When Rabbit Howls

by Truddi Chase

  With distaste, Lady Catherine observed the disarray of Ms. York’s desk, how her coat hung askew on the coat rack, the mad filing system inside her open briefcase. Expressly annoying to Lady Catherine was that the briefcase was plastic, not leather, and she elevated her nose. Inefficiency everywhere, and bad taste as well. Peasants.

  Ms. York returned. “Look,” she said. “It’s almost five. How about a drink someplace where we can throw this around quietly? I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

  “No thank you,” Lady Catherine said. “We have plans.”

  “One moment then,” Ms. York said, as if held together with steel rods. “Let me catch up with one of the department heads.”

  The door slammed shut behind her for the second time.

  “Do that.” It was plain Catherine who picked up the phone on Ms. York’s desk without asking. Plain Catherine never asked anyone for anything. She took.

  Page answered immediately as Catherine smiled into the phone. “Hello, darling,” Catherine said. “Did your father make an appointment for you so that we can investigate learning hypnosis?”

  “My father changed his mind,” Page told her. “He says hypnosis screws up your brain. Mommie, does it?”

  Hands shaking with rage, the woman dialed Stanley’s number.

  “In view of the amount of hypnosis I’ve had, Stanley, how screwed up does Norman think I am? He doesn’t believe hypnosis will help Page so he can’t possibly believe it’s helped me. He does think I’m crazy!”

  The woman heard the low-pitched, hissing rage in her voice. Stanley told her the anger level was good but the volume needed to be revved up a little.

  “I have a job,” she said. “We’re cartooning a five-hundred-page manual for an ad agency.”

  Stanley wondered which of the Troop members was the artist for this job. He asked what kind of cartoons.

  “Children,” she said. “For some reason, as I draw them the flicks are wilder than ever and the smells; if I smell manure one more time, I’ll scream. I’m scared. I shake all day doing the cartoons at home and then I shake while delivering them. It’s hard to be sure I’ve done enough, well enough, but I guess we’re OK. There’s something else. My half brother’s face is in one of the sketches. I could never draw that well, Stanley, but there he was, line for line. As soon as I saw his face, the others slid it into my mind: the stepfather did horrible things to him, Stanley, things that went beyond emotional or physical abuse.”

  “Sexual abuse usually goes hand in hand with the other two,” Stanley said. He didn’t like doing therapy on a new issue over the phone, but she sounded ready for it.

  “Would the stepfather do that? The others seem to be saying that he would.”

  “Your stepfather was capable of anything. That’s a blanket statement and I make no apologies for it. As a child, I experienced, as do most children, a very few unpleasant things. So I pulled back on those occasions. But within the Troop Formation, the first-born child pulled out completely. You, the other selves, were created to handle what she could not.”

  “Stanley, what can be worse than what the others keep shoving at me? They’re getting stronger, they seem so active lately.”

  “They’re going to bring further recall. In order for them to do that, you must get to know each one. You see, in view of all that went on, you still don’t have enough memory. Perhaps it’s not that they’re stronger,” Stanley forced himself to be more direct, “but that you are more aware of them.”

  An hour later, the woman sat with smoke in her eyes, acclimating herself to the low-lit, noisy room. There’d been no time to repair makeup, or straighten her hair after the windy street.

  “I adore happy hour,” Ms. York said. “Two for one.”

  “It gets you there faster, right?” Elvira surfaced completely. She threw back her head and laughed, snapping her fingers to the beat of the band behind them.

  “You’re a listener,” Ms. York said, well into her fourth bourbon. “Listening is a fine art that disappeared a thousand years ago. I can’t believe you’re real.”

  “Oh, we’re real. Tell me. What’s your first name and what were all those little bottles on your desk this afternoon?”

  “Thementa, and please don’t laugh. My mother was a Southern lady who married a crabby Northern banker. She named me to let the world know he’d driven her crazy. It’s a sort of take-off on ‘dementia.’ As for the pills, I have backaches, allergies, and an ulcer. The advertising business, you know.”

  “My ass,” Elvira said, now transmitting for Sewer Mouth and Ten-Four, who needed time before they could surface in a socially public place. “What do you guys do for fun?”

  The woman heard only music, “Devil with a Blue Dress On.”

  “At the agency we expire a little more each day, the pressures, you’ll never know.” And Thementa related the terrors of her job as she knew them, complaining forthrightly, to the woman’s horror, loudly in a public place.

  “You’re so cold,” Thementa said, “and then you’re so understanding. I don’t understand you at all.”

  Catherine gave an enigmatic smile. “Everyone,” she said, gazing around the room, “will understand us very shortly. That’s why we’re here.”

  From the far reaches of the Tunnel the brogue sounded. The Weaver listened to the weighty statements being made and halted at his task. Tonight the woman would be privy to, and would remember, large portions of the evening ahead of her.

  This will be fun, Me said. Do we get to stay up and watch or do we have to go to bed?

  Sleep is not so beneficial as instruction, said the Irishman. Watch if y’ will.

  What are you drinking? Me asked.

  Nothin’ y’d be interested in. There’s not a bloody drop o’ chocolate in it.

