by Truddi Chase
But behold—the enemy as attacked by the man o’ mere words, stumblin’ and damaged in droves, ner t’be safe ner sane again—stabbed and gutted beyond repair, diminished in mind and spirit by the tongue o’ the man o’ blindin’, roilin’ words, goin’ forth t’ carry the message far . . .
And so it goes—each man o’ us, no matter his method o’ fightin’, and preserved one from the other in his own beliefs and desires t’ win, each within his own fashion, must mind the deadly sabre, whether it be forged o’ steele ’r flesh.
EAN FOR THE TROOPS
Ean. Stanley laid down the page. The name had an Irish ring, although he would have expected it to be spelled with an “I” as in “Ian.” Did Troop members hide, even behind spelling choices?
“Whose name is this?” he asked.
“Is there a name on it?” The woman’s face was blank; she stared at the page, fixedly.
It had been in front of him all along; today it finally sank in. She heard, smelled, felt, remembered—saw—only at the discretion of the others.
“Now that you’ve read it,” she said, “what does it mean? The voice was reading that to the children. The next morning the page was in the typewriter. Later I found it in my purse. I can’t seem to keep track of it, it never stays in one place.”
“I think Ean, whoever he is, means several things. The most obvious, is that the pen is mightier than the sword. Beyond that, he’s saying it required as much courage for the man ‘o’ mere words’ to go into battle armed with nothing more than his tongue, as it did for the man with the sword of steel.”
“Courage,” she said. “The thing I haven’t got.”
“Are you telling me that it takes no courage at all to sit in a house with that manuscript in front of your face, no matter how much you do or do not grasp in it? I don’t buy that. You might not have lived these experiences the first time. You may even be ‘pulled-back’ as you ‘live’ them this time, but they’re getting heavier, both in content and in the way the others give them to you. I’d say that takes an extraordinary amount of courage, the kind most people haven’t got.”
“No.”
“No? Would you like to know what kind of company you’re in? There are two hundred cases of multiple personality, documented since the early eighteen-hundreds.” Stanley waited for the reaction.
“In the entire United States?” The woman’s voice was a whisper.
“The entire world,” he said. “In the next three years I expect that perhaps another two hundred will be documented. Yours will be one of them. You will have done most of the documentation yourself, through the manuscript and the training films.”
“So few cases,” she said.
“Exactly. But it’s out there and we know that it may not be as rare, relatively speaking, as once thought. Would you tell me that other multiples are not courageous, that it didn’t take guts and stamina for them to survive?”
“No.”
“Then give yourself the same points. You’ve also had something else to contend with. My therapy methods move a client faster than usual. Sometimes too fast for safety and surely too fast for complete comfort.”
Sewer Mouth told him that the Troops were angry as hell. With all that anger motivating them, she said, the entire Formation should have reached their goal of therapy completion.
“Some of you are hesitant, still feeling me out. Some of you know that we’re working toward the merging of everyone into one whole human being who will enjoy whatever is enjoyed now as separate people.”
The woman had surfaced again. “Merging? I’m not sure anyone here wants to do that, Stanley, I don’t want to do that. It wouldn’t be fair to any of us.”
“Well, it’s something to think about,” Stanley told her.
“There’s something else here, long before we come to that. It won’t go away.”
“Your fear that you’ve done something comparable to murder? Suppose Mean Joe, for instance, that person who in your mind is a strapping black man with the power of the gods and the will to protect the little ones, were to do something . . . ultimate? What if the little ones were really in danger and he had to act in an ultimate way to save them? What if there were no other choice?”
“You mean if someone were about to rape or kill one of us?”
“It happens all the time in society. Would you sit there without defending yourself?”
“Why can’t I accept what you say and be done with it?”
“The patterns of a lifetime don’t go away so easily. The progress you’re making, all of you, is remarkable. You can’t see it fully, just yet.”
“I know you won’t call it progress when I tell you that we are going to kill the stepfather, Stanley. But we are. Regardless of anything else, courage or no courage, we are. And nobody here is dumb enough to think we’ll get off scot-free. Just remember when it happens, Mean Joe had nothing to do with it.”
Stanley watched her shrugging into the raincoat and tugging on her boots. Short of locking her up, there wasn’t much that could be done about the decision.
“Stanley,” she said at the door, “say that to me one more time, that thing you say about the chips. Sharon says it’s a trite phrase, but I don’t care. Somehow, every time you say it, I feel better.”
Stanley laid down the clipboard. “Let the chips fall where they may.”
“Thank you, Stanley. For whatever reason, I find more courage in those words than any others, except maybe, ‘Let the devil take the hindemost.’ I love it. I really do.”
* * *
That night the woman heard a garbled conversation. Someone who sounded like a preteenager explained with grave politeness to someone else that, loosely translated, “Let the devil take the hindemost” meant “to moon the devil.” The translation was not well received. Someone of a more literal nature, and not nearly so polite, cursed and said, “Be real, you twit.” The woman wanted to hear more and could not. She went on applying Worth liberally, at throat and wrists. Smelling good was important these days; it drove the odour of manure from her nostrils. Me, with her teddy bear in her lap, sipped hot cocoa and yawned. It was past her bedtime. For one tiny moment the woman felt someone’s fright and a desire to stay home. At that, “Tube Snake Boogie” began to play and Elvira screamed aloud. The music played until the woman arrived at the restaurant.
