“Mr. President,” Erica says. “Mr. President, if you’re still in there, we’ll talk to you. But only to you.”
Whoop-whoop, whoop-whoop.
“I ate Easter,” announces the entity living in Nixon’s body. “It’s gone because I ate it.”
Bishop Marlin refuses to acknowledge this boast. Instead, for the second time, he begins to recite an Episcopal version of the Rituale Romanum; its purpose is to locate, scourge, and expel the demon or demons, up to and including Satan, occupying the body and suppressing the personality of the one possessed.
The reading of psalms constitutes nearly half the ritual, and the bishop is reciting, “ ‘Some sat in darkness and gloom, prisoners in affliction and in irons, for they had rebelled against the words of God, and spurned the counsel of the Most High…’ ”
Whoop-whoop, whoop-whoop.
Cal shuts his mind to the psalm. Ritualistic formulas, unless they involve ranch work, bore the piss out of him, and once already today he has heard the modified Roman rite.
But the President’s body, tensing, bridges between buttocks and shoulder blades, and Cal and the other men lean their full weight on him to keep him on the gurney.
Bishop Marlin’s voice grows more authoritative: “ ‘I cast thee out, you filthy spirit, along with the least encroachment of the enemy, and every phantom and diabolical legion! In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, depart and vanish from this creature of God!’ ”
Erica Zola says, “Hang on to him, guys. Make it through this go-round and maybe the Richard Nixon core will assert itself, and we can proceed psychotherapeutically rather than ritually.”
“Fuck you,” blurts the spirit of evil, arching the President’s back. “A python in your pumpkin, a rattler up your rufus.”
Whoop-whoop, whoop-whoop…
This is no “creature of God” talking, Cal understands, and they are supposed to love the person possessed by the malevolent entity taunting Erica—but, so far, Cal has had real trouble mastering his outright revulsion. The growly curses escaping King Richard, along with the terrifying whoops of Kai’s coffee pot and the disorienting effects of lunar gravity, have half convinced him that this entire experience has sprung from his subconscious mind.
Right. This is a dream of the id. A Freudian nightmare. If Lia were here, she’d wake me from it.
But the nightmare persists, and with Nixon’s body straining under him, Cal knows that love is the last thing he’s likely to shed on either the possessor or the possessed.
But at least I’m participating, he consoles himself. Kai, by contrast, hasn’t gotten any closer to this gurney than a yard or two. His revulsion is that much greater than mine, and he’s the anamnesiac who wanted us to “engineer the redemptive shift”.
Whoop-whoop…
Coffee. Kai’s sitting on his glorified buns brewing a pot of black-black, molasses-thick, swamp-water swill. Hoping the chicory and caffeine will put enough starch in his plasmic substance to get him off those buns.
As the bishop speaks, one of Nixon’s legs kicks out and sends Dolly backward into a stack of coffins. Then he crosses the free leg over and hammers his foot into Vear’s abdomen, loosening the major’s grip. Now the President’s head is trying to come off the gurney, too, and Cal must brace his own legs against the floor and flatten his chest against the man’s brow. Whereupon the possessed man begins to bray, a continuous, ungodly braying that Cal can scarcely believe is issuing from a human throat.
“Dear God, we’ve got a case of nearly perfect possession here,” Bishop Marlin cries. “Usually, my patients want to be healed. But this time we’ve undertaken the rite without Nixon’s consent—the real Nixon’s consent—and we may be in for a war a helluva lot longer than it’s already been.”
Great, thinks Cal, gritting his teeth and pressing down. Just great, Your Right Reverendship.
He remembers that three hours ago the exorcism procedure began with a brief outcasting ritual and a fifteen-minute waiting period as they sought to penetrate the occupying demons’ identities. This was the stage of the ceremony called the Pretense, Bishop Marlin explained, and its sole function was to break through the sham that no possessing spirit inhabited the patient. This stage lasted only fifteen minutes primarily because Tyler’s struggle with Nixon in the corridor has clearly disclosed what everyone already suspected, namely, that at some point during his presidency, perhaps the year after the US win in Indochina, Richard Nixon’s own evil cunning began to give way to the evil cunning of a greater malefactor, and he was eaten by it from the inside out with no apparent diminution of his own personality.
