by Неизвестный
David sank into his chair and listened. Joseph stood motionless, afraid to disturb him. He looked away from David out at the sky and the trees. All night long until the moon sank and the early lights of the sun streaked from the east, first blue and gray, then red, the two men stayed there, while only the mockingbird's song broke the silence. The song seemed to take on the unruffled calm of infinity. It filled their ears and minds. It poured into every corner and cranny of the room where they were. It was surprising, full of unexpected flights and long, graceful sustainments that teetered on to the edge of melody, then swung away just in time to take up new scales. It was not triumphant. It was celebration of calm, proclamation of continuity, assertion of living's value, confirmation of beauty for beauty's sake, assurance of a morrow as well as blessing on all yesterdays. It came as annunciation, and filled their night silence with grace.
Toward the dawn Joseph heard a low whisper and glanced at David. He was reciting the Ave Maria in the Greek of Paul and Luke and John: “Chaire Miryam, kecharitomene,” and repeating that long, leaping compliment the Angel Gabriel paid the Virgin: “Kecharitomene! Kecharitomene! Kecharitomene!.., Full of Grace! Full of Grace! Full of Grace!” Slow tears ran down David's cheeks.
There was no point, Joseph knew, in disturbing him now. The peace of silence and that song were all he needed and what he deserved, all the balm he wanted.
They waited until day broke full and the mockingbird had trilled to silence in a quick descent. They saw it take off from the trees and soar up, singing again as it went until it was a mere speck in the lightening color of the morning sky, alternately sailing and fluttering, until it faded from sight into silence.
David stirred and moistened his lips. He did not look at Father Joseph, but just said: “Let's make some coffee, Father Joe. Then let's get over to Jonathan, before it's too late.” Father Joseph did not stir. He was waiting for David's glance and some word. David turned and smiled at the other man: “I know now, Joe. I now know.” He paused and looked out the window again. “It is the same spirit. The same method. The same slavery.”
Joseph glanced at David's face as he drove. It was firm and expressionless, save for a certain granite-like set to the jawline. His cheeks were hollow, but the growth of his beard filled his face out. The eyes were steady. David seemed driven by some powerful inner force Joseph felt much more than he understood. It made him a little afraid. He sensed vaguely a touch of ruthlessness, a downright and decisive thrust. He looked away from David; and, without warning, he found himself laughing quietly with a surprising surge of ironic humor. “What's the joke, Joe?” It was good to see David's mouth soften.
Father Joseph had found himself saying spontaneously, “God help the poor Devil,” when he saw the determined look on David's face. David grinned and threw an admiring look at his companion. “God bless you, Father Joe. You're never in any danger. You never took yourself seriously enough.” Then they both laughed..
They reached Jonathan's house just after sundown that same day. David decided against waiting to round up assistants. He knew he would be in control of this case; he knew he had already bested the “Mister Natch” that had taken Jonathan so much farther into possession than David himself had been.
When they drew up at the house, the front door was open. Jonathan's mother, Sybil, stood in the doorway, a shawl around her shoulders. She was not smiling, but not sad, just quietly matter-of-fact.
“You were expected, Father David,” she said, as the two men entered. “They told me you were coming.” Then, in answer to the query in David's eyes, she explained that until early that morning, until about three o'clock, Jonathan had been all right; that is, he had remained unchanged. “But,” she continued, “when you were liberated, he suddenly got very bad.”
Joseph was stunned; he could not believe he had heard her say to David, “when you were liberated.” But David's eyes were filled with understanding as she went on. “I'm not worried about my son's body. It's his soul.”
For some seconds David stood looking at her. Joseph knew he was excluded from an intimate understanding between these two people. But he knew too that the price of being included was too dreadful.
On the hall table beside them two candles were already lit. Side by side with them were crucifix, ritual book already open, holy-water flask, and stole.
“It shouldn't be too late yet,” David spoke.
“It shouldn't be,” she rejoined. Then grimacing gently: “It's just I have not long to go myself. And if he must go too, I want us all to be together.”
