The longer we stay, the more often the dreams come. If the lunacy of the rectory is closing in on Jason, it is doing something equally strange to me: I am turning to vapor. If I seem colorless and receding, a background character in my own life who simply receives what happens to her, it is because I am vanishing again, the way I did when I was young. It is such an annihilating sensation that sometimes I think, just a gentle push and I would fall back into the old faith; I would believe all of it again, everything.
“I don’t know how you survive them,” Jason says the morning after one of these nightmares, over an egg-white omelet called the Triathlete. “You can’t even watch movies where moms and dads fight. You get scared by the sound of violins.”
“Tense violins, that are playing as a girl walks through the woods to her certain death,” I say, pouring cream into the coffee that helps me stay so nervous. “Besides, you got scared once when you looked down, saw your shadow, and thought it was a little child hugging your leg.”
“Both of us are easily frightened,” he acknowledges. “It’s why our marriage is so successful.”
“Tell the cook there are nightshades in this,” my mother instructs the waitress, handing back a plate containing a single deadly potato. “One bite of a nightshade, and every joint in my body will become inflamed.”
“Is the mansion still there?” I ask my mother, as Jason offers her half of his Triathlete and a piece of dry wheat toast. She looks at him with love; he is so healthy.
“Of course,” she says. “I could take you up there to visit it, but I don’t think we would be allowed inside. It’s a Home for Troubled Nuns now.” She squeezes her fist and says, “I’ll give them trouble.” No one is sure why she hates nuns so much, though she has alluded to certain sinister teachers from the past, presiding over classrooms in black habits. When I asked her about it once, she said darkly, “Sister liked to spank,” and then refused to elaborate further.
That weekend, we drive the three hours from Kansas City to St. Louis to investigate, and find the fabled mansion sitting on top of its steep sledding hill, still guarded by its epiphanic oak. It’s built of brown brick and is surprisingly modernist; it looks like the clash of two rhombuses. I creep around the corner and try to peer into the kitchen, where my mother used to pour iced tea on my Cheerios in the morning, but can see only glass reflecting other glass. A flash slides by inside, and I run away before the Troubled Nuns can get us. “Gun it!” I shriek, and Jason and I leap into the getaway car. Mom peels out on the road with nun-despising glee, as if to say Who’s getting spanked now, Sister?
I do not ask if we can visit the rectory where the nightmares always end, the one across town at Our Lady of Mercy. Every step and square foot of it is painted on the inside of my eyelids, and has been ever since the first night I spent there, alone with my sister Christina and my father in the pitch-black of its basement. It was the height of dead-aired August in 1994, and our family was moving back to St. Louis after five years in Cincinnati. The three of us had driven out a week ahead of everyone else so we could unload boxes and furniture and get things in order at the new parish, and Dad had used this rare opportunity of complete freedom from my mother’s civilizing influence to show us The Exorcist for the first time.
Perhaps he saw it as a tender rite of passage—it was, after all, the same film that had converted him on that paranoid submarine so long ago. He popped the tape into the VCR and settled down beside us on the sofa, stretching out so expansively that I had to shift half of my sitting apparatus onto Christina’s lap. The most frightening theme music I had ever heard began to play, strongly suggesting that a green demon had entered a synthesizer and was thrashing around in there, refusing to leave. As the glow of tween possession began to warm my father’s face, he said, with every appearance of perfect happiness, “Now here’s what you need to know. This story is absolutely true, it happened right here, right in St. Louis, and it will one day happen again. Maybe to one of you, or to one of your friends.”
There are downsides to believing everything that everyone tells you, but I had not discovered this yet. Terrorized, I scooted the other half of my sitting apparatus onto long-suffering Christina, who groaned with something more than fear. He continued. “This was not a psychological disturbance. This was not puberty. Don’t listen to the shrinks. This was the presence of evil, pure and simple. The wing where that kid was kept is permanently fifteen degrees colder than the rest of the hospital. A priest I know who was allowed access to the case file threw up as soon as he set eyes on it and was never afterward able to speak as to its contents.”
