Daemonomania

  She believed that she had collaborated in this forgetting, so as to deny what she had done even to her most inward awareness, though she could not imagine how she could do this without knowing it still in an even deeper part of herself; psychology said you could successfully deny reality, and she believed it was so just as she believed other things she didn’t know or that seemed impossible to her, things said in the group, things Pierce had told her, that the universe was made of nothing but electricity or that the peepers of spring nights weren’t bugs but frogs. Frogs! Yes! Tiny frogs! She thought this surely couldn’t be so, and she’d studied his face for signs that he knew it wasn’t, that he was mocking her or himself in that way he was always doing: as though someone else were listening, to whom the joke would be funny, and funnier because she didn’t get it or even get that it was a joke.

  Was that cruel, or what? She laughed, forgiving him, laughing because it was so easy to forgive. So easy. She could remember, and she could forgive: forgive because she could remember, and thus be forgiven herself for all that she had once denied. Everything, everything she had done and believed she had not done, all able to be opened and studied, like the cooked books of some shady enterprise, transparent to God, and so to her at last.

  Mr. Cichy, Mal, his tinted glasses and pointy beard. Reading what paper in his train seat across the aisle from her, she could almost even at this distance see the name of it. See-shee he pronounced his name but she had already heard it differently in her inward ear when he wrote it and his phone number on a page torn from his leather notebook; Mal Cichy, the man she had set out to meet, apparently, and could not refuse once she had come across him. Into the tunnel under the river, down into the city toward which she had bent her soul. Mal sent me she was to say when the apartment door was opened to her, a palatial building somewhere; in its windows the high city gleamed and glittered ceaselessly. Mal was there already. It was there at that party, or later, at another place or party, that she had been asked to be in the film, the Japanese film; a producer or director she met, they were all producers or directors or something, had bought a Japanese film and wanted to add some scenes. She would be masked. A loft somewhere, black-velvet hangings, naked men and other women in masks too. Tenderly, carefully that older woman (the director’s lover or friend) had bound the false face on her, just a silk handkerchief really but painted with a Japanese dollface, through which her own face showed faintly, animating it. He paid her at the end of the shoot, counting out fives from a fat wallet. Later he offered her a hundred dollars to let him spank her, and she accepted that money too as she accepted everything else, every assent confirming that there was something inside that could not be reached or soiled.

  Somewhere that film must still exist. She had not remembered it or Mal’s name or his newspaper (Observer!) or the mirrored elevator in which she had arisen to go to that party or the other party. Now she did.

  She wondered if it was possible to be possessed from the outside in. When she thought of possession, when they talked about it in the group, she thought of something entering you and taking, yes, possession of your inmost self, something which then drives your outside actions and your speech and whatever. But if something possessed her, and maybe it did or had, it had not crept within her like a germ but had fallen upon her and covered her over, then going on doing things that she herself did not do, herself staying still, amazed at what she could bear, alone insidemost.

  And if that was possession, and if it could be lifted, then it would not be the casting out of something that was rooted deep within like a carcinoma, the way some of them talked about it; no the outside one would crack or peel like a shell or a skin or a suit of armor, and then the one inside, the one that nothing had reached, would be the outside: the hidden patent and the inside out.

  The phone rang, strange in the half-light, and she went to it slowly, tugging her robe around her protectively. But it wasn’t Pierce; it was Mike Mucho.

  “Yes I’m awake,” she answered his first question, happy to hear his voice. “Yes Mike. Awake.”

  “Just thought I’d call.”

  “Yes. Thanks.”

  “Busy day today?”

  ”Oh sort of. Studying.”

  “Okay. No trouble sleeping?”

  “No, Mike. None.” She laughed as though they shared a secret, which they did, though not the one Pierce thought they shared (which made it even funnier and sweeter) and which wasn’t even a secret, she’d tell anybody: that she had no trouble sleeping, and no trouble waking. It had been promised.

