Meg and Fred Waldheim looked up as I came in, seemed to study me as I sat opposite the wheelchair. I had to give them this much: they didn’t look afraid. Fred seemed positively fascinated, like a bombsniffing dog nosing a dubious suitcase. Meg said, “You must be struggling to come to terms with the situation.”
I picked up one of the books. Smokestack Johnny Routes, 1946–1986. “What situation is that, exactly?” I said. Fred nodded, as if I’d made an excellent point. “We only saw what happened during the session, what you saw on the video,” he said. His beard obscured his mouth so that it was hard to tell when his lips were moving. Maybe it was a ventriloquist act, and I was supposed to play along and talk to the wheelchair. “We can make guesses, but no one can tell us what it means but you.”
“Bullshit. We all know what’s going on.”
“Why don’t you tell us?” Meg said. Soft, comforting Meg. I shook my head. They might be grand wizards of an elite Gnostic/Jungian secret society, but they sounded like every psychiatrist I’d ever met.
“All right then, let me explain it to you. I’m a fucking demon, okay?” Meg blinked, but didn’t interrupt me. “Something happened when I was—when Del was five. The Hellion took him, but it didn’t let go. He stayed. He went native.”
I was crying again, dammit. I never had controlled everything about this body. Not the way I’d controlled Lew.
I wiped a hand across my eyes. “Hey, what do they call it when the hostage falls in love with his captors? The Patty Hearst thing.”
“Stockholm syndrome,” Fred said.
“That’s it. That’s what happened to me. I fell in love with the people who strapped me to that bed. Lew, my dad, my mom—” My mom. I couldn’t get my grammar straight. My dad. My mom. My life. A problem with possessives.
“But here’s the kicker,” I said. “I used to think, hey, if things get really bad, at least I have suicide as an exit strategy. But now—” I started to laugh. “Now I don’t even know how to kill myself.”
O’Connell put a hand on my arm. “Del . . .”
“Don’t touch me,” I said, and yanked my arm away from her. The three of them looked at me in shock.
I sighed. Nodded toward the stacks of folders.
“So what’s the deal?” I said. “You guys have something in your X-files that’ll help me with that?”
The Other Dr. Waldheim shrugged. “You never know.”
The Red Book files contained the details of every possession since 1895—and it eventually became clear to me that they wanted me to look at every damn one of them. And comment. About what? Anything that came to mind. They were big into free association.
“Synchronicity,” Fred kept saying. “Everything’s connected.” Meg Waldheim kept a tape recorder rolling at all times. We worked past supper the first night, then picked up again at breakfast. The Waldheims tag-teamed their way through lectures on the epidemiology of possession. Jungians saw evidence that archetypes had been seizing human minds since prehistory. In America demon sightings had been recorded since the Pilgrims, but most scholars pegged the start of the modern possession epidemic at the first publicized appearance of the Captain on July 12, 1944. The Truth and the Kamikaze came soon after. By 1949, the Hellion, Smokestack Johnny, the Painter, the Little Angel, and an infrequently seen demon called the Boy Marvel had all taken victims, though the exact dates of their first appearances were in dispute.
“How about this one?” O’Connell said. She kept coming back to a particular stack of pictures, like a cop pressing mug shots into my hands. Except these were all pictures of the victims.
“No,” I said for the hundredth time. I had my own favorite pictures, from an overstuffed folder called Nixon’s War on Possession: clinical shots from the fifties and sixties of dark-suited “psychics” wired up to refrigerator-sized boxes; bare-chested Japanese men—God help the Japanese after Eisenhower—surrounded by pentagrams, a Tesla coil at each point in the star; dog-collared priests holding jumper cables to steel mesh satellite dishes. If Nixon’s Secret Service guys hadn’t taken their boss out in ’74 he’d probably still be president and the internment camps would still be open. O’Connell held up a black-and-white photo. It looked as if it had been taken in the fifties. “You’re hardly looking. Are you sure he’s not familiar?”
The problem was that they were all familiar. A parade of boys with sharp noses and mischievous smiles and blond, cowlicked hair.
“I told you,” I said. “I don’t remember being any of these kids.”
“Give it time, Del,” Fred said. They all still called me Del.
“Your conscious mind is only one part of the psyche,” Meg said, picking up the attack. “That conscious shard is constrained by space and time, but the rest of the psyche—”
“I know, I know, the rest has its tail in the collective unconscious.”
God was I tired of talking about the collective unconscious. Talking about it, reading about it, dreaming about it. O’Connell and Meg Waldheim pushed books into my hands like missionaries. Jungians described the CU as a kind of aboriginal dreamtime tarted up with quantum mechanical theory—a late ornamentation, after Wolfgang Pauli became one of Jung’s patients. This vast reservoir of human thought was a primordial soup that gave birth to the archetypes—which were either just patterns or objectively real independent personalities, depending on which of Jung’s books you were reading, and who his audience was at the time. Jung seized upon demons and possession as confirmation of his ideas, and his public pronouncements began to match his private beliefs. Ghosts entangled themselves in the nervous systems of the living; telepathy and precognition worked by virtue of the trans-spatial, faster-than-light medium of the collective unconscious; archetypes stalked the Earth.
“Look,” I said. “What if there is no connecting medium? What if the demons have nothing to do with archetypes?” I pushed away from the table. We’d been camped out in the dining room all this time, because that’s where the files were. “The philosophizing angels and snake women Jung saw don’t have much in common with American demons. How many gun-toting vigilantes did Jung meet when he was touring the underworld?”
“Now you’re just being difficult,” O’Connell said.
“The archetypes don’t change,” Meg said, voice even as always.
“But their expression at any given time is filtered through culture. The Truth is an imago of the father, the destroyer and protector, like Shiva and Abraxas. The Captain is our Siegfried, the eternal hero. And the Piper, obviously, is just an aspect of the Trickster.”
“There are no new ideas,” Fred said from behind his book.
“There’s only repackaging.”
“What about Valis?” I said.
“A purely rational being, absent of emotion,” Meg said. “The representation of thought itself, dressed in technological garb.”
“You said Valis was a fake,” I said to O’Connell.
“He is. Dick made him up—writers do that.”
“Maybe he did make him up, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a demon. Maybe he’ll disappear when Dick dies —kill the author, kill the demon.”
“You can’t kill an archetype,” Fred said.
I stood up. “You know what? I don’t feel like a fucking archetype.”
I walked around the end of the table and pulled out the wheelchair. Fred looked up from his book with alarm.
“I don’t know what the hell I am,” I said. “But I know one thing. I don’t belong here.” O’Connell tried to interrupt, but I cut her off.
“Here. In this body.” I gripped the edge of the wheelchair, rolled it into me. “It’s not mine. There’s a kid who