“You’re going to die up there,” the possessed girl said on-screen, in that strange, empty-drawer tone of someone whose words were not her own. My father chuckled with narrative satisfaction and rammed a handful of potato chips into his mouth. “Now get a load of this,” he said. “She’s about to pee on the carpet.”
The true story ran mercilessly in its course; it overflowed its banks and threatened to sweep me away. After a while, it occurred to me hazily to wonder how I was still alive, since I hadn’t breathed in more than an hour. My father attempted to mute the line “Your mother sucks cocks in hell!” but hit the wrong button on the remote and actually ended up blasting it at maximum volume. By the time the credits rolled, my sister and I were so paralyzed that we couldn’t even get up to brush our teeth. We slept on the foldout sofa bed that night clutching each other, muttering what must have been prayers, trying to drown out the occult creakings and soft, unholy speeches of this new place. At four in the morning, I woke to hear her singing in the tiny bathroom, valiantly and loudly, in the face of onrushing darkness just like a Christian soldier. I wish I could remember the song.
• • •
WE HAD ARRIVED BACK in North County just as everyone else was fleeing it, in a mass exodus that seemed almost biblical. The airport had grand ideas of expansion and was buying up swaths of small, boxy houses in the surrounding suburbs. My father’s church in Hazelwood was too underpopulated to support a school—schools seem somehow to die at my father’s touch—so we attended St. Lawrence the Martyr in neighboring Bridgeton, which would lose more than two thousand homes and a third of its population in the next decade. Kinloch, a historically black town that had flourished on the other side of the airport for a century, was being razed, and its displaced families were moving in reluctant procession to Berkeley, Florissant, Ferguson.
Any attempt I made now to dissect that atmosphere would be slicing with a scalpel my twelve-year-old self did not have. All I understood then was the feeling of doom, that certainty that the last days were stepping toward me and had knowledge of my name. Above me and always, the sky roared in its loud blue suit like a preacher. The airfields were so close that if you got your courage up, you could walk to the weedy fringe of them and watch the bolted silver bellies go by overhead, spiriting people other places.
Mostly I did not get my courage up. The year before, a girl named Cassidy Senter had vanished on her way to a friend’s house, and her bludgeoned body was found wrapped in comforters, her jeans pulled down over her ankles. She was the latest in a string of North County girls who had been plucked up by God knows who and sometimes set down again, sometimes not. The New York Times wrote a story about it called “A Town in Terror as Children Disappear,” which began:
Ten miles from the hustle and horrors of big-city life in St. Louis, some of the streets twist and dip like a country road, and the fields and woods nearby remind everyone of what once was.
But these days there is plenty of heartbreak and fear in these suburbs to remind everyone of what now is.
Someone is stealing and killing children.
That’s a hell of a lede. If my mother hadn’t hated The New York Times even more than she hated nuns, I might have suspected her of writing it.
Before my father took over, the rectory had been inhabited by an ancient priest who left
an upstairs closet stocked with poker chips and rhinestone-colored schnapps. The legend was that he died in his bed, staring at the ceiling until it broke into clouds, and then became a chill presence that squeaked open the closet door and drank Sour Apple Pucker in the night. The level of the Razzmatazz and the Hot Damn! never went down, but the Sour Apple Pucker sank by gulps. “Girl. That place was HAWNTED,” Mary tells me when I ask her what she remembers of that era. “Hawnty-hawnty. Big ol’ ghosts. Guzzling that nasty Jesus juice.” Then, after a moment of reflection, “Either that or Paul was drinking it.”
