by Truddi Chase
Many Troop members had operated their entire lives on a verbal and physical level that still remained unknown to the woman.
For those Troops who were aware of each other, the experience ranged, after the initial shock and anger wore off, from joyous acceptance, to nitpicking at each other’s shortcomings, to rage and disgust. Facing some Troop members through thought transference or the more potent “evidencing,” the woman was aware at times of a kind of wonderment; she almost wanted to count their fingers and toes the way a mother might when presented with her new-born child.
That motherliness was not her own. The Troop members were giving her, as they always had, their recall and their feelings and reactions, because she had none of her own. They gave her only what they thought she could handle. The Tunnel walls rumbled frequently with preparations to give her more.
By late June, the preparations fell into place as the woman stood on a street corner, trying to decide if it was safe to cross. For her, streetlights were in a category with math, clocks, and calendars. A light drizzle had been falling and now the humidity moved in, making her blouse stick to her skin. She smelled the cigar smoke on the man waiting next to her and determined that she would cross when he did. That was the last she saw of him.
With no warning, two separate entities invaded her mind. One was a silent, far-off figure; the dead “essence” of someone whose birth and death had happened simultaneously and long ago. Adult core. The words, without meaning, slid into the woman’s mind. The “essence” of the adult core remained for a moment and the woman felt as if their two minds had been joined, as if she herself floated into the vast, empty space of them both.
The second entity’s emergence was only the cry—of someone locked out of Troop Formation experiences for sporadic, but long periods of time. This entity was almost as empty as the first. And then the woman “received” from it, frustrated, fearful, wondering; and the emptiness was filling up with not more than five memories of an entire lifetime and confetti shreds of the rest. The woman had believed those five memories and the shreds were hers, and if not, what did that leave her?
In the Tunnel, he waited and stayed the Gatekeeper from giving the third signal.
Darlin’, he said to the woman, y’ have now received the essence of the two who sit nearest you. Are y’ up t’ receivin’ the third?
His voice was so strange, so bland, as if before it reached her ears, he somehow filtered it through time itself. There was not a hint in that voice of the person behind it. The woman trembled and he said things to her in that bland voice that she could not comprehend, but the pain of experiencing both entities, the silent, far-off adult core and the one who had been locked out for so long, had taken her mind in a giant fist and wrung it. The emotional pain grew and flooded her.
The second entity, darlin’, is the source o’ all your own emotions and thought. The second entity shields the first. Y’ are more empty than either o’ them.
The woman, her mind joined with the second entity and feeling as she had all her life, that one’s bewilderment and emptiness knew he told the truth. The other Troop members held their breath. But that truth plunged straight through the woman’s brain like a bullet and sped off, leaving nothing but disbelief and denial in its path. When he asked again if she were ready for the third one to evidence, the clarity of his silent thought became a call of outrage heard through the Troop Formation ranks.
He knew it wouldn’t work this time; she would have to be devoid of anything given to her by other Troop members, and their outrage blocked his efforts. But he forced the woman to listen to her own mind; forced her to hear the dead silence of it. And then she knew who the third one was—and inside herself she ran like hell and the Weaver ran with her, snatching away all that the Tunnel darkness had given her.
Mean Joe waited in that lone, fleeting moment, ready to absorb any blow which the Buffer could not handle. His two giant hands, beneath which there was no terror, went out to the woman.
We all have to evidence sometime, Mean Joe said. Paideia, the Greeks called it; the transference of knowledge. When one of us evidences to you, you receive what we are and at the same time, we receive and know ourselves, too. Even the most infinitesimal among us can evidence. There aren’t any words to express some of us, except to say that nothing is something, too. You need to keep that one idea, hang onto it, because your turn is near.
With no idea how she’d done it, the woman saw she’d not only crossed the intersection but had navigated a very big parking lot and was sitting in her car. The radio played full blast. Hurriedly, instead of turning the volume down, she rolled up the windows. The Outrider laughed and the woman was glad of it. Harsh afternoon sun streamed in, slanting across the dashboard, making her eyes water. Or was that someone else’s tears? Numbness had set in.
Knowing himself to be a full-fledged bastard for the act he was about to perform, Mean Joe seized the advantage.
He signaled and the long-dead image of Olivia I inserted a piece of recall in the woman’s mind . . . she was almost three years old and in the first farmhouse kitchen. Walls and floorboards rattled with the gusts of icy wind. The room filled with raw winter light glinting off the snowbanks outside. The high chair in which she sat was made of varnished maple with a yellow duck painted on it. The tray held a dish of gritty cereal and a tin cup of milk. The hand coming toward her seemed giant in size and covered with little black hairs. In the hand was a silver baby spoon with a curved handle, a gift from her mother’s mother; in the spoon, cereal on which Karo syrup floated, golden, pretty, ugly.
Why was she imprisoned in this high chair to eat her breakfast when memories of sitting down at the kitchen table for various other meals, at this same age, were suddenly batting her from every direction?
