by Truddi Chase
On a main aisle, a teddy bear sat on the highest shelf. Lambchop smiled at the stuffed animal. She looked different than she had this morning. Before the woman could pin down what the difference was, Mean Joe had blocked her vision. He snatched the bear down from the shelf. The woman shut her eyes, hoping that no one noticed him, hoping that no one in the store could see or hear or feel him—or the other selves—as she did.
At the checkout counter Lambchop held back, afraid to join the line of customers. A bored, nasty-faced clerk balked at large bills and didn’t seem to know the price of anything that wasn’t marked. Several people left their items on the counter and walked away, grumbling. The woman’s turn was coming up. She trembled, the way she always did in public, except that the Buffer was usually there, and often the Front Runner was sitting ahead of her, so no one really noticed it.
Lambchop wasn’t frightened. She smiled at Mean Joe, as an older black man gathered up the items his wife handed him. The black man walked up to the bored clerk, all six foot, seven inches of restrained determination and politeness and strength. He laid his wife’s items on the counter. The clerk wasted no time ringing them up and giving him change for a very large bill. The woman took note and stopped trembling. She, after all, had Mean Joe, who was every bit as intimidating.
Lamchop watched the black man, so big and capable of commanding the clerk’s attention. The woman herself, still unaware of Mean Joe’s own blackness, knew that for some reason, the little one associated him with the black man at the checkout counter, and therefore felt the stranger to be safe. She could only assume the child’s trust, as her own, was based on their similar tallness and strength.
The child, under Mean Joe’s watchful eye, was playing a mind-game; thinking of herself as miniaturised into a tiny piece of lint. Mentally, she was gluing herself, in the form of that lint, beneath the black customer’s armpit.
“I’m going to stay right here,” she whispered, “and nobody can ever touch me again.”
During it all, the woman, unable to control a single action, found herself propelled by the child’s mind, as close to the black customer as she could get.
No one in the store, including him, seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary.
Mean Joe watched the interaction between the black customer and the woman and what she thought of as the same little one who had emerged to her in the bedroom yesterday. Mean Joe glanced from side to side, from out of his beautiful, slanty eyes, tracking the movements of everyone in the store. Lambchop, finished with her mind-game, smiled up at him. The tiny person asleep on his shoulder, disturbed by the closeness of so many people, uttered a small cry, and Mean Joe crooned softly. The cry faded away.
The woman paid her bill, felt Lambchop’s hand in hers, and wondered again why her hands weren’t sticky. In the parking lot, walking past other shoppers, she became desperate with the desire for invisibility, desperate that her people not be noticed, as they piled into the car.
Before she realised what had happened, a simmer began at the injustice of their place, or lack of one, in the world. Sewer Mouth was raging. Catherine couldn’t step in quickly enough to siphon the anger to Black Katherine. The woman jammed the keys into the car’s ignition, while the hum grew in her veins. She turned the key this way and that. The motor would not turn over.
When summoned, a mechanic from the shopping mall gas station took charge.
“Lady, there ain’t nothin’ in the world wrong with this car.” Wiping his big oily rag, the mechanic stared into the engine block. “God damned tank truck, built for battle. Has it happened before?”
Don’t tell him, Catherine warned, don’t tell him it won’t start when that back-burner, dead-white rage stews too long. Because this man will say you’re crazy and they’ll lock you up. This time they really will.
More than fifteen minutes had passed since the car had malfunctioned. Catherine, who knew the car would shortly start up of its own volition, put a smile on the woman’s face and began to speak for her.
“As a matter of fact,” Catherine said to the garage mechanic, “it’s happened several times. But we just weren’t turning the key properly. There’s a trick to it, you see.”
Back at the house, the woman glanced around the spotless kitchen, noticing how the hanging ferns flourished when she couldn’t recall tending them. She watched what she regarded as “the little one” clutch her new teddy bear while foraging on the lower cupboard shelves for cocoa. The woman would have sworn that she sensed more than one small child—one who was sticky and one who was not; one who spoke words, and one who conveyed thoughts only.
Catherine demanded diet cola. The woman never bought soft drinks, she hated them. Puzzled, she opened the cupboard doors. There they were, Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi.
In a burst of affection for the teddy bear, Lamb Chop planted a kiss and a gob of butter on its nose. The butter came from the toast she had to have, even though dinner was being prepared. Lamb Chop remembered afternoons at the second farmhouse, where there had been hot tea with plenty of milk and sugar and jam on the bread, or tiny slices of rich chocolate cake, from the recipe on the back of the Hershey’s cocoa box.
The one whose voice sounded like a duchess reclined in a chair at the kitchen table, with no sense of humour. She watched them all, unsmiling and offended. She announced her full and proper name to be Lady Catherine Tissieu and, over roars of protest, loaded her plate with cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and string beans.
The others refused to eat. They hated vegetables. Now the woman knew why a hatred of families struck her so often. She was too tired to consider what she might like for dinner. Over the aftertaste of something suspiciously like jelly beans, she pondered, believing her “family” to be complete.
