Demon Camp

by Jennifer Percy

  “Like a midget demon?” the minister asks.

  “They do seem to be getting shorter and fatter,” she says.

  The same three people raise their hands when Tim asks about our abilities to bring back the dead.

  Mary tells us about the day she saw an ambulance come down the road and load up this young guy who’d died of a drug overdose and how she and the Christians surrounded the ambulance, put their hands flat on its side, and prayed until his heart came alive.

  Tim takes his fingers and drags them across his face. “My ultimate task,” he says, “is to bring a man back from the dead.” He wants that man in the casket. Embalmed. Dead. That way there will be no swooning.

  Ezra raises his hand and asks, “What is the extent of Satan’s power?”

  Katie opens the door. She shouts, “You’ve got thirty seconds because supper is on.”

  • • •

  Ezra sits all alone at supper. He has old, thin hair. On the way to Portal he stopped at the International House of Prayer and had a calcium ball removed from his foot. “It was this big.” He connects his thumb and index finger. “Usually it takes surgery to get these calcium balls removed, but not at IHOP.”

  Mary parades her prophetic paintings around the room.

  “This is darkness,” she says, pointing to the lower corner, where there are greens and blues and purples. “And this,” she says, pointing to the yellow and orange section, “this is God.”

  “And these,” I say. “What are these?”

  “Those carry the breath of God.”

  • • •

  At ten o’clock Tim leaves for home so that he may rest for his morning’s work. Katie gathers us into the back room and assigns us all a time for deliverance. It takes thirty minutes and the exorcisms will be going on between eight and noon. Katie spreads herself on the floor. We join her, our bodies loose and exhausted.

  We are marinating the demons, she says.

  Singing begins and all the arms in the room rise together. Katie whispers to herself and to God. The whispers rise and meet the music of her daughter, who plays the piano and taps her feet. She is a thick, sensuous girl with dark long hair.

  Candles burn and the light licks clavicles, hollows cheeks, carves eyes as if our bodies depended only on this light to exist.

  I crawl over to where Katie is lying down and ask whether the demons know that they’re about to get kicked out of our bodies.

  “Demons aren’t deaf,” she says. “They can hear us speaking.”

  I ask what will happen if you aren’t ready for deliverance but you do it anyway, and you don’t believe.

  “If you aren’t ready,” she says, “then a legion of ten thousand demons will come after you and they will try to destroy you.”

  She refers to Corinthians. “When unclean spirit comes out of a person it will go through dry places. But it will come back. It will see the place swept and garnished like a house but nobody will be living there, and so they will bring back seven worse with themselves. They always come back to check on you. It will come back with a friend.” She rolls over to face me. “Legion,” she says, “is a metaphor for the Roman legion. It’s a Destroyer demon on steroids.”

  I rise from where I’m sitting and disappear out the door and into the woods and get in my car and run from them—the bodies on the floor. I drive out of Portal.

  On the highway, the waffle houses glow like beehives in the night. I’m an hour out when Caleb calls. He demands to know why I left. I never told him I was going and he’s upset. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I tell myself that if I don’t return and go through deliverance my leaving points to something like belief.

  The psychologist Julian Jayne believes ancient humans were controlled by auditory hallucinations. If, let’s say, an ancient human came across a tiger in the woods, she’d hear: run, fight, hunt. It was a hallucinated voice that mimicked the voice of the chief. Even after the chief died, the voice remained, the commands continued. In this way, the leader never died. He was always a ghost. Jayne believes this voice is the origin of human religious sensibility. A voice that became God.

  On the way back to Portal, there’s a severed deer leg in the road, in the middle of an intersection. All chewed up. No flesh except near the hoof, like a little red sock. I can’t find the body. All I can think about is how it looks set there like a warning.

  It’s said that the first trauma, the original trauma, was the trauma of being hunted down by animals and being eaten.

