Pandemonium

by Daryl Gregory

  “She’s an exorcist, Tom,” Valis said in his long-distance voice.

  “One can’t retire from a calling.”

  “I have to go now,” I said. “I . . . it was nice to meet you.”

  Valis inclined his head in a nod. The woman smiled and the other man—Tom, Valis had called him—raised his pop can and cigarette in a salute.

  5

  Dr. Ram was mobbed before he left the podium. I hung back, waiting for my moment to get his attention, but his admirers—fellow scientists, students, fans?—kept asking him questions, and he kept nodding and answering as he unhooked his microphone, packed up his laptop, and made for the exit. The crowd moved with him, forcing him to go slowly, like a man underwater.

  The bald woman that Valis had called an exorcist, Mother Mariette, wasn’t among them. She hadn’t shown up for his presentation. You didn’t have to be there to know the talk would be a success. Dr. Ram was already a celebrity in the neuroscience world. The field had failed to come up with a hypothesis for possession disorder that would stand up to repeated testing. For the past few years researchers had hung their theoretical hats on linking possession to artificially induced OBEs: out-of-body experiences. Most research teams were looking for a chemical explanation, but then a team from Sweden, during surgery to implant electrodes inside a woman’s skull in order to alleviate her debilitating seizures, had zapped the woman’s parietal lobe, in a structure called the angular gyrus. The woman, who was awake during the operation, reported floating above her body. A few other researchers replicated the experiment, but most groups were 7 0

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  constrained by ethical considerations: without some extreme medical necessity, they couldn’t just open up the skull of someone and start zapping.

  Dr. Ram had taken another approach, and started running former possession victims through functional MRIs, hoping to see heightened activity in the angular gyrus, or perhaps some deformation in the area that these patients had in common. Perhaps they all shared some mutation that made them prone to possession; perhaps they suffered some damage from being possessed. He examined over eighty possession victims in a two-year span.

  And found nothing. Nothing for twenty-four months. Then Dr. Ram got “lucky.” One of his patients (name withheld, of course) was possessed by the Piper while receiving the fMRI. The session went to hell. Dr. Ram never spelled out the details in any of his papers, but somehow he was driven from the room, and a female nurse was “harmed.” Given that the demon was the Piper, everyone understood this to mean rape. The MRI, however, recorded what had happened inside the patient’s brain moments before he pulled his head out of the MRI tunnel, yanked off the headphones, and started singing. This was the first time this had happened anywhere; MRIs had only been around since the eighties, and demons didn’t submit willingly to medical examinations. Dr. Ram had posted still pictures and a few mini-movies of the famous scan on his website. They reminded me of the radar weather maps on TV: colorful high-pressure systems of thought rolling over a cauliflower-shaped island, blossoming in reds and yellows and virulent greens. When Dr. Ram finally went back to replay the scan, he was shocked: the parietal lobe and the angular gyrus had stayed dark, but a portion of the temporal lobe had lit up like a thunderstorm. Brain function (or malfunction), Dr. Ram argued, might be able to completely explain the disorder, wresting the disease from the grip of faith healers, Jungians, and UFOlogists. Once you had a way to attack the disease scientifically, anything was possible: demon detectors, unequivocal diagnoses of possession, testable treatments . . . a cure.

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  “Dr. Ram.”

  He didn’t hear me. I followed him down the hall toward the elevators, persisting even as he shed members of his entourage by ones and twos. One of his shoes was untied, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “Dr. Ram, if you have just a second—”

  He glanced at me, then was immediately distracted by a scruffybearded man at his elbow. Dr. Ram grunted at something he said, and then the elevator opened and the people around them shuffled forward, and Dr. Ram and the bearded man went with them. Dr. Ram looked up, and waved me inside. I put out a hand to stop the door from closing, and wedged inside.

  “Thanks! I enjoyed your talk. I was—”

  But the bearded man was still talking, something about calcium channel blockers. We went up.

