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demi-demons weren’t on the menu. So I was either a possession victim unique in the annals of the disorder, or I was crazy—and frankly, my credentials for crazy were impeccable.
I had managed to work up the courage once to call his office. He wasn’t accepting patients—at least not walk-ins like me. I’d considered flying to California and pitching my case personally, but then I’d read on his website that he’d be attending this year’s ICOP. I’d convinced myself that this was my best chance to get to him. I put on the blue shirt and hung up the white one, and changed from jeans to beige, wrinkle-free khakis. I looked in the mirror. My hair was sticking up in the back, but otherwise I looked perfectly normal. Just another sane, reasonable person who had every right to walk up to a neurologist and introduce himself.
The thing in my head shifted like a toolbox sliding around the bed of a truck.
In the lobby I acknowledged the security guard with a nod and tired smile and walked through the frame of the metal detector. Detector and detective were silent. I followed the registration signs down an escalator to a long windowless room. A line of registration booths divided up the alphabet.
ICOP registration procedures were designed to keep out curiosity seekers, religious nuts, and especially the attendees of DemoniCon, ICOP’s shadow conference. The $185-a-day fee immediately scared off the merely curious and the average fanboy. But even if you had the cash, only members and guests of ICOP sponsoring organizations (APA, AMA, WHO, and a dozen other acronyms) were allowed to register. Fortunately, a DemoniCon fan site had offered an alternate entrance mechanism. 6 0
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Go to www.apa.org and apply for a $45-a-year student member-
ship—don’t worry, you’re not going to pay for it. Choose Check or Money Order not credit card. Enter a disposable e-mail address (you just need it for a couple minutes) and a fictitious street address. After the site tells you that your membership is inactive pending payment, go to the site’s Forgot My Password page and enter your temp e-mail address. That’s right, the site automatically generated an account for you when you applied. Thanks, morons! The site will e-mail you the password (in plain text of course—these people haven’t heard of encryption). Now log in to the Members Only section and go to Edit My Account. See that 15-digit membership ID? Copy that bad boy to the clipboard. Next, go to the ICOP website. In the conference registration form, choose APA from the organization dropdown list, and on the next screen, paste in that membership ID (evidently this is a web service to APA’s server, because it actually checks if the ID’s in their database—fake IDs don’t work). Last, pay $15 via credit card (sorry folks, there’s no “check or money order” option here). Voila. Your only problem: now that they have your credit card, if they ever bother to check that you’re not a student, they’ve got you for FRAUD. Enjoy the conference!
I stepped up to the “M-N-O-P” booth, and presented my driver’s license and web receipt. The woman spent a long minute looking over the receipt and studying a laptop in front of her. I realized I’d made a mistake. Anyone from ICOP could have run across the site. How many DemoniConners had tried this scam? How could they not notice the unusual number of APA student registrations?
The woman handed me a conference badge. “Keep this with you at all times,” she said. Then she gave me a program book and complimentary nylon tote bag. I walked a short distance away and sat heavily on a couch. I looked at the program book first. Most of the speeches and panels were being held in the dozens of small rooms under the Hyatt, but the bigger
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events—the keynote address, the Vatican panel, the speech by O. J.’s lawyer, Robert Shapiro—were hosted in the ballrooms. The poster sessions were in one of the main ballrooms. Okay then. Ready for ambush?
I eventually found the right ballroom. People drifted in and out of the big double doors, watched by a security guard glancing at badges. I took a cleansing breath and went inside. I found myself in the middle of a seventh-grade science fair. The room was filled with double rows of tables, their surfaces walled off into individual display booths by cloth-covered boards. The mysterious poster sessions, I realized, though there were few actual posters: almost all the visual aids—graphs, data tables, diagrams—
were printed in off-tint ink-jet colors on 81⁄2 x 11 sheets and stapled into the cloth. Titles were usually in huge type, printed a few letters at a time across several pages.
