Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “And he’s lying to me, of course? Playing with me?”

  Virginia nods.

  “Because …?”

  “Because it’s funny to him. But he wasn’t there, Dr.—Curtis. With her. Sweren. The barbecue case. He didn’t see it at the end.”

  “‘It,’” Curtis repeats, enunciating clearly for her, “of course he wasn’t. Now about this ‘we’re all going to die’ … certainty of yours … Sarah Connor, right? The sequel to your movie?”

  “I never should have said anything.”

  Curtis smiles, points at her with his pen. “Almost a double negative there, y’know. The old Freudian slip, if you see what I mean.” Virginia doesn’t; Curtis translates liberally: “You’re glad you told me everything.”

  “I’m not saying anything else to you,” Virginia says. “Starting now.”

  Curtis rises, smiling agreement. Extends a hand to her, prompting her up. “Then I guess this means you’ll come quietly to my little show-and-tell.”

  After much inner turmoil, Virginia lets him take her hand, pull her to the hospital’s security room, an old guard there in his bolted-down chair, surrounded by banks and banks of black and white monitors, scenes from the hospital tripping by in no particular order.

  “Metatron,” Curtis says grandly, introducing the room and guard as one, ushering Virginia in: “The recording angel.”166 METATRON nods to Virginia, saluting with one hand, hiding his 3-D167 glasses under his chair with the other, a lit joint already stashed there. It burns into a plastic lens, the smoke trailing up his arm, curling around his full-sleeve tattoos.

  Virginia is still tight-lipped, cross-armed.

  “There hasn’t been an unsolved violent crime here for eleven years,” Curtis is telling her. “And never any … gargoyles. Should one appear, however … ” he trails off, giving the floor to Metatron.

  Metatron doesn’t take it, though. Instead he looks one-eyed up at Curtis. “Gargoyles?” he asks. “You mean wings, teeth, all that bullshit?”

  “Yes,” Curtis says, trying to make this work, “but—”

  “No such thing,” Metatron coolly interrupts.

  “But if there were … ”

  Metatron stands, regarding Curtis. Shrugs. “I guess I’d have me a damn gargoyle gun, then,” he says, palming his Taser. “Instead of this piece-of-shit electric razor.”

  “Put that—”

  “I could shave their hairy gargoyle asses with it, though,” Metatron says, thinking aloud. “They hate that, don’t they? When it starts growing back all prickly and scratchy? Shit.”

  Curtis stares Metatron down. Continues: “Now if there were … a threat—”

  “Gargoyles or just … interruptions?” Metatron asks pointedly.

  “Gargoyles,” Curtis says. “What would your professional response be? As a trained and certified security officer. As an employee of this hospital.”

  Metatron looks at Curtis for a long time, considering. “You want I should just show you?” he finally asks, cocking his elbow for his Taser again.

  Curtis neither nods nor doesn’t nod. Is wary. But all the same he watches as Metatron playacts astonishment at seeing gargoyles on his monitors. In animated slow-mo he reels back, runs carefully and with cartoonish exaggeration past Curtis and Virginia, double locks the door with his own sound effects, then returns to his seat, sliding his fingers along the row of buttons until the red of REC is inserted. He pushes it, laces his finger behind his head, and turns back to Curtis. “This is where the money starts rolling in,” he says, winking on the sly to Virginia, then chin-pointing at the door. “It’s bulletproof, like my wife, and impregnable. Not like my wife.”

  Virginia almost smiles, manages to hide it.

  Curtis purses his lips in anger then turns to Virginia. Starts to say something about rescheduling but Metatron interrupts again: “This … you mean this is therapy?” he asks, switching his fingers back and forth between Curtis and Virginia. “Who’s the crazy one, then?” he says, hand on his Taser again, but Curtis’s response is muffled by Virginia’s inattention. He and Metatron fade into the periphery of her POV. What’s important to her now are the flickering monitors: OR3, charred black, still police-taped off; the waiting room, some teenager’s arm up the candy machine, tongue Jordanned out; a high angle on a door opening and closing; a doctor sprinting down the hall, white coat flapping behind him; a thin twenty-five-year-old guy in a Cat in the Hat hat168—RUSH—approaching two wheelchair kids in the hall, one of them pulling a red wagon with spray cans and Christmas decorations.