  At the eighteenth floor Dr. Ram stepped out, and the bearded man was still talking as the doors started to slide shut. I abruptly jumped forward, and Dr. Ram’s eyes widened. The doors closed behind me. Dr. Ram didn’t move. Maybe he didn’t want me to know where his room was. I opened my mouth, shut it. I fought the urge to say, “I am not a stalker.”

  “Are you a student of Dr. Slaney’s?” he said.

  “What?”

  He nodded at my badge. “Dr. Slaney. Or perhaps Dr. Morgan?”

  His accent was pure California, vowels stretched a bit longer than a Midwesterner’s.

  “I want to show you something,” I said. I unzipped the tote bag, flipped through the other pages I’d picked up, and withdrew the fMRI printouts. I held them out to him. “I’d like you to look at these.”

  “I’m sorry, I really don’t have time. I have to meet someone . . .”

  I stood there, holding them out to him. Finally he took them. He looked at the first one, shuffled it to the back, looked at the next one.

  “Where did these come from?” he said intently. He studied the first scan again.

  “Me.”

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  He looked up, his expression guarded.

  “I’ve been following your work,” I said. “What you noticed about activity in the temporal lobe—you see it there?”

  “I see something.” He flipped a page, tilted his head. “But even if I take these scans as valid—which I would not—they could mean almost anything. You could have been experiencing fond memories of your birthday, or simply contemplating a new haircut.” He handed the pages back to me, but his voice was kinder. “I know these scans might be alarming to the layman, but heightened activity in the temporal lobe by no means suggests that you were possessed while getting your MRI.”

  My cheeks flushed in embarrassment. “I’m not—” I breathed in. “I don’t know how to put this. I’m possessed now. I can feel . . . I can sense this presence inside me. I know that it just feels this way, that it’s just a subjective sensation that could be a symptom of the disorder, but—” I smiled tightly. “It’s just that I feel like I’ve trapped this thing in there.”

  I had to give him credit; he didn’t immediately dismiss me. What I was saying was impossible—no one that I’d ever heard of walked around saying that they’re possessed.

  But he thought for a moment, and then said, “What would you have me do about this?”

  “I was thinking. If your theory is correct—” I almost ran into a Jurassic-size potted plant, and stepped around it. “If this section of the brain is responsible for possession, then if we disable that section—”

  “Disable? How?”

  I looked at him. He lifted his hand. “No. No.” He turned and started down the hallway, the laces of one shoe whipping along the floor. I hurried after him.

  “At least consider it, Doctor. There are similar operations being done for tumor victims.”

  “You don’t have a tumor! I can’t just cut into your brain based on a theory. It’s not even a theory, it’s a hypothesis, and an unproven one at that. Maybe, years from now, there will be some surgical option—”

  “So you have thought about it.”

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  He stopped in front of a door. He seemed genuinely angry now.

  “Young man. No one would do what you’re asking, no respectable doctor. You’re grasping at straws.”

  I shoved the papers back into his hands. “Please, just look at them. Maybe
we’re not talking about surgery; maybe there’s some chemical way to—I don’t know, interrupt the process.”

  He shook his head, fishing in his pocket for a key card. “Even if I believed you, there is no way to do what you’re asking.”

  “I’m not making this up. Just look at them. My name’s on there, and I wrote down a couple phone numbers where I can be reached.”

  He looked at his door, then down the hallway, anywhere but at me or at the pages in his hand. “Please,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” Dr. Ram said. “I cannot help you.” He stepped inside and closed the door without looking at me again.

  “Liar,” I said.

  Later, my new friend Tom steered me toward the bar.

  “Trust me,” he said. “You need another fucking beer.”

  “No, I’m okay . . .”

  “Three more Coors Light,” he told the bartender. Then he turned to me. “Seriously, you look like somebody just ran over your cat.”

  I laughed, shrugged. “So is your friend really a demon?”

