Daemonomania

by John Crowley

  It was getting late. Sam slid otterlike over the back of the seat into the front next to her, and helped her mother get the attention of deaf or uncaring citizens.

  “Pediatric Institute?” a taxi driver she pulled up next to said. He rolled the toothpick in his mouth in puzzlement.

  “A children’s hospital.”

  “You mean little ones?”

  “What?”

  “Little ones. Sure. You’re right next to it.” Horns honked behind him, which he ignored. “This here’s the back side, is all. Go around. One way this way, though. Make a circle.”

  She made a circle, or a rough square, and drew up before it, a huge edifice in many parts, fitted cunningly into narrow streets laid out for livery stables and chandler’s shops a hundred and fifty years ago. The name was spelled out in shiny metal letters laid into the side of a sort of windowed bridge or flown passage that led from one new wing of it over to another, older wing: Conurbana Pediatric Institute and Hospital. But on the high architrave of the older building was carved in stone letters another name, City Home for Little Ones. The name it had once had, the first name.

  The name it had had, Rosie thought, when Rosie had spent her time here.

  “Mommy. Yets go.”

  Yes when she had been here, when she had been kept inside here. All the closed doors she had pushed or forced open since she had come back to the Faraways led down to here, to this door. Aware of horns blown behind her and the necessity of moving one way or another, Rosie before the gray building could only hold out inward hands to receive, or fend off, or recapture like a fleeing dream, the thing that had happened to her once in that place.

  Rose Ryder tapped the ash of her cigarette into her palm, felt the soft gray worm fall there, almost too hot.

  “Well I’ve always prayed,” she said. “Holy Spirit be with me and in me.”

  “You prayed,” Mike Mucho said. “But did you really believe your prayers were going to be answered?”

  “Well sure, I mean. It always made a difference.”

  “If you ask for bread you’re not going to be given a stone. Remember that? Weren’t you a Bible camp kid?”

  He said it not unkindly. They sat together on the stairs of the Tower, where they had come to a stop, halfway between up and down: where Mike had made her sit down and talk, so that they could discuss this where no one else would hear.

  “And about casting out demons?” she said. “That part?”

  “What if it’s so?” he said.

  She looked down at the end of her cigarette. What if it’s so? What would it be like to say it was, to know it was?

  “It’s like a bet,” Mike said. “The people who bet on there being no God, or on a God who can’t do anything to help them—if God can help and will help but they don’t believe it and don’t ask, they lose. But if you bet God can help and will help, what do you lose if he can’t? And if you’re right, and he can and will, you win. You win big.”

  She had never thought of this. It seemed to be something you would only think up if you already believed it to be so, that God would help. And she did.

  “You know what Ray’s talking about,” Mike said. “The possibility of cures. Real cures. Not just talking forever. Changing somebody’s heart and mind, lifting the suffering from them.”

  What’ll I do, she thought. What’ll I do. She made a small noise of interest and surprise: “Huh,” she said.

  “Somehow you know I never did believe that anybody was going to get better because of anything I did or said. I thought they could get better, but because of what they did themselves; I was only there so they could believe they could.”

  “Dumbo,” Rose said.

  He lifted his eyes at this response, and after a moment seemed to understand it; but he only said: “Rose. All my life I’ve never, never got a single thing I wanted with all my heart. I want this. I want you to want it too.”

  The cigarette had burned down to the filter, and Rose nipped off the living ash with thumb and forefinger, let it fall on the rubber tread of the stair she leaned against; let it expire.

  “Tell me what you thought,” he said. “What you’re thinking.”

  She felt arise in her hugely what she had been thinking, not today but for so long now, so long that it was as though she had never lived without it; wanted to tell it all, tell him how she had rolled her car on the Shadow River road for no reason, how she had lived for weeks as though inside a globe of glass, unreachable; that she could not always remember what she had done the night or the week before, or how things that she possessed had come into her hands. That she imagined futures for herself only to see them die. How afraid she was that, without ever actually willing it, she might die too: wander away from the path, get lost, exit.

