Daemonomania

by John Crowley

  Their roommates were a solid woman older than Rosie, with great sympathetic eyes, and her youngest child—three more at home, she said, twin girls and a teenage boy. She had been here three days already “this time,” knew the nurses and even some of the patients, who had happened to be here at other times when she was; she gossiped generously about them. The seizure kids, she’d say, the cancer kid across the hall.

  “Doyle is bad,” Sam said. “He won’t take his medicine.”

  “Doyle,” said the woman, “hasn’t taken his medicine yet without a fight. Spoiled,” she said to Rosie. “I mean you can understand, but. The poor nurses.”

  “I have to take my medicine,” said Sam. “But if I need to, I can cancel.”

  “Oh yes?” Rosie said, wondering who had said that in Sam’s hearing. “You think so?”

  Sam nodded. She took hold of the tall rolling tripod that carried her recorder, and carefully, as though it were a delicate pet, baby giraffe or willowy orang, she guided it out the door.

  “Going for a walk?” Rosie asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Cute,” said their roommate.

  Her own child, delicate and beautiful, was already asleep; about eighteen months, Rosie guessed, maybe two years, with pale curls on one side of her head, the other wearing the common badge of fourth-floor neurology, a temple shaved and bandaged.

  “She’s got a plastic tube in her head,” her mother said. She and Rosie leaned on the crib’s edge looking down as into a fish tank. “Because her spinal cord didn’t form right. The tube drains off the cerebrospinal fluid. Otherwise, she’d get a big head—you know, water on the brain.”

  “How long does she need it?”

  “Oh. Always. Part of her now. Except it got plugged up, and she had to get it fixed.”

  “Oh. Well. I hope,” she started, but thought no, no hoping. “It’s nice you get to stay with her.”

  “Well yes. They only just started that. They didn’t use to. You could hardly see the kid.”

  Rosie remembered. Her mother came down from home every day on the bus, two hours, to sit with her for the length of visiting hours, after which she would leave again for the two-hour ride home, and the vacancy would settle again over the room and the halls; Rosie never decided if she was more relieved to see her mother come in the morning with her schoolwork and her clean jammies, or to see her go, leave her alone with the others who belonged here, the kids in their beds and the nurses and rare doctors and the mild shy candy-striper who offered her books and magazines in which she could read about the world she had come from. Worse was when her father came, so hurt, so tense and combative, ordering around the nurses and disrupting the routine. How afraid he had been of the girl, what had her name been, in the bed beside hers.

  Lilith. The curtains drawn quick around her bed, the rattle of their hooks and the muslin rising like wings.

  “You were here? On this floor?”

  “Not on this floor. Somewhere. I don’t know where.”

  “What was wrong?”

  “A cough. I don’t know really. They could never figure it out. I was here for a couple of weeks. Maybe more.”

  “Jeez. A couple of weeks. Get insurance to pay for that nowadays.”

  “I think my parents paid.”

  “You got better?”

  “I don’t know.” The past time, that other hospital contained inside this one, reached toward her, trying to come clear. “I mean yes, I got better, but I wasn’t cured. The girl in the bed next to mine died.”

  The woman only shook her head minutely. Rosie could not remember if she had ever told anyone these things, and wondered if she could tell them now without weeping. Lilith. Rosie’s father had been shocked that they could not save her, seemed to think it impossible, and that if they could not save her they should somehow keep the knowledge of their failure from her, and certainly from his own daughter in the next bed; some of them there did try, and answered Rosie’s questions with cheerful evasiveness, but not most of them. And Lilith knew: she knew she was there to die, not to get better, and they were there to help, and attend on her. Not everyone gets better; she taught Rosie that, and Rosie wanted her father to learn it and be quiet.

  “It must have been leukemia. She would get cards from her friends at school, and open them and read them to herself, and give them to the nurse; and the nurse tacked them up where she could see them. She didn’t say anything about them except who they were from.” She was dark-haired and white, and grew whiter as she lost weight; her eyes bigger too, from the weight she lost, like the huge-eyed kids starving in famine photographs: though Rosie had thought then that her eyes grew big from what she saw approaching.