  Tom looked back toward the table. We were in a lounge on the second floor of the Hyatt. The place was crowded, half the people in costume. Valis, with his neatly trimmed beard and tweed jacket, looked like an Oxford don. He sat next to the handsome woman—Tom’s wife, Selena. They were surrounded by half a dozen people who had coalesced around Valis in the past hour. Tom had spotted me sitting alone by the bar and had sucked me into their gravitational field. Tom sighed. “Phil’s had a complicated life. Ever since the stroke—

  well, even before the stroke, he heard voices. Imaginary friends, you know? Then in eighty-two, the first thing he said when he got his speech back was that we should refer to him from now on as Valis.” He shrugged. “I asked an exorcist to talk to him—”

  “Mother Mariette?”

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  Tom’s eyebrows shot up. “Yeah, that’s right, you saw her! Anyway, she declared him a fake. Valis didn’t jump, he wasn’t in the public record, and it was simpler to say that Phil had finally . . . well, Phil had taken a lot of medications in his life, and this wasn’t his first hallucination. And frankly, Valis’s arrival wasn’t all bad. Look at him—you can’t even tell that half of him used to be paralyzed. Total recovery. Better than total! He eats better than he used to, he exercises, doesn’t take pills. He lives with Selena and me, but he takes care of us as much as we take care of him. I mean, shit, he’s enjoying himself! He can’t help it. He tries to do the silent Valis thing, but then somebody hits one of his hot topics, and he’s off, man.”

  The bartender returned with three tall glasses filled with faintly discolored tap water. We carried the beers back to the table, navigating around bodies, through the smoke. Selena barely seemed to speak, Tom talked constantly, and Valis mostly listened, though when he did speak, as he was doing now, people shut up. A glass of ginger ale sat on the low table in front of him, untouched.

  “But you cannot separate science fiction from fantasy,” Valis said,

  “and a moment’s thought will show why. Take psionics; take mutants such as we find in More Than Human. If the reader believes that such mutants could exist, then he will view Sturgeon’s novel as science fiction. If, however, he believes that such mutants are, like wizards and dragons, not possible, nor will ever be possible, then he is reading a fantasy novel. Fantasy involves that which general opinion regards as impossible; science fiction involves that which general opinion regards as possible under the right circumstances. This is in essence a judgment call, since what is possible and what is not cannot be objectively known but is, rather, a subjective belief on the part of the reader.”

  There was a slight pause, and then a Hispanic kid younger than me, dressed in a black T-shirt and immaculately pressed khakis, spoke up. “But does it matter what the readers think is possible? It seems to me that it’s how the characters in the novel behave that determines what kind of book it is. A character in a science fiction novel believes

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  that the world is rational, that you can find the answer, the ultimate truth, and goes about finding it. In More Than Human, the characters think that they’re the next step in evolution, part of a scientific process—”

  “No, it’s the fact that there is no ultimate truth that makes it SF.”

  This from a tall, bony man who looked as old as Valis. He sat on a low chair, his knees at the same height as his shoulders. “You can always ask one more question. But magic is fundamentally unexplainable.”

  Behind him, I saw the back of a shaved head, weaving through the crowd. Mother Mariette? I stepped sideways, trying to get a glimpse of her profile. If I could catch her . . .

  “Nobody in a fantasy novel tries to figure out why magic works,”

  the bony man said. “It just does. Jesus turns the water into wine, end of story. In the real world—”

  “In the real world most people don’t try to figure out how things work, either,” the Hispanic kid said. “Electricity works by flipping a switch.”

  I’d lost her. If it was her at all. I turned back to the group, and Selena was looking at me curiously. I shrugged. The tall man said, “Yes, most people are philistines. But if they wanted to find out, nothing is presumed to be unexplainable.”

  A frizzy-haired woman in a peasant skirt said, “Wait, most of the important things in life are unexplainable. The soul is unexplainable; demons are unexplainable; consciousness is unexplainable . . .”