Norman smiled. “I read what you underlined in the book you gave Page. Learning hypnosis sounds good to me. I guess you were right.”
The woman raised her glass to his, feeling wonderful and very much in control. That battle was won. A red carnation sat in the vase between their place settings. Its green leaves seemed pressed between the layers of her mind. Green. For no apparent reason, the colour made her smile. She gazed out of the window onto the street beyond the restaurant. She did not see the snow. She saw green land, be-hilled and rolling, misted and stretching forever. She saw the joy of battle and ultimate, triumphant victory.
The woman’s fingers were twisted together in her lap. She did not feel her smile grow wider as the fingers slowly relaxed and then went limp, as if time itself were meant to slip through them. Not her own time, but someone else’s; someone who touched her mind softly, transferring knowledge so tenderly that she was hardly aware of it. Time, and the voice was a faint whisper in her mind, is not meant t’ be grasped and hoarded, but rather wrung dry o’ all its juices and then let go. Because there is plenty o’ time and more when that is gone.
The words held an invitation, and the one who spoke them beckoned to her, unknown and unmenacing. He also held out the idea of the white light: that place free of problems, the need for decisions she felt inadequate to make, wars she was uncertain of winning; and, most of all, the agony and consequent punishment of daring to fight at all. And she heard his laughter as he laid aside the idea of escaping into the white light, as if he knew her mind better than she did.
She’d always tried to run, rather than face anything, and if he took away the possibility of the one sure escape she needed to have ready . . . especially since there was a feeling she couldn’t put aside lately, a feeling of dread, that things had reached a boiling point within the Troop Formation, within herself and the one right behind her, and everything was about to blow sky high. . . .
Eventually, she realised that she and Norman had a strange waiter. The man slapped plates down on the table with an icy stare. Norman asked if she couldn’t keep her voice down.
“Our chat tonight is turning sour,” he said.
Chat? The woman, unaware of any conversation, had wondered why Norman was so silent. She had not spoken a word, afraid that somehow she’d offend him. Why was he giving the other diners embarrassed glances and why were they looking away?
Time slept again for the woman until some of her people got in each other’s way as they came and went, holding a conversation with Norman which she could not hear. A piece of chicken lodged in her throat as she tried to swallow, unaware that the act of eating was not her own. She was suddenly gasping for breath, fighting for air. Norman saw her face going red. His own flushed as he reached across the table.
But another Troop member flung the woman’s head back and forced breath into her mouth. Dazed, she experienced being helped, even as she knew that no human hand had touched her. She swallowed again with a raw throat and tears from the effort stung her eyes.
“There’s no need,” Norman said, “to bring that language to a public restaurant. And where did the new one come from?”
“What language? What new one?”
Norman was motionless on his side of the table. “Have you heard any of this conversation tonight?”
“We haven’t had any conversation!”
* * *
“Slow Hand” played as Nails wheeled into the parking space outside the ad agency. The woman looked at the travel alarm that had replaced her wristwatch. Clocks that sat in her purse worked, watches worn on her body did not. They were twenty minutes late but Elvira refused to budge until the song was over. Someone began to cry, afraid of being late, jeopardising the job.
Someone brand new to the woman’s complete awareness laid a hand on her arm, then brushed away the tears. The woman felt the smile; tender . . . and uncontrollable. She felt the innocent youth and kindness that was the essence of this new person. Wrapped in all of that, yet standing above and beyond it, the woman became enmeshed in the soaring intelligence of a brilliant mind. She had just met Twelve.
The appointment went well. The woman sensed how easily people responded to Twelve’s manner. She had a knack for listening, for turning problems into common meeting grounds, for cutting through to the solution without wounding anyone.
After the appointment the woman found herself out on the street with a different attitude toward the world around her. Some of the fear was gone. They passed a brick wall on the way to lunch. Twelve’s hands sought the warmth each brick had absorbed from the late morning sun; she listened to the trickle of melting snow along the sidewalk. Twelve said kind things, and, thunderstruck, the woman heard them and recognised the sensation of being twelve years old out on that dance floor. This was the Troop member who had danced and looked at people, wide-eyed with enjoyment; the one who had talked so deeply with the black man.
The woman sought out her favourite hiding place—the dime-store lunch counter down the street from the ad agency. The food wasn’t bad, and it enabled her to be among people without being recognised. Twelve ate a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich. She dropped crumbs everywhere, wanted milk, and looked from side to side, checking out her company manners.
Grimly as it happened, the woman wrote it all down in the daily journal and gave the waitress distracted orders for whatever Twelve fancied. To test this “happening,” the woman lit a cigarette after the meal, tasting the flavour of tobacco, as if she’d never smoked with these taste buds before.
Twelve did not cough, her eyes were gleaming.
You’re enjoying this, the woman said silently, you’ve smoked before, haven’t you?
