The Demonologist (23 page)

O’Brien is already backing away. She hooks my elbow as she passes me, the two of us mouthing silent apologies. Then we turn and start as quickly away as a walking pace permits.

When we make it to the Mustang I start to explain what I saw back at the truck, but O’Brien is already opening the passenger door and throwing herself in.

“Drive,” she says. “You can tell me without me worrying about some secretary screwer putting a bullet in my skinny ass.”

We slip back onto the interstate. Me checking the rearview for the Dodge, O’Brien checking e-mail and voice messages on her phone.

“You expecting a call?”

“A nervous tic,” she says. “I get anxious and start playing with the buttons on this thing.”

“That’s
everybody’s
nervous tic.”

O’Brien collects herself. Asks what I saw in the truck.

“Raggedy Anne. Remember the hitchhiker I told you about?”

“Yes. Unforgettable Anne. But she wasn’t alone, was she?”

“You’re not going to believe this.”

“It’s way too late for you to preface anything you might say with that.”

“Anne was doing the nasty with someone. A particularly
nasty
nasty.”

“I thought she was dead.”

“She is. And I got the distinct feeling the man she was with was, too.”

O’Brien is absorbed by her phone’s screen. Then she sniffs and sits straight. Eyes blazing with a kind of mad excitement.

“Tell me who it was,” she says.

“Will Junger.”

She makes a sucking intake of breath so sharp I take it to be a flare of pain.

“Let me ask you something,” she manages.

“Okay.”

“Have you checked your phone today?”

“No. Besides, I’ve been sitting beside you all day. Have you seen me check it?”

“No.”

“Why is this important?”

“That last e-mail I read came from Janice in the Psych Department at Columbia.”

“What’d it say?”

“A car accident. Just last night. Solo crash into a bridge abutment on the Long Island Expressway,” she says, sucking air again. “Will Junger died four hours ago, David.”

T
WO PROFESSIONAL TALKERS ON A LONG DRIVE WITH STRANGE
news swirling around their Ivy League noggins and neither O’Brien nor I say much more than “You hungry?” and “Any more Dr. Pepper?” between Denton, Texas, and Alexandria, Louisiana. We may be trying to figure things out. We may be in shock. We may be wondering if we will ever go home again. The only certainty is the road rolling out before us, indifferent and shimmering. Along with the sun that drills through the windows, licks of clammy air around our necks. We welcome the South with brooding silence and incremental bump-ups to the A/C.

We decide to stop in Opelousas for the night. The Oaks Motel offers rooms for “less than a gimlet at the Algonquin,” as O’Brien points out, so we take two with a pass-through door between them.

Sleep isn’t possible. I know this without trying. So I open Tess’s journal again. Find another entry that proves my daughter knew so much more of the world I have entered than I could ever imagine.

I know where bullies come from.

There’s one in my class. Her name is Rose. Probably the most wrong name for a person in the world.

Everyone is afraid of Rose. Even the boys. Not that she’s so tough or anything like that. If you saw a picture of her you wouldn’t think SCARY! But if she’s in the room with you, you feel it. When she looks at you, you wish she’d stop.

(Rose is a little on the fat side. She’s getting boobs, too. The first in our class. And her nails are long and dirty, like she uses them to dig. She’s an almost-fat girl with dirty nails and boobs.)

She never bothers me. It’s because I know why she is the way she is. I even whispered it in her ear one time.

You think you have a secret friend but it’s not a friend

And after I did, she gave me this look. A
How could you know that?
look.

Now she leaves me alone. Like she’s the one scared of me.

Miss Green taught a special class about bullies at the beginning of the year. She said they do bad things because they’re just scared and alone. She was only half-right.

Bullies are scared. But they’re not alone.

There’s a secret friend inside them. Something that starts out saying nice things, keeping them company, promising to never go.

And then it says other things. Gives you ideas.

That’s how I know about Rose. I can see her secret friend.

After another couple pages I come upon another disturbing passage. Disturbing in part because of what it says about the horrors she experienced. In part because what she wrote was meant for me to read now that she’s gone.

