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“You want to know what happens in your client’s mind. Her mind is only a tunnel, an avenue to each of us when we choose to enter or “flood” it, on occasion. The opening of the Tunnel or avenue is a choice—and you can be sure it is made wisely at all times. The Gatekeeper is the one who makes the choice.
The woman is merely the tool of the Troop member who, among other things, directs her as the façade.”
“The Buffer only sits in most instances in front of the woman. When one of us moves in, the woman is gone and so is the Buffer. In most instances. So you see, the Buffer couldn’t know everything.”
Stanley knew the woman was gone again, and that someone else sat here, discussing herself as if she were a total stranger. He found that many Troop members did that; it was another way of hiding.
“Holy, unmitigated shit,” said a gravelly voice, “how do we get out of this black hole?” “Shit is not holy,” Elvira said with a smile, “excrement is holy.” Stanley ignored both the comment and the voice change. If the others wanted to talk, they could introduce themselves. “You get out of it by letting your people out,” he said, “by relaxing enough to let us hear what they’ve got to say. Your people hold the keys. They hold the memories you don’t have.”
She could do that, it seemed, swing from adult to child and back again.
“You asked me once tonight and I’ll ask you again; are you dangerous?” The woman gave the only answer she had. “I don’t know.”
when I was between six and thirteen, I tasted the freedom of two weeks each summer, during vacations with him and his mother, my paternal grandmother. They lived together in a two-bedroom apartment up over a Jewish delicatessen.
“Hell, no, I don’t go for either sex, got that? Sex is a waste of time. First you got to figure out who you want, then you got to figure out if they want you and if the whole thing is ‘appropriate.’ You wind up, in any relationship, spending all your time wondering what you’re doing wrong and when you’ll get caught at it and spit on. Screw that.
He was unsure of the Outrider’s origin but something told him that for Ten-Four, Nails, and Sewer Mouth, the trauma of that incident might have “given birth” to selves of their nature; a trio who eschewed sexual relationships, either male or female, and henceforth channeled all energies into work and business.
The Outrider evaluated what the Buffer and the Front Runner were reporting on a daily basis and knew that the woman, because of her construction, still operated at a safe distance from the truth. That distance was a straight line, leading directly to Troop members whom no one wanted disturbed.
Regardless of the treasured glass and over a strong sense of apprehension, her eyes were riveted on the spider. Her mind soared for a moment, then focused. Unaware of what she was doing, the future course it would take, she memorised the spider’s motions, refined them. She was, in effect, “giving birth” to the seed that would eventually become Grace, the Zombie. The Zombie, not the child, would walk out of this field today.
“Olivia II died in the well,” the child sobbed. “She hadn’t been around long enough to have anybody to take over, so Catherine did it. Catherine is her adult mirror-image.”
“Who are you?” Stanley asked. “Olivia I is dead, too, because of the stepfather and what he did to her with the pink thing, and because the mother walked on her. She was four years old. From Olivia I, there’s just me left. I’m her child mirror-image.” Stanley asked what her name was; she howled that she didn’t have a name, didn’t want one. “Who,” Stanley asked with a dry throat, “took over as the adult for Olivia I?” “The Outrider.”
“Do not confuse childish with childlike. Someone inside you is very young and wants to play. Please try to believe that it does get better.” “Are you telling me that she’s a real multiple, that there’s somebody like me around here? Is she experiencing these same things; is it hell for her? Please. Is she real?”
“Integrated. That means everybody is ‘one’? Before that, did she sound as crazy as I do? Is she really like me?” “Jeannie wasn’t crazy. Nor was she mentally ill or insane or whatever other label most people use. Her other selves were protecting her. I suppose to an outsider the way they went about it might seem unusual.”
“Mean Joe,” Lambchop said, “is a mountain. We call him Mean Joe Green now. Did you know that, Stanley? We call him Mean Joe Green ’cause we found out the other day that he’s black.”
No one in the Troop Formation understood how it had happened. They only knew that the particular child in front of Stanley was the child core’s mirror-image. She had put herself in jeopardy and themselves along with her.
Her anger, while frightening, was always safely vented through the cursing.
