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time he tried to kill himself,” he continued in that distant voice, “I seized his body, wrote the emergency room number on the palm of his hand, and awakened him. But the watershed moment came in 1982. Phil experienced a stroke followed by cardiac arrest, his third and most damaging attack. In order to restart his heart and resume blood flow to the brain, I had to seize complete control of biological functions. It was necessary for me to install a holographic shard of my essence.”
“You possessed him.”
He shook water from his hands—two economical flicks of his wrists—and drew a paper towel from the stack above the sink. Outside, someone was shouting, but I couldn’t make out the words. “I continue to pump this heart, to work these lungs. I fear that if I left this body for very long, he would die.”
“Okay, but . . .” I shook my head. “Why?” I laughed. He regarded me calmly, and that only made me laugh harder. “I mean, why not just let him die? It was his time, right? What good are you doing him walking around in his body?”
His head tilted, and he smiled. “That’s the question each of us must ask.”
He pushed open the bathroom door and the noise from the bar rushed in: angry shouts, amused catcalls, drunken hoots. A crash as some very large piece of glass—or maybe a hundred smaller pieces—
struck something hard and shattered.
Valis held the door for me. Across the room, a bare-chested man hung above the bar by one arm, legs tucked up under him, swinging from the rack of wineglasses. The rack alongside the short end of the bar had already been pulled down.
The swinging man was clad only in a kind of leaf-covered loincloth. His face was painted red, and little horns protruded from his skull. In his free hand he held a wooden panpipe. At the top of his swing he let go, arced through the air, and came down feetfirst on a round table.
“Time to dance, my revelers!” he shouted.
“Jesus, it’s just like the Olympics,” someone near me said.
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It was the same thing the Piper had shouted back in 2002. A Finnish speed skater, Arttu Heikkinen, was on the last thousand meters of the 5000-meter race, half a lap ahead of the nearest competitor, on pace to break the world record. Suddenly Heikkinen slowed, looked around until he spotted the TV cameras, and beamed. The second-place skater started to pass on the outside. Heikkinen tripped him, sending him sliding into the padded walls, and burst out laughing. He ripped his Lycra suit down the middle and let it hang like a half-shed skin. And then he turned in a circle, and commanded the spectators in the arena to dance. Heikkinen never recovered from the shame and never appeared in another race.
Most of the people in the bar were trying to get away now, but others were frozen in their seats. I pushed through the outrushing crowd, bouncing off bodies, trying to get closer. The Piper hopped onto the bar’s yellow chair, and then leaped over the back of a couch, landing next to a red-haired woman. She screamed.
“I . . . said . . . dance!” the Piper exclaimed. He yanked her to her feet, laughing maniacally. The woman, thin and perhaps forty years old, shook her head frantically, tears already running down her cheeks.
“Hey mister,” I said.
The Piper turned and leered down at me. “Ye-es?”
I didn’t know what was in the glass—water, 7Up, vodka—something clear. I shoved it at him, splashing his face. He sputtered, blinked. The woman yanked her arm free.
“Get the hell out of here,” I said. “You’re not fooling anyone.”
He stared at me. Whatever he’d used to paint his face was running onto his chest in scarlet streaks.
“I said, get out.”
He stepped down off the couch. “Jeez, take it easy. Take a fucking joke.” He slumped toward the open end of the room that connected to the hotel proper. A long moment, and one of the male bartenders ran past me, trying to catch him.
Someone slapped me on the back. Someone else pushed a shot glass into my hand. Tom, laughing. “How’d you know, man? How’d you fucking know?”
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. . .
“—wouldn’t even listen to me. He just walked away. All I’m talking about is taking down the antenna. There’s some hardware in our heads that’s picking up broadcasts from the All Demon Network, and we just have to figure out a way to pull the plug, or at least change the fucking channel. I’m not even talking about real surgery. We wouldn’t have to even drill into the lobe, you could do it with microwaves, the way they can kill off tumors with these intersecting microwaves, all of
’em too low powered to hurt you except at the exact point where they overlap. Is that so much to ask, to just consider it?”
Selena nodded sympathetically. Or maybe she was just humoring me. I chose to take the sympathy.
“You can’t do that,” the Hispanic kid said, interrupting. Who wasn’t Hispanic, it had turned out, but Armenian. “I’ve read about this Dr. Ram guy, and what he’s talking about is cutting out the Eye of Shiva.”
“The whatsis?” I dimly remembered somebody mentioning that earlier.
“The hidden eye that the ancients believed opened them up to God,” Tom said. “In Phil’s terms, it was the thing that allowed him to receive the information that Valis was firing at him. If you look back at—”
Tom suddenly lurched forward, his drink sloshing onto the carpet. A huge man in a T-shirt and cargo shorts had backed into him. “Someone stole my costume! It was right here! Who stole my costume?” He turned, and I recognized the fat man from in front of the Hyatt this morning, the one dressed as the Truth.
“Nobody here, man,” Tom said.
The fat man scowled, then shoved off in a new direction. “Where’s my fucking fedora!”
The Hispa—Armenian kid gripped me by the arm. “Del, look at me. Do you really want some quack to cut out your connection to God?”
