by Неизвестный
“Ah! The lily-white cur!” Each word came out like paste squeezed slowly from a tube. Everyone present and listening waited on every syllable. “We'll fix you. In time.” Gerald was filled with pity for John: now he was in for it.
“You'll lose some of your hair. And you'll sit in a confessional and secretly wonder why they do the things they confess to you. And the wonder will change to curiosity. And the curiosity to desire. You won't admit it, but you will end with desire. To murder. To steal. To fuck. Whatever they tell you. And you'll feel the prick in you and you'll fudge on the monies. And you'll tilt the bottle. Then you'll let her hot hands soothe your fever”—the sarcasm was biting—“and when you get up, she'll drive you to the sea for your health and you'll have a quickie in the back of the car—all for the love of your sugar-coated Jesus. And she'll need more and more of your love of God. And more. And more. And more. And”—the voice was now at a screaming crescendo—“you'll take several wives of several men, just to console them. You'll be a whoremaster on the altar, you lily-white cur. And you'll be afraid to confess it.” Richard/Rita started to screech and howl with laughter, rolling around the couch. “Maybe”—he stopped laughing and fixed John again with the one eye speculatively—“maybe, you'll come even into my box.”
The captain laid two strong hands on Richard/Rita's shoulders, restraining him firmly but gently. He was suddenly quiet. Then he turned the one eye on the captain and wrinkled his nose in mock disgust: “He'll screw your wife. Yours! She wants him already. A nice clean young man no woman ever had.”
“Frank, hold it,” Gerald said hurriedly to the captain. He squeezed John's hand to reassure the young priest. He was now standing erect by himself. He reassured them all with a glance. Then slowly and in a solemn tone of voice to Richard/Rita: “Your name is Girl-Fixer. You will answer our questions.” Painstakingly he listed them: “How many of you are there? Who are you? What do you do? Why do you hold this person whom Jesus saved?”
Each question acted like a hammer blow on Richard/Rita. With each one Richard/Rita sank back further on the couch. He seemed to shrink and diminish as if being flattened. A look of trapped horror spread over his face like a film.
Gerald continued: “I ask these questions in the name of Jesus. You will answer.”
Richard/Rita's body relaxed and went limp; he lay on his back, eyes closed. The captain loosened his hold finally and stood back. Gerald motioned to the assistants; they moved away from the bed. Richard/Rita's two brothers looked at each other for a brief instant. They recollected later: their horror was almost equaled by their curiosity. What malign and dark forces had seized their brother? Why? Could he be freed of them? Would they give up?
The pressure on Gerald was lightening inch by inch, he felt. He could feel little pockets of relief throughout his body. His vision started to clear up again. His ears stopped aching. He was no longer bleeding. He still had the inexorable gnawing around his middle, but now it was a dully insistent pain, steady, unwavering, predictable.
For a few minutes Richard/Rita's mouth opened and shut alternately. They could see his tongue moving inside, his cheeks tautening and loosening, his Adam's apple jerking up and down. He seemed to be forming words soundlessly.
Then they began to hear him, at first faintly as a distant whisper, then in half words, then broken phrases, finally in whole sentences punctuated by trailing pauses and delivered in that gravelly tone which not even his brothers recognized as that of the Richard they had known all their lives. Dr. Hammond, too, had recovered his composure, and was once more engaged in clinical observation of what was happening.
“How many of you are there?” Gerald repeated. Then he leaned forward listening intently. Bit by bit, he began to pick up the middle of words, the beginnings of phrases.
“. . . numbers. . . no bodies, fool. . . can you can't. . . numerality. . . spr—. . . negative math. . . count only in power. . . unbroken will each and eve—. . . stick together. . . gargantuan push on little pygmies. . . no one solitary. . . off on their nothing. . . any one of us alone is nothing, has nothing own among us, a single spirit is merely a few fibers—will, mind—strung out on a measly being forever headed to an eternal absence, an endless vacuum. . . a belly on two legs stumbling aimlessly across the dry bed of confirmed hopelessness. . . that's each one alone. . . impossible. . . nothing, a real nothing. . . hating, loathing, loving unlove and unloving. . . together around a human or hating the High Enemy. . . oaaaaaaaaaah. . . the push and shove and dent we make, the Kingdom, the Kingdom, there High Enemy never rules, dense, indistinguishable, one mass, one will, one complete beast, one brilliance pouring from the Daring One to all the others. So that humans back into the corner. . . take darkness as their lot, disease and pain and death and darkness. . . on all sides scratched, bitter, stung, deadened, maddened by the crawling members of the Kingdom, the Kingdom. . .”