I had my own room for the first time since the mansion, a basement room with a wide window that gave me an excellent view of the neighbors. Mom had instructed us never to interact with them because they were “a family of drug dealers, whose daughter calls me a bitch whenever she sees me.” This sounded like a promising premise for a sitcom. The Drug Family had pale, scrappy fights in the front yard where they rolled flamboyantly across the hoods of each other’s cars while emitting rebel yells. “Bitch!” a voice would call out if my mother happened to emerge from the front door while they were in the thick of it.
“Don’t worry, I’m on the case,” she said grimly, and assured us that she was both “spying on them through bird-watching binoculars” and “keeping a daily log of their activities,” including the comings and goings of the bad daughter, who wriggled out of her window on Friday and Saturday nights, disregarding the warnings that at any time she might disappear into thin air.
She was the only one who dared. Children were gap teeth in the landscape, missing wherever I looked. I never heard anyone chanting Cinderella dressed in yella or the contained splat of a basketball. If I did venture somewhere on my own, an anonymous car would often crawl alongside me until I reached my destination. The neighborhood was nearly silent, as if it had been blanketed in snow, as if it had been swaddled up in something. Nobody went outside. We went to the house of the prophet instead.
• • •
THE PROPHET’S NAME WAS BILLY, and the first thing you heard as you approached his house was singing. It floated through the ceiling in a ring and gave the low, humble roof a halo. Christina and I were late for the meeting, as usual, so we hurried across the lawn and eased open the door, which was never locked. At once our shoulders squared and our faces went under the same blank, oval spell, which waited to be rushed full of something else, like eggs.
When Billy first formed the youth group, he had christened it God’s Gang. This was the mid-1980s, mind, a time when parents believed that gang members were tiptoeing into the suburbs at night and singing, “When a CRIP is a CRIP he’s a CRIP all the WAY,” at their children’s open windows until the children sleepwalked outside with their arms straight out in front of them and murmured, “Now is the time for me to join a gang.” Teenagers especially must be kept off the streets, or they would go mental from peer pressure and begin worshipping at the church of crime. Either join the Gang of God or else find yourself a member of the Drug Family, visibly dusted with crack, wrestling your own brother on the hood of an El Camino while my mother watched through binoculars.
I stepped behind my sister into the basement, which was 40 percent shag carpet and 60 percent Bible verses. This proved the prophet’s Protestant background. Bible verses were . . . fine, but we secretly thought they would be more effective if they bled when you read them, just as we thought the commandments ought to shriek when they were broken. When I wasn’t swooning over the Psalms, which were poetry, my own Bible study mostly consisted of reading and rereading all the stories about whores, and the donkey emissions that they desired, and wondering who was Oholibah and why the heck were her breasts so round.
In the far corner, we saw a group of teenagers with their eyes closed and their plucked-chicken arms raised, singing, with the peculiar naked look of people whose souls had risen to the surface and were breaking through in patches. The voices rose yellow and dizzy and yearning, straw spun only halfway to gold, and the circle opened in two places and we joined them. My sister’s voice lifted above the others in a pretty heaven. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” was printed on a picture of lilies above her head, but we were here because we wanted something terribly—even if just to be elsewhere, away from our own homes.
The singing portion lasted about twenty minutes, and we usually wrapped it up with “Bananas for the Lord,” which consisted of a single verse, repeated faster and faster until the circle broke into laughter.
He’s a peach of a savior
He’s the apple of my eye
He prunes away the branches
When the branches get too high
He bears his fruit in season and his love will never die
And that’s why I’m bananas for the Lord!
“Why on earth did you keep going?” Jason occasionally wonders, appalled at the idea of me down in that basement Wednesday after Wednesday for five years, proclaiming that I was Bananas for the Lord. “My youth group wasn’t like that. It was mostly just an excuse for kids to fingerbang each other in the backs of church buses.”
“Well, they had soda there,” I say lamely. “And no one stopped going once they had started. Or if they did, no one noticed they were gone.”