Whoop-whoop, whoop-whoop…
Cal recalls that the demonic liars inside Nixon began cursing them just as he was starting to think that all that would come of the whole boring business was their capture and a series of summary executions.
Suddenly, the patient’s bray mutates into other animal noises—a wolf’s howl, a boar’s grunting, a rhino’s rhonchus, a series of raucous cluck-cluck-cluckings.
As if, thinks Cal, someone has gassed a whole flock of turkeys with helium.
Meanwhile, Dolly has come back to pinion Nixon’s belligerent leg, and Erica has rushed to help Tyler recinch the gurney straps on his forearms.
Shut your eyes, Cal advises himself. Don’t look at him.
Earlier, when their silence broke the Pretense, Nixon’s face flowed into such a corrupt mask that Cal could not imagine how mere human musculature could achieve so hateful a look. Now, the same hideous expression is back, and to gaze upon it—unmistakable sign of the Presence—may be to succumb to its iniquity.
It’s not human, Cal reflects. Does that make it fiendish? I can’t honestly say, but it’s definitely something other…
“Perfect possession,” the bishop said. That’s a case where the inhabiting entity has pushed the person’s real human personality down so deep that the body becomes the unquestioned property of the occupier. In such cases, the chances of even discovering the fact of possession are remote.
Whoop-whoop, whoop-whoop, whoop-whoop…
Bishop Marlin has told them that the evil occupier works hard to disguise its presence from the suppressed human personality. It convinces this person that the occupier’s goals exactly mirror the occupied’s. That, in fact, the occupier and the occupied are one and the same being. In such cases, the occupied human personality becomes comfortable with the fact of possession; it never occurs to this person to seek healing. If it did, the possessor would hurry to squelch the notion. The bishop has also said that only persons with an innate, rather than an imposed, bent for evil ever become so self-extinguishingly occupied, and these persons seldom undergo exorcism because they do not present themselves for it.
But that’s the kind of patient, Cal realizes, listening to the President’s falsetto gobbling, that we’re working with here. We’ve taken the man against his will, as well as against the will of his occupier or occupiers, and this is the result…
Abruptly, the coffee urn ceases to whoop; the cessation of this noise stuns even the patient.
For a moment, no demented animal sounds escape the President’s mouth; he lies perfectly still. His eyes flick from side to side. Cal, staring down at them, sees nothing reflected in their pupils but a dizzying blackness that spirals down to an absolute void. Unriven emptiness. Meanwhile, the walls of these unplumbable eye sockets radiate hatred, a blistering thermal energy.
Kai comes out of his Buddha posture and grabs a plastic bag of Styrofoam cups. “Anybody besides me want some of this brew?”
All but Dolly and Tyler say no, and Kai keys the spigot on the urn to fill three cups.
Cal can smell the hot coffee, see its rising steam, and hear it pitter-pattering into the Styrofoam. He’d drink a little of it if he weren’t already sweating like a deckhand.
“Not a good idea, Philip,” Bishop Marlin says.
“Maybe not for you, Your Right Reverendship, but I’m literally going to go up in st
eam myself if I don’t have some.”
He comes toward the gurney, extending cups to Dolly and Tyler. Even Cal agrees that this is a bad time to interrupt the process, but how can he rebuke the resurrected Kai?
Nixon’s body begins to bridge, hump, thrash, flounce. The fragile cups go flying, and coffee splashes Cal’s neck and lower jaw. Cal yells. Erica Zola and the bishop jump back. The President has broken the straps on his forearms, and Cal, despite his pain, steels himself and covers the man’s upper body.
Nixon’s head goes crazy under his chest, bumping him, trying to find a nipple or a fold of skin to bite. His mouth slides from side to side like the bubble in a carpenter’s level. It snaps like a piranha’s. As it snaps, the President begins quacking like a duck. Like Daisy Duck.
“Kai”, who returned to the coffee urn as soon as Nixon’s body began flailing, shouts, “The Dream Impeachment of Harper Mocton! My God, it’s coming true!”
