Demon Camp

by Jennifer Percy

  “I’m the son of Jesus,” she says again. Her hands rise simultaneously, palms up. Her eyes roll back. Only white shows.

  The deliverees surround her, holding plates stacked high with meat.

  “I don’t get it,” Mary says. She’s wearing all red, shaking her hips, eating standing up. “Why are you the son of Jesus? You’re not a man.”

  “Because,” the son of Jesus says, and she pauses and her hands drop to the table in a loud slap, slides forward until her arms straighten and her breasts rest on the polished wood. “Because he told me. Because I know.”

  “No, I mean, you’re a woman. Why the son of Jesus?”

  “Man’s the original. Woman came from man. When a man and a woman marry they become one flesh. Two individuals but one entity. We’re all sons of God.” When she speaks it looks like she’s carving a clay statue really fast with her hands.

  “I’m the son of Jesus. A disciple.”

  Bobby says, “Are gay demons more difficult to get out than other demons?” He is a small man wearing a big shirt.

  “They aren’t harder to get out but it might be harder for the victim to recover from the session. Usually, homosexual demons attach themselves to their victims during a moment of sexual abuse. Most don’t realize this. They think there’s something wrong with them.”

  “But it’s just a demon?”

  “Just a demon.”

  The son of Jesus touches me with her hand. It’s cold like a wet paper towel. “I’ve never seen you before. Are you married?”

  I tell her I have a boyfriend. She drags me to the fridge, away from the others, and gets really close to my face. It’s covered in a thin patter of cream. “Any man who doesn’t propose within a year isn’t worth it.” She waits until I say, “Okay.”

  Back at the table, they’re talking about hormones and how they’re getting in the water, causing fish and stuff to change sex.

  I wander over to a couch and I sit with my legs pressed together, trying to finish my burger. A woman cuts my vision with her hand. “I’m Tanya,” she says. We shake hands. Another woman says, “I’m Lynne.” Lynne has short hair and green eyes like cut avocado. She has a peacock on her scarf.

  “I’m in training,” Tanya says. She holds her hand out as if waiting for a ring. Before I can shake, she pulls back and flips her hair with it. “I went through deliverance last summer and I just loved it. I came back to learn how to do it for the others.” She leans forward. “Girl,” she says, “get ready for wholeness.”

  Tanya had an accident but I don’t know what happened. Half her face is paralyzed.

  “Where do the demons go afterward?”

  Tim told me that if the demons are sent in the wrong direction, they might run straight into an unknowing pedestrian, a grandma, a cat, they might even run into my laptop and destroy my hard drive. Once when he was still young and inexperienced, Tim sent a demon into the street and it entered a man—just this regular guy walking to the grocery store—and the demon made him shatter the window of his Mercury Mountaineer in the church parking lot. The demon stole his radio.

  “I don’t know where they go,” she says. “Lynne, do you know?”

  Lynne shrugs.

  Tanya grabs her purse, digs, finds a piece of Juicy Fruit, chews. The purse is a clutch sewn from the ass part of Levi’s blue jeans. It has rhinestones and matches her jacket. “You’ll have to ask Tim.”

  Paper plates pile up in the garbage cans. Conversation grows quiet. The kitchen door closes. Women clean. Children are ordered to play. The demon camp welcome lunch is over.

  • • •

  The minister begins his talk on demonology in the living room while Katie watches. A few of the men and women being trained in deliverance sit quietly among us. Tim says they might do this—watch us—because they need to feel things out before the exorcism. Tim has on khaki shorts, high white socks, whiter running shoes, and a Hawaiian shirt—the tropical storm kind. He raises his arms, and the tips of his fingers catch light.

  He says we should listen to him but that he’s not God. He says Christianese is church talk for the unenlightened. He says the first time he learned to control the weather his wife was holding on to a piece of sheet metal and the wind blew her in the air like a parasail. He commanded the wind to stop and it stopped. He tells a story about an endless bowl of spaghetti that’s still somewhere out there in the world. He says people are trying to actively teach that there are no demons in America. He says once they were messed with by a demon named Jesus.