Somehow the ducks, of all the farm animals in the world, never frightened her. Except when she watched their long necks and was reminded of snakes. Then she hated ducks, too.
Even flying out the front door she knew: this was why incest victims stood mute, why they hid themselves away in terror and why, with few exceptions if they appeared at all,
Sewer Mouth’s rage burst, and she slammed the steering wheel with a doubled-up fist. The horn did not blare; it was not working either. Elvira reached over and turned on the car radio. Manfred Mann began to wail.
A lovely, hellish colour. It grew in her mind, that colour, until it ignited and burst in the mind of Black Katherine. Now it wasn’t just voices inside the woman’s head, there was also Black Katherine’s banshee scream that first, at its lowest ebb, blended with all the other voices. It reached a crescendo then, and hurled itself on to a fever pitch. Black Katherine was beside and inside the woman, her being personified by gritting teeth and flashing, glaring eyes.
Mean Joe thought about Olivia I’s mirror-images: one, the child who had emerged, lisp and all, in the session today, just like a ghost—and the other one, Catherine, the adult. The child mirror-image had never grown, never would. As for Catherine, she had called out to him in the session with more human feeling, more passion, than he’d ever glimpsed in her before.
THE Troop Formation now fell into four categories: those who had made a conscious decision to speak more directly to each other and to the woman by thought transference and aloud to Stanley and to outsiders; those who had been pushed to do so against their will by emerging recall; some who spoke only to each other and not to the woman or Stanley; and a few diehards who chose to lurk in the background, as yet “unevidenced” to anyone but themselves. Many Troop members had operated their entire lives on a verbal and physical level that still remained unknown to the woman.
For those Troops who were aware of each other, the experience ranged, after the initial shock and anger wore off, from joyous acceptance, to nitpicking at each other’s shortcomings, to rage and disgust. Facing some Troop members through thought transference or the more potent “evidencing,” the woman was aware at times of a kind of wonderment; she almost wanted to count their fingers and toes the way a mother might when presented with her new-born child.
With no warning, two separate entities invaded her mind. One was a silent, far-off figure; the dead “essence” of someone whose birth and death had happened simultaneously and long ago. Adult core.
The second entity, darlin’, is the source o’ all your own emotions and thought. The second entity shields the first. Y’ are more empty than either o’ them.
“Freud says that children secretly want sex with their parents, couldn’t she be fantasising?” or “She reacts so hysterically, could she simply be menopausal?” or “She’s just one of those people who overdramatise things; can child abuse really do this much damage?”
In her place behind the bangs sat a woman with apple-green eyes. The outer edges were ringed with a thin line of black and in each center was a tiny, dead-black iris. It would take Stanley years to figure out that this self was Black Katherine’s mirror-image; created to go where Black Katherine could not, to deal as Black Katherine could never deal, because her rage was too great. Black Katherine was one of the selves who would forever remain in the darkest shadows of the Tunnel, secluded and on guard. One day, in a retrospective mood, Elvira would tell Stanley that the Junkyard Dog of “Bad,
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“Yes,” she said tonelessly, “write it down. The nonsense has got to stop. Sister Mary has her place in our structure. She earned it by rejecting the stepfather’s sexual demands. Sister Mary, because of her religious leanings, has been greeted by heartfelt scorn among us; yet she’s the one who said no to the stepfather. Of course she wasn’t the one who paid; Rabbit took the pain whenever the stepfather lashed out.”
“You’re wondering,” she said, “what other purpose someone like me serves. I am also the safety mechanism between Catherine and the Big Three, the means by which Catherine siphons her anger off so that she operates in the world without killing anyone. If wishes were deeds, Stanley, there wouldn’t be a living soul within a hundred miles of Catherine.” She told him how the rage was siphoned off. Even with the change already taking place, she managed, hurling one word after the other. “I’m a filtering process,” she said. “Catherine feels the rage; it’s red-hot. By the time it’s filtered through
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Someone who did know reached out and, very gently, led the Suicidal Warrior back to where it was warmer, safer. That someone laid strong hands across the shoulders that were rigid, as rigid as if a last sleep had already begun. And the song heard that night in the back of the woman’s mind was an Irish lullaby, the kind that old warriors used to sing—to young warriors fallen in battle from wounds so deep they would not recover.
