Pandemonium

by Daryl Gregory

  I freaked out. They held me down and gave me something to knock me out.

  The swelling from my concussion receded, my vision cleared, but the noises kept coming back. Sometimes it was the pounding; sometimes it was just a wordless whisper that scritched and scraped inside my skull. They took blood, made me lie still in expensive machines, changed my diet. Mostly they fed me pills. If I was asleep, I couldn’t run out of the hospital.

  Mom and Dad were there—Dad was alive then—but it was Mom I remember sleeping in the chair beside my bed. The doctors decided it wasn’t a physical problem—not internal bleeding, not brain damage, not tumors—and it wasn’t like any possession anyone had ever heard of. They suggested that it was time to bring in a psychiatrist. It was Mom who found Dr. Aaron.

  Her office now was in an elegant two-story Victorian, a block from the train station. A big improvement over the flat-faced brick building she’d rented space in before.

  “Is this it?” Lew said.

  “This is the address.” I levered myself out of the Audi.

  “Comb your hair—it’s sticking up in back.”

  I’d had trouble getting up this morning. I’d taken two pills to make sure I’d stay out, and it had worked. Lew had started pounding on my door at 10:30—he couldn’t understand why the door was locked—and I’d finally stumbled out like a zombie.

  “I’ll be back in an hour to pick you up,” Lew said.

  “Is that a therapy hour or a real hour?”

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  “A TV hour. I’ll see you in forty-two minutes.”

  Inside, the house seemed empty. There was no receptionist at the tiny desk out front. On the wall were a dozen plastic in-box trays labeled with other “doctor” names. I stood for a while looking up the big staircase, wondering which room might be Dr. Aaron’s. It was a Saturday—maybe she wasn’t even here yet.

  I sat on the couch in the waiting room, a converted living room with a long-dormant fireplace and big windows that faced the street. I stared at the front door for a while, then picked up a copy of Newsweek. Marines were still in Kashmir. The Church of Scientology was suing the Church of Jesus Christ Informationalist for copyright infringement. Critics were panning Exorcist: The Musical. The issue was a month old, but it was all news to me—I’d lost touch with current events just before Christmas. I wondered if the demon from the airport had showed up in today’s papers. Somewhere upstairs a door opened and closed. I looked up, listening to the steps. A large woman in a black, knee-length sweater coat came down the stairs, and there was a moment before she turned and saw me. My God, I thought, she’s gotten fat. And then: I am such a jerk.

  “Del?”

  I stood up, stepped awkwardly around the coffee table. “Hi, Dr. Aaron.”

  I hadn’t seen her since I was in high school. Then she’d been trim, serious, and in my fourteen-year-old eyes, seriously older: at least in her forties. But she was no older than forty-five now. Back then she would have been in her early thirties—probably only a few years out of med school.

  I took her hand, unsure what was permissible—were we old acquaintances, or doctor and patient? Her open smile disarmed me. I leaned in and hugged her with my free arm, and she patted me on the back.

  “It’s good to see you, Del.” Her face seemed to come into focus. Short black hair, thin dark eyebrows like French accent marks, pale pale skin. The woman in front of me overlaid the hazier version in my memory, replaced her.

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  She led me up the stairs. “I’ve thought a lot about you over the years, wondering how you were doing.”

  “I’m doing okay.”

  She glanced back, judging this for herself. “Come in and catch me up.”

  Her office was anchored in heavy colors: dark red walls, deeply stained oak floors and wainscoting, a barge of a desk. Everything else in the room strained to lighten it up. A Persian rug shot with PeptoBismol pink, pale floral loveseat, lacy white drapes and lamp shades. The only thing that remained from her old office that I remembered was the chocolate leather armchair.

  She took my jacket and hung it behind the door. I sat on the loveseat, she sat in her armchair.

  We smiled at each other again. Old times.

  I said, “You’re not going to take notes?”

  “We’re just visiting, right? Besides, I don’t scribble as much as I used to. I found out I listen better without a notepad.” She shifted her weight, crossed her legs. “So you live in Colorado now. How did you get out there? The last we’d talked—well, I got a letter from you when you went to college. You couldn’t decide what to major in.”

  “I opted for a degree in Starving Artist.” I shifted into Amusing Summary mode. After a dozen “Hi, my name is Del” introductions with doctors and fellow patients and various small groups, I’d decided that this was the least painful way to cover the arid territory between college and my current life. The long job hunt to turn my Illinois State graphics arts degree into a job offer, the ignominious move back into my mother’s house, the series of low-paying jobs. I highlighted the most humiliating moments, such as deciding to move across the country with my girlfriend, then getting dumped as soon as we arrived.

  “I think it was thirty minutes after we’d emptied the U-Haul that she broke up with me.”

  She laughed. Thank God she laughed. “Well, she wasn’t going to break up with you until you unloaded, right?”

  “Oh no, I only date the smart girls. Anyway, I decided I liked Colorado. I went through another string of dead-end jobs, office temp 2 4

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  work, a few months at a web development shop that went bust, an even shorter stint drawing farm equipment ads for the PennySaver. My last job was at a decaling shop in Colorado Springs.”