  The image disappears and, just when it seems gone for good, reappears on another monitor, Rush that many steps closer. Virginia frantically chases the image, once, twice, and on the third time it holds long enough for her to not want to see it anymore. She presses her hands over her mouth in silent scream, falls back, the guard catching her, tracking back to the bank of monitors for us, to one out of all of them: the woman’s bathroom door, a water fountain. Instants later another image replaces it: Rush, about to pass the two wheelchair kids in the hall, the first a ten-year-old boy in a serious racing wheelchair, SANDRO, the wagon hitched to him, the second a wan-looking ten-year-old girl from the original, looking directly up into the security camera, as if she knows we’re watching.

  JENNY.

  RUSH snaps in front of her eyes to bring her back to the suddenly colorized hall. She turns her head slowly, fixing her eyes on him. He’s evidently in the later stages of chemo: no hair; bad, pale skin; no meat to speak of.

  He blows her a kiss and walks on, leaving her and Sandro, Sandro evidently offended by this.

  “Hey, you,” he says, playing tough. “Michael Stipe!”169

  Rush stops, cocks his head. Looks at himself; the resemblance is there.

  “A shiny happy fan?”170 he asks, turning around hat-first.

  “The end of the world as you know it,”171 Sandro says back, wheeling forward, grim in the face, smudges of green paint there.

  Rush smiles, impressed. Sees Jenny and gets it.

  “I think I missed her anyway, big guy,” he says, holding his kiss-blowing hand up below his chin, overplaying the Waco Kid172 unsteadiness. “I mean look at what the radiation … wait, wait,” he says, then, tacking into the wall behind Jenny’s chair. “There it is … I did miss. See?”

  Sandro is suspicious of all this.

  Rush looks both ways, and when the coast is clear plants his lips low on the wall, sucking the misguided kiss back off, making a big show of swallowing it, wiping his mouth.

  “We’re not kids, y’know,” Sandro says, having to try not to smile. “We just saw a dead lady down the hall.”

  “Then you’re already older than I ever want to be,” Rush says, and punctuates it with a grand bow, sweeping the top of his Cat in the Hat hat languidly across the floor, already backing away.

  As he recedes, Jenny turns to Sandro.

  “Michael Stipe?” she asks.

  “R.E.M.?” Sandro says, obviously, wheeling back and forth. “Where you been anyway, sister?”

  Jenny doesn’t answer, doesn’t answer, and finally the shot regresses back to a black and white POV inspecting the contents of their wagon from above—a Christmas tree stencil there, some paint—then passes them, follows Rush unsteadily, Rush looking back every few steps, nodding once suggestively to a particularly nubile CANDY STRIPER passing by.

  The POV follows the candy striper intently, until she’s blocked by wide, white-stockinged legs, scrolling down the screen to reveal first a name badge—HILDEGARD—and then NURSE HILDA herself.

  The shot reverses onto Con, stooped over, all guilty with a video camera. “Broomh—?” he starts, clapping his own hand over the last two syllables. The shot lingers on her long enough for the association to rise, circulate: the same nurse who caught TJ in the original. Con looks to Rush for help but Rush has his back to him, hat off, hiding in plain sight.

  Con shrugs, caught. “You’re not going to believe me
,” he says.

  Hilda only stares at him in response. Con falters on: “My friend,” he says, “end-stage bone cancer. He won’t let his little brother come see him like this so I’m making him, the brother, a video, for … after.”

  “How long’s this friend got?” Hilda asks.

  Con looks into the lens, his POV registering the inset lower-left display: 3 h. Shrugs. “It depends if we go slow play or extended, I guess … ” Hilda shakes her head, looks away, back. Con says it so she won’t have to: “I’m working double shifts, aren’t I?”

  “You were already working double shifts, Mr. Simms,” she says, depocketing a grimy red and once-white Santa hat. “Now you’re Santa Claus. Consider it an honor.”

  “But I—” Con sputters, unable to finish, as Hilda’s broad backside is already turned to him. She clomps off in his just-raised video POV. As she recedes, though, things change, go high-def, everything suddenly weighted, heavy, the black and white contrast functioning in top form: Nona approaching in the viewfinder, looking down the lens, time card in hand, brows furrowed, hair still wet from washing, as if still wet from the sprinklers in the coma ward seven weeks ago.

