The Demonologist (28 page)

“The river where your brother drowned.”

“I never told you he drowned.”

“But I’m right, aren’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” she says, her voice retreating to a cracked whisper. “Consider me convinced.”

I
ASK
O’B
RIEN TO DRIVE FOR A WHILE AND PRETEND TO SLEEP IN
the backseat. Instead, I open Tess’s journal to where I left off last time. Reading her words as much for the shape of the letters she made as what she expressed.
Her
hand, working over
these
pages. The trace of a presence I can almost touch, almost summon into being.

Dad always tells me things about when I was a kid. Things I don’t really remember because I was too young. But they seem like
my
memories now, I’ve heard the stories so many times.

Like this one:

When I wasn’t even two yet, I would climb into bed with my mom and dad early in the mornings. My dad was always first to wake up. He’d try to let my mom sleep, so he was usually the one to take me to the bathroom and pour my cereal, etc., etc. He says it was his favorite part of the day. But I’ve heard him say the same thing about reading bedtime stories. And seeing my face when he picked me up from kindergarten. And the two of us sitting at the diner counter and having tuna sandwiches. And brushing my hair after a bath.

Anyway, he would wake up first and I’d be there LOOKING at him. Three inches from his face. (Dad always says it was close enough to taste my breath. What did it taste like? Warm bread, he says.)

I would ask him the same question every day:

“Are you happy, Daddy?”

“I’m happy now,” he’d say every time.

The funny part about it is I still want to ask my dad the same thing. Even now. Not just because I’m interested in the answer. I want to be able to
make
him happy by asking. To be breathing near him and for him to feel it and for that to be enough.

And then, along with the entries like these, something odd.

Insertions that don’t line up with what precedes or follows them. A second voice more powerful than the first, cutting through.

Dad thinks he can run from what follows him. Maybe he doesn’t even see it, or tells himself he doesn’t. IT DOESN’T MATTER. It’s coming for him just the same. Like it’s coming for me.

I saw a nature documentary about grizzly bears once. It said that if you encounter a bear in the wild, you should never run, but stand your ground. Talk to it. Running marks you as prey. As food.

The ones that run never get away.

But maybe, if you face it, you can show you’re not scared. You can get a little more time. Find a way to escape for good.

When the time comes, I won’t run. I’ll look at it STRAIGHT ON. Maybe it’ll be enough to give Dad a chance.

Because if the bear doesn’t take one of us, it will take us both.

How did Tess know all this? How could she see what I had hidden so well I couldn’t see myself? I was always aware of our closeness, the amount of unspoken information we could pass in a look over the dinner table or in a rearview mirror glance. Yet I thought we were no more special than the luckiest of similarly hardwired fathers and daughters.

Turns out she could read far deeper signals than that. How we shared the unwanted gift of melancholy, the burden of the Black Crown which, for us, was what opened a doorway through which other things could come and go. The entities that usually go by the name of spirits but feel heavier and more willfully destructive than the wispy apparitions that word implies. Beings long ago separated from their bodies but so fierce in their search for new skins they are indifferent to the harm they cause, indeed take pleasure in that harm, as they slip inside the living again for a time. What they leave behind is never the same again, the ones who walk among us but whose stares go emptily through us.

It makes me think of my father. How whatever marks Tess and me marked him as well. A man who grieved before he ever lost anything, who suffered without any obvious grounds for suffering. Through his distance from us, his family, through moving from town to town, through alcohol, he tried to run from the bear that
stalked him. And in the end, Tess was right. The ones who run never get away.

Maybe I’d been running since then, too. But not anymore.

I
CALL MY WIFE FROM A
KFC
MEN
’
S ROOM STALL.

Not that there’s anything to say—that is, there’s too much that cannot be said—but there is the unavoidable compulsion to try. That I make the attempt sitting on a closed-lid john while absently reading some of the filthiest graffiti I’ve ever seen strikes me as oddly appropriate.

