by Truddi Chase
Late afternoon sunlight slanted through the warehouse windows. Elvira puffed on her cigarette, inhaling the smoke and blowing it out quickly. His question had triggered a deep fury. How many times as children, hiding from the stepfather, had the Troops heard the name of the first-born child behind called? How many times had the mother screamed that name in rage?
“Listen,” she said. “I sent you the note.”
There were five places Stanley should have been over an hour ago. While the Troops had been absent, his schedule had grown tighter every week. Right now he should have been exhausted but a familiar energy surged through his blood vessels.
“To hell with this garbage,” Elvira went on, transmitting for other, unwilling Troop members. “We’ve got to get moving. The woman is fucking incapacitated.”
“The woman is scared,” Stanley said, knowing that while she might sound like Sewer Mouth, the body stance and speech pattern were much different. He felt like a fool after so long a time, talking about his client as if she weren’t there. “Do you hear music?” Stanley had been watching her body, her hands, swaying and snapping to a silent beat.
“Sure do,” Elvira said on her own behalf and then Sewer Mouth’s. “I hear my own music. It drowns out the crap. Lotsa crap around these days, you know?”
“Where do you, uh, hang out when someone else emerges?” Stanley asked.
Elvira, from her peculiar place within the Troop Formation, felt the emptiness of the woman and the mirror-images of all the dead children around her.
“I have places to go, things to do.” Almost as an aside, she said, “We are going to kill the stepfather, Charlie.”
“Don’t you think,” he asked, “that the book and the training videos will be satisfaction enough?”
“Hey.” Elvira took a last puff and stubbed out the cigarette. “Don’t try me, Charlie. You know damn well that nothing will ever be enough, not where the stepfather is concerned, or the mother, either. We got raided, Charlie, we got stomped on.”
She’d begun to grip her forearms and the knuckles were turning white. He thought it was the woman who surfaced moments later and began to cry, talking about things unrelated to the conversation he’d been having.
“Look,” Stanley told her. “You’ve got a choice. Either accept the fact of multiple personality and therefore the upcoming recall, or hide again and face life as you’ve been living it. It’s October. Do you know it’s been two months since our last session?”
“It can’t be more than two weeks!”
Someone was struggling to complete an emergence. It had thrown the woman off balance; she was shaking her head, dazed. From a distance, she was hearing spoken words, clearly.
“I hear you talking, suddenly, but I can’t get in, I just can’t get in. You said it’s October. Where’s Christmas? Did I miss Christmas?”
For the woman, all sound in the room then ceased. Too disoriented to question Stanley further, she stared at her hands. The joining began, her mind with that of the adult core’s mirror-image. Between the two of them, flowing from the silence and emptiness, a recognition passed. The woman from her own emptiness accepted what she could not return: a hideous feeling of empathy and a blinding bemusement.
The look went from fear to dismay, to panic-stricken shock. “Where’s the time?” she screamed. “Where’s the time? The farmhouses, there was never a clock, I never saw a clock! Did we have a clock, we must have, but I never saw it, where’s the time?”
Stanley busied himself rewinding the second tape and inserting it into the recorder. What accounted for so big a time lapse? Had he gotten so used to thinking of the Troops as belonging to an unclassic case of multiplicity, a case wherein the changes simply melded from one to the other with no appreciable lapses between one self and another?
He studied the person in front of him more closely. Then he remembered a past session and the discovery of a self new to him, someone who surfaced far less often than the woman. Someone who mirror-imaged her in a way he could not explain. The differences then, as today, had been so slight that he’d caught but not defined them.
Marshall already knows, Stanley thought. This is what he told me I’d eventually figure out for myself.
Breaking through to this one seemed an impossibility. He tried, but nothing worked. This one felt left out, or locked out of this conversation—and perhaps an entire lifetime. Finally, she simply faded away.
The woman glared accusingly at the two white envelopes on Stanley’s clipboard, recognising one of the many handwriting styles she saw almost every day in the manuscript notes.
“I got them three days ago,” he said. “One had your telephone number. The other contained a tape recording. I played it. There was almost nothing but static.” He busied himself with the recorder again, trying to determine the least offensive way of saying what he knew she’d hate to hear. “If I were you, I’d be scared to death going through this. The whole thing is odd, even bizarre. And no one you talk to is going to understand it enough to discuss it with you. After all, how would you feel if somebody said to you, ‘Hey, there are fifty of me. I’m fifty different people. I do things I’m not aware of. There are blanks in my life for which I cannot account.”
Stanley let that sink in and went on. “Unfortunately, ignoring these people won’t make them go away. We’re not treating a cold here, or even cancer. The documentation on multiples is scarce. The proof that others have gone through it, the way they managed, or even how their various persons expressed themselves as they emerged . . . it would be nice if you could run down to your local newsstand or talk to other multiples and reassure yourself that what you’re experiencing is normal.”
The person in front of him wasn’t deaf to his voice but she gave no sign of agreement.
“It’s a hard thing to face. The choice,” he said, “is yours.”
Who heard him now? Her reality could be so alien to him. If it confused him, what did it do to her?