He bursts into a Christian rap and I join him; sadly, we remember every single word. (“CHARM is DECEITFUL and BEAUTY is VAIN! A woman who fears the Lord, she AIN’T PLAYIN’!”) We know the genre so well that we’re unbeatable at that game where you flip through radio stations and guess within five seconds whether a song is Christian, usually because they use some gross hopeful chord or a word like “arise.”
The truth is that I have searched myself and still I do not know. Sometimes I suspect I went because I so loved to sing, and where else could I in all my imperfection do it?
• • •
“EVER SINCE I WAS A CHILD,” the prophet said, “I’ve been afraid of very beautiful people.”
I looked around the circle and was reassured. “Very beautiful people” were not a big danger here. Everyone who attended was a sibling or a cousin, so that our faces repeated each other with bland variation, like casseroles. In order not to tempt each other with our bodies, everyone wore plaid shirts over T-shirts. Our jeans fell in cascades, our center-parted hair fell in cascades, we flowed like the water out of Jesus’ side. We pronounced “milk” as “melk,” “mostaccioli” as “muskacholi”; we had a talent for ecstasy and we were in this together.
“The devil can work through perfection,” the prophet said, with a televangelical thrust of one hip.
I called Billy the prophet because he looked like the Old Testament. He had the profile of a promontory, with crazed eagles of belief wheeling majestically off his forehead and cheekbones. His eyes were a fixed and staring blue, and shed a fanatic starlight. It was plausible that he had grown up in a town with no dancing. There was something thumping, something plain-pine-church, something snake-handling about him. Once, we had heard, a burglar broke into his home and Billy sat him down and testified to him about Jesus until the burglar wept. He walked out of the house forgiven and free, and as high off the ground as the Good Thief.
“The devil can work through perfect symmetry,” he continued.
I exchanged glances with my friend Angela, who was drawing something unchristian on the hem of her jeans with black ink. She listened to the kind of music where people screamed, but still she served the Lord.
“I have no idea,” she whispered. We loved Billy, but sometimes it seemed like he came from another planet.
When he had finished enlightening us about how symmetrical faces were the devil’s playground, he asked us to welcome the main speaker, and I braced myself. The quality of our speakers was unpredictable. The best, by far, had been a woman with a side ponytail who cried as she told us about a therapy session where she had beaten a pillow labeled with the words “MY MOTHER” to symbolic death w
ith a Wiffle-ball bat. Her teenage son, sitting in the circle, let his lank corn-tassel hair swing forward and twirled his guitar pick between his fingers as she spoke. The principal of my grade school came too, and cried as she confessed that she had slapped her daughter hard across the cheek that morning—but when she dropped to her knees to pray about it, she saw a rich, throbbing, near-black red, and knew that God had carried her into his hot aorta to forgive her. Her teenage daughter, sitting in the circle, summoned perfect anonymity into every line and curve of herself and crossed her long, knifelike, lifeguarding legs. It was a blessing, then, that my father hated happy-clapping so much. It meant I would never see him up there talking about me.
Most often, though, our speakers were well-scrubbed virgins in their twenties and thirties who were saving themselves for soulmates they hadn’t met yet, which became more poignant as the seasons passed and they kept returning. Could that happen to us? we wondered. Because we were saving ourselves too—the majority of us kept virginity pledges in our wallets that mimicked the look of business cards, and said “True Love Waits” on the back. I carried one myself, not feeling the need to disclose that I had long ago sacrificed my herman to a deep end.
This week we were treated to an earnest male virgin in Dockers, who looked like a spaniel standing on hind legs. He was one of the ones who was so determined to give it to us straight that he sometimes said things like “Did God create the anus to be a pleasure source? Yeah. Absolutely. In His infinite wisdom, He did.” Right now he was explaining in patient detail that you could get AIDS from kissing if the person you kissed had flossed too hard that morning, and if you had also flossed too hard that morning, so that the two of you were bleeding freely into each other’s mouths in a dark Sadean parody of kissing.
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