  “It’s hard,” was all she said.

  Cure me, she wanted to say. Cure me.

  “Hard,” he said. “Rose this is the most amazing and wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me, the most amazing and wonderful thing that can happen. But it is hard. So hard. The hardest thing I’ve ever done. Like the hardest course you ever took in college, the toughest game you ever played, the hardest hill you ever biked. You don’t just buy this stuff. You have to try. You have to try and keep trying. I didn’t know that.”

  She watched him, still on his step, hands locked together and hung between his knees: as though she could watch him trying, right here and now.

  “He’s amazing,” Mike said after a while. He shook his head in wonder. She knew who he meant. “You know he sleeps like three hours a night? He has unbelievable energy. See him preach sometime.”

  She said nothing. Mike huffed out his breath, as though he were going to dive, as though the next thing to say took courage or at least nerve. “So,” he said. “What I have to say, about this place and you working here. It’s this. If you can’t be in on this, there’s nothing else here for you.”

  “You mean I’m not getting asked to come back.”

  “Well there’s not going to be anything left to come back to,” he said. “This place is coming to an end, an end as what it was anyway. I can’t really tell you a lot more now, but the only thing now that will save it is God. If we give it to him.”

  She felt she had to go to the bathroom, and really quickly; the need had come over her unrefusably without any warning. She stood, still holding the tiny burnt offering in her hand. “Mike,” she said.

  “An old world dying,” he said, as though quoting something she should know. “And a new world struggling to be born.”

  6

  It had been just a cough at first, not even a bad cough, but persistent. Rosie’s mother, who was always made uncomfortable by illness, had watched Rosie and listened to her with that peculiar cross on her face, formed of her contracted brows, her pinched inquiring nose, and the furrow running up her brow between the deepened wrinkles—stigmata she could still produce. Rosie as a kid thought it was what was meant by saying someone was cross.

  She coughed and coughed: Dr. Crane came and looked into her throat and took a culture, the swab making her gag and spatter his glasses with sputum, but there was nothing. She coughed daylong, nightlong; would be sent home from school, put to bed, seem to improve, and start again. She was eleven, no twelve: had not yet had her first period.

  “Look, Mommy.” Passing the cheerful and chock-full gift shop, stuffed animals large and small, some bandaged or with little casts and crutches; balloons, games, puzzles, treats.

  “Yes, hon, same as you have.” Sam’s Mary Janes rapped on the terrazzo floor, and her small hand was damp in Rosie’s.

  Oh the interior of those nights coughing: watching the strip of light beneath her door, waiting for Mom to come into her room once again, sit on her bed in her static-crackly nightgown of rayon, and feel her head. No fever, she never did have a fever, but her mother felt her forehead over and over. Held her too while Rosie coughed, her coughs reaching deeper, searching her until a violent spasm came too deep eve
n for coughing and she produced a spoonful of yellowish sputum.

  She had entirely forgotten, entirely forgotten: until she looked up at the name of this place and it began returning to her, sometimes in a stream so fast that she had to stop walking while it filled her, saying Oh oh while Sam puzzled over her. She remembered the life she had led bound up with that cough, a life different from the life she had led before and after. She and her cough: she hadn’t chosen it, didn’t like it, God no: but remembered, in some awe, the feeling of settling in with it, getting to know it: her life, different from others’.

  Would Sam do that, was she doing it already, going into that place where she would live alone?

  “Hi, we checking in today?”

  “Um yes I guess.”

  “And what department are we visiting today?”

  “Neurology.”

  “Sure.” A smile for Sam, who looked up at her. Grandmotherly in glasses hung with gold chains. Information taken, and an elaborate set of directions given, as though they faced a labyrinth, which they did.