At the door, he stopped to wonder how many more rules of therapy he’d have to break before this was over.
“Most incest victims,” he said quietly, “most multiples, have a support system of friends and family. You don’t. I want you to understand that from now on, I’m your support system. Is that clear?”
It was the closest he’d ever dared to come with her to being parental, authoritative, and nurturing. He waited for the explosion. Instead, something suspiciously like gratitude crept into her eyes. The woman was incapable of expressing it verbally.
She nodded.
* * *
At home that night, Stanley dialed Marshall’s number. He wondered if their views would coincide.
“This afternoon, after a two-month hiatus,” Stanley said when Marshall answered, “we had a session and I saw a sort of mirror-image of the woman, someone who surfaces so briefly and seldom that I always thought they were the same. They aren’t. The one who emerged this afternoon kept saying, ‘I can’t get in,’ as if she doesn’t know how. It made me think: suppose the woman was created as a façade, someone who passed in society because of what she didn’t know about the abuse?”
“I didn’t want to influence your conclusion, Stanley, but we’re in agreement.”
Together they began to sort out what Marshall had been seeing in the manuscript pages, what little Stanley had had time to read of them, and what had come out in the sessions so far: the woman had been created to stand in the stead of the original first-born child. Her other selves referred to the woman as an inanimate object, an entity with no capability for thought—indeed for anything that her other selves did not first give her.
“The Troops,” Marshall said, “created for themselves the perfect doppelganger; someone with no memory of the abuse beyond a far-away sense of terror . . . of the literally unknown. The woman has been able to operate in society only by virtue of what they call her ‘nonexistence.’ Had she known a
ll along what the Troops do, she couldn’t pass for what society considers normal.”
“Now that I believe it, or rather now that I understand it, how do I tell this woman she’s not the first-born, the original child?”
“You don’t,” Marshall said. “The Troops were gone for two months. I think they already told her.”
The calendar said November. The weather had turned cold. Wind knifed through the cracks in the warehouse walls. Inside on the loft floor, with six-pound weights on her arms and legs, the woman listened to Catherine’s voice directing the exercises.
“Don’t stop, darling,” Catherine told her. “There is no such thing as an irretrievable muscle. Thirty times each leg and then thirty times each arm and then a nice jog around the loft, since you’re so scared of the street.”
Many levels of awareness were working today and confusion mounted in the woman’s mind. “Smoke on the Water” blared in the background as the arm weights swung from ceiling to floor and back. It felt strange, as if she were lifting only feathers. And quickly, as if two of her people were emerging and retreating unsynchronised, a muscle in her shoulder snapped. She felt the quick jab of searing pain—and it was gone.
She’d never felt pain before.
In a shot she was up off the floor, standing resolutely by the front door. It was a heavy one, made of solid oak. She opened it with fingers that didn’t seem like her own and slammed it against her head. She waited. There was no pain.
* * *
The tooth infection had finally been beaten down with massive applications of baking soda and peroxide; the lingering temperature rode daily at only 99.5°. The relief gave the woman added energy. She prowled the warehouse loft, until the need to call Stanley became unbearable.
“What about Page?” the woman whispered. “I look at her when I dare, I think of buying her things to make up for what I can’t give her. It’s the way I’ve always expressed emotion, with things, gifts. But she needs a mother, not gifts. She’ll be grown up in another two years. Stanley, there’s something I should tell you, I would tell you, except it’s so . . . Stanley, where’s Page’s mother?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “So many of you went through a developmental cut-off; Page’s mother may be one of those who just didn’t make it. She had a lot to deal with; a pregnancy that to her was the vilest thing on earth. . . . You’re doing well,” he said into the phone because it was the only thing he could say. “Your progress is fantastic.”
“Yes, it is. Except that I shake so much and if anyone told me I had three legs I’d have to check it out before I could say they were wrong.”
Her voice was too quiet, as if she had made a decision about something.
“There’s a sheet of paper here in the loft,” she went on, still in the too-quiet voice, “with airline information. To Rochester, New York.”
“Where did it come from?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“What do you want to do with it?”
“It’ll have to be a joint decision. I don’t know at the moment.”
* * *
The personnel agent faced the woman and shook her head. “This is your résumé? You have an incredibly varied background. You’ve got to work on your typing, though. We gave you three tests. You scored thirty-seven, eighty-five, and one hundred and twenty-five words per minute. Can you explain that?”
“I want a job,” the woman said.
“My dear.” The agent shoved her chair back and got up, smoothing the wrinkles from the lap of her dress. “You’re capable of almost anything in the work force, but this is a government town. You have no educational credentials for the kind of job you should have. I can’t place you. We have entry-level positions, but they’d bore you to death. You wouldn’t last. We’d lose our fee.”
It was the third employment agency the woman had been to that morning. They all said the same things. Back out on the street the November wind cut through the woman’s coat. A sailing leaf flew into her face. Ten-Four grabbed and crushed it with brutal force. After job-hunting for over a month, it had become apparent that employers wanted credentials, and without them, the going wage for a woman was seven dollars an hour.
