Daemonomania

by John Crowley

  She named her child by him Roberta, which was the secret name those Yankee children in Bondieu had bestowed upon her when they baptized her with a trickle of water stolen from the nuns’ church—Roberta, the name of the power that had been in that baptizing, in that water and the words in another language that the boy said. Each of those children had had their secret name, which they said they received in a church—not the little white church-house in Bondieu but a real church with a bishop: Bobby saw in her mind when she thought of it a place as high and stony as a mine was deep, and dark as the pines beyond her grandfather’s house. The eldest girl’s name was Hildy and her secret name was Teresa; the boy’s name was Pierce and his secret name (not yet bestowed) was to be John Bosco, like the chocolate drink. He had showed her a picture of this John Bosco, in white lace and a red robe, looking heavenward. He had showed her a lot of pictures.

  Their house on a hill, that was a place she never once thought of going back to, as though it couldn’t be found, as though it was a story like the story of the more perfect gospel teachers, though it had really happened to her. So had the meetings with the dead happened to her. She went the other way, away from stories.

  Her secret name hadn’t saved Roberta, baby Roberta, who died when she was four. That was in Pikeville after Randy left for Detroit. Died of what? Bobby didn’t have a name for it, and later would resent the way city people looked at her when she said she didn’t know; so she came to call it by the names of various illnesses she learned about as a nurse’s aide, each different name with a different story, so that Roberta went farther away with each telling.

  And Bobby too moved farther away. Whenever she lived in any place long enough and knew it well enough to be able to say My home, my church, my neighbors, she would begin to see their dead: those who should not have died, those who had been rapt away from life before their time; and she would move again. There were towns and cities and mountain farms and a hospital where a judge sent her and where she recovered from TB; there she learned she had no fear of the sick and the dying, and could make her own living among them. She did not turn to the Word again, though, until the morning after the night when her daughter Roberta found her again, in Conurbana two hundred miles from her grave in Breshy County, Roberta still four years old, in her nightdress stained and foul: came to stand in her door, to look at her and try to take her hand.

  Two vans from The Woods were ranked in the parking lot of the Bypass Inn with cars and busses from other places. On an easel by the front desk the name was stuck up in white letters on the black notice board along with Bears Boosters and Avon and some others. Powerhouse International. They didn’t believe in churches; wherever two or three are gathered together in My name. Bobby was told that when they had bought an abandoned Bible college out in the Midwest somewhere to be their headquarters, first thing they had done was to take down the cross over the chapel: the symbol of a cult, they said, not for them, the only true uninterpreted unreconstructed Christians.

  In the Empire Room they were just finishing the first half of the meeting—time for a break for a while, food and drink, people could only mind for so long, no matter how caught up. She looked in: people were pushing back their folding chairs, looking (some of them) as though they were rising from a deep pool, opening their eyes after long immersion. Mostly though like kids done with school. Ray Honeybeare sat on the dais, still, his arms across his breast, hands cupping his elbows, his eyes looking inward and his mouth downdrawn, a look she knew. Pitt Thurston, who had been preaching (you were not to call it preaching, she had been told that more than once) listened, grinning intently, to a woman who had come up to speak to him. Dark circles of sweat under his arms when he removed his nice sport coat. Working hard. Bobby could hear his strong heartbeat: almost thought she could.

  Seeing him changed her mind: she wouldn’t tell him what she had seen. If she did the whole story would come unasked from her mouth, and that would prove to him and to all of them that she wasn’t what she wanted to be, what they had all worked so hard to make her: it would prove that she remained what she had been, a thing worse than they could imagine, and unable to be changed or touched.

  People milled out into the foyer where a long table clothed in white had been set up with a bunch of chrome coffeepots, two women readying them and some trays of cookies, their own baking for sure. Bobby recognized one of the women, young and dark and tall. She had prayed with her: one of those who had come in vans from The Woods.

  “Got you helpn, huh.”

  “Oh. Oh hi. Yes.”

  “Bobby.”

  “Yes, sure. Rose.” She gave a little wave in lieu of a handshake, busy, unsteady it seemed on her low heels.

  “Need some help?”

  “I think I.”

  Rose bent to lift from a serving cart a big tray of small creamers, all full. Never been a waitress, for sure. Bobby without time to stop it saw her heft the tray wrong at the same moment as her heel turned under her; the tray had almost reached shoulder height when the girl’s body folded beneath it, and as she tried to keep from sinking and Bobby reached to right it, the little round creamers like passengers on a sinking ship rattled all together down the tilting tray and off: Rose trying to avoid them slipped and sat down, gathering most of them in her lap.

  “Oh boy,” Bobby said. “Oh Lord.”

  Rose was on her feet again, face shocked, betrayed, afraid. Cream ran down her blouse and dripped from her fingertips; wetness like a bad kid’s accident spread over her skirt.

  The other woman serving hurried to wipe Rose with stiff motel napkins but made little difference. Bobby turned and saw Pitt Thurston’s wife at the meeting-room doorway and—only needing to point for an explanation—got from her the key to one of the rooms she knew the group would have rented for the night.