Then, Diane’s voice. She hasn’t changed the recording since before Venice, so that there’s a lightness in it still, an almost flirtatious promise. It would be different now.

You have reached the voice mail of Diane Ingram. Please leave a message.

“Hey, Diane. It’s me. I don’t know if I’ll be able to call again after—”

After what? Something final, whatever it is. So I should say good-bye at least. Or maybe it’s already too late for that.

“I’m sorry.
Shit!
If you had a nickel for every time you heard me say that, right? There’s just no other way to put it, I guess. It covers all the bases. Tess. You and me. Will. I heard about the accident and, believe it or not, I’m sorry about that, too.”

The bathroom’s door opens and someone comes in to wash their hands. The faucet turned on full blast, raining spots onto the floor I can see from under the stall door.

“Diane. Listen, there’s—” I start, lowering my voice. But the idea of someone hearing what even I don’t know I’m about to say stops me. I wait for whoever stands at the sink to finish. But he doesn’t. The water pounding into the sink. The drops pooling together into puddles on the tiles.

“I just hope you find a way to be happy again,” I whisper. “I hope I haven’t taken that away, too.”

Too?
What did I mean by that? I’ve taken her happiness as well as the wasted years of our marriage? As well as her daughter?

The hand-washer clears his throat. Draws a wheezing breath. Begins to laugh.

I yank the stall door open. The water still on full, plumes of steam graying the mirror. But nobody there.

Next I’m plowing out into the hallway to hug the wall, to feel its cool reality against my cheek. Visible to those sitting at plastic tables, digging chicken out of buckets, some of whom look back at me. Their thoughts of
Drugs
or
Crazy
or
Stay the hell away
written on their faces as they chew.

I check the phone and hang up. An almost three-minute message. The first half a stuttered apology, the second a torrent of running water, concluding with the laughter of something dead.
What would Diane make of it? She’d probably come to a similar conclusion to the drumstick-holders staring at me now
.
There’s no helping someone like that.

The funny part is I’d meant to be comforting. I’d meant to sound sane.

W
E PASS INTO
T
ENNESSEE WITH
O’B
RIEN SINGING THE FEW BARS
of “Chattanooga Choo Choo” she can recall. The actual Chattanooga slipping past as yet another cluster of highwayside motels, padlocked factories, and self-storage barracks. There is a real town beyond this ass-end of streets. Neighborhoods with families buoyed by the same affections or shattered by the same crimes as other neighborhoods, the ones we have lived in and therefore deem more real. People who, for all I know, are conducting similarly impossible searches. Talking to the dead and praying to whoever will listen.

There’s gonna be

A certain party at the station . . .

Soon the asphalt ribbon switchbacks up into the Appalachians, though nobody slows, a collective denial of charging eighteen-wheelers and yawning cliffsides. And nobody more indifferent than us. Tag-teaming the wheel through the night, gnawing on tacos and reconstituted
chicken products, washing it all down with coffee near-solid with Sweet’N Low.

From time to time, O’Brien asks about my father. It prompts me to remember more than I tell her.

Because I was so young when he died, I can summon only snapshots, the taste left behind in the air by his darkening moods in the months leading up to my brother’s accident. Behavior that, considered in light of my own experiences of late, takes on a greater resonance. How he, never a religious man, began reading the Bible cover to cover, then starting again when he was done. The lengthy silences when he would stop whatever he was doing—mowing the lawn, spooning instant coffee into his mug—and appear to listen to instructions none of us could hear. And his
looks
. These more than anything else. How I would catch him looking at me, his son, not with pride or affection but a strange appetite.

I keep what I tell O’Brien to the surface things. His depression, his drinking. The lost jobs. His urging me to not be like him. And until recently, I thought I’d succeeded.

“But there’s more of him in you than you figured,” O’Brien says. “It’s why we’re going to him.”

“Even though he’s dead.”

“Doesn’t seem to be stopping him from coming back, does it?”