“I can drive a truck,” Ten-Four said.
“Shut up,” the woman snarled. “I’m trying to think.”
THIRTY
“I told you, Norman, it isn’t one isolated occurrence that Stanley can pull out like a rotten tooth. It will take a while.”
“So much for progress,” Norman said over the phone. “Can you meet me for dinner tonight?”
“Dinner? Out? I could make dinner here in the loft.”
“Still hiding? If you’d put this thing in perspective; how many times have I told you? Eight years ago that shrink was a fool and now you’re burying yourself with another one!”
“Goddammit, I’ll meet you for dinner!” Crash. The receiver hit the wall. Seconds later in the kitchen area, the woman felt herself removed, watching. Dish after dish crashed against the walls, a fern was torn to shreds and the dirt flung in all directions. If Norman had been there . . .
I’d have taken his throat in my hands, someone said, and not let go.
* * *
“Why,” Stanley asked, “didn’t you tell Norman how you felt?”
“Are you crazy?” she whispered. “It would hurt him.”
“Do you hurt?” Stanley asked whoever was listening. Pain was usually buried under rage; until fully surfaced, both were poisonous. He decided to try an old method, designed to let a client see the amount of anger he or she normally kept well-hidden.
“Take that cushion,” he said. “Go ahead, take it.”
The woman didn’t move. There was no sign that another self, whom he only sensed, and whose name he couldn’t determine, would move either. Unwilling to bend enough to evidence fully, Black Katherine’s presence flickered behind the woman’s own. He shoved the pillow in front of the woman’s knees.
“Show me the rage,” he said. “You know why it’s there. I once had to treat a professional killer behind bars. Whoever you are, your eyes are exactly like his.”
“A hit man? What was he like?”
“Very much like you,” Stanley said. “He could kill with a smile, without an instant of remorse. He was a pro.”
The voice was harsh with delight. “On the farms I wasn’t evolved enough and by the time I was actually born, the stepfather lived too far away. But opportunities recur.”
“Hit that.” Stanley pointed to the pillow. “Go ahead, show me the rage. Pretend it’s the stepfather.”
Neither the woman nor Black Katherine would lift an arm, so he did it for them. He lifted and let the arm drop five times. The woman laid her head on the pillow and began to sob.
“I hate me,” she wept. “I hate me.”
She was saying what most incest victims said. Hatred that should have been directed toward her abuser had been directed inward.
“I don’t know where your angry friend went just now, but you’ve got to let that kind of emotion out. It kept you alive through those two farmhouses. It’s the healthiest part of yourself. If you don’t let it out, one of your selves will, and you won’t be there to designate recipients. People may be frightened, they may try to negate your anger, pass it off as momentary insanity. But you aren’t insane and you have a right to every last ounce of anger.”
“I have none,” she said tiredly.
“It’s there. Believe me.”
* * *
While waiters glided past in the softly lit restaurant, the woman hid her damp palms against the tablecloth. Before ordering, Norman had outlined his plans for Page and how he intended to shape her into a “respectful” human being. He’d gone into religion and how he believed it a good thing, steering people down the proper paths of life, especially, he’d said, those teenagers with no sense of respect for their
parents.
His placid face, his self-assured belief that he had the right to lay down laws for another person . . . a child. Be calm, too many Troop members thought; don’t let it show, don’t react.
The woman heard a verbal agreement to encourage Page to study more and cut out the frivolity. She gripped the wineglass hard.
“Norman, this intense desire of Page’s for friendships, the fact that she can’t stand to be alone for a minute, shows a feeling of rejection.”
“Phillips says so, right? I’ve never rejected her. She needs to crack the books. Nobody’s life is perfect and I won’t mollycoddle her when it comes to grades.”
“I rejected her, Norman, and that’s my fault, but I won’t get down on my knees to you about it.”
“You’re raising your voice, you’re getting angry,” he warned. “Can’t you sit quietly and enjoy this meal?”
“Once upon a time, I sat in a farmhouse, quietly as you say, when I should have gotten up and smashed my stepfather’s head in. You want me to be a lady now and keep my voice down. Have you any idea how that makes me want to hit you?”
She handed him a brown paper parcel and stood up.
“You’ve been angry all night,” he said evenly. “You can’t control your emotions so you’re beating retreat now like a spoiled child.”
“You bet we are. Much as that offends your sense of propriety.”
“What offends me is the way you’re throwing your life away by concentrating on hatred for your stepfather. It’s crazy!”
In unison with a self whose teeth were gritted, the woman leaned down to stare into Norman’s eyes.
“The manuscript is in that package,” she said. “Read it and then tell us the anger is unwarranted, that it’s out of proportion.”
* * *
Norman would laugh at the manuscript. Twelve wished he didn’t have it and the woman, feeling someone else directly behind herself, wished she could remember exactly what was in it.
His call came in well after midnight.
“Dear christ,” he said. “Your stepfather deserves more than death. Your manuscript made me angry too. Not just for your loss but for my own and Page’s. But you should try to make the emergence of these other selves more real in the manuscript. It isn’t real the way you’re writing it.”