  “Come on, honey,” she said to Rose. “Quick.”

  She could hear the squish of cream in Rose’s shoe as she led her to the elevator. The elevator’s ceiling was mirrored, like a whore’s bedroom, and Rose looked up at herself, and laughed and wept, holding out her hands helplessly.

  The room was filled with bags and knapsacks, a cot unfolded and unmade, fast-food bags unremoved. More important things to do than tidy. They found the bathroom.

  “God, this never happened before. I feel so stupid.”

  “I seen it,” Bobby said. She had seen it a lot: how for a good while after you accepted and were cleansed, you could feel that giddy sensation of having been emptied and then refilled with something softer, lighter, new and unknown, and how hard it was to manage your newness sometimes. If you were out in the world, and you fell down the stairs or something, you’d talk about Satan’s powers that were around you, tripping you up. Maybe so.

  “Don’t mind me if I help,” Bobby said. She sought the catch of Rose’s skirt, slippery, hard to get a grip on, like a kid’s wet snowpants. “‘Cause I’m a nurse,” she said, which wasn’t exactly true. “Comes naturally.”

  “No sure thanks. Really thanks.” Bewildered apparently still. Beneath the skirt, panty hose, wet too, and pale peach underpants, tiny and fine—a surprise, for some reason. Rose, her face a mask of disgust, was trying to undo the buttons of her blouse without handling the sodden silky material.

  Bobby turned on the shower, and Rose without hesitation stripped off the last of her clothes and stepped in. Bobby stood for a minute listening to the roar of water and observing Rose’s shadow, strangely fragmented, on the pebbled surface of the glass shower door.

  “You got somethn else to put on?”

  “No. Not really. My raincoat’s downstairs.”

  “I’ll get it.”

  “Thanks, really. It’s a navy one. With leopard-print collar and cuffs. Sort of silly. You can’t miss it.”

  Bobby went down again. She thought of the other time she had met this woman: how she had hugged her at the end of prayers, as she had of course all the others. In the bathroom just now she had seen that Rose had sha
ved off her pubic hair, and she wondered why, at whose suggestion or request.

  When Bobby returned Rose stood wrapped in towels in the bedroom, shivering a little; she changed the towels for the coat Bobby held out.

  “Okay now?”

  “Okay” She hugged herself. “What I need,” she said, “or want actually. Well. Is a cigarette.” She looked at her feet. “I guess they really wouldn’t want you to smoke.”

  “Nope.”

  “I’ve almost quit.”

  “Me too,” Bobby said. She rummaged in her coat and brought out a pack, crumpled and nearly empty. She opened the window a crack; they sat together on the littered bed and Bobby lit their smokes with a butane lighter.

  “So you’re with us now?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes. I am.”

  “Seen benefits already.” Not a question. “You gone take the healing training?”

  “I want to,” Rose said. “I’m going to. It’s … I just don’t know if I ever could. Really heal.”

  “Well. It’s not everybody who can. You pray to be let to. Now I never. I ain’t no healer. I just look to get healed. I get, I don’t give. That’s a different training.” She smiled. “You might be one though.”

  She considered Rose, and Rose looked down at her hands, then into Bobby’s eyes. But what Bobby was thinking, looking so closely at Rose, was not that the woman might heal, now or ever. What she thought was: She is of the kind I am. She doesn’t know it, but she is. I think she is.

  “You never tried?” Rose asked.

  “Got to try. I took some training. They start with you, yourself.” What was it, was it the woman’s hooded eyes, revealing and hiding her at once; was it how she took in smoke so hard; was it the way that nothing had passed from her to Bobby in that embrace she had once given Bobby, nothing at all?

  “Is that hard?” she asked. “Starting on yourself?”

  “Depends,” Bobby said. “On what’s inside you that has to come out.” She stabbed out the cigarette. “I ain’t gone tell you what they drug outta me. Long as I’m shet of it.”

  Rose looked within: Bobby recognized the look, the same look within that you see on people’s faces when you tell them you just had a rotten tooth pulled, or found a lump in your breast. Checking.

  Bobby believed she had known others of her own kind; she had usually been quickly certain of it, had revealed herself to them too, without words for none were needed. People who had like a cast in their eye, couldn’t look straight ahead at what was there to see, but hungry for it nonetheless; laughing maybe, good-timing, praying even maybe but always seeming to be straining forward like starved dogs; not starved but never full. Bobby knew. Often she knew not only those ones but also the ones who were in pursuit of them, years-long stories she would come across, pass by, encounter again: she knew them.

  But of this one she wasn’t sure. Could she be one, and not know it?

  “One thing they ask you,” she said, “is what you most want in the whole world. You got to answer that. If you know. And it ain’t so easy, if you tell the truth.”

  “I,” Rose said, and looked stricken, as though Bobby herself had demanded to know this of her, right now. “Oh boy,” she said. “Oh man.”

  Bobby took her hand. Felt the woman’s spirit beat, as though pulsing down through her ring finger from her heart. She is, she isn’t, is, isn’t. “Cause God wants it for you. They’ll tell you that. What you most want. And you’ll get it.”