The high chair tray was lifted then, and the woman knew why. Tiny hands were bound to the arms of the high chair. Karo syrup, the taste of it in her mouth—Karo syrup not floating on a spoon of cereal but coating the long pink thing that nestled in the wiry bush. A small voice in the woman’s head, crying. Go away, leave me alone.
The long pink thing bobbed up and down; the hand with the dark black hairs gripped it, pushing it at the child’s face, aiming it at her mouth. The small voice wailed in the woman’s mind. It was the same one she’d heard that night in the bathtub, during memories of the games the stepfather had played right in front of the mother and for which the child had later been punished. Her mother wasn’t in the kitchen though, not today. Something told the woman that her mother was busy elsewhere, giving birth to the first half sister.
Because the woman’s mind was open now, because Mean Joe knew with this recall that Olivia I had her pinned like a fish on a hook, wriggling and screaming protests in her own brain, he let Olivia proceed. Right into the woman’s helpless mind, he allowed the insertion of one more picture.
Sunlight shot through the slats in the barn, although the barn itself was hazy. The dust motes were much clearer, dancing in the hot summer air. It was the crate that really got her, sitting off to one side, but looking as if it were often used. Wooden, with metal straps around it for extra support; a very strong crate, strong enough for a man to stand on. No sound at all in the barn and then she heard the cow bleat, heard the stepfather grunt.
That was all because Mean Joe let the picture fade and he even took the sound away. So she didn’t know why her screams should be louder than the music playing in the car. Or why somebody should be trying to tell her that the screams weren’t her own; that there was a very good reason why all recall seemed like a movie of someone else’s life.
Mean Joe did move then, assuring her as much as he dared that the image had meaning, that the wooden crate and the cow had a definite purpose in the stepfather’s games back at the second farmhouse. On hearing his words the woman did not move. She stood like a stone with dread rising in her throat until it formed an ice-cold knot.
Suddenly, June
was gone and by the middle of July, the woman felt nothing except the dire need to hang onto herself, counting minutes by the clock to make sure that no one else stole her time. To what purpose, she had no idea. Stanley had been beating his brains out to help her overcome the lethargy.
The presence of her people, now that more of them had come forth, was inundating. The woman became confused. The more she wondered what it was that she wanted, or needed, or was, the more determined they were to tell her what they wanted. The woman wondered what her own purpose was.
We’ll let you know, they said.
On most days, she worked on the gallery floor except when typing, knees folded beneath her. The small voice cried out as she worked: Go away, leave me alone.
At times, for no apparent reason and with no prior warning, the woman found herself down on those same knees, rocking back and forth, sobbing. Depression grafted her tired limbs together and immobilised her so badly that there were times when she barely moved except to drag herself to the sessions.
Someone dumped it into her mind one day that in view of the irrefutable evidence of the Troop members, her denials sounded stupid. To the woman, the Troops and the incidents sounded at times unreal. The media had not yet begun to publicise child abuse in all its horror. So the woman might well have been alone, although joined in a pitiful alliance with countless millions of other victims.
But as Norman was quick to point out to her, other victims kept their mouths shut; they did not allow their therapy to be filmed and shown at a large university to a student population that asked Stanley questions, like: “Freud says that children secretly want sex with their parents, couldn’t she be fantasising?” or “She reacts so hysterically, could she simply be menopausal?” or “She’s just one of those people who overdramatise things; can child abuse really do this much damage?”
Stanley reported such comments to the woman in an offhand way, checking her reactions. He wanted her to be aware and prepared for the day when someone would make such comments to her face. He also reported to her on those students who watched the videos and thus found the courage to report their own childhood abuse to him.
On hearing that those students were now getting treatment, the woman cried with relief. The other selves urged faster completion of the manuscript.
“How can the bastards be so dumb,” Sewer Mouth raged. “Do they think that female children of twelve are menopausal? And what about male victims? Are they menopausal, too? Screw Freud and the horse he rode in on!”
From a distance the woman heard snatches of Stanley and Sewer Mouth’s conversation. The language, the anger, were frightening, and told her that Sewer Mouth at least was real. The woman knew she could not have changed or prevented a single word that had been uttered.
Occasionally, listlessly, when not consumed with terror, the woman picked up such evidence of her other selves and turned it over. Immediately, thankfully, the bizarreness of it would leap into her mind, allowing that evidence, as if it were flawed merchandise, to be put back on the shelf.
For the woman, July did not mean beaches and languid sunning. Paying 25 percent interest on a recent business loan had depleted the savings, and three settlements, whose proceeds would have carried her nicely for another four years, were shoved into limbo. Land purchasers were scared, afraid that inflated housing prices would not hold. The banks weren’t lending to any builder who wasn’t liquid, and few builders had been liquid for a long time now. The career for which Ten-Four had struggled so hard was going down the tubes. Real estate companies were closing.
Nowhere could the woman find the energy to plot alternative and necessary job changes. Loser, said a raspy voice. And it was true. Moving out of the house and leaving everything she loved about it loomed ahead, if the bills were to be paid by renting it out. Pressured beyond the ability to cope, she stayed away from television news as well, for fear that it might loosen her fine-edged grip on sanity. One Friday morning, the horoscopes, the only thing she read these days except “Hagar the Horrible,” stated: “Your mental stability is suspect today.” She cancelled the subscription to the Washington Post, killing her last media connection.