The tables were numbered. I walked down the aisles, looking for the one assigned to Dr. Ram in the conference guide. The topics I passed were all over the map: reports of UFO abductions correlated with incidents of possession; demographics of possession victims by country; a demon cosmology based on aspects of Tarot; a pictorial history of Kamikaze airport shrines; thematic similarities in victim abuse stories; postpossession Kirlian aura distortions; genetic predisposition for possession in twins; recurrence of folkloric devices in the New England Journal of Medicine articles; Indian asuras contrasted with American demons; a theory of telepathy through quantum entanglement maintained in Penrose microtubules; Joan of Arc as an early example of possession disorder; an airborne vector for possession explained by wind patterns over Superfund sites . . . My own demon’s name caught my eye, in a paper called “Expanding the Post-War Cohort: A Bayesian Analysis of Incident Reports, 1944–1950.” The bearded guy in front of the table was having an energetic discussion with another bearded guy, so I took time to skim the abstract. I couldn’t figure out what the point of the article was. Everybody knew that the big three—the Kamikaze, the Captain, and the 6 2
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Truth—had all appeared around the same time. The paper was arguing that several more ought to be included: Smokestack Johnny, the Painter, the Little Angel, some demon named the Boy Marvel, and my own Hellion. Okay, knock yourself out. What did it matter? I imagined bearded guys all over academia working themselves into a lather over this, precisely because the stakes were so low. A few minutes later I’d found the row that had to contain Dr. Ram’s table. Three numbers down from it I slowed my pace, took another deep breath, and slowly exhaled.
No one was there.
I checked the number: 32. Definitely his table. I was immediately ashamed at how relieved I felt that he was gone. The table wasn’t empty, though. A thin stack of articles was set on the white cloth: “Voxel-Based Morphometry of Gray Matter Abnormalities in Post-Possession Patients.” Dr. Ram’s name was on it, followed by three others. I’d already read it online, and could only follow every third sentence.
I couldn’t see the doctor anywhere in the aisles, and I was pretty sure I’d recognize him from his pictures. My relief turned to annoyance. Where the hell was he?
“We are,” the woman at the next table said. She was leaning against the edge of the table, a sheaf of pages in her hands. I glanced around, but I was the only person there. She smiled at me expectantly. She was about my age, short brown hair, triplepierced right ear, but dressed semiformally in long dark skirt and chocolate boots.
“Excuse me?” I said.
She nodded at my badge. “We are . . .”
I looked down at my badge. “Del Pierce?” I said. She laughed. “Penn State. I did my undergrad there.”
“Oh, sure, yeah.” My fake alma mater. But I had no idea what the
“we are” thing was about.
Her booth featured a series of seven photographs—snapshots enlarged to blurriness, printed on slick ink-jet sheets—each of a young
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girl in a white nightgown. Several seemed to have been taken in hospital rooms. The research paper’s title, in 78-point Futura, was “Cases for Nonlocal Intelligence,” followed by the smaller subtitle, “Information Transfer and Persistence among ‘Little Angel’ Possessions.”
“You’re looking for Dr. Ram,” she said. “Are you into the neuropsych end of things?”
�
�Yeah, kind of. And you’re working on the Little Angel?”
Otherwise known as the Angel of Mercy and the Girl in White. The demon possessed pretty, prepubescent girls, dressed up in lacy nightgowns, and went around visiting people on their deathbeds: cancer patients, motorcycle accident victims, burn unit residents. The Angel’s kiss killed them. Urban myth had it that her touch relieved these unfortunates of pain and gave them an overwhelming sense of calm. The deceased were silent on the matter.
“I know,” she said. “Been done to death.”
“No, no, I wouldn’t say that.” (Why not?) I picked up a copy from her own stack of articles. It was stapled, maybe twenty pages long. I looked at the abstract, something about how some girls possessed by the Angel knew things that only other Angels—Angels that had appeared in other states, in other times—would know.