  • • •

  I’m assigned to stay the night with a woman named Dotty, who lives behind the gas station. Everyone is given a place to stay for free with members of the ministry. Either that or they can choose to stay at a hotel. When Dotty picks me up that evening she doesn’t want to talk to me because she thinks I have a demon. She stares at me with small, cloudy irises. She’s an older lady with track pants and a blouse. I step inside her car and she drives across the street to her house. Fake plants and paintings of what look like interstellar nebular births clot the living room. On the wall a laminated sign of Uncle Sam says, “I Need You to Pray.” In the guest room, the closed green curtains, bright with a streetlight, tinge the room with a sickly glow. The bed suffers beneath lace pillows.

  That night I have a dream and in that dream they open my brain and they eat it.

  • • •

  In the morning Portal is full of damp, opossum-smelling air. The sky looks larger than the land, the palest blue. Saturday morning, and my deliverance is scheduled for noon.

  I leave Dotty’s house an hour early to walk around town. In twenty minutes I’ve seen everything. Lots of rusting lawn chairs in alleys, parking lots, and on rooftops. I find a dog in a cage large enough to house a person. The playground at the Portal Middle School is full of forklifts and deep holes. The main road crumbles on its edges and gives way to a gravelly dust.

  The factory-sized red barn, a thrift store called Tumbleweed’s, the abandoned Pig’s BBQ, and Clyde’s market where in 2008 a $275 million lottery ticket was won by an old man in work boots. “I don’t have to work no more,” he told the paper.

  The town has two blue water towers, one bearing the town’s name in thick white letters, announcing that you are here, that you have arrived in Portal.

  The son of Jesus hopes to turn Portal into a new Bethlehem. “There really is a Portal here,” she said. And she had told me a story about how Tim was lying on the floor of the Bible Covenant Institute talking to God when the ceiling ripped open and he could see all the way through the sky and into heaven.

  “Sometimes that happens,” Katie explained. “He’ll show up to town and he’ll just rip a big hole in the sky.”

  Pepper Jack’s serves collard greens and pork in buckets under incubating lights. A polluted stream runs parallel to the road from Pepper Jack’s to the Bible Covenant Institute. While I’m walking, a van rumbles off the main road, turns onto the dirt one, and starts following me. He pulls to my side. A black man sticks his head out the window. There are two men in the front seat next to him. “You need a ride?” The van putters at the speed I walk. In the back, bodies move around plants and machines and dogs.

  “We see you walking,” he says.

  “You’re not from here,” the driver says.

  “We’d know if you was from here,” the small man in the middle says. He leans forward and rests a hand on the dashboard. An ice cube moves from one side of his cheek to the other.

  “Thirsty? We got Cokes in the back.”

  “I’m going up here to the church.”

  “We can drive you.”

  The driver takes his hat off and presses it to his heart.

  Glory be to Jesus,

  Who, in bitter pains,

  Poured for me the lifeblood

  From His sacred veins!

  He closes his eyes, loses himself in the song, humming until the hum travels through his body and out his fingertips, and he shakes them with the violence of a
pianist. The other men bow their heads. “Nice day, ma’am,” the driver says.

  They drive away. The van turns softly in the heat. They’re gone. Disappeared behind the Bible Covenant Institute, where Walter and Brother John are being exorcised. Doors closed. Blinds shut. The locals don’t know. I asked a man at the gas station if he knew about the exorcisms. He shook his head. “God’s going on in there.”

  Down Mullet Row, a little alley of abandoned buildings running parallel to the Mather building, there’s a reflection in one of the windows. A dark figure. I wait until the figure proves to be a man. It’s the driver. Footsteps on quiet mud.

  • • •

  Inside the Bible Covenant Institute are soft piles of bodies. Just delivered, a few still waiting. The prophetic painter is passed out with a blanket over her head. Brother John is on the couch flipping through exorcism notes. I sink into the couch across from him. He leans forward. “You ready?” A rough laugh takes his torso to his knees.

  Each time the minister comes in from the main room, his shadow moves like a tongue over our bodies, rousing us to step into the room where no one wants to go.

  The minister enters and points to me. “Next victim.”