  “It was way late one night,” she said, “and I was awake; I don’t know what woke me. They were around her bed, and then they drew her curtains. And I thought”—Rosie only at that moment remembered that she had thought so, she had forgotten till now—“I thought that they did that so she could pass in private, with just them. But I guess she was already dead, and they were just.”

  “Yes.”

  “After that I got better,” Rosie said.

  “Huh. Just like that.”

  “I guess I thought: you’re not that sick. You’ve got no right to be here. Get serious.”

  “Funny how kids can be. So smart.”

  “Smart and not smart at once.”

  “Not like us,” the woman said, and laughed.

  Come night, nothing ceased; the halls weren’t dimmed, though the room’s curtains could be drawn and the lights turned off. The blinking monitors stayed on, and the intercom, though the voice issuing calls and names grew softer, sadder, sleepier. She got Sam into her hospital johnny, open in the back, made to fit over IVs and machinery such as Sam was hooked to. The nurse helped her manage. A new shift had come on; several of the women Rosie had first met now gone and replaced by others, this one older and smelling of cigarettes, a silver cross between her freckled breasts.

  “They’re going to give Doyle a shot,” Sam said. “Bobby said so.” She looked at her mother. “Bobby knows Daddy.”

  “No. Really?”

  “Yets take this off for sleeping,” Sam said. She reached up to touch her Medusa curls.

  “No no honey, no sweetie,” the nurse said. “Got to keep those on.”

  Sam looked at her, and lay back against the pillow, that look of unreal resignation in her face that frightened Rosie. “I’m going to sleep too,” she said to Sam. “I’m tired.”

  “Sleep,” said Sam. “Go to sleep.”

  “Okay.”

  The nurse showed her where to find sheets and a thin blanket (it was a hothouse in the room and would be all night, she guessed) and how to unfold the chair into a sort of half bed. Rosie’s roommate was already in a cotton nightgown; Rosie would not go so far, intended to stay in her clothes and tough it out through a probably sleepless night; the woman shrugged.

  “Okay?” Rosie said to Sam. “I’m ready.”

  “Lie down,” Sam said.

  “Okay. You want anything more?”

  Sam thought. “Sing,” she said.

  “Oh Sam.”

  “Sing.”

  “Well what song? We have to be quiet for the baby.”

  “‘Aiken Drum.’”

  “Really?”

  Sam nodded, definite. This song about a monstrous hero and his battle on the moon she had learned at day care, it wasn’t one Rosie had ever known or sung. Almost in a whisper, Rosie began: “His head is a … What’s his head?”

  “A doughnut!” said Sam.

  It was different every time. Rosie sang:

  His head is a doughnut

  His head is a doughnut

  His head is a doughnut and his name is Aiken Drum.

  The fun of the song was the assembling of Aiken out of things you chose, the queerer the better. What’s his heart? “A button,” Sam said instantly.

  His heart is a button

 
; His heart is a button

  His heart is a button and his name is Aiken Drum.

  “His arms are spaghetti,” Sam sang out next, “his arms are spaghetti, his arms are spaghetti and his name is Aiken Drum!”

  “Sh, Sam, sh.” Rosie found the song unsettling, creepy even, Aiken pathetic in his odd inanimate parts; the song seemed to mock him in his insufficiency, and Rosie felt his struggle to stay together and do battle. She met things like that in dreams, coming toward her, malevolent or needful.

  “That’s all, now hon. Got to close your eyes.”

  “You close your eyes.”

  “I will. I’m here.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. I love you.”

  “I love you, Mommy.”

  She shut the last light she could shut, lay back against the chair’s hard back. No dreams, please no dreams: the shallow vivid dreams of nights in bad beds in strange places. Aiken Drum. What was it that was so horrid about him, horrid like those portraits made long ago, perfectly realistic readable faces made all of birds, or vegetables, or kitchen utensils. Was it that you knew they really had no inside at all, were just stuff, and yet would not or could not lie still? Dead but alive. Skeletons maybe were the same, the inanimate part of you, dry bones empty inside, getting up and hanging together, by no means.

