Demons (2 page)

There were those, of course, who asserted at first that the demons were space aliens or the confabulations of aliens or multiple races of space aliens come to invade, that the invaders resembled demons only because our past encounters with the aliens left ancestral memories of their shapes, extraterrestrial shapes, remembered as “demons.” You know the sort of thing. But anyone who has survived an encounter with one of the seven clans is left with no doubt that these are supernatural creatures. There’s no question that they are quite specifically demonic, that not only are they not aliens, they distinctly belong here. How does one know this? It’s another one of those intangibles that, ironically, define the creatures. Once you’ve encountered them—you simply know. You can
feel
their miraculous nature; you can feel they’re somehow rooted in our world. And after having such encounters, Close Encounters of the Nearly Fatal Kind, the purveyors of ET explanations fall silent.

I’m writing this now because of Professor Paymenz’s theory. I should say one of his theories—he has so many. This one is something like Paymenz theory number 1,347. Dr. Israel Paymenz believes that we can communicate with other times, other eras, through the medium of a sort of higher, ubiquitous ancestral mind that links all humanity. He believes that writers and poets and declaimers in the past sometimes “dictate” to writers of the later eras through this psychic link; that historians of the future communicate, unconsciously and with only partial accuracy, with the writers of the past—thus the more believable science fiction. So it is that much writing is, unknown to us, a kind of Ouija affair; only, the receiver is not hearing from the dead but from people of another time, from the living of the past and future.

Not very likely, that theory; I doubt he believes it either. But writing this, at a time when I feel resoundingly helpless, makes me feel better.

So I try to believe his theory . . . which leaves me writing this just eleven years into the twenty-first century, hoping to warn the previous century, or even earlier. Not warn them of some specific act or mistake. We don’t yet know
why
the seven clans came. But I dream of warning that they will come, so that, perhaps, the people of the past can begin looking for the
why
in advance. The demons certainly have given us no whys nor hows nor wherefores. They delight in communicating only what confuses.

Though the demons will talk to us sometimes, they are, of course, notoriously unhelpful. When the President went with a delegation, including the Vice President, to see an apparent demon clan chieftain—we don’t know for certain he was a chieftain; their hierarchy is arcane, if they have any at all—who was stalking the West Wing of the White House, they had a rather extensive conversation, nearly fifteen minutes, that was recorded and analyzed and that offers exchanges like this, transcribed from near its end:

THE PRESIDENT:
And why is it, please, that you have come to—to us, now?

GNASHER CHIEFTAIN:
Home is where the heart is. Boy Scouts have a salty sort of taste, with marshmallow overtones. I like your tie. Are those Gucci loafers?

THE PRESIDENT:
Yes, yes, they are. So you’re familiar with all our customs?

GNASHER:
I’ve never killed a customs agent. Are they good to kill? Never mind. Where is your wife?

PRESIDENT:
My—she’s . . . in Florida.

GNASHER:
Does the Vice President have sex with her? Which vices does he preside over? I’m just fucking with you about that. But seriously: Do you like sweet or salt best?

PRESIDENT:
Could you tell me please why you have come here and if there’s something we can give you . . . some arrangement we can make. . . .

GNASHER:
I wonder what you’d look like inside out. Like a Christmas tree?

PRESIDENT:
We are willing to negotiate.

GNASHER:
I can almost taste you now. You once had a dream you cracked open the Moon like an egg, and a red yolk came out and you fried it on the burning Earth, didn’t you, once, eh? Did you? Do speak plainly and tell me: Did you?

PRESIDENT:
I don’t believe so.

GNASHER:
You did. You dreamt exactly that. People think someone like me would delight in the carnage of a battlefield, but I prefer a nice mall, don’t you?

PRESIDENT:
Yes, certainly. Perhaps in that spirit—

GNASHER:
You wish to sell me cuff links? Can you breathe in a cloud of iron filings? Let’s find out. Let’s discover a new jigsaw, a new 3-D puzzle, shall we? The human body, disassembled, might be put back together in a way that makes sense. You could make a fine buckyball out of the bones and a yurt from the skin and a talk show host of the wet parts. What an imaginative people you are. We stand in awe at the outskirts of Buenos Aires in the summertime, each fly a musical note. Can we send out for ice cream? For girls who work in ice cream parlors and their boyfriends in their electric Trans Ams? Taste this part of my leg. It tastes differently from this part. You won’t taste? I have a penis. Would you prefer it? Do you like salty or sweet? Seriously. Choose one. Would you like to see my penis? I asked for it special. There’s a catalog.

With that, a steaming green member pressed from a fold on the Gnasher’s lower parts, and as the President tried to back away the Gnasher caught him in a long ropy sweep of its arm and pulled him close and forced him to his knees. In front of the TV cameras.

An eruption of gunshots from the Secret Service had no effect, of course, on the Gnasher. It was the Vice President—a decisive man, who’d been broodingly biding his time for two years—who took a pistol from the President’s bodyguard and shot the President in the back of the head. It was obvious to everyone there, and to a sympathetic Congress the next day, that the Gnasher, after all, was choking the President to death with his engorged, steaming green penis. It was a question of restoring dignity to the President and the office. The Vice President fled the scene, sacrificing a number of Secret Service men ordered to delay the pursuing demon while he escaped.

“It’s profoundly tragic,” the Vice President said afterward, “but it’s God’s will. We must move on. I have certain announcements to make. . . .” He is reported more or less safe in a certain underground bunker.

But I should tell you how it began. It was months ago. Despite the usual outbreaks of savagery, the wet snow of the ordinary was blanketing the world. The miraculous rarely shows itself. When it does, it comes seamlessly, and for some reason, everyone is surprised.