  He’s talking, rolling on the floor, rubbing his back against the wall, opening his hands near his cheeks and faking yelling. He’s making us laugh. Throbbing. Red-faced. Screaming. We’re sitting on the floor and in chairs and he is above us.

  “The lowest order of demons are the foot soldiers,” he says, “and in the Satanic Kingdom the most powerful demons rule over cities, states, countries. The demons assigned to warfare in the Western world use subtle tactics and attack ancillary measures in our life, trying to mess up schedules.”

  He demonstrates different ways people have come into the kingdom using the door as the metaphorical bridge between heaven and earth. He enters on his knees. He enters weeping. Indifferent. Screaming. He does it over and over again.

  He says he hates Fridays because he’s talking to all these demonized people.

  “Just remember,” he adds, “that if you go through deliverance too casually you’re going to come out shell-shocked.”

  He leans over, lets his back bend and his arms carry weight. He walks forward and stands in the middle of the circle, a defeated gorilla. He rises straight again. He says demons know how to deal with Westerners. He says he can make our demon materialize if we needed evidence.

  A simultaneous no, a begging, please don’t!

  Katie pulls a sweat cloth from her purse. She runs to him, makes the handoff, sprints back to her chair like those fast kids on the tennis court. Tim wipes his forehead and throws himself against the wall again. He shakes, letting his lips slack and glisten. “Does anyone have any questions?” he says.

  “What’re you going to do to us?” “Will it hurt?” “What is it like when the demon leaves?” “Will we know when it’s gone?” “Will we feel it?”

  Tim says he won’t touch us. That it’s not like The Exorcist, where people are puking and they have to stab you in the heart and your head is spinning and the devil is trying to have sex with you and your face is rotting. They vote on the demon—like a demon democracy—and the other demons follow. It’s quiet. It just takes a minute.

  He sits down and his hands make a beautiful curving movement to his thighs. He says some of the exorcists talk directly to God. Some see pictures. Some see scenes from movies. Caleb sees scenes from Die Hard.

  “What if it’s something you can’t get rid of?”

  “We’ve seen everything,” he says.

  I have a shopping demon! Lynne yells. I’ve got a divorce demon. I’ve got a retirement demon. I’ve got a debt demon. The minister laughs, stomps his feet.

  I have an ice-cream demon, I say. No one laughs.

  • • •

  We take a snack break and eat peanuts. The minister eats a whole chicken in the garage.

  “What kind of demon did you have?” I ask the saved man next to me. He’s tan with white hair and a blue Hawaiian shirt. He used to play Halo on the weekend with the minister.

  “Destroyer,” he says. “Two heart attacks. Two lightning strikes. Nearly drowned under a tipped canoe. Car accident. Horse accident. And for five seconds, I was dead. I was having heart surgery and I saw it.”

  “How did you get it?”

  “I was a Baptist,” he says. “I’ll tell you whatever you want tomorrow. We shouldn’t even be talking.” He runs away and I head to the bathroom but Tanya blocks me. “I saw half a dog in my room last night.”

  “You saw half a dog?”

  “A dog means something.”

  “What demon
did you have?”

  “The fear demon. By the way, does anyone have any ibuprofen? My back hurts.”

  I dig around in my purse but the son of Jesus intercepts me: “Who needs ibuprofen when you have God?”

  The son of Jesus prays over Tanya. They hear a pop. Tanya’s back is okay.

  “My back hurts too,” I say for no particular reason.

  They wave me over. They pray but nothing cracks. The son of Jesus asks the minister’s ten-year-old granddaughter for help. The girl puts her hand on my stomach and looks into my eyes. She says my stomach is moving. She can see it moving. I feel her heat and it’s the first time I’m scared of a little girl. They recite a prayer about lamb’s blood and they rub imaginary lamb’s blood all over my face.

  Mary and Vivian, the wives of Bobby and Noah, are talking by the coffee machine. “I hate treadmills,” Vivian says. “I’m a dancer at heart.” Vivian jumps around when she speaks.

  “I like walking, myself,” Mary says, “because then I can talk to God. That’s where I get my ideas.”

