Come Closer

by Sara Gran

  Where was the magazine? I looked around my desk. Not there. In my mind I went back again to the magazine stand. After the messenger raced by I shook my head, took a second to get my bearings. Just a little moment of lightheadedness. I walked up the side streets back to work, smoked another cigarette, stopped to admire a beautiful red rose bush in a front yard. I stopped to check my watch before I came back into the building. Five to. What I expected. But I had only checked the long minute hand, not the short hour hand. So where was the magazine? I didn’t have it on the way back to work. I remembered reaching into my purse for cigarettes and lighter and having both hands free. No cigarette, no magazine.

  I mulled it over in my mind for a few minutes before I came up with an answer: I had fainted. That was the only possibility. When I thought I had only stumbled, avoiding the messenger, I had fainted. I had been out for an hour, righted myself, and then returned to work without knowing it had happened, drawing no attention from a single passerby, and then forgotten the whole thing. Sitting at my desk I weighed a visit to the emergency room. No, I was okay now.

  It was just like people in this city not to stop and help. Of course the magazine dealer would have seen the whole thing through the door, but he certainly wouldn’t have lifted a finger to help me. I called Edward at the office but he was out. The rest of the day went by without incident and at six I went home. There was a message from Ed on the answering machine saying he would be late again. I ate a bowl of cereal at the kitchen table and almost forgot about having fainted—until I went to the bedroom and started to undress, changing into pajamas for the evening. Underneath my jacket, on the left shoulder of my white shirt, was a spray of small brown dots.

  It looked like blood. Enough so, in fact, that there was nothing it could be but blood. My mind flip-flopped again. Then I remembered lunch at the coffee shop—a rare hamburger. Mystery solved. The stain was from lunch. I had transmitted a fine spray of blood from a cooked hamburger around my jacket and onto the shoulder of the shirt underneath, then I had fainted, righted myself, and forgotten about it. As simple as that.

  Edward came home at nine, with a bag of Mexican take-out for dinner and an armload of apologies. I told him what had happened and, shocked, he quizzed me with all the warmth of an emergency room doctor: What had I eaten? Was I getting my period? Had I slept well last night? How did I feel now?

  “Why are you interrogating me?” I yelled. I felt fine, I looked fine, eventually I convinced him that I was fine.

  It wasn’t until a few days later that I happened to watch the television news. Ed was still at work. The sun had just gone down and a gray light was coming through the windows, meeting the blue from the television in the middle of the room. I was sitting on the sofa about to bite into another take-out dinner, pad thai and papaya salad.

  A vaguely familiar face popped up on the television screen. Middle-aged, male, not at all attractive. Where did I know him from?

  “Kareem Singh was buried today,” a woman’s voice said. Cut to a funeral in a crowded slum of the city. “The owner of a newsstand was killed with a box cutter on Monday afternoon in what police think was an attempted robbery.”

  Of course. The asshole from the magazine stand. Horrible. But I wasn’t surprised, the way he’d acted. Probably said the wrong thing to the wrong person. And I had been there on Monday, it must have been right before—

  For a very small moment, for a tiny sliver of time, the thought occurred to me. But as soon as the spark was lit it was put out again. Impossible. The television news moved on, cut-cut, and so did I.

  It wasn’t until months later that I would look back and realize that, most likely, I had killed the magazine dealer myself.

  THAT WEEKEND WE went to the Asian Museum to see a rare display of Meiji Japanese furniture, Edward’s favorite. After we walked through the exhibit we had an elegant lunch in the museum cafe, watercress salad and crustless salmon sandwiches—a little too elegant, I guess, because soon afterwards we were hungry again, and went for a walk in the park in search of hot dogs and pretzels.

  In the park we ran into Alex and Sophia and their six-year-old daughter, Claire. I didn’t like Alex and Sophia. All that could annoy me about Ed was amplified in Alex and Sophia. They worked in finance, in some capacity, and made tons of money. Their apartment was revoltingly spotless and bland with an absurd white carpet they paid a woman to come in and scrub twice a week.

