by Truddi Chase
She screamed aloud but the small presence at her side acted as if nothing had happened. In her quiet eyes and her miniature mouth that seemed to have been glued shut, there was a strong aura of sadness. The little one was the kindest of them all, the woman told herself, the little one didn’t speak a word.
She reached out to pick her up, to hold her and say, “It’s alright, I’ll make it better.”
She couldn’t. The stickiness on the small mouth and hands prevented her.
The woman stood there, recognising Catherine’s voice and seeing with Catherine’s eyes other, as yet unidentified, Troop members standing directly behind her, hidden in the shadows cast by her presence.
“Get ready,” Catherine said pleasantly, “their turns are coming.”
TWENTY-FIVE
THE little one hovered in the window seat, uneasy in the gloom, and reminiscent of another little girl a long time ago who had sat wishing her father would come take her away from the farm. A stiff breeze had come up, rattling the tree limbs against the gallery walls. Shadows loomed. When it rained, as it would shortly, this room got dark before any other in the house. All day long things had moved or seemed to move, somewhere just beyond the woman’s vision. She still wanted to pick the child up and hold her, but empathy vanished at the sight of her tiny hands and mouth. The woman’s mind fastened on jelly beans or frosted cake, but neither produced such a residue.
The child, from her perch at the window, saw the woman’s indecision, her torment, and sent a message in silent, childlike thought. Catherine stepped forward to translate: A substance more directly related to the childhood sexual abuse had caused the stickiness.
The woman accepted the idea without understanding it and began to cry someone else’s tears.
Patience, someone said, the child’s job today is only a part of the overall picture and she’s slow. Bear with her. Your mind and hers, like a few of the others here, are a lot alike—unformed.
Wondering if they would ever stop, the woman saw the tears fall into her skirt as she sat up straighter at the typewriter. Her hands shook while threading a new ribbon into the Smith-Corona. The carbon, black and oily, stained her fingers and the keys. It didn’t budge when she went on scrubbing, moistening Kleenex with spit and going back over each finger. Slowly it dawned: somehow the mind right behind hers preferred to think of the carbon as the source of the stickiness—not the child who had left the window seat, carrying a doll in one hand. She was coming across the gallery.
On tiny feet she went, her essence encapsulated in the minds of those in the Troop Formation who knew her identity. They had suffered her infant rage for her, too long. The rage burst among them. It reached her.
The first-born’s child mirror-image, finally grasping her place in the Troop Formation, felt an onrush of anger. The anger, bigger than she was, filled her mind, gave her a momentary strength beyond her normal capacity for movement. She held the doll in front of herself as if it were a sword and as she advanced on the woman she sensed denial from too many other Troop members and her anger grew . . . until from the Tunnel, she heard it, as her small steps brought her closer: the cadence of old Gaelic, bittersweet in message; in words that were so ancient they disintegrated as she heard them, and all she could remember ever after were the cadence and the warmth of someone as old as the words themselves. And he spoke again.
Child, he said. Y’r place be a fine one and as y’ mature, y’ll treasure it as we treasure you. Go softly, little one; carry y’r brain before ye and look beyond y’r pain. Y’r pain be the armour. Give it t’a the woman. She’ll need it all an more.
Chilled by the cold air which seemed to come from the child, the woman felt herself taken in other hands, strong ones, which forced her into a yoga position on the red oriental rug. The woman rubbed her arms, desperate for warmth. The cold air and the nearness of the child became unendurable. So did the sticky substance on her dress and hands and around her mouth. The woman tried to fight back the tears with no idea why she cried.
For a moment, the child sat on the rug, playing with the doll. The cadence still softened her rage and she laid the doll carefully in the woman’s lap. Her mind worked at a solemn pace, pointing out matter-of-factly that what the Seventh Horseman had presented in that session had actually been a small child, less than three years old, made of flesh and blood—a small, naked child, without a single pubic hair, whose legs the stepfather had taken in his hands and pulled apart.