David nodded his head slowly while he stared at the door beyond her. His mood was part wariness, part musing. Then he returned her gaze, saying: “You will be, Mother. Have no fear. You will all be together. The worst is over.”
He slipped the stole around his shoulders, took the ritual book and holy-water flask in hand. Joseph held the candlesticks. David looked at the open pages of the ritual. Jonathan's mother had opened it at the page where the main prayer started. Stepping past her, he turned the doorknob and entered Jonathan's room.
It was shuttered and dark. An unnaturally acrid and fetid odor hit his nostrils. Jonathan was sitting on the floor in the far corner, his feet doubled up beneath him. The light from the corridor fell across his face. David read the terror in his eyes, but it was a frozen terror. And David knew immediately: Jonathan would do nothing more, would struggle no more.
Jonathan's mouth was open. But neither tongue nor teeth were visible. Joseph placed the candles on the small night table by the bed. As the light fell on Jonathan, they noticed a curving line of fresh water drops running from wall to wall. His mother had shaken holy water recently in a semicircle pinning her son into the corner. One hand lay by Jonathan's side, but the other, the one with the crooked forefinger, lay on his chest in an eerie gesture. He was deathly still; but his eyes were glued on David's face and followed him as he moved closer.
As David stood over him, Jonathan's eyes were large, bloodshot whites with little half-moons of black irises glinting up at David.
Joseph expected David to start immediately, but David said nothing. He stood there. Silence.
Jonathan's crooked forefinger stirred from his chest in a slight motion toward David. David looked, still and silent. The forefinger wavered in thin air, then fell back stiffly. It was a gesture of helplessness. Jonathan's mouth opened and closed; he was trying to say something.
Still David did not budge or say anything.
Jonathan moved his head from side to side, his eyes still fixed on David, as if he was trying to pry himself loose from some ropes of influence binding him to David. A sudden and visible tremor ran through his body, and he turned his face and body away from David to the wall. He was shaking all over. They could barely hear the words which came muffled and thick from his mouth. “Speak to me, Brother. . .”
“No brother, Satan! No brother!” David's voice was like a heavy knife. Joseph winced. David was silent again.
“We too have to possess our habitation, Father. . .” the voice began.
“Your habitation is forever in outer darkness. And your father is the Father of Lies.” The trenchant sneer in David's voice again hit even Joseph where it hurt. David, he understood, hated and loathed more than Joseph ever dreamed a man could hate and loathe.
“Even the Anointed One gave us a place with the swine.”
“As a sign of your filth,” David spat the words out, “and as an indication of your being buried alive in torments.”
“Listen!. . . Listen!” the voice went on with a deathly note of desperation. It was almost a wail. “Listen!”
“You will listen and you will obey!” David was not shouting. But every word exploded from within him as a living missile. “You will all obey! You will go forth! You will relinquish all possession of this creature! You will do this in the name of God who created him and you, and of Jesus of Nazareth who saved him! You will depart and get back to the uncleanness and agony you chose.
You will do it now. In the name of Jesus. Now. Go. Depart. In the name of Jesus.”
Then David's voice changed. He was speaking to Jonathan from a reserve of tenderness and affection clothed in strength that moved Joseph as deeply as he had been shocked just a moment previously.
“Jonathan! Jonathan! I know you hear me. And hearing me, you hear the words of Jesus.” Jonathan's body started to rack and tremble. He began to stretch out face down on the floor until only his fingertips touched the corner in which he had been slumped. David and Joseph moved back a pace.
“I know,” David continued, “what you have been through. I know where you failed. I know how you were possessed by this unclean spirit. Jesus has paid for all your sins, as he did for mine. But now you have to pay. Believe me, I know. I know that only you can finally consent. With your will, Jonathan. With your will. But you must consent to suffer the punishment. Do you consent, Jonathan? Do you consent? Consent! Jonathan! Consent! For the love of Jesus, consent with your whole will!”
Then to Joseph: “Sprinkle some holy water!” Joseph obeyed. David opened the ritual book and started to recite the official prayers.
From Jonathan's mouth there came a howl lasting longer than any normal breath. David kept reading steadily, while he held up the crucifix in front of him. According as he progressed in the prayers, the howl increased, interspersed with dreadful sobs and groans.