  Luckily they had Claire, so I had some entertainment when we met. While Ed and his friends talked about Alex’s promotion, which was supposed to be interesting, Claire and I walked down to the lake to look at the swans. Swans were beautiful but could be dangerous, I explained to Claire as we walked. As long as they didn’t feel threatened, I told her, they were fine. But if we were to get too close to the birds they would try to bite.

  When we got to the water we stood there for a minute or two, watching four white swans pick each other’s feathers clean with their hard orange beaks. Then Claire turned to me—not exactly to me but in my direction, a little to my left. She did this a few more times, and I looked around to see if anything interesting was going on. But I knew a little girl could find an unusual blade of grass or an out-of-place bottle cap fascinating, so I didn’t give it too much thought.

  Then Claire turned towards me again. “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “Sure about what, honey?” I said.

  She ignored me. “Okay,” Claire said. And then she let go of my hand and ran to the water’s edge and reached her hand out to the nearest swan. The bird bent its long neck towards Claire with a nasty look on its face. It all happened in the blink of an eye. I ran down after Claire, scooped her up, and jumped back. The bird waddled up the riverbank after us.

  “Hey!” I yelled at the swan. “Fuck off!” It stopped and stared with its beady eyes. I ran with Claire in my arms like a sack of potatoes back up the embankment. After a few yards I put her down and we walked back towards her parents.

  “Claire, why did you do that?”

  She squeezed her eyebrows together and pouted. “She told me to!” She cried. “She said I could!”

  “What are you talking about? No one told you to do anything.”

  “Her!” Claire said with frustration. She pointed to my left side, at about the same angle she had been looking earlier. “Your friend.”

  “Who, honey?”

  “The lady who’s always with you,” she said. Claire pouted and looked at the ground.

  When we got back to our little group I told Sophia that Claire had been telling lies.

  THATNIGHTIpicked up Demon Possession Past and Present and took the quiz again. This time I scored a seven.

  0-3: You are probably not possessed. See a doctor or mental health professional for an evaluation. 3-6: You may be haunted, or in the early stages of possession. Do not be alarmed. Seek a spiritual counselor for assistance.

  6-10: You are possessed. Consult with your spiritual counselor immediately. You may be a threat to the safety of yourself and your family. See the RESOURCES page for a qualified professional in your area.

  SISTER MARIA, SPIRITUAL advisor, was the closest professional in my area. What could it hurt? I asked myself. I had always been curious to visit a psychic, just to see how they did it—the tricks they might use, the leading questions—because of course there was nothing to it. Of course I didn’t believe in psychics or spiritualists or demons or devils. At the very best this Maria might be an intelligent person with strong intuition who could give me a little insight into the changes that I saw happening in myself the past few months. Take some time to relax, I imagined she would tell me. Take some vitamin C. At the worst, it would be good for a laugh. I used that phrase a lot that year, good for a laugh. And the word curious. That’s what I would tell Ed if he found out that I wasn’t at the Fitzgerald house that day, like I had told him—it was just for a laugh, I would tell him. I was curious.

  In the northern tip of the city, where Sister Maria�
�s shop or office or clinic was, I didn’t know what to expect—the streets crunched with bottle caps and fast-food wrappers and used hypodermic needles. The windows in the rundown tenements were cracked, some missing and replaced with balsa wood or particleboard. But it wasn’t wholly without charm: an elderly man sat on a folding chair in front of his doorway, hat in hand, and wished me a fine day. On a grocery store wall I noticed a small plaque from the Landmarks Commission; it had been the site of a famous jazz nightclub in the thirties. A slow wailing big band sound flowed through an open window. Accompaneme, the woman sang—come with me. A crowd of children played hopscotch in the middle of a street. Up the street a clique of teenage girls sat on a stoop and pretended to ignore the grandstanding teenage boys on the street around them.