He spigots a cup of chicory-doped coffee, down-gulps the stuff, and discards the cup. Then he comes to the gurney to tell everyone to let the possessed body of the President go. Cal refuses to obey him because this is so clearly a formula for siccing a galvanized Frankenstein monster on all of them. What in hell does Philip hope to accomplish? Their communal ruin?
“Don’t let go of him!” Bishop Marlin cries, one hand on the purple stole at his neck. “Don’t!”
“Do!” Philip urges. “This is a fucked-up situation, but it’s going to be okay if you guys’ll just trust me.”
“Quackquackquackquacka…!”
Major Vear, Peter Dahlquist, and Tyler Robinson all step away from the gurney, and Cal finds himself restraining the quacking chief executive all by himself. One stupendous bridging of the presidential spine dislodges Cal; in fact, it sends him skidding toward the coffee urn on the seat of his jumpsuit. Whereupon the President flaps his arms, slides off the platform, and, growling his falsetto growl, confronts the seven of them from the crouch of a sumo wrestler.
“Get back,” Philip K. Dick commands, waving everyone away with the stumpy black arms of Horsy Stout. “Get back.”
With Gordon Vear’s and Erica Zola’s aid, Cal gets to his feet. The muscadine-tinted air in the slump-pit cavern seems to be losing a little of its color. Is Philip’s psychospiritual support of the timelessness affecting the rest of the moonbase starting to decay? Cal’s own lightheadedness suggests as much. So does the fact that his body wants to rise through the floor of the Censorinus crater and up into a celestial orbit similar to the dead writer’s. Into what alternative continuum would such a flight carry him?
Well, thinks Cal, Philip has his wish. He and Richard Nixon have squared off to contest each other’s possession, and all we can do is stand back and root for the home team. Crap.
“Satan,” Philip says, circling the President’s body, “why have you invested this man?”
Robotically, the Nixon body turns as Philip turns. ““One can kill many,”” he says, the voice a sepulchral blur.
“And one in a place of power can kill many more, right?”
A stream of overlapping obscenities from the entity inhabiting the President. (That means yes, Cal tells himself.) In response, Bishop Marlin begins to recite psalms again, and to utter chants of expulsion, and to sprinkle holy water at the possessed from his aspergillum.
The muscadine color of the chamber’s air has already decayed to plum, and from plum to pink, and from pink to a thin claret…
“And why do you want to kill?” Erica Zola asks.
The President turns upon her his impossible face. ““Because I hate the many who hate me,”” he says, bassooning the blurred words and revealing a tongue as red as blood.
This pronouncement is followed by a verbal assault unlike any Cal has ever heard. The President’s possessor blasphemes, taunts, and ridicules, facing each of its would-be exorcists in turn and telling on them intimate private shames. Rather than have such matters publicly revealed, Cal realizes, many people would commit suicide, and yet the seven of them must stand together amid seven stacks of coffins listening to this scandalmongering. The demon motivating the captured meat of King Richard recites seven litanies of past crimes and sins previously so well hidden that Cal wonders at its malign omniscience.
“Philip, you’re right,” Bishop Marlin says. “Only God or Satan could know such things about us, and only Satan would reveal them.”
“ ‘O Satan, enemy of mankind and rebel against heaven,’ ” chants Philip, “ ‘tremble and be afraid!’ ”
And the bishop joins him in reciting, “ ‘Leave this man’s body and go to your place of darkness!’ ”
Satan, incarnate in the body of the President, advances on the spirit in Horsy Stout’s body and delivers a spastic haymaker to his nappy head. The punch flashes, sizzles, and knocks the Nixon thing into an astonishing backward stagger.
Get down, Cal thinks. And he draws Gordon Vear and Erica Zola into a self-protective huddle beside him. Tyler and Dolly scamper for cover, too, but the radiant homunculus leaps forward and grabs Nixon’s Frankenstein-monstering body by the ankles. This contact produces another series of flashes and frying noises.
“Look,” says Vear. “It’s like Jacob wrestling the angel of God for a blessing. In reverse, I mean.”
Cal knows that he would not have thought of this image himself, but it has a certain appropriateness. Horsy hanging heroically to the legs of Tricky Dick, noisily illuminating the coffin warehouse, does have weirdly biblical overtones, even in a lunar context, and it’s undoubtedly the eschatological implications of their struggle that provide them.
