Demonology

by Rick Moody

  In one photograph, my sister is wearing a Superman outfit. This, from a prior Halloween. I think it was a Supermom outfit, actually, because she always liked these bad jokes, degraded jokes, things other people would find ridiculous. (She’d take a joke and repeat it until it was leaden, until it was funny only in its awfulness.) Jokes with the fillip of sentimentality. Anyway, in this picture her blond hair —brightened a couple of shades with the current technologies —cascades around her shoulders, disordered and impulsive. Supermom. And her expression is skeptical, as if she assumes the mantle of Supermom —raising the kids, accepting wage-slavery, growing old and contented —and thinks it’s dopey at the same time.

  Never any good without coffee. Never any good in the morning. Never any good until the second cup. Never any good without freshly ground Joe, because of my dad’s insistence, despite advantages of class and style, on instant coffee. No way. Not for my sister. At my dad’s house, where she stayed in summer, she used to grumble derisively, while staring out the kitchen windows, out the expanse of windows that gave onto the meadow there, Instant coffee! There would be horses in the meadow and the ocean just over the trees, the sound of the surf and instant coffee! Thus the morning after Halloween, with my nephew the shark (who took this opportunity to remind her, in fact, that last year he saved his Halloween candy all the way till Easter, Mommy) and my niece, the Little Mermaid, orbiting around her like a fine dream. My sister was making this coffee with the automatic grinder and the automatic drip device, and the dishes were piled in the sink behind her, and the wall calendar was staring her in the face, with its hundred urgent appointments, e.g., jury duty(the following Monday) and i? & A to pediatrician; the kids whirled around the kitchen, demanding to know who got the last of the Lucky Charms, who had to settle for the Kix. My sister’s eyes barely open.

  Now this portrait of her cat, Pointdexter, twelve years old —he slept on my face when I stayed at her place in 1984 —Pointdexter with the brain tumor, Pointdexter with the phenobarbital habit. That morning —All Saints’ Day —he stood entirely motionless before his empty dish. His need was clear. His dignity was immense. Well, except for the seizures. Pointdexter had these seizures. He was possessed. He was a demon. He would bounce off the walls, he would get up a head of steam, mouth frothing, and run straight at the wall, smack into it, shake off the ghosts, and start again. His screeches were unearthly. Phenobarbital was prescribed. My sister medicated him preemptively before any other chore, before diplomatic initiatives on matters of cereal allocation. Hold on you guys, I’ll be with you in a second. Drugging the cat, slipping him the Mickey Finn in the Science Diet, feeding the kids, then getting out the door, pecking her boyfriend on the cheek (he was stumbling sleepily down the stairs).

  She printed snapshots. At this photo lab. She’d sold cameras (mnemonic devices) for years, and then she’d been kicked upstairs to the lab. Once she sold a camera to Pete Townshend, the musician. She told him —in her way both casual and rebellious —that she didn’t really like The Who. Later, from her job at the lab, she used to bring home other peoples pictures, e.g., an envelope of photographs of the Pope. Had she been out to Giants Stadium to use her tele-photo lens to photograph John Paul II? No, she’d just printed up an extra batch of, say, Agnes Venditi’s or Joey Mueller’s photos. Caveat emptor. Who knew what else she’d swiped? Those Jerry Garcia pix from the show right before he died? Garcia’s eyes squeezed tightly shut, as he sang in that heartbroken, exhausted voice of his? Or: somebody’s trip to the Caribbean or to the Liberty Bell in Philly? Or: her neighbor’s private documentations of love? Who knew? She’d get on the phone at work and gab, call up her friends, call up my family, printing pictures while gabbing, sheet after sheet of negatives, of memories. Oh, and circa Halloween, she was working in the lab with some new, exotic chemicals. She had a wicked headache.