  There’s a man engaged in a strange kind of war dance, putting his palms in the air, stretching his fingers wide, and moving them as if he were doing pull-ups. He’s wearing a salmon pink button-up shirt. Burgundy hair sits high on his head. He has thick freckles like water spots. As he hums, his skin turns ocher and the freckles fade.

  “Come on,” he says with a growl, “come on. My name is Justin and I’m addicted to the Holy Spirit!” Justin cringes and shakes. He hits his head like a frat boy would when smashing a beer can to his head. “Y’all say it now! I’m addicted to the Holy Spirit!”

  The minister leads me to a curtain in the back of the room. He parts the fabric. There are eight people sitting in a circle on foldout chairs. In the middle, there’s a chair for me. A woman with long fake nails clacks its metal. The son of Jesus is there. So is the tan man who had the Destroyer, and Tanya, who saw half a dog in her room. There is also a ten-year-old girl on the team.

  The team leader, as he calls himself, is the minister’s son-in-law Kevin, married to his oldest daughter, Heather. “I’ll be in charge of sending the demons away.” Then there’s the scribe. “I’ll be taking notes. Someone has to be watching if the demons attack.” Other than that, everyone is there to determine your demon.

  For a few minutes, the team members talk among themselves. I don’t really know what to do with my body so I just close my eyes and listen. “Is that a star you just drew on your notebook?” “No, my pen doesn’t work.” “An ink freeze or something.” “Do you want me to get you another pen?” “Now my pen is frozen too.” “Mine’s not. Just for the record.” “You’re awesome.” “It’s these Uni-Balls.” “I use gel pens myself.” “I’m sweating over here.” “This will be fun.” “This should be boring,” the tan man says. He lifts his hand in the air and lets it bend at the wrist. “Take a nap.”

  The team begins with worship. They tell God he is the greatest. Next, they secure the perimeter. The minister wants 360 degrees of protection around the building. Also, intercessors. These are men and women scattered across the country, serving as backup, praying and asking God for help. Twenty minutes are spent discussing backup and weapons.

  “I’m a failing human being with no authority or opinion of my own,” Kevin says. “No strength at all. We do not come in our name, we come in the name of Christ. We come again, Christ.”

  “Quiet, demons,” his wife says. “Be still. Don’t move or manifest.”

  A dusty radio releases a deep-throated voice: Do not snatch your word of truth from my mouth, for I have put my hope in your laws. I have always obeyed your law, and forever I will walk about with freedom.

  Everybody says they have no idea. They can’t find the demon.

  They blame me. The tan man says I need to let it out. “Show us your pain.”

  They start again. Nothing. No demon.

  The prayers are repeated and again we wait.

  And then it happens. That thing I can’t see. Their hands seek places of rot. They start chanting. Their mouths twist to say God. Light collects in their eyes. One of them draws a picture of my heart in the air. They say my heart is half withered, like rotten fruit. They ask for Jesus blood, and the Jesus blood burns hot into my cheeks like a fever.

  Everything is soft-looking and cries with the Holy Spirit.

  I’m feeling blissed out. It’s the term psychologists use to describe what converts feel following a conversion experience. The enthusiasm is usually temporary; fading the farther one strays from the organization and its followers. I walk out of the building and into the hot parking lot. There are a few women selling tickets to the chicken lunch at the ING Lanier’s General Store. I’m tired enough that I can feel the distant flicker of dreams. My lids part, just enough. I return to Dotty’s house, the one by the gas station, and fall asleep. They said this might happen. That sleep would be our strongest desire. I sleep, and in a muddled dream state I see a crucifix rise and then dissolve into the floor.

  • • •

  At dusk everyone is back inside the building. Creepy music plays like wind chimes. The team members keep saying that we look happier. They say our eyes look clearer, more stuck to the head. They say we no longer have dark circles or tired, purple bags. They’re all smiling, a roomful of them, with smiles big enough to make their eyes disappear behind folds of skin.

  “Your scales are gone,” they keep saying. “Your scales are gone.”

  “Remember,” the minister says, “this is about the warfare in your own mind.”