Time itself may not be ending, but this time line (as the pale claret of the chamber’s air decays into a crystalline translucency) is quickly reaching its terminus. Von Braunville trembles, and the ramparts of Censorinus quake like those of Jericho.
Nevertheless, the evil soul frog-marching Nixon about refuses to let him topple. Instead, it changes him. It subjects him to a series of transformations whose purpose is to shake Philip’s dogged spirit and defeat their exorcism team. First, the President’s body blisters as if burned in a fire. Second, it splits at the abdomen and evicts its salmon-hued internal organs, many of which balloon, grow hair, and emit a stench unlike any Cal has ever encountered. Third, with the dwarf still astride its ankles, the golem sucks its vitals back into its gut, peels away its face, and stares at each of them from the eye holes of a death’s-head. Fourth, again illusorily whole, the Nixon body sprouts horns, inflates to elephantine size, and trumpets deafeningly. Fifth, it dwindles, acquires a nauseating dermatosis of lesions and whelks, and begins to spin—first one way, then the other. Sixth, it stops spinning, levitates, and begins telekinetically hurling the stacked coffins. These collide, ricochet, smash, and clatter. Cal and his friends must scurry to escape being crushed.
And, seventh, when these several ploys have failed to dislodge the dwarf, the evil spirit inhabiting the President combines the tricks of levitation and inflation and floats above Bishop Marlin’s team of exorcists like a blimp.
Cal cannot help thinking of Bugs Bunny, Popeye the Sailor, and Daisy Duck in a televised Thanksgiving Day parade. The Nixon thing is not so large as those friendly, vulcanized monsters, but large enough, with Horsy Stout dangling from its bloated feet like a man in danger of falling from a burning dirigible.
The room’s ceiling is eighteen feet high, and Philip’s boots—Horsy’s boots—tick-tock about six feet above its floor. Bishop Marlin continues to recite the modified Rituale Romanum, and Cal can tell by the expressions on their faces that the major and the Secret Service agent are praying.
Dahlquist, on the other hand, seems to be searching the chamber for something—a slingshot, a bow and arrow, a pistol—with which to shoot the President down, while Erica scribbles frantically in a pocket notepad.
“Cal,” Philip cries, “help me!”
By doing what? Cal wonders. What can I do? If this were The Dream Impeachment of Harper Moc
ton, I could lie down and dream a human monster to justice. But this isn’t. Even if it were, where would I lie down? What would I dream?
Here, Philip, we’ve got the evil of an ancient demonic force on our hands—Satan itself, it seems—and its hold on the Nixon body will take more than wishful thinking to terminate…
“Who the hell’s thinking wishfully?” the homunculus calls down to him. “Move your butt, Pickford! I need you!”
Cal approaches the gurney over which the continuously inflating Nixon body and the dwarf are hovering. Because the President can go no higher, his expansion proceeds horizontally, spreading out under the ceiling like a thundercloud.
Riding the instep of the President’s foot, which is now a kind of teat on the underside of the ballooning monster, the glorified body of Horsy Stout fights to unpin the intaglio fish holding its shirt together. With one hand, this is hard, but Philip is using Horsy’s other hand to hang on for dear life.
“Climb up here!” he cries. “Now, you sorry cowboy!”
Glad for the weak lunar gravity, Cal climbs up on the gurney, takes one of the dwarf’s legs, and hoists himself high enough to grab the President’s other inflated foot. Frightening himself, he swings into its saddle the way a cowboy would mount a bronc in a rodeo chute. If the chute were upside down. If the bronc had the body of a huge rubber shoe with perforated wing tips.
Meanwhile, Bishop Marlin is holding a crucifix up and reciting, “ ‘Source of death! Root of evil! Seducer of men! Behold the Cross of the Most High God! I command thee: obey and begone!’ ”
Hunkered under its bloated posterior, Cal is surprised to hear the spirit of evil speak again. It does so from the vast pucker of King Richard’s mouth, and its voice fills the chamber like that of a chorus of spoiled children: “ ‘It is the essence of moral responsibility,’ ” it pontificates, “ ‘to determine beforehand the consequences of our action.’ ”
Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas Page 36