But then they heard a thin voice singing. It came from the corridor outside. Jonathan's mother was chanting a hymn to the Virgin—the ancient Gregorian chant of the Salve Regina. As the medieval Latin syllables reached them in her little voice, Jonathan's howling and tremors began bit by bit to diminish. David stopped reading the prayers; he closed his book and listened.
The timbre of the mother's voice was quavering, reedlike. Yet, for David and for Joseph, it reached past their conscious recollections, past all the censor bonds of their adult life, back to the raw hours and days and months and years when once upon a time they were vulnerable to the misery of human unhappiness and when the love they enjoyed from home and family was their only and quite sufficient safeguard against all wounds.
Jonathan's mother was quite literally putting her soul into that sung prayer. Her mother's heart was crying to another mother. And, as far as Joseph could see, only these two mothers could appreciate what was now at stake. He had never been a highly emotional man; but memories crowded up in front of him, and he was gently stung by nostalgia. Joseph's enjoyment of esthetic pleasures had always been limited by an unsubtle mind and lack of personal culture. To his own mother he had never spoken as an adult; she died before he matured.
Until this moment, the woman to whom Jonathan's mother was praying had been merely a brightly lit and inaccessible star in his religious firmament: a Galilean Jewess who, without personal merit, without having thought one thought or said one word or performed one action, had been privileged with a grace no other human would ever, will ever, receive—to be totally pleasing to God's purest holiness from the very first instant of her personal existence. That had been the sum of Mary for Father Joseph. This had been all her dignity. She had never plucked the flowers of evil. She had been preserved. One of God's favorites.
Now, listening with David to that chant, he sensed with a speed that made understanding almost violent what being a mother and what being a child meant. He grasped the mysterious convivium, the mutual sharing and togetherness in human living of child and mother, their presence one to the other. And it dawned on him that that presence had no parallel elsewhere on the entire landscape of human living—neither lover to beloved, nor friend to friend, nor citizen to country, nor man to God.
Now this one mother was singing in prayer to another mother with a faith and a confidence that no man could summon. He understood: as mothers who had lived within a filigree work of heartbeat to heartbeat, breath to breath, movement to movement, sleep to sleep, wakefulness to wakefulness, they both had been placed, not at the periphery, but at the luminous center of a child's delicate beginnings in psychophysical life; and both had seen a child pass across the threshold of birth, quickening to consciousness, to recognition, to mentalism, to volition, to meaning.
Jonathan's mother finished the Salve Regina. For a moment there was silence. Then she improvised a last, spoken prayer. David and Jonathan heard her say: “You were his mother. You saw him die. You saw him live again. You understand. You could have died of pain on either occasion. Help me now.”
Joseph felt helpless against the tears that came to his eyes.
He was aroused by David's voice speaking quietly. In the corner David was kneeling beside Jonathan. Jonathan had sat up and was leaning, not crouching now, with his back to the wall. Both hands were in David's.
Joseph turned away to leave the room. He had understood nothing, he felt. Anyway, it was confession time.
Jonathan had the bleached and windswept look of one whose face has been torn by pain and weeping, the angelic calm and luminosity—almost joy—that Joseph had most often seen on the faces of the dying when, after rebellion and despair, they finally accepted the inevitable and turned fully to belief and hope.
It was an enviable peace.
The Virgin and the Girl-Fixer
Suddenly the whole scene changed in that Exorcism room, like an eerie and expert theater experience where, in a few seconds, the main actors change costumes and roles and the scenery is switched on invisible wheels, back to front, upside down, inside out, producing a kaleidoscope of change that makes everyone blink in disbelief.
At one moment, Father Gerald, the exorcist, was bending over the possessed, Richard/Rita, who had sunk his teeth in his own instep. In the next instant, the glaze in Richard/Rita's eyes broke, melting into a lurid gleam of mockery. Greenish. The teeth loosened their grip on the instep. The mouth opened, baring gums and throat, the tongue protruded, quivering on a stream of gray foam bubbles. The whole face was furrowed in irregular lines, as Richard/Rita broke into peals of laughter. Great buffeting gusts of mocking, jeering, Schadenfreude laughter. Laughter pouring from a belly of amused scorn and contemptuous hate.
