“The police want to talk to you about that doctor who died downtown. And the people you’ve been seeing—this Bertram person won’t stop visiting Lew, and that old woman at the motel. There are things they’re not saying, Del. It’s not just me, Amra thinks so too. And this woman you left with—she’s a priest?”
I started to answer and she interrupted me. “Del, you need to be careful. These people will tell you they have all the answers. They’ll make all kinds of promises. But they can’t help you. Come home, talk to someone objective, someone we trust. I’ll call Dr. Aaron. I’m sure she can—”
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“I’m sorry, Mom. I can’t.”
She kept talking. All I could do was repeat that I was sorry, that I couldn’t come back home, that she shouldn’t worry about me. I couldn’t tell her that she was talking to an imposter.
“Take care of Lew,” I said. “I’ll call again as soon as I can.”
I hung up the phone. Braced myself against the stove, leaning over the cold cast-iron burners. Breathing. Still fucking breathing. O’Connell moved into my peripheral vision. After a while she said, “We have some things we’d like you to look at.”
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
Meg and Fred Waldheim looked up as I came in, seemed to study me as I sat opposite the wheelchair. I had to give them this much: they didn’t look afraid. Fred seemed positively fascinated, like a bombsniffing dog nosing a dubious suitcase. Meg said, “You must be struggling to come to terms with the situation.”
I picked up one of the books. Smokestack Johnny Routes, 1946–1986. “What situation is that, exactly?” I said. Fred nodded, as if I’d made an excellent point. “We only saw what happened during the session, what you saw on the video,” he said. His beard obscured his mouth so that it was hard to tell when his lips were moving. Maybe it was a ventriloquist act, and I was supposed to play along and talk to the wheelchair. “We can make guesses, but no one can tell us what it means but you.”
“Bullshit. We all know what’s going on.”
“Why don’t you tell us?” Meg said. Soft, comforting Meg. I shook my head. They might be grand wizards of an elite Gnostic/Jungian secret society, but they sounded like every psychiatrist I’d ever met.
“All right then, let me explain it to you. I’m a fucking demon, okay?” Meg blinked, but didn’t interrupt me. “Something happened when I was—when Del was five. The Hellion took him, but it didn’t let go. He stayed. He went native.”
I was crying again, dammit. I never had controlled everything about this body. Not the way I’d controlled Lew.
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I wiped a hand across my eyes. “Hey, what do they call it when the hostage falls in love with his captors? The Patty Hearst thing.”
“Stockholm syndrome,” Fred said.
“That’s it. That’s what happened to me. I fell in love with the people who strapped me to that bed. Lew, my dad, my mom—” My mom. I couldn’t get my grammar straight. My dad. My mom. My life. A problem with possessives.
“But here’s the kicker,” I said. “I used to think, hey, if things get really bad, at least I have suicide as an exit strategy. But now—” I started to laugh. “Now I don’t even know how to kill myself.”
O’Connell put a hand on my arm. “Del . . .”
“Don’t touch me,” I said, and yanked my arm away from her. The three of them looked at me in shock.
I sighed. Nodded toward the stacks of folders.
“So what’s the deal?” I said. “You guys have something in your X-files that’ll help me with that?”
The Other Dr. Waldheim shrugged. “You never know.”
The Red Book files contained the details of every possession since 1895—and it eventually became clear to me that they wanted me to look at every damn one of them. And comment. About what? Anything that came to mind. They were big into free association.
“Synchronicity,” Fred kept saying. “Everything’s connected.” Meg Waldheim kept a tape recorder rolling at all times. We worked past supper the first night, then picked up again at breakfast. The Waldheims tag-teamed their way through lectures on the epidemiology of possession. Jungians saw evidence that archetypes had been seizing human minds since prehistory. In America demon sightings had been recorded since the Pilgrims, but most scholars pegged the start of the modern possession epidemic at the first publicized appearance of the Captain on July 12, 1944. The Truth and the Kamikaze came soon after. By 1949, the Hellion, Smokestack Johnny, the Painter, the Little Angel, and an infrequently seen demon called the Boy Marvel had all taken victims, though the exact dates of their first appearances were in dispute.
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“How about this one?” O’Connell said. She kept coming back to a particular stack of pictures, like a cop pressing mug shots into my hands. Except these were all pictures of the victims.
“No,” I said for the hundredth time. I had my own favorite pictures, from an overstuffed folder called Nixon’s War on Possession: clinical shots from the fifties and sixties of dark-suited “psychics” wired up to refrigerator-sized boxes; bare-chested Japanese men—God help the Japanese after Eisenhower—surrounded by pentagrams, a Tesla coil at each point in the star; dog-collared priests holding jumper cables to steel mesh satellite dishes. If Nixon’s Secret Service guys hadn’t taken their boss out in ’74 he’d probably still be president and the internment camps would still be open. O’Connell held up a black-and-white photo. It looked as if it had been taken in the fifties. “You’re hardly looking. Are you sure he’s not familiar?”
The problem was that they were all familiar. A parade of boys with sharp noses and mischievous smiles and blond, cowlicked hair.
“I told you,” I said. “I don’t remember being any of these kids.”