The others heard. The silence in the kitchen was palpable. And when the woman looked into the mirror over the sink, her eyes were strange: apple-green with a thread of black around them and in the center of each, a tiny, dead-black iris.
* * *
In answer to the woman’s usual question about the normalcy of the drugstore incident and dinnertime afterward, Stanley told her, “There’s never a never and never an always. We’re dealing with the human mind, and there aren’t any charts or graphs or yardsticks to measure the normalcy of your,” he searched carefully for the word, “experience.”
“That’s a cute word, Stanley.” The woman shifted her position on the cushions. “It’s not so cute when I have to consider myself a possible murderer.”
She asked again about her fear that she’d done something awful in her past. She believed more firmly than ever that she might have killed her stepfather back at the second farmhouse.
Stanley knew he was walking a very fine line. His duty was to her—to make her more accepting of the other selves but without encouraging antisocial behavior simply because she or the other selves might desire it. He’d already decided which came first, however, so he concentrated on her fears about Mean Joe as regarded the stepfather.
“Any mind,” he said, “has a limit to how far it can be pushed. Those two farmhouses would have blown the average mind sky high. You have recalled a lot, but I’ve a feeling your subconscious knows the upcoming layers will be far more frightening. Hence, partially, the extreme panic now and the need for Mean Joe when you were growing up. If Mean Joe retaliated with violence back there he’d have been dealing in what I call ultimate ways. Sometimes that’s what saying the final ‘no’ boils down to. Ultimate ways.”
Stanley hesitated as the blank expression on her face dropped away. For a moment she stared at him. Then she began to laugh out loud, and pound her knees.
“Stanley, I love those words! Ultimate ways. They sound without reservation, so beautifully bloody! I’m going to treasure those words always. I’ll tuck them away in my mind and when I am lonely, I’ll take them out and enjoy them again.”
The woman couldn’t stop laughing. Sta
nley shielded a smile behind his coffee cup and, in the booth, even Tony smiled.
“Mean Joe is very nice,” she said. “I realise he guards the little ones and Miss Wonderful. I can feel him doing it. Sometimes I catch just a small glimpse of what their world must be like. I never get to see very much, just snatches, and I can hear tiny bits sometimes of what I know must be whole sentences as they speak.”
The woman described Mean Joe as best she could. It became obvious to Stanley that she didn’t know Mean Joe was, as one of the other selves had described him in admiration, “black as the ace of spades.”
Stanley tried hard to convey a lot to her without bringing up the question of who she was within the Troop Formation.
“You don’t remember most of your life,” he told her, “because you weren’t there. The others were. They have the memories. Think of Rabbit with no skin and no fur, as one of your people describes her. In Rabbit’s lifetime, she’s had nothing but the pain. Think of the one with no name, who lives for music with a loud beat, refusing as she does to think of anything sad.”
Stanley just mentioned you, Twelve whispered to the Outrider. Why don’t you sing him a little song? Give him a clue to your first name.
So just for the hell of it, the Outrider did.
Twelve listened with grave politeness. Maybe you should have singing lessons, she said. We’d all chip in.
The woman seemed to be humming under her breath, a tune Stanley recognised as the Oak Ridge Boys’ “Elvira.”
“Psychotic,” the woman whispered, “means one afflicted by a psychosis, and psychosis means a severe mental or emotional disorder; a partial or complete withdrawal from reality. That sounds like me. But you keep telling me I’m sane.”
“You are. You haven’t withdrawn from everyday reality, you’re simply part of another world as well.” Stanley explained how he prepared his students for her videos, telling them to lay aside for a moment their own sense of reality. “I tell them,” he said, “that for some incest victims, some sexually and/or physically abused children, this is reality.”
She asked if the videotapes were helping anyone.
“Yes,” he said. “They give my students and the people they talk to a very graphic sense of the situation. The police officers were astounded. They saw how important it is to understand and accept what child abuse actually does to the victims.
“A lot of people won’t listen to you,” he said, “because if they do, your pain will be too real for them. I’m afraid that, for the time being, you’ll have to live with that.”
“It’s alright,” she said. “I can’t talk about some of these things to anyone, anyway. Like the sexual feelings.”
Stanley laid down the clipboard. The woman looked abysmally ashamed. He handed her Kleenex as one of the selves made the sign of the cross. The woman took on the peculiar, eyes-right, eyes-left, listening attitude that he’d grown used to.
“Sexual,” she said. “The disgust just sweeps over me!” The fists beat on her head and again, there was the sign of the cross. “I keep hearing beads clicking, as if someone is . . .”
“Praying?” Stanley ventured. “I imagine someone prays a lot. Sex to her,” Stanley was thinking of Sister Mary, “is for one purpose only: procreation within the confines of marriage. For her, sexual pleasure is out of the question. So, she is deploring either past sexual acts with the stepfather or those acts taking place now.”
“Now?” The woman looked blank. “I haven’t been anywhere with anyone.”
“To the best of your knowledge,” Stanley said, and pretended he did not see the fingers of her left hand begin to twine a lock of hair, very slowly, while the mouth relaxed into a sensual, languid, plump line.