  * * *

  My sister didn’t pay much attention to the church calendar. Too busy. Too busy to concentrate on theologies, too busy to go to the doctor, too busy to deal with her finances, her credit-card debt, etc. Too busy. (And maybe afraid, too.) She was unclear on this day set aside for Gods awesome tabernacle, unclear on the feast for the departed faithful, didn’t know about the church of the Middle Ages, didn’t know about the particulars of the Druidic ritual of Halloween —it was a Hallmark thing, a marketing event —or how All Saints’ Day emerged as an alternative to Halloween. She was not much preoccupied with nor attendant to articulations of loss, nor interested in how this feast in the church calendar was hewn into two separate holy days, one for the saints, that great cloud of witnesses, one for the dearly departed, the regular old believers. She didn’t know of any attachments that bound together these constituencies, didn’t know, e.g., that God would wipe away all tears from our eyes and there would be no more death, according to the evening’s reading from the book of Revelation. All this academic stuff was lost on her, though she sang in the church choir, and though on All Saints’ Day, a guy from the church choir happened to come into the camera store, just to say hi, a sort of an angel (let’s say), and she said, Hey Bob, you know, I never asked you what you do.

  To which Bob replied, I’m a designer.

  My sister: What do you design?

  Bob: Steel wool.

  She believed him.

  She was really small. She barely held down her clothes. Five feet tall. Tiny hands and feet. Here’s a photo from my brothers wedding (two weeks before Halloween); we were dancing on the dance floor, she and I. She liked to pogo sometimes. It was the dance we preferred when dancing together. We created mayhem on the dance floor. Scared people off. We were demons for dance, for noise and excitement. So at my brother’s wedding reception I hoisted her up onto my shoulder, and she was so light, just as I remembered from years before, twenty years of dances, still tiny, and I wanted to crowd-surf her across the reception, pass her across upraised hands, I wanted to impose her on older couples, gentlemen in their cummerbunds, old guys with tennis elbow or arthritis, with red faces and gin blossoms; they would smile, passing my sister hither, to the microphone, where the wedding band was playing, where she would suddenly burst into song, into some sort of reconcil-iatory song, backed by the wedding band, and there would be stills of this moment, flashbulbs popping, a spotlight on her face, a tiny bit of reverb on her microphone, she would smile and concentrate and sing. Unfortunately, the situation around us, on the dance floor, was more complicated than this. Her boyfriend was about to have back surgery. He wasn’t going to do any heavy lifting. And my nephew was too little to hold her up. And my brother was preoccupied with his duties as groom. So instead I twirled her once and put her down. We were laughing, out of breath.

  On All Saints’ Day she had lunch with Bob the angelic designer of steel wool (maybe he had a crush on her) or with the younger guys from the lab (because she was a middle-aged free spirit), and then she printed more photos of Columbus Day parades across Jersey, or photos of other peoples kids dressed as Pocahontas or as the Lion King, and then at 5:30 she started home, a commute of forty-five minutes, Morristown to Hackettstown, on two-laners. She knew every turn. Here’s the local news photo that never was: my sister slumped over the wheel of her Plymouth Saturn after having run smack into a local deer. All along those roads the deer were upended, disemboweled, set upon by crows and hawks, and my sister on the way back from work, or on the way home from a bar, must have grazed an entire herd of them at one time or another, missed them narrowly, frozen in the headlights of her car, on the shoulders of the meandering back roads, pulverized.

  Her boy lives on air. Disdains food. My niece, meanwhile, will eat only candy. By dinnertime, they had probably made a dent in the orange plastic bucket with the Three Musketeers, the Cadbury’s, Hot Tamales, Kit Kats, Jujyfruits, Baby Ruths, Bubble Yum —at least my niece had. They had insisted on bringing a sampling of this booty to school and from there to their afterschool play group. Neither of them wanted to eat anything; they complained about the whole idea
of supper, and thus my sister offered, instead, to take them to the McDonaldLand play area on the main drag in Hackettstown, where she would buy them a Happy Meal, or equivalent, a hamburger topped with American processed cheese food, and, as an afterthought, she would insist on their each trying a little bit of a salad from the brand-new McDonald’s salad bar. She had to make a deal to get the kids to accept the salad. She suggested six mouthfuls of lettuce each and drew a hard line there, but then she allowed herself to be talked down to two mouthfuls each. They ate indoors at first, the three of them, and then went out to the playground, where there were slides and jungle gyms in the reds and yellows of Ray Kroc’s empire. My sister made the usual conversation, How did the other kids make out on Halloween? What happened at school? and she thought of her boyfriend, fresh from spinal surgery, who had limped downstairs in the morning to give her a kiss, and then she thought about bills, bills, bills, as she caught my niece at the foot of a slide. It was time to go sing. Home by nine.