  Ghosts too. No not ghosts, ghosts are the opposite: they have an inside and no outside. Naked. Cold. More afraid than you are maybe: what they always said about wild animals, stray cats with bared teeth, moths beating against the pane.

  She thought of Boney, almost a skeleton when he died, but alive, alive.

  Where was he now, did he mind being dead as much as he had hated dying? She thought of her father—who was Boney’s nephew—hiding from the knowledge that people die, that his daughter might.

  What was it anyway with the Rasmussens, all of them, that they feared death so much; was it death, really, that they feared, or what? Rosie had lately come to think that the world lay under some kind of curse or spell, a lassitude or inattention to what is really important, a kind of sleep that could not be shaken off, and that it was up to her to break or lift it: or rather she didn’t think this at all but caught herself in moments of abstraction assuming that it was so. But maybe it wasn’t the world at all that lay in the grip of such a spell, maybe it was only her own family.

  Herself too: maybe herself.

  The Curse of the Rasmussens. As though they were made backwards, thinking they were fleeing what they feared when really they ran right to it. It had seemed to her as she grew up that her father was not really actual, that he talked and ate and kissed her good night and went on business trips and came back with presents but that compared to other people he wasn’t there at all. Her mother laughed when Rosie asked her what after all her father’s business had been, because it hadn’t been real, he had not needed or wanted it to be real, only to seem real, a ghost business. His real life was unreality: Demerol. Percocet. Morphine, whose name means sleep. Thought he was lucky, maybe, that he had found a medicine for fear.

  And then he was dead himself, really dead: an overdose that her mother was sure was accidental. But then her mother had also thought he took the stuff for an unremitting pain in his bones, pain no doctor could or would deal with, thus forcing him to go for relief into what she called—because he did—the Underworld. Where one day he acquired stuff (where and how, in that nice city in the nice middle of the country in that decade?) that was maybe a little stronger, a little more compelling or impelling than usual.

  So now he knows.

  That was what Rosie thought. She thought that the dead know everything, if they know anything. They know what they no longer have, and what they might have had if they had done things differently, and they know that there’s nothing now that they can do about it.

  She had begun dreaming of her father, after he was dead, dreamed that she talked with him long and intimately but about nothing in particular; dreamed of him talking to her, at last, about what was in his heart. Sometimes in the dreams he would put his head on her shoulder, or in her lap, giving up all defenses and pretendings, the self-protective kidding he always kept up when alive, and became a weary needy lover or tired baby, at which she woke.

  One time, though.

  One time in a dream she had asked him—the paradox coming for once clear to her dreaming self—if he wasn’t actually dead, for she knew he was, remembered him dying, dead, in his glossy box of maroon wood. Yes, oh yes, he admitted, he was; he would have to go back soon, now in fact, the time was at hand. If she wanted, though, she could go back with him.

  No, she thought not; no no she would not want to go.

  Oh not to stay, he said; just to visit. Just to see where his time was spent; where hers would be too. Wasn’t she curious? She’d be safe, he said. She had only to take his arm this way—and he wound his arm right around hers, so that their hands joined together backwards, secure—and not let go. Just don’t let go. And they set off toward that land; and of course it wasn’t far, though when she came in sight of it—the far tops of its buildings in the distance like the far view of Cascadia from the turn of the highway—her imagination apparently ran out and she saw nothing more, and then woke. Woke wondering how, if she was not supposed to release his hand, she could ever have returned.

  Death. She had never thought of it as a land, she knew it wasn’t, and yet she could dream that it was, that her father could return and take her there. Maybe we have to think it’s a land, can’t help it, where all the dead are alive. It wouldn’t be far, even: she was as close to it here in her chair as it was possible to be, in this half-light; here where so many had died so young. She heard their footfalls in the halls, their voices in the whisper of the intercom.

  Bobby looked in as her double shift was ending, stepped softly into the room lit by the night-light and the green glow of numerals counting things, heart rates, brain waves, life. Everyone was for the moment asleep. Bobby stood for a time watching Sam and her mother breathe almost in unison; then she left.

