The bathtub was a decent old-fashioned kind, sliding glass doors and two sprocket knobs, none of this single-handle hardware that made it impossible to set the water temperature. When it was hot, I pulled up on the plunger, and the spray drummed the bottom of the tub.
I walked back into my bedroom and shut the bathroom door behind me. I carried the laptop back to the bed, set it on my knee. The lid crackled as I opened it. I rebooted, and while the rest of the screen seemed okay, the lower left section had turned black. Windows finished loading, though, and in a minute I had the video running again. The subject sits on the couch. His arms are at his sides, forgotten. The camera is to his right, but he’s gazing straight ahead of him. He’s wearing blue jeans, a gray John Hersey High School sweatshirt unraveling at the cuffs, a blue T-shirt visible at the neck. His smile is slightly self-conscious. He needs a shave and his hair’s a little too long; the back of his head is roostering where he’s slept on it.
Meg Waldheim’s voice, off camera: Let your shoulders relax. Good.
She continues to speak, and the subject does seem to relax. The smile fades. His expression grows distant, as if he’s listening to soothing music.
Meg Waldheim says, All right, Del. Let us talk to the Hellion. The subject doesn’t change expression. He gazes straight ahead, as if considering their request.
And then he lurches forward, throwing himself off the couch. He’s on all fours, his chest heaving, as if he’s gasping for air.
The side of Meg Waldheim’s head appears in the frame; she’s leaning forward. Tell us your name, she says. The subject looks up at her. His eyes are wide in animal terror. He doesn’t recognize them. Tell us your name, she says again.
The subject screams. The sound is raw, unmodulated. He scrambles away from her. Only his leg is visible now. And then he’s up, back in the frame, running and half stumbling for one of the outcroppings of wall. Suddenly he drops out of sight of the camera.
A dark blur as Fred Waldheim crosses in front of the camera. A moment later he’s back in view on the other side of the couch, moving deliberately to where the subject is, somewhere on the floor. He says something the camera doesn’t pick up. He raises one arm, and says louder, There there, we aren’t going to hurt you.
The subject screams, and this time he’s screaming a word at the top of his lungs, the same word over and over: Mahhhhhm!
Mahhhhhm! Mahhhhhm!
Meg Waldheim, still off-camera, says again, What is your name?
This part of the video annoyed me. They must have realized his name by then—how much more obvious could he be?
“Del,” I said to the screen. “His name is Del.”
Over the past few days, whenever I’d grown tired of watching the laptop, or staring at the water-stain heart on my wall, or trying to sleep, I’d spent a few hours composing pages for a mental scrapbook called Things I Shouldn’t Remember. Alongside “Lew reads Del The Flash”
and “Mom Reads Del Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel” was a jumbled collage of a page called “My First Exorcism.”
First the hands: touching my head, my shoulders, my legs, trying to soothe me but hold me down, too, to stop me from bucking and twisting out of their grip. A circle of faces around the bed, all men, and my father among them, calling my name. And through it all the preacher’s voice, rising and falling, rising and falling. In that moment my mouth is open and my chest is full, ready to scream or laugh. That was it. A fragment, a leftover, like a dusty playing piece from a lost board game. It wasn’t something I’d suppressed. It was just that I hadn’t recalled it lately.
Because this wasn’t the first time I’d remembered the exorcism. Every once in a while when I was a kid I’d stumble across the image in my brain—those disembodied hands, those floating faces—
and then, unable to make anything of it, let it fall back into my mental toy box. I didn’t even know anymore if I was recalling the original event or the memory of a memory, a distorted and embroidered version fed by the fears of a kid growing up in a religioncharged family. The scene had a lurid quality that suggested it’d been lifted from one of those hellfire-and-brimstone evangelistic comic books Lew brought home from Vacation Bible School. It was easy to convince myself I’d made it up. Easier to let it sit in a box, unlooked-for.
Until now. Now I didn’t have any choice but to abandon amnesia. Anamnesis, baby.
All clear?
Yeah, me too. Me the fuck too.
The first thing I said to her was, “How’s Lew?” I wanted to know, but I also wanted to short-circuit any talk about me. It was a tactic I’d used to great effect during long-distance calls from the psych ward.
“He’s doing better,” Mom said. She told me about blood tests, ACE inhibitors, the real cardiologists he’d be seeing as soon as they got back to Chicago. But as soon as she’d run through the headlines in Lew’s recovery, she was back on me. “Where are you? What are you doing with that woman?”
“That woman” was twenty feet away, a stack of folders and thick books the size of photo albums in her arms. She’d been ferrying them into the dining room while Dr. Waldheim sorted them into piles on the long table, and the Other Dr. Waldheim sat at the table studying the screen of a laptop newer and thinner than the one O’Connell had broken. The empty wheelchair took up the spot next to him. O’Connell set down her load and glanced up at me. I stepped out of the archway, out of her line of sight, and leaned against the stainless steel face of the refrigerator.
It took me many minutes to explain to Mom that I’d left of my own free will, that I was working out things with these new therapists O’Connell knew, that I was fine. It was clear that she didn’t believe me. Or if she believed me, she didn’t understand. How could I sneak out of the hospital when I was still hurt? How could I leave Lew alone like that?
“So when are they letting him out?” I said. A second distraction attempt.
“He’s going to be released tomorrow. We’re going to start driving back in the afternoon. But if you come back, we’ll wait for you. We have both cars.”
“Mom, I wish I could, but I can’t right now.”
“Del, you’re only getting deeper in trouble.” Her voice shook, and I realized it had been years—maybe as far back as my pool accident in high school—since I’d heard her sound so sad, so truly dismayed.
“The police want to talk to you about that doctor who died downtown. And the people you’ve been seeing— this Bertram person won’t stop visiting Lew, and that old woman at the motel. There are things they’re not saying, Del. It’s not just me, Amra thinks so too. And this woman you left with—she’s a priest?”
I started to answer and she interrupted me. “Del, you need to be careful. These people will tell you they have all the answers. They’ll make all kinds of promises. But they can’t help you. Come home, talk to someone objective, someone we trust. I’ll call Dr. Aaron. I’m sure she can—”
“I’m sorry, Mom. I can’t.”
She kept talking. All I could do was repeat that I was sorry, that I couldn’t come back home, that she shouldn’t worry about me. I couldn’t tell her that she was talking to an imposter.
“Take care of Lew,” I said. “I’ll call again as soon as I can.”
I hung up the phone. Braced myself against the stove, leaning over the cold cast-iron burners. Breathing. Still fucking breathing. O’Connell moved into my peripheral vision. After a while she said, “We have some things we’d like you to look at.”
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