  Somebody laughed—the pale young man in the eyeliner and tuxedo shirt leaning on the arm of a chair. “That just means you’re a confused fantasy character intruding in a science fictional world. Most scientists—most scientists at ICOP, anyway—think that we’ll eventually be able to understand all of that. Just because we don’t understand it now—”

  “Man in his present state is not able to comprehend,” Valis said in his distant voice. “Or if he comprehends, he is unable to hold on to that comprehension. The Eye of Shiva opens, then closes.” His voice seemed to carry much farther than it ought to at such low volume, like 7 6

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  a radio signal catching a lucky bounce off the ionosphere. Or maybe it was just that people strained to hear him. He was famous, he was rich, he wrote books. At least he used to, before he decided he was possessed by a Vast Active Living Intelligence System. I hadn’t read the books, but I’d seen a couple of the movies.

  “Okay, so we get maybe one second of total enlightenment, now that’s depressing.” I couldn’t see who was talking. “At least in a fantasy novel, everybody gets to know the truth. Moral order is restored, the One True King returns, Jesus rises from the dead.”

  Somebody else said, “You’re confusing theme with genre.”

  “No, he’s talking about destiny,” Tom said. “As soon as you introduce destiny, you’re in a fantasy, even if you dress it up as The Matrix or Star Wars. As soon as the universe starts responding to you personally, that’s magic—you only get to draw the sword out of the stone if you’re King Arthur—”

  “—or Bugsy Siegel,” someone said.

  “Yeah, sure,” Tom said, waving him off. “But in an impersonal science fictional world, anybody who knows the trick, the technology of sword extraction, gets to be King of All Britain.”

  “Or else you scuba dive down and wrestle the Lady of the Lake for it.”

  “ ‘Strange women lyin’ in ponds distributin’ swords,’ ” the pale man said in a not-quite British accent. “ ‘Is no basis for a system of government.’ ”

  The conversation instantly degenerated into a flurry of Monty Python quotes, then fragmented into a variety of smaller conversations. The tall man had left with the frizzy-haired woman, but other people joined the group. Tom seemed to know everyone, and everyone at least recognized Valis. The volume of noise and smoke climbed, and it wasn’t just our little band; DemoniCon partiers were descending from all
levels of the Hyatt towers. At some point in the night—1 a.m.? Certainly past midnight—I found myself in the john, Valis at the urinal next to me. I was pissing away what seemed to be gallons of Coors Light, amused by the fact that it looked almost exactly the same going out as coming in.

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  On the wall above the urinal, someone had written dogma: i am god.

  “So . . . ,” I said. “You piss.” I realized at this point that I was a little more buzzed than I’d thought.

  He nodded without turning to face me. “The body has its own imperatives,” he said. I couldn’t argue with that. Out in the bar, someone shrieked in laughter.

  “People don’t treat you like a demon,” I said. “They like talking to you.”

  “They like talking to Phil.” He stepped back from the urinal, zipped up, and walked toward the sink. “They prefer to think of me as their old friend who is not gone, but merely gone crazy. It comforts them.”

  “Wait—you let them think you’re faking, but you’re really . . .” I processed this for a second. “A demon pretending to be a man pretending to be a demon.”

  “Exactly. A fake fake.” He turned on the faucet. Hot only. I was surprised to realize that I believed him—or at least didn’t disbelieve him.

  “Okay, so if you’re really a demon,” I said, “how come you never possess anybody else? Jumping would pretty much settle the matter, wouldn’t it?”

  He addressed me through the mirror as he washed, steam rising past his face. The water temperature didn’t seem to bother him. “Divine intervention is not always divine invasion. I have intervened in Phil’s life twenty-two times. Nineteen of those disruptions involved simple transmission of information, compressed into cipher signals that would trigger anamnesis.”

  “Say what?”

  “Anamnesis. The loss of forgetfulness.”

  I blinked at him.

  “Total recall.”

  “Oh.”

  “A few times it was necessary to take more direct action. The first 7 8