In the face of every excuse denying the stepfather’s purpose, the child merely stared the woman down. The child insisted that the expression the woman had read on the stepfather’s face in that same session was what it seemed. Gleeful, goading, he had enjoyed the act and the pain it caused.
The pattern in the red oriental rug swam in the woman’s tears. For the last few weeks she’d been trying, for no reason and to no avail, to visualise herself as a small child without pubic hair. Her people, she realised, were careful with the images they transmitted. Comforted by their concern and remembering Stanley’s instructions to “go with it,” the woman allowed the child to guide her further. As she did, she caught somehow not the sound, but the sense, of a tiny lisp. Together, minds joined, the child held up the flicks and the woman watched what had previously been obscured.
Flick. A child, six years old. The starving Great Dane on the hedgerow barked at the end of his chain. He lurched against it. His teeth were long and sharp and despite the lack of food, his muscles still powerful. Flick. The dog faded and so did his barking, but the hedgerow itself did not. Blue tin doll dishes were spread out on a rock underneath the hedgerow’s wild cherry trees. The woman crouched beneath them, smelling their fragrance and staring down at the tiny plates and miniature silverware. From her peripheral vision, two big black shoes laced up the middle appeared in front of her and paused. The stepfather’s words were not clear, but she felt his anger and saw the shoes move. They came down crushingly on the silverware and the blue tin dishes. Yanking her up by one arm, he flailed her through the air like a bundle of rags.
Flick. Someone slid it into the woman’s mind: a navy plaid dress with a fragile lace collar and puffy sleeves, a golden locket on a chain. The child was very dressed up; it was her father’s visiting day and he was due any minute. She was clean, too, fresh out of a bath in the old tin washtub, her hair smelling of shampoo.
All around, the fields and paths were bogged in spring mud. The woman saw the child scrambling to her feet, trying to escape the stepfather’s anger.
“Don’t try it, the mud will slow you down!” The Seventh Horseman, wild with anger at the stepfather, called out and the woman saw the horse above her, white and gleaming in the early morning dew. “Up,” the Seventh Horseman urged from atop the dancing animal, “I’ll take you!”
The Seventh Horseman’s call had reached no one’s ears that day because she was still dormant, lying in the incubation stage just before her birth. The woman caught a sense of that, and drew back, unfamiliar with the process and therefore disbelieving.
Flick. The stepfather had been quick and unafraid of the mud. The little one showed the woman the brutality of the sexual assault occurring then on the hedgerow. The woman could not look and started to cry and laugh hysterically. Because, regardless of the stepfather’s brutality, she felt protected, wrapped in that warm blanket her people seemed so fond of.
She did not see Mean Joe, massive and flinty-eyed in the dim gallery light, a bulwark of strength from which the little one drew her own. Nor did she sense him sending his own signals to yet another of his charges who waited just out of sight. The switch from one child to the other would soon be made, for the first child’s strength was waning. For now, she struggled on, with Catherine translating her thoughts into adult words.
“The stepfather,” she said, “hated it when the father came to visit. He made us pay that day. It wasn’t enough for him, though, he tripped us on the way back to the
house and when we fell, he put his foot in the small of our back, grinding us into the mud. When we got to the house, the mother was angry over our dirty clothes.”
The woman clutched her head, trying to concentrate on rage for the stepfather, at what he’d done so long ago. Putting this recall down on the pages in a way readers would accept would be a horrendous task. Would anyone ever accept the way her people brought the recall?
Stanley had laughed so quietly the other day, and he’d told her that other victims who had seen the tapes accepted it all.
The little one placed a tiny hand in the woman’s and, along with the feeling of stickiness on the small fingers, came a shock of realisation. The woman fought to tear her hand away, but the child’s grip was too strong.
“There was,” the little one said, “a search for particularly quiet, hidden places. They changed from one location to the other, depending on the time of day, the circumstances, and the proximity of others.”