  Con lowers the camera for a clear look and seems to almost remember her, reach for her after she’s gone, but then Rush is over his shoulder, in his ear: “Cinderella in her janitor clothes, man … wait, wait [fake dry-heaving], I can feel the need to … she may have to come back yet … ”

  Con pushes him off, still distracted, and they slope off down the hall, burst into Oncology. A DESK NURSE looks at her watch.

  “Distracted again?” she asks, leading them back to the treatment room.

  “Not exactly my favorite place,” Rush says, looking around, one of the doors heavy-duty, with radiation warnings.

  “But our favorite nurse,” Con says, videoing her.

  The nurse pulls out an oversized hypodermic needle in response, Rush reluctantly offering his pockmarked arm.

  “Pretend it’s green eggs,”173 she says, slipping the needle in, sinking the plunger, Con right there with the camera.

  “But I don’t like green eggs,” Rush says in black and white, biting his lip and looking away, at the radiation door, Con zooming in and out on it.

  IN a dark and dislocated stairway Nona is getting ready for work: smoking a joint, blowing the smoke out the dusky window, open maybe a few inches. Some makes it, some doesn’t. On about the second drag, her watch beeps. She watches without emotion until it goes off, then nods, runs her still-wet hair behind an ear.

  “Mother’s little helper,”174 she says, standing to reach in her pocket. Extracting a pill bottle. As she puts the pill in her mouth though, a door opens in the vague above, closes. She’s no longer alone.

  Her POV leans out, trying to see who, but it’s a clear shot all the way to the ceiling, stories and stories above. She sets her pill bottle on the windowsill, swallows audibly. Depockets a boxcutter, leans down for another drag, then pinches the joint off, balances it on the pill bottle. Clicks her boxcutter open. All these small, tense things.

  She finally shrugs the false-alarm shrug, leans over to look down, no one in her POV again. But then the POV switches, turns on her: Nona from one story up, unaware.

  Back on her own landing she turns, is reaching for her joint when a shadowy FIGURE descends behind her.

  The shot becomes a latexed hand, reaching for her shoulder. As it makes contact she spins, boxcutter first.

  Markum.

  Holding his now-bleeding forearm.

  “Oh,” Nona says, disappointed.

  “Who the hell were you expecting?” Markum says, indicating her knife. “Or what?”

  Nona shrugs. “Always be prepared,” she says back. “A girl alone in the stairs … ”

  Markum looks from her to the joint, continues for her: “… already engaged in all kinds of nonpolicy activities.”

  But he smiles, reaches for the joint himself, managing to knock the pill bottle out the window where it can crack open on the cement stories below. Just enough light left to make it out. A dog head rises from the trash to inspect, growl. The same dog that was barking at Vangelesti’s ambulance earlier.

  “THANKS,” Nona says, with sincere insincerity, looking out the window, cringing. “Hope that’s not your dog, though. Hope that’s not anybody’s dog. First night on that shit’s grade-A bad for sleep.”

  Markum keeps his distance from her until she backs the boxcutter’s blade back into its handle, repockets it.

  “Or good,” Nona adds. “Depending on your … chemical inclinations.”

  Markum still has the joint. He lights it, inhales, studying her.

  “Don’t you have to rush off to surgery or something?” Nona says.

  “Not calm enough yet,” Markum says, inhaling again.

  “I see.”

  “What was that?” Markum says, motioning toward the window.

  “Clozapine. Halonal. Something.”

  “Ahh,” Markum says, holding the joint up to eye-level. “I see. And you must be trying to counter your anti-hallucinogenics with a … hallucinogenic? Original … ”

  “It’s more of a depressant, right, doc?” Nona says, removing the joint cleanly from his hand. “And really none of your business.”

  “I can replace it,” Markum says, “if that’s an issue.”

  “You don’t even know where I got it.”

  “Metatron,” Markum says, smiling with one side of his face. “Isn’t that what he’s calling himself this month?”

  Nona just stares. Markum continues: “But I was talking about the clozapine.”

  “Oh.”