In a fraction of a second Gerald understood. The Girl-Fixer, invisible to his eyes, was on him, two claws clutching at his middle. His assistants heard the raucous laughter. They held their ears. But Gerald's agony they could not know. All they saw were Gerald's.
Richard O. is a transsexual. In talking about his life before his operation, I refer to him as Richard O. or simply as Richard. Afterwards, until his exorcism is completed, he is referred to as Richard/Rita. In conversation, Father Gerald frequently referred to him as R/R. With Richard O.'s permission, I refer to him throughout this narrative with the masculine pronouns—he, his, him. Today he calls himself simply Richard O. sudden, violent spasms backward and forward “as if his middle was caught in a vise”; then the screeching shredding of his cassock and clothes, leaving him naked from chest to ankles. After that, all details escaped them in the violent jerkings and writhings of his body.
Gerald felt one claw was now totally sunk in his rectum. Another claw held his genitals, stretching his scrotum away from his penis, jerking at him brutally. Both claws were stiff, cutting like the jagged edge of a tin can, driving deeper and deeper, impaling him. He reeled away from the couch where Richard/Rita lay laughing, laughing, laughing, kicking the air and thumping the couch with clenched fists in deafening bursts of merriment.
Gerald staggered zigzag across the room, bent like a jackknife, involuntary screams gushing from his throat. One claw rocked back and forth within him. Slivers of agony jabbed and pierced through his buttocks and belly arid groin, as flesh and veins and mucous membrane and skin tore and ripped irregularly.
A fetid smell wafted up to his nostrils and from behind his head. The voice of the Girl-Fixer beat at his eardrums unmercifully: “You're my sow. I'm on you. Your boar. My snout is giving you the best blow-job in the Kingdom. Shoot, sow! Spread your legs, sow! Your boar is mounting your flesh, opening
your little untouched hairs. My prick is taking your virginity. You're no girl. But I'm still the fixer of every box!”
Gerald staggered in spasms, stumbling over his feet, doubled up, flaying the air helplessly, leaving a thin trail of semen, blood, excrement, and screams, until he bumped heavily into the wall, and fell to the floor in a twisted bundle. Blood sprang from a thin, vertical split that opened from the middle of his forehead up into his hair. Richard/Rita froze into the blazing look again. The attack had lasted about three seconds. It was over before the others recovered themselves. Suddenly, Gerald's screams and Richard/Rita's laughter stilled, there was a moment without sound in the room, like the farthest edge of whispers. The raw silence after raucous, earsplitting noise.
Then, a flurry of voices and activity. The doctor and the police captain lifted Gerald onto the stretcher that had ironically been brought for Richard/Rita. The four men quickly bound Richard/Rita down tightly to the iron frame of the couch. No one looked at those eyes. All felt the blazing glance on them, intent, triumphant, smug.
“Like tying down a hot, steamy carcass,” one of them recalled afterwards.
Richard/Rita's two brothers, Bert and Jasper, eyes swollen red with tears, faces dirtied yellow with panic, carried the stretcher out. As the assistants left the house, they felt the stark contrast between the scene they had just witnessed and the outside world. In the garden by the pond the thrushes were warbling in the first wave of the dawn chorus Richard/Rita had loved so much and which had drawn him to live here in the first place. The sun was shining.
Inside, Gerald's priest assistant, Father John, still wearing his immaculate cassock, settled down in an easy chair to watch and pray. He was wordless. Just to be sure, he held the crucifix in one hand and the holy-water flask in the other.
A year earlier, in the ordered life of the seminary, he had known nothing of all this. Had not even suspected its existence. Evil had been a definition on the white page of a theology manual. And the Devil, well, that had been really not more than a mysterious name for a gentleman thought of in terms of horns, a green face, hooves, and a forked tail. Now John had the bleached, drained look which only youth carries when strain and weariness veil its freshness, and it has neither age lines to show nor makeup to lose, only paled illusions to shield it. It was 6:20 A.M.