“God? You think this—you think these things are God? Smoke-
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stack Johnny, the Piper, the Fat Boy?” I reached for my glass, my glass of brown something. “Then God is a fucking whack job.” I had to concentrate: the tips of my fingers had gone numb, as had my lips, and getting the glass to my mouth involved levels of concentration I usually reserved for winning kewpie dolls with the Claw. Drop a quarter, win a Wild Turkey.
Whose hotel room was this?
“The Eye can destroy, too,” the kid said. “Valis says that the carrier signal is also harmful radiation. Maybe some people can’t handle the information when it hits them. These deviants get overridden by the purity of the info-stream.”
“We should go,” Selena said.
“Or maybe that’s the real message getting through,” Tom said.
“Shiva’s two-sided, man—protector of the weak, but destroyer of the wicked. If you try to shut that down, you’re removing the divine essence from humanity.”
“Divine essence?” I said. “Hey, I’m Fat Boy, I’ll possess a guy and make him eat ten pounds of chocolate at one sitting! Yeah, that’s divine, that’s fucking deep, that’s like . . .” I couldn’t think what that was like. It was like something, though. “All I’m saying, we shouldn’t have to live in fear like this. I mean, Christ, ever since Eisenhower’s assassination, the Japanese have been treated like dogs, and the president still can’t appear on live television—everything’s a fucking tape delay!
And the Secret Service guys are standing by with tranqs in case he gets all Nixon on them!”
“Nixon wasn’t possessed,” somebody said. “He was just crazy.”
“All I am saying—”
“Is that we can’t live like this,” the kid said. “But we can. We do. Even the Israelis get back on the bus.”
“We should go,” Selena said again. Not just for the second time—
she’d been saying it since Valis left an hour ago, escorted by a trio
of young people.
“Let me get one for the road,” Tom said. He pulled another Coors Light can from the case, then took something from his pocket—a flap 8 2
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of vinyl. He wrapped it around the beer, transforming it into a publicly respectable Mountain Dew can. A RePubliCan.
“You know,” I said, struck by a brilliant thought. “If you poured the beer out now, and replaced it with Mountain Dew, then you’d have a fake fake.”
“You don’t say,” Tom said.
“A Valis Special!”
Selena said, “You’re not driving anywhere, are you, Del?” I shook my head vigorously and waved good-bye.
Sometime later I looked around and realized I didn’t know the name of anyone in the room. Even the Armenian kid had vanished. I left the party and started looking for a way up to my floor. I passed a sandwich sign announcing possession movies playing in a ballroom—
Omen, Being John Malkovich, Fail-Safe, 2001: A Space Odyssey—and veered toward the doors, but then I saw the bank of elevators and corrected course. A door opened and a bunch of us pressed inside. “Eighteenth floor,” I said. A minute later the elevator hissed open like an airlock, and someone behind me tapped me between my shoulder blades. That bit of kinetic energy sent me slowly drifting down the hall.
My vision had tunneled down to the wrong end of a cheap telescope: everything was too small and too far away. I drifted down to my door.
The key card eventually appeared in my hand, a clumsy magic trick. I slid it in, slid it out, slid it in again . . . Door sex. The red light blinked at me, refusing to turn green. I grabbed the handle, stared into the bubble lens of the peephole. The thing in my head stomped and rattled. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Open the fucking—
I leaned back from the door, squinted at the number. This wasn’t my floor. But I’d been here earlier; I’d walked past that prehistoric-size plant . . .
Oh, right. Dr. Ram.
Dr. Fucking Ram.
The demon thrashed in my head. I was crashing. Lucite banks of
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processors began to shut down in my brain, one by one, overwhelmed by alcohol and demons. Daisy, Daisy . . .
Then I remembered the chains. I couldn’t be wandering around like this. Had to get them chains.
I turned, unsure now which way led back to the elevators. The hallway stretched into the distance, door after door after door, the infinite regress of a mirrored mirror. 6
I woke up screaming, limbs paralyzed by restraints. This wasn’t unusual. Over the past few months, it had become routine. What was new was the intense light in my eyes, the number of people around me, and the particular quality of the pain. Someone just out of sight—a tall, blond nurse with blue eyes, I think—was scraping the skin off my hands with a carpenter’s file, or perhaps playing a butane torch over my knuckles. Another tall, blond person was working behind me. The holes in the top of my skull had already been drilled, and now she was inserting the tiny wires that would carry electricity into the folds of the angular gyrus. Other Scandinavians, dressed in brilliant white, moved in and out of the light, haloed and indistinct, murmuring in Swedish. However, when I shut my mouth and stopped screaming, a female voice said, “Thank you.” So at least one of them was bilingual.
The butane treatment went on for a long time. I waited for the electricity to travel down the wires into my gray matter and jolt me out of my body. I was looking forward to seeing what the room looked like from the ceiling: my body stretched out on a tasteful pine gurney by IKEA, the sensuous nurses bent over my empty tin can of a body, their crisp uniforms unbuttoned to expose milky white cleavage.
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“Hit me!” I commanded in my best James Brown.