  “We have to talk later,” he said. “Will you be at Dynamo tonight?”

  “Yes sure.” The cute name for group meetings shamed her a little, and worse were the names that beginners in the group bore, dynamen and dynamettes, it was worth studying hard just to go up a level and shed them.

  “Some amazing things are happening,” he said. “Fast, too. We were talking about you, about what might be next, and where you might fit in.”

  “Sure,” she said, feeling a hot surge of pleasure and anxiety beneath her breastbone.

  “So we’ll talk,” Mike said. “See you.”

  She hung up and couldn’t remember what she had been thinking.

  Oh right. Oh yes. Forgiveness: the bugs and frogs that had inhabited her, all made to come forth and be dismissed, so unimportant. Walking in the Spirit: she had only found herself able to do it infrequently so far, but she knew that if she asked and if she practiced she would be in it longer and longer and then at last maybe forever.

  Forever.

  Pins and needles in her fingertips and a constriction in her throat, as though she sensed a predator somewhere near about to leap.

  On the windowsill lay her father’s Zippo, which she had stolen from his coat pocket the day she left home, and her pack of Merits. One of those would end this mood for a time: quell it, snuff it. As though it had already done so merely in the thinking of the thought, she could feel the Spirit depart from her.

  What had Mike meant, what did they want from her? She had given a bad answer when Ray had talked to her about moving up to the next level of training, she had seen it in his eyes, though he nodded and took her hand and was as kind as ever. She hadn’t assented with all her heart. She would, she would, but they had to see it would take time. When you’ve been a certain way for a long while.

  There were probably still a lot of things she could not yet remember, lost like dreams. Or maybe they were dreams. She dreamed sometimes that she could remember distinctly things that in waking life she had never done: as though there was a world in there with more than just unreal experiences: with unreal memories too, unreal histories, unreal beginnings, unreal destinies.

  She could remember if she tried. She didn’t right now want to, that’s all. She picked up the pack of cigarettes, slid her thumb tip over the slick cellophane, shook one out and lit it. Smoke eaters: that’s what the group called those who hadn’t yet given up cigarettes. Dog returning to its vomit. Every time when with Pierce she had lit one she had seen in Pierce’s eyes a small triumph, told you so.

  Some cult, she thought, feeling a coldness moving from the outside in, familiar coldness, she shrank from its advance. Aren’t they supposed to be here, manipulating my mind? Where the hell are they? They give you all this stuff and then leave you alone with it. Do it if you can.

  Suddenly, surprising herself, she arose as though yanked upright, walked swiftly over the cold floor to the sink, turned on the tap and thrust the cigarette and the half-filled pack under it. There. There. Better, more final, than throwing them in the trash, that only meant you would be searching there later, pushing through the Tampax and tissues and hair combings to find them. She stood looking down at what she had done, and a wave of longing and loss swept over her so intense she thought she might faint.

  The phone rang again. She knew who it was.

  “I’m sorry if it’s early,” Pierce said. At the sound of the connection made he had felt
instantly uncertain, as though the phone line had tapped him into a well of alien energy. His heart, which for an hour or two had been so placid, rising and falling like blue sea swells, shrank and began again to drum.

  “I was up,” she said. “How are you? Are you all right?”

  “Well basically. It’s just that I had something to say, and I didn’t think it could wait. To apologize first, though, and …”

  “Yes well listen, Moffett, I think you’d better be careful. Some very strange and bad things are happening. I was almost set on fire yesterday.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “I was boiling water. I was going to put the kettle on. I got this awful feeling, and then I saw that the sleeve of my robe was burning. I mean flames.” She waited, and when she heard nothing she said: “I got it out okay. But just imagine if it had reached my hair.”

  “Oh my God.” More faintly than before.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “The bad stuff can’t hurt me. But I worry about you, Moffett. Listen. When I was driving back from your house, the window of my car—and there was no wind blowing or anything, and I wasn’t even driving fast—it exploded. It just exploded. On your side.”