Twelve did not answer. The woman was startled by the sound of her own teeth crunching down on the shred of BLT from Twelve’s plate. Twelve wanted a strawberry soda; the woman wanted to throw up. She disliked strawberry.
* * *
Wanting that evening to do something without being told for once, and to show them all that she was on their side, the woman brought out milk for dinner.
“What,” said Twelve, taking her place at the table, and showing what a normal twelve-year-old she could be once somebody got to know her, “no chocolate milk? I could share this with the little ones if it was chocolate.”
The woman made a trip to the local carry-out, bought a carton of Yoo-Hoo, got in the car, and handed it over.
“What,” said Twelve. “No straw?”
That night the woman got into bed with a bottle of Yoo-Hoo in her hand while a mad desire for scotch and a cold bottle of beer rattled her taste buds. There were cookie crumbs on her sheets. The little one whose identity she’d never been able to pin down had to be around somewhere, because even with the white socks and the heavy flannel nightgown, the woman’s skin felt icy.
“Stop calling me ‘the little one,”’ said a small voice. “My name is Lamb Chop. It was the only thing I liked to eat on the first farm. Lamb chops with mint jelly.”
I didn’t wake her up, did I? Lambchop liked this part of the evening, when everyone was getting ready for bed. It wasn’t like the two old farmhouses.
Mean Joe glanced down at the tiny, sleeping face. Nobody can wake her up. He looked at the others, who were still sleeping.
They want to mush us up, make us all one, Lamb Chop said. They’ll kill us.
Not as long as I’m here.
Catherine put on the black lace nightgown. She kicked the white flannel under the bed.
“Are you listening to me?” she asked the woman.
When the woman did not answer, Catherine bore down again.
“You won’t listen when Stanley talks to you about the stepfather. You won’t accept fully his acts against us. But you need to know that stepping on a cockroach would be more sinful than killing him.”
Before breakfast the next morning, the woman dialed Norman’s number, determined to hear the worst and deal with it.
“It was a horrible meal,” Norman said. “All I know was that the person speaking never made one single mistake with that cadence. The voice was a man’s, lower than yours, more husky, but refined. The brogue was unmistakable. He told me I had no idea what was going on out there in the world, made me feel like a dunce. Then the one with the garbage mouth came out and started swearing. Actually, I remember her when we were married.”
* * *
“Norman says there’s someone here with a brogue,” the woman told Stanley. “I can’t believe him. I’ve never heard it.”
Later in the session, Catherine stood back and showed Stanley one of the selves who lived in the shadows behind her. The Troops had been talking about time, how little there was of it to do all the things they wanted to do in the course of a day. The person who emerged just then let him see how the Troops had made it possible to do a mind-boggling number of mundane, routine chores in a relatively short time span, thus freeing them for more esoteric pursuits. The movements were unbelievably quick as the newly emerged Troop member went through the purse, sorting out piles of loose change, makeup, money, sketches, and lists. She could not seem to sit still, he could see her mind working as fast as her hands.
“Why can’t you believe it?” Catherine asked, even though he hadn’t said a word.
“It just seems humanly impossible. What’s her name?”
“Mable. She can clean a whole house in forty minutes, from top to bottom. She can apply a full makeup in three minutes flat. She sews, irons, cooks, organises
the closets, buys the groceries, and keeps the manuscript files straight.”
“Mable,” Stanley muttered.
“She doesn’t hire out,” Catherine said wryly. “There are others behind Mable, each one with her own specialty. One of them does very fine stitching, one of them is a gourmet cook, one has the ability to endure, for more than three or four hours, a roomful of Clorox, ammonia, and Top Job. It’s a very powerful cleaning mixture, dangerous if inhaled. The fumes don’t bother her at all. Before you ask, I don’t know their specific names, I only know that they are separate.”
“The Outrider,” Stanley said. “Does she live in your shadow, too?”
“The Outrider is her own person,” Catherine said, “the only one of us to have two identities. Half of her duty entails creating . . . a certain atmosphere, to disguise our unhappiness and pain, and perhaps even her own, no one knows. The other half is to ride herd, to acknowledge and bind our wounds without drawing attention to the blood. She is the essence of all camouflage. She taught the Junkman to survive by hiding, when he thought all was lost. Others live in her shadow, too: Twelve, until she became a Front Runner; some of the sexual ones, Sixteen and Rachel; Brat and Me and a few of the more literarily creative ones, to mention just a few. Surprises you, doesn’t it?”
Catherine wouldn’t tell him the Outrider’s second identity, but Stanley had made a guess, based on the sessions and the manuscript pages.
“I’m glad to have this little conversation,” Catherine said. “Because I have a bone to pick with you. In the last session, and I quote you verbatim, you said, ‘suppose Mean Joe, for instance, that person who in your mind is a strapping black man . . .’ Stanley, I know you’re comfortable telling the woman that she lives in two separate worlds, ours and reality, the latter of which I assume is your reality, too. But have you ever wondered how real your world actually is? As you sit there, you perceive things in a certain way and assume all of it is real. That’s only natural; it’s your frame of reference. But how can you be sure that somewhere another world doesn’t truly exist wherein your reality, as you perceive it, is just as ridiculous, or at least as strange, as you perceive ours to be?”