“Give it time, Del,” Fred said. They all still called me Del.
“Your conscious mind is only one part of the psyche,” Meg said, picking up the attack. “That conscious shard is constrained by space and time, but the rest of the psyche—”
“I know, I know, the rest has its tail in the collective unconscious.”
God was I tired of talking about the collective unconscious. Talking about it, reading about it, dreaming about it. O’Connell and Meg Waldheim pushed books into my hands like missionaries. Jungians described the CU as a kind of aboriginal dreamtime tarted up with quantum mechanical theory—a late ornamentation, after Wolfgang Pauli became one of Jung’s patients. This vast reservoir of human thought was a primordial soup that gave birth to the archetypes—which were either just patterns or objectively real independent personalities, depending on which of Jung’s books you were reading, and who his audience was at the time. Jung seized upon demons and possession as confirmation of his ideas, and his public pronouncements began to match his private beliefs. Ghosts entangled them-
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selves in the nervous systems of the living; telepathy and precognition worked by virtue of the trans-spatial, faster-than-light medium of the collective unconscious; archetypes stalked the Earth.
“Look,” I said. “What if there is no connecting medium? What if the demons have nothing to do with archetypes?” I pushed away from the table. We’d been camped out in the dining room all this time, because that’s where the files were. “The philosophizing angels and snake women Jung saw don’t have much in common with American demons. How many gun-toting vigilantes did Jung meet when he was touring the underworld?”
“Now you’re just being difficult,” O’Connell said.
“The archetypes don’t change,” Meg said, voice even as always.
“But their expression at any given time is filtered through culture. The Truth is an imago of the father, the destroyer and protector, like Shiva and Abraxas. The Captain is our Siegfried, the eternal hero. And the Piper, obviously, is just an a
spect of the Trickster.”
“There are no new ideas,” Fred said from behind his book.
“There’s only repackaging.”
“What about Valis?” I said.
“A purely rational being, absent of emotion,” Meg said. “The representation of thought itself, dressed in technological garb.”
“You said Valis was a fake,” I said to O’Connell.
“He is. Dick made him up—writers do that.”
“Maybe he did make him up, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a demon. Maybe he’ll disappear when Dick dies—kill the author, kill the demon.”
“You can’t kill an archetype,” Fred said.
I stood up. “You know what? I don’t feel like a fucking archetype.”
I walked around the end of the table and pulled out the wheelchair. Fred looked up from his book with alarm.
“I don’t know what the hell I am,” I said. “But I know one thing. I don’t belong here.” O’Connell tried to interrupt, but I cut her off.
“Here. In this body.” I gripped the edge of the wheelchair, rolled it into me. “It’s not mine. There’s a kid who got it taken away from him. So.” I pushed the chair forward again, pulled it back. I couldn’t look at 2 0 8
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their faces. “So why don’t we do something useful and find me a body. My own goat. Maybe a murderer or something, somebody who doesn’t deserve their skin anymore.” I looked up. “How about that? Got any serial killers in those files?”
“This isn’t all about you and the boy,” O’Connell said.
“No? Who the hell is it about then?”
She gestured at the fan of pictures on the table. “Those kids. Toby. Dr. Ram. Everybody who’s been possessed, everybody who’s had their lives ruined by the demons.”
“You mean you.”
“Yes, me too!” She was on her feet now, her pale skin flushed.
“And your brother, and your mother, and everyone who’s ever—”
Meg said, “Siobhan, please . . .”
O’Connell stalked toward me. “We have a chance here—maybe the first real chance we’ve ever had. You’re one of them, Del. What they know, you know. We can find out how the demons do what they do; we can find out how to turn you—”
She shut her mouth.
I raised my eyebrows. “You were about to say, turn me off.”
The Waldheims watched us. No one said anything.
“Okay.” I nodded, ran a hand through my hair. “I can get behind that. That’s what I want too. Tell me how.”
O’Connell and Fred exchanged a look.
“You already have a plan,” I said.
“We think you should try to jump again,” O’Connell said.
“What—now?”
“If you’re ever going to leave your current body, you’re going to have to practice,” she said. “Better to do it into the body of a volunteer, in a controlled environment surrounded by people who could take care of the boy.”
“Who’s the volunteer? You?”
O’Connell seemed embarrassed at this. Meg looked away. Then the Other Dr. Waldheim raised his hand.
“Fred?!”
My head swiveled between the old man and the women. “Are you
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all crazy? O’Connell, you saw what happened last time—I almost killed my brother. There’s no telling what I would do to, to—”
“An old fart,” Fred said agreeably. He laid his book on the table.
“I don’t think the plan is perfect either,” Meg said. “But we can’t bring others into this.”
“I’ve been possessed before,” Fred said.
“How long ago?” I said.
“We don’t think you’d repeat the mistakes of your first time,”
O’Connell said. “That was a dire situation—you were drowning, and you panicked. This time . . .”
“No. We find another way. We—” I stared at the open page of the book Fred had put down. “What is that?” I said.
“Painter artifacts,” Fred said. “From 1985 to 1992.”