  Silence. Rose waited for a reply, but none came.

  “Now you can say it’s just coincidence,” she said. “You can go ahead and say that if you want, but …”

  “No,” he said. “No, no I won’t say that.”

  “Well.” Pause. “I had a talk with Ray,” she said. “About us.”

  Pierce in Littleville, throat thick with panic, thought: Now it comes. What they had all along been planning.

  “And what he said was, that if seeing you was making this harder for me, if you were throwing me off, then maybe I might think about not seeing you.”

  “Uh-huh.” A wind blew away his skin and flesh. “Hm.”

  “For a while.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It’s what anybody would say, Pierce,” she said. “About somebody having as much trouble as we are.”

  “So is that what you intend to do?” he said at last.

  “No. It’s what he said I might want to do. For a while.”

  “The reason I ask,” Pierce said, and then nothing more for a while, he waited to see what might emerge. “Is. Well. I wondered if you still want to come here for the Ball. On the river.”

  “If you still want me to.”

  “I do.”

  “Well sure. I really do want to. I do.”

  “Come as you aren’t,” he said. “That’s the rule.”

  She pondered that till it made sense. “Oh. Okay.”

  “It could be anything.”

  “Yep,” she said. “There’s a lot of things I’m not.”

  Nothing.

  “So what was it you wanted to say?” she said. “You said it couldn’t wait.” She had to listen to another and even longer pause, but then Pierce only said, “Oh. Oh gosh.”

  And then: “Well.”

  And then: “I’ll tell you when I see you. It wasn’t anything really. I’m sorry.”

  4

  Next it was Rosie Rasmussen who, late that morning, turned in at the stone gateposts looking for Pierce’s cottage; ghostly and maybe invented childhood memories of the Winterhalters’ house had led her to it. “Okay,” she said to Sam. “I think it’s someplace down there. A little house by the river.” She turned the Bison away from the drive up to the big house, and took the less trodden way down to the fields and the river.

  “He should live there,” Sam said, pointing to the tall chimneys of the big house. She wore last year’s winter coat, rabbit fur matted around the hood and too small, but the warm weather and living in two households had caused the need for a new one to be missed. She clutched her plastic backpack in her arms, for some reason unwilling to sling it in the back as she usually did when going to Mike’s.

  “That must be it,” Rosie said.

  “It’s little,” said Sam.

  “Now you’re okay with this?” Rosie said. “It’s just for a visit. I’ll be back really soon.”

  Sam said nothing.

  In the little house Pierce was wearing his own winter coat, he too needing a new one; he had been out going up to do his duty and look into the Winterhalters’ house, and on his return had sat again without removing it, safer somehow inside it. He heard Rosie’s car approach, rising growling sound that almost until it was upon him he did not recognize for what it was, afraid to get up and look out to see. His door then was flung open suddenly, and he started, clutching the chair’s arms; a small child came in, and looked at him frankly in summons or command. No it was just Rosie’s daughter Samantha. Rosie too right after her, calling to him.

  “Hi,” he said, unmoving.

  They stood before him, making cheerful greetings, the cold air they had brought in swirling gaily through the place. Sam turned to slam shut the door with awful force. Rosie, arms akimbo, looked around Pierce’s house, where she had not been before, and at Pierce himself, who had not risen from his chair.

  “You don’t look so hot,” she said. “Did you sleep in that coat?”

  “I don’t really sleep.”

  “Are you okay?”

  He wanted badly to tell her that he was not, so badly that the heart within him seemed to vault painfully toward her, and tears came to his eyes; but he only felt his unshaven jaw, and said, “Coming down with something.”

  “Are you eating?”

  “Certainly.”

  “What?”

  “Food.”

  He rose and followed her through the tiny rooms as she toured the place. She peeked through the bathroom into the bedroom beyond with its two beds, the little and the big, but made no remark on them. In the office she ran her long hand over the blue bosom of his typewriter; she lifted the top page of his typescript, and put it down. She noted Kraft’s, too, in its box. “You were supposed to copy that,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I will. I haven’t. I will.”