The woman refused the thought.
“But you will believe,” the child said. “All this and much more. You will feel the warmth, feel the pleasure.”
Two other selves spoke to the woman and the blanket was drawn tighter. Tiny hands, more than one pair, patted hers, comforting but determined. The woman smiled at their concern but one of them urged, through Catherine, “Go on, get it out of your mouth, stop thinking about how much you hate the word ‘pleasure,’ or how much Sister Mary hates it. The search for hidden places was constant in the stepfather’s mind. Like a game he had to win. The flatbed car on the hedgerow was part of the game. It could not be seen from the house. In the summertime, green weeds sprang up around it and in the fall and winter, the weeds turned brown and scruffy. The stepfather lay under the flatbed car on a piece of woven cloth. See it now, the burlap, in the furthest, darkest corner under the flatbed car?”
The little one, though she had been calm throughout the recall, stopped. Catherine could hold her no longer and, with a faint cry, the child’s thought crumpled.
Mean Joe moved fast, his hands huge and black against the pale skin. He snatched up the waif in the dull brown dress. Her head of golden curls drooped against his shoulder. He signaled for the one who waited just out of sight.
Now, he said.
A little voice continued but it sounded different to the woman. There was something about the lisp that was the same as before but not quite. . . .
“The stepfather,” Lamb Chop said as she filled the gap, unaided by Catherine, “would catch our eye and if the mother wasn’t looking, that pink thing appeared. It was the signal. He’d leave the room those times and go to whatever place he’d decided on beforehand. Whenever the stepfather signaled, one of us followed him. No matter how it wound up—him putting us with a dog or himself—one of us followed.”
Catherine’s voice broke in over the cursing that had erupted. “Don’t be distracted by Sewer Mouth,” Catherine told the woman. “Sewer Mouth is an extremely angry lady. Do you blame her? You’re going to be sick. Hurry up, we’ll be here when you get back.”
And they were. The woman left the bathroom ten minutes later, unable to understand why she could not throw up. The urge, almost unbearable, produced nothing except a watery substance. One of the children threw up but the woman wasn’t there to see it.
The Zombie placed her like a block of ice down on the bedroom floor with the tape recorder. The other selves hovered. Again the small hands in the woman’s larger ones. Again, a flick showing a tarpaulin under the flatbed car. The tarp looked black and smelled oily. Rain had collected in the center of it. Small bugs and larvae showed beneath one edge and the little one’s mouth formed an “O” at the sight of them.
Sewer Mouth cursed at the next flick. The woman felt the tips of the child’s small, grubby fingers curled inside her own clenched hand. Where had the stickiness gone?
“Say it,” a raspy voice instructed.
The woman obeyed, woodenly. “I feel the warmth, the stepfather’s touch, and even though it kills me to say it, I get the feeling that there is willingness.”
The flashback shredded at the word “willingness,” then it swung back, fully formed. From her yoga position, the woman lowered her head to the floor. The child stared, silent and waiting. The stepfather’s face in the flashback showed clearly, suffused with pleasure as the pink thing, exposed in the zipper opening, moved from side to side and then curved upward. His hands gripped the small thighs which were rubber-ball firm and quite short. His hands were slipping inside the white cotton pants, the dress was being shoved up to the child’s waist and steadily there came a pounding, then throbbing, warmth.
Now positioned atop him, the child felt the pink thing squeezed between her small, bare legs, the warmth of his body against hers, the heavy odour of his sweaty work clothes. The child’s arousal. Confusion tore at the woman’s mind. The first small recall today had shown the brutality of the sexual attack on the hedgerow. This segment showed arousal, pleasure, willingness.
The Seventh Horseman seeing the woman’s confusion, spoke: “We’re giving you our memories,” she said. “One of us was created to deal with the arousal. It’s a normal part of one’s sexuality but, under the circumstances, it is also ugly. We all have our jobs, the one who dealt with the arousal didn’t want hers, but life doesn’t always give choices.”