  “Did you know?” she asked. “When they asked you? What did you say?”

  “Yes mam.” If she could get close enough to the woman to smell her, Bobby thought, she could tell: if she could stick her nose in the cleft of her butt, like a dog. “I said that what I wanted most in the whole world was a brand-new white convertible. Stingray or a Vixen. With red leather seats.”

  7

  The resident, tidy in his white coat, held out a huge hairy yellow-nailed palm to Sam. “Shake,” he said. Sam stared at him in horror, not the comic Halloween horror he’d been aiming at but what seemed to be social horror, as at a breach of manners. She didn’t take his hand, though she stared unsmiling at it; she kept her grip on Rosie’s pants.

  “This is Sam,” the aide said—Bobby, the same who had guided them here before. “The one’s got a name like mine.”

  The resident pulled off the King Kong gloves and hunkered down before Sam.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” he said. “My name is Sam.” He pointed to his name tag, where a teddy-bear sticker was affixed beside his name, Dr. Samuel Rosenblatt, which Sam couldn’t read. Rosie had the impression that the young doctors who did most of the work here were childless, their hours too long, medical school too tough; they had a bantering tone that suggested they didn’t know much about kids as people, however much they might know about them in other ways. She wondered what they thought about having kids themselves, after being here, seeing so many of them so sick.

  “Okay, well,” he said, after looking deeply into Sam’s eyes for a moment, “let’s see what we’re going to do.”

  Rosie had hoped that the test would be given in the newer part of the hospital, in a big clean ward painted freshly in modern colors like the lobby, pale salmon and wintergreen; but Neurology hadn’t moved. The same walls, battered by collisions with rolling beds; the same teacolored stain across the ceiling tiles. The amateurish murals of forest animals, chipmunks and bunnies, given what seemed to be serious medical defects by sloppy drawing, walleyes and pinheads and twisted grins. Maybe once they’d seemed cheerful; now they seemed like a mean joke played on the kids being treated here, a joke so pointlessly mean and clumsy and sinister that Rosie did laugh, laughed with covered mouth, embarrassed.

  Dr. Marlborough hadn’t appeared, though all the lesser doctors who came to look at Sam and check her wires and read the results were careful to say that they worked with (never for or under) him. Rosie pondered why they all had their stethoscopes, clipped around their necks or slung over their shoulders like pet snakes, and decided it was not because they expected to use them but because having one marked you as a doctor; only the doctors seemed to be allowed to wear them.

  There were two others being tested, as Sam was, to discover the sources of their seizures, in the program as they said, a teenage boy who didn’t leave his room and a boy two or three years older than Sam and apparently worse off. Pretty seriously involved the nurse had said to her, and then no more, seeming to be sorry she’d said even that much. This boy was introduced to Sam; they faced each other, heads shaved in neat spots, both wired up and tethered to the recorders beside them on tall chrome rolling stands. They regarded each other momentarily with the usual kid mix of indifferent incomprehension and simple acceptance, not joined by what grown-ups assumed would join them. The boy, pinch-faced and with eyes of scary intensity, was named Doyle.

  “Doyle don’t need no outfit,” said the aide. “He’s gone be a Martian, right honey?”

  Doyle in sudden understanding contorted his face, held out his arms and began stalking stiff-legged around the ward, Martian, robot, mechanical man of any kind; Rosie suspected that having got the idea he was going to do it for some time, and he did, for hours, machinelike, stopping only to plug himself in at various likely-looking places to recharge.

  Sam ignored him. She didn’t seem to feel Martian, or mechanical. She touched with awful care the wires attached to her head, and took no steps to do anything, sit, play, explore. At the nurses’ station now a doctor in a high-collared black paper cape and whiteface checked reports and bared his phosphorescent fangs at the nurses, who took it calmly. Not everybody had got into the spirit, but many patients and nurses had masks and black-and-orange bags of candy.

  What were they thinking, though, really, or didn’t they think. Making jokes, the usual jokes, about blood and death. Rosie remembered that doctor outfits, including organs or bloody scalpels, had always been a regular Halloween choice. She thought of how she would des
cribe this night, this scene later to someone, to Spofford or to Pierce, how she would tell about the doctors dressed as predatory monsters and some kids with masks no worse than their own faces; how odd it was, more than dreadful; what the lesson of it was, which she might know by then.

  The rooms were small, and there were two children in most; parents and relatives came and went, bringing clutches of balloons with cheerful faces on them or stuffed animals larger sometimes than their child; the sicker the kid the larger the animal, maybe. Parents sat and watched inane TV shows beside their children or helped with meals or sat on chairs in the doorways of their rooms like housewives along an old-world alley, talking to one another and swapping inquiries and complaints. Some of them seemed like old hands; they knew how to just nod when a neighbor’s condition or treatment was named, and to ask questions but not to show pity or alarm at the answers. Rosie supposed that she would be one herself someday, that a part of her life was going to be spent here, nobody could tell her how much; that this was life too, after all, being lived, here where kids got shots and Easter baskets and Christmas presents in their beds and got well or didn’t and died; and that was the lesson, maybe, or part of it.