“No, that picture.” I picked up the binder, looked at the photograph in its plastic sleeve. A drawing had been scratched and scraped with coal or black dirt, onto a slab of concrete that could have been a section of highway. The drawing was hardly more than an outline, a fuzzed sketch of a woman.
She leaned into the corner of an armchair. Her hair had fallen across her face, hiding one eye. The other eye was closed. Her lips were slightly parted. A book lay splayed open on the floor, as if it had slipped from her fingers. It was a picture book: a few smudges suggested paragraphs; faint lines hinted at a brontosaurus neck, a boxy head, tractor-tread feet. Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. There weren’t any distinguishing details that would allow a stranger to match the woman in the picture to a real person. But the way her hair fell across her face, the way her legs were tucked under the chair . . .
“I need to borrow this,” I said. I nodded toward the stack of albums.
“I need all of them.”
An hour in, I realized my project required more space, and I moved from my bedroom to the library. Under the gaze of the Black Well painting I laid out the piles of plastic-wrapped pictures into clusters and series, setting out trails of stepping stones that ran in and out of the 2 1 0
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niches, around the furniture, turning the room into a giant game board. The chronology of the pictures’ creation had nothing to do with my organizational scheme, and neither did geography. Or style and material, for that matter: the same subject could be tackled in sculptures, chalk drawings, paintings, collages. The demon’s name was the Painter, but that was a misnomer.
I crouched over the smallest series, only three pictures. The first was the sketch of my mother—Del’s mother. The label on the back of its cover sheet said it had been created in Moab, Utah, on September 8, 1991. Next to it, from two years earlier and several states away, a sculpture made out of wood and bits of tin and barbed wire that somehow looked like a young, chubby Lew. Last, a smear of yellow and green paint created in Hammond, Indiana, 2001 that I recognized as my father’s 1966 Mustang gleaming in the driveway. None of them created anywhere near the times they depicted—Lew was a high schooler by ’89, my mother sold my father’s Mustang when he died in
’95—but that seemed to be the point. These weren’t snapshots from a moment in time. None of them were photorealistic. These were interpretations, images fished from my memory, distorted and glossed by emotion.
“Are you finding what you need?” a soft voice said behind me. Meg had appeared in the room, silent as a cat.
“I don’t know,” I said. I looked at my watch—already past 1 a.m. I should probably be in bed, but I wasn’t tired. This body was just a vehicle. I could drive it as fast as I wanted until the gas ran out. “I feel like there’s gotta be some kind of message here.”
“You aren’t the first to be fascinated by the Painter’s work,” Meg said. “Most of the originals are in the hands of private collectors, though Red Book has tried to acquire as many as possible. Everyone is searching for clues in them—the government, academics, hundreds of hobbyists on the Internet. A theory for everyone, and everyone with a theory.”
I had suspected as much at IPOC—all those academics were the tip of the iceberg.
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“The Boy on the Rock, for example.” She stooped, picked up a picture from one of the trails I’d laid, and showed it to me. I’d found a dozen pictures of a kid maybe eleven or twelve, at a stream. Sometimes he sat with his arms around his knees, sometimes standing, about to dive, sometimes climbing up onto a boulder, a towel draped across his back. I’d first seen one of the pictures in the ICOP slideshow.
The kid wasn’t me, wasn’t Lew, didn’t seem to be any of the Hellion victims. I didn’t know what to make of him, but he seemed
important to the Painter.
“He’s got the most regular features of any of the subjects,” Meg said. “Everyone’s tried to identify him, match him to a photo of somebody real. The government interviewed thousands of people back in the seventies. Lots of near misses—you can find plenty of fresh-faced boys, and even plenty in bathing suits—but no hundred-percent matches. Still, there are theories. It’s a self-portrait of the original Painter. Or he’s the Painter’s son. Or he’s the archetype of innocence, a cherub. Or he’s not even been born yet; he’s the one the Painter is waiting for.”
“To do what?”
She shrugged, smiled. “You know how it is with messiah stories.”
She set the picture down again and grunted as she stood up.
“So I’m wasting my time here,” I said.
She shook her head. “Oh no. None of us have ever had your resources. No one’s been able to ask a demon what they mean. The Painter is always silent.”
Meg came to the source pile, the clump of pictures I couldn’t sort. I kept returning to the pictures, sifting through them, waiting for the moment that something resonated, some synapse fired—and then I’d carry the picture to another part of the room. She frowned at the pile—perhaps thinking of all the work of putting these back in their binders—and moved on, her eyes following the horizontal exhibition on the floor.
“How is the boy?” Meg said casually. She didn’t mean the boy on 2 1 2
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the rock. “Do you still feel him straining to get out?” They couldn’t call him the Hellion anymore, and they wouldn’t stop calling me Del. So the person in my head was like an unnamed fetus: the boy, or just he, him.
“Quiet,” I said. He’d been silent and unmoving since the hypnosis session. I didn’t think time passed in there. He wasn’t conscious, stalking his cage and scheming his escape. He was like a fitful sleeper, and sometimes when his nightmares came on strong, or there was light coming into the cage from some hole I’d opened up, that’s when he got agitated. Since my car accident I’d been leaving the cage door open at night, and I hadn’t even known it.
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