The potential child and potential adult cores had slept from the moment of their birth, unaware of anything. Their mirror-images could not verbalise or understand the concept of the sex act, beyond fondling. Neither could the dead first-born child. As to her child mirror-image—Twelve didn’t know what she knew or understood. Which brought her back to the woman.
I think, Twelve said, that I’m too young to be hanging out with you. No, child. Y’ve got the mind o’ a witch and an Irish warrior’s backbone. All this preparation, Twelve said, what’s it for? F’r Christmas, darlin’. The time o’ the high feast.
This light flowed forever and it consumed the space before her—everything without end. Without beginning. Y’ don’t have t’ go back. The choice is yours.
Stanley began the count back, from zero to ten but Rabbit had difficulty with sequential numbers.
‘Into the jaws of hell, into the valley of death, rode the six hundred.’ And don’t tell me it makes sense, because it doesn’t.” “That’s not an exact quote from the original verse but it probably makes sense to the others. Somehow ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ must have special meaning to one of them.”
The Seventh Horseman emerged with a quick flash of grey-green eyes in an angular face and body movements that almost hummed, as if she were possessed of hundreds of tiny, danger-sensitive antennae, all working at once. She used her hands like whips to accentuate her carefully enunciated, sandpapery words. She explained that another Troop member had paved the way for her as she herself at times paved the way for others, making the journey safe.
“I had been present for a long time before my birth, but inactive. When the Great Dane arrived at the farmhouse, I ‘arrived,’ too. It was my job—not to find an escape, because there wasn’t one—but to warn beforehand of danger.
But if one of us slipped, we would all go down for a time. On such occasions, the Front Runner keeps us going while the Foot Soldiers carry the wounded.”
The faint brogue vanished. As she continued, it was easy for Stanley to imagine her reciting “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in her sandpapery and dramatic voice. “The woman, or at least the seed of her, has been with us since the first-born child was two years old. The woman’s actual birth took place much later. Her construction allowed her to operate in the world—no different before her birth than after it. She was empty then, she’s empty now. We operate through her when we need to, otherwise we act on our own. Please try to understand,” she continued, “that except for the woman and a few
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“For most, yes.” The Seventh Horseman stared straight ahead. “You’ve met the Zombie? Her name is Grace, as in ‘Grace Under Pressure,’ but ‘Zombie’ suits her better. When the woman’s strength wanes drastically, the Zombie steps in and moves for her, one foot ahead of the other. She is one of those who were immune, impervious, deadened, removed from it all.”
“It pleases me,” she said. “Just as the Collector’s pleases him. Or the Recorder or the Renegade. Some of us choose names as I did; other names are given to us by each other and some names simply arrive, unbidden, as it were.”
The Collector will never speak to you. He saw too much on the farms and has closed his eyes against everything. He spends his time discovering and hoarding words and other precious things which he happens to find appealing. For him I am like the blind man’s seeing-eye dog. I go where the Collector cannot go; I recite for him his favourite poetry and the snatches of literary wisdom which he has gathered over the years. That shores up morale within the Troop Formation, just as Elvira’s relating anything unpleasant to one song or another wipes out the sadness we feel.”
The emergence was that of a child-essence, closer than anyone to the first-born, and enveloped in this moment with what amounted to awe on the part of more than one Troop member. It was that awe which swept through the woman’s mind. Still hypnotised, the woman stared at what she perceived to be a small child sitting at her elbow. The woman began to paint a verbal picture of a very tiny, silent person, with a head of pale gold curls and a brown dress. “Sticky,” the woman said. “The little one is sticky.”
Catherine, the other still mercifully unidentified,
She had just experienced what Frank Putnam’s research termed “jamming,” the act of one self fighting to take away the too-dangerous thoughts of those selves closest to the sleeping cores.
Sharon exploded. “Look, I know you! I’ve seen every side of you and they’re only mood swings! You are not sick, you haven’t got multiple personalities.
The Zombie listened and sipped her coffee with precise movements. There was no need for her to be careful in handling the cup of scalding liquid. The Zombie never got excited, never made a mistake.
