mother. She said he had hands of concrete, hell on anything smaller than a 2x4 or more fragile than sheet metal. He never worked on a piece of wood trim that didn’t snap.
“You already got to the bakery?”
“Seven o’clock Sunday morning, and it was packed.” I went into the kitchen, set the box on the counter. “Same old Polish ladies. That place hasn’t changed a bit.”
“You didn’t go back to sleep, did you?”
I shook my head, even though she couldn’t see me. “Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to wake you up.” I felt embarrassed and guilty, as if she’d caught me wandering around the house naked. She started the dryer and came into the kitchen, drying her hands on a paper towel. She threw out the remains of the coffee I’d made at four—I’d needed plenty of caffeine—and started a fresh pot. I busied myself getting down plates and cutting slices of the coffee cake. We sat down at the table and divvied up sections of the Trib. The cake wasn’t sweet in the center— nothing in the Polish bakery was as sugary as something from a regular bakery—but it tasted better to me than any roll or donut I’d found. Or maybe it was just nostalgia. We ate and read in silence for a long time.
The demon I’d seen at the airport two days ago was mentioned on page three. It was a brief story, a follow- up to whatever they’d run the day before. The victim was not going to be charged—nobody thought he was faking. Experts agreed it was the Painter strain of the disorder. (Those were the official terms—strain, disorder—as if marrying a medieval word like possession with more medical and modern-sounding partners tamed the idea, boxed it up into something tidy enough for science.) Best guess, there were perhaps a hundred distinct strains—
a science-weasel way of saying one hundred demons. The CDC recorded over twenty thousand cases of possession a year in the US, some lasting weeks and most lasting only minutes. Some people were hit repeatedly, as if being struck by lightning charged them for life. Most of the time they were seized by the same demon, but sometimes it was a different one every time. The government hastened to add that the reports contained an unknown number of false positives, false negatives, incorrect diagnoses. Demons left behind no DNA, no wake of antibodies in the bloodstream, no cellular changes in the brain. A possession—especially a brief, one-time possession—was easy to hide and easier to fake. Different people were highly motivated to do either. Demons could make you do awful things—but awful things could make you famous. Possession survivors showed up on TV all the time.
Next to the airport story was a sidebar on the International Conference on Possession and its outlaw para- conference, DemoniCon. DemoniCon was not, technically, even a conference: it had no charter, no committees, no reservation agreements. It was an improvised annual party that followed ICOP around the globe. Demonology cranks, hobbyists, and demon fans bought up hotel rooms in whatever city ICOP was being held at that year, tried to crash the more interesting ICOP events, and then made nuisances of themselves. People were worried about more cases of possession cropping up because of the conferences, or worse, more cases of copycat possessions. Nobody wanted armed impersonators of the Pirate King or the Truth running around. Security was supposed to be tight, though that would make no difference to a real demon. Nothing could stop a real demon.
“Lew’s coming at ten?” Mom said.
“So he says.” Amra and Lew had driven back to Gurnee last night. It was an hour up and an hour back, depending on traffic, but Chicagoans seemed to take this in stride.
“And you’re staying in the city both nights?”
“Uh, yeah.” I got up and refilled my cup. The “Self Clean” light was blinking. I hadn’t told her about ICOP, or Dr. Ram. I hadn’t even told her about seeing Dr. Aaron, except that we’d had a good visit, and that she’d gained a lot of weight.
I hadn’t told her anything, and Mom hadn’t pressed me. This wasn’t like her.
“I’m worried about you, my son,” she said.
My son. That always floored me.
“I’m going to be fine,” I said automatically. “I’ve just been . . .” I sat down again, the coffee cup hot against my fingertips. “Mom, back when I was little . . . how did I snap out of it? If it wasn’t the prayer thing, what happened? Did I just wake up one morning . . . back?”
“I suppose you were too young to remember.”
“I was in bed for a long time, I remember that. There were these straps. Right?”
She gazed at the floor. “You were in the hospital for almost three weeks. All they knew how to do was sedate you and keep you tied up. We took you out of there, but even at home you had to be watched all the time, even at night, because you’d get up and tear around the house. You started a fire in the living room one night, to roast marshmallows. You were wild. And so strong.
“But you weren’t mean—you didn’t try to hurt anyone, not on purpose. You were just careless. You didn’t know your own strength. Lew was seven, and much bigger than you, but even then, well, eventually your father . . . your father and I decided that you had to be kept in your room. Your father boarded up the windows to keep you from escaping, and we put a bolt on the outside of the door. A lot of that time, because of the tantrums, you had to be strapped down. We fed you in bed, though all you wanted to eat was peanut butter sandwiches and ice cream.”
“I scream, you scream,” I said, half singing it. Mom looked up at me sharply, and then away. “You’d chant that at the top of your voice.”
“Lovely.”
She sighed. “You weren’t easy to live with.”
“So what changed? When did I get better?”
“It didn’t happen in one day—it didn’t happen in one month. The thing you liked, the thing we finally figured out, was stories—you’d lie still for stories. I read from picture books and the jokes from the paper, Lew would read you comic books. I told you stories from my childhood, talked about all the things you’d do when you grew up . . . oh, anything I could think of. We went through every book in the house, then went to the library every other day for a bag more. This was after my surgery, and it was a lot of strain, but some days I think I did nothing but read to you and take Tylenol.”
“Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel,” I said.
“Oh Lord yes. We must have read Mike Mulligan five hundred times.”
I loved that book. “Okay, so then . . .”
“Then you calmed down. Gradually, we let you play more in the room, and you behaved yourself when you came out. You just got better and better.”
I shook my head. “But how did you—when did you know I was me? What happened to let you know that the demon was gone?”
She smiled, shrugged. “I just knew. There was one thing, though. For the longest time you hadn’t called us by our names. Lew was ‘that big boy.’ Your dad was ‘mister,’ and I was ‘that tall lady.’ And then one day I was feeding you lunch and you called me ‘Mom.’ ” She shrugged. “That was enough for me. I knew then I had my little boy back.”
Inside the shower I let the hot water beat on my skull and tried to drown myself in noise: the thrum and hiss of the shower; the indistinct male rumbling of the voice on the clock radio on the bathroom counter; the intermittent faint trill that could have been a telephone in the next room. It didn’t help. Through all this, wired directly to my nervous system, was the rattling pressure of the thing in my head. I twisted off the shower and slid open the glass door. The phone was ringing. It stopped a moment later.
Had to be Bertram. He’d left two more messages on Mom’s machine while we were out last night, and I hadn’t called him back. Why did he think it was okay to call me? We’d gotten to know each other in the hospital, as much as you could get to know someone nutty as a fruitcake. We’d had hours to fill with talk as we made circuits of