  “Ideas for what?” I say.

  Mary makes a sound like air leaving a balloon and shifts her weight toward me. “I’m a prophetic painter. God shows me things. He shows me the river and the stagnant part of the water and says that’s how he feels when I ignore him. He says that though the stagnant area is full of life, faith makes him all foamy and free and then he can spread the life all over the river.”

  While the women talk, an old lady with loose, blood-speckled rags on her feet starts coming toward me. “I love you,” she whispers. Her cold hands wrap around my neck. She wears sport sandals. “I love you.” I take her body in my arms. “I love you.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Brenda and I make the food.” Her skin is blue almost all the way through, as if her veins had floated up to the surface and melted. She speaks in quick gulps.

  “It’s my heart,” she says. “It works only one third of what it should.”

  “That’s why you’re here?”

  “I don’t want your pity. I get bronchitis terribly. I have thyroid problems. I have diabetes. I have nerve problems caused by the diabetes. My bad cholesterol is good but my good cholesterol is bad. And you know what? When I sleep, I stop breathing. Don’t ask me how I got here. I do not know for certain. We did a lot of studying. Bible studying. Deep down Bible studying. But I didn’t understand talking to God. You gotta understand poor Methodists don’t tell you to talk to God, they tell you to talk to the ceiling.”

  Brenda is Portal born and raised. For ten years every Sunday, she walked two blocks to the Portal Methodist Church to hear the sermon of Myra Beer, who said there had to be more to God than what they were experiencing. Myra said the best way to find out was to go outside and look for it. So Brenda left and spent days at home waiting for God. One day she heard screaming from the streets. Downtown she found a red circus tent shaking with voices. She pushed through the crowd until she faced the traveling preacher with his handsome nose and said, I surrender all.

  “Did I know what all that meant?” she says. “Nope. I hadn’t gotten that far.” She takes her sleeve and wipes a drip on her nose.

  A group of teenagers passing through town, all wearing black, linger by the doors, peering inside, pointing fingers.

  “Ain’t they cute,” Brenda says. “I hear they have sex in the school bathroom.” She sucks her chin into her neck. “I told my son, ‘I need to give you some sex education.’ And he told me, ‘Oh, Mama, you already did. You said don’t sleep with any woman until you’re married and when you’re married your wife will teach you everything you need to know!’ He’s a good boy—straight from the Lord, this one. After the Columbine shooting I went up to him and I said, ‘Are you okay? What did you think about all that? What would you have done if you were there?’ He told me, ‘Mama, the Lord would either take care of me or take me home!’ He’s a good boy. You’d like him. Real good boy.” A quick smile. Her throat is a long white curve. “The devil tried to kill him once,” she adds. “Fell into a pond. Anyway, God told the Mathers to develop a college here and, well, them folks, they kinda do what God tells them to do—whether it makes sense or not.”

  There’s a kid waving at us from across the street. We can see him through the windows. He’s standing outside the ING general store.

  “That kid,” she says. “They found him in a ditch. His name is Beasley. He’s a good kid.”

  The kid won’t stop waving. He’s moving his feet, bouncing, trying to raise his arms higher. With all the sun, I can’t figure out how he sees us through the glass. I wonder if he’s waving at his own reflection.

  “What was he doing in a ditch?”

  “Same as anybody you find in a ditch. I don’t think he knew either.”

  A woman, maybe his mother, comes out of the store behind Beasley. She runs her fingers through his hair. He’s shirtless and the skin on his stomach hangs over his pelvis like a skirt.

  “Sweet boy, that Beasley. Sweet boy.”

  “What demon did you have?”

  “One nasty big Jezebel. Nasty. They told me it was like a nasty toenail that had been cut but was still trying to hang on. I wish I could say deliverance was awesome—that it was the most fantastic thing I’ve ever done. But it was awful.” She flaps her arms, beats her thighs. “I’m from the house of nasty! I used to get real mad at my husband because he’d be bossing me around. I was so mad sometimes I could eat nails. Sometimes I’d go home and I’d say, ‘God, I hate him. I’ll tell you right now. I’ll be the first one to confess. I don’t care. I hate him. What’re you going to do about it?’ God found the hurt spot and put his finger on it. I didn’t get mad as much after that. You know, we’ve been married for thirty years. But this was before deliverance. God did a lot for me before deliverance. Now, deliverance. That was hard. That was really hard. One of the things they did was cut the generational curse line. That’s how I knew I was from the house of nasty. Tim said I was.”