1

As for me . . . I was up in a high-rise in San Francisco, those months ago: the morning the demons came.

I had gone to see Professor Paymenz or, to be perfectly honest, to see his daughter under the auspices of seeing the professor. It was housing that San Francisco State had arranged for him—they had a program supplying subsidized housing to teaching staff—and as I arrived I saw another eviction notice from SFSU on the door. Paymenz had refusedto teach comparative religion anymore, would lecture only about obscure occult practices and beliefs, and rarely showed up even for those classes. He hadn’t ever had his tenure settled, so they simply fired him. But he’d refused to leave the university housing on the simple but contumacious grounds, as he explained, that he deserved this more than the teacher down the hall, who taught “existential themes in daytime television.”

Vastly bearded, restless-eyed, in the grimy alchemist’s robe that he wore as a nightgown, Paymenz looked over my shoulder into the hallway behind me. Expecting to see someone back there. He always did that, and he never met my eyes, no matter how earnestly he spoke to me.

He seemed almost happy to see me as he ushered me in. He even said, “Why, hello, Ira.” He rarely troubled with social niceties.

I saw that Professor Shephard was there, small-brimmed fedora in hand. Shephard seemed poised between staying and going. Maybe that was why Paymenz was happy to see me: It gave him an excuse to get rid of an unwanted visitor.

Shephard was a short, fiftyish, bullet-shaped man in an immaculate gray suit, vest, tie that matched the season. He had a shaved head, eyes the color of aluminum, a perpetual pursed smile, and a jutting jaw.

He put his hat on his head but didn’t go. Standing there in the exact middle of the small living room, with his arms by his sides, his small feet in shiny black shoes neatly together, Shephard looked out of place in Paymenz’s untidy, jumbled apartment. He looked set up and painted like one of those Russian toys, the sort made of smooth wood containing ever-smaller copies. Shephard was an economics professor who believed in “returning economics to philosophy, as it was with our Founding Fathers, and, yes, with Marx”—but his philosophy had something to do with “pragmatic postmodernism.” Today his tie was all coppery maple leaves against rusty orange, celebrating autumn.

I knew Shephard from the last conference on Spirituality and Economics he’d put together—he’d hired me to create the poster, with “appropriate imagery,” and paid me three times for doing three versions, each version less definite, blander than the one before. At every poster-design discussion, he’d brought up Paymenz. “I understand you’re his good friend. What is he up to? And his daughter? How is she?”

The questions always felt like non sequiturs. Now, recognizing me, he nodded pleasantly. “Ira. How are you?”

“Dr. Shephard,” Paymenz said before I could reply, “thank you for dropping in—I have guests, as you see. . . .”

Shephard’s head swiveled on his shoulders like a turret, first at me, then to Paymenz. “Of course. I am sorry to have precipitated myself upon you, as it were; perhaps certain matters are of some urgency. Perhaps not. I only wished to plant the seed of the idea, so to say, that, should the conference on Spiritual Philosophy and Economics not come about this weekend for any reason, I do wish to stay in touch—very closely in touch. Please feel free to call me.” He handed Paymenz a business card and was moving toward the door. He startled me by
not
seeming to move on rollers; he walked as any man his size might. A normal walk seemed odd on him. “I will speak to the board about your housing issue, as promised, one more time. Au revoir!” He opened, passed through, and closed the door with hardly a sound, smooth as smoke up a chimney.

Paymenz irritably tossed the business card onto a lamp table heaped with cards, unopened letters, bills. “That man’s arrogance, the way he just shows up unexpectedly . . . always as if he has no agenda . . . babbling about his conference not coming off—when there’s no reason it shouldn’t . . . I should never have agreed to go to his antiseptic-yet-strangely-septic conference, if he hadn’t offered me a fee . . . but he knows perfectly well I need the money.”

Hoping Paymenz remembered he actually had invited me over for coffee, I looked around for some place to hang my leather jacket. But of course there was no place, really, to put it. The closet was crammed full with clothes no one wore; and with junk. The other apartments in the twenty-story high-rise were underdecorated minimalist-modern affairs, trying to echo the utilitarian, airy curviness that the architects of the building had borrowed from I. M. Pei or Frank Lloyd Wright. Paymenz, however, had covered the walls with an ethnically disconnected selection of tapestries and carpets—Persian and Chinese and a Southwestern design from Sears. He collected old lava lamps, and though the electricity had been turned off, they churned away, six of them crudely wired to car batteries, with lots of electrical tape around half-stripped connections. The lamps sat on the car batteries and on end tables and mantels, shape-shifting in waxen primary colors. A week previous, it was said, the entire SFSU board of tenure review had come out to the university parking lot to find their cars mysteriously inert.

Half a dozen more lava lamps were broken, used as bookends for the many hundreds of books that took up most of the space that wasn’t tapestry. Two candles were burning, and a fading battery lamp.

Cats darted behind chairs and moved sinuously up and down much-clawed cat trees. I counted four cats—no, five: They’d taken in a new one.

There were bits of breakfast toast in Paymenz’s long, shovel-shaped gray-and-black beard; his eyes, red-rimmed gray under bristling brows, rested on me for only a flicker as he spoke. “Many the auguries this morning, Ira. Would you like to see?”

“You know how I feel about medieval techniques, especially any that involve damp, decaying guts,” I said, looking about for Melissa. I was an aficionado of the arcane metaphysical, being the former art director for the now-defunct
Visions: The Magazine of Spiritual Life
, but I drew the line at peering into rotting intestines.

“It’s fresh pig bladder,” he said, “none of that decaying stuff anymore. Melissa made me promise. I suppose the place is rank enough already.”