  My sister as she played the guitar in the late sixties with her hair in braids; she played it before anyone else in my family, wandering around the chords, “House of the Rising Sun”or “Blackbird,”on classical guitar, sticking to the open chords of guitar tablature. It never occurred to me to wonder about which instruments were used on those AM songs of the period (the Beatles with their sitars and cornets, Brian Wilson with his theremin), not until my sister started to play the guitar. (All of us sang —we used to sing and dance in the living room when my parents were married, especially to Abbey Road and Bridge Over Troubled Water.) And when she got divorced she started hanging around this bar where they had live music, this Jersey bar, and then she started hanging around at a local record label, an indy operation, and then she started managing a band(on top of everything else), and then she started to sing again. She joined the choir at St. James Church of Hackettstown and she started to sing, and after singing she started to pray —prayer and song being, I guess, styles of the same beseech-ment.

  I don’t know what songs they rehearsed at choir rehearsal, but Bob was there, as were others, Donna, Frank, Eileen, and Tim (I’m making the names up), and I know that the choir was warm and friendly, though perhaps a little bit out of tune. It was one of those Charles Ives small-town choruses that slip in and out of pitch, that misses exits and entrances. But they had a good time rehearsing, with the kids monkeying around in the pews, the kids climbing sacrilegiously over that furniture, dashing up the aisle to the altar and back, as somebody kept half an eye on them (five of the whelps in all) and after the last notes ricocheted around the choir loft, my sister offered her summation of the proceedings, Totally cool! Totally cool!, and now the intolerable part of this story begins —with joy and excitement and a church interior. My sister and her kids drove from St. James to her house, her condo, this picturesque drive home, Hackettstown as if lifted from picture postcards of autumn, the park with its streams and ponds and lighted walkways, leaves in the streetlamps, in the headlights, leaves three or four days past their peak, the sound of leaves in the breeze, the construction crane by her place (they were digging up the road), the crane swaying above a fork in the road, a left turn after the fast-food depots, and then into her parking spot in front of the condo. The porch by the front door with the Halloween pumpkins: a cats face complete with whiskers, a clown, a jack-o’-lantern. My sister closed the front door of her house behind her. Bolted it. Her daughter reminded her to light the pumpkins. Just inside the front door, Pointdexter, on the top step, waiting.

  Her keys on the kitchen table. Her coat in the closet. She sent the kids upstairs to get into their pajamas. She called up to her boyfriend, who was in bed reading a textbook, What are you doing in bed, you total slug! and then, after checking the messages on the answering machine, looking at the mail, she trudged up to my niece’s room to kiss her good night. Endearments passed between them. My sister loved her kids, above all, and in spite of all the work and the hardships, in spite of my nieces reputation as a firecracker, in spite of my nephews sometimes diabolical smarts. She loved them. There were endearments, therefore, lengthy and repetitive, as there would have been with my nephew, too. And my sister kissed her daughter multiply, because my niece is a little impish redhead, and its hard not to kiss her. Look, it’s late, so I cant read to you tonight, okay? My niece protested temporarily, and then my sister arranged the stuffed animals around her daughter (for the sake of arranging), and plumped a feather pillow, and switched off the bedside lamp on the bedside table, and she made sure the night-light underneath the table (a plug-in shaped like a ghost) was illumined, and then on the way out the door she stopped for a second. And looked back. The tableau of domesticity was what she last contemplated. Or maybe she was composing endearments for my nephew. Or maybe she wasn’t looking back at my niece at all. Maybe she was lost in this next tempest.

  Out of nowhere. All of a sudden. All at once. In an instant. Without warning. In no time. Helter-skelter. In the twinkling of an eye. Figurative language isn’t up to the task. My sister’s legs gave out, and she fell over toward my niece’s desk, by the door, dislodging a pile of toys and dolls (a Barbie in evening wear, a posable Tinkerbell doll), colliding with the desk, sweeping its contents off with her, toppling onto the floor, falling heavily, her head by the door. My niece, startled, rose up from under covers.

  More photos: my sister, my brother and I, back in our single digits, dressed in matching, or nearly matching outfits (there was a naval flavor to our look), playing with my aunt’s basset hound —my sister grinning mischievously; or: my sister, my father, my brother and I, in my dads Karmann-Ghia, just before she totaled it on the straightaway on Fishers Island (she skidded, she said, on antifreeze or something slippery); or: my sister, with her newborn daughter in her lap, sitting on the floor of her living room —mother and daughter with the same bemused impatience.