  It was to this place they had brought Rosie at last (not to this cheerful pastel new place with its blond furniture and wide windows, but nevertheless here, Little Ones). She was losing weight, not getting better, her mother too giving way under the pressure of it, of it and everything—so Rosie imagined, able now to put this event or episode into the story (opaque or invisible to her then) of her parents’ marriage and her father’s death. Took away her clothes, installed her on her ward, in her white bed.

  The poor kid, Rosie thought, oh that poor kid: filled up with pity for the skinny scared girl, carrot-topped, cat’s-eye glasses awry on her face, in her bed, coughing ceaselessly for no reason. For no reason.

  Neurology turned out to be housed in the older, shabbier wing, much shabbier, dismayingly shabby for a big hospital; the sixth floor, reached by a cavernous clanking elevator, big enough for a rolling bed or a cart full of breakfasts, of which it smelled too; and now Rosie, as though following her own old trail by scent, knew she had been this way before: knew this sad smell, cold toast and porridge and ineradicable traces of soured milk.

  “Ever been here before?” the nurse at the intake window asked her, and Rosie thought for what must have seemed a long time before understanding that Sam was meant and not her; and they and their papers were given over to an aide, who would take them down to the treatment room.

  “What’s your name, sweetheart?” the aide asked Sam.

  “Sam.”

  “Huh. Same as me.”

  “Your name is Sam?” Rosie asked in wonderment.

  “No. Nope. But I got a boy’s name, just like her. Bobby.”

  “My name’s Samantha,” said Sam firmly, already touchy about this.

  “Mine’s jes Bobby.”

  She was a sharp-faced, narrow woman, with pale lashless eyes that made Rosie think of Pilgrims or of farm women in old photographs, but her black hair was teased and flipped and puffed in imitation of country singers, not quite enough of it though. They followed her down halls and half flights of stairs. She saw Rosie look up at the ceiling tiles stained in yellow arcs like a peed bed.

  “We’re movn,” she said. “So they don’t spend a dime back here. When we’re all moved into the new part they’ll fix up back here.”

  Back here. Back here, deep in, you saw more: the kids in the public areas were mostly just entering, or leaving, all better, but here kids whose illnesses couldn’t be guessed at moved slowly through the halls in wheelchairs or were pushed in coffin- or boatlike carriages of plywood stencilled with their floor number; kids in hospital gowns, some cheerful, some dazed, some it was hard not to look away from, though Sam didn’t, her eyes wide, silent. Shaved heads were popular, in Neurology: half a head shaved, and a big bandage. Please please let them not shave her head.

  “Aren’t we going to see this doctor?” Rosie asked. “Dr. Marlborough?”

  “You do the test first,” Bobby said. “Then you got something to talk about.”

  If courts of law are like crossroads—one road leading to punishment, cost or confinement, and the other to liberty, exculpation, vindication—then the waiting rooms of doctors are like the trunks of trees: the squirrel of your thought scampers out along a hundred branching ways as you sit there with the doctor’s magazines, running toward cure, toward quick cure, toward nothing really wrong at all; or toward something sort of mysteriously wrong which might one day get worse, a little worse, a lot worse, or really quickly worse, very bad right now, much worse than you thought or than you feel, but then maybe better, the resources of medicine—as mysterious as the forces of disease—brought all to bear, one quick treatment, or a few treatments, many treatments, endless treatments, bewilderment, failure, surrender. Death. Life. Half-life worse than death. All these embryonic fruiting bodies ready to come forth at each twig tip.

  The test anyway had not been bad; Sam had allowed them to do with her as they liked, curious and unafraid and mild; Rosie wanted almost to warn her, oh don’t Sam, fight back a little; they put their electrodes on, she lay hooked up with her arms over her breast like a baby pharaoh or Frankenstein’s Daughter, and even fell asleep for a while (She’s asleep said the technician, watching not Sam but the pen making its shuddery marks on the graph paper) and then it was done, and they gave her a lollipop, transparent barley sugar, Sam would remember it years later; then back up, making their own way this time, to the doctor’s office, through a corridor that passed the nurses’ station of the ward. By the station there was a windup rocker chair just like one Sam used to have, a Swingading, a Rockadoo, what was it called: a little seat hanging from a frame, a spring you wound up that kept the seat swinging back and forth like a metronome. Sam as an infant had suffered from Mystery Shrieking, colic maybe or maybe not, and the only thing that would soothe her was to be in motion. In this one a large white fat baby, too large, too white somehow, sat unmoving but awake, expressionless, rocking; only just in passing did Rosie see that the back of its big bald head did not match the front, that right over the arc of its skull, under the skin, could be discerned the line where whatever made up the back was joined, not precisely, with the front.