“He’s not the only one.”

I
HAVEN
’
T TOLD
O’B
RIEN EVERYTHING.

Not because I worry she won’t believe me. I haven’t told her because it’s just between me and Tess. To reveal it runs the risk of breaking the thin thread that still connects us. To speak of it aloud might let Belial know that such a thread exists.

For instance, I didn’t tell O’Brien all the reasons I know we have to go to the old cottage by the river. I didn’t tell her about the entry in Tess’s journal where she spoke of the dream-that’s-not-a-dream.

Standing on the bank of a river of fire.

Tess taken to the far bank where my brother and I never ventured as
kids. We didn’t speak of it, but we knew it was a bad place all the same. The trees there growing aslant, their leaves never quite returning in the summer, so that the forest appeared hungry.

The same place Belial had shown me on the swing in Jupiter. The playground surrounded by dark forest. An emerging beast.

The line between this place and the Other Place.

And my daughter on the wrong side. Hearing me searching for her, calling her name. Watching my brother’s body float past.

Arms pulling me back. Skin that tastes like dirt.

Tess begging me to find her.

Not words from my mouth through the air, but from my heart through the earth, so only the two of us could hear it.

I hadn’t known that’s what it was. That the sound I can sometimes recognize beneath the ringing tinnitus and talk-radio blather and exhaust-tainted air blasting past the open window, is her.

W
E MAKE
O
HIO AND SWITCH TO
I-90
AT
T
OLEDO, SO THAT WE NOW
speed along the underbelly of Lake Erie, flat as aluminum foil in the night. The irony of a sign for Eden draws us off the interstate to park at the rear corner of a Red Lobster lot for a half hour of sleep, though only O’Brien cranks her seat back and closes her eyes.

As O’Brien gasps and whistles her way through the slumber of the unwell, I flick through Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy
. I’m drawing my thumb across the pages and letting them flip and blur when the book opens to a bookmark I didn’t know was there. A photograph. Curled at the edges, white borders turned yellow with time. A photo of me.

This is who I take it to be at first, anyway. Though in the next second I see it is my father. The only picture I have of him. I know this because I had long believed I’d destroyed all the others. The shock of the similarity leaves me slightly breathless, fighting for air just as O’Brien does next to me.

He would have been almost exactly the same age I am now when he went out into the woods with the Mossberg 12-gauge his father
had given him, slipped the barrel past his lips far enough to reach the trigger with his free hand, and fired. In the photo, taken only weeks before my brother’s accident, his expression might appear as one of fatherly satisfaction. The underslept smile of the dad who’s been pulled away from his work by his wife, who has sat him down here, in an easy chair before a fire, to snap a portrait of the breadwinner in the prime of his life.

But the more studied appraisal reveals the efforts of both the subject and photographer: the glassy, mirthless eyes, the shoulders and clasped hands angled in a “relaxed” pose. An overlookable sort of man whose near-desperate sadness was evident in his details, from dimpled half-moons under his eyes to the psoriasis-reddened knuckles.

I’m thinking about opening the car door and letting it slip out onto the concrete when I notice the only underlined section on either page the photo had been stuck between.

The Devil he is a spirit, and hath means and opportunities to mingle himself with our spirits, and sometimes more slyly, sometimes more abruptly and openly, to suggest such devilish thoughts into our hearts. He insults and domineers in melancholy, distempered phantasies especially.

Why that passage? I don’t remember it having any particular significance in my research, and I’ve never cited it in any of my lectures. But it must have leapt out at me nevertheless. And I’d placed the only photograph of my father between the pages to mark it though I’d never returned to it over the years.

A foreknowledge. That’s what it must have been. I’d read those words—
melancholy, distempered phantasies, Devil
—and sent a message to my future self I couldn’t have understood at the time. I’d recognized my father diagnosed by Burton’s observation. A man of reasonable promise, blessed by better luck than most, but nevertheless a ruin, a witness to a child’s death, a violent suicide.