The Seventh Horseman reinforced with louder messages, giving the woman a portion of their joint session. Very briefly, she went into various Troop dates of actual birth. Including the woman’s own.
“You lie!” the woman screamed. “I’ve always been here!”
The Tunnel darkness deepened.
“No,” the Seventh Horseman corrected her without explaining. “And I don’t lie, ever.”
The Seventh Horseman waited to see if the woman had absorbed to the point of understanding and full acceptance. But the woman, aside from feeling her face scrunched with anger and flushed red, simply looked puzzled.
In the Tunnel, Twelve turned to the Gatekeeper. The one sitting behind the woman doesn’t understand math. Someone will have to find another way.
No, said the Gatekeeper. The second skin of memory is not ready. But can you imagine such a gift in view of what we know and what the Weaver is weaving? To have it laid in your face that you were born of no parents at all?
The selves offered little escape from the recall that day. Just before dinnertime the woman called Sharon. Coffee she could not remember making perked on the stove, fragrant and welcome. But she needed more than coffee, she needed the sound of a human voice, as much to make her own self real as to find comfort.
“How much longer,” she whispered into the phone, “can I hold on and cope with all of this?”
Sharon exploded. “Look, I know you! I’ve seen every side of you and they’re only mood swings! You are not sick, you haven’t got multiple personalities. Phillips is so used to seeing very sick people, people who are really insane, that he can read almost anything into what you’re telling him!”
The woman vanished. In her place at the kitchen table the Zombie nodded in agreement at Sharon’s voice on the other end of the line. Methodically she poured five teaspoons of sugar and liberal amounts of milk into her coffee. Sharon told her about the value of mind relaxation and encounter groups. The Zombie closed her eyes.
“You are what you think you are,” Sharon insisted. “You beat the system in so many ways over the years, you can do it again if you just put this multiple business right out of your head!”
The Zombie listened and sipped her coffee with precise movements. There was no need for her to be careful in handling the cup of scalding liquid. The Zombie never got excited, never made a mistake.
While the woman heard Sharon’s frantic tone of voice, it came from far away. It didn’t make sense that her friend had become so outraged, so frightened. The woman hung up the phone and took a mouthful of coffee. Shocked at the sweet
taste, she spit it out, emptied the cup, and rinsed it at the sink.
“Sharon,” the Zombie said, “doesn’t believe you. She’s frightened for you and would rather we all disappeared. You’ve already tried most of the remedies she suggests. They didn’t work. We can’t just go away, it isn’t possible.”
The rain outside the kitchen windows had started to pound, and so had the woman’s temples.
“Tell you what,” the Zombie said, and for the first time, the woman noticed her speech pattern. The Zombie spoke with a definite pause between each word: “This cup of coffee is mine.” She poured more coffee into another cup and added milk and sugar.
Well, the woman told herself, here we are. All my life there’s been this insatiable need to be alone. Now I really am. Just me and them.
TWENTY-SIX
SUNDAY shoppers, carts loaded with miscellaneous bargains, elbowed through the drugstore aisles, ahead of and behind the woman. Each time the evidencing grew stronger as one self took over from another, she experienced it. Nobody gave his or her name. Right now, she felt, heard, and “saw” a child. With her toes pointed in, Lambchop was skipping down the aisles, inspecting the merchandise. Undaunted by the ninety-degree weather outside, she hummed “Deck the Halls.”
Lambchop stumbled over some of the words. The woman identified another voice as one she’d heard yesterday; one which helped the child and, in the process, considerably embellished the song: “’Tis the season,” Elvira sang aloud, “to be greedy. . . . Deck the halls with boughs of money, tralalalala . . . lalala.”
The child was staring at one of the displays. Squarely between two worlds and trying to acclimate herself, the woman reached out, ignoring other shoppers, and put two boxes of crayons into the shopping cart. There was a small sigh of happiness.
