When Rabbit Howls

by Truddi Chase

“What else? Water and animals and high places. They aren’t just frightening; they strike terror in me. Most women are afraid of spiders or lightning or something dumb. Spiders won’t hurt you and neither will lightning if you’re careful. But these other things? Hey, run for your life, man.”

“Fragmented, huh?” Tony bent over his dials, frowning. “I’d like to know why this damned equipment only goes haywire when the two of you are in there.”

What kept him going was having read somewhere that treatment for most multiples (provided they really existed) was a guess-and-go situation.

waking up in the middle of someone else’s mind, with her own mind quite empty.

Catherine had been verbalising sporadically. Part of her job was to hold her own rage and that of several other Troop members. The excess was filtered up to the Big Three, of whom Black Katherine was felt to be the reigning power.

One of the Big Three glared at Stanley and spoke through gritted teeth. “I have no mother. Family? I’d like to see them all bloodied before my eyes. We are related to no one. And that’s final.”

From deep in the Tunnel, someone heard the silence in the woman’s mind. The Gatekeeper gave the signal. The Buffer sat up front now, allowing the thoughts of another Troop member to flow again through the emptiness of the woman’s mind.

“He was my friend, that black boy. He made the mother smile a real smile, bringing me home up on his shoulders that day I got lost back there behind the apple orchard. She smiled and said what a nice person he was to do it, can you believe that?”

“I was so sure I had everything under control the other day but I went on appointments, grocery shopped, all with a silly, sixteen-year-old smile on my face. When I caught sight of myself in the mirror, I looked different, gleeful. I was warm with people all day, caring, ridiculous. Around five o’clock that same afternoon, somebody else took over and again I felt different. That’s the way it happens, they just take over. They take me. I’m them. Am I crazy? What do I do now?”

Do any of you realise how unconducive therapy is to orderly thinking on the part of a client under fire? The intensity stimulates a kind of free association. So a lot comes out, much more than if I tried to structure thinking to any great degree. There’s nothing ‘neat’ about psychotherapy. You might say that it holds up a mirror to a life being probed. As therapists, you may find eventually that no one’s life is orderly.”

“Multiple personality,” said a student at the classroom door, “is rare. Your client is a businesswoman. Her competence doesn’t tie in with the disablement that multiple personality caused people like Eve and Sybil.” “Ah,” said Stanley. “Boxes, compartments, niches, neatness, chronological order.”

“What does she mean,” Albert asked, “about the headaches that don’t hurt?” “Defense mechanism, it looks like, highly developed. To her mind, nothing happened if there was no pain.”

The Gatekeeper’s signal was heard. The Front Runner, the Outrider, and the Buffer moved as one. With quiet determination, they blocked the tiny glimmer of light that threatened to penetrate the walls of the Tunnel. And the Weaver wove in furious haste, as he had been weaving since the restaurant incident, closing strand by strand the gap through which the woman might have seen too many things. There was an objection. The

“Mommie, are you going to alter my states?” It had long been a joke between the two of them,

Catherine made it all a game, and Elvira supplied the teenage expressions, “gross, awesome, totally,” since Valley Girl was big at the moment.

“Don’t push the river . . . the mind is a river with its own undertow and very deep currents. It’s nature’s miracle; a strong, protective, protected entity. Push it too far and too fast ahead of itself and you’re asking for trouble.”

His job would be pushing her not to strive for normalcy, but to dare to reach beyond it.

Sixteen yearned to be touched, caressed, warm;

some were duplicates or triplicates. She could not have quoted the story lines in any of them, but her other selves could and frequently did. The books were arranged in no particular order. The Troops did not like categorisation.

a tall black youth wearing a red beanie, smiled at her. In a voice that sounded like an ocean of raw silk, he quoted a price and extended an armful of flowers. His presence, the beauty of his wares, were strong messages. Three very small Troop members responded and their thoughts seeped through to the woman.

People are so used to your strength, it probably shocks them to see you in this situation. But if they can’t accept this situation, that’s their problem, not ours.”

Olivia, the one the other Troop members would shortly refer to as “The Well of Creativity,” was coming alive; not as the dictionary defined “alive,” but rather as it was defined within the mechanism of the Troop Formation. And to a man, within the dark Tunnel, there was a scurrying, a making of comfort, a paving of the way. For Olivia would bring with her untold artistic abilities and a horrifying reality.

The green eyes were frosty. “Love is a fallacy,” one of the Big Three said.

“Thank you for the crayons.” Lamb Chop’s voice was tiny. Stanley grinned.

a three-, a six-, and a ten-year-old, to a hard-nosed twenty-five,

Although he asked repeatedly, no one would give him a name. As things calmed down, he heard a single voice, good-humoured and unflappable. The female speaking did not introduce herself.

“Night and day . . .” Elvira, whose name he didn’t know but whose voice he recognised, along with her abandoned body language, sang the words in an alto, to a Southern baptist beat.

Brat, who was eight years old, simmered just behind the woman. Brat seldom appeared in public, she was too volatile, unable to stand still long enough, to understand much except the rage inside herself. Her rage expressed itself in tantrums, instant and full-blown at any cross word. For Brat, the world and the people in it meant torture, misery, degradation.