  Tim dares Brother John to get baptized and to see if those dark faces are still floating around in his eyelids. Brother John nods and Tim collapses into a chair, crossing his legs with his too-big black Wrangler jeans bunched over cowboy boots. He raises his arms and speaks. “Let’s think of a demon speaking through a person, saying, ‘You’re a murderer,’ ” he says. “ ‘Don’t defend yourself.’ You’re not a murderer but you’re a human and thus you’re part of the human family. We all know that someone in this human family has killed someone. It’s not the demons transferred through generations but the propensity to sin passed down through the generations that demons use to demonize. It’s repenting the sins of the fathers. I guarantee that there’s no terrible thing that a human being has not once done.”

  Some psychologists believe that the damages of violent histories can hibernate in the unconscious and will be transmitted to the next generation like an undetected disease. Violent histories can generate psychic deformations that can be passed on from generation to generation. It’s the way that one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another. How the trauma of war can quietly trickle through our lives, possessing us, in a way, with the lives of others. Not just what we inherit from our parents and our family, but what we inherit from culture and from history.

  In regard to the question of original sin, Kierkegaard wrote, “To the innocent man it never can occur to ask such a question, but the guilty man sins when he asks it; for with his aesthetic curiosity he would like to obscure the fact that he himself has brought guilt into the world, has himself lost innocence by guilt.”

  According to my mother, I was guilty in the womb.

  Her first memory is of me rearranging myself to lessen her pain. She’d fallen in the woods and hurt her spine. I readjusted my body so that my fetal knee did not press into her shattered bones. Had an inheritance already begun?

  When the Puritans accused Mercy Short of demonic possession in 1692 the minister Cotton Mather took on the role of Mercy’s spiritual physician. He wrote down her nightmares in the book Brand Pluck’d out of the Burning. “There exhibited himself unto her a Devel having the figure of a Short and a Black man,” wrote Cotton Mather. “He was a wretch no taller than an ordinary Walking-Staff; hee was not of a Negro, but o
f a Tawney, or an Indian colour; hee wore an high-crowned Hat, with strait Hair; and had one Cloven-Foot.”

  Cotton Mather believed Mercy’s hysterical fits, and the Salem witch trials that followed, marked the beginning of Satan’s assault on the New World. The Puritan settlers believed they were God’s chosen people. The Devil was a good explanation for why they were losing the war.

  Mercy Short was an orphan of the First and Second Indian Wars. The death rate doubled that of the Civil War and was seven times that of World War II. When Abenaki Indians invaded the frontier town of Salmon Falls, New Hampshire, in 1690 they broke into the home of fifteen-year-old Mercy Short and made her watch while they butchered her parents and three siblings. They dragged her north, on a wilderness march. On the way, the Indians decided to take a hatchet to five-year-old James Key’s head. He’d cried for his parents. They chopped his body into pieces. Other crying children were bashed against trees.

  Mercy Short remembered the trauma of her family’s slaughter by pantomiming—in dreams, in visions—the torture of the Indians. In her visions the Devil thrust hot iron down her throat that ripped the skin off her tongue and lips. He engulfed her in flames. Blisters sprouted on her head. The room smelled like brimstone. Bloody pinpricks covered her body. Witch wounds. The Devil made her sign contracts in blood. She suffered fainting spells, trances, blindness, deafness, muteness, anorexia, and physical contortions. Indian drumbeats filled her dreams.

  If Caleb sustains one kind of hallucination, then America maintains another—the hallucination of a sterile war. If we consider the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay’s understanding of PTSD, that it is among other things, the persistence of wartime behaviors into peacetime, I can’t help but wonder if the United States as a nation is suffering from a form of cultural PTSD.

  For Caleb, Katie says, it began in childhood when he was always trying to save one kid by beating another. Always saving his younger brother, John. Saving himself from the lies of women. Saving himself from the quiet failures of his parents. In the military he was always saving everybody else, saving their lives or making life easier. When he arrived in Portal, he was always trying to fix some company about half shut down, hoping to stop guys coming home from blowing their heads off. If someone broke down on the road, he’d have to pull over, watch them bleed, cover the wound. He was still trying to save his dead friends.