They are all around us.

Open your mind to them and they’re with you. Inside you. It’s almost too easy once you do it a few times. And even if you don’t like it, it’s hard to stop.

What do they want? To show us things. What they know, or want us to
think
they know. The future. How to make the world ready for them.

They are all around us.

I reread the passage. And again. Even before the pity, before the guilt, is the certainty that she was right.
About all of it
. I’ve opened my mind and closed my eyes and now I, too, have seen some of the things they want to show us. Though there is much more that hasn’t been revealed to me that had been to her. Even as we walked through Central Park to feed the ducks on the weekends, even as I read to her from
The Secret Garden
at bedtime, even as she kissed me good-bye and threw her bird-boned arms around my neck at the front doors of her school,
she knew
.

A knock on the pass-through door. When I open it after tucking the journal out of sight, O’Brien is standing there with her tongue hanging out in a pantomime of deathly thirst.

“Let’s get a drink,” she says.

We walk across the street to the Brass Rail and order Budweisers before sitting at a table in the corner. The beer has no taste, but it’s fizzy and cold and performs the tongue-loosening magic of alcohol.

“He must have been on his way to or from visiting Diane,” I begin.

“Probably right.”

“Maybe I should call her.”

“You want to?”

“No. For about eighteen different reasons, no, I don’t.”

“Then don’t. Seems to me this isn’t the best time for insincerity.”

“I didn’t wish the guy dead.”

“Really?”

“Injured, maybe. Something to wipe that smirk off his face, sure. But not dead.”

“Well, he sure as hell’s dead now.”

“And the first thing he does with his time on the other side is find me.”

“Sounds like that wasn’t his decision alone.”

“The Unnamed.”

“It chose Will to speak to you. What did it say?”

I don’t repeat the cruelty about O’Brien’s condition. But I once again make mental note of it. Not for its obscenity, but the fact that the Unnamed referred to O’Brien right off the top. It means we are being watched. But what’s also significant is that O’Brien may have been right about me being lured out here, far from New York, to deny me the support of my friend. In any case, for the hundredth time today, I’m grateful she took the flight out to Wichita to join me.

“Anne spoke first, actually,” I white-lie. “
Live while ye may, Yet happy pair
.”

“Don’t tell me. Milton.”

“Who else?”

“Why that line? Was she referring to you and Tess?”

“No. You and me. But the tone was distinctly sarcastic.”

“You and me,” O’Brien echoes, hugging herself.

“It’s from Book Four. Satan has arrived in Eden and is plotting Adam and Eve’s ruin. He’s hatefully jealous of all they have—enjoyment of their bodies, the natural world, God’s favor. So he tells them to have fun while they still can, because it won’t last long.
Live while ye may, / Yet happy pair; enjoy, till I return, / Short pleasures, for long woes are to succeed
.”

“A threat.”

“Certainly. As well as a joke. He’s comparing us to Adam and Eve in the garden.”

“And here we are in Louisiana. Middle-aged, one of us searching for a lost child, the other withering from a terminal disease. About as far from sinless joy as a pair can get.”

“But there’s something in this,” I say, growing excited. “Something for us to use.”

“What?”

“An indication of its sensibility.”

“A comedian.”

“An ironist. All along, it has been citing a canonical text, a
masterpiece of the poetic form, but with ironic intent. It says something of its personality.”

“Who cares about its personality?”

“I do. I have to.”

O’Brien sits back in her chair and brings the bottle to her lips, surprised to find it empty. She waves it at the bartender and throws up two fingers for more. Then corrects herself by adding another two fingers.

“Just in case,” she says.

When the beers arrive I tell O’Brien how when I asked the Unnamed who it was it answered with another Milton quote.

“
Not to know me argues yourselves unknown
.”

“Okay, Professor,” O’Brien says. “Unpack that.”