  They waited now to see the doctor, to find out about Sam. Inside his little office he was reading the EEG. They were next to see him. Sam continued telling the story of Brownie’s life to Brownie; Rosie read her booklet about epilepsy. Though epilepsy was once thought to be a dangerous and uncontrollable form of insanity, it can now usually be fully controlled by medication. Most people with many types of seizure disorders lead full lives without any difficulty. Who were the most and the many, she wondered; when did you find out you weren’t them. Famous people who have suffered from seizure disorders include Julius Cæsar and the beloved children’s poet Edward Lear, author of “The Jumblies” and many other works.

  “Samantha Mucho? That you, honey?”

  The Jumblies, Rosie remembered: far and few, far and few, the lands where the Jumblies live.

  The doctor didn’t look up, when the nurse showed them in, from the long paper; a mechanical pencil in his hand hovered over the marks but in the end chose not to alight on any; he looked up and smiled, and showed them seats.

  “Never been here before, huh?” he asked.

  “No,” Rosie said. Sam climbed into her lap and hid her face in her mother’s shirt. “I have. A long time ago.”

  He looked up, interested. “Oh yes? For what reason?”

  “Just a cough,” Rosie said, and for a moment felt tears rise to her eyes. The doctor looked down again, losing interest. He was a large ugly man, black hair plastered over a pear-shaped head, and two large moles or warts on his chin.

  “So you know why we did this?” he asked.

  “Not really.” She wished he’d talk to Sam, ask how she was. Couldn’t he see she was afraid?

  “Seizures come in a lot of varieties,” he said. “Some are what we call idiopathic, which means we don’t know what causes t
hem. Most of them are, actually. I think Sam’s are that kind.”

  “Oh,” Rosie said, not knowing what to make of this, but not encouraged; Dr. Marlborough seemed to read her face, and said:

  “Actually that’s okay. Idiopathic seizures are often the kind that don’t do real harm. They’re not due to some underlying pathology; they’re just the way someone is.”

  Rosie said nothing.

  “I say I think that’s what they are. But there’s some kind of funny things here.” He lifted his eyes from the strip of paper. “Sam,” he said, “do you want to see your brain working?”

  She looked at him with a face that made Rosie laugh, a curl of her lip that suggested she thought the invitation bizarre, maybe unseemly; but after a moment she climbed from Rosie’s lap and went to Dr. Marlborough’s side. All three of them looked at the long paper, unwieldy as an ancient scroll, and as obscure.

  “See, here’s your brain, making waves,” the doctor said. “Every time your brain made waves, the pen moved. Your brain moved the pen. And the waves are very nice. But see?” He let his pencil touch certain clusters of marks that seemed to Rosie no different from the rest. Sam lifted her hand slowly to her head and placed it on her curls, as though she might be able to feel the waves, still rising.

  “Well they suggest that maybe there is an underlying disorder, a particular place in the brain that’s giving rise to these seizures. But we can’t tell unless she has one while she’s hooked up to the machine.”

  “Oh great,” Rosie said.

  “Well, what we’re doing, and what I’d like to suggest for Sam, is a new sort of program we’ve started here. You come in for a number of days—three is usually enough, it might take less—and we have a system where Sam can be attached to an EEG of a special kind during all that time.”

  “Yikes. That sounds awful.”

  “Well, it’s pretty flexible. You have a portable unit, you can get around …”

  “And you just wait for her to have a seizure?”