“So you haven’t seen him, have you?” I said. “Dr. Ram?”
She shook her head. “Those papers were on the table when I got here to set up. But if I see someone I can tell them you stopped by.”
“No, don’t do that,” I said quickly. “I’ll catch him later.” I lifted her article and said, “Thanks for this. It looks interesting.”
I turned and walked away, making a show of reading the rest of the abstract with great interest. The research team had interviewed eyewitnesses to the visitations going back to the forties, concentrating on what the Angel had said that wasn’t reported in the media. Then they’d interviewed families of patients who had died during the visitations. They found out a couple things: One, Angels knew things about the patients that no stranger would reasonably know; and two, Angels knew details from previous visits that had never been broadcast or published. 6 4
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I reached the end of the row, glanced back. She wasn’t looking at me, but there was no one between us. I tucked the paper into my tote bag. There was a garbage can ten feet away, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings by throwing it out in front of her. And the paper was garbage. So these “nonlocal intelligences”
knew things they shouldn’t know, and seemed to be the same “person”
possession after possession. In any decent junior high science fair, the appropriate response to those claims would be, Duh. And that pseudo-scientific phrase: Nonlocal intelligence. Every booth lobbied for some new term, each more ungainly than the last: meme, archetype, viral persona, possession disorder variant (PDV), intermittent shared consciousness (ISC), socially constructed alternate identity (SCAID) . . .
None of the names would catch on. Demon fit. Possession fit. A seventh grader could diagram that sentence: Demons possess you. Subject, verb, object.
I circled through the big room, shuffling sideways around clumps of people having minireunions—this must be quite the social occasion for academics who only saw each other at conferences. I couldn’t look at the poster titles anymore; I was just trying to get back to the only open door, where I’d come in. The bag dug into my shoulder. My face felt hot.
Ten feet from the door the way was blocked by people watching a slideshow projected onto the white wall. I shouldered my way through the crowd, and looked up as the picture changed. It was a picture of the farm the Painter had created in the airport—the same white farmhouse, the red silo and red-brown barn, golden fields bounded by lines of trees—but rendered in paint on a brick wall in some city, and on a much larger scale: judging by the garage door at the edge of the slide, the painting was at least fifty feet long and maybe twenty feet high. Then the picture changed, to a chalk drawing of a boy in swim trunks, arms around his knees, perched on a rounded boulder in a stream. A towel was draped over his back like a cape.
The thing in my head jerked and shuddered, and I clamped down on a wave of nausea. I pushed out of the crowd, not caring that people
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were staring at me. I reached the hallway and went down the stairs, heading for the exit and cold lake wind.
Some academic would write a paper about the recurring subjects of the Painter. There were probably factions arguing about the meaning of the farm images, and young turks proposing radical interpretations of the boy on the rock. Trying desperately to make it all mean something.
The truth was scarier: nobody in there knew what the fuck was going on. Or else everybody was right and it was all true: aliens and archetypes and asuras, psychosis and psionics, hellfire and hallucinations. Pandemonium.
“Have you heard the poem about the dog who had a bone in his mouth?” the bag lady said. She had no shopping cart or bags, but she clutched an oversize vinyl purse the size of an artist’s portfolio, which I decided met the minimum qualifications for the position. She wasn’t talking to me, and I kept my head down. The concrete bench was cold against my butt and thighs, but I still wasn’t ready to go back inside.
The woman spoke at a notch above normal volume, her words delivered with the overenunciated deliberateness of the borderline autistics I’d met in the hospital. She was impossible to tune out. She wore a red hooded sweatshirt, a blue-striped winter jacket over that, and a long checked skirt over gray sweatpants. The tops of her rubber boots were trimmed with leopard-print fur.