Of course, Mean Joe couldn’t be there all the time but when he was, watch out. The mother didn’t dare smack him. People look at Mean Joe today. His voice, his size, it scares them. But Mean Joe wouldn’t hurt anyone unless they tried to stomp on one of us. Besides, the Peacemaker is always with him when he’s out, more to calm whoever he’s talking to than to protect them from his wrath. Mean Joe isn’t a wrathful person.” The Peacemaker, Stanley thought, someone who made peace in Mean Joe’s wake, another of what seemed to be checks and balances in a complicated, internal process?

“The mother hated that romantic streak in us. One night, Sixteen, when she was thirteen—Does that confuse you, Stanley?—leaned out the bedroom window. The moon was full, so pale a blue, a colour no one can mix, no matter how hard we try. It washed over the countryside that night; quiet, no movement anywhere. We smiled to ourselves. And the next morning the mother hissed: ‘Did you sleep without your nightgown on last night? You know that’s not nice, the rule is you sleep in your nightgown, you keep your clothes on at all times.’

The roots, he was told, could not be discerned from the branches, because they intermeshed, clinging together. Somehow he felt the symbolism was linked, client to tree. Had whoever painted it understood what they were painting, had they done it intentionally? “Does anyone paint anymore?”

She doesn’t know. Stanley wrote it down on the clipboard, digging the pen into the paper. If his assumptions were correct, here was the heart of Multiple Personality Disorder. Her eyes at this moment, no matter what knowledge various other voices had imparted to him this day or any other, were empty of that knowledge. They reflected only the shock he’d seen growing in the last hour, the surge of disbelief at what her vague suspicions had to mean.

“NO question. She’s a multiple. I’ve counted at least seven of her in thirty minutes. So what’s the problem?” Marshall Fielding turned away from the video screen.

“I’d rather chart the researchers, watch the clients from a distance. And watching them isn’t always what the movies lead us to expect. On the other hand, these persons here have only known you two months; they may be a little reticent, sort of feeling you out. The tapes show a very smooth transition from one person to the other, and sometimes I don’t even see a transition, I simply hear more than one of them verbalising at the same time.”

But think about this whole multiplicity process; its purpose is to protect the core, the original, first-born entity. These people can’t do that if the core is out wandering around all the time.”

“It’s a child,” Marshall said. “You’ve tapped the well, so to speak. Behind this child, there are others, just as small and probably far more damaged. She’s a façade for them. I can almost feel it. See the way she holds herself?”

“From the tapes and the manuscript, your client is a candidate for the higher numbers. We’re discovering that between fifteen and thirty-seven is the median; beyond that, nobody knows. In Los Angeles right now there’s a man with two hundred, and at a very prestigious Ivy League university a young woman with one hundred and twenty-five is studying for her law degree.

“I told her two weeks into therapy that before becoming a therapist I was a minister. Come to think of it, the reply was a little strange. It took about thirty seconds of consideration and then she said, ‘We forgive you, Stanley.’”

“Stanley, could you possibly be right, that if incest and physical and sexual child abuse is so prevalent, then multiple personality may be prevalent, too?”

Marshall was saying that according to Frank Putnam at NIMH, Stanley had handled his client with professional aplomb: he had given encouragement, never a feeling of rejection, no matter how strange she might have sounded. He had planted posthypnotic suggestions in her mind as to her worth and instead of downplaying fears had told her that she had every right to be scared out of her senses.

It was as if she were right back in the middle of the experiences that had caused the multiplicity in the first place. He had re-created a restrictive environment for her.

When Putnam was researching schizophrenia, he discovered that the term didn’t fit all the patients he encountered. That led him to research the multiple personality cases recorded since the early 1800s.

“I never had an imaginary playmate,” the harsh voice told him stubbornly. “I wanted to be alone, got that? Totally, one-hundred-percent alone.” A shiver went through the hunched shoulders. “I never ‘saw’ myself doing anything, good or bad.

I never heard voices until I began putting journal notes together for the manuscript. One night I was walking from the kitchen to the gallery, putting coffee on. Someone whispered my name. That voice was real, Stanley, and I was all alone in the house. Am I crazy? Is that what multiple personality is all about?”

“You received over one hundred and fifty awards,” Stanley said. “Didn’t so many convince you of your talent?”

and what is sometimes called the ‘core’?” “Never. Your journey to both will never end.”

“Y’ may,” the husky voice said, “call us the Troop Formation, f’r that is what we are.”

emerges. As the Front Runner, the duty to inform you is mine. Our core, what should have been one person, is split in two. One half is a ‘child,’ and the other a ‘woman.’ The two halves are so damaged that the child is little more than an infant mind. The adult half is so unevolved that, were we to describe her condition, you might be skeptical. We can only tell you what we observe. Neither of our cores, ‘child’ or ‘woman,’ exists in the outside world.”

“Behind whom do those Troop members live?” Stanley asked, looking at his notes because the question had just popped into his head. He assumed that he’d written it down somewhere. The Front Runner had the grace not to smile. “They live in the shadows where it’s safe,” she said. “For one, they live behind Catherine.”

“You may call me the Interpreter. The differences between the Buffer and myself are vast and complicated. The Buffer stands between the woman and the outside world, absorbing emotional and physical impact. She also absorbs any stray knowledge the Weaver cannot reweave from her mind. The Buffer cannot reason as well as I. She is more emotional about the past because she operates on an emotional level and I operate on the cognitive. I am trying to make this very simple.”