  Through the smoke and the noise, the woman could not say what had passed through her mind just then. She watched Thementa head off to the ladies’ room and congratulated herself. It was turning out to be a rather nice evening. She lit a cigarette, staring at the one already in the ashtray. Hadn’t Thementa taken hers with her to the ladies’ room?

  A well-knit man of medium height, wafting the persuasive scent of Givenchy Gentleman, with hair so dark that it was almost black, and an enormous pair of blue eyes, came to ask for a dance. The woman took a last sip of scotch and went into his arms. And it began.

  There was faint conversation, heard as if from another room; she “stood back” as if watching a movie not in Technicolor but in black and white. She would remember it afterward, how the colour had gone out of everything. The actors and actresses, in the form of bar patrons, moved in front of her; the words she thought were coming from her mouth changed, even as she heard them, into other words—that had nothing to do with her.

  Tonight was much like her whole existence; wandering about, disconnected from everything and everyone. Under her fingertips, she felt the man’s suit jacket. She caressed it for a moment, attempting by the action to absorb him, make him real, to give her some bearing on who and what he was. She drifted in his arms, dancing the way he did by incorporating a borrowed observance of his dance steps into her own. She laughed when he did and tried hard to follow his conversation. It got away from her too often, and she felt herself slipping into her own mind and then beyond.

  The man led her back to the table, his voice resonant and assured, as he sat down, still talking. He showed no sign of boredom or the urge to leave. Thementa had altered her black business suit and severe hairdo to a lowered neckline and loosened hair. The woman, in her beige-on-beige clothes, without even a bright scarf to relieve the tedium, felt out of place among the casually dressed dancers.

  But Thementa appeared irked after a while, and the dark curling tendrils from her long, floating hair were electrified and bristling. Thementa’s ire had to do with the man’s job description. Since the woman couldn’t catch what he was saying, she leaned c
loser to grab Thementa’s words.

  “He’s in nuclear fission,” Thementa hissed. “He’s right here in town, he’s one of those bomb makers.” Thementa didn’t care that she talked loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear her, even with the band at full blast.

  The man defended himself but no remark he made struck Thementa pleasantly. The woman discovered him gesturing to her in a way that suggested dancing. She smiled as if she’d heard, and they carved a path through the dancers.

  He talked as they danced. She grew more confused. He had some kind of cadence to his voice, twined in words she wasn’t catching fully. It was charming but phony, she was sure. It floated in and out of her mind, and eventually she lost track of time completely.

  Thementa mentioned the cadence to her when they went back to the table for another drink and the woman floated away again. Irish? The man had no accent at all that she had noticed.

  When a male mouth, she didn’t know whose, fastened itself on her cheek a while later and she felt strangely like a twelve-year-old, she simply went along with it. She had no kneecaps. Her legs, limber as hell, whirled and spun her around the floor to every beat the band played.

  I don’t dance, she kept screaming in her head.

  But I do, Twelve said.

  “My dear,” Thementa slurred her words as she danced past in the arms of a balding salesman, “you seem to be having a great time! Who is Nails?”

  Nails. The name was one of those things buried deep in the woman’s brain that surfaced seldom and made her want to throw up. Were her people carousing here in a public place? She tried to blame it on the scotch and knew she wasn’t drunk.

  Want to hear a secret? Twelve asked.

  The woman did not want to hear anything.

  During a social evening, Twelve said, when so many of us are out, we may get only one drink apiece. We can last all night. Our drinks do not affect you. We are all separate from one another. Of course, one of us may drink faster and consume more than the rest. That person might get soused but it’s his or her problem, not yours.

  The woman faded. But one of her people yanked her right back, threw her into the gyrating dancers, and she found herself facing a black man who’d become separated from his partner. The rubber knees she possessed as if they were hers got right into the beat of the music with him, propelling her in his wake. He told her that he studied something heavy at Columbia University and wrote songs for distraction. He told her she was brilliant and a lot of other things, but the woman heard none of them.

  She wondered if she were having a good time tonight. Possibly, possibly not. The black man laughed just then, and with difficulty she focused on his face. He was handsome and very young, but there was a look of pain in his eyes that caught the woman’s attention. The attention became riveted. As it did, she experienced something so strong that it was like being wrested from herself and thrown bodily across the room. Another’s thoughts entered her mind; and in that brief second, the woman knew what it was to despise injustice and prejudice and man’s inhumanity to man.

  The one who lived far back in the Tunnel had just sent the woman all that he had ever known and objected to on the subject; he sent it en masse in one huge, lightning-quick wave. He was many things, but this thing, above all others, crowned his “essence”; it was the core of his being and the woman felt it, was inundated by it.

  The black man laughed. “I’m having a great time,” he said. “You know music, and you can talk about anything.”

  The woman felt a hand take the man’s arm. There in the dim light with the smoke a grey haze over their heads, someone smiled a twelve-year-old smile and talked about subjects so deep that the woman heard them and could not be sure they existed.

  Twelve, with her flying mind, had been transmitting the words of the Tunnel Troop member, and much of his brogue had been hidden behind her young voice. The conversation had indeed been deep, the kind that wraps people together in an exposure of emotion unfelt in most lifetimes.