  “And whatever else too,” he adds, drawing near, jangling his shiny-new pharmaceutical keys. “Candy store, you know.”

  Nona smiles back, looking him up and down. “Yeah, well. Saw that movie. And you’re no Matt Dillon.”175

  “Well, you’re not even blonde … ”176 Markum counters, “not that that’s any kind of problem.”

  Nona laughs, rolls her eyes, then cashes the joint and drops the roach in the front pocket of her shirt. Markum keeping his eye on it, her chest, etc.

  “You don’t know what I am, Trapper John,”177 Nona says, making her exit. “And anyway, I don’t date doctors. I never know what they’ve had their hands into at work—or who.” With that she leaves Markum slowly bleeding on the stairs, the dog below snarling mad at something. Its attention is centered on a window three or four stories up. The window is the last in a series, all of them decorated for Christmas, twin electric candles on each side, not turned on yet, green paint sprayed between, in the form of a tree.

  BEHIND that last window, too, there’s another POV looking through the tree at the dog, muted by the glass. A Predator178-quality image, but bleached out and jumpy, so the dog is there not so much via color but contrast. As if this POV sees some sort of charcoal shadow, its source of light wholly different, not about wavelengths at all. Christmas music in the b.g., “Jingle Bell Rock,” the song already associated with death for us, via Lethal Weapon.179

  SOME indefinite period of time later, as established by her frizzy-dry hair, Nona is singing the same song quietly to Hale. Otherwise the coma ward is quiet, just Lin in the b.g. changing sheets, her male patient rolled over to one side of the bed, a rag doll. It’s the patient directly above the drain, the one who seized in the rain. The shot circles behind Nona and their window is dark with night now, a green tree decoration just visible, but there. The electric candles flicker on and Lin notices.

  “You should have seen them,” she says. “Serious. They were pulling a wagon with their wheelchairs, Nona. It was so cute I almost got pregnant just standing there.”

  “Yeah,” Nona says, eyeing the faint green wheelchair tracks leading out the door, “cute. They do everyone?”

  “On this floor,” Lin says.

  “Figures,” Nona says, straightening Hale’s covers in good-bye. Lin notices this too.

  “So what is it wi
th you and JD?” she asks.

  Nona stares out the window, prepares her response: “You remember Heaven Can Wait?”180 she asks. “At the end, in the tunnel, when that football player’s not Warren Beatty but still something in her knows … ”

  “You don’t even remember who the actress was, do you?” Lin asks.

  Nona shrugs like it doesn’t matter.

  Lin smiles, shakes her head in pity. “You don’t remember because you already think you’re her. ‘Best supporting actress from a movie she really wanted to be in … ’”

  Nona gives Lin a casual middle finger over her shoulder. Lin smiles it away. “He’s not waking up, y’know,” she says: “Or is that the way you like them? Helpless, dependent, strapped down … ”

  “It’s just that nobody ever comes to see him.”

  “Nobody even knows his name. Just that he tried to hang himself.”

  “Tried?”

  Lin looks hard at Nona. “I took a workshop on this. Suicide. When someone shoots themselves in the stomach, it’s because they’re vain, they want to leave an attractive corpse. Et cetera. [nodding to Hale now] When someone hangs themselves, though, it’s more about justice. Punishment, all that. Like they think they’re guilty … ”

  “You here when they brought him in?” Nona asks, turning around.

  Lin shakes her head no. “The cute ones never wake up anyway,” she says. “Trust me. And they wouldn’t remember all your … attention if they did. Put some makeup on, girl, go to the bar. Find a real deadbeat like the rest of us.”

  “I don’t drink,” Nona says. “It would interfere with my medication.”

  “Well I know you dance,” Lin says, smiling, moving the patient, lifting him easily with one arm, to where his whole body is nearly off the mattress. Which should be impossible. She doesn’t notice though, continues tucking and talking: “I see you through the glass, y’know. I’m not as blind as everyone around here thinks I am.”

  Nona starts to respond (“Blind isn’t exactly—”) but only has her denial partway formed when she does see what Lin’s doing.

  “Been working out, Lin?” she asks in a impressed voice, and Lin looks, realizes, and jerks back in fear, breaking the passing close-up of her black nail off in the patient and spilling her Pepsi. It rolls fizzing under the bed.