“Have you all various names?” Gerald interjected. “Are you all equal? What are your identities?”
The voice coming from Richard/Rita had sunk to a stage whisper.
“Brilliant! Brilliant!” the psychologist breathed wonderingly to Gerald. “Just the question to be asked!”
“Must you go further on this line, Father?” Bert asked Gerald, watching his brother in dismay.
“Kindly wait, my dear man.” Dr. Hammond's eyes were bulging with interest, his face flushed with anger at the interruption. “This may be a landmark case of multiple personality.”
Gerald looked sideways at the psychiatrist. It was a look more of pity than surprise. But there was no time for more.
“. . . round and fat and red and black and male and female and what they do or smell like or walk like or do like, pygmy humans. . . names, what names?. . . a breath of little lungs. . . it's what we do, we are. . . millions if you count the wills, the minds, infinite if you weigh the hatings, the living hatings. . . one above the other, no one is all, all are under one, some so near the Daring One they have intelligence only the High Enemy can match, some so low they are turds, the shards, the lumps beneath his heel, the dust between his toes. . . and loving it all, all the degradation. . . anything to disfigure beauty.”
A fit of crackling, cackling laughter seemed to grip Richard/Rita. Whatever or whoever was amused, it was a frightening look Richard/Rita now wore: his mouth drawn back, all his teeth bared, his cheeks lined from the stretching of the lips, chin bobbing up and down, nostrils flaring and distended—and the ugly horror of that amusement. This was no belly laugh or dry, subtle joke, no reaction to fine wit or deep humor. Just a triumphal screeching sound undulating out on felt waves of satisfaction for hate, of acquiescence in unhappiness, of refusal to envisage any existence but that of living in death, of mercilessness, of perpetual banality exalted into a way of existence.
Gerald spoke again. “What do you do, you of the Kingdom? Girl-Fixer? All of you? What do you do?”
Richard/Rita was now covered with perspiration. His clothes and the top of the couch were sodden. The temperature of the room had become stifling in the last hour. A stale odor hung in the air. Each one present had a throbbing headache. Bert and Jasper had begun again to support Gerald on either side. Both the brothers looked like men wounded and bled dry of any feeling. They had been numbed by compassion for their brother and by fear for his well-being. Father John was saying his rosary beads. The teacher and the police captain stood on either side of the couch. Listening to Richard/Rita's rambling talk, they seemed to have shrunk to shadows of their former selves, their burly forms drooping and listless.
The only one still spry, coldly thoughtful, active, still moving around and in apparent control of himself, was the psychiatrist. In spite of his apparent stress, there was a gleam in his eyes, picked up by his steel-rimmed spectacles, that bespoke the professional behaving predictably in the teeth of invaluable experience. Dear God, Gerald prayed silently, let him be spared the price of any further stupidity he may yet commit.
Dr. Hammond, however,
concentrated on Richard/Rita's reply as his body stiffened on the couch. The police captain and the teacher held Richard/Rita down. Jasper left Gerald's side and placed his hands on Richard/Rita's ankles. They could all “feel” the resistance coming.
“Why should we reply? The High. . .”
“Because Jesus commands you. And his cross protects us. And you were defeated by his sacrifice. And you will obey. Answer.”
Again Richard/Rita went limp. The groaning started and lasted a minute or two. James could feel his brother's whole body vibrating as if electric waves were being shot through it in quick, successive spurts.
“We. . . we. . . leave us to the Kingdom. You hear! Rita is one of us now. Forever. You cannot have Rita.”
“Rita is baptized. And saved. And forgiven. You do not anymore have the freedom of Rita's body and Rita's soul,” Gerald shot with a savagery he never had felt before. “You will tell us what you do, how you fix. Answer. In the name of Jesus.”