  “I mean what if this place burns down.” She lifted the box’s cover, and Pierce had an impulse to warn her, warn her away, as from a chasm’s lip or a loaded cigar. “Listen,” she said. “This is kind of weird, but I have a favor to ask. I have to go talk to a lawyer, in the Jambs, and it might take a while; I thought I could leave Sam at Beau’s place, but it’s not one of my usual days, and Beau’s gone.”

  “Yes,” Pierce said. “I know.”

  “So I was wondering if Sam could stay and visit for a while. An hour or two.” Sam herself was looking at him over the edge of the table, only her curls and her eyes visible. Pierce paid her a smile.

  “Do you believe in God?” she asked him, mildly.

  “Um,” he said. “Gee. Why do you ask?”

  “Sam,” said her mother, a warning or a plea.

  “Are you a Jew or a Christian?” Sam asked Pierce.

  “It’s Mike,” Rosie said. “She’s getting it from him.”

  It took a moment for Pierce to see what Rosie meant: not that Sam had been sent by Mike to ask him these things. “Neither,” he said. “There’s not just the two.”

  “So would that be okay?” Rosie asked. “Just for an hour or two?”

  “Sure,” Pierce said. “If you’re okay with me.”

  “Mom,” said Sam. “What if I have a seizure?” She said this to her mother in her own mom voice, her arms akimbo just like Rosie’s.

  “You won’t, hon,” Rosie said. “You took your medicine. Right? Right.” She pointed upward to a shelf. “Is that,” she asked Pierce, “one of those Russian dolls?”

  “It is,” he said, and took it down, and gave it to Sam. She shook it, heard its interior make sounds; Pierce showed her how it opened. An old crone, and inside her a red-cheeked peasant mom, and inside her a heavy-braided bride, and inside her. Rosie seeing Sam absorbed took Pierce’s arm and led him to the kitchen.

  “It’ll really be all right?” Pierce asked. “About the seizures?”
r />   “What the doctor told me,” Rosie answered, “is that you have to live as though one will never happen again. Just live as though. Even though they will. I can’t keep her home in bed. Or me either.”

  “No,” said Pierce. “No. But suppose if this morning …”

  “It’s not dangerous,” Rosie said. “It’s not like a medical emergency. It’s just her.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It lasts a second. A few seconds. Just don’t let her head hit the floor. Even then it’s okay; she has an amazingly hard head. She’ll sleep afterwards. But Pierce it won’t happen. I promise.”

  Being raised in a doctor’s house had imbued Pierce, as it had his cousins, with an unalarmed directness in medical matters, spurious mostly, but he listened to Rosie calmly and nodded, I see. Okay.

  “So now tell me what’s the matter,” Rosie said, sitting at the kitchen table. “Something is.”

  “Well,” Pierce said. He drew the unshed overcoat more tightly around him. “You know Rose.”

  “Yes, Pierce. I know Rose.”

  “Well the Powerhouse.” This name he extruded or secreted only after a struggle. “The Powerhouse International, you know?”

  “Oh no,” Rosie said.

  “The bunch that, you know …”

  “I know.”

  “Yes. Well she seems to have. You know.”

  “Oh my Lord.”

  She looked over at him where he huddled in his chair, seemingly sightless or seeing something elsewhere. “Pierce,” she said in sudden fear. “You’re not, not …”

  “No, no oh no.”

  “No. But she is?”

  “She seems to be.” He told her in a low voice all about Conurbana, Mike, Pitt, the glossolalia, the rain; she listened as to a fairy tale or war story, mouth ajar and eyes wide. Oh Lord. Oh my God.

  “So,” Pierce said. He would not tell her about calling Rhea in the midnight; nor about how the Devil broke the windshield of Rose’s car. Nor how he had wept.