  Nails, whose duty it was, among other things, to keep the woman from such exposure, stepped in.

  “Watch it,” she said to the man firmly.

  The woman wasn’t there as Twelve took the man deeper into himself, laying out ponderous truths in a wondering fashion, some of it expressed by the thought transference of the one who lived in the Tunnel and some of it her own. Twelve marveled at the black man’s mind and thought of Mean Joe who kept his own brilliance under wraps.

  The woman surfaced occasionally but from a distance and knew there were tears on her face that did not belong to her. The man’s eyes were misty too. What was everyone saying?

  The woman never knew where the time had gone. Suddenly the Irish bomb maker, as Thementa called him, was kissing the woman’s hand at the door and all the lights in the bar were going off, a signal that the evening was over.

  * * *

  Seated in her car in the parking lot behind the bar, the woman looked down to find the bomb maker’s dark head resting in her lap and his feet hanging out the window. She shook him and he didn’t move; she tried to be polite about it while shaking him harder, and he leaped up. It took a while, smiling and making excuses, to convince him she couldn’t go home with him. She accepted his telephone number and saw him to his car around the corner, feeling competent and in full control, but desperate to get away from the sound of his voice although she couldn’t have said what bothered her about it.

  * * *

  Thementa’s voice trilled over the phone the next morning, “I danced all night. My feet are killing me.”

  “Arrrgh,” the woman said, peering from gritty eyes.

  “You certainly have a lot of energy. I seem to have more than my own share this morning. It’s the best I’ve felt in a long time.”

  In the warehouse loft, traipsing at the woman’s back like a stealthy ghost, one of the Troops had left a trail of activity behind in the form of Alka-Seltzer packets and drinking glasses frosted with a powdery white residue.

  * * *

  She started talking in the session that afternoon, and couldn’t seem to stop.

  “Stanley, the Alka-Seltzer glasses frightened me. I was tired from lack of sleep but somebody had a hangover. The evidence sat in front of me, in those glasses . . . you don’t know what that’s like, to see the actual traces of someone besides yourself. They’re angry with me, what can I do to make them understand that I get frightened? The next day, there is guilt over having a good time, even from a removed position, the shame over things I imagine must have happened.”

  “You’ve got to realise how active and strong, how much a part of your life they always were. They protected you. All they’re asking for now, is what they’ve always had: their own lives.”

  “I wish I understood that. If I created anybody, I certainly don’t remember it.”

  “You didn’t do it alone,” Stanley said.

  “We created ourselves?”

  “You are all real parts of the first-born child.” He knew he hadn’t answered her question. Nobody knew how, in spite of the research going on.

  “I don’t know what it means,” she said as the session ended, “but someone is reading aloud at night to the children. It reminds me of the farm when the mother used to read to us.”

  “That sounds very nice,” Stanley said.

  “Nice? There’s something ominous about it. I can’t tell whose voice is reading, or even what the subject matter is. The children seemed lulled by the voice and the story, but I’m not. I can’t shake the feeling that it’s a sort of prelude.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  THE five nights in succession, the children listened to the sonorous voice and nodded between wakefulness and sleep. The woman sensed in some of them an almost terrifying quickness, a keen comprehension of the most difficult of concepts. For the voice wasn’t reading only children’s stories; the voice seemed to be imparting an inn
er knowledge born of both extreme compassion and a warlike desire for justice.

  One morning, standing in a bright shaft of light reflected off the snow outside, the woman found a sheet of paper in the typewriter and when she tried to read its contents a second time, the page was gone. Her mind would not reconvey to her a single word.

  Nails drove to the session that morning, enjoying the snow on the streets and the long fingers of ice on each tree branch and twig. The snow and ice reminded her of the farmhouses, the utter silence of the countryside during long winters—and of the contrasting turmoil and screaming inside the farmhouses. Nails smiled. Christmas was now just a month away.

  In that identical moment, Nails’ anger surged into the woman’s mind. She almost smiled all by herself, the pleasure was that great.

  The pleasure faded.

  Having emotions, even secondhand, entails responsibility, someone said. It means involvement, response, confrontation.

  * * *

  Almost before the session began, the woman laid the sheet of paper in front of him. Stanley read it:

  As many years ago as there are drops o’ water in the ocean ’r grains o’ sand upon the beach, a mighty warrior rode down from the hills and raised his sword on high, preparin’ to slay the vast numbers o’ enemy stretched before him. So, too, rode a man o’ mere words with no sword a’tal, only the power o’ his mortal tongue.

  The battle raged on for as many years as there are drops o’ water in the ocean ’r grains o’ sand upon the beach, the mighty warrior and the man o’ mere words fightin’ with supreme diligence and dedication to duty, each preserved from the other within his own beliefs and desire t’ win.

  And the time came then, t’ count the bodies o’ the fallen enemy and ’twas discovered to the great shock and dismay of the observin’ crowds that the mighty warrior had indeed slain to the left and slain to the right—as far as the eye could see, and a bloody, awe inspirin’ sight it was.