She was addressing a bearded old man who sat at the next bench. He could have been any age between seventy and ninety. He sat like a sculpture, hands folded in his lap, and listened patiently. Seated next to him was a strikingly handsome white woman I took to be his daughter, or maybe granddaughter. She studied a program booklet, though she didn’t look like an academic: long black hair that reminded me of Amra’s before she cut it, tanned legs crossed under a tight skirt.
“It’s a very good poem,” the bag lady said. The old man said nothing. The black-haired woman glanced up, then exchanged a look with 6 6
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the only other person outside with us, a man about a dozen feet away. He was a florid, fiftyish man in jeans and a blazer, with boyishly long sandy hair. One hand was jammed in his jeans pocket; the other held both a Mountain Dew can and a lit cigarette. He’d been pacing and smoking, somehow managing to drink and smoke with the same hand. He took a drag from his cigarette, looked at the bag lady, and shrugged.
“The dog came to a puddle and saw his reflection,” the bag lady said. “He looked in the reflection and what he thought he saw was a dog with a bone in his mouth, but he didn’t recognize that the dog was himself, he thought it was another dog with a bigger bone in his mouth. So he dropped his bone to get the other dog’s bone, and lost his bone in the water. Now there were two dogs without bones. The moral of the story is that the grass is always greener, you see?”
“This is the way of the world,” the old man said. His voice was strangely flattened, like a satellite phone call digitally processed for maximum compression. “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.”
“I’ve read all of Philip K. Dick’s books,” she said. As if this were the natural follow-up to a dog poem. “Flow My Tears, Ubik, The Owl in Daylight. I’ve read VALIS twenty-two times. I carry the book with me at all times. Look.”
I glanced up. She’d pulled a paperback from her purse. “Would you sign it for me?”
She opened the cover and thrust it at him, inches from his face. He didn’t flinch or pull back. He slowly took a pen from the inside of his jacket, supported the spine of the book, and made a series of curving strokes, finishing with an X through the middle. I couldn’t see what he’d drawn, but I doubted it was an ordinary signature.
“Thank you very much,” the woman said, and closed the book without looking at it. “I hope you find Felix. I have to go now.” She turned abruptly and nearly walked into the grille of a cab pulling into the drive. The cab jerked to a stop. The woman paused for a long moment, staring at the driver, and then she moved around the hood, heading for the Hyatt.
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I glanced at the old man, and he caught me looking. His
eyes were set back into his skull, but they were glittering and sharp. One eye closed, reopened. A wink.
I thought of the Painter back at O’Hare. That same wink.
“A fan,” he said. His lips gravitated into a slight smile, and he seemed to shrug without moving his shoulders. “I have certain responsibilities.”
The cab’s rear door opened, and a dark-skinned man stepped out, hefting an oversize laptop bag. I recognized him from his book jacket photo, especially that expanse of wavy, oil-black hair, just shy of Elvis length.
Dr. Ram strode in my direction, nodding vigorously at something being said by the person who had stepped out of the cab after him. His companion was a priest: a bald head above a clerical collar and a long, black, loose-sleeved cassock.
No, not a priest—or at least not a Roman Catholic one. It was a woman. Her head had been shaved down to stubble, but that only revealed a fine, elfin bone structure: high cheekbones, a pointed chin. She walked with her head bent close to the doctor, matching his intensity. Although Dr. Ram was nodding, they seemed to be having an argument.
I stood up. I hadn’t expected to see him just now, but this was the time to talk to him, before he went to his presentation, before he was surrounded by students and colleagues.
The bald woman glanced at me, but then she noticed the old man on the bench, and stopped. “Hello, Valis,” she said evenly. She sounded Australian, or maybe Irish. Her ears were beautiful.
“Good afternoon, Mother Mariette,” Valis said. Dr. Ram had already pushed through the revolving door. She followed after him. I hadn’t even moved. Valis’s friend (son? son-in-law?), still carrying the Mountain Dew and cigarette, stalked over. “What the hell’s O’Connell doing here?”
he said, amused. “I thought she retired, became a hermit or something.”
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