“Okay, that’s it,” a male voice said. In English again, unless my hyperstimulated lobes, drawing on race memory encoded in my DNA, were automatically translating. “Take him down to the drunk tank.”
That’s right, I’d been drinking. Coors Light, mostly. Coors Fucking Light! Was it even possible to get drunk on Coors Light?
Evidently.
Walls zipped past. Elevators dropped and rose. The ambulance rumbled. Time progressed in a series of jump-cuts: Now, Now, Now. Something bad had happened. Several bad things. I was almost sure of it.
I needed to remember something important. Or unforget it. What was that word again?
I looked into the upside-down face of the man pushing my gurney into the building.
“Anamnesis,” I said proudly.
“Uh-huh,” he said.
Amra and My Very Bigger Brother were waiting for me in the busy front room of the First District Police Station.
“Good morning, starshine,” Lew said.
I smiled weakly. I felt nauseous, still slightly drunk. My body felt like it had been yanked apart and snapped back together by clumsy children. My hands ached fiercely. I suspected the pain would only get worse as the alcohol wore off.
“Thanks for this,” I said. This: driving downtown on a Monday morning; putting up money for bail; existing. “Did you tell Mom?”
“What, and kill her?” he said.
“Thank you,” I said. I didn’t have the energy for banter. Amra lightly touched one bandaged hand. “Does it hurt?”
“Little bit.” I’d woken up with my right hand wrapped from wrist to fingers, turning it into a club. My left hand was only partially wrapped, but blood had seeped through the bandages on my palm like a stigmata. The tips of my fingers were stained black from the fingerprinting. Or so I assumed. I couldn’t remember that. 8 6
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The bandages had made it difficult to sign the I-Bond, the piece of paper releasing me on my own recognizance until my court date on April 20. My thought was that if I was still cognizant of anything by then, I’d be more than happy to show up.
We walked slowly toward the front door. I shuffled like an old man. I’d pulled a muscle in my lower back, and my shoulders felt shredded, as if I’d tried to bench press a piano. I hadn’t felt this bad since the car accident.
“I think something bad happened last night,” I said. Lew laughed. “You think? They told us you tore up a hotel room and half a hallway. Mirrors, TV, broken furniture. Total rock star. And I guess you also banged up three security guards before they tied you down.”
“Oh.”
“Oh yeah.”
Amra opened the door for me. Sunlight smacked me in the face.
“The cop we talked to said they haven’t filed assault charges yet, though that could be coming,” she said. “As for the damages, he said we should talk to the hotel, sometimes they’ll drop the criminal mischief charge if—”
I stopped them. “Where’s my bag?”
“What, your duffel bag?” Lew said.
“I need my bag.”
“Jesus Christ, Del, you’re worried about your fucking luggage?” he said. “Forget that shit. You can buy some more clothes. Your bigger problem is that you’re about to do time. We’ve got to get you a lawyer, maybe find a—”
“Do the cops have it? I need my bag, Lew. Find out what happened to my bag.”
He blinked, lowered his voice. “What’s the matter with you? You got drugs in there or something?”
“No,” I said scornfully. But then realized that wasn’t true. The Nembutal. But that was legal, and it wasn’t what I was worried about.
“Please,” I said. “Just find out what they did with it. See if the cops have it.”
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He shook his head in disgust, but then he turned and went back to the counter. I sat down on one of the red plastic chairs and rested my arms on my knees. I could feel every pulse in my hands.
“He’s worried about you,” Amra said, after a while. “We’re both worried. This is not just about getting drunk, is it?”
“Nope.”
>
“This sounds like possession, Del.”
“Yep.” I couldn’t look up. The thing in my head was dormant; whether it was because it was worn down by the night’s exertions or masked by the hangover, I couldn’t tell. I wanted to lie down on the dusty linoleum, because it looked smooth and cool. Lew walked back. “They say they don’t have anything of yours besides what you had in your pockets.”
“Fuck,” I said.
“Come on, I’ll loan you some clothes when we get to my house.”
He was already half out the door.
“We have to go back to the Hyatt,” I said.
Lew, outlined in harsh sunlight, stopped, sighed, then slowly shook his head again, signaling a new level of disgust. I wished he would stop doing that.
“On the way there,” I said, “I’ll tell you everything.”
I told them everything. Almost everything. Something, anyway.
“And that’s what happened last night?” Lew said. “This wolfing out thing?”
Lew was driving again, but I was too nauseous to sit in the back, so Amra had let me take the front passenger seat. I spent most of the drive with the side of my head pressed to the cool window.
“I must have passed out before I got back to my room,” I said. “Or I got back to my room and couldn’t get the restraints on. Either way, I lost control.” Lost it completely. It wasn’t just property damage this time. I’d beaten up security guards.
Amra said, “And you’re sure that this demon is the Hellion, the same one who possessed you when you were a kid?”
“I think so. I don’t know.”
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But I did know. It had always been in there, sleeping, even when I couldn’t feel it. The car accident had merely woken it up.
“You said it was just noises,” Lew said. “You said it was no big deal—this Dr. Ram guy was just going to help you with the noises. You didn’t say anything about surgery, or exorcism, or any of that shit.”
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