that held a stone-cold rage, Mean Joe called out to another Troop member and was answered.
The Recorder moved forward and sat, mind unleashed, under the gooseneck lamp. Her lips were pursed, her brows drawn with the strain. Her whole body tensed with the breath she took in, and then she relaxed. The words formed and flowed, one by one, from the mind of the Recorder through to the hands of the woman sitting at the typewriter. Letter by letter, thought by thought, the twenty pages were re-created. Deep in the Tunnel, the cries subsided.
The Well of Creativity slept. And her name was Olivia.
* * *
“Even the mail scares me. Always has, I don’t know why. I’m not sure I’ve ever opened any mail. Isn’t that silly? I’m tired of being scared of everything. It means that in the long run I can’t ever win.”
“That’s right,” Stanley said. A kind of ingenuous wonder hung in his client’s eyes. What did she mean, she never opened the mail? Everybody did. It was like death and taxes.
“I get the feeling,” she said, “that I’m doing things wrong all the time. It isn’t just the mail, either. I can’t relate properly to people. I can’t be like them. I don’t have feelings or emotions of my own; when a situation calls for responsiveness, I’m lost.”
“You weren’t brought up to use the feelings you were born with, but they are very strong within you, and hidden.”
“I never felt them. Once, in grade school, the boy I had a crush on broke his arm. I looked all through myself but there was no emotion. I remember that day; I was very puzzled.”
“But you had a crush on him. Wasn’t that an emotion?”
“In a funny way, the crush wasn’t mine, either. It was sort of borrowed.”
Stanley knew the woman was gone again, and that someone else sat here, discussing herself as if she were a total stranger. He found that many Troop members did that; it was another way of hiding. A pink tongue circled the mouth slowly, moving at the same pace as the fingers that had begun to twine a lock of hair round and round. Purposely, Stanley made no comment. The time wasn’t right to say that having no emotion was just as dangerous as having no sensation of pain. Without pain there was no valuable warning signal when the body suffered from a physical ailment. Without emotion, one tended to act, minus regard for the feelings or desires of others—and it eliminated the need for love. Would anyone here ever openly admit to wanting love and affection? So far he’d heard it expressed obliquely, in convoluted terms, as if they were afraid and unsure of its meaning. He asked now if she’d ever felt loved. The answer was no. He thought it came from the woman.
“People,” Stanley told her, “have had close relationships with you. Norman, Sharon, your daughter . . .”
“No, not close. I always felt a terrible lack of love in any relationship, unless I was good—a pliant, perfect person. I didn’t feel anything for them, not really. It wouldn’t matter if everyone died tomorrow, that’s how much they affect me. I’m telling you the truth, Stanley; not just to get a rise out of you, but to explain what’s going on inside me.”
Stanley knew that in adulthood, abused children often turned a deaf ear to any avowal of love. Nor could they, themselves, avow it.
“Sometimes,” he said cautiously, “when we don’t feel worthy, we can’t give or receive anything. To someone laboring under a feeling of low self-esteem, love is completely unrecognizable and therefore unattainable.”
“Please,” she said, “try to understand. I don’t want it, even though I hear myself saying or thinking at times that I do. I’m empty. When I say all this to you, it’s confusing because I feel so far away and because so many different thoughts go through my head at once. I can’t be sure of anything when that happens, except that I’m so scared.”
“Once you’ve absorbed and accepted what your people are trying to tell you, once the denial period is over,” Stanley said, “and I can’t predict how long that will take, whether it’s months or years, you’ll feel many things. All kinds of emotion will be real for you. Love, passion, happiness . . .”
“The word ‘feel’ doesn’t apply at all.”
“You may be receiving everything on an intellectual level only.” Stanley wanted the layers to peel back by her own efforts, but it couldn’t hurt to peel back a few himself. Eventually she would make her own way and grasp her own realisations. “Emotions aren’t harmful to us, they serve a useful purpose. They’re a human ventilation system. By expe
riencing all—the good, the great, and the worst of emotions—you will also be able to relax. Along with that will come a new ‘sight,’ a view of yourself as lovable, worthy. Your mother and stepfather took that away from you so early on that to construct any other image was impossible. Once your ‘sight’ is changed and their picture of you has been destroyed, new pictures will form. You’ll have the ability to act as yourself without the need to construct a pliant persona that changes constantly, merely to fit whatever others want of you. Some of that anger will be able to get out.”
Stanley also figured that the woman wasn’t the only one listening and others could benefit, too. The woman couldn’t tell him that she had never “constructed” anything, and that while she recognised the anger in herself at times, it was not hers. He would think she was simply denying responsibility.
Green eyes blinked rapidly and the woman shivered. “I’ve got to tell you something because it sits right here in my mind. Except for what you call these other selves, I’ll be alone for the rest of my life. The best part, Stanley, is that it won’t even bother me.”
The switch this time didn’t take very long. It had been gathering momentum for several seconds. It looked strange, her sitting there like that, childlike and bemused, and all the while those sensuous movements—hair being caressed between long fingers, the mouth taking on a plumper, less narrow line. But before he could readjust to the obvious differences, both the childlike quality and the more womanly movements faded.
“Holy, unmitigated shit,” said a gravelly voice, “how do we get out of this black hole?”
“Shit is not holy,” Elvira said with a smile, “excrement is holy.”
Stanley ignored both the comment and the voice change. If the others wanted to talk, they could introduce themselves. “You get out of it by letting your people out,” he said, “by relaxing enough to let us hear what they’ve got to say. Your people hold the keys. They hold the memories you don’t have.”