For a few minutes, Gerald had the impression that the confused babel of voices was starting again, but it came to nothing. In that tiny, limping, unknown voice, Richard/Rita spoke again. It was the weird and unaccustomed voice that made him a stranger to his brothers.
“Oh, it starts with the box and ends with the box. So long as we make them think the box is all, we fix them. We can make a whore of the grandest—all legal, all secure, if once. . . if once they think the box is woman, woman a box. . . the greatest insult to the High Enemy, because woman is likest to the High Enemy. A man is a thing. A woman is being. We fix them so they think. . . it's nothing but a big, fat dick in a sea of hormones, and smellings and screams, and all the shouting and jabbing and pulling and jerking. Tie them to the dickybird tight in his cage. Tie them to that. Don't let them see beyond. And she will make the man in her image. Tie him too. . .” Richard/Rita broke off, turning on the couch and gasping as if for air. “You! Priest! We've fixed you for. . .”
“No, Girl-Fixer. Jesus has defeated you. In his name you will answer: why do you hold this creature, Rita, in slavery? Why?”
Gerald in his inexperience was following a dangerous yet apparently elementary line of reasoning. It seemed logical to him to insist on finding out why or how Richard/Rita had come to be possessed. But there was always the danger that his own mental curiosity would conquer his better judgment. He might, in that case, advance so far as to tamper with the innards of evil and get injured beyond repair.
As it turned out before the end of the exorcism, it was not Gerald who suffered the consequences of such tampering.
“We do as we are bidden by the Daring One. Rita was our prey, our soul. Rita chose to be a box, to be a box, to be a box, to be a box. Even when the High One spoke, he chose to be a box, to be a box, to be a box.”
Gerald, by some inner sense, felt that one single, personal strand of evil and resistance had faded or was fading from the scene; it felt as if a lesser intelligence was now coping with his questions.
Richard/Rita began to struggle and gasp again. Gerald reflected for a moment. What next? Should he keep silent and let all things quiet down? Should he press forward and extract more information? He remembered the old Dominican saying with a shake of the head: “If you get a chance to squeeze them dry of words, do so. If you can, press them to tell what exactly happened. But don't get into a give-and-take of a normal argument. They will always beat you. And a beating can be more than you can take.”
Gerald looked again at Richard/Rita; his body was thrashing back and forth jerkily; the assistants were looking at Gerald for some direction. He decided to ask one more question.
“Evil Spirit, in the name of Jesus, announce the trap in which you caught Richard/Rita. I ask this by the authority of the Church and in the name of Jesus.”
Richard/Rita's horrible voice answered: “We start with self-growth, self-discovery. We tell 'em, we told Rita: First, you must be yourself, find yourself, know who you are. They stick their noses in their own navels and say: I like my own smell! Then, that woman alone, woman alone, is the thing to be. She has it all within her, but man has it all hanging out.”
The assistants had moved away from the couch and stood in almost unbelieving fright near Gerald. Bert no longer supported Gerald, but leaned on the night table.
“To be a woman is to be completely independent, we tell them. No guilt. Not masculine. Not feminine. Complete in herself. Cunt and clit in one. Androgynous. Free of guilt feelings, of all responsibility to a man. Biologicaaaaaaaaaaal!” Richard/Rita's voice stretched out, caressing the last syllable. At a sign from Gerald, the assistants moved back and laid hands on Richard/Rita. A pause. Then: “To be freed from any need of other. Let them think that they are past ambition of ecstasy on a prick, but totally sensual because they can laugh at love and all its makings; that they are developing their own self-contained skills; that her own intimacy with herself is the whole world, without the intrusion of the male; that she is full of internal spaces in herself, infinite spaces, infinite enough to contain all she could ever wish to have or be; that she can be tranquil, full of personalities, many-sided, all of man, without his tomfoolery, all of woman without the alley-cat carry-on.”
Richard/Rita stopped. Only the four pairs of hands restrained him from getting up. His legs and arms wrestled for a few moments, then ceased. He groaned again and began to mutter inaudibly.
“Speak, Girl-Fixer! Speak! Let us hear your voice clearly!”