The mail she didn’t read, stored in over twenty paper grocery bags, disappeared from the cupboard one day soon afterward.
Coward.
The woman winced at the voice that sounded like her mother’s. She didn’t miss the mail, but the receipts, records, and notes, the extraneous baggage of a life she hadn’t lived, were gone, too. Everyone kept such things; people said it was required. Elvira, who pressed closer these days along with yet another formerly distant self, replied, So what? The woman shrugged. Whatever she could, ought, must do, seemed to have lost its hold on her. Most people would have been shocked at her lackadaisical attitude. The woman, having experienced little but fear and an overpowering compulsion to “do right” all her life, felt only a hesitant relief.
“Thank you,” she said to whoever might be listening.
You’re welcome, they said warmly. See? We are all cooperating here. You didn’t think we could do that.
The idea of being cared for and the newer, relaxed pace seemed suspect and their charms paled quickly. Sewer Mouth took her gripe to Stanley.
“I’m starting to feel smothered. I’m capable of running my own life, I always have been and always will be.”
“They have been with you a very long time,” he said. “They have your best interests at heart.”
Sewer Mouth couldn’t bear it. She leaped right over the woman’s half-surfaced presence and snarled. “That statement sucks. It’s a bloody platitude. I’m suspicious whenever someone tells me junk like that. As for this ‘other self’ business, this ‘process’ as you call it, I hate the whole damned thing. It scares me.”
“Why does it scare you?” Stanley did not smile. He wanted to because Sewer Mouth, adamant about not giving her name, was one of the most easily recognisable Troop members.
“It means,” she growled, “that the only private place I ever had to myself has been invaded by strangers, and I’m not alone anymore. I hate it!”
“Why do you hate it?”
The woman, receiving only fragments of the conversation, wondered at the carefully withheld smile on Stanley’s face, at his constant Whys. Couldn’t he follow what she was saying? Or was he distracted or responding with smugness at some stupidity of hers? In her exhausted state, all she could do was watch his mouth carefully, trying to hang on as she studied the thought moving in her head. It came out of her mouth with no effort on her part and the clarity of its meaning amazed her.
“People who get close,” she said, “can kill you.”
Finally, Stanley thought, they were getting down to it. No matter how strong she grew in business, her personal life would always be nil unless she did understand. She would always run at the idea of closeness to anyone.
“People can kill you?” he repeated. “How can they do that?”
She started to speak but her voice broke and the changes were happening so quickly that Stanley kept missing them. One minute he was looking at the woman and the next he wasn’t sure who sat in front of him. The only thing he knew definitely when the voice broke was that his client was gone.
In her place behind the bangs sat a woman with apple-green eyes. The outer edges were ringed with a thin line of black and in each center was a tiny, dead-black iris. It would take Stanley years to figure out that this self was Black Katherine’s mirror-image; created to go where Black Katherine could not, to deal as Black Katherine could never deal, because her rage was too great. Black Katherine was one of the selves who would forever remain in the darkest shadows of the Tunnel, secluded and on guard. One day, in a retrospective mood, Elvira would tell Stanley that the Junkyard Dog of “Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown” fame had nothing on Black Katherine.
“Are you aware,” the apple-green eyes bored right into Stanley’s, unblinking, “that the
re is a nun in our midst? Her name is Sister Mary Catherine, and sits clicking the beads all night and calling out, ‘Harlot!’ She prays. We can hear her. Have you any idea what Sister Mary Catherine is trying to deal with?”
“A nun,” Stanley said. It was all that he could say.
“Sister Mary is on the edge.” The voice held no emotion. “We don’t know exactly how to keep her from that edge, when so much of a sexual nature is being hurled at her.”
While the person seated in front of him spoke of concern for the Troop member she called “Sister Mary Catherine,” her tone reflected no concern whatever. Neither did her eyes. There was something not quite right about them.
“Sister Mary,” the voice went on while the eyes stared at him fixedly, “finds the sexual recall difficult. I gather that having been a minister you can understand her problem, but she’s driving some Troop members crazy with her bleating.”
“And you,” Stanley said, “how do you feel about Sister Mary’s reaction?” He had figured out what was wrong with her eyes. Aside from the unusual apple-green colour and the fine thread of black at their edges which reminded one of an Alaskan husky, they were utterly without human emotion. She looked as if she could kill without remourse; and as if the loss of her own life would concern her even less. In her whole attitude there wasn’t a shred of humanity. Stanley was finally frightened.
She did not answer his questions. She made statements with no change of expression, matter-of-factly, as if she did not care one way or the other what he thought.
“You don’t like me,” she said flatly. “I’m not here to be liked. Some of us don’t even like each other. But there is one thing we all have in common—our individuality. While no Troop member will accept Sister Mary’s beliefs, to a man, we are determined that she, like the rest of us, be allowed her own space. No matter what she represents.”