  I asked her to explain the house of nasty.

  Brenda smiles and the corners of her eyes crumple like silk.

  She looks off at a corner of the room. “I see demons. They’re little black things that run around.”

  • • •

  We gather again in the back room and the minister writes the word enemy on the board.

  He says don’t take any sass from the demons. He says they use the term warfare for a practical reason: people are dying. They’re dying and slipping into eternal darkness. He steps into a square of sun and cups his hands in the light, almost like he can hold it and drink it.

  “You’re being stalked,” he says. “The enemy’s had six thousand years to practice. And let me tell you, he’s good at his job.”

  Attacks begin as early as three days before deliverance. Sickness, car breakdowns, church uproars. One couple had been trying to come for five years. They’ve never made it.

  Mary turns to her husband, Noah. “Were we attacked?”

  Noah can’t think of any attacks.

  The old lady says her car broke down.

  “Listen, don’t focus on the war stories of the demonic guys. Just relax. If you don’t, the demon will send you right out that door.”

  The minister hands out demon workbooks. A black plastic spiral holds photocopied pages. On the cover, images of bullet holes. There’s even a blank space to write down the name of your demon in case you forget. “Here,” he says, tossing them our way. “A compilation of everything I’ve ever learned about demons. Who they are and the nature of them.” Topics include Territorial Level Warfare, Primary Level Warfare, Kingdom of Darkness and the Realm of Demons, Carnal Christians, Prophecy 101, Demonology 101, Evidence for the Existence of Demons, The Punishment Crescendo (Sin Effect = X), Elementary Demonology, The Origins of Demons, The Nature of Demons.

  The minister keeps a document on his desktop called “Demons I Have Met.” It’s a list of eighty names, but he’s met at least four hundre
d demons.

  Walter has a question. “Do demons speak English?”

  The minister says they have their own demon language but they understand all earthly languages. “They’re brilliant,” he says.

  The demons can be fear-based, anger-based, pleaser-based, martyr-based, sex-based.

  “These aren’t the names of the demons,” he explains. “These are their functions. Their modus operandi. It’s what the demons use to manipulate their victims.”

  The minister steps carefully back into the square of light, giving him a look of unearned holiness. “You’ll know and understand your life in the completely different realm of angels and demons.”

  Brother John settles more deeply into the couch.

  “What’s the operational plan of a demon?” the minister asks.

  Kill! Steal! Destroy!

  “It’s terrible. Don’t think too much while you’re here or you’ll go crazy.” That’s why he calls it the living room experience. To calm people down. He’s been known to give deliverance while eating a cookie. “I have to make jokes about everything because otherwise people will lose their minds.”

  • • •

  The minister tells us these church people in New Jersey wanted to give an eight-year-old girl an exorcism and decided that the demon probably needed some outlet to leave her body. They drilled a hole in the back of her foot and locked her in the church basement for three days. The foot got infected and they had to amputate it.

  Some ministers make you barf in a bag. Once a man choked his granddaughter to death trying to get the demons out while the mother danced naked and crazy. The police stopped her with a stunt gun. In Milwaukee a boy died because the pastor sat on him trying to get the demons out. In Africa, a pastor poured hot candle wax on the belly of a girl and then ripped it off with his teeth. Steel crucifix in the throat. Wood crucifix in the brain. A lethal potion of ammonia, vinegar, cayenne pepper, and oil. Wooden cheese board. Ceremonial walrus bone.

  “A lot of you will want to see your demon manifest during deliverance. Trust me, you don’t. Has anyone ever seen a demon?”

  Three people raise their hands. Noah says they looked like wolves; Mary says her demon looked like a faceless man with a dark robe and funky hands; Vivian says she saw a short, squat demon that walked right up to her door.