  At number 77 was a shop with a life-sized plaster Madonna in the window. She wore a black wig and a white dress, and at her feet was a bowl of water with coins at the bottom. The glass was clean and the street in front was well swept. A bell jangled when I opened the door. Inside was a neat little shop lined with shelves like a grocery store, except I wasn’t quite sure what was on the shelves. Jars of herbs. Quarts of green and brown liquids labeled with numbers. Come-to-me oil, money-drawing soap, house-blessing spray, hot-foot powder, four thieves vinegar, Florida Water, St. Christopher oil. Candles in the shape of men, women, cats, and dogs. Lucite pyramids filled with lucky charms, and good old-fashioned crystal balls in various sizes. Behind a glass case of medallions and charms stood a teenage boy, a flaming queer in tight designer jeans with a silver ring through his bottom lip. He smiled and asked if he could help me.

  “I’m here for, uh, to see Sister Maria.”

  He went to the back of the shop, opened a door, and called out in a language I had never heard before—Portuguese, maybe—but somehow I knew what it meant.

  “A white woman’s here to see you,” he called. “I’ve never seen her before.”

  “Send her in right away,” the woman called back. “Then lock up and go to lunch.”

  THE BACK room was pretty much what I expected a low-rent reading room to look like; walls draped in deep red velveteen, a folding card table with more velveteen draped over it, anchored in place with a crystal ball, a cup for reading tea leaves, a pen and paper, and a deck of tarot cards. At the table sat a woman five or ten years older than me, with nutmeg skin and pretty features hidden behind cheap makeup. She wore blue jeans and a tight denim jacket. She gestured for me to sit in a folding chair across the table from hers. I sat down.

  I was curious. It would be good for a laugh.

  “What’s you name?” she asked. I told her. She wrote it down on the paper and did a quick calculation.

  “You number is seven,” she said. She took the deck of tarot cards and laid seven of them out on the table. Death, The Tower, Queen of Pentacles, The Moon, Five of Swords, Eight of Swords, The Lovers. I had no idea what any of them meant. Maria looked at the cards for a few minutes, then back up to me with her eyebrows pushed together, then down at the cards again.

  “Someone’s watching you,” she finally said. “She’s right next to you. Beautiful, but black. Evil. Have you tried to get rid of her?”

  This wasn’t so good for a laugh. This was less funny by the moment. “Who is it?” I asked.

  “It’s not a who,” Maria answered. “It’s a what. A demon. I see her; she has long black hair and pointy teeth.”

  “Are you sure she’s a demon?”

  Maria nodded. “No one else has a black aura like that. So you haven’t tried to get rid of it?”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t know.”

  “You really didn’t know what that was?” Maria asked. Her voice was suspicious. I had a sick nervous feeling as she looked at me; it reminded me of being in school without having done my homework. I felt like I had been caught at something naughty.

  “No,” I told her. “How was I supposed to know?”

  Maria looked at me crook-eyed again, like she wasn’t quite buying my excuse. “You have to do exactly as I say, it’s very important. I’m going to give you a wash. Number Five. For three nights in a row you pour it over yourself while you pray. Pray to God to help you. Then you stop for three days, then you use it again for three days. Use it until the bottle’s all gone. It won’t make her disappear but it will cleanse your spirit so you can fight her better. But the most important thing is that you never, ever give in. You give even an inch, she’ll take a hundred miles.”

  “What if it doesn’t work?” I asked.

  “It always works.”

  “But what if it doesn’t?”

  “She’ll possess you. She’s probably already started. Not all at once. You won’t lose yourself all at once. But a little bit at a time. That’s why you have to do exactly as I say.”

  “I understand,” I promised.

  Maria stood up and I was clearly dismissed. Out in the store I settled the bill with the young man who had come back and was eyeing me curiously. He handed me a large jug of thin, greenish gray liquid in which floated a few leaves and twigs and some small berries that looked like peppercorns. On a white label with black letters was printed: “NUMBER #5: DEMON FIGHTING.”

