The Video Watcher (12 page)

When he'd called the previous night, I knew something was really wrong because he'd done something that he had never done before: he
didn't
make me guess where he was—he just told me.

There were problems with his medication, and they were going to try something different. But what most worried him was another patient. The patient, an older woman with a “Woodstock Forever” T-shirt, had threatened to cut his head off.

“Hey,” he said, noticing me. He dropped the ball in a pocket.

“Do you want to play?”

He shook his head and stepped back from the table.

“I brought you something—” I'd thought he'd catch on right away.

He looked puzzled.

“A
gift
.”

Still a blank expression. But then he smiled wanly. “Oh yeah. Yeah, thanks. But I can't do that. They think that's what might be interfering with my medication. Sorry.”

“No problem,” I said, shrugging.

In the room to the right of us, there was a woman in an easy chair watching television. She had her back to us, and she seemed to be tearing something in her hands.

“So is that her?” I said, not actually thinking that it was the woman he'd told me about.

“Shhhh,” Damien said, suddenly very nervous. “Keep your voice down.”

The woman looked to be in her late forties. She wore a green terry-towel housecoat, and had very short hair that appeared to have been dyed orange.

I couldn't see from where I was standing whether she was wearing her “Woodstock Forever” T-shirt.

“Come in here,” he said. He led me into the kitchen area. From the fridge he took out a small cup of Dairyland raspberry cocktail.

“You want one?”

Ignoring the sign that said that drinks were for patients only, I nodded.

“I haven't seen these in years,” I said, peeling off the foil cover. “This girl I used to play with, her mother would always—”

“I'm
not
joking,” said Damien. “I'm really scared of that woman.”

“The woman in there?”

He nodded and told me that that morning she'd been standing over his bed with a pair of scissors.

I laughed.

“Fuck—I'm serious!” he said. “She said all this crazy shit. Like she knew I was a dirty pervert. That I was masturbating about her and she—she was going to fucking cut
it
off.”

It was difficult not to laugh again. “Then why don't you just tell the nurse?” I said.

“They don't do fucking anything,” he said desperately. “They'll just talk about adjusting my medication.”

We were still talking about the woman when a male nurse approached us. He was pushing a cart with paper cups on top.

He checked a list on a clipboard, then said in a saccharine tone. “Okay, Daniel. Time for the ol'
medication
.”

Damien took the paper cup from the nurse and shook it. He turned it on its side and shook it again. The nurse just stood there, watching.

“What's this?” Damien said, pointing to a large blue pill.

“Daniel, that's
your
medication.”

“This is Androcur. I'm not supposed to be on it. They changed my medication.”

“You just take them and I'll ask Doctor Bennett.”

There was a garbage can beside us. Damien dropped the cup in it.

“Oookay Danny.” The nurse wrote something on his clipboard. “Have a nice day.”

“That's what I fucking hate about this place,” Damien whispered when the man was gone. “Now I'm going to be in all this shit. Fuck!”

After that, he wanted me to leave. I said that I could stay and help him talk to the doctor. But he said it was better if I wasn't there.

I tried to figure out what I should do. It was hard to know how seriously to take what Damien had said about the other patient. He had a habit of exaggerating things, and I didn't even know if he really believed what he said, or just wanted to shock me.

The last thing that I remember was his feet. I was staring down as he told me about how the nurse was a “fag” and probably wanted him to get killed anyway: his feet, in the paper hospital slippers, lined up perfectly with a seam in the linoleum floor.

 

At the end of that week I received a very strange phone call from Cam. Unlike the other calls, which came late at night, this one came in the afternoon. For most of it he just whimpered on the other end of the line, saying that a fortune cookie had said that it was going to happen. The question of what was never answered. The only response I got to any question was that he was tired of being so insecure.

After about five minutes of this, the line went dead.

“Are you there? Are you there?” I heard the click that really meant the line was dead.

I was on the portable phone and I went back to my bedroom and hung up. For a few minutes I just stood there, listening to the muted sound of the rain on the shed's roof—the hollow smacking sound each drop made as it hit the plastic cover—then walked back down the hall and into the living room. It had become dark while I'd been talking on the phone. The streetlight outside was now on, and coming to the window, I noticed that the light made the wet black surface of the driveway shine.

What was I supposed to do?

 

My hands felt shaky as I flipped through the stations. The rain had let up outside. I turned my wipers off and slowed for the intersection, images of a pedestrian's yellow coat and a red stop sign floating on the wet pavement. Kitchener was the next street. I turned right. There was no parking in front of Maria's house, and I cruised down one street and over another, and finding a spot, pulled into it. As I walked back, I kept telling myself to be calm, I didn't know for sure that it had been Maria.

The week before I'd gone to The Railway to see a band play and was certain that I'd seen Maria in a booth with Sadie's friend Hugh, at least I thought I had. It was hard to tell because she'd had her face turned to him. But he had
that
sport coat over her lap, and
that
hand doing something under it. I'd been afraid she'd see me, and had gone to the washroom before I could make sure. When I'd come out, they were no longer there, but I couldn't find any couple in the club that looked like the couple I'd seen.