The woman began to tell him about her cars, three of them in the last few years, that had been traded in because of electrical problems—and how the other day her selves had brought the solution to her: when the car won’t start, get away from it for a while.
“But the fuses for the overhead lights, the cigarette lighter, and the clock blow out, I don’t replace them anymore. The light bulbs in the house flicker and blow out too soon. The television, the stereo, my little tape recorder, the car radio, these videotapes we’re making, everything is so full of static.”
“Well,” Stanley said finally, “don’t you want to know if you’re crazy?”
“Stanley, this is a mechanical problem. Except that agents have driven my car and it doesn’t happen to them. Only when I’m in the damned thing, does everything blow.”
She turned to face him, squarely. “It’s got to do with energy, the energy of the mind, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said. “It does.”
The session and Stanley’s calm reply to her question stayed with her all that morning, along with a hundred flicks that came in rapid succession. The woman finally felt someone’s anger. Then she felt their rage. The stepfather deserved death, even without more recall. But had she killed the bastard or not? A voice in her mind told her to hurry. Before she could refuse, she was dialing the long-distance operator.
Yes, the operator singsonged. That gentleman did have a phone listed in his name. Without asking and contrary to telephone company rules, she began to put the call through.
“Hello?” the woman said.
* * *
In the classroom, a Protective Services worker raised her hand.
“The woman I mentioned to you the last time,” she said, “scored an eighty percent on her test.”
“She could have scored twenty-five percent and still be a multiple,” Stanley told her. “The process has revealed almost no absolutes. Observation is your best tool. Watch the facial and body movements, the figures of speech, the attitudes toward established social and moral values, the habit patterns. Particularly in the case of my client, anyway, watch for someone distracted, bemused, who gets lost easily, can’t follow directions. And then look for just the opposite, and all the variations thereto.”
The time was almost up. Stanley wanted to go on: Could your client have been a gifted child, perhaps one that nobody recognised, because multiples hide or fragment their creative, extreme intelligence? Does your client indicate, as most gifted children do, familiarity with the paranormal, and, quite possibly, does that disturb your professional aplomb? But those were his own questions, as yet unfolded to a complete degree, and he put them aside to pack up his equipment.
* * *
“Did you at one time live in a small town, Far Crossing, New York?” The woman shook so hard. Even the Buffer sitting in front of her couldn’t absorb all the fear.
“Yes, I did,” he said.
Just like that. In the same tone of voice, the one he used on her as a child to let her know that no matter what, he was right, Ten-Four thought.
“Who are you? What do you want?” he demanded to know at least three times before the woman, amazed and shaken, hung up.
The stupid bastard was still alive. The woman bit her lip until the blood dropped onto the kitchen table. He had to be in his early sixties by now. She had wanted him dead, but hadn’t killed him after all. Knowing that, why didn’t the guilt go away? If she hadn’t killed him, what had she done?
Sewer Mouth knew. Her curses filled the air that night, in the wooden fortress the woman called her bedroom. Around her, meticulously placed, were built-in dressers, heavy with clothes and books; odd pieces of antique furniture and wall hangings and drifting ferns. Personal, yet impersonal possessions, the accumulation of many lifetimes, but certainly not hers.
“Don’t worry,” Catherine said. “Some of it’s mine, some of it’s theirs. Like the worm farm in the living room.”
Children’s voices sounded then, claiming whatever in the house belonged to them. The woman felt someone’s tears on her face and saw a child grabbing for the teddy bear, holding it with pained, accusing eyes.
The question of what the woman
was seeing, her reality, as Stanley had mentioned in the session today, his hope for her acceptance of it so that she would accept the recall, too, had until now been far away. But this child was real.
The woman went where the child led her, seeing through her eyes, everything bigger than she was, at eight years old. Hurry, down the hedgerow from the black orchards. Past the old pear tree where the crazy owl with the gemstone, hooded eyes, cried each night, swerving quickly toward the farmhouse, follow the dirt path to the side of the old garage.
Chicken wire had been nailed on the side of the grey frame building. Rambler roses in scarlet profusion climbed the wire, heady with scent. Two persons stood on the dirt path; one was the stepfather, frowning at a loud refusal. He reached out, seized the arm of the young girl in front of him. Through the child’s eyes, the woman saw the cement wall that formed the base of the back porch, saw the stepfather hurling the girl who was screaming . . . and the cement wall coming up so fast to meet her face, her arms flung out in front of her face, blood gushing, spattering the wall. . . .
Click. There was an instant image of a long, dull black robe . . . something white at the throat of it, and something black covering the head.
Sister Mary Catherine had evidenced.
TWENTY-SEVEN
MONDAY morning arrived in a thick blanket of August humidity. Directly behind the woman’s, there was a mind in which turmoil and agony boiled. The extreme summer heat beat on the woman and the one behind her, weighed them down, sealed them together, in sweat and confusion. As the temperature rose into the high nineties that day, so did their joint rage. The stepfather was alive.
Beyond Catherine, who was busy lacquering her fingernails in a frosty peach colour, the eyes of a small child stared at the woman, solemn and accusing.
Help me. Why can’t you help me?
The woman sent back her own message: “Because I’m guilty.”