  There have been, at different times, ways by which living men and women have gone down into the land under the earth—not down through the soil and stones underfoot but into the earth that is the deepest circle of creation, a circle not different from the earth that we live on, that we lie asleep on, only its shadow. And once there they can placate the dead, the greedy dead, even sometimes win back from them the souls of those they hold in thrall.

  To do that, those who go down to the dead have often had to die themselves, or undergo sufferings like death (didn’t Jesus—greatest of all the magicians, Bruno thought—have to suffer and die in order to go down and free us from death, to free not just one grieving supplicant’s child or parent but all of us?). Elsewhere or at other times they have not needed to suffer and die but have had to cease to be themselves and to become animals, and why animals? Because animals do not die: wolves die but Sir Wolf never dies, not born for death. And when the time is past when those who go down into death are able to turn themselves into animals, still there are those who are able—while remaining asleep in their beds—to go out, in spirit, in the form of an animal, or riding on one. And when that time is also over, we can still remember that it was once done or can be done. Some of us can.

  Jean Bodin, who wanted to find and burn all witches, all those who took animal form or believed they did—all those who had illicit or unregulated dealings with the dead—was in fact a modern man, a man of the time to come: he was fighting against the tendency to slip back into the older ways, the old world in which persons can be in two places at the same time, the world where Sagittarius sat on the horizon and the doors were still open: the old world that rationality is always fighting against, trying to mop it up, or leave it behind. Dam it or damn it. Clearheaded men like Bodin, Catholic and Protestant, antiphantasmic warriors, pushed back the dark together, rejecting the age-old truce between the Church and the pagans, both with their old philosophers and
their old gods, with the small gods of everyday life, with the warning and helping dead. No more, said Bodin, Calvin, Mersenne.

  And it worked too. Frightened or ashamed, those who investigated Nature or nature drew in their researches, shut out the universal rays, narrowed their questions to those that had some promise of clear answers, and to whose formulation no powers could object. If they hadn’t done so the plain stepping-stones of science couldn’t have been uncovered, and swept. One by one. So successful was that enterprise that by the time Pierce Moffett discovered the old arts (or discovered that others had discovered or never forgotten them) the world in which they had been practiced was centuries gone and they couldn’t really be used. Pierce didn’t believe they had ever really worked.

  But (he typed on his big blue typewriter, alone on All Saints’ Eve as night fell) suppose the world is in fact now coming to an end, the world of Meaning we have always lived in. And suppose that the Powers who must make from it a new one—one that will be just like the old one in most but not all respects—are mulling just now over what sort the new world might be, and what garb they themselves might appear in too. If that’s the case, then that old multilayered earth and its shape-shifting travellers would have to be among the worlds from which they could choose—mutatis mutandis, the same but never exactly the same, take a little out of the waist and plump the shoulders. More likely not, though; more likely they’ll choose something entirely different this time, something in a fierce hound’s-tooth maybe, or a moiré taffeta, eye-fooling, iridescent: can’t you see them (I can) moving amid the racks and counters fingering the goods, unable to decide, all possibilities laid out before them once again before they make their choice, thereafter to pretend (once again) that everything has always been this way, that they themselves have all along had these aspects and not others, rank on rank, the army of unalterable Law?

  And who is that littlest one among them, wide-eyed, just awakened and believing he has never made this choice before? You know, don’t you?

  He rolled this out of the typewriter and read it over; and after a long moment of gazing on it he tore it in two. Too extravagant, too clever, too. Daring? Taunting? He put his hands in his lap, afraid. Years before, when he had finally and wholeheartedly abjured the Church and all its pomps and works, had denied wholesale and at large all judgments it could make or had made on him, he had remembered the Sin Against the Holy Ghost, which no one could define but which Jesus was very clear in stating could not be forgiven, and he had said in his mind All right, whatever it is, I hereby commit it: and had felt a sudden chill nakedness, as though he had been taken notice of, and his statement recorded. Which was what he felt now too.