  “Decaling?”

  “It’s like an automotive tattoo parlor. I tweaked the graphics files, managed this big Agfa film printer. And if I was a good boy, every few months I got to make up a new logo. I’m very proud of my Beaver in Hardhat with Wrench.”

  “You said, ‘your last job.’ You’re not working there anymore?”

  “Ah, no. They fired me officially a couple weeks ago. Of course, I’d stopped showing up weeks before, so I can’t blame them. ”

  She nodded. “When you called, you sounded upset.”

  “I did?” That night I’d made sure to calm down before I dialed. “I may have been a little stressed.”

  “You said you needed a prescription refill on some sleeping pills. What are you taking?”

  “Nembutal?”

  “Okay.” A slight pause, enough time to start me worrying. “When was this?” she asked. “How many milligrams?”

  “Fifty, at first, though he upped me to a hundred. This was probably the middle of January.” Her expression didn’t change, but something made me backpedal. “Maybe the end of January. But not every night—just when I need it. Occasionally.”

  She frowned. “So that would be before you lost your job, then. What happened to make you look for a doctor?”

  She hadn’t said whether she was going to give me the prescription or not. I felt like a junkie on a job interview. I described the crash at a level of detail between what I’d said to my mother and what I’d said to Lew and Amra. Smashing through the guardrail, yes, flipping and crunching to the bottom of the ravine and almost drowning, not so much.

  “And the noises started again,” she said. That’s what we’d called them in therapy, too—the noises. She’d immediately noticed the parallels between the crash and my swimming pool accident, and leaped

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  to meet me. I’d forgotten how quick she was, how in sync we could be. It was like we were picking up where we left off years ago.

  “When did they start?” she asked. “While you were in the ER?”

  “Faster this time. I was still in the car when they start
ed.”

  She pursed her lips. “So how are you handling it? Are you using your exercises?”

  “I’ve tried them.” I’d worked with Dr. Aaron for months before she taught me something that could smother the sensations in my head. The exercises were mental plays I could enact. The one that worked best was one I called Helm’s Deep. My mind was a fortress, and the noises—the pounding, the shaking, the metal-on-metal rasping—

  were orcs coming over the walls. All I had to do was knock them off the parapets. If they kept coming, I just had to back into the keep and seal the door. And if they came through the door, I retreated to the caves. Yeah, it was cowardly, but there were no frickin’ elves to help me out. And it had worked—until now.

  I ran a hand across my neck. “The door’s closed, but I can still feel them.”

  “How are you getting through the day?”

  I laughed. “I don’t know. I can’t just ignore it—sometimes it’s the loudest thing in the room.” Loudest was the wrong word, but she knew what I meant. “I’ve learned to not respond, at least in front of people. I keep my face blank; I try not to wince when it startles me. I just . . . concentrate on what people are saying. And I keep nodding.”

  “That must be incredibly tiring.”

  I laughed, ran a hand across my mouth. “You have no idea.”

  “The Nembutal . . . are you using that to help?”

  “During the day? No. That’s just to help me sleep. I mean, I can sleep most of the time, it’s just that sometimes I can’t sleep. Look, I know you’re worried about the pills—”

  “Nembutal’s a heavy-duty barbiturate, Del. They use it to knock people out before operations. It’s heavily addictive, and a hundred milligrams isn’t far from overdose territory. You have a few beers when you take one, and you could end up like Marilyn Monroe.”

  “I’m not about to get addicted. Trust me, that’s not what I’m wor-2 6

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  ried about.” I lifted my hands from my lap, dropped them. “Doctor. Do you think possession is real?”

  “Of course.” She tilted her head. I remembered that gesture from our sessions. “Del, I know you’re not making this up. And neither are the thousands of people who’ve been affected by it. ”

  “That’s not what I mean. Not possession the disorder. Oldfashioned possession. Do you believe you can be taken over by some outside force—some god or demon or whatever—or do you think it’s all just . . . delusions of delusional people?”

  “No one knows, Del. What matters is—”

  “Just tell me what you believe, Doctor. Yes or no. Are people just going crazy, or is it something else?”

  She frowned, seemed to weigh her answer. “I think that yes, there are people who are psychotic, or who have multiple personality disorder, who also say that they’re possessed. There are even people who aren’t psychotic who want so badly to be possessed, or want to explain some past trauma, that they convince themselves that they were seized by some higher power. I’m not talking about people who fake possession—there’ll always be people who’ll use the O. J. defense. But there are people like yourself, Del, who don’t want to be possessed, and who aren’t liars and aren’t ‘crazy.’ The Jungians—”

  “Oh God, not the Jungians.”

  “There’s a reason eighty percent of psychotherapists are Jungians. The idea of the collective unconscious, continually recurring archetypes, the nonphysical independence of the soul—all that makes a lot of sense given the evidence. There are so many cases of possession where the victim displays knowledge or skills that they don’t have access to, like seizing control of a plane, opening a bank vault. The literature is clear, and the Freudian explanation for possession just doesn’t stack up, in my estimation. All these possessions can’t be just the expression of the victim’s innermost drives.”