“Then. . . then. . . the same old trap. The same old trap we've taken many in-we still catch them in. That they fuck as necessarily as birds sing, as water flows, as the fire burns. Merely to show how independent they are. How superior they are. That if they don't breathe for fucking, live for fucking, sing in fucking, they can't breathe, cry, sing, love, or do anything. Be liberated. That's what they begin to say. Man, woman, or goat, little boy, or if it comes to that, little girl. And then, when Rita got there-Oeeeeeeeeeeeh!” It was a yelp of triumph as before.
Gerald was in command. There was not even a vestige of the Pretense now. But Richard/Rita was still caught in the teeth of this wild, evil thing and was virtually flung about on the couch as the Girl-Fixer cackled on.
“And, after that. . . one penis. Then another penis. Then a third. A fourth. A fifty-fourth. A forest of 'em. Sharp stakes. All the same. Oeeeee! And then the hate at being loved so. And the disgust at hating. And the hating of so loving. And the loving of hate. And the lying in wait for the penis. And the laughter at its nonsense. And the slavery. Many of us are the rump of the Daring One. Every Rita is a piece of his shit. . .”
It was enough. Gerald broke in brusquely. There was only one question more. “At what point in time did Rita give over possession to you? When was it consummated?”
“In the snow. In the wind. We knew then we could find a place in him. Bend him to our will. But he had invited years before. . .”
Gerald decided that all he wanted to know had been told. The evil spirit had been sufficiently subdued and humiliated, Now it could be expelled.
“”Lord God of Heaven, in the name of Jesus Christ, your only begotten son, and in the name of your Holy Spirit, we pray that you will grant us our prayer and free this your servant, Richard, from the toils of slavery and the foul possession of this evil spirit.“ Gerald had been looking up at the ceiling during this prayer. Now he looked down at Richard/Rita, held up the crucifix, and prepared to begin the final exorcising prayer.
Dr. Hammond broke in, whispering urgently in his ear: “Father, don't let it stop here. Let me put a few professionally oriented questions.”
In spite of his dislike of psychiatrists and his general annoyance with this one, Gerald remained afraid for him. He whirled around painfully, urgently pleading in a cracked voice: “For the love of Jesus, Dr. Hammond, for your own sake, keep your mouth shut. Stay out of this. You don't know what you. . .”
But it was too late. Dr. Hammond had gone over beside Richard/Rita. He sat down on the edge of the couc
h and began to speak calmly, persuasively.
“Now, Rita, we have nearly finished. This is almost at its close. You will be calm. There's nothing to be fearful of. Answer my questions. And after that, you will wake up.”
Richard/Rita stopped turning and twisting. He lay utterly still. His face relaxed. The expression around his lips softened. Dr. Hammond, rather tense in the beginning, now began to relax. It was a mistake on Gerald's part to allow the psychiatrist to do this. No experienced exorcist would have permitted such blatant and dangerous interference. It was dangerous not only because the whole exorcism might break down and be completely lost, but it could be possibly fatal for the person so unwary as to reach out in ignorance and touch summary evil. So it proved in one sense for Dr. Hammond.
A sudden, dull silence fell in the wake of his opening words to Richard/Rita. After all the pain and noise and groaning and strain, that silence was surprisingly alien to them all. One by one, each head lifted. Hammond's professional air—his blue business suit, his spectacles, his knowing tone, his very confidence in moving to Richard/Rita's couch and sitting down to speak, overruling Gerald's warnings by his behavior—all this made them think, as the policeman recalled, “After all, this may be more normal than I thought.”
But what Gerald sensed was not the lifting of an evil presence, but a shift. Dr. Hammond had fallen into the same trap as Gerald had done four and a half weeks before, and with infinitely poorer defenses than even Gerald had had. Only Gerald and the teacher grew tense with the fear of understanding.
But suddenly, almost in unison and as if their unwinding had been something you could see and hear, they all stopped unwinding. You could almost see and hear the sudden cessation of flooding relief. In that silence they were listening. A change was taking place. They all sensed now what Gerald and the teacher had sensed. A change in something or somewhere near them or connected with them, with that room, with Gerald, and with Richard/Rita.