  My sister started to seize.

  The report of her fall was, of course, loud enough to stir her boyfriend from the next room. He was out of bed fast. (Despite physical pain associated with his recent surgery.) I imagine there was a second in which other possibilities occurred to him —hoax, argument, accident, anything —but quickly the worst of these seemed most likely. You know these things somewhere. You know immediately the content of all middle-of-the-night telephone calls. He was out of bed. And my niece called out to her brother, to my nephew, next door. She called my nephews name, plaintively, like it was a question.

  * * *

  My sister’s hands balled up. Her heels drumming on the carpeting. Her muscles all like nautical lines, pulling tight against cleats. Her jaw clenched. Her heart rattling desperately. Fibrillating. If it was a conventional seizure, she was unconscious for this part —maybe even unconscious throughout —because of reduced blood flow to the brain, because of the fibrillation, because of her heart condition; which is to say that my sister’s mitral valve prolapse—technical feature of her broken heart—was here engendering an arrhythmia, and now, if not already, she began to hemorrhage internally. Her son stood in the doorway, in his pajamas, shifting from one foot to the other (there was a draft in the hall). Her daughter knelt at the foot of the bed, staring, and my sister’s boyfriend watched, as my poor sister shook, and he held her head, and then changed his mind and bolted for the phone.

  After the seizure, she went slack. (Merediths heart stopped. And her breathing. She was still.) For a second, she was alone in the room, with her children, silent. After he dialed 911, Jimmy appeared again, to try to restart her breathing. Here’s how: he pressed his lips against hers. He didn’t think to say, Come on, breathe, dammit, or to make similar imprecations, although he did manage to shout at the kids, Get the hell out of here, please! Go downstairs!(It was advice they followed only for a minute.) At last, my sister took a breath. Took a deep breath, a sigh, and there were two more of these. Deep resigned sighs. Five or ten seconds between each. For a few moments more, instants, she looked at Jimmy, as he pounded on her ches
t with his fists, thoughtless about anything but results, stopping occasion ally to press his ear between her breasts. Her eyes were sad and frightened, even in the company of the people she most loved. So it seemed. More likely she was unconscious. The kids sat cross-legged on the floor in the hall, by the top of the stairs, watching. Lots of stuff was left to be accomplished in these last seconds, even if it wasn’t anything unusual, people and relationships and small kindnesses, the best way to fry pumpkin seeds, what to pack for Thanksgiving, whether to make turnips or not, snapshots to be culled and arranged, photos to be taken —these possibilities spun out of my sister’s grasp, torrential futures, my beloved sister, solitary with pictures taken and untaken, gone.

  EMS technicians arrived and carried her body down to the living room, where they tried to start her pulse with expensive engines and devices. Her body jumped while they shocked her —she was a revenant in some corridor of simultaneities —but her heart wouldn’t start. Then they put her body on the stretcher. To carry her away. Now the moment arrives when they bear her out the front door of her house and she leaves it to us, leaves to us the house and her things and her friends and her memories and the involuntary assemblage of these into language. Grief. The sound of the ambulance. The road is mostly clear on the way to the hospital; my sister’s route is clear.

  I should fictionalize it more, I should conceal myself. I should consider the responsibilities of characterization, I should conflate her two children into one, or reverse their genders, or otherwise alter them, I should make her boyfriend a husband, I should explicate all the tributaries of my extended family (its remarriages, its internecine politics), I should novelize the whole thing, I should make it multi-generational, I should work in my forefathers (stonemasons and newspapermen), I should let artifice create an elegant surface, I should make the events orderly, I should wait and write about it later, I should wait until I’m not angry, I shouldn’t clutter a narrative with fragments, with mere recollections of good times, or with regrets, I should make Meredith’s death shapely and persuasive, not blunt and disjunctive, I shouldn’t have to think the unthinkable, I shouldn’t have to suffer, I should address her here directly (these are the ways I miss you), I should write only of affection, I should make our travels in this earthly landscape safe and secure, I should have a better ending, I shouldn’t say her life was short and often sad, I shouldn’t say she had her demons, as I do too.