“It’s a Satan line again. When he’s stopped by angels guarding the earth, and they demand to know his identity. He doesn’t give them a direct answer. His pride is too great. The Devil feels they ought to know who he is for all his accomplishments, his fame, the fear he provokes.”

“So our demon feels we should know who it is.”

“It’s more that he wants me to figure that out.”

“Another test.”

“I’d say so.”

“Why does it
need
you to puzzle out its name?”

“I’ve wondered that, too. And I think it has to do with intimacy. If I am able to speak its name, it brings the two of us closer. And it needs us to be very close.”
Not friends, perhaps
, I recall again its dead voice predicting from Tess’s throat.
No, certainly not friends. But unquestionably close.

“Maybe it
can’t
be the first to say its name,” O’Brien offers, slamming her beer down. “It
needs
you to say it, to give him greater authority. Anonymity is one of the demonic drawbacks. It denies them a degree of power. Think about it. ‘My name is Legion.’ Satan not introducing himself at Eden’s gates.”

“The exorcist’s first step is to discover the name.”

“Exactly! Names have power, and it can go both ways. In the case
of demons—
our
demon—it doesn’t say who it is because it’s not able to. But if
you
are able to determine its name and say it aloud, it opens a channel for it somehow. Through you.”

O’Brien puts her hand over mine. Her blood pulsing so strongly through her papery skin I can feel each beat.

“I think you may be right,” I say. “Except I would go a step further.”

“Step away.”

“
Not to know me argues yourselves unknown
. It’s a two-way street. We will be united only once I discover who it is
and
who I am.”

“The line says ‘yourselves,’ David. Plural. I think I’m part of this self-discovery, too.”

We drink some more. Start into our “just in case” third beers.

“So here’s the million-dollar question,” O’Brien says, wiping the sudden sweat from her forehead with the back of her wrist. “What’s the Unnamed’s name?”

“I’m not sure yet. But I think it’s one of the Stygian Council who sit in Milton’s version of Pandemonium.”

“Definitely not Satan?”

“No. Though it covets its master’s fame.”

“Ambitious. Add that to its characteristics.”

“And literary-minded. Using
Paradise Lost
as a kind of codebook.”

“Language. It shares a passion for words with you, David.”

“Seems that way,” I admit. “And it seems like it would like to have a talk with me as much as I would with it.”

O’Brien abruptly opens her mouth wide in a sudden yawn.

Even here, in a roadhouse lit only by neon beer signs and old pinball machines, O’Brien’s illness is plainly drawn over her features. For stretches of time her humor and animation disguise the ongoing damage being done within her, and then, all at once, it pushes through to show itself. It’s like the Unnamed doing his face-morphing trick with Will Junger in the truck, or the man in Venice becoming my father. Cancer is a kind of possession, too. And like a demon, before it claims you, it nibbles away at who you are, erases the face you have always presented to the world to show the unwanted thing inside.

“Let’s get you to bed,” I say, rising and offering O’Brien my hand.

“I might think you were coming on to me if you didn’t have that worried-little-boy look on your face.”

“I
am
a worried little boy.”

“Here’s something I’ve learned the hard way,” she says, standing but leaving my hand untouched. “You all are.”

W
E RETURN TO THE MOTEL, BUT WHEN I GET TO MY DOOR
O’B
RIEN
stands right behind me. I turn to face her and she pockets the key to her room.

“Is it okay if I stay with you tonight?”

“Sure,” I say. “But there’s only one bed in there.”

“That’s kind of why I’m asking.”

Inside, she slips out of her jeans and sweater so that, in the single lamp’s light, she stands in only a T-shirt and underwear. I don’t mean to stare, but I do. Her lost weight confirmed by the bones nudging against her skin, replacing curved lines with knobs and ridges. But she is still beautiful despite this, still an elegant woman capable of invitation with her poise, the promises of her body’s shape. Perhaps tomorrow the disease will steal this, too. But not yet. Tonight, she is a woman my eyes linger on with desire more than pity.

“I must look awful,” she says. But she doesn’t cover herself, doesn’t hide beneath the sheets.