  SISTER MARIA had held me spellbound, but back at home it was easy for the whole matter to be good for a laugh again. Except I wasn’t laughing, and I didn’t tell anyone else about it, either. But I thought I might as well use the wash. I mean, it couldn’t hurt. It’s not like it would do anything, of course, but it wouldn’t hurt. I rubbed off the neatly typed label with vegetable oil, so if Ed noticed the bottle I could tell him it was bubble bath. I stood in the bathtub, naked, and asked God to help me as I poured the liquid over my head. It smelled like licorice, and it stung slightly where it dripped into my eyes. I kept my mouth closed so I wouldn’t swallow anything—I had forgotten to ask about that. I spread out my arms and let the wash trickle down my body, leaving a trail of goose bumps where it flowed.

  Nothing happened. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to rinse afterwards or just let it dry on my skin, but it smelled strong and so I took a quick warm shower, and then dried off and put on pajamas and spent the rest of the night paying bills and watching television.

  THE GERMAN SHEPHERD was waiting at the train station again a few days later, looking right through me. The idiot didn’t even know who I was anymore.

  “Go,” I snapped. “Get out of here.”

  The dog looked at me and I looked back. I really hated him now, this stupid beast, staring at me with those big chocolate accusatory eyes.

  “Go,” I yelled again. I pointed toward the wasteland of our neighborhood, in the opposite direction from our house. Still holding my eyes, he pulled his shoulders down and his tail up, as if he were stretching his back. Then he leapt up to my outstretched hand and bit me.

  I screamed, more from shock than pain. The skin on my hand was barely punctured, and it felt more like a book had been dropped on my hand than what I had imagined a dog bite would feel like. Then he lay down with his head between his paws and whimpered. Now, finally, the old adage had become true. He was more scared of me than I was of him.

  “Fuck off!” I screamed. The idiot got up and ran away. I went home, washed my hand, wrapped it in a clean white dish towel, and called Ed, hoping he would drive me to the emergency room. He wasn’t in, so I called a taxi to take me instead. By the time I got to the hospital it hurt at least as much as I had imagined a dog bite would. I tried Ed again. Still out. For three hours I sat in the waiting room and tried to guess what the other people waiting had wrong with them. Some were obvious—hacking coughs, swollen appendages—but most I had to guess. Finally I was ushered into a brightly lit little examination cubicle, where a doctor washed the wound and then asked if I knew the dog who had bit me.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because if you don’t, you need to get two shots now, another in three days, another in seven, another in fourteen, and another in twenty-eight. Whenever there’s a bi
te by an unknown dog, there’s a chance of rabies.”

  “What if I’m really, really sure this dog doesn’t have rabies?” I asked.

  “If you don’t know the dog,” he said with irritation, “you’re not really, really sure. The only way to avoid the shots is to get a brain sample from the dog. Now this is going to hurt.”

  The doctor gave me a shot with a thick needle in my right hand, near the bite, and then another shot in the upper arm. The shots hurt worse than the bite had.

  It was obvious that a brain sample couldn’t come from a living dog. Good, I thought at first, serves the stupid fucker right. Then I thought of that dumb old dog, the fellow who used to be my pal, my best buddy, how he never gave up trying to seduce me, even after I made it clear I was married. I couldn’t. So on the third, seventh, fourteenth, and twenty-eighth day after the bite I went to the doctor’s office for more painful shots, and I never saw the dog again.

  ED WAS in a state when I got home at eleven that night, furious that I had let him worry. When I explained where I had been and showed him the ugly red puncture marks on my hand he relented and showed appropriate sympathy.

  “Really, though,” he said, after kissing my hand, “you should have called.”

  We were sitting on the sofa, curled up close. He gently held my bitten hand. For a few minutes we had been in love again. Friends again. And now this. He wants an apology, I thought. “I tried,” I told him. “Twice.”

  “Still, hon, I was worried.”

  Where was he? I thought. “I tried,” I said. “Where were you, anyway?”

  Ed made a face. “What do you mean, where was I? Working, you know that.”

  “Just asking. You ought to get one of those cellular phones. In case of an emergency. You’re out of the office so much these days.”