  “Well, there’s the Piper. He looks like pure id.”

  “But that’s an archetype too—the satyr.” She waved her hand.

  “We’re getting off track. You want to know what I believe.” She leaned back in her chair, crossed her hands in her lap. “I’m not a Jungian, and

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  I’m not convinced by the Freudians. I don’t subscribe to any one theory—for me, the jury’s still out. There’s definitely scientific evidence to suggest that the disorder is not entirely triggered by internal factors.”

  “ ‘Not entirely.’ ” I laughed. “You mean it may not be all in my head.”

  She smiled. “The important thing, Del, is that I believe in your experience. I believe that when you were five years old you lost control of your body. Does that mean you were taken over by some vodun spirit or a Communist telepath or an archetype from the collective unconscious? I don’t think so. But there are plenty of smart people who believe that’s exactly what’s going on. My own hope is that someday we’ll discover that there’s a biological trigger to possession—

  something viral, or genetic, or bacteriological—something we can fight. We already know that a few of the victims are Japanese, a few are girls, but the overwhelming majority are white men and boys—in America, anyway. Some are possessed repeatedly. Maybe there’s a genetic predisposition that’s triggered by something in the environment, some stressor, and that we can take steps to inoculate ourselves against. In fact, there are some researchers coming to ICOP this week—that’s the International—”

  “The conference on possession. I’m going.”

  “You are?” She frowned in confusion, then understood. “That’s why you came back this week.”

  “There’s a neurologist I want to talk to, Sunil Ram. From Stanford?”

  “I’ve heard of him.”

  “Let me show you something.” I got up and retrieved several folded papers from my jacket’s inner pocket. “These are just copies, but I thought you might be interested.”

  She took them from me, and slowly paged through them. “These are MRIs of your brain, I presume.”

  “My doctor back in Colorado Springs did several fMRIs while I was staying at the hospital.”

  She looked up sharply.

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  “I’ve annotated the interesting bits,” I said, moving on. “Do you know Dr. Ram’s theory about possession? Look at the right temporal lobe.”

  She was looking at me with concern. She glanced at the pages again, then handed them back to me. “Del, I’m not a neurologist. Why don’t you tell me what you think they mean.”

  What you think they mean.

  I folded the pages again. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s just a theory. Everybody’s got a theory, right?” I put them back in my jacket pocket, pulled the jacket on.

  “Del, were you hospitalized?”

  “I was getting to that.” I didn’t move from the door. “I was in for two weeks, which coincidentally, was exactly as long as my insurance paid for.”

  “Please, sit down. Tell me what happened. Why did your doctor suggest that you be hospitalized? Did you try to hurt yourself?”

  “No. Yes.” I shook my head. “I didn’t try to overdose, if that’s what you’re getting at. That’s not why he had me committed.”

  She waited.

  “If I tell you something, you have to promise not to do anything about it.”

  “Del, I can’t promise something like that without knowing what you’re going to tell me. Are you afraid I’m going to commit you?”

  I put my hand on the doorknob. “I need an answer on the prescription.”

  She blinked slowly. “I can’t just write you a prescription for a drug like that, Del. Sit down and talk to me. If you can explain to me what’s going on, and I’m convinced you’re not a danger to yourself or others, that might be a possibility. You’re a strong person. If you tell me you’re in control, I’ll take you at your word.”

  “I’m in complete control,” I said. “Almost all the time.
”

  I’d walked halfway back to Randhurst Mall before Lew coasted up beside me. “Hey good lookin’, be back to pick you up later.”

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  Cars queued up behind him. No one had honked yet. I climbed in. “I need a beer, an Italian beef, and a beer.”

  “You know what would be good with that? Beer.” He punched the accelerator, burping the tires, and then braked to a halt fifty yards later at a stoplight.

  He looked over at me. “If this is what therapy does for you, sign me up.”

  “Where’s Amra?”

  “Shopping. There’s this place called the Container Store that sells—”

  “Lingerie?”

  “Fish, but good guess. And Mom wants us to pick up groceries.”

  “Can you drive me into the city tomorrow?”

  Lew stared at me. “Why don’t you take the train?”

  “I don’t want to schlep my stuff through train stations.”

  “What, your one duffel bag? You are such a wuss.”

  “A wuss? You still say wuss? The light’s green.”

  He rolled through the intersection, but the traffic ahead of us wasn’t moving. “What are you going to do in the city?”

  “I’m going to see some people.”

  “What people? You don’t have any people.”

  “The Art Institute, then. Where are you going? You missed the turn.”

  “Nonsense. I have an unerring sense of direction.”

  “I’m driving on the way home.”

  “This car? Not a chance, Delacorte.”

  There was a strange car in the driveway—a dark blue Buick that looked freshly polished. We parked on the street. Lew opened the Audi’s trunk with his remote (“Because I can”), and we carried the grocery bags into the house. A man sat at the kitchen table across from my mother, his back to us. I didn’t recognize him at first, but then he turned and smiled broadly. “Well look who’s here,” he said.