At the gate in front of the house, I hesitated. I remembered the evening that I first unlatched it. The pink twilight. The warmth of the air. The cat weaving between our legs.

The front room was dark. I tried to see if anyone was in there, then opened the gate and climbed to the porch and knocked. Cuban music came faintly from the other side of the door. I stood on my tiptoes. Down the hall light shone from the kitchen. I knocked again. A dark figure appeared in the lit doorway. I thought it was Fernando, then that it wasn't, then saw that it was. He'd grown a beard.

The music became louder as the door opened.

“Sorry—”

He shook his head.

“Is Maria in?”

“She. She gone.”

“When is she going to be home?”

“She. She moved.”

“Where?”

He shook his head.

I remained standing there, so finally he said, “Wait.” He gestured with his hand for me to stay outside. He closed the door and disappeared through the lit doorway down the hall.

When he didn't come back right away, I wondered if he was going to return. The kitchen doorway darkened with shadow, and he appeared and walked toward the door and opened it.

He handed me a slip of paper. “This. Her address.”

“Thank you,” I said. He'd scratched the address out faintly in pencil.

I walked in the direction he'd pointed. I didn't know the area, but I hoped that unlike the streets in North Van, these streets connected.

Light spilled out of the pizzeria at the corner of Commercial and Kitchener. In the steamed window a couple my age was holding hands.

The next street was the street written on the piece of paper. I turned right and began to check the house numbers. The house whose number matched the number on the paper was almost identical to the house I'd just left: three stories high, a porch in front, a garden fenced with wrought iron.

I opened the gate (also identical) and walked through the garden. The trees were still dripping from the rain earlier. Soon it would be fall and they would be losing their leaves. I climbed to the porch and knocked. A joke Maria had told me came back to me:
Kill me, just don't leave me.

With the ringing of a bell and squeaking, the door swung back.

A woman in her early thirties peered out.

“Sorry. Someone said a Maria, a Mexican girl, lived here.”

The woman turned and shouted into the house. “Maria, someone's here to see you.” She did this so casually I wondered if other men had come to the door asking for Maria.

When she turned back, her bangs fell in her eyes. She used her little finger and cleared them out of the way. The other hand was still holding the door. Her bare legs and the oversized UBC sweat top made her look young, but there were lines around her eyes.

“You a friend of Maria's?”

I said that I was.

A vehicle splashed by slowly on the street behind me. Someone inside the house was playing U2's “One.” The woman leaned out the door and stared at the dark sky.

“Has it stopped raining?”

“Yes.”

“Almost feels like fall.”

“Yeah.”

She hollered inside again, “Maria.”

“Hey, where are you going?” she said. “She's coming.”

But my right foot was already on the edge of the top step. “I forgot something. My car, it's parked in front of a fire hydrant. I'll be back in a sec.”

 

3:43 A.M.

“These possessions… how do they occur?”

“They can occur in a whole number of ways. They—”

“Can… Sorry. Go on.”

“They can occur in a whole number of ways,” said the guest. He was soft spoken, with a light, Irish accent. “But one precondition in about ninety percent of the exorcisms I've been involved in is loneliness. The demon approaches the person when they are alone and cut off from people. And then once the person is possessed the demon, or demons—quite often there is more than one—they will keep that person alone.”

“So they get you alone, and they keep you alone.”

“Exactly
.”

“For those of you who have just tuned in, I am speaking to Caleb Collins, a retired priest and exorcist, and we're talking about demon possession in general, and in particular, the case of Mitchell Schrader, the elderly man whose decapitated body was found in his scooter in a field in Wisconsin. So, Father, you were saying earlier that you think whoever did this to Mitchell Schrader was demon possessed.”

“It's very likely …”

I lowered the volume and turned on my back. I had closed the drapes because outside was a full moon. Above me the ceiling's exposed wood beams looked shadowy in the green light of the stereo's dial, and I imagined what it would be like if they came down on me.

 

I was in my room packing, getting ready for the trip to Harrison when the doorbell rang.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Me—Cam.”

I was a bit surprised when I opened the door. Cam stepped in. He looked somehow bigger than the last time I'd seen him. His hair and leather jacket were wet.

“Sorry I didn't call first. I was afraid they were listening.”

“Who?”

He panted. “I'll tell you in a sec. Do you have a towel?”

When I returned with the towel, Cam had taken off his Adidas runners and was coming toward me.

He snatched the towel and wiped his head. In my room I sat at the desk. He got up on the bed opposite and leaned against the wall.

The desk light was on. His face, I remember, looked tired and haggard in the light.

“Put some music on.”

“What do you want?”

“I don't care. Just put something on.”

That week I'd been getting ready for my move back to UBC, but my old stereo was still hooked up. I dug through the CDs strewn on the floor. I intended to play
Zeppelin I
or Aerosmith's
Pump,
but found
Appetite for Destruction
, and put it on.

Seconds of silence. Slash's delayed riff.

Cam grinned as the drums and bass guitar entered.

As Axl Rose muttered something about God, I'm sure Cam and I were thinking of the same memory: the bus ride to outdoor school in Grade 11